Was Luther in His Old Age in Agony & Bitter About Lutheranism?

In my 2003 book, Protestantism: Critical Reflections of an Ecumenical Catholic, I described a set of quotations from Luther as evidences of Luther’s “Agony Over the State of Early Protestantism.” Fellow “reformers” Philip Melanchthon’s and Martin Bucer’s statements (in some ways even more explicit and specific) were also included in this appendix. Some anti-Catholic polemicists have lately been critiquing this. One such harsh and (as always) irrational critic is the inimitable “Turretinfan”:

Dave’s appendix was not even “Scholars who think Luther Agonized Over the State of Early Protestantism.” Dave’s appendix purported to provide evidence of “The Agony of Luther, Melanchthon, and Bucer Over the State of Early Protestantism.”

With the appendix as named, Dave is conveying the idea that the quotations he provides support the thesis for which they are provided. . . . he misled the readers.

Dave may now regret that he didn’t do a more thorough job of researching some of the quotations in the appendix. He may well try to shift the blame to the secondary sources he relied on. Hopefully, at some point, he’ll just come out and say, “I didn’t carefully research the matter, and consequently ended up misrepresenting Luther.” . . . However, perhaps there is some reason that Dave is not interested in correct his research deficiencies of the past. (2-26-10)

Is it just me: the so-called “Catholic propagandist” or supposed “anti-Luther” zealot, or just partisan Catholic historians making this claim? Hardly (my blue highlighting throughout):

Personal disappointment and fears strengthened his conviction that he was living on the eve of the Last Judgment. Although he had never entertained much hope for the mass of sinful humanity, events from the mid-1520s onward still shocked and disappointed him. He was made particularly indignant by what he saw as widespread indifference and ingratitude toward the renewed Gospel. The “ingratitude of the Germans” is a complaint heard with increasing frequency as he moves through the last decade or so of his life. (Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Luther’s Last Battles, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2004, p. 17)

In the late 1520s the Reformation movement had begun its transition from an ideological movement made up largely of committed individuals to an established institution embracing whole political entities. Luther had already experienced some of the inevitable disappointment and compromise that accompanies any attempt to translate theory into practice. He had also been challenged by the brutal realities of the Peasants’ War, the findings of the first visitations, and the rending of the Protestant ranks.

. . . in the intervening decade Luther had also experienced extreme frustration and disappointment about the progress of the Reformation movement. He expressed this disappointment through searing indictments of the ingratitude with which the Germans had responded to the restored gospel. He upbraided them for the “Epicurean” indifference and, what was worse, for their open blasphemy. Alongside his attack on the papal “abomination,” then, he added a condemnation of his contemporaries’s response to the gospel.

This change should not be attributed to Luther’s growing age or increased illness. In his grimmer moments, and in the articulations of his theology, he recognized that true Christians were rare, and that the great bulk of the population would remain fast in its sin despite the renewed preaching of the gospel. Yet at some level of his being, above or below his understanding as a theologian, he had apparently hoped for more than the actual course of events had provided. . . .

Luther was doomed to disappointment. And so as his hope for the progress of the gospel in this world, however faint, withered in the light of experience, he found solace in his hope for the Last Day. (Ibid., pp. 113-114)

The older Luther was a man who saw the world engaged in a metaphysical struggle between good and evil. He was a man gripped by apocalyptic hopes and fears; a man who had given his name to a movement that had taken, for him, a painful and frustrating direction. . . . opponents and circumstances, and even the action of allies and friends, disappointed his hopes and marred his efforts. Not infrequently, he found himself mired in petty disputes that brought neither him nor the movement any credit. He found himself misunderstood and held responsible for actions that he himself deplored. So as his own death neared . . . he became ever more pessimistic, praying not only for his own release but for the end of the world. (Ibid., p. 208)

His last years in Wittenberg were bitter. He was disappointed in the undisciplined lives of his congregation, and he raged at his audiences from the pulpit. Near the end of his life he threatened to leave the city altogether. . . . The Christian was moved by gratitude to God and sought to do good works not to win salvation but out of spontaneous love. Luther saw no evidence that his people in Wittenberg were so moved. In September 1545, only a few months before he died, Luther preached a long, rambling, and heartfelt sermon lambasting the Wittenbergers for adultery, greed, and the desires of the flesh. (Richard Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death, Harvard University Press, 2000, 466)