A Half-Millennium Rift

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In 1541 a group of well-meaning men met in the German town of Regensburg. Their topic was Martin Luther's ideas about justification by faith, rancor over which was fast splitting Western Christianity in two. Could justification, which all saw as the precondition of salvation, be influenced by human effort, or was it, as Luther had insisted, out of mortal hands? The Regensburg conferees, representing the Roman Catholic Church and the new Protestantism, produced language on the issue they thought might mend the rift.

They were wrong, but their cause was not totally lost. Last week--457 years, several disastrous religious wars and dozens of denominational splits later--Edward Cardinal Cassidy announced Vatican approval, with some caveats, of a Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, toward which Catholic and Lutheran theologians have been toiling since 1967. Some of the Vatican's fine print was shockingly critical of the text, but it let stand without objection the Declaration's grandest statement: "Together we confess: By grace alone, in faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping and calling us to good works." Half a millennium of strife is not instantly undone; last week's participants, unlike the Regensburgers, didn't imagine they were reuniting the church. But the Declaration does preserve faint hopes of such a reunion. And it is "momentous" in its own right, notes influential Catholic commentator Richard John Neuhaus, for seriously addressing "the root cause of a division that has shaped all of world history."

Luther's doctrine of justification by grace was his solution to two problems. One was personal: the era's Catholic practice presented divine forgiveness and salvation as earned, a function of one's merit. Like many people, Luther was periodically paralyzed by fear that his merit might fall short. He was also angry that the church, as age-old intermediary between believer and God, was profiting from this fear. For a price, the appropriate cleric would perform merit-building practices like prayer, penance or pilgrimage on one's behalf. The sale of such "indulgences" financed many a medieval cathedral. Retreating to his New Testament, Luther considered St. Paul's letter to the Romans. Human "works," preached Paul, could not affect anyone's eternal life; "Justification"--the state of being right with God --was based on a single principle. "On the principle of works?" Paul asked. "No, but on the principle of faith." And faith resulted not from human striving but from God's grace.

"By grace alone; through faith alone" became the slogan of Luther's followers. In the short run its consequences included his excommunication by a furious church, much of whose power derived from "works"; and the formalization of additional grievances by Catholic and Protestant sides into anathemas, or catalogs of heresies. In the long run differences over justification can be seen as shaping the subsequent divided character of Western Christianity: Catholicism's continuing emphases on hierarchy, communalism and good works, and Protestantism's intense individualism.