 Welcome to the annual Jewish Christian Engagement Lecture co-sponsored by the Center for Catholic Studies, which I direct. My name's Paul Lakeland, and by the Bennett Center for Judaic Studies, directed by Alan Umanski, who you'll hear from later, who's sitting on the front row here. Before I introduce the lecturer, I'm going to do a little commercial for both centers. So the remaining two events of this semester in the Judaic Studies Program after today. On Wednesday, November the 15th, the Jacobi Lunan Humanitarian Lecture will be offered by Father Patrick DeBoys, who is going to talk about a voice of conscience on covering mass murder from the Holocaust to today. He works with the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops Conference, and he's the founder of Yahud in Unum, an organization dedicated to locating sites of mass graves of Jews killed by German death squads during the Second World War. So he'll be speaking on November the 15th. It says here at 8 p.m., I guess. It's co-sponsored with open vision, so it's in the Quick Center for the Arts. You can call the box office. That's a ticket-only event, so you can call the box office to order a ticket for that. And then the last event of the year in the Judaic Studies Program is on November 28th, the Adolf and Ruth Schnomacher Lecture, which will be given by Dr. Shalkelner, Associate Professor of Sociology and Jewish Studies at my alma mater, Vanderbilt University. And he'll be talking about, is it a he or a she? He, sorry, about how American Jews mobilized to free Soviet Jewry lessons for activism today. So those are the two remaining events in the Judaic Studies Program. There are two more events in the Catholic Studies Program. We do not have more distinguished speakers, but we certainly have more curious titles to our lectures. So next Wednesday, Carlos Eyre, who is a distinguished professor at Yale University, will be celebrating the day after the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation with a lecture entitled, Writing the History of the Impossible, Catholic Miracles in the Age of the Reformation. Catholics Love Miracles, Luther was a little dubious about them. And then our final event on November 15th, that one is next week at 7.30 in this room. And on November 15th at 7.30 in this room, we have a distinguished professor from Boston College talking about, and this has to be the best title of the year, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and the Discovery of Fake News. So I have no idea what he's gonna talk about, but he's a good friend of mine. You'll have a good time. So those are the upcoming events in our two programs. And tonight we are very delighted with the upcoming presentation by Professor Kirsten Stöner. So in less than, oh, before I do that, a bit more housekeeping, off to the lecture, as we always do on this joint event, we'll have a brief response this time from Professor Jumanski, and then we'll have time for questions and comments and so on. So that's the way the evening will go. So in less than a week now, the world will celebrate the 500th anniversary of one of the most famous events that never happened. The day when Martin Luther nailed his 95th thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Whether he did this or didn't do this, this symbolizes the initial moment in what became the Protestant Reformation. So when Ellen Jumanski and I sat down to plan for this year's Jewish Christian Engagement Lecture, we immediately decided that we would commemorate the event somehow or other. How lucky we were to learn that Professor Kiasishtirna was willing and able to be our speaker on the occasion of the 12th Annual Lecture in our series. Dr. Shtirna is currently the first Lutheran Los Angeles Southwest Synod Professor of Lutheran History and Theology at the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary of California. How did I do with that? Was that all right? Yeah. She's also a member of the doctoral core faculty at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and she holds a position of docent in the theology faculty of Helsinki University in Finland. Previously, she taught at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. She's also an ordained pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland. Kiasishtirna's early studies were in her native Finland, culminating in a master of theology and systematic theology and ecumenics at the University of Helsinki. She completed her doctoral studies at Boston University Graduate School. Interestingly, both her MA thesis and her doctoral dissertation focused on the theology and spiritual visions of the 14th century St. Berghitta of Sweden, in whom the younger Catholic Martin Luther showed considerable interest, perhaps because she spent a great deal of her life in Rome advocating for church reform with very little return on her time investment. But back to today's speaker. So I can only give you a tiny sample from the 22 page single spaced CV that you can find online. She's a prolific writer, author, and co-author or editor of many books, including a particular interest for tonight. Martin Luther, the Bible and the Jewish People study published in 2012. Women and the Reformation published in 2011 and more recently in 2016 and counters with Luther new directions for critical studies. Among her many current projects, she's on the advisory board and participates in a three year collaborative project and international interdisciplinary exchange on the history of desire for Christian unity in the 19th and 20th centuries. And she's a collaborator on two other major projects, one called Luther, a Christian and his legacy to be published this year, I think by De Grater and also on the encyclopedia of Martin Luther and the Reformation, which should also appear this year. So I could go on, but I won't. So please join me in welcoming Professor Sterna to deliver her lecture on was Luther's Jesus a Jew. Thank you. This is the only year I can brag on this Andy Warhol called Luther and Catalina Montbara back. So I worry for me, it brings me power anyway. This is a picture of French Jews in the 16th century. Whenever I talk about theology, I always want to remember and remind my students that we're talking about people. Theology is made by people. And when we talk about Jews, Luther, we're talking about people. So to give some perspective. So this is, I have no interpretation of that, but this is an image of the 16th century French Jews. And I promise not to speak from the notes, but I am a foreigner, I'm a fan, and English is not my first or second language. So I will every now and then cheat a little bit because I want to be able to comprehend you to comprehend what I'm saying. But it is an honor to be here today. And the topic is extremely difficult. And at the same time, it is the most important and life-giving topic I find as a teacher of all the courses I teach, my students tell me this is the best class. Not because of me. It's the topic that gets up together. So I stand in front of you today as a lifelong Lutheran. I was born in Finland where everybody is Lutheran. By being born in Finland, you're Lutheran. You're not asked, you want to be Lutheran. You're born, you're Lutheran, right? And I married a man who at this moment is giving a lecture at the St. Joseph's Seminary University in somewhere in Pennsylvania. It's a sister Jesuit school on the same topic, Luther and the Jews. He teaches Hebrew Bible and the Jewish-Christian relations in the United Lutheran Seminary. And I'm a grandmother of a Jewish baby, Soleil. So if you haven't noticed yet, it's time to notice, it's October and Luther is everywhere. Even there's a PBS movie, two-hour feature movie on Luther. How many of you have seen that? Yeah, it's on PBS. To have two-hour documentary devoted on a religious figure is almost like we don't care what religion it deals with, we want to pay attention, right? Two hours on that. He must be important. And I would like to say yes, Martin Luther is important for many reasons. There are many reasons to remember him or celebrate or criticize him. And the word freedom is the word that gets me interested in him. And it is the reason why I'm still a Lutheran. It's the word freedom, more on that later. So I understood not everybody here is Lutheran, which is great. It's kind of boring to always talk to Lutheran people. So I prepared three slides of The Life of Luther just to get us all on the same page here. So who the heck is Martin Luther? Well, those are the dates. He was an Augustinian monk. He was a scholar, priest, professor, author. He was a condemned heretic. To my knowledge, he still is a heretic. So am I. He was from Iceland. He was schooled in air food. He had a career in Wittenberg. He was a professor of the Bible at the University of Wittenberg which was sponsored and protected by the very powerful man at the time of Elector of Saxony Prince Frederick. He had several turning points in his life. Kind of conversion experiences that made him who he was. And these are the reasons why we remember him. One was he was a student of law. He had an experience