The crucial point to remember in discussing Luther's struggle with socialethical issues is that he understood himself to be a theologian and pastor not a sociologist or economist or politician. Indeed, Luther's ethics may be understood as pastoral care. For Luther, therefore, theology and ethics served the proclamation of the good news that salvation is received not achieved. Our justification before God “must be believed and cannot be obtained by any work, law, or merit.” In contrast to all pieties of achievement, then and now, Luther affirmed God's descent in Jesus to us rather than our striving to ascend to God. In opposition to the medieval renunciation of the world, epitomized by the image and metaphor of the ladder to heaven, Luther proclaimed that Christ could not be dragged too deeply into the flesh. Hence Luther criticized the religion of the Turks, Jews, and papists for prescribing “heavenward journeys on which the travelers will break their necks.”

The subject of theology and ethics is not God in heaven, in his absolutemajesty, the “naked God,” but rather God “clothed in HisWord and promises”for us.

Martin Luther had a fairly low opinion of himself, though one must leave open the question if this was because he was profoundly convinced that such was the case, or because he thought it to be good politics to say so, or because he saw himself as analogous to the Old Testament prophets who similarly had a way of denouncing their own importance. “I am but a stinking bag of worms,” he observed on one occasion. And even though he had also insisted that at his death all his books and writings should be burned and “the children of God not be called by my name,” neither, in fact, proved to be the case. Luther's long shadow fell over the subsequent centuries. With the passing of time, posterity chose not to take Luther at his word, and the importance he had attained during his own lifetime was dwarfed by an ever increasing importance afterwards. Arguably, Luther's legacy has been one of the most striking phenomena in Western intellectual history. The fundamental observation, all the same, is that such dramatic eminence notwithstanding, Martin Luther has also been one of the most controversial figures in Western life and thought. Indeed, there has been controversy not only about his theology, but also about his impact on German history. For a long time, mentioning the name of Luther meant to step on to the barricades.

This chapter cannot be written from a strictly analytical or historical point of view. An earlier theologian's contemporary theological importance can only be assessed from within the church's present theological enterprise, that is, from within her continuing reflection on her mission. Since the church's mission is to make and be faithful to the claim that the God of Israel has raised his servant Jesus from the dead, we may also think of theology as the intellectual labor internal to speaking this “gospel” intelligibly in the always new times and places which the mission reaches. Theology is thus a temporally extended debate - sometimes a calm discussion, sometimes a shouting match - about Christ and the church, which has now continued for nearly two millennia. As such a protracted conversation goes on, participants drop out, leaving their influence and writings behind them, and new ones enter, from new historical contexts.

Such considerations must give this chapter its method. Active participantsin the continuing theological argument are inevitably and properlycannibals of their predecessors. They dismember predecessors’ systems orstructures of intuition, and use bits and pieces for their own purposes. Toask about Luther’s contemporary theological significance is, therefore, toask for suggestions that such and such aspects or parts of Luther’s theologyare likely to further the present enterprise.

FACING INTIMIDATION

The great pleasure of reading Luther is complicated by several problems. The greatest of these is the sheer mass of material. The critical edition in German and Latin, the Weimar Ausgabe, includes sixty-eight volumes of his published writings, seventeen of his letters, twelve of documents relating to the translation of the Bible, and six volumes of Table Talk. The American Edition of Luther's Works in English contains fifty-five volumes. Even this fraction of the whole can overwhelm the strongest student.

The mention of German and Latin reminds English-speaking readers of the difficulty of reading Luther in his original languages. Any knowledge of these languages will help, but Luther's German is difficult (think of English a century before Shakespeare!) and his Latin also is quite complex. While the most important documents are available in translation, a few significant ones are not. Some translations are not especially accurate, or not based on more recent critical texts.

Some Luther writings are hard to read. One current anthology beginswith Luther’s 1517 theses: Disputation Against Scholastic Theology. Theargumentation in a later and very central work, The Bondage of the Will,is quite complex and difficult to follow. Many other writings are muchclearer, and some are simple and delightful. Luther had a great capacity tocommunicate with ordinary readers.

