Protestants: Obedient Rebel

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In 1522, Luther returned to Wittenberg to put into effect a spiritual reform that became the model for much of Germany. The episcopate was abolished, since Luther had found no Scriptural warrant for the office of bishop. Clerical celibacy was abandoned, even for monks and nuns—and in 1525, Luther married a former nun, Katherine von Bora. The sacraments were reduced from seven to two: baptism and the Lord's Supper. Luther revised the Latin liturgy and translated it into German, allowing the laity to receive the consecrated wine as well as the Host, substituting a new popular hymnody for Gregorian chant. Emphasis in worship changed from the celebration of the sacrificial Mass to the preaching and teaching of God's word.

Civilization Transformed. By 1530, when a summit conference of Reforma tion leaders convened in Augsburg to draw up a common statement of faith (the Augsburg Confession) leadership of the movement had begun to pass out of Luther's hands. He continued to preach and teach the Bible in Wittenberg, but even sympathetic biographers have found it hard to justify some of the actions of his declining years. He endorsed the bigamous marriage of his supporter, Prince Philip of Hesse. He denounced reformers who disagreed with him in terms that he had once re served for the papacy. His statements about the Jews would sound excessive on the tongue of a Hitler. By the time of his death in 1546, admits Biographer Bainton, Luther was "an irascible old man, petulant, peevish, unrestrained, and at times positively coarse."

The personal defects of an aging rebel do not in any way detract from the grandeur of his achievement, which ultimately transformed not only Christianity but all of Western civilization. Luther's conviction that all men stand equally naked before God constitutes the theological substratum justifying liberal democracy. His teaching on "the two kingdoms"—that man with his soul belongs to the church, and with his body to the world—contributed to the rise of the modern secular state. Luther's con ception of the "priesthood of all believers" implied that man served God best in his daily existence—the basis of the Protestant ethic of work and achievement. His insistence that men must read God's word contributed to the spread of literacy. And in his own translation of the Bible—a rendering whose only peers are the King James version and the Latin Vulgate—Luther wrote a German of poetry and power that has been matched only by Goethe himself. In effect, he created a common language for Germany, the necessary prelude to nationhood.

Catholic Scope. Out of conviction, Luther stood for truth at the expense of unity—but the truths he stood for are essential to the Christian church: the primacy of faith and God's word, the necessity of an ecclesia semper refor-manda (ever-reforming church), and the centrality of Jesus Christ. The Lutheran heritage, sums up Theologian Joseph Sittler of the University of Chicago Divinity School, is "a tradition of profound, relentless, critical Biblical studies, a theological reflection of truly catholic scope, a type of piety nurtured by liturgical continuity with the old Catholic tradition."