when he thought he was gonna die out of a lightning strike. And he gave his life to God. He became a monk and a scholar of religion instead of a lawyer. He found a merciful God. He's an individual who was looking for a merciful God and he found that God from scriptures. He was an overachieving, neurotic, compulsive Christian who did all that the current theology taught that Christians should do to be good. And it didn't work for him. He had a conversion experience when he realized that the current recipe doesn't work for him. Doctrine of justification by faith by grace. This is what Luther is known for, a teacher of grace. Well Lutheran, Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Jews, we all teach grace. So that's nothing new. So it's helpful to think that when we look at Luther, whatever the issue is to see what was the impact on him personally that he read from the sacred scriptures something that gave him to experience a grace that God saves me without me having any role in that. So we can relate to that regardless of what our sacred scriptures are. He attacks scholastic theology. It's like anybody faculty here, try attacking your discipline, try attacking your dean or try presenting a different method of scholarship. That's really dangerous. He did that, 1516. He attacked the dominant theologies of the day and the methods of the day. And he had questions about power and authority and how does the theology meet the needs of the people? 1516, 1517. He called people from all walks of life to take control over what he thought was the word of God, the gospel of grace. He got excommunicated, excommunicated 1521 as a result of all these activities. He was a very unusual and a theologian in the 16th century because he was married. They were not married theologians in the middle ages. They were theologians with women and children but they were not married. He was married to an ex-none, Catalina Mambora. He had six children. They had two miscarriages. They fostered several children. They were a mother and a father for several children. So something to think about. What made Luther so famous is the printing press. It's Luther is the first theologian who really took advantage of the worldwide web and the Twitter and the Instagram. He went nuts with that. And that is the reason why everybody knew about Luther already within months from his big statements. So 2017 remembers that 1517, which is the year of when we usually date the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. There are other dates. Not everybody cares who about 1517 but this is the date we remember when Martin Luther became known for his 95 tweets, right? What the monk was tweeting about? Different things. First of all, there's a lot of excitement right now about did he really post them, write them, nail them? I mean, who cares? We know he wrote them. We know he mailed them. He made sure that people in higher places knew about his 95 issues with the church and theology. So that's the main thing. Whether he actually nailed them on these doors, it doesn't matter that much. This is a door from Wittenberg's castle church. How many of you have been there? It's in Wittenberg, downtown Wittenberg. Yeah, pretty magnificent doors. And these are the 95 thesis after the fact, both there. And look at the image here. I need to point out it's really outrageous actually. So there's the cross. There's Luther and there's his collaborator, Phillip Melangson, who translated Luther to people who were interested in more conciliatory language of faith. And then that's the Lutherans Confessions from 1530. That takes a lot of hoots by the Buddha out there. It is so strange and offensive in so many ways that I apologize for that. You shouldn't have that there. But anyway, what was Luther so very quickly, just to make sure we're all in the same page, I'm gonna give you a few words about Luther, his issues, developments. Then I'm gonna get to the writings of Luther and the Jews. So what could Luther famous is his attack against the practice of indulgences. This is an image of indulgence of the sixth century. And really what he was actually attacking was not necessarily practice of indulgences or the papal office. In my understanding, he was attacking this issue that is it possible that you could put a price tag on grace? Is it possible that you could have any kind of transaction when it has to do with grace? He had an issue with theology that keeps people in fear. He had an issue with that, that theology that keeps people in fear. He had an issue with unchecked papal authority and authority in faith and grace matters in general and who has the power to forgive? He began to question these things. Who has the power to give? And this is the big issue for him. How come it is so that people in Germany, Northern Germany, where there are people are poor, people are sleeping on streets, people are hungry, the kids are living in rags and they are sending money to build that? He got a win of that and he really had a problem with that. It is a wonderful church. How many of you have been to St. Peter's? It is magnificent. How does it have to be that big? It doesn't need to be that big. And especially when you look at it from the perspective of a German monk, why do my people's money go there? Luther was a practicing preacher, a dean of the school at the time, but he was always preaching and dealing with people. And he saw people hungry and carrying these indulgence letters and he got a win that, wait a minute, you bought that in the next town over, you bought, we are here in Fairfield. You bought that from Philadelphia. What are you doing, what's going on here? You bought that to give you money to build that while you should be feeding your kids. So there are a lot of things going on. In my reading of the 95th thesis, and we're not gonna stay with them, is that, and how many of you have read the 95th thesis of Luther? Because that is the date. I forgot to mention it. So 95th thesis, he wrote them October 31st, somehow procrastinated them and that started what we call the Avalanche of Brothers and Reformation. The way I see is that he had a deep concern for the well-being of his neighbors. He was bothered by the poverty and people's spiritual needs. He thought that the church was not being effective in meeting those needs or feeding people. And he was wondering about this whole question of authenticity of faith, that what is faith for? A religion for, how many of the practices we have really have any value to them? And the bottom line is who reads the scriptures where we are supposed to get this stuff? Like who is reading and do we have it right? His major discovery had to do with freedom. That grace is actually free. We are safe, free, freely, without any price tag. Forgiveness is free. And the church is supposed to convey that. So how come we're sending money to Rome? And how come the theology doesn't seem to be relevant enough to make people feel free? And by the way, everybody should be able to read the Bible for themselves. And we take that for granted. Like I come from Finland, I read Bible in Finnish, you read Bible in your languages. But in the middle ages, that wasn't granted at all. Jan Hus, John Wycliffe, earlier had promoted the same idea that people should be able to read the Bible in their own language. They got killed and condemned as heretics. There was really a strong control over how you read the Bible. So all this has consequences, what Luther's tweeting about. Oh, and this is a reminder of the holiness of when we criticize the medieval religiosity, we also want to remember the holiness and the power and the beauty that it did have in people's lives. So back to Luther. Those of you who are not studying the Lutheran Confessions, very quickly, this is an amazing. So 1520, after Luther tweets 95 times, he is writing three major treatises, one to these rulers and one against the Catholic theology of the sacraments and to the people where he is calling for a major action. He is calling everybody to stand up and come and protect the gospel. And he is critiquing Christian doctrine, including the doctrinal transubstantiation, which is a no-no. And he's calling for every woman and a man to rise and be free and be Christian, whatever that means. 1520, he's excommunicated within months from that. Outload and excommunicate it and everybody with him. So it's kind of weird to think that, well, come 1530, they're still there. They're like mosquitoes, they don't go anywhere. And Lutherans are meeting the emperor and they're presenting their Catholic confession of Augsburg and it is rejected. And still 1555, they're still there. And by the way, 1555, it's the first time ever since the Council of Nicaea 325 that any group diverting from the mainstream is given the right to practice their faith. It's only the Lutherans who practice faith in accordance with the Augsburg Confession within 1530 that they are allowed the right to live and practice without persecution, but only them, not Anabaptists, not Presbyterians, sorry, not Anglicans, just the Lutherans with Augsburg Confession. That's the first time there is so-called religious freedom in a very limited sense. 