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 Denifle had access to a student copy of Luther's unpublished lectures on the Epistle to the Romans delivered in Wittenberg in 1515-16.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.
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