Culture 2: non-Lutherans… for Luther? P. Smith, Michelet, Jay, Hedge

        This concludes from Part 1 in a 2-part blog presenting F. Bente's report on the cultural benefit of the Reformer, Martin Luther. — This segment presents an extended array of "non-Lutherans", even a Roman Catholic and a Unitarian, testifying for Luther. — From Der Lutheraner vol. 89 (1933), p. 364 [EN]: 

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Luther's cultural influence.

 

The American Reformation historian Preserved Smith says: 

“Luther's work is the beginning of the present age. It is fair to say that every person in Western Europe and America is living a different life today than he would have lived, and is a very different person than he would be if Luther had not lived and worked.”

[Jules] Michelet, a Catholic historian in France, says: 

“Luther is the restorer of the liberty of the present age.”

John Jay, the first chairman of our federal Supreme Court, says:

 

“No country has more cause than our republic to remember with joy the blessing which Luther has secured for the whole world by winning freedom of thought and conscience, and by expressing the seal of Christianity to our modern civilization. Although America had just been discovered by Columbus, yet Luther's far-reaching influence, still felt from the Atlantic to the Pacific, contributed to the settlement of our continent by such settlers as laid the foundation of its future freedom.” 

The Unitarian F. H. [Frederic Henry] Hedge of Harvard University, who translated Luther's “Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott” into English, writes: 

“We owe our civil independence to the Saxon Reformer.… We Anglo-Americans, above all other men, owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Luther for our national independence and religious liberty.”

Luther preached nothing but the old Gospel of Christ, the power of God for salvation for all who believe it. With this he made the Church unspeakably rich again. But neither has the world and its culture become poorer as a result. The modern age dates from Luther onwards. The Reformation means at the same time the reorientation of the whole world. The source of all that is good in the modern state and in modern culture in general is to be found nowhere else than in Luther's Reformation. F. Bente, 1917.

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      A rationalist writer/philosopher, a rationalist historian, a Catholic historian, an Episcopalian Chief Justice, and a Unitarian “Transcendentalist” Harvard professor — quite an eclectic group that Prof. Bente chose to quote. But his purpose was only to show that even in the sphere of civil righteousness and culture, the influence of Luther was recognized.