Luther was not the first German translator of the Bible. Translations into old German dialects had already appeared at the time of Charlemagne (Charles the Great, 742-814), based on the first Latin Bible, the Vulgate (from the Latin vulgare, “to make common”) offered by Jerome (348-420). He had used a Greek translation of the Old Testament by Christian scholars in Alexandria, Egypt, from the third century, known as the Septuagint (from the Greek for “seventy”, an alleged legendary number of the scholars involved in the translation). The emperor had ordered a translation of portions of the Psalter and the Gospels from the Vulgate as part of his program to convert his subjects to Christianity. Rare whole German Bibles began to appear in the fourteenth century. When the Mainz German printer John Gutenberg refined the ancient Oriental art of printing by using movable type, one of his co-workers used an unknown German Bible from Nuremberg to produce the “Gutenberg Bible”of 1466. It became popular in a version of 1475, edited by GüuntherZainer in Augsburg, with corrections based on the Vulgate and some linguistic updating. The Nuremberg printer Anton Koberger added stylistic refinements and published a revised version in 1483, the year of Luther's birth.

Prelude: finding the guitar in history

The history of the modern guitar begins in the culture of late medieval Europe, where we find the first unequivocal evidence of the characteristic figure-eight-shaped instrument in court documents, images, and poetry of the fifteenth century. By the Renaissance, the guitar had developed a sizable and idiomatic repertory written in tablature and it became standardized enough in construction, tuning, and technique to permit an explosive realization of its potential in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Italy, Spain, and France. By the nineteenth century, the guitar thrived in salon culture and on the concert stage, producing dazzling virtuosos and laying the foundations for what is now largely accepted as the guitar's core “classical” repertoire.

From this point on the instrument's development becomes much less indebted to its classical past. In fact, its role in Western art-music over some 600 years is but one small chapter of a much larger story concerning the enormous global impact the instrument has had since 1900. By contrast with the piano, whose developments in structure and repertoire were conditioned almost exclusively by the art-music tradition until the early twentieth century, the guitar's development is made up of multiple and overlapping histories. To put it another way, guitar history simultaneously spans popular and classical styles, urban and rural techniques, contemporary and historical practices, written and unwritten traditions, and Western and non-Western cultures, revealing the contributions of both formally and un-formally trained players.

Introduction

Ever since its incarnation in modern form, the guitar's adaptability to different musical roles has led to its use in a wide variety of indigenous music. According to ethnomusicologist and virtuoso slide player Bob Brozman, the cross-cultural impact of the guitar results from the contact between the instrument's diatonic applications (specifically, the use of chords) in the West, and the non-diatonic ideas (specifically, an orientation toward modes and drones) of indigenous music from around the world. Add to this the instrument's ubiquity and portability, its players' receptivity to different musical styles, its suitability for multiple musical functions (monophonic, polyphonic, homophonic, drone-plus-melody, instrumental versus accompanimental), and its long ancestral lineage in the plucked string instrument family, and it comes as no surprise that the guitar plays a significant role in the modern history of “Celtic” traditional music. This article will focus particularly on the role of the guitar in Irish traditional music, as that role is well documented historically, and has been a strong influence, through the medium of the “Celtic revival,” in other Celtic guitar traditions.

The history of the Celtic guitar reflects in many ways the modern history of the music itself. Prior to the earliest Celtic recordings made during the first decade of the twentieth century, consisting of a series of wax cylinders recorded by accordionist John J. Kimmel (1866–1942)and piper Patsy Tuohey (1865–1923), vernacular instrumental music of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and Brittany was mostly monophonic and unaccompanied.

THE LIBERATION OF MARTIN LUTHER FROMHIS CAPTIVITY

It is obvious that for centuries after the Reformation and for the majority of his followers Martin Luther was not a theologian of the worldwide church. Rather, already in the seventeenth century, in Lutheran Orthodoxy, he was considered to be the father, founder, and foremost – if not normative – theologian of the Lutheran church and tradition. Luther became the Lutheran par excellence. He was not only the Lutheran, but the German Lutheran, and as a central figure and cornerstone of German Lutheran identity his critical and even polemical position over against the Roman Catholic and Reformed traditions became prominent while his vision of the universal church was forgotten or ignored.

Throughout the ensuing nearly four centuries after his appearance asa reformer, Luther was owned and reinterpreted, misrepresented and misusedas the chief ideologist and hero of Lutheran Protestantism. During theEnlightenment period of the eighteenth century, Luther was seen as theChristian hero, who had liberated Protestant Germany from the dictates ofa foreign power, the papacy in Rome. He had brought freedom from theyoke of tradition and the bondage of conscience. In the nineteenth centuryLuther was praised as the grandiose representative of the German nationalspirit, while in the twentieth century at the time of World War II such distortedimages were replaced by a sharply contrasting one when some Anglo-Saxon writers considered Luther as initiator of a movement of authoritarianideology that led, by way of Bismarck, finally to Adolf Hitler’s Nazism.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the classical guitar finds itself at a level of quality and popularity that was unimaginable even fifty years earlier. There are scores of degree programs in the United States alone, major and minor record labels keep increasing their catalog of guitar recordings, and a growing number of international competitions are being won by young players of astounding technical facility. The ubiquitous Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez is one of the most popular concertos for any instrument of the twentieth century, new music ensembles commonly include the guitar, and virtually every major composer of our time now attempts to write for the instrument. In fact it can be argued that, for the first time, the current repertoire and performance level of the guitar rival that of any instrument. And such is the embarrassment of riches that many players are seeking out unique corners of the repertoire, becoming specialists in transcription, or nineteenth-century repertoire, or new chamber music. In short, guitarists face the daunting task of finding a voice in this crowded field, which is populated by relatively young players and teachers. But even the youngest players seem to be unfazed, as the number of students entering academic institutions to study the guitar, against all financial reasoning, appears steady.

In this chapter I will connect the major points of the guitar's extraordinary development in the twentieth century, and discuss what are, to me, some of the most promising developments for the future. Since I am foremost a performer, recording artist, and teacher of the guitar – not a musicologist – this essay reveals the thoughts of a player trying to realize his own vision of the instrument. Consequently, this is a personal, rather than an objective view.

APPROACHING LUTHER’S ETHICAL THOUGHT

A proper understanding of Luther's ethical thought is hampered in two ways. First, contemporary ideas of ethics as a discipline in its own right, when projected back on to Luther, are likely to fail, as his ethical thought cannot be separated from doctrinal considerations within the whole scope of his theology. Instead of singling out his “ethics,” then, we must rather explore his “moral theology,” the web of theological thought of which the texture of his moral ideas is composed.

The second complicating factor is that Luther's ethic has elicited a degree of passionate apologetic and repudiation rare among theological ethics, and thereby has been exceptionally exposed to one-sided and distorted interpretations. Consequently, no account of his moral theology can be given without some engagement with those interpretations and their problematic claims.

A look at the history of the reception of Luther’s theology arouses oursuspicion of monistic accounts such as Hegel’s Luther of “freedom,” KarlHoll’s Luther of “conscience” ormany a theologian’s Luther of “justification.”These fall short not because they overemphasize one aspect of Luther’sthought to the disadvantage of others, but because they fail, in most cases, todo justice to the very concept focused on. Hegel, for example, was not wrongto present Luther’s theology as a theology of freedom; rather, his account offreedom was flawed because his portrayal of Luther as the founding fatherof modern individualism by virtue of his superseding traditional authoritycould not be reconciled with Luther’s strong theological concept of authority.

The pioneers

A century ago, the first strains of blues guitar echoed across the American South. While the style's exact origins are lost in the distant traditions of field hollers and work songs, African influences, spirituals, ragtime, minstrel tunes, folk and pop fare, parlor instrumentals, and other musical forms, one thing is certain: From the beginning, the blues and the guitar have traveled side by side.

