Economist, Jan 7, 2017 (II)

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How Martin Luther Has Shaped Germany for Half a Millennium; The 500th anniversary of the 95 theses finds a country as moralistic as ever.
http://www.economist.com/news/eu ... w-martin-luther-has

Quote:

"the whole nation is celebrating the 500th anniversary of the monk [on Oct 31, 1517] issuing his 95 theses and (perhaps apocryphally) pinning them to the church door at Wittenberg.

"After generations of secularisation, not to mention decades of official atheism in the formerly communist east (which includes Wittenberg), Germans are not particularly religious. But the Reformation was not just about God. It shaped the German language, mentality and way of life. For centuries the country was riven by bloody confessional strife; today Protestants and Catholics are each about 30% of the population.

"For Luther * * * Ostentation was thus a disgraceful distraction from the asceticism required to examine one's own conscience. The traces of this severity live on in Germany's early 20th-century Bauhaus architecture, and even in the furniture styles at IKEA (from Lutheran Sweden). They can be seen in the modest dress, office decor and eating habits of Angela Merkel, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor, and of Joachim Gauck, Germany’s president and a former pastor himself.


Note:
(a) Legends about Luther: Nailing the 95 Theses.
www.luther.de/en/legenden/tanschl.html
(i) The first proponent of church-door nailing, Philipp Melanchthon was Martin Luther's junior by 14 years and fellow Lutheran.
(ii) The notion was first debunked in a book:

Erwin Iserloh, The Theses Were Not Posted; Luther between reform and reformation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.
(Now deceased, the author was German.)

(b) ascetic (adj & n; Did You Know?; etymology)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ascetic
(The noun "asceticism" is lumped in this page)
(c) "Lutheran Sweden"

religion in Sweden
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Sweden
("Lutheran Christianity is officially the largest religion in Sweden [2016 census: 10m], with 6.2 million Swedish citizens being members of the [government-backed] Church of Sweden. * * * Despite that, religion in Sweden plays a limited role compared to the European average")
(d) Thanks to Luther's influence, in Germany "concerts are still attended like sermons, sombrely and seriously.  Luther's inheritance can also be seen in the fact that Germany, the world's 17th-most populous country, has the second-largest book market after America's. After he translated the Bible [New Testament in 1522 and Old Testament in 1534] into German, Luther wanted everyone * * * At first Protestants became more literate than Catholics; ultimately all Germans became bookish."

choi

(e) "Finally, a familiar thesis links Luther to German attitudes towards money. In this view Catholics, used to confessing and being absolved after each round of sins, tend to run up debts (Schulden, from the same root as Schuld, or 'guilt'), whereas Protestants see saving as a moral imperative. This argument, valid or not, has a familiar ring in southern Europe's mainly Catholic and Orthodox countries * * * Yet on money, too, Luther differed from other reformers. When Max Weber wrote of the Protestant work ethic in 1904 [book title: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism], he had in mind Calvinism and its relatives, such as American Puritanism. Calvin viewed an individual's ability to get rich as a sign that God had predestined him to be saved. To Luther, Christians were already saved, so wealth was suspect. Instead of amassing it, Christians should work for their community, not themselves. Work (Beruf) thus became a calling (Berufung). Not profit but redistribution was the goal. According to Gerhard Wegner, a professor of theology, this “Lutheran socialism” finds secular expression in the welfare states of Scandinavia and Germany.  Luther's 'subcutaneous' legacy keeps popping up in surprising places, says Mrs Eichel. Germans, and especially Lutherans, buy more life insurance but fewer shares [ie, stocks] than others (Luther didn’t believe in making money without working for it)."
(i) German-English dictionary:
* Schulden (noun feminine; plural form of Schuld ‎fault or guilt): "debt"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schulden
* Beruf (noun masculine; literally “calling,” from berufen)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Beruf
   ^ berufen (adjective; from be- +‎ [verb] rufen [call out, shout]): "appointed, called"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/berufen
* Berufung (n; from berufen +‎ -ung)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Berufung

Remember: The first letter of all German nouns are capitalized.
(ii)
(A) Max Weber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber
(Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber; 1864 – 1920; German)

Quote: "The phrase 'work ethic' used in modern commentary is a derivative of the 'Protestant ethic' discussed by Weber. It was adopted when the idea of the Protestant ethic was generalised to apply to the Japanese people, Jews and other non-Christians and thus lost its religious connotations.

(B) Maximilian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximilian
(iii) Puritanism. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Puritanism

Quote:

"Puritanism, a religious reform movement in the late 16th and 17th centuries that sought to 'purify' the Church of England of remnants of the Roman Catholic 'popery' that the Puritans claimed had been retained after the religious settlement reached early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Puritans became noted in the 17th century * * * Their efforts to transform the nation contributed both to civil war in England [1642–1651, where Puritans allied with Parliamentarians, against King Charles I, who lost and was beheaded in 1649] and to the founding of colonies in America as working models of the Puritan way of life.

"The moral and religious earnestness that was characteristic of Puritans was combined with the doctrine of predestination inherited from Calvinism to produce a “covenant theology,” a sense of themselves as elect spirits chosen by God to live godly lives both as individuals and as a community.