Work On Luther and Lutherianism
For some time previous it had been known that Denifle was engaged on such a work, and in 1904 the first volume of 860 pages of Luthertum in der ersten Entwicklung (Luther and Lutheranism in its first development) appeared. Denifle had access to a student copy of Luther's unpublished lectures on the Epistle to the Romans delivered in Wittenberg in 1515-16. “My only source for Luther,” claimed Denifle, “was Luther himself.”
Denifle, who was beloved by Leo XIII and Pius X was a conductor of the cardinalitial Commission of Studies, a member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences (Vienna), and of those of Paris, Prague, Berlin, Göttingen, honorary doctor of the Universities of Münster and Innsbruck, member of the Légion d'honneur, of the Order of the Iron Crown, etc. He was on his way to Cambridge, where he was to be made Honorary Doctor of that university, when he was struck down by the hand of death.
Denifle's thesis had two main prongs: (1) "Luther was so vile that he could not possibly be an instrument of God" and (2) "this so-called reformer made no discovery at all in the theological realm, that he was not only a liar, but an ignorant liar." According to Atkinson, while Denifle's thesis has wreaked irreparable harm on Catholicism's understanding of Luther in general as well as its scholars in particular, it has invigorated Protestanism, particularly its scholars. By the 1920s Protestant scholars (e.g., Karl Holl) began to show mastery of medieval scholasticism and had embarked on a Lutheran renaissance.
Read more about this topic: Henry Denifle
Famous quotes containing the words work on, work and/or luther:
“Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I shall never be a heretic; I may err in dispute, but I do not wish to decide anything finally; on the other hand, I am not bound by the opinions of men.”
—Martin Luther (1483–1546)