Blog Posts - THE CATECHIST CAFE with Tom Burns, MA, LMHC

The Reformation 40a: Salvation in a Honda

9/10/2019

If you think the sale of indulgences is an old retired problem, or that no one "buys salvation" anymore, you might be intrigued by this news report from Christianity Today involving my old neighbor Pastor Benny Hinn.

During my years in the ministry I owned only subcompact cars, Dodge Colts to be precise. When I came into my 40's I discovered that leasing a 1992 Honda Accord cost the same as my monthly loan payment on a Colt, so approaching midlife I finally leased a basic Accord. For the first week I was almost too nervous to drive it. I had never owned a sedan before. So I was carefully driving down the road, starting to feel at home with my car, and listening to the local news on the car radio.

It seems that Pastor Benny, living in Orlando then, was coming under media attack for his high living. So Benny took to the microphone and made a statement: "I am an important man of God. Do you think a man in my position should be seen driving around town in a Honda?"
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Installment 41 of The Reformation is in preparation now.

Reformation 40: Luther Rallies The Princes

9/5/2019

After several encounters with Church officials in multiple German settings in 1518 and 1519 led to his being declared a heretic by the pope on January 3, 1521, Luther was formally designated an enemy of the Holy Roman Empire and subject to seizure and remand to Rome for execution by fire. In practice, any European civilian prince or authority was empowered—indeed, obligated—to capture this traitor of the Faith for the good of the Church. However, the monk remained enormously popular in his home regions of Germany among both the peasantry and local princes, both populations fatigued with Roman taxes and costly indulgence crusades, among other complaints. Consequently, his influential friends arranged for Luther to take a “sabbatical” in a secret and isolated castle, Wartburg Castle at Eisenach, where he remained for about one year.

During this period of isolation necessitated by his fugitive status, Luther composed three works which provide us today with the theological nature of his break from Rome and the roots of what we would call today Protestantism in the historical sense. Many churchmen in future years would take Luther’s writings in different and much more radical directions than Luther intended; there is significant difference between Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Evangelical bodies today. But Luther’s writings provided justification for breaking free from Rome and new insights into the primacy of the Bible, the process of salvation, and ecclesiastical governance.

Eric Metaxas makes the point [p. 220] that Rome’s responses to his call for reform brought about something of an apocalyptic mood in Luther: none of the Church’s responses to his various concerns for reform mentioned a word of Scripture. For Luther, this was a very ominous sign that all power and all judgment in the Church was drawn from the raw human authority of the pope, and none from the Word of God. Taking this fear to its extreme, Luther saw a Church drifting from its lifeline, and thus the pressure for reform took on something of a lifesaving desperation. This outlook led him to pen To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation [1520]. As Wikipedia summarizes its contents, Luther “attacked what he regarded as the "three walls of the Romanists": (1) that secular authority has no jurisdiction over them; (2) that only the pope is able to explain Scripture; (3) that nobody but the Pope himself can call a general church council.

Put another way, the Letter to Christian Nobility of the German Nation is a call to the civic leaders of the region to assume responsibility for the reform of the Church. Metaxas and others refer to this letter as one of the most significant statements in Western Civilization, on a par with the Magna Carta, a paradigm shift in the ways that mankind thought of itself. Luther was introducing a type of equality within the Church, with laity enjoying the same rank as clergy by virtue of Baptism. Later reformers would take these concepts much further, for Luther’s Letter, for all its shock value, was not as radical as some make it out to be. In the first instance, Luther is not calling for a new church; he believed then—and to some degree for his entire life—that implied in Baptism is the reality of one family in a Scripture purified Church. As will subsequently be seen, Luther maintained hope for some years that the Roman Catholic Church, reformed in this manner, would remain the mother church of Christendom.

Second, Luther’s own conversion experience of some years past came directly through his reading of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans on justification by faith. Luther believed—correctly for his time—that the role of Scripture in the Church had been diminished to source texting for expansion of Church practices, at best, and in many cases, Scripture provided no support for such innovations as indulgences. Of particular concern was the gulf between the printed Word of Scripture and the judgments and operations of popes.

Luther was cutting new ground here, the idea that the bible was a living document piercing the heart of each believer and commanding an ultimate obedience in conscience. Our term “freedom of conscience” is not appropriate here, for Luther was not advocating a “do your own thing” in matters religious and moral. Rather, he argued that every baptized person was obedient to the Word of God and would be judged by this obedience, and not by what Luther saw as the human inventions of the Church. He believed that in the case of indulgences, for which he could find no Scriptural reference, the Church was wrong to extract belief in the practice.

Luther has been called “the disobedient monk” by his detractors, but in truth he advocated obedience to the Scriptures as the primary responsibility of a believer. It was his faith and allegiance to the Scripture that led him to put his life on the line when he rejected papal commands to recant his preaching and writing on the need for reform, beginning with the office of the papacy itself. In the 1500’s the idea that the formation of the New Testament collection was put together by the Church over four centuries after Christ was not known by Luther and his contemporaries. The sharp distinction he made between the Scripture and the Church would not stand up in the scholarship of most Christian denominations today, including Catholicism.

The Letter makes its case for civil or princely intervention in Church reform by undermining three “errors” identified by Luther in his present-day perception of the Church’s condition. [Specifically, he refers to the process as “breaking down three Roman walls.”] His first identified wall/error reads that “secular authority has no jurisdiction over them [the clerical state.]” Luther did not deny the need for priests and bishops, but he interpreted that need as a function, not as an elevated state. He goes further to argue that in religious matters all the baptized laity should have power of vote or input. In Luther’s theology Baptism is the primary sacrament of identity. By virtue of baptism the natural order of society—individually and collectively—has input on good Church order. Hence, the civil authority of princes has a vital and natural role to step in when internal Church abuse damaged the lives of the faithful.

The “second wall” is the contention that only the pope can explain Scripture. Luther’s attack upon this tenet reflects his belief that all believers have the right to study and find the directive word of God in their own circumstances. But Luther may also have had in mind the growing contention that some of the most cherished documents buttressing Roman authority and power, notably the Donation of Constantine, were found to be hoaxes. Possibly the most famous of these historical investigators was Lorenzo Valla [1407-1457], whose works were published, ironically, in 1517, the year that Luther came into prominence.

The third and final Roman wall is the contention that nobody but the Pope himself can call a general church council. By Luther’s day the papacy was very skittish about reform councils. It was a mere century earlier that the Council of Constance [1414-1418] had been summoned by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to depose three claimants to the papacy and end the Great Schism. This Council had mandated regular reform councils at specified periods in the future, but once a valid pope was restored to the Throne of Peter, he and his successors were able to achieve a good measure of previous power in governing exclusively.

Under civil and ecclesiastical pressure from France, Pope Julius II convoked the Council Lateran V [1512-1517], but its five-year run was marked by political jockeying between the major national powers of Europe and internal bickering and housekeeping. That this Council ended in the same year as Luther’s posting of his 95 Theses is evidence enough that Lateran V had done nothing of substance to address the concerns of many Catholics across Europe regarding a true spiritual reform of the Church in capite et membris, i.e., in head and members. Luther’s letter argues that kings and princes, exercising their baptismal priesthood, should step in and summon clerics to councils when popes fail to summon such meetings or do not push agendas of true reform.

Luther’s To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation is seen today as one of the first documents of the modern era to advocate what in practice is a break between church and state, though others would later make this more explicit. Luther, fixated on reform in this work, probably set in motion more radical thinking than he anticipated. And, separated from the world as he was in hiding from church agents, he could not gauge the impact—good and bad—of his text as thousands of copies were marketed throughout Europe. He would pen two more extraordinary letters in his seclusion, and when he began to speak openly on the German landscape after a year, he would discover reform and regrets.

Reformation 39: The Light Goes On

8/15/2019

After their much publicized meeting, Luther’s failure to make an oath of submission—and rejection of his call for reform and a council to address the indulgence question—left the papal representative Cardinal Cajetan with nothing to present to Pope Leo X in terms of quelling Luther’s writings and speaking, which thanks to the printing press, were available and often well received by readers across Western European society. The next inevitable step would be a papal pronouncement of excommunication. Upon its declaration, Luther would become subject to arrest, deportation to Rome, imprisonment, probably torture, and summary excommunication by fire.

From his own writings it seems clear that by the time of the meeting with Cardinal Cajetan in Augsburg in 1518, Luther had come to peace with the possibility that his calls for reform might very well lead to his martyrdom. But by the end of the Augsburg meeting, Luther was no longer a “voice crying in the wilderness.” Throughout Germany and much of Europe, thanks to the printing press, Luther had admirers as well as enemies. Some of these were German princes chafing under the taxes of the Holy Roman Empire. Others genuinely worried for the Church and appreciated the reform spirit of the Augustinian monk. At some stage along the way Luther’s pastoral instincts came into play: his mission was not simply to save his own soul, even with a glorious martyrdom. He was now responsible for an outline of a purified Church.

The encounter with Cajetan jarred Luther in the sense that he came to see more clearly the heart of we call today “the Reformation.” In the heat of debate with Cajetan, the Cardinal cited several papal pronouncements on indulgences from centuries past. He banked on Luther’s lack of historical familiarity with previous papal documents on the subject. [Looking back, Cajetan’s was an odd strategy given that indulgences had been the issue that roused Luther in the first place.] Luther knew the passages quite well, in fact, and used counterarguments to fluster Cajetan to the degree that the latter became quite flustered and to object of amusement to the audience.

With Luther piling up debate points, Cajetan resorted to consistent demands that Luther recant and submit to the pope, regardless of what Scripture did or didn’t say. As Eric Metaxas records, “And yet in all of this, Luther’s greatest fears were realized. He saw that the cardinal cared not a fig for the Holy Scriptures, and quite seriously maintained that church decrees superseded them…that the greatest minds of the church were genuinely unaware of having become unmoored from the rock of the Scriptures and were even indifferent to this.” [p. 150] Luther, of course, had found in the words of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans the understanding of justification and a new hope he would be saved; he could not understand how the Church would deny the saving words of the Bible in favor of erroneous teachings of churchmen, even the pope.

From our vantage point, we can see the errors of both sides of the question. Luther did not appreciate the origins of sacred scripture, how sacred books were written by members of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and how the Church fathers selected which books embodied the full message of salvation, a gradual process that lasted at least till 300 A.D. This selection process produced a canon or collection we know today as the New Testament. [For a deeper study of how the New Testament came to be written and determined, F.F. Bruce’s venerable 1990 book, The Canon of Scripture, is still a valuable source.] Four centuries of research stand between Luther’s era and today; he would not have had access to the research detailing the development of the Gospels, Epistles, etc. While it is true that God is the author of sacred scripture, it is the Spirit working in the Church that makes our bibles what they are today, the “words of life.”

The New Testament lays the groundwork for a “petrine ministry,” a position of leadership we attribute today to the pope. However, it is very reasonable to expect that (1) anyone holding the office preaches the Scriptures and the wisdom of the Church in interpreting the sacred Word, and (2) exercises his office with vigilance for reform in capite et membris, i.e., in head and members. The bane of many popes in the medieval and Renaissance era was hubris and worldliness. Luther would have been correct in his assertion that the pope cannot govern exclusive of the Bible, since the petrine ministry is derived from the Bible, i.e., the Holy Spirit through the Church. In 1518 Luther’s advocacy of the Bible created a conundrum of bible vs. papacy.

Several of Luther’s “guardians” realized his need for protection, even if Luther was a bit naïve of the full danger. Even in his home region, he was vulnerable to seizure by papal agents; the separation of church and state was a long time in the future, and the German states were members of the Holy Roman Empire. Moreover, those who harbored him or gave him comfort could become liable to a charge of heresy themselves. It is even more remarkable, then, that Luther’s Augustinian Superior released him from his vow of obedience so that Rome could not order the superior to silence him. Luther could continue to preach, write, and present his case as events unfolded.

Finally realizing his danger, Luther decided to leave Augsburg and return to his home turf, Wittenberg. On October 20, 1518, he fled the city, though all the gates of the town were locked, presumably to keep Luther within arm’s reach for arrest. It is unclear precisely how he escaped, but a horse and guide were ready for him on the other side of the wall. Luther rode 44 miles that night, and 45 the next, and he soon reached Wittenberg safely, though he would be saddle sore for days after. Luther had left none too soon. Cardinal Cajetan wrote to the Elector Frederick, Luther’s strongest civil protector, demanding that Luther be turned over to Rome.

Metaxas observes that Frederick’s protection of Luther is hard to fathom, given that the Elector was a well-known trafficker in relics and indulgences. The best guess is that his university theologians, supporters of Luther, encouraged Frederick to protect him. But Luther was wise enough to know that his continuing public presence in Wittenberg was creating problems for Frederick, and that he would need to go into hiding, to protect himself and more importantly, to write the foundational texts for a reform of Western Christendom.

Reformation 38: The Heart of the Question

7/25/2019

We left off at the last Reformation post [37] in 1518 with Luther’s long-awaited meeting with an official papal representative, Cardinal Cajetan, one of the major theologians of the day. The meeting in Augsburg, Germany [a home court advantage for Luther negotiated by his protector Frederick the Wise of Saxony] was not simply an unsatisfactory standoff, but it illustrated for anyone with eyes to see that the two men, Luther and Cajetan, held to major differences in the area of ecclesiology [the theology of Church purpose and structure.] For Cajetan, the issues were less Luther’s thinking and writing, and more about the monk’s simple refusal to reject his writing and renew his obedience to the pope.

Luther would not give Cajetan the satisfaction, a point that would cause the Cardinal much frustration and embarrassment when he returned to Rome. [“You only had one job….”] Specifically, Cajetan sought an admission from Luther that the pope’s authority was the last word on indulgences, and thus Luther must stop demanding academic and theological examination of the practice. The Cardinal laid out several papal directives composed throughout the medieval era defending the practice of indulgences. Luther countered that these documents depended solely on the authority of the popes, without the ultimate authority of the bible. Cajetan retorted that the pope enjoyed ultimate authority, even in matters of biblical interpretation.

Luther was astounded by this line of argument. As a theologian, he was quick to see that if all serious matters of faith and practice were circumscribed by the pope acting independently, what was the point of Church universities and academies, the very places Luther wished to take the indulgence question for study and debate? But Cajetan’s position raised two more significant points—one might call them the heart of the Reformation. First, from the Cardinal’s argument, what is implied about the role of the Bible itself as an authoritative source in Catholic life? Was the Bible simply a source for cherry picking isolated statements to support ecclesiastical disputes of the day? Or was the Bible to be understood as in the words of Hebrews 12:4, “For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”?

The second of Luther’s takeaways from his encounter with Cajetan was the latter’s seeming denial of human participation in Church governance. Cajetan’s demand called for Luther to pledge obedience to the pope, and only the pope. Luther countered that the Church lived as an organism of leaders and faithful. He did not deny a papal or Petrine ministry, but again his mastery of the Scripture included the history of the early Church as recorded in St. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles and the letters of St. Paul, in which Paul, according to Galatians 11ff, met Cephas [i.e., Peter] and “withstood him to his face” for Peter’s indecisiveness over the matter of accepting Gentiles into the Church of Christ.

Let us take the long view of what was happening at this critical junction in history. Luther’s own history reveals a man of religious neurosis who found salvation in the pages of sacred scripture. His personal encounters with the Bible proved to be the guiding direction of his life. He assumed, then, that the reading of the Bible was both the privilege and the obligation of all the baptized. Put another way, he came to appreciate what we might call individual spirituality, with an attendant freedom of conscience. The issue of freedom of conscience and the lawful demands of Church authority were not resolved in Luther’s day, and Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, “Declaration on Religious Freedom,” would bring the issue to contemporary consideration in 1965.

On the other side of the ledger was the pressure upon the Church from inside and outside sources—good and bad—to provide leadership in the Western Roman Church when events began spinning out of control. A century before Luther, the Council of Constance deposed three men claiming to be rightful popes at the same time and legislated that in the future a pope was obligated to call a reform council every five to ten years. For a time, the world’s bishops were, hypothetically at least, equal to if not superior to a sitting pope. Geographic impracticality as much as anything restored the supreme influence back to the papacy. But consequently, future popes were loath to convoke reform councils, such that there was no concentrated effort to address critical issues arising in the late Medieval and Renaissance period.

Luther was not the first nor the only academic to address the need for reform. He was, however, among the first to profit from new technology, notably the printing press; from a growing sense of regional patriotism and a resentment of outside imposition of taxes; from a growth of spiritual communities made up of individuals who cultivated intense personal experiences of meditation, independent of the larger Church structure. The famous religious classic The Imitation of Christ developed in this milieu, known today as the Devotio Moderna.

By the end of the unproductive meeting of Luther and Cajetan, it became clear to all involved that a serious and dangerous feud was developing. Again, Luther profited from his timing; his religious order, his university, his countrymen, and his protector Frederick saved him from being seized by Cajetan’s soldiers and dispatched to Rome for trial and burning. Perhaps feeling invulnerable to threat, Luther engaged in another public debate, this time with a fellow German scholar, Johann Eck, who proved to be a much better opponent than Cajetan [Eck spoke German, for starters.] Eck put the question to Luther, is the papacy of divine or human origin? Eck was able to position Luther’s answers with those of previous heretics, notably Jan Hus, who had been burned at the stake at the above-mentioned Council of Constance.

Luther now understood his precarious situation. As Carlos M.N. Eire writes in Reformations, “Luther was aware that in the eyes of the church he kept attacking, he had become a rebel and a heretic.” Again, from Eire, “Everyone now prepared for the inevitable bull of excommunication from Pope Leo X, the flames, and the stench of Luther’s roasting flesh.” [p. 157]

The Reformation 37: Luther Meets Rome; It Does Not Go Well.

6/27/2019

A year after Luther’s inaugural statement of theological grievances in 1517, he was finally summoned to Rome to recant his errors. This would not be the academic colloquium that Luther had demanded in his 95 theses, but rather, something akin to an ecclesiastical trial. His failure to recant before Pope Leo X or his representative could very well cost him his life. A century earlier, the Czech reformer Jan Hus was granted a safe-conduct protection to expound his theology before the Council of Constance, but the pledge was not honored, and Hus was imprisoned, tried, and burned at the stake during the Council in 1415.

But Luther was more fortunate in that he enjoyed the protection of Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony, who put forward a somewhat safer scenario for Luther’s major encounter with Rome. In the fall of 1518, a general meeting [or “diet”] of the Holy Roman Empire was scheduled to take place in Augsburg, a German city in Bavaria. It was well known that one of the most powerful Cardinals in Rome, Thomas Cajetan, would address the assembly, most urgently on matters of financial support for wars against the Turks in eastern Europe. Frederick reasoned that Luther’s personal safety would be best assured in German lands where Cajetan, so to speak, would prosecute away from his home field. Luther’s confrontation would take place under the protection of his friends.

It is remarkable that this plan was approved by all parties, some with more reluctance than others. The Emperor Maximilian regarded Luther a trouble-making heretic, but he, like the many German princes, believed that holding the trial in Augsburg was a way of asserting power against the Italians. Resentment against Roman taxes is an undercurrent of the Reformation that should not be overlooked. Frederick the Wise shared the tax resentment, but he also seemed to have some affinity for Luther the person and protected him to the degree his was able.

The Diet of Augsburg did not go well for Cardinal Cajetan, whose ecclesiastical hubris may have blinded him to the problems he would face on German soil. The Diet itself addressed the “Turkish tax” issue, with German unanimity that no funds would be forthcoming. Moreover, the full extent of German animus poured forth; one representative protested how “German money in violation of nature flies over the Alps.” The Diet used the opportunity to complain about the poor quality of priests being sent to Germany, and the meeting ended with the Diet pleading “Let the Holy Pope stop these abuses.” [Metaxas, 143]

Having failed miserably at his first task, Cajetan then turned his attention to Luther. It is my conjecture that, having seen the depths of German resentment toward Vatican practices, Cajetan saw greater urgency in bringing Luther to his knees in submission. Frederick arranged for a private meeting between Luther and Cajetan, but he worried that Cajetan might have Luther kidnapped and spirited in chains to Rome. When Luther arrived in Augsburg, he was not invited to see Cajetan immediately, but met instead with Vatican officials who labored to convince him of the importance of his recanting his arguments from the 95 Theses. Luther, who had longed for the opportunity to bring his reforms to Church life, made it clear that having arrived before the highest authorities of the Church, he was not going away until his arguments had been addressed.

Luther’s ire was raised by his treatment from the Cardinal’s representatives, and he was more determined than ever to face off with Cajetan. He was angered that Cajetan’s entourage boiled down the conflict to what they considered a sole issue: disobedience to the pope, Leo X. Luther’s theses, by contrast, were a comprehensive treatment of multiple subjects on the matter of forgiveness, indulgences, religious disposition, and the pure intentions of the Bishop of Rome. He was further annoyed at thinly veiled personal threats, such as his potential loss of the protection provided by Frederick. If anything, his pre-Cajetan briefings had solidified his determination to have it out here and now; he was, at this point in his life, ready to die on principle.

Finally, on October 12, 1518, the two men met face to face for the first time. Luther could not know that Cajetan carried no portfolio from Leo to debate Luther’s theses; his one task was obtaining a recant from the Augustinian monk. Cajetan attempted to treat Luther as a wayward son whose mischief was causing more trouble than he realized. But as Luther pressed for specific examples of his errors, Cajetan went beyond his mandate and highlighted this one, that Luther denied the pope’s right to access the merits of Christ and the saints and utilize them for the sale of indulgences. Luther replied, and in doing so he shone the light on the issue probably most to the heart of the Reformation, the power of Sacred Scripture.

Luther agreed with Cajetan’s formulation, but then he asked the Cardinal where in the Bible were these privileges of the pope to be found in the first place. [Thus, the central question was posed: what is the ultimate authority by which all earthly religious matