Protestants: Obedient Rebel

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Christly Neighbors. Lutheran Leader Franklin Clark Fry suggests that a proper interpretation of the reformer's teaching is that faith must find its existential expression in service. Luther advised his followers to be "a Christ to your neighbor"—which means, says Fry, "that one has to be the servant of everybody by love. Part of my service to my fellow man through love, in this age, is to make sure that he has his rights, to make sure that no man is robbed by society before he has a chance to live in society." Luther's conviction of man's equality before God implies that "I have to rebel with all the heat that is in me against any man's being submerged in this world."

Both Catholic and Protestant theologians agree that the founder of the Reformation is an apt starting point in today's quest for Christian unity. "Luther is an appropriate symbol of ecumenical encounter," says Chicago's Sittler. "His protest was a protest by a child of the church in the name of the church Catholic for the sake of the renewal of the church Catholic." Roman scholars agree and—more than four centuries later—the Second Vatican Council adopted many of his ideas: the vernacular liturgy, the priority of Scripture, the church as the people of God who all share in the priesthood of Christ.

Temporary Movement. Protestant scholars, in turn, have been rediscovering how much of Luther was essentially Catholic—his lifelong devotion to the Virgin Mary, his belief in the efficacy of confession, his respect for a moderate amount of ceremony in worship, his spiritual debt to medieval mysticism. One leading Lutheran scholar, Dr. Carl Braaten of Chicago's Lutheran School of Theology, insists that Protestant union with Rome is precisely in accord with the reformer's wishes. "The Reformation was always meant to be a temporary movement," he contends. "When the Roman Catholic Church is reformed, there will be no justification for a separate Protestant church." He believes that any unified church structure would have to accept the papacy—not as an infallible magister but as "a symbol of the unity of the church."

But Luther does not offer to the church any easy, adaptable solutions to Christian troubles. What he presents is something more: the exemplar of what a man of faith can and must be. In a dark age obsessed by pain and trouble, Luther was above all an "Easter Christian," dominated by the memory and promise of Resurrection, the hope implicit in God's word. He also possessed in full measure the quality that the late Paul Tillich, himself a Lutheran, summed up as "the courage to be." For Luther, the life of faith was an existential risk; commitment to God was a summons to follow conscience and Christ—to sacrifice, dissent, even to death. Today, as in the 16th century, the believer will find few better guides than the words of God's obedient rebel at Worms: "Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders."