"If you young fellows were wise, the devil couldn't do anything to you, but since you aren't wise, you need us who are old"
About this Quote
Luther opens with a provocation that sounds like a scold and lands like a strategy: if the young were actually wise, the devil would be unemployed. It is classic Reformation-era rhetoric, built to jolt an audience into admitting vulnerability. The devil here isn’t a Halloween prop; he’s a live explanatory framework for temptation, error, and spiritual drift. Luther’s move is to make wisdom less a badge of intelligence and more a form of practiced discernment, the kind you only get by being burned a few times.
The barb in “since you aren’t wise” does more than chastise. It establishes hierarchy. Luther was a professor and a polemicist in a world where authority was being renegotiated in real time: the Reformation cracked open the idea that ordinary believers could read scripture and stand before God without priestly mediation. That could easily sound like “the young don’t need the old.” Luther counters by making experience itself a kind of necessary office. He’s not re-installing Rome’s institutional gatekeeping so much as installing a new, more personal one: elders as spiritual risk managers.
The subtext is anxious and practical. Youth, in Luther’s telling, is a combustible mix of confidence and inexperience, prime territory for self-deception. By naming the devil, he externalizes the stakes and justifies blunt counsel. It’s paternalism with a theological edge: you can have access to truth, but you still need guides who’ve learned where the traps are.
The barb in “since you aren’t wise” does more than chastise. It establishes hierarchy. Luther was a professor and a polemicist in a world where authority was being renegotiated in real time: the Reformation cracked open the idea that ordinary believers could read scripture and stand before God without priestly mediation. That could easily sound like “the young don’t need the old.” Luther counters by making experience itself a kind of necessary office. He’s not re-installing Rome’s institutional gatekeeping so much as installing a new, more personal one: elders as spiritual risk managers.
The subtext is anxious and practical. Youth, in Luther’s telling, is a combustible mix of confidence and inexperience, prime territory for self-deception. By naming the devil, he externalizes the stakes and justifies blunt counsel. It’s paternalism with a theological edge: you can have access to truth, but you still need guides who’ve learned where the traps are.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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