RUSSELL-MARTIN LUTHER OR MASON? 173 Consider that the three great Bible translations of Western Culture are the Vulgate, Luther's ,and the Authorized Version (King James). Only Luther's is the work of a single man. At first, the author thought Luther must have borrowed from previous German translations, but a study of those shows that their quality was so poor, that Luther received little benefit from them. Heinz Bluhm in Martin Luther: Creative Translator, p. vii, states "Luther is indeed one of the supreme literary geniuses of the entire Christian tradition at the same time that he is one of the keenest and boldest Christian thinkers of all time." "The real study of Luther's German Bible has hardly begun." Bluhm set out to show text by text the "magnitude and sheer brilliance of Luther's achievement." Luther's approach to the Scriptures was entirely different than Russell's. Russell would develop a "reasonable" scheme and mold scriptures to it. His mystical interpretations, his deemphasis of Christ, his inability to simply let scriptures speak for themselves places Russell parallel to the Masons, and a great distance from Luther. Francis A Schaeffer describes the approach of Martin Luther and other reformers," The men of the Reformation...in contrast to the Renaissance humanists, they refused to accept the autonomy of human reason, which acts as though the human mind is infinite with all knowledge within its realm. Rather they took seriously the Bible's own claim for itself—that it is the only final authority....The church was under the teaching of the Bible—not above it and not equal to it. It was Sola Scriptura. This stood in contrast to the humanism that had infiltrated the church after the first centuries of Christianity. At its core, therefore, the Reformation was the removing of the humanistic distortions which had entered the church."12 Russell's emphasis on human reason, meant his movement took off in the opposite direction of the Reformation. And his movement created some of the same NOTES________________ 12
Schaeffer, Francis A. How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture. Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, Co., 1976, pp81-82.