LUTHER AND THE SYNOD:

...There were reforming currents in the pre-Reformation Church, true...

...His concern about liberation was theological, and we need that in an age when the disillusioned inhabitants of the secular city are searching for an organic link to their two-thousand-year-old tradition...

...Times have changed...

...No matter...

...The bishops of the synod are now open to their evangelical brethren because conditions of contemporary society are such that believers, whatever their stripe, are passengers in the same leaky ship...

...His main point is that Faith in Christ liberates a man to fulfill his destiny in terms of God's unconditional love, a love which places him above the constrictions of the law...

...It took centuries for confessional polemics to turn into dialogue, and that only became a reality in Germany, the heartland of the Reformation, because Catholic and Lutheran alike were forced to witness together against the obscenity of National Socialism for their mutual survival...

...The norms of European culture were at least verbally Christian but more often than not honored in the breach rather than the observance...

...With this Faith, there came a full measure of liberation with all its joy and pain for the Christian Church of the sixteenth century in both its Catholic and Evangelical forms...

...In his concluding address to the bishops at the synod, Pope Paul stressed a point which Luther would have applauded when he said, "The totality of salvation is not to be confused with one or another aspect of liberation, and the good news must preserve all of its originality: that of a God who saves us from sin and death, and brings us to divine life...

...His emphasis that the radical way one stands open to the grace of God received in Faith allows the Christian the freedom to be open to all and serve all provides a foundation and context within whose framework the word "liberation" may take on a truly human meaning, yet one sufficiently transcendent so that the Spirit may move the human family toward the "integral salvation" of which the bishops speak...

...It is distilled in his "The Freedom of a Christian Man...

...But, mirabile dictu, the trauma caused Rome to stir from its lethargy, and save itself at Trent...

...A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all subject to none...

...Catholic and Evangelical then settled into a duel of sword and pen which was to run its dreary course almost until Vatican II...

...Protestant scholars like J. Boehmer and P. S. Watson have spoken of the "Copernican Revolution" of Luther's work, the shift from an anthropocentric to a theocentric Faith...

...In the face of this, the bishops state that "we intend to collaborate more diligently with those of our Christian brothers with whom we are not yet in the union of a perfect communion, basing ourselves on the foundation of Baptism and on the patrimony which we hold in common...

...and if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law...

...Before John Eck, the sixteenth century's equivalent of William F. Buckley, Jr., and assorted other curial jackals harried the young Augustinian to his wits' end, Luther made one last effort to stay aboard the Bark of Peter...

...In his last months as a Roman Catholic, it is significant that Luther's thoughts were on liberation in Faith from over-ripe structures...

...Mary's Fiat, her "Yes," is a prerequisite for the Faith that leads to liberation both personally and societally...

...LUTHER AND THE SYNOD JOHN P. HIGGINS The German Hercules comes to Rome A 1522 cartoon by Holbein depicts Martin Luther as the German Hercules, wielding a club against the prostrate scholastic philosophers and theologians whose intricate Gothic structures Thomas More's portraitist (for Holbein had an ecumenical taste in minds) and many of the contemporaries felt that the recently excommunicated monk was doing yeoman work in demolishing...

...Fishing for souls is no longer the easy enterprise it once was...

...Luther used it theologically in an age of great social tension and radical economic dislocation-one very much like our own...

...He could not stop the forces that were to lead us to a global society plagued by war, racism, hunger and poverty...

...For Luther, liberation was a two-edged sword...

...Luther's savage denunciation of their behavior in the Peasants' War of 1525 does him little credit...

...This is to his credit...

...While Luther would not countenance political revolution, he still insisted on the obligation of Christians to love their neighbor in word and deed...

...But the whole episode illustrates the risks that lurk in the word "liberation...

...For Luther, Faith active in love liberates man...

...The Enlightenment delivered an acerbic eulogy, and the twentieth century has provided ample evidence ranging from the "German Christian" Lutherans who collaborated with the Third Reich to the recent sophistries of an American Jesuit in defense of moral bankruptcy that the cosmetized corpse of Christendom is now only useful when it may suit the convenience of those opposed to human liberation...

