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Friday, November 07, 2008

"In these early years, Luther’s attack on the Church’s canon law and clerical authority sometimes ripened into an attack on human law and earthly authority as a whole. “Neither pope nor bishop nor any other man has the right to impose a single syllable of law upon a Christian man without his consent,” Luther wrote famously in 1520. The Bible contains all the law that is needed for proper Christian living, both individual and corporate. To subtract from the law of the Bible is blasphemy. To add to the law of the Bible is tyranny. “Wise rulers, side by side with Holy Scripture, [are] law enough.” When jurists of the day objected that such radical biblicism was itself a recipe for blasphemy and tyranny, Luther turned on them harshly. “Jurists are bad Christians,” he declared repeatedly. “Every jurist is an enemy of Christ.” When the jurists persisted in their criticisms, Luther reacted with vulgar anger: “I shit on the law of the pope and of the emperor, and on the law of the jurists as well.”"

--- Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation / John Witte, Martin E. Marty
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