Luther Love Disscussion Essays - Spirituality, Christian Soteriology

Luther Love Disscussion Eric Pacheco Love As Ethic and Idea Rewrite Paper 2 Spring April 2001 Throughout history and especially since the sixteenth century many Roman Catholics like Martin Luther, have distinguished ordinary or acquired prayer, even if occurring at a super conceptual level of love, adoration, and desire for God, from the extraordinary or absorbed contemplation which is entirely the work of God's special grace. Only the latter is mystical in a strict sense, according to this view. Other writers, such as Bonaventure, can apply the terms of mysticism to all communions with God. Martin Luther, a fifteen-century monk, questions all that is caritas though three campaigns. The first campaign Luther uses attacks the heavenly ladder. The heavenly ladder becomes questionable to Luther. Martin Luther believes if there was such a ladder then it would be God in all his perfection coming to us, and not the other way around. We cannot simply climb up to God in heaven by human actions alone. The second campaign Luther uses attacks the formula fides caritate formata (also known as faith formed by caritas). Martin Luther refuses the idea of indulgences, which spare you from purgatory. In other words Luther can not accept paying for absolution. As if God can be bribed to climb the fictional ladder used in the first campaign. The third and final campaign (I will mention) Luther uses attacks the self-love of caritas. Martin Luther argues that self-love is inherently bad. This self love is the ultimate expression of sin, in the Luthers opinion one should love thy neighbor ins tead of yourself. This self-love Page 2 carries the idea of selfishness. God should be the only one to through you, love you and others. Luther discusses laws for the Reformation of caritas. One must first Hammer, which means to breakdown our self-love. The second laws that Martin Luther discusses Is Mirror, which reveals our self to our sin. Luther suggests that though grace one can enter the Kingdom of Heaven. While Luther had a well-known antipathy to mystics, it is also true that there is the foundation of mystical life in his theology of the heart, particularly in his early thought. Perhaps through mysticism on can gain grace to stand with God. Bonaventure emphasized the total dependence of all things upon God, and he wrote guides to mystic contemplation. There are certain common fallacies current about mysticism: that mystics are not practical and that they are revolutionary. On the contrary, many of the greatest mystics have been both intensely active as well as submissive to authority of whatever sort. Mysticism does not promote solitary thinking. Nor is the solitary thinker necessarily, or even usually, a mystic. Mysticism mainly states that God is all around us in nature in and in us. There is no need for a church and system to be close with God or to be one with him. There are two general tendencies in the speculation of mysticsto regard God as outside the soul, which rises to its God by successive stages, or to regard God as dwelling within the soul and to be found by delving deeper into one's own reality. The idea of transcendence, as held most firmly by mystics, is the kernel of the ancient mystical Page 3 system, Neoplatonism, and of Gnosticism. Their explanation of the connection between God and humans by emanation is epoch-making in the philosophy of contemplation. In the plain language of old-fashioned theology man's sin is stamped upon man's universe. One can see a false world because we live a sham life. According to mysticism the average people do not know themselves; hence do not know the true character of their senses and instincts; hence attribute wrong values to their suggestions and declarations concerning our relation to the world. This lucid apprehension of the True is what mysticism means when it speak of the Illumination, which results from a faithful acceptance of the trials of the Purgative Way. That which we call the natural self as it exists in the natural world--the Adam of St. Paul--is wholly incapable of super-sensual adventure. All its activities are grouped about a center of consciousness whose correspondences are with the material world. In the moment of its awakening, it is abruptly made