1580 Lutherans come together, they have time to argue amongst themselves. They come with the formula of conquered. They kind of agree that we are all Lutherans, why Luther never wanted anybody to be called Lutheran. He wanted people to be Christian. But 1580, a book of conquered is compiled and that's where it stopped, nothing sexy has come since then from the Lutheran circles. Sorry. And so of all these, I just wanna point out of all the horrible stuff we were looking at today is that there's certain things we can admire is the bravery and the courage and the tenacity towards change and the courage Luther expressed when he spoke up, when he was bothered, existentially bothered by some human concerns. They were more human than theological first. And it takes a lot of courage to critique the powers and the worldviews of the time and it takes a lot of courage to critique the ways the sacred texts are interpreted. So he started what I would call, and this is indisputable, he started an avalanche. However you wanna measure it, he did start an avalanche. What is more disputed is this, that can we use the word freedom when we talk about Luther? Was he really a freedom theologian? Was he standing for freedom? As some people thought he was, like the peasants, they were really looking up to him thinking, wait a minute, there's finally a theologian who speaks for my issues, and with whom I can go and get them princes killed and get my rights. And some of us maybe, some of, I don't know how much you know about the story, but Luther was not in favor of any kind of rebellion and he wanted the princes to squash that kind of rebellions. But I'm gonna get back to this, but to disclose my starting point, to me, why can I still be a Lutheran today knowing what I know? It's this, that I'm drawn to the elements of freedom in his theology that I want to bring up, otherwise I could not be Lutheran today. So to remember, there are endless opportunities today. How many of you have been to Wittenberg this year? Nobody, oh wow, well lucky you, it is crowded, there are lots of people there, millions of people going through Wittenberg, they have a mall now, you can buy Luther noodle, gather in a liquor, you can buy Luther socks, here I stand, everything, it is a big time event going on right now. And I met this man, people are going to Wittenberg to kind of seek for some answers. And I met this man from Airfoot, Airfoot is one of the cities in previous XDTR region, and there was this man who used to practice law, now he sells beer, and I had some of his beer, maybe one or two, and we were talking, and he said, I was so willing to be interested. He's from DDR, so he was raised an atheist, not believing any kind of God or religion, and he sees all these people coming to his town, he said, I was willing to be interested, but so far I'm not, because I only see celebration, and the Luther noodle. And I said, well, what would make you interested? And he said, if something real was being discussed, like the Lutheran Jews, how is it possible that that happened, and how is it possible that the Holocaust happened, and how is it possible that my people did what they did, and they evoked the name of Luther? I would be interested with that, so that's the realness, there are real people involved in the story, and when we keep our focus on the real people, we have a certain perspective that's helpful, it's humble, and it's down to earth, and we're dealing with people, and that's interesting. So when we think of the 2017, we could do all kinds of things. We're gonna have a big party, we can celebrate, and think of what is worth really celebrating of the past. Like in Berkeley, we're all forward-looking, it's really hard to look back at all, but why do we ever look back? Do we wanna celebrate something, or critique something? Do we want to reform something? Do we wanna name something that needs reforming? Do we wanna correct the narratives? Do we wanna correct the theology or the meaning of the good news, which is a Christian term? What do we mean with the good news? Do we want to transform our hermeneutics? This is actually a big thing. It's much easier to have a nice party to celebrate than to actually remember and repent and reform. So I personally think that the 2017 is the time to listen, repent, and reform. So this topic, Luther and the Jews, it's a hot topic. If you look at all the events around the world, there are two topics that rise to the top. One is women and Luther, and women in reformation, and one is Luther and the Jews. And it is abandoned research. You can find so many works on that. And this is one of the topics that really divides people. People have very different opinions on this. And the question is why would we really actually bother about this? Why don't we do something more cheerful? Why do we even bother to think about this? So why bother? One rational is that, well, the Holocaust happened. The Holocaust happened. Luther did write against the Jews explicitly so. There are people who use his name to name their faith tradition. So these are obvious reasons why we had to talk about Luther and the Jews. And in our current climate, where there's an increased permission to hate talk and anti-Semitism and xenophobia, racism, we have to talk about Luther and the Jews. We have to talk about Calvin and the Jews, Erasmus and the Jews, John Eck and the Jews. Let's start with Luther. Luther offers us a window to the past and to the present and to the future. And I would say to ourselves, studying him gives us some further understanding of the foundations of Christian faith and its tainted pieces that need to be reformed in order for there to be Christianity for the future. And I hope the study of Luther and the Jews somehow facilitates coming together for choosing Christians, not to become the same, but coming together. I have a sticker here, a bumper sticker on my laptop. It never again, or what you do matters. I got that from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum where I taught last June with my husband on the same topic for educators. So I personally, I put that there to remind me and everybody who I encounter about the importance of critical study of the past and present for the sake of a better future. And I stand with this statement that never again and what you do does matter. So this is what I do as a Lutheran professor. I want to speak the truth from my perspective on a person who is extremely important in my faith tradition in the interest of what I believe is our shared concern for the biggest truth and the human rights and freedom interests. And especially this anniversary year with the rise of anti-Semitism, anti-Semitic talk and hate crimes. This gives us an impetus and a moral responsibility to dig deeper to the roots, to uproot the rotten roots and tainted pieces that we have carried on and pass on with our Christian faith traditions of a Lutheran kind. Also, this study leads us to a better understanding of our faith ancestors with the Lutheran of other kind. And it warns us of the power of theological convictions and biblical hermeneutics. They actually have power. Our theology has power. And this kind of study teaches us something about ourselves and our neighbors and about our capacities for better and for worse. And it importantly makes us to pay attention acutely to what is being said and done around us right now and give us some mojo to put stop to it. So with my husband, Brooks Ram, who is right now lecturing at St. Joseph's, we put together a resource that we, and this is not advertisement. I'm just explaining what I'm doing and this is the limit of what I can do. I'm very limited in what I'm doing here. We have been teaching the topic of Lutheran Jews for maybe 10 years together and our students need the book and our constituencies out there in the congregation need the book. So we put it together. It's a collection of Luther's own texts throughout his career with introductions and annotations. And we wanted to acknowledge that there are many ways we can approach this topic Lutheran Jews. We can look at Luther's theology in light of the Jewish question or we could look at Reformation history and Jews in that or we could look at Luther's biblical hermeneutics, those three things. So we put all those perspectives together to create this reader that hopes to do this. It is a reader that facilitates a reader to read and analyze a selection of Luther's writings focusing on his exegetical works as well as treatisees in which Luther most explicitly deals with the Jewish question as he calls it. Some of our guiding questions are these. What... I'm gonna show you some of them. What is the Jewish question for Luther? What does it mean? The Jewish question. Number four, what did Luther actually say about the biblical Jews or the Jews of his time or of the Jewish faith? Are these similar things of what he's saying about? Is there a difference? Did Luther's arguments change over time? It doesn't matter. How does the study of Luther illuminate the roots and continued influence of