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127. Is the Ecumenical Martin Luther the Real Luther?

August 1st, 2016

As the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation is approaching, it is no surprise to find books wanting to offer fresh accounts of Martin Luther’s theology and legacy. Who was this man? What was his message then and how do we understand it five centuries after? Walter Kasper’s recent volume on Luther (in German: Martin Luther. Eine ökumenische Perspektive,; in Italian: Martin Lutero. Una prospettiva ecumenica) is a valuable contribution to the on-going discussion on the historical and theological significance of the beginnings of the Reformation. Cardinal Kasper is one of the most authoritative living theologians in the Roman Catholic Church and he is highly appreciated by Pope Francis because of his work on the theology of mercy, the center of Francis’ pontificate. Since Kasper was President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity from 1999 to 2010, his analysis of Luther is also worth reading because it gives voice to widespread ecumenical evaluations and concerns.

Dialectical Interpretation

Kasper’s book focuses on Luther’s remoteness with regards to our contemporary culture. From the introduction onward Luther is painted as being a “stranger” for the modern public opinion. Very few people nowadays understand his existential questions framed with the language of sin, a guilty conscience, and the fear of divine judgment. Those theological categories and the controversies around them seem “irrelevant” today. These are “outdated” issues coming from a démodé character immersed in medieval mysticism and anti-scholastic polemics. Yet, according to Kasper, Luther was grappling with the “question of God” in his own cultural ways and patterns. He is outdated but his basic concerns are perennial. They need to be heavily decoded in order to be represented in a more palatable way and eventually appreciated.

Kasper’s interpretation of Luther is therefore dialectical: on the one hand, Luther appears to be very far and in need of significant filtering to be dealt with; on the other Luther is asking the vital questions provided that one understands what he is saying. There is truth in this, of course. As it is the case with any historical character, Luther belongs to a remote world and cultural bridges are necessary in order to meet him. The Cardinal, though, seems to distance the reader from approaching Luther in his own terms by encouraging her to apply a deconstructive interpretation that will tame the German reformer and make him closer to us postmodern Westerners. The impression is that Luther needs to be freed from his idiosyncratic edges and this is something that an ecumenical reinterpretation of him may help doing.

Kasper suggests many cautionary remarks in encountering Luther, perhaps too many to allow Luther to speak for himself. For example, are we sure that Luther’s concerns (sin, guilt, judgment and therefore grace, faith, the gospel) belong to a buried theological baggage in need of being updated with friendlier present-day standards? Wasn’t Luther rediscovering biblical truths that were blurred in medieval Christianity but are central for the Christian faith in all ages? Ultimately, the issue at stake is whether or not Luther is to be rescued from himself in order to be heard by the church and the world. Kasper seems to pit the confessional “bad” Luther against the ecumenical “good” Luther. Is this a fair way of coming to terms with Martin Luther?

Reformation or New Evangelization?

After Vatican II (1962-1965), Roman Catholic scholarship on Luther has seen a significant change of perspective. For centuries he was blamed with all possible theological evils (e.g. being a heretic and schismatic) and personal failures (e.g. prone to drunkness, chasing women). Since the work of church historians like Joseph Lortz, Luther has been mildly appreciated as a sincere reformer who has tragically gone astray. Nowadays, Catholic scholarship considers Luther as a wayward child of the church, provided that his work is excised of all hard line Protestant elements. This is also what Walter Kasper is convinced of.

According to the Cardinal, Luther belongs to a cloud of witnesses who across the centuries have sought to introduce measures of renewal in the church. Kasper mentions St. Francis of Assisi as one of them preceding Luther. The German reformer went further though, and dramatically so. With his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers he undermined the sacramental structure of the church. With his insistence on the primacy of grace he severed his theology from the optimism of Christian humanism. Instead of exercising patience and longsuffering, Luther changed an emergency situation of tensions within the church in an ordinary condition of separation and controversy. The result was schism and the beginning of a fractured confessional age that now needs to be overcome by the ecumenical age. The question is: have Luther’s basic questions been settled to move from conflict to communion?

Kasper is convinced that if Luther would appear today he would support the New Evangelization that the Roman Catholic Church is engaged in, i.e. the attempt to draw baptized but not practicing Catholics back to the Church by reaffirming the traditional body of Catholic teachings and practices. The book is an attempt to save Luther from himself and to facilitate his symbolic return to the Roman Catholic Church, dropping his teachings on grace alone, Scripture alone, and Christ alone. The New Evangelization is the Roman Catholic re-packaged program of inner renewal that has absorbed some Reformation inputs while rejecting its main doctrinal outlook. Would Martin Luther accept the deal? Perhaps the book speaks more of Kasper and present-day Roman Catholic reinterpretations of history than of Luther and his permanent call to retrieve the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

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126. What Does It Mean to be Catholic? A Book Review

July 1st, 2016

Jack Mulder Jr., What Does it Mean to be Catholic? (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2015) 226 pp.

What does it mean to be Catholic? The question is simple but the answer is fraught with complexities. Is there a recognizable core, a pervasive blueprint, a distinct pattern of what Roman Catholicism is all about? The issue is worth tackling, especially in times like ours where confessional identities are often blurred and flattened. The merit of this book is to present a comprehensive, albeit short and readable, introduction to what is constitutive of the Roman Catholic identity. The intention of the Author, an associate professor of philosophy at Hope College (Michigan, USA), is to show “a small glimpse of the internal coherence, the beauty, and the depth of the Catholic faith” (p. 9). Rather than testing Roman Catholicism in terms of biblical truth or gospel faithfulness, the primary interest is to underline the coherent nature of Roman Catholicism in terms of its aesthetical attraction and profound structure of thought. In itself this is already an indication of what it means to be Catholic: looking for coherence, beauty and depth, not necessarily according to and under God’s revealed Word. The Author was raised in the Protestant faith and converted to Roman Catholicism in his adulthood. So he knows the evangelical subculture quite well. In presenting his newly found faith he often and interestingly interacts with concerns and questions that are normally asked by evangelical protestants.

Catholic Distinctiveness

The opening sentence of chapter 1 well captures the essence of what Roman Catholicism is all about in its practical outworking. “In my wallet I carry a little card with a picture of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and a tiny piece of cloth laminated to it. Next to the cloth it reads: This piece of cloth has been touched by his relics” (p. 11). What used to be thought of as being the quintessence of idolatry, i.e. the reliance on pictures, relics and saints, is now seen as expressing the genuine longing of the Catholic faith: the blessed presence of divine grace accessed through tangible objects and human holy mediators. The Author readily acknowledges that in order to make sense of this practice one needs to have a wider concept of Divine Revelation than Scripture alone. According to Roman Catholicism, Scripture and tradition are streams of the same wellspring of Revelation that the Church is given the task to rightly interpret and duly apply, thus governing the “development” of doctrine and practice. From the religious point of view, carrying the card with St. Thomas Aquinas makes sense given the fact that the “formal principle” of the Roman faith is not Scripture alone, but Scripture as interpreted as part of a bigger Tradition ultimately received and spelt out by the teaching office of the Church. As it was the case in the XVI century, the evangelical “Scripture alone” is utterly incompatible with Roman Catholicism.

Having clarified this foundational epistemological point, the rest of the book aptly presents the Roman Catholic faith, introducing topics as central and diverse as The Church and her Magisterium, God and Humanity, The Person and Work of Christ, Mary and the Communion of the Saints, The Seven Sacraments, Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, The Human Person. All in all, the Author well manages to navigate the complexities of Catholic doctrine and practice, always trying to trace their doctrinal development and pointing to the coherence of the whole in terms of the present-day teaching of Roman Catholicism. He does a great job in expounding the coherence of the system given its wide foundations which go well beyond the Bible. The problem is: is it what the biblical Gospel is all about? Once established that the normative reference point is not Scripture alone, every point he deals with raises serious concerns from a biblical perspective.

A Gradualist View of Salvation

A test-case of the deviant direction of Roman Catholicism has to do with the view of salvation as having a universal scope and a hopeful end for all. The Author sides with the post-Vatican II account whereby there are circles of salvation which ultimately embrace the whole of humanity. Quoting Paul VI and John Paul II, but evoking standard Vatican II teaching, “There are four concentric circles of people: first, all humanity; second, the worshipers of the one God; third, all Christians; and fourth, Catholics themselves” (p. 9). Salvation is seen as a gift that people receive in different degrees depending on the circle they chose to identify with or find themselves in. Roman Catholics receive God’s grace in the fullest measure through the sacraments administered by the (Roman) Church under the Pope and the bishops who are the successors of the apostles; other Christians receive God’s grace to a lesser extent because they retain true elements of the faith but lack the fullness of it in not being in full fellowship with the Church of Rome. Religious people receive it because they have a sense of the divine, although they miss important aspects of the faith. Finally, the whole of humanity receives it because they are human and therefore existentially open to God’s grace which works in mysterious ways. Ultimately, “the only real way to get outside of God’s grace is to expel oneself from it” (p. 190). The conditions for such self-expulsion are so remote and limited that practically there is hope that all will be saved. This is quite different from clear biblical teaching that turns the picture upside down. According to Scripture we are all by nature children of wrath (Ephesians 2:3), all sinners (Romans 3:23), all under his judgment (John 3:18). It is not us who exclude ourselves from God’s grace. Because of sin we are all born into this condition. Roman Catholicism turns the argument around and believes the contrary, i.e. we are all born into God’s grace albeit at various levels of depth and at different degrees.

As an aside comment, the Author interestingly says that “when evangelical leader Rob Bell came out with a book called Love Wins, which only raises the possibility of everyone ending up in heaven, and never definitively claims that this will happen, controversy erupted in evangelical circles, but Catholics took very little notice” (p. 187). This is no surprise given the hopeful scope of the Roman Catholic gradualist view of salvation for all.

The book is very honest in presenting the Roman Catholic faith and not hiding points of controversy with other Christian traditions. Contrary to some attempts to blur the lines, this volume does a good job in highlighting what is distinctive of Roman Catholicism and therefore in showing how it is different from the evangelical faith. Even in its post-Vatican II outlook, Roman Catholicism is still idiosyncratic to Scripture alone, Christ alone and faith alone.

 

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