Martin Luther: The Power of Fathers

It have always marveled at the impact that my father has had on me.
Most specifically, on my relationship with my God.

My History of the Christian Church class has finally moved on from Saint Francis, and today we watched a documentary on Martin Luther.

(I LOVE DOCUMENTARIES.)

Martin Luther had a father. His father had broken free from the confines of the feudal system and struck out on his own as a copper smelter. In those days, this was quite an accomplishment. Having succeeded in this, his greatest desire was to witness his son surpassing all his accomplishments by becoming a lawyer.

Martin Luther's father was extremely harsh to his son; he criticized every move his son made. All his hopes were tied up in this boy, and he was not about to let him fail. Nothing his son did was ever satisfactory. He could always have done better, he could always have excelled more.

And so, when he was old enough, Martin Luther left his home in Mansfield and traveled to Erfurt to attend the university there. He studiously gained his Bachelor of Arts and Master's degrees. (blah blah blah)

BOOM! On to the fun part!

Then, the same year he was to take his last steps into becoming a lawyer, Luther was engulfed in a furious thunderstorm. He was riding through the forest when the dark clouds blotted out the sun and swirled over the landscape. Lightning flashed and thunder rolled through the hills. Luther was terrified.


He begged God to spare his life. If God did not kill him in this storm, Luther cried, he would dedicate the rest of his life to the service of God.

Once the night sky had cleared, Luther set out immediately to become a monk. He dropped out of law school and joined the Augustinian friary in Erfurt, one of the most strict in the world.

Luther became obsessed with pleasing God and being granted salvation. He quickly became the most devout of all the monks in Efurt. He fasted more than he ate, he prayed constantly, he flogged himself, he even slept naked in the snow all night and there saw the grim fringes of icy death. It is said that he would confess his sins to the priest, take a few steps, and return with more to confess. He began to see God as a great judge, looking down on him and condemning him for his every sin. The debt of his wrongdoing, it seemed, could never be repaid.

I hope my point can be clearly understood.
Luther's initial understanding of God as a righteous judge of condemnation was rooted in his earthly father. His earthly father was a cold, dark hand pressing down on Luther's mindset. He was never appeased, always demanding more, and nothing Luther did could ever be good enough. This made it easy for Luther to see his Heavenly Father the same way. There was no atonement, no satisfaction in anything he did. God, to him, was never pleased.


Do not underestimate the impact of father figures on your view of God.

The Church Fathers Were Streakers

I picked a terrible time to set up this account.
No time, no time, heavens, there is certainly no time!

I have an essay to write on what motivated Saint Francis of Assisi to do what he did.

He certainly did alot.

I will share one notable thing with you:

Upon receiving a message from God commanding him to "Rebuild my church", Francis abandoned his life of relative ease for extreme poverty. He began begging, not only for food, but also for STONES. He took his message from God literally; he was "rebuilding" the run down place of worship on the outskirts of Assisi.

He was passionate about his calling. He returned to his family's house at one point in order to retrieve his extremely lavish clothing to sell for more building supplies. Francis' father was already irate about his son's behavior. When he heard about the clothes, he dragged Francis before the bishop. He demanded that Francis be made to "return that which was his". Francis, before all the court and the bishop of his city, promptly removed all of the garments on his person and placed them in his father's hands. "God is my only father now" Francis told him. He then left the court, still naked, and danced singing all the way out of the city.

The best part? A few days later, a priest that had scorned Francis on that day joined him and became part of what would soon be the Franciscan Order.

What a fun guy!

A Mattress Killed the President

James A Garfield, the 20th president of the United States was president for less then 200 days before he was shot. The circumstances surrounding his attempted assassination and treatment are both unfortunate and bizarre. Medicine and technology as a whole were still in their beginning stages. Mankind had yet to fully understand the complexities of his own body. Doctor’s simply didn’t take the precautions that they do now, despite having known of bacteria to some extent for some time. It was living in such an unadvanced time, not a gunshot, that ultimately led to the president’s demise.

On July 2, 1881, James A Garfield, recently elected president of the United States, was about to set out on a trip to New England to visit his sick wife. As he passed through the waiting room, a young lawyer named Charles Guiteau snuck up behind him. Poor Charles had been denied the ambassadorship to France he had expected as a reward for a speech he had written for Garfield. The megalomaniac also believed he had seen a vision in which God told him to shoot the president. So as President Garfield walked by, Charles shot him in the back with a .44 pearl handled revolver. The bullet lodged itself somewhere in Garfield’s abdomen. As his would be assassin readily gave himself up to avoid being beaten to death, Garfield was quickly carted off to the White House.

There he was put under the care of Doctor Willard Bliss. The first thing Doctor Willard did was shove his un-sterilized fingers into the wound. He felt around inside the president for a bit, but he found no bullet. He did however, succeed in gouging a false passage that later confused other doctors and caused them to conclude that the bullet was in Garfield’s liver. Many more doctors made similar attempts and got similar results. The location of the tiny piece of lead continued to evade the presidential care givers. One doctor stuck his (also unsterilized) fingers so deep, that he actually punctured the liver. As the doctors continued to feel around inside him, a feverish president Garfield was put on a diet of milk and brandy.

On July 26, in a desperate attempt to save the president, Alexander Gram Bell, the creator of the telephone, and his assistant threw together a metal detector to find the elusive bullet. Strangely, the metal detector kept beeping wherever it was placed on Garfield’s body. Despite this, Bell said that he detected the metal much deeper then they had originally thought. Hopeful doctors cut open the president, but they found nothing. It was later discovered that the president had been lying on one of the first coil spring mattresses. Thus, if he had done this experiment on a normal bed, Bell probably would have been correct in his findings, and Garfield would have been able to prove himself as president.

The originally three inch wound was now a massive twenty inch hole in the president. It was incredibly infected, and he also began to show signs of infection from the bullet. On September 19th, 1881, after 79 days of ‘treatment’ James A Garfield died of a heart attack. The doctors concluded that he had died of a ruptured blood vessel in his stomach. In autopsy, the location of the bullet was finally revealed. It was lodged near his spinal cord in a protective cyst. Had the doctors left him alone, the president would have survived.

History books will tell you that our twentieth president was murdered by a crazed lawyer, but this is not the whole truth. It was the well meaning doctors gathered round his bed that truly killed James A Garfield. To be more precise, it was the newborn state of medicine of the time, the unsterilized fingers, the lack of adequate equipment and a blatant misunderstanding of the human body that ended the president’s short term. We will never know if the country would have flourished in his capable hands, but we do hope that an event like this will never repeat itself.