Title: Where Luther Got It Wrong: The Peasants' Revolt - Way To LEAD
Headings: Where Luther Got It Wrong: The Peasants’ Revolt
Where Luther Got It Wrong: The Peasants’ Revolt
Content: He said Copernicus was trying to turn the whole world of astronomy upside down (54:359), and tried to prove him wrong from Scripture (Joshua 10:12). He said men had broad shoulders and narrow hips, therefore possessing more intelligence, whereas women had broad hips and a wide fundament for keeping the house and raising children. And who hasn’t read Luther’s senile ranting about the Jews in his 1543 pamphlet, that Luther scholars prayed would get lost in the dustbin of history? I want to devote these next few paragraphs, however, to another place where Luther got it wrong, and missed a huge opportunity: Luther’s stance on The Peasants’ Revolt of 1525. In Luther’s day, the vast majority of Europeans did not live in cities. According to Princeton Reformation scholar Kenneth Appold, most Europeans were rural peasants living in some form of feudal servitude. Since 95% of them did not know how to read or write, their names are not known, and their story is often not told in books chronicling the events of the Reformation. Long before Luther was born, in the mid-14th century, the Black Plague began to devastate Europe. The Black Plague, also known as the Black Death or the Bubonic Plague killed over 100 million people, around half of Europe.