This 2009 video says about itself:
Reformationists Martin Luther & Thomas Müntzer
Martin Luther (1483-1546) changed the course of Western civilization by initiating the Protestant Reformation. Luther taught that salvation is not from good works, but a free gift of God, received only by grace through faith in Jesus as redeemer from sin. His theology challenged the authority of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church by teaching that the Bible is the only source of divinely revealed knowledge.
Thomas Müntzer (1488-1525) was an early Reformation-era German theologian and Anabaptist. He turned against Luther with several anti-Lutheran writings, and became a rebel leader during the Peasants’ War. In the battle at Frankenhausen, Müntzer and his farmers were defeated. He was captured, tortured and decapitated.
By Jenny Farrell in Britain:
The peasants’ war for a people’s Reformation
Tuesday 31st October 2017
Luther’s opposition to church hierarchy and hypocrisy began something of a class war, writes JENNY FARRELL
ON OCTOBER 31 1517, Martin Luther made public his 95 Theses against the widespread practice of selling indulgences and clerical corruption.
He attacked the Church’s claim to be the sole interpreter of the word and intentions of God and defended ordinary human entitlement to God’s grace without Church involvement.
The Roman Church was the greatest landowner and represented the central force of European feudalism.
Its increasing greed, the ruthless extortion of everybody, including the poor, caused discontent. The sale of indulgences, claiming to ensure clear passage to heaven, were used to finance the upper clergy’s affluent lifestyle and ever more splendid Church buildings. Such plundering deprived all territories of their financial resources and became an obstacle to early capitalist development.
Throughout the late middle ages, opposition to feudalism took the shape of open heresy and armed rebellion from the 14th century. These were class wars despite their religious guise.
One of the most effective heresies that took hold in the rising middle classes was the revival of early Christian teachings, and the demand to eliminate Church hierarchy, including the papacy.
Such radical anti-feudal sentiment could only be expressed in theological terms at the time. From this time stem early translations of the Bible into the native languages of the people empowering them significantly.
Plebeian demands went further. They called for the restoration of early Christian equality of all members of the community — to include civil equality, equity of property of all, and the abolition of ground rents, taxes and privileges.
They articulated the interests of a separate new class in the 14th and 15th centuries, which led to the first major peasant uprisings under the leadership of preachers. John Ball, Wat Tyler and Jack Straw are examples in Britain, Jan Hus in Bohemia and Luther’s contemporary, Thomas Müntzer, in Germany. Tyler was murdered, Ball and Straw executed; Hus was burnt at the stake. Müntzer was decapitated.
Luther’s contemporaries understood his Theses as a break with the Pope and the Church at a time when Germany was ripe for upheaval. He lit the fuse, so-to-speak.
Luther became the protagonist of heresy against the Roman Church and for a short time in history, all oppositional forces rallied around him. His Theses, therefore, mark the Reformation of the Roman Church and constitute historically the first stage of the early bourgeois revolution in Germany.
Luther’s translation of the New Testament from Latin into German in 1522 meant that ordinary people no longer depended on the interpretations of the clergy.
Now, they could read and understand the message of the Bible themselves and reformed preachers held church services in the vernacular. This translation was one of Luther’s lasting contributions. Luther’s writings on usury, his equation of usurer and merchant even earned him the praise of Karl Marx.
Increasingly in 1522/23, conflict arose between the interests of the German propertied patricians, and the dispossessed, marking a second phase in the bourgeois revolution.
Peasant and plebeian demands became the most far-reaching. The two classes that had momentarily identified the same historic opportunity of breaking with feudal control polarised in the early years of the Reformation, and separated.
Each party needed a representative. Luther had to take sides. He claimed he never intended his Reformation of the Church to ignite civil unrest.
As the reformed lesser nobility and the urban middle classes gained power, they rallied around Luther.
Luther dropped those elements of his position that were open to radical interpretation and instead emphasised Bible passages referring to God-ordained authorities and obedience, acceptance of social inequality.
His adversary Thomas Müntzer, on the other hand, attacked all main points of Christianity, preaching a kind of pantheism approaching atheism.
He repudiated the Bible as the only and infallible revelation and stated that reason is the revelation, existing among all peoples at all times.
He concluded that heaven is not of another world, but to be sought in this life, and that it is the task of believers to establish heaven on Earth.
As Múntzer’s religious philosophy approached atheism, so his political programme approached communism.
Müntzer became a leader of the German peasant war of 1524/25, the third stage of the bourgeois revolution.
He is Germany’s most outstanding leader of the people’s Reformation, which went far beyond Luther’s “moderate” bourgeois Reformation, and aimed at the complete abolition of feudal power and exploitation.
The peasants were defeated and slaughtered in enormous numbers. Betrayed by the propertied classes, who no longer felt they needed them to achieve power.
However, a bourgeois nation state was not realised. Germany remained splintered into political fiefdoms for over 300 more years.
PETER FROST reminds us of Martin Luther’s rabid anti-semitism and misogyny. … So should we celebrate the 500th Anniversary of Luther? On balance I don’t think I’ll be doing much cheering myself although I will certainly raise a glass to another clergyman who shares his name, his basic religious beliefs, but not any of his obnoxious prejudices — Martin Luther King.
Dear Kitty. Some blog 
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