...Together, the papal and episcopal statements chart new paths for the Roman Catholic portion of the Christian community...

...The practical result of the Reformation initiated by Luther was to destroy Christendom as an organism...

...Damage was done: the unity Christ prayed for was broken...

...Just as the heated iron glows like fire because of the union of fire with it, so the Word imparts its qualities to the soul...

...Episcopal stress on the In-carnational nature of the Church and papal caveats about her eschatological vocation are classic Christian themes which are also found in Luther...

...No good work can rely upon the Word of God or live in the soul, for faith alone and the Word of God rule in the Soul...

...Holbein's cartoon showing Luther as the scholastic giant-killer appeared the year after Luther's excommunication, and graphically shows that the artist and a large number of other Europeans were burning their bridges behind them...

...Paul by which Luther opens his treatise...

...Theological speculation in the nominalist form in which Luther was trained was at one and the same time jealous in the power it assigned to an arbitrary God, and often almost Pelagian in its emphasis on works...

...Luther has been praised/blamed for starting the whole process that led Christians into the bracing/freezing cold of a secular age...

...It was Robert Kennedy who said, "It is a revolutionary age we live in...

...It is painful for a Catholic today to realize that the tragedy need never have come to the denouement pictured by Holbein if matters had been handled more sympathetically and tactfully...

...In speaking of Christian witness, the bishops state, "we are profoundly convinced that without the grace of God...

...Ecclesial Schizophrenia Historically, Luther broke free from the shackles of works righteousness which so seriously marred contemporary Catholic practices...

...The Roman Church was pervaded by deep theological confusion, and its efforts at evangelization, feeble as they usually were, were un-dergirded by threats and worse to the dissenter...

...In the light of the bishops' concern with human liberation and evangelization at their recent synodal meeting in Rome, it seems significant that Luther's pamphlet, "The Freedom of a Christian Man" also deals with the central theme of human liberation imparted by Faith in Christ...

...Hence, human advancement, social progress, etc., is not to be excessively emphasized on a temporal level to the detriment of the essential meaning which evangelization has for the Church of Christ...

...Whatever else he or she may say about the reformer, a Catholic today should admit that Luther redirected the energies of the Western Christian community back to basics...

...The bishops rightly emphasize that it is necessary "to eliminate the social consequences of sin which are translated into unjust social and political structures," and note that the Church is not bound to any political or social system...

...The same Faith that Luther had will surely lead to freedom for the Christian community today as it seeks to proclaim the good news in terms intelligible to a world that both literally and figuratively hungers for the deepest dimensions of liberation that are at the heart of the Gospel...

...the announcement of the good news...

...This is that Christian liberty, our faith, which does not induce us to live in idleness or wickedness but makes the law and works unnecessary for any man's righteousness and salvation," Luther affirms...

...A thoroughgoing secular society was but a gleam in Machiavelli's eye when his German contemporary strove to redirect the concerns of the Christian to the liberating message of the Gospel as formalism threatened to choke its expression in the contemporary Church...

...Luther's "Tower Experience" which took place sometime between 1513 and 1519, caused him to explore the link between Faith and human liberation...

...But Rome has never understood Germans: the recent processes against Kung and Pfurtner are ample evidence of a continuing triumphalist tradition of curial myopia...

...Catholic scholars like Stephen Pfurtner have shown that the gap between a scholastic Realist like Aquinas and a Nominalist like Luther on the question of salvation may well be more a matter of emphasis and approach than content...

...The bloodbath of the Peasants' War caused Luther to have some second thoughts on the meaning of freedom...

...Thus we can henceforth render to the world a much broader common witness of Christ, while at the same time working to obtain full union in the Lord...

...Luther's accomplishment was that he liberated himself and much of Europe by God's grace in Faith from the tyranny of the spirit wielded by the contemporary ecclesiastical system...

...The bishops ask us "to receive, following her example, the word of God with an open mind and a docile spirit, to offer it to the world after having meditated upon it and faithfully translated it into daily life...

...The pre-Reformation Church, which nurtured Luther and from which he emerged, had repression and not liberation as its stock in trade...

