Welcome back to Samus Popery. I'm Joe Heschmire, and I want to unpack a fascinating writing from the father of Protestantism, Martin Luther, in a show why I think you should probably change how you view Luther.

Now, one of the things that Martin Luther and Taylor Swift have in common, besides having large bands of devoted followers, is a tendency to make implausible claims about how well they know Aristotle.

Now, in Swift's defense, she may want us to recognize how embarrassing the line you know how to

ball I know Aristotle is. I mean, being massively overconfident

and how well you understand a great thinker is so high school. But it's also less

defensible when it's coming from Martin Luther, who's a grown-up and a monk and a priest. And yet we find him doing the same thing. He seems to have

fancied himself quite the scholar of Aristotle. In fact, I think it's fair to say he thought of

himself as the greatest expert on Aristotle who ever lived. Now, you might be saying,

But Joe, why should I care about Aristotle at all? Well, I want to offer two reasons.

One, the battle over Aristotle is in many ways a battle over faith and reason. Do faith and reason

work together as gifts from God, or do we view them as enemies so that faith becomes irrational

and reason leads us away from God? The second reason is that Luther's attacks on Aristotle really reveals something about

Luther himself, something which I think helps to make sense if his attacks on the Catholic

Church of his day or on the faith of the early Christians.

But for now, I'd simply suggest to you that when you read Martin Luther's 1520 open

letter to the Christian nobility where he argues that many

of Aristotle's best books should be banned from universities by the secular authorities,

that this should ring some alarm bells.

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