anti-Semitism? And how can the critical study of Luther with the Jewish question in mind foster mutual respect and conversation between Jews and Christians? Starting from how do we read the Bible? And we concluded that really, we can have all kinds of opinions of the matter. But this is the kind of existential question whether it's with Luther or Calvin or Erasmus or some more contemporary person that one needs to deal with that with oneself and find really good conversation partners. Because you can't really believe what other people say about this. Like you can't believe what other people tell you about the Holocaust. You need to be able to deal with that. So our effort is that a reader might help you to get a little bit more deeper on that. So not that. So these are the texts I wanna turn our attention to. Martin Luther. This is a very long intro, but there's a purpose because it's 2017. Usually when people talk about Luther and the Jews, they start with the last four. Against the sepaterians, on the Jews and the lies, on the infable name of the last verse of David. People don't usually include that Jesus Christ was born a Jew and they definitely won't include a whole book worth of texts from Luther to talk about that. It would be very nice if you could say that in the end of Luther's life, he just got cranky, tired, ill, and weird and say these things we can dismiss and never translate again. And this is actually one of the big questions when we have been producing new works on Luther for the new readers. Should we even include these? Or should we just say no? We no longer honor them. We don't wanna have them in our books. And what would that do if we just erased the memory of these texts and remembered the Luther who never said anything ill about the Jews? And then you realize actually the thoughts in these last words were present already in the very first text he ever wrote because he was a Christian medieval theologian. I could, is there any question at this point? Clarifying question before I move on to the second part? No? Now you can see all my, what's junk on my email here and my, oh, where is that? It's here. I lost it for a while there. All right, getting started here. So these are the notorious texts. Must read unpleasant. And as I said, at PLTS where I teach, we teach this course regularly. Like we're not gonna teach Luther without this. This is equally true about him as is the freedom theology part. So, but there's also dimension, couple of other works. So if you look at the timing of these works where he's explicitly known for being anti-Jews in the end of his career and then the son is 1523. I'll talk about that in a minute. There's some other texts we could lift up from 1526, 37, 43. When he's talking about the Psalms, he's led to a very known Jewish rabbi, Lexus and Isaiah. So there's a lot, there's a lot we could lift up here. I'm not gonna read now from this, but we could start this lecture by looking at how Luther wrote to his wife in the end of his career. He's called to Islepen where he was born and he's going there to help with the dispute with the Dukes there. And he's running to his wife, Katarina, about, and we have no Lutherist lectures to his wife, of course, because women's writings were not considered important. And he's running to his wife about, oh, I'm passing this valley and there were, I don't know, maybe 50 Jews. And I felt this cool air in my head and I got dizzy. And I felt like I'm dying. And I think it was the Jews, right, honey? And then he moves on to talk about how much good beer he had and he had three bowel movements. So there are women who are trying to woo him. And so that letter is too long to share right now, but it gives us a sense of the climate. Luther and his wife are casually talking about the Jews cursing the Christians, making Luther feel sick. And at the same, with the same ease, he talks about his health and beer and women. So that's the culture Luther comes from. But let's look at this actually first. So instead of looking at the letter, let me give you like one minute summary of these main treatises of Luther. In 1523, Luther writes that Jesus Christ was born a Jew. It is a wonderful title for a treatise. I wish that's the only thing he had written. He teaches there, he writes about how the Jews need to be taught, how to read the scriptures. That I regret he did that. But the title is good. But in this treatise he talks about how the Jews need to be taught how to read their own scriptures. But they are the faith ancestors. They really are the faith ancestors. They heard God first. So we should really love them and never ever hurt them. We should facilitate conversations. 1538 moving forward against the superterians, also often not included in this discussion. He talks about how is it possible that Jews have been exiled for 1500 years and before and before and before. I mean, come on people, don't you see? And he becomes suddenly this historian of the Jewish history and his conclusion is somebody's lying here. Either God lied about the promise to a God's people or the Jews are doing something weird and lying. And he comes to conclude that the law of Moses had his time is dead, Judaism is dead. That's terrible. 1543, right before he's dying, he writes on the Jews and their lives. This is the most famous Luther's works where he has an agenda. He explicitly tells the rulers and the preachers in different columns like what you should do about the Jews who are still here. You should suppress their religion. You should forbid the rabbis from teaching. You need to prohibit people from uttering God's name. You need to confiscate the books, burn the synagogues, destroy the houses where you can find Jewish literature and make the Jews earn their labor with sweat. The time of tolerance is over, Luther concludes. The last ones on the last were the David and the ineffable name are so bad that they have often excluded from any Luther editions for a reason because they are scatological, plasphemous, absolutely nasty, nasty and nauseating reading where he is supposedly challenging rabbinic interpretation of the Bible and Jewish faith. He's fearful of the Jewish mockery of Christian faith while he is mocking the most precious elements of Jewish faith in his slandering. And if you wanna find the best example of Christian super-Sessonist writing, you feel free to look at those. Austen Sarkin, a Jewish historian, has said that Luther's anti-Jewish writings belong to the forefront of treatises and speeches and sermons delivered against the Jews in all of church history. Heiko Oppemann says similarly, what does he say? I can't see my notes. The very tragedy of the relationship between Jews and Christian world can be studied in a concert-ready form in this one person. In a concert-ready form, we can study this huge existential issue with this one person. Howard Frankl Colchman writes that it's not was, she says it was not just Luther actually but the entire society that Luther was born in believed in the wickedness of the Jews and that they were the children of Satan. Just as they believed in the evil and satanity of the witches. Luther was one of the most famous speakers of the time. So obviously we pay more attention to what he's saying but we should not forget that this is the mood but I just described earlier how Christians generally felt about the Jews. Christians rejected Jewish faith. They did not see any value in that. Looking at the history, if you look at the protectors of the Jews, it was the emperor and the pope who were not the bad persons at all in this picture. How does this anti-Jewish mood show in Luther's time? Jews and Christians were forced to live in separate quarters. This is an image of the Venice ghetto. Typically, as I think you all know, Jews were forced to live in separate quarters surrounded by walls. There were curfews and limitations where Jews could practice business. And I read from Deborah Kaplan's work that was really eliminating to me when she says that we should not write the Jewish history as a lacrimonious history as if Jews had no agency but we need to look at like, well, how did it mean to be a Jew in that world and have acknowledged the agency of every Jew in that situation? And she talks about how the ghetto, from my perspective, that's an awful thing. And she says, but actually, it also protected the Jews in a climate where it was really dangerous to not be Christian. So I don't know how many of you have been to Venice and the Venice ghetto, the book, yeah, well. The limitations, and this, I have never been able to understand this, that the Christians had this need to be able to identify who are the other. Christians demanded, Christian rulers demanded that the Jews would wear either of this unit ringle or a star or different cloak or hat or something to indicate that they were Jews. Like, you know, the Jewish woman coming from the bells on her dress. It's like this fear of the Jew. You need to know who you're dealing with. Propaganda, graffiti, explicit anti-Jewish humor, it's everywhere. This is from Wittenberg and from the 1300s on, in many of the German churches, there