...Toward the end of their statements, both Luther and the bishops take the Mother of God as the norm for the Christian...

...In its most extreme forms, nominalism, be it expressed in a philosophical treatise or popular sermon, led to ecclesial schizophrenia...

...It is clear, then, that a Christian has all that he needs in faith and needs no works to justify him...

...If evangelization has become more difficult for Catholic and Evangelical alike, Catholics for their part would do well to reread Luther on Christian liberty...

...In the course of his work they become reconciled through the alchemy of God's perfectly free gift of Faith...

...A Catholic might mildly reply that Luther's theocentric insight was already extant in the liturgical life of the Roman Church, despite the admitted decadence in this area so characteristic of the pre-Reformation Church...

...As the bishops sifted through the wreckage of the '60s at their recent synod, it would appear that they have found the priceless pearl of the liberating message of the Gospel...

...The German peasants were to understand Christian freedom in a sense different from the Wittenberg Theology Professor...

...Luther's leap of Faith lasted his whole life...

...Luther's crucial insight into Romans that the just man lives by Faith led him to say later, "I felt as if the gates had opened before me into Paradise...

...Luther's whole lifework was bound up with this notion of God's grace in Faith (sometimes to the point of imbalance, for his witness was a uniquely personal one with all the limitations that implies) which leads to true freedom...

...But much of the good in our society may be traced in part to his witness...

...In our own age, Machiavelli (or, more properly, the sea-change his thought has undergone over the centuries) has triumphed...

...The whole theme of liberation, the integral salvation of the whole man, individually and in community, be it expressed today in religious or secular vocabulary, lies at the heart of Luther's experience...

...A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all," are the paradoxical theses drawn from St...

...and if he has no need of the law, surely he is free from the law...

...Since the Reformation was essentially a revolution in theology, Luther cannot be said to have missed the boat...

...The Pope's reminder that we have here no abiding city provides an excellent complement to the statement of the bishops...

...In September, 1520, he wrote a pamphlet which he dedicated to Leo X, the sleek Medici dilettante who was to lower the boom of excommunication on the Wittenberg monk a year later with his bull, "Arise, O Lord, a wild boar has invaded thy vineyard . . .": Leo was fond of the hunt, so the metaphor came naturally...

...True, he barred a totemic response to the Gospel, and insisted on Christian freedom in Faith...

...One does not have to read The Little Red Book or Beckett's latest play to realize that the banality and desperation of it all find an echo in the collapse of Christendom at the Reformation...

...The bishops see this, and accept the fait accompli...

...As Luther says, "We should devote all our works to the welfare of others, since each has such abundant riches in his faith that all his works and his whole life are a surplus with which he can by voluntary benevolence serve and do good to his neighbor...

...5:5...

...Today, the bishops address a society that is secular and sometimes even atheistic in its cultural values...

...Luther's vision was restricted to Europe, and the bishops rightly add that, "We intend furthermore to seek the collaboration of all men of good will who for reasons which are undoubtedly diverse but sincere, are in search of a deeper meaning to life or are committed to gaining more human conditions of life for their brothers...

...Such collaboration as the bishops suggest might include looking at Luther's comments to Pope Leo before his excommunication...

...For Luther, she is "a pre-eminent example of such a faith [by which] we ought to do all things freely and joyfully for the sake of others...

...But it took Luther's labors from outside the visible structure to channel these currents into the work perfected at Trent...

...The bishops speak of their "attempts to radicalize the Gospel in its entirety" which is precisely what Luther tried to do in his own age...

...I only mention this to show that many of the supposed differences between Evangelical and Catholic may be more apparent than real...

...Not that Luther was an angel: his two other pamphlets of 1520 are written in acid...

...Catholic substance and Protestant principle today seek points of convergence, but the hour is late...

...we would be completely incapable of carrying out this mission as it should be done (Cf...

...The whole process was intensified in the months after the monk's initial protest against the peripheral matter of indulgences in October, 1517...

...Religious pluralism stemmed from the Reformation...

...One doubts if he read Luther's last appeal...