Lutheran Ping!
Posted on 09/15/2009 5:54:18 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
The Roman Catholic bishop of Osnabrück in northern Germany has said that the 16th-century Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, offers a "positive challenge" to Protestant and Catholic churches.
"It's fascinating just how radically he puts God at the centre," Bishop Franz-Josef Bode said in an interview with the German Protestant news agency epd, in connection with a service at Osnabrück's Lutherkirche earlier this month, during which he preached on Luther.
Luther, said Bode, had rightly denounced failures in the Church and he had recalled the roots of faith.
Bode described Luther as a "fascinating personality for both churches", noting that the reformer had not intended to divide the Church through the dissemination of his 95 Theses of 1517, but that his teaching had later been exploited by others for their own purposes.
Luther had been more concerned in dealing with the fundamental question of how God turns towards human beings.
In the Church of that era there had been tendencies that contributed to "misunderstandings", said Bode, citing grace and the forgiveness of sins as things that certainly cannot be bought, in a reference to the contemporary practice of the Catholic Church of selling indulgences.
"The focus on Christ, the Bible and the authentic Word - are things that we as the Catholic Church today can only underline," said Bode. He noted that especially with the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church has been able to understand and address in a new way Luther's thought and his esteem for the Word of God.
The Second Vatican Council met from 1962 to 1965 and it led to the Catholic Church accepting for the first time that there could be coexistence of different forms of faith in Christ, said the bishop.
The 50th anniversary of the council in 2015 takes place in the decade preparing for the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation of 2017. Bode said he would work within the German (Catholic) Bishops' Conference to ensure that the ecumenical aspects of the Second Vatican Council are underlined.
Still, said Bode, there remain elements of division between the Catholic Church and Luther. These divisions centre on the understanding that Luther developed from his own experience of the Church, the priesthood and the sacraments.
The Catholic Church would, however, "today deal with such a provocation in a different and a better way," said the bishop.
...The Catholic Church would, however, "today deal with such a provocation in a different and a better way," said the bishop.
I suspect it would. There are some individual Catholics who could learn a thing or two about that.
The proliferation of custom-made churches which we see around us today would have horrified Luther.
ping
This is a reasonable assessment of the young Luther, up to about 1518. After being double-crossed by the papal curia (behind the pope’s back they tried to get Elector Frederick of Saxony to hand him over for a heresy trial when heresy was not the issue and he had been promised not a trial but a theological debate), he became angry. That was justified—he had been treated wrongly. His issues up to this point were well taken points of theological disagreement. The Church was responding to him fairly, on the level of one theologian to another (Cardinal Cajetan was sent to deal with him theologically.)
But then he radicalized and began calling the Pope the anti-Christ and denying fundamental matters of ecclesiology. At that point he rightly was judged to be a heretic.
The Curia was wrong to move secretly against him. The people who did that were scum. But as a Catholic, he was wrong to reject the whole Church because some of its leading officials were scum. He gave up on the indefectibility of the Church at that point. That was his fatal error. The fatal error of the Curia was to try to quash him unjustly. But others in the Church were trying to deal fairly with him.
So yes, I would hope the Church would deal differently with him today. But I also would hope that a good Catholic would deal fairly with the Church today. When some bishops do evil things, one does not throw the theology of the indefectibility of the Church out the window. Luther did.
Even after the controversy escalated like that, it’s possible it could have been settled without lasting schism had the kings and princes and city councils not jumped and taken sides. It was the power-grab by the state, creating state churches under the thumb of the city-states, kings, princes, that doomed the “Reformation” to become lastingly church-dividing.
Excellent post!
Yes I believe that Luther was wrong to leave the Church, but the reality is that he was also being used as a pawn for political purposes. The Church had a lot of power and a lot of income, German noblemen saw Luther as a way to get their hands on a lot of it and noblemen throughout Europe soon followed suit.
“Bondage of the Will” by Martin Luther.
Preferably, by fixing the problems before they led to a Luther-type figure.
There were ample opportunities to fix the abuses that led to Luther -- multiple tenantcy (one man paying $$ to be bishop of multiple sees, which is what led to the "selling" of indulgences), bad catechesis, heterodox teaching in universities, uneducated clerics, an over-emphasis on peripheral things like pilgrimages and relic veneration, etc. -- before Luther.
All of them were botched.
It wasn't until Luther showed everyone what was at stake that Trent was able to fix them.
Houghton M., my friend, your hope and reality are on two divergent paths.
We’ll see.
What, pray tell, is the “indefectability of the church?” I’ve read a lot over the past 55 years about Luther, the Roman Catholic church, et cetera, but this is a new term and concept to me.
We’ll see in our lifetimes, aint that right Houghton!
My apologies for the late response. Yesterday was nonstop business. Indefectibility is the belief, based on “the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church,” that Christ has promised not to let the Church defect from him, apostasize from him. Luther came to believe that the “papal Church” but not the whole, invisible Church, had defected, apostasized, so one needed to come out from among the apostate Papal Church in order to save the Church. Catholics said that individual Christians, including bishops and popes did wrong but that one can’t split off the visible, papal Church from some “invisible” True Church because Christ clearly designated Peter and his successors (Is. 22 lies behind Mt 16, a succession is implied) to lead the Church, so, to say that the Christ-deignated human leader of the visible Church had apostasized but the Church had not was nonsense.
The Church is visibly as well as invisibly Christ’s Body and if Christ said he’d preserve the Church from apostasy as a whole (individual members and groups may apostasize) then that includes the bishop of Rome (Pope/Peter’s office).
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