The earliest reported sighting of a blues performance occurred in 1903, when bandleader W. C. Handy was awakened in the Tutwiler, Mississippi train station by the strange sounds of a ragged black guitarist. “As he played,” Handy wrote in his autobiographical Father of the Blues, “he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by the Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly: ‘Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.“ The man was singing about Moorehead, Mississippi, where the Southern Railroad crossed the Yazoo–Delta Railroad, “the Yellow Dog.” Once Handy began orchestrating “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor” and other popular black folk tunes, his bookings increased. His conclusion? “Negroes react rhythmically to everything. That's how the blues came to be.” Handy also described the fundamental structure of the blues which has remained a constant for almost a hundred years: “The songs consisted of simple declarations expressed usually in three lines and set to a kind of earth-born music that was familiar throughout the Southland.”

Martin Luther is famous as reformer, theologian, professor, translator, prodigious author, and polemicist. He is well known as hymn-writer, musician, friend of students, mentor of pastors, and pastor to countless clergy and laity. Yet he saw himself first of all as a preacher even though his only income came from his professorship at the University of Wittenberg.

No matter what else he was involved in, Luther preached, usually in Wittenberg's Stadtkirche. Unless he was away from home, he was in the pulpit at least as often as the congregation's pastor. Wherever he traveled, the local clergy insisted that Doktor Martin deliver the sermon.

Luther’s preaching ministry was remarkable, his productivity prodigious– almost miraculous. In the midst of lecturing, protesting againstchurchly abuses, translating, writing scores of theological treatises, adjustingto marriage and children, carrying on a voluminous correspondence, andattending almost endless meetings and conferences, in 1528 he preachednearly two hundred times in spite of severe headaches and dizzy spells. Onforty days that year he preached twice; most years he preached over a hundredtimes. Among the slower years were 1522 with only forty-six sermons,and 1540 with forty-three. Of the approximately 4,000 sermons he preachedin his lifetime, about 2,300 have been preserved in some form.

YEARS AS A STUDENT

From the outside, Luther's life passed by simply and steadily. With few exceptions, his whole life took place within the territories of Thuringia and Saxony, mostly in Wittenberg, the electoral capital at the Elbe river, and its surroundings. Only a few journeys led Luther beyond this small sphere of life: on behalf of his order to Rome (1510/11), to Cologne (1512) and Heidelberg (1518); later on behalf of a Reformation consensus to Marburg (1529), and also on his own behalf to Augsburg (1518) and Worms (1521). Equally, with regard to his profession, Luther's was a remarkable and steady character. From entering the monastery through to his last moment, Luther always remained a man of the word: as a preacher, professor and writer.

During Luther’s life the horizon of world history and humanities wasin the process of becoming radically changed. The following names muststand for many others representing this era: the two emperors Maximilian Iand Charles V, the popes Leo X, Clemens VII and Paul III (Council of Trent),as well as the names of such artists and scientists as Raphael, Michelangelo,Dürer, Copernicus and Paracelsus. However, as far as Luther is concernedthese changes could be deceptive because his childhood and youth had notbeen touched by the spirit of humanism or of the Renaissance. Limited to theprovincial surroundings of his hometown, Luther grew up as a typical childof the late Middle Ages – just like thousands of other boys around him.

Accidents will happen

Did rock and roll guitar emerge by accident? Certainly the creation of rock and roll itself was a complex phenomenon indicative of the shifting tides of race, class, and popular music in the mid-twentieth century United States. And yet, amidst the broader historical currents that one might consider in any rock and roll chronicle, there also exist the odd details and apparent accidents that can be seen to have made all the difference in the world. Take, for instance, the 1951 recording of “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston with Ike Turner and his Rhythm Kings. Said by many historians to have been the first bona fide rock and roll recording, “Rocket 88” achieved much of its distinctive sound from an accident that happened on the way to the Memphis recording studio run by Sam Phillips. Guitarist Willie Kizart's amplifier fell from the roof of the band's car, leaving the amp with a burst speaker cone. Lacking the time and the resources to fix it, Phillips and the band began experimenting, and after a while found that the fuzzy tone produced by the broken speaker sounded good, giving Kizart's electric guitar a heavier sound that was almost more like a saxophone than a guitar, but was also thoroughly electric. With this unique electric guitar sound holding down the bottom end of the song, “Rocket 88” took shape as a song with as much drive as the car about which Jackie Brenston sang, and laid some of the groundwork for the reconstruction of rhythm and blues that would subsequently become known as rock and roll.