I agree with the question about Luther’s “breakthrough.” He seems to preach a matter of election that later turned into Calvin’s double predestination and a rather vicious image of God designing people for hellfire.
Not the biggest fan of Luther in general, him being an antisemite that called for the persecution of Jews because they wouldn’t convert.
Which leads to other traditions of Christianity using their interpretation of the Bible as a means to persecute people.
Luther did does seem to stress the importance of the Bible. By breaking with the Church he broke away from a tradition that allowed for the Bible as well as new divine revelation via the Church.
Luther and many denominations of Protestantism seem to throw away continuous revelation in favor of a Bible that wasn’t written for dozens if not hundreds of years after Jesus’s death.
(Making any reference to the Logos most certainly not a reference to the Gospels or later books of the New Testament.)
This seems to miss the point of the Holy Spirit which Jesus is quoted as saying “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever, the Spirit of Truth.” John 14:16
It seems to me this spirit of revelation could very much be the inspiration for Jonas’s concept of Christ.
As for your understanding of world religions, I would have to point out that many religions have gods who suffer and died for them.
Hinduism is filled with gods who incarnated and died to save their people from one disaster or another.
In Hinduism, though, there is room to understand the irony that the king created his own rules requiring death and then tortured himself or his son in order to fulfill his own rules and wrath concerning sin and its atonement.
That is because Hinduism has the concept of Brahmin wherein it’s all part of the great dream, where we can make peace with a diety that is both sacrificer and sacrifice.
Also, most every pagan religion around the world has stories of sacrificed gods that help human beings thrive and prosper from Attis to Osiris to Inanna to Prometheus.
No, they’re not under the narrative that God was so furious with his creation for eating a fruit he himself made that he required the torture of himself as a human being but they do have the narrative of the divinity suffering in order to further nature and its abundance in some way that helps humanity.
Further, those pagan traditions that were survived for long enough all developed a concept of panentheism where God is one with many faces and most eventually developed divine mysteries wherein humanity is brought into oneness with God via the sacrifice of one of the divinities, which is God itself.
Much like the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost but with Mothers, Sisters, Divine Brothers, a whole family, pets included.
Thank God for Jesus, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Krishna, Prometheus and all the rest!
