Luther Created Chaos

 ST. THOMAS MORE: "LUTHER’S PRINCIPLES DESTROY SCRIPTURE, AND WILL RESULT IN CHAOS"

Rev Fr David Olusi 

More than 488 years ago today, St. Thomas More was martyred at the hands of a schismatic and lustful king. “I die the king’s good servant,” he said, “but God’s first.” More refused to compromise on either papal authority or the sanctity of marriage. He lost his life as a result.

12 years earlier, More wrote one of the most brilliant refutations of Luther ever written, “A Response to Martin Luther.”

Today, I am Catholic, formerly protestant, for two basic reasons:

1. Long before I read any Catholic, I realized my protestant system (of whatever variety) was nowhere in Scripture; and 

2. After reading the ancient Church Fathers, I realized we protestants had not “restored” the gospel, but radically departed from it. If we were right, then virtually all Christians for 1,500 years had been wrong on many doctrines essential to the Gospel.

As More explains, I realized the claim of following Scripture was a pretense—the absurd notion that God will guide the individual, but not His Church, who He had promised to guide into all truth until His return, and to whom He had given the authority of binding and loosing.

St. Thomas More, pray for us!

A RESPONSE TO LUTHER (Book 1) (1523)

“Now let us see whether he does not by every trick possible attack the very sacred scripture for which he pretends to fight. 

In the first place, to say nothing of how he everywhere very wickedly, everywhere stupidly twists the scriptures to the defense of destructive teachings, what can more thoroughly or more clearly destroy the whole force and fruit of all the scriptures than the fact that this fellow strives hand and foot so that no one will believe any learned men at all concerning the interpretation of scripture; so that no one will believe any of the holy fathers at all, or all men taken together at all; not believe the whole church at all, though it has been of one mind from the very origins of the church until this day; but that each one will oppose his own interpretation to everyone? 

What fruit will the scriptures bring forth if anyone whatever claims such authority for himself that in understanding them he relies on his own interpretation in opposition to that of everyone else, so that he is influenced by no authority at all not to measure the scriptures according to feeling and fancy? Here he clearly opens the window by which the people may plunge into perdition.

 

Tell me, Luther, by your madness, if you had lived during that tempest in which the church was thrown into turmoil by Arian storms, would you have urged what you now urge: that anyone of the common people who pleased might consider himself qualified judge concerning that controversy, and that each one might rely on himself in understanding the scriptures which he read, and that he might make light of the judgment of the holy fathers who were present at the council sessions in which the heresies were condemned, so that, although you admit that Christ is present wherever two or three are gathered together in His name, you deny that He was present where there were gathered together in that same name six hundred men, and those from every part of the Christian people?

 

But who is so blind as not to see that in this matter you have no other intention than that, after abolishing completely the authority of public agreement, you may be able to stir up a tumult from the heedless disagreement of private individuals, in which case you may find some men foolish enough to think themselves free to rely with impunity on you, a single scoundrel, in opposition to the faith of everyone else? 

Lest the authority of scripture might have any force against you, you work so that each person will drag into doubt the meaning of the sacred writings and defend his own fancy not only against the judgment of all the holy fathers, against the universal judgment of the whole church, but even against the judgment of blessed Paul the apostle.”