were images like this up on one of the stables where there would be an image of an anti-Jewish image. There we have a Jew, I mean, a sow, and then we have a Jewish rabbi looking in the behind of the sow, and then we have two rabbis looking under the pig. It's an absolutely horrific image. This was very common in the German churches in the Middle Ages, and they were not removed before, during, or after the Reformation, in most cases. And why I'm showing this horrible image is to give you a sense of that when Martin Luther was born when he was a young man, when he went to church, he wouldn't think twice that he's going to worship through a door that's under this kind of an image. It was like you were supposed to be anti-Jewish if you're Christian in the most exaggerated ways. Expulsions, persecutions, most Jews were expulsed from Spain, England, France from 1200 on. German speaking lands actually were the only lands still welcoming Jews in Luther's time. And even there, the Jews lived under the mercy of the whimsical decisions of the local rulers who would negotiate with local people. And often the money was the issue, that who benefits from the Jews being expulsed. So in any time, any Jewish family or community could be expulsed. So this is another irony that this is a reality. We can see it from the facts that the Jews are being randomly expulsed time and again and moving towards East to find a safe place. And yet when Luther writes about the Jews, it's like, oh my gosh, they're here again. Because he lived in a world where there were no Jews. His city had no Jews. So to him, it's almost like the terrorists are back again. I mean, is that kind of fear of the other that is absolutely hard for us to relate to, but on some level we understand that if you're so afraid of the other and you think that the other is about to hurt you, yeah, you're scared. Anything I say, I'm not in any way excusing anything of what he's saying, by the way. So all of this, what is the engine for Luther other than that he lives in a world that is anti-Jewish, absolutely anti-Jewish? He's a professor of Bible. It's all about the Bible for Luther. That Bible was the source for him for his freedom theology, his experience at grace. He became a reformer because he read the Bible the way he did. What else can we say about that? So he lectured the Bible all the time and most of the times of the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible, most of the times he lectured on the Hebrew Bible that he thought he kind of understood better than any rabbi that ever lived. That was his first love. And I think it irritated him that he couldn't quite compete with the rabbinic tradition. Some statistics, how many sermons on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Old Testament actually, he wasn't that interested after his revelation. It was the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible that he was drawn to. It's as a tragedy as Salah Barov says that his lifetime of preoccupation with the Old Testament made him less than more friendly to contemporary Jews. Oh, sorry, not that, sorry, don't look at that. So these are really outrageous claims that he's making as a Bible professor, he knows his stuff, right? That everything is at stake, how we understand the Bible talk to us about the Messiah. He sees there's a unity between the Old and the New and actually he sees the entire scriptures as a Christian book. Factors in his interpretation are, he inherited anti-Jewish attitudes and hermeneutics. He's chronically suspicious towards rabbinic texts. He is absolutely lacking in any real interaction with any practice in Jews. He doesn't know any practice in Jews. He only knows Jews who have converted, who want to impress him how Christian they are. And Jews had been expulsed from Wittenberg. So it's like he's dealing with this Jewish question in abstract. This is what I noticed in my reading that it's almost like Luther makes a difference that there are the biblical Jews whom he loves. He loves Sarah and Abraham, all the people in Old Testament, they are his faith heroes. But it's the Jews after the writing of the Bible that he has a problem with. And some of the theological issues that how is it possible that there's this exile experience that surely God wouldn't allow that? That is a terrifying possibility for him. God would not desert God's people, he thinks. And what about this God's covenant? Did the Jews get it right? Or is there another way to read that? What does the covenant mean and who belongs into the covenant? And how about this Messiah? Why do the Jews continue to say no to Christ? Well, Luther thinks it's pretty clear that Messiah has come. So it really boils down to how people read scriptures and the promise in the scriptures. For the Jews, the Messiah will come. For the Christians, the Messiah has come. And Luther's thinking. Luther cannot comprehend. He is almost taking it personally that why doesn't everybody in this world, including the papers, convert and see the Bible in the way he sees that? We could name this very issue as the very tainted piece from the Christian side of you, the tainted piece of how Christians have approached the scriptures. Making the Messiah question to center and assuming that the message of the Messiah has been completed and that the Christians get it right. I mean, that is the kind of the elephant in the room. Luther has many meanings for the word Jew. I discovered that when he talks about the Jew, it's kind of this ambiguous abstract person. They're typically negative. Typically, Jew is the one who rejects the gospel. Jew is the one who rejects the Messiah or a come. Jew is the one who represents law-based religiosity. And Jew, the word Jew represents the Luther as if the inner Jew we all carry, the one we need to conquer. He doesn't know any real Jews as a reminder. I really think if Luther ever had a chance to have a separate meal with the Jewish family and dance in a wedding, I think he would have changed his mind. I see it in other cases when he actually had a real person in front of him. He changed the way he talked about that, but he never had that. The engine in Luther's thinking about the Jews is how he reads the Bible. There's really no other way to understand that, but how he understands and reads the Bible. So people who have tried to explain Luther's anti-Jewish statements outside of this question are faulty. The way he reads scriptures is inherently anti-Jewish and it's because the way he found God in the scriptures that changed his life. So in his biblical work, he sees that both Christians and Jews are actually in the Garden of Eden. When he looks at the Genesis, he comes to see that both Christians and Jews are already in the Garden of Eden. We are all already there and we are all kind of people of God. And he totally mixes the meaning of Jew and Christian when he comes to conclude on these things who are really the people of God. But his bottom line is that God has made a covenant with people and that is unbreakable. God would have never broken a covenant. We kind of get that, but then what he does with his identity of Jews and Christians is mildly put a little strange. I'm really sorry, but in final analysis, for Luther, Jews are the enemy. In the end of his life, he is very clear, Jews are the enemy, they have no future unless they convert. Christians are God's elect and Christians read the Bible correct. He aims for the conversion of the Jews and he wants to honor, this is where he's been a good guy, he actually honors the conversions, he doesn't doubt them. His views in my opinion do not change, but what does change is what he thinks Christians should do with this Jewish question. And towards the end of his life, he's pretty adamant that the Jews need to be asked to leave. He never condones any kind of killing of any people. The peasants' wars are a different thing, let's not talk about that, but in the question of Jews, he does not, I have not read anything where he would say that any Jewish person should be killed, is the Jewish faith that is already dead in his view. Interestingly enough, his words didn't have that much impact. His colleagues tried to suppress some of his work saying this is not really cool stuff, we're gonna not circulate this, but his electorate did listen to him and it is very apparent that in his time, the Jews did not get more rights to travel through Saxony. They did not gain any more rights while there was a moment when the Jews in German speaking lands thought that Luther was one of those bigons of hope that you could go and get some help, but Luther vehemently denied any opportunity of meeting with any living Jew to support their travel or profession. And the impact, so this is a difficult one, the Nazis did evoke Luther's name. They were not that Hitler read Luther, but Himmler and others had read Luther and they did explicitly use his name and use some of the Luther dates to do some horrible things like the Kristallnacht. So I don't know what we do with that. We can see what the impact of somebody's theology has been in the past, while the person probably