Protestants: Obedient Rebel

(2 of 9)

Scorn Gone. The most remarkable aspect of the Luther renaissance is that it is enthusiastically endorsed by Roman Catholics, whose postconciliar hymnbooks are patently incomplete if they do not include his martial hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Less than a generation ago, Luther was scorned—even by Catholic scholars who should have known better—as a sensuous, psychotic, fallen monk, the deliberate destroyer of Christendom. Luther, wrote Jesuit Hartmann Grisar in his 1926 biography, suffered from "an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion."

Today, the vast majority of Catholic theologians concedes that Luther was a profound spiritual thinker who was driven into open revolt by the corruption of the Renaissance church and the intransigent stupidity of its Popes. Jesuit John Courtney Murray, for example, calls Luther "a religious genius—compassionate, rhetorical and full of insights."

An American theologian teaching in Rome allows that "Luther was right on indulgences and on most theological points," and that his teachings on justification "are more palatable to me than Thomas Aquinas." After studying one of Luther's major doctrinal tracts, reports Father John Healey of the Jesuits' Woodstock seminary, "my students say that the only question we're not talking about today is the problem with the Hussites"—the pre-Reformation Bohemian heretics of the 15th century.

Prophetic Figure. Appropriately enough, contemporary interest in Luther is proportionate to his direct impact on Protestant Christianity. Of the world's 230 million Protestants, 74.5 million call themselves Lutherans. Although a truly universal church, Lutheranism is strongest in Germany, Scandinavia and the U.S., where it is the third largest Protestant segment (after the Baptists and the Methodists). Three branches of the faith account for most of the nation's 10 million Lutherans: the Lutheran Church in America, the American Lutheran Church and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Far more than other reformers, Luther towers over his century by the sheer force of his personality, Churchillian in its scope and complexity. Yale's Roland Bainton, whose Here I Stand is one of the best modern biographies of the reformer, says that "Luther is not an individual. He is a phenomenon." Dr. Jerald Brauer, dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, calls Luther "one of the three or four greatest figures in the history of Christianity, perhaps the greatest prophetic figure in post-Apostolic Western Christendom."