Protestants: Obedient Rebel

(7 of 9)

Even after the break with Rome, church historians agree, Luther wanted only to reform the one true church—and not to found a new Lutheran de nomination. With that in mind, many contemporary theologians agree that he could hardly fail to be displeased by much of the present condition of the churches.

One object of Luther's wrath might well be the bureaucratization of the churches. Although one target of the Reformation was the overweening power of the Roman Curia, hardly a U.S. church exists without a frightening quota of red tape and organizational concern. "The Law of Moses may have been abrogated," glooms Yale Historian Pelikan, "but not Parkinson's." Bureaucratic business goes hand in hand with clerical direction of the churches. "It is one of the great ironies of history," says Dean F. Thomas Trotter of California's Claremont School of Theology, "that whereas Protestantism began as an anticlerical movement, by and large today, at least in America, it is a movement of the clergy."

Brownie Points. An even graver charge is that in much of Protestantism —including many of the churches that bear Luther's name—his central insight into the primacy of faith has been lost in a bog of building campaigns, service agencies, relief programs and other church-instigated "good works." American Christianity, charges Lutheran Theologian Martin Marty, has fallen back on precisely the kind of spiritual error that the Reformation was designed to combat. The typical parishioner, adds Marty's colleague at the University of Chicago, Theologian Brian Gerrish, feels that he has "done something that puts God in his debt if he puts down a nice thick carpet in the chancel hall—a sort of afterlife insurance policy." Some laymen feel that all too many clerics are trying to earn what Marty calls "Brownie Points" by engaging in secular crusades—picketing against Viet Nam or for civil rights.

While the time may have arrived for another Luther, few Christian leaders expect one. For one thing, many Protestant thinkers are convinced that denominationalism is an obsolescent evil—the answer to Christian failings is not a revolt that creates still another new church. For another, a Christian distraught at the situation of the churches no longer needs to create a new spiritual community. Says Father Dino Bellucci of Rome's Gregorian University: "Today, it is possible for a man to leave the organized church and try to remain a Christian outside organized Christianity"—the path chosen by English Theologian Charles Davis when he recently left Catholicism (TIME, Dec. 30).