would not himself have wanted to have anything like Kristallnacht ever happened. So anything positive? That treatise that Jesus Christ supported you in 1523, one of my, it is one of my favorite treatises from Luther in this regard for many reasons. And one is that it is so utterly woman-friendly and uteris-friendly, and also if he had stopped there, it would be kind of something we could deal with. His focus there is Mary, emphasis on the woman's role in the salvation history, and his Mary is absolutely Jewish and he kind of dwells on that, that Mary is a Jewish young woman and Jesus was Jewish. And his strong advice to Christians, to be kind, if you want to be Christian, you need to be kind and loving, otherwise what's the worth of being a Christian? And his focus there is criticizing the papal church for the abuses and corruption and any kind of actions that would lead to forced conversions. His call for authentic Christian life. Interesting statements in this text that the Jews are actually nearer to Christ than Christians are. Christians are in-laws, only aliens, while the Jews are really the first children of God, children to elect. And God has honored the Jews the most. Mary, a pure maiden and Jesus were genuine Jews and all is possible for God. The omnipotence of God that comes through his conviction of that in this text is inspiring. But what is misleading is that this text has been used to prove that Luther wasn't always anti-Jewish in theological speaking, that he had a change of heart. No, he really didn't have a change of heart in theological speaking. And Luther did not want to be known as a Jew friend. He had a chance and he said no to that. Gonna conclude here. I wish I had something more positive to say. The bottom line is that for Luther, the Jewish question was a theological issue and a biblical interpretation issue. It really didn't deal with real people. There was no celebration of diversity so we can't expect him to speak like that. There was just none. In 16th century, you were supposed to be Christian in Europe. And maybe the last part is maybe the most important that his own personal experience of freedom was so overwhelming he couldn't see any other way. I know my old father in law told me when he asked me, do you think Jesus is the only way to heaven? And I said, oh no, he said, well, you're gonna go to hell. Because to him that was the way he got, how God loves you. I shouldn't have said that, but I'm not gonna tell you his name. Yeah. So let's see what I have. Oh, not so though. So I'm gonna keep that there. I'm gonna save some, a few words and I'm gonna conclude here. So many find Luther's freedom theology life-giving. His rebellious acts and the standing up for power and all that very life-giving and inspiring. And that is the reason why there still are Lutherans today still using the name Lutheran. And some choose to put the Lutheran to choose question aside because it is simply too painful and there's no answer. Like, what do we do with that? In my own work, I see it vital that we come together to read the sacred texts and let God speak to us, to the texts and to one another. And I also see it's extremely important that we reject the tainted pieces and teachings of even the most revered teachers like Luther and bear the consequences. Luther himself taught about the single uses of the cutter. You're simultaneously a sinner and a saint. In his role as a reformer, he was a powerful theologian of freedom while he was vocally also, vocally anti-Jews. Luther thought and showed us about the capacity for evil as he showed us about the capacity for good. When we were at the Holocaust Museum last June with my husband, there was an exhibit on the anti-Semitism and there was an exhibit called Some of Them Were Neighbors. And if you've seen that, you see the normal people, the good people do outrageous things and you see the normal, not so good people do wonderful things. So to me, that is the way I try to deal with that, trying to see the humanity of all this and remembering that no matter what other people did, what I do today, that actually does matter regardless of who I read or listen to. So I do understand when I'm dealing with Luther that Christ, his experience of Christ brought him freedom and it transformed his life, which enabled him to become a reformer with many good results. I see his transformation experience, born-again experience as he talks about it, firing him up with a passion that made him a relentless reformer. His sources were the Holy Scriptures, which he loved, he loved. And he only could see one way to salvation that was what fired him up, this whole idea of salvation. In his world, religious hospitality was not an option. In that regard, he remains a late medieval man. We can't expect him to be anything more than that. Today, we can both appreciate his freedom experience and we can reject the tainted pieces of his freedom theology. We can reject using the Jew in any negative form, we just don't do that. I am inspired by his love of the Scriptures that are endless in their life-giving power to us. And I'm warned by the fear of the other that I see in Luther, see the dangers of ignorance and not knowing your neighbor. I am convinced of the need to listen to one another, to come together with the Holy Scriptures and ask God to speak to us through one another and through our brokenness. I have learned from Luther the absolute value of holy humility and letting God be God. I'm gonna end with a quote from my church. I represent, I guess, the ELCA, which is Evangelical Lutheran Church that gave a statement against Luther's writings about the Jews and this is just a sample of that. And I'm gonna just read a sample of that. In the spirit of the truth-telling, we who bear his name and heritage must with pain acknowledge also Luther's anti-Judaic diatribes and the violent recommendations of his later writings against the Jews. As did many of his Luther's own companions in the 16th century, we reject his violent invective and yet more do we express our deep and abiding sorrow over its tragic effects on subsequent generations. In concert with the Lutheran World Federation, we particularly deplore the appropriation of Luther's words by modern anti-Semites for the teaching of hatred towards Judaism or towards the Jewish people in our day. This is where we stand today. So we are trying to think, how do we move forward with that? Thank you. Thank you so much for your talk. I really look forward to the question and answer period. I have some brief remarks. As a scholar of modern Judaism, including both Jewish history and Jewish theology, I have long been fascinated by the works of Martin Luther. In my many courses on Christianity, both in college and in graduate school, I was taken by his theology, even though I'm Jewish. I wasn't personally attracted to his theology, but I really was taken by his theology. And I came to understand why so many found and still find the concept of salvation as a gift from God as opposed to something one can earn or purchase to be an idea that is particularly compelling. And in graduate school, I still vividly remember learning about those events or forces that directly or indirectly led to a process called emancipation. That is the entrance of Jews in Western and Central Europe, beginning in the early 17th century, going through the late 19th century, the entrance of Jews into the modern world. And among those forces that led to Jewish acceptance within modern society was the Protestant Reformation and Martin Luther's insistence on the importance of Christians reading the Bible for themselves. This led to an appreciation for Jews as people of the book, an appreciation which again, directly led to Jews eventually gaining acceptance in modern society. But of course, I also learned that most of the Christians who supported Jewish emancipation, whether it was in the 17th, 18th, 19th century or even in the 16th century, that is, most Christians who supported Jews becoming part of society gave their support not because of who Jews were, but in spite of it. What I didn't learn either from my Jewish or Protestant professors was that Luther's great sense of compassion didn't extend to Jews. Nor did I learn about the five anti-Jewish treatises that Luther wrote during the last 23 years of his life. And thus reading Luther's essay on the Jews and their lives, which I first read several years ago, and also reading his earlier that Jesus Christ was born a Jew, which I first read in part in Professor Sturda's Martin Luther, the Bible and the Jewish people about six months ago, really came to me as quite a shock. While the 1523 publication of that Jesus Christ was born a Jew may have earned Luther the reputation among the German Jewish community and among some Christians that he was a friend of the Jews. Even a cursory reading of this essay makes it clear, I think, that Luther himself was not something that he himself acknowledged in an essay published in 1538. Just as Luther was incapable or disinterested in looking at Judaism as an ongoing, meaningful religion in its own right, a religion apart