Protestants: Obedient Rebel

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Of few men can it be said with absolute certainty that they changed the course of history. Jesus was one; so was Karl Marx. Still another was Martin Luther, friar of the Augustinian Order of Eremites, who 450 years ago posted his 95 theses concerning indulgences to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church. There was nothing defiant or earth-shaking about the act itself—all theologians of the day publicly announced their willingness to debate a timely religious issue. Not until later, in fact, did Luther come to realize that his action of Oct. 31, 1517, was the first shot in the war of words that was to create the Reformation.

To Yale's Lutheran Historian Jaroslav Pelikan, the Reformation was a "tragic necessity"—tragic in that it shattered the unity of Christendom, necessary in that it cleansed the church and restored man's faith in God to its Scriptural roots. It is equally true that the Reformation is an unrealized hope and unfinished ideal. Today, says Dr. Wilhelm Pauck of Union Theological Seminary, "one could characterize the spirit of our epoch as pre-Reformation. The old order is in a process of dissolution, but there is also a great positive religious expectancy."

Rudderless Ship. Several theologians, in fact, have quite soberly wondered aloud whether the situation of the church demands the shock of another Luther. Even as it gropes toward ecumenical union, Protestantism stands threatened by secular inroads and spiritual indifference. Ranking church leaders openly question the relevance of Christianity, while old denominational quarrels have been upstaged by a new threat of schism: crisis-centered activists who see the church's function as worldly service, against heaven-glancing traditionalists who argue that Christ's message was to save souls not nations.

Given new impetus by a council that in many ways answered the Reformation demands upon it, Roman Catholicism frequently seems like a ship that has lost its rudder in high seas: almost every week a priest defects and marries, a theologian challenges defined dogma, new evidence appears that laymen are putting aside authority-given moral guidance to take a stand, Luther-like, as conscience dictates.

Christian thoughts about a second Luther coincide with a remarkable surge of new interest in the first. Within the past 50 years, points out Theologian Pauck, there have been more books written about Luther than about any other Christian figure, including Jesus. According to Dean John Dillenberger of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, seminary students are showing a new interest in Luther's own writings, finding in them an existential kinship to that favored secular rebel with a cause, Albert Camus. During this anniversary year of the Reformation, there will be Luther-honoring services and seminars in Protestant churches around the globe —including several in East Germany, where the atheist Ulbricht regime officially regards Luther as a spiritual precursor of Marxism for his fight against imperial and Papal oppression.