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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, DECEMBER 30, 1983
All scholars agree on Luther's impertance for German culture,
surpassing that of any single person in the English-speaking
world, including Shakespeare.
Luther's masterpiece was his
translation of the New Testament from Greek into German.... The
Luther Bible sold massively in his lifetime and remains today the
authorized version in German-speaking Protestant churches. In
the process, says Walther Killy of West Germany's renowned Herzog
August Library in Wolfenbuttel, Luther virtually created the
modern German language. Before his Bible was published, there
was no standard German, but a profusion of dialects••.• "It was
Luther," said Johann Gottfried von Herder, one of Geothe's
mentors, "who has awakened and let loose the giant: the German
language".•.•
It is fortunate that Roman Catholics are in the forefront of
Luther scholarship today, because the guest for Christian re
unification inevitably must come to terms with his teachings.
Only a generation ago, Catholics were trained to consider Luther
the arch-heretic; given his florid polemics against the church of
Rome as the "whore of Babylon" or against the "idolatry" of the
Mass, they had ample grounds for offense..•.
In the gradual rapprochement since Vatican II, an international
Lutheran-Catholic commission, at work on the basis for a possible
reunion, has declared that the two sides agree on basic doctrines
and can reconcile their theologies of what occurs in Communion.
In 1980 the group settled on this statement: "It is solely by
grace and faith in Christ's saving work and not because of any
merit in us that we are accepted by God and receive the Holy
Spirit who renews our hearts and equips us for and calls us to
good works."
A similar dialogue commission in the U.S. also
worked through key disputes, and has just issued a highly sig
nificant 21,000-word joint statement on justification. The docu
ment embraces much of Luther's thinking, though with some careful
hedging from the Catholics.
There is doubt, to be sure, about the degree to which Protestants
and Catholics can, in the end, overcome their differences.
Catholics may now be permitted to sing Luther's� Mighty Fortress
Is Our God or worship in their native language, but a wide gulf
remains on such questions as the status of Protestant ministers
and papal authority.... Church structure also divides contem
porary Catholics from Protestants. In the end, Luther's rebel
lion was against the authority of the papacy...•
Meanwhile, the internal state of the Lutheran church raises other
questions about the lasting power of Luther's vision. Luther
anism in the U.S., with 8.5 million adherents, is stable and
healthy; after decades of strenuous effort, several Lutheran
groups are scheduled to merge into a united Lutheran church by
1988, though not the conservative Missouri and Wisconsin synods.
The church is also growing in Third World strongholds. But in
Lutheranism's historic heartland, the two Germanys and Scandina
via, there are deep problems•.••
Only 6% of West Germans--or, for that matter, Scandinavians-
regularly attend. A government poll in Sweden found that only