from the anticipation of Jesus as the Messiah and an anticipation of the birth of Christianity. So Luther, I think, was incapable or disinterested in learning about Jewish history. In his essays about Jews, he's not arguing history. As Curcie made clear this evening, he's largely arguing theology. For him, the Hebrew Bible or what he called the Old Testament was nothing more than a proof text. And thus he interpreted biblical passages such as Psalms and Genesis in ways that supported his own theological claims. To him, Jewish interpretation of these same passages were simply wrong. And thus he wrote, and I quote from Luther, the Jews will not listen to this, that is to the correct interpretation of Scripture until they first accept and acknowledge the fact that Christ must have come in accordance with this prophecy, that is the prophecy concerning the coming of the Messiah. History for Luther was salvation history. And in his essays, Jews have no role as Jews and certainly not in his essay published in 1523. For him, the prophets of the Hebrew Bible foretold the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. And therefore, as we heard this evening, the Jews need to convert in order to be saved. By the time that Martin Luther wrote on the Jews and their lives in 1543, the Jews were assigned a role as Jews, namely to embody Satan and those who willfully reject salvation. Angered and embittered by their refusal to convert, Luther saw them existing as quote, rejected and condemned and eternally damned people. In the 1520s, he wrote the Christians should treat Jews kindly so that they'll be open to hearing Christian teachings. By 1543, he maintained that the friendlier we who are Christians are towards Jews, the more they will curse us and our faith. They should be driven from our country. And if this idea isn't acceptable, we should burn down their synagogues, destroy Jewish homes, confiscate their prayer books and so on. I do not believe that Martin Luther was an antisemite. First of all, the term did not come into use until near the end of the 19th century. So even if he had been what we might call a proto antisemite, which I don't think he was, no one would have ever called him an antisemite. Secondly, the term antisemitism largely refers to, and I would say primarily refers to hatred of Jews as a race. That was a 19th century creation. Martin Luther, like others of his day, did not see Jews as a race. And yet, given what Luther wrote in 1543, it isn't surprising that Nazis drew on his writings as supporting their ideas. Given this and the fact that antisemites today continue to draw on the writings of Martin Luther, statements such as that made by representatives of the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations and the Lutheran World Federation Consultation in 1983 are extremely important. And so I think is ongoing Jewish Lutheran dialogue, including those that have taken place more recently. In many ways, all of that we've heard this evening, I think affirm that Jews and Protestants in general have a long way to go in rectifying anti-Jewish statements of the past. As Kirstie wrote in her introductory essay to her book, Martin Luther, The Bible and the Jewish People, for all practical purposes, the Jews of Luther's time remain strangers to Luther. Like so many of his contemporaries, he missed the most powerful opportunities for learning and correction, which would have been through personal relationships. On the 500th anniversary of Luther's nailing to the church door in Wittenberg, ideas that sparked the Protestant Reformation, or if he didn't nail these ceasings, at least he wrote them 500 years ago. On the occasion of this anniversary, I hope the Jews and Protestants can continue to take the kind of steps that have characterized Jewish-Catholic relationships for the past 50 years, namely steps that acknowledge, accept, and even value one another for who we are, learning about, and from each other. Now Paul's gonna join me up here, and we're gonna take some questions. So we have some time for comments or questions for Professor Sterna, or even for Professor Jomanski, for me, but I didn't actually say anything, so you can't challenge me. And we have first a question or comment over here. Luther at one point contracted with a Jewish scholar to help him read Hebrew, work with Hebrew. Is there anything known about his relationship with this Jewish scholar and what that was like? Yeah, Bernard, there was Bernard who was a convert, and Bernard was often, he has some issues with cash, and he actually lived with Luther for a while, and there was a very friendly relationship with that, but Bernard was a converted Jew. So Luther writes about this, Bernard, my dear Bernard, because Bernard was a converted Jew. Yeah, yeah, and that's where Luther was different. He absolutely, because if you're a Jew in Luther's world, even if you convert, you do, if you do, you do, and if you don't, people don't really believe that you really, really are Christian. But Luther was one of those people who said, once a convert, you really are. So that's where he really embraced these converted Jews in Wittenberg. So, but Bernard to him was a Christian person. Did Hitler make reference to Luther in Mein Kampf? Yeah, I don't know if Hillary, but Himmler. Himmler had known about Luther, and through Himmler, Luther, I mean, Hitler knew about Luther. But to my knowledge, Hitler himself did not refer, but I am not absolutely positive. But later, when they're not. Very selective knowledge of what Luther had done. They knew about the birthdays of Luther's birthday and all the anniversaries, so the Nazis knew about them, and they used those dates to do these big events like Kristallnacht, yeah. So somebody there knew, somebody had read Luther. And I had this manuscript from Finland in 1939. Somebody translated Luther's on Jews and their lives into Finnish language in 1939 with the preface where the writer says that, we should do what the Germans are doing. They're doing it right. And it's an extremely anti-Semitic text, yeah. Birthday, yeah. I'm trying to understand how Martin Luther and his theories fit into the history of anti-Semitism. And I would like to know, in your opinion, I mean, obviously it didn't, anti-Semitism existed long before Martin Luther, but did the later anti-Semites, including the Nazis, feed on Luther? Did he feed on people before him? How are they interrelated? I wish my husband was here. So I, not just because he's a guy, but because he's dealt with this part more. I'm a Luther person, so I'm really stressing you. But my sense is that I went to you. Luther was anti-Jewish religion and a guy. He did not see the value in Jewish faith. It was the threat, the other. He did not think in racial terms. And me coming from Europe, I kind of understand that. Like, I'm trying to learn about anti-Semitism and racism and all that. And I recognize those in myself too, but it's just a different setting. So for an anti-Semitism comes from 1800s. It's a new term. That term even wasn't in Luther's time, the word anti-Semitism. So programmatically speaking, it's almost like we are reading something in Luther's words that would fuel anti-Semitism. And we could say that I'm sure that there have been people who are anti-Semites who have drawn from Luther. But does that make Luther the father's anti-Semitism? Not. But certainly people have been able to say, look, there's Wagner, Richard Wagner, and there's so-and-so, and Gobineau, and there's Darwin, and there are all these people, David Hume, and there are all these people who have said things that you can say, you see people before me have said similar things. So it's a very complicated trajectory. But one can certainly say that people have used Luther to make anti-Semitic statements. That's why in Berkeley, we are pretty firmly standing. I mean, we live right there by Martin Luther King Park. Our seminary is right there by the park where there's a lot of demonstrations going on. The alt-rightists there and all that, and we are actually going to war against them. And say, no, you're not gonna use Luther's name with this anymore, maybe your ancestors did, but no, we're gonna reclaim it differently. So there's a certain moment in time today to name it and say, yes, you can use the past altars, but we can also repent and say, we're not gonna do that anymore. I just wanted to thank you for a very interesting talk. I know of Luther, but I know very little about him, so I've learned a lot this evening. I have a question, though. If, obviously, Luther acknowledged Jesus as a Jew, and if he did, and of course he knew scriptures, Jesus never denied being Jew, he never started really Christianity. And he also said he didn't come to destroy or to do away with anything, he came to fulfill. So I'm just questioning why Luther would not acknowledge that, that's all. And I'm sure he did, and I'm talking as a novice anyway. And also a comment, you use the word abstract a lot in describing his theology, his writings, whatever. And it just reminds me that we will never come together as people in an abstract way. It has to be very, very intimate, and we kind of avoid that, which I think is unfortunate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that's what I meant, that if Luther had had friends who were Jewish, I mean, he said all kinds of awful things about a lot of things, but there's also evidence when he met the first person, for instance, baptism. He teaches like any medieval Catholic theologian that baptism is necessary for salvation, absolutely non-negotiable. And then he meets a mother who just buried her child who was not baptized. And he's very nimble, focusing on God's grace, saying actually there, God is bigger than our conventions and your tears have already baptized that child, don't you worry about that. And totally going, and then in another treatise he's absolutely firm, like no, baptism is this kind of doctrine and you cannot, so there's this human, it's just when we meet face to face which is different, so about the Christ, I think Luther, we could say Luther is a Christ-holic. He really encountered Jesus in the books of the Bible. And to him that Jesus was the Messiah. He was an Old Testament professor, so he's professional and personal, a merchant there. And that Christ that he encountered is in the Psalms and he is infuriated that people don't see that. He's mad that the Catholics don't see the gospel his way and start practicing sacraments like he thinks is the right way to do. And he's definitely mad at the Jews who are the most vulnerable. It's almost like, I have a student who is a, he has a PhD in partial theology and he calls a lot about, what is it called? Displaced anger, and he has all these psychological terms of how Luther is totally doing that. He's putting all his anger against the Jews who are the unknown, the abstract, vulnerable group that you can lash on because they will never fight back. So, but so this is like, what's true to him is so true to him and he's so fired up. And to him, that is his hermeneutics. And that's what we, in a seminar, we tried to break that hermeneutics. Guess how hard that is? Like Lutheran preachers, you can actually preach that the Jesus is in Isaiah 53. You can actually do that. Try preach another sermon. You're not going to well, but you can start somewhere, right? Christ is there, well, let Christ be there, but, well, let the Jews tell us his Christ is there. Or maybe Christ is something bigger than none of us can see, I don't know. Thanks so much for your lecture. I just, just to be clear, I think it's really helpful the way that you talk about Luther's engagement with the Jews, but I'm afraid sometimes that particularly my students who are here think that this is a Luther Jewish thing, where it's in fact, when you say that, you know, Luther is recognizing that Jesus was born a Jew, Luther is born a Catholic. And so the impulses that he's getting, good and bad, are coming from his Catholic roots. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, oh yeah. Luther represents the best and the worst of Catholic Christianity. And he never wanted to start Lutheran Christianity. He died as a Catholic in his view, but he was expulsed from Catholic Church for these things that he did. So yeah, he didn't invent any of this. This is already in the early church. This is already in Augustine. This is in Thomas Aquinas. This is in Erasmus of Rotetam. You pick any Christian, John Chrysostom, the best preacher of Christianity, all say theologically the same things. And it goes back, that's why I'm always so intrigued with what happened with the early Christians and the Jewish communities. How did the breakup happen? Because from the very first century on, there have been Christians who have been teaching against the Jewish interpretation of the scriptures. And that became Christianity. Yeah, so yeah, it's a long linear. So that's why this is actually a big deal. Like, well, if we know this, then what are we gonna do about that? Do we just go along like we did before? Or how can we repent and be more attentive? Like I tell my students, is try to preach every time you preach, whatever the text is, think that there's at least five Jews in the congregation and try to preach that text. Oh, yeah, try it for once. And is there anything else in the text you can preach that what we have read to that for centuries? But that's the tentacle of anti-Semitism and supercessionism. Supercessionism means you're replacing one interpretation with another, replace one tradition with another. And that is maybe why there's so much resistance to this question from, in the Christian circles. I wouldn't say there's any resistance maybe from the Jewish circles, but from Christian circles because it jeopardizes so much of the foundation of we thought, oh, we can preach this. And then it kind of explodes our view of God. Like God is actually bigger than the Lutherans thought. Oh, God is bigger, the scriptures are bigger, they speak to us much more than we thought. I want to thank you also for your presentation. Does the rejection of Luther's hatred of Jews represent the reform movement of Lutheranism? Say that again. I'm confused if by birth and by choice those people that consider themselves Lutherans follow the basis of Luther and his hatred of Jews and then reject that portion of his hatred of Jews but still consider themselves Lutheran. Does that represent the reform movement within Lutheran religion? If I understand your question right, I'm pretty convinced that people who choose to be anti-Jews today and anti-Semitic, they fall to different religious groups and people who consider themselves Lutherans are really shocked when they learn about this because they have not been taught about this. They are shocked and embarrassed and deeply disturbed, but there are minorities in each, I would say, named a religious group where there are people who are anti-Semites but the Lutheran tradition does not condone and like I never knew about this and I was a lifelong Lutheran and a teacher and a pastor and it took me a long time before I even heard about this and how come I never learned about this? So that's why I got into this group. I need to look, what is this? Because the word Lutheran seems to cause some reaction. With some of my conversation partners. So I would say the most Lutherans are absolutely oblivious to this and they think what they've been taught that oh, it was just the angry old Luther who had hemorrhoids and all that, who got kinda angry and said some nasty things but don't worry about that, yeah. But in an early, that brings us, that the reformation is about reforming big things. So this question makes us think about the big things. Who is God? Who does God talk to? Who are God's people? So that's a good thing. We're gonna take one more question. This is more of a comment. First, thank you so, so much. Raised Roman Catholic, converted or woke up to being Lutheran, learned more than, like I have a lot to digest here because this is not what I was taught and my coming to Lutheranism was the grace by faith. I can't earn it. Raised Catholic, it was like oh, go to church, go to confession, earn, do, do, do, do, do. And for me, the moment that I woke up was I don't have to do, I'm saved. But I learned a lot tonight as Lutheran that I have not been taught in my being brought into the church, the Lutheran church. So I don't know if that helps you at all. But thank you. Thank you. Yeah, it was hard to think like, first I totally misunderstood what this lecture's about and then the way, wait a minute, it's a bigger audience. So I hope I give you enough to make you interested in Luther as a person and maybe challenge you not to blame one person for all the wrongs Christians have to deal with today but also have ammunition to challenge the individuals today of how we do and act and preach. I'm gonna change my mind and take one more. Positively the last. This may be simplistic. I think perhaps I'm simplistic, but what I would like to know to answer this question, what did Luther say about the Jews in his table talks? Oh my, all those table talks. So when Luther gathered for meals and he gathered for many meals provided by his wife, he would say all kinds of things, drink few beers and say things that people will record them. So you get a lot of juicy stuff from there. I have never spent any time with them. So whatever he said about the Jews there, I haven't, what I've read and I haven't seen anything they'll be drastically different, I haven't. But I kind of tried to stay away from that table talks because they come from, after you had few beers and your student write down what you write, do you really wanna read that later, 500 years later? I don't know, but that would be somebody, somebody should probably look at that. There's something there that might be. Do you really want it to be published? That's the question. Yeah, yeah. Do you really want it to be published? Because on the other hand, that could be the real Luther because he goes all over the place there, but I personally haven't done that. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being here. Please give a round of applause to Professor Sternach.