Obedient Rebel

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A new Luther would almost certainly be as much of an unpredictable surprise to Christianity as the original was. There are Protestants as well as Catholics who believe that a modern reformer has already appeared, in the person of Pope John XXIII. "If we think functionally of someone who opened up the church to reform," contends Claremont's Dean Trotter, "the closest to Martin Luther has been Pope John." Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak of Stanford suggests that Luther's spirit of reform is most likely to be embodied, if at all, by someone totally outside Christianity. "The Luthers today are not in the established church," he argues. Novak suggests that the impulse for reformation today is in the New Left. Lutheran Liturgist Edgar S. Brown agrees that should a new Luther materialize, he would most likely turn up as "a novelist, poet or dramatist"—someone with the gift of words that Luther had "to get at men's minds and hearts and grab them."

Guilt & Fear. Whether or not a new reformer appears to shock Christianity out of its malaise, churchmen agree that the old Luther still speaks directly to many of their current concerns. Although theologians have trouble trying to translate justification by faith into contemporary terms—a discussion of the subject at a 1963 meeting of the Lutheran World Federation broke up in total bafflement—few Protestants are prepared to repudiate it. Yale's Pelikan insists that "there is some relevance to a thought whose entire concern is how to cope with guilt, anxiety and fear."

Anglican Bishop C. K. Sansbury, general secretary of the British Council of Churches, suggests that Luther's basic insight into justification by faith "fits in very closely with the findings of many psychologists. When you think of all the nervous breakdowns, which are caused by the fact that people have built up some great image, this is still a liberating doctrine: that even when you slip up, you lay the whole lot at the feet of Christ, and you go on from there. All the striving and fear and anxiety goes. This seems to me a rediscovery of the sheer wonder of God's grace." Recent Luther research has emphasized the strong streak of secularity in his thought, which amounts to a virtual command for the Christian to live his faith in action. Traditionally, Luther's doctrine of "the two kingdoms" has been taken to imply that Christians hould not interfere in the affairs of state. But Union Theological Seminary's Pauck points out that Luther, in his tract On Civil Government, argued that a Christian must disobey a political ruler who expects him to disobey the will of God. It is no accident that the martyred anti-Nazi hero of the World War II German resistance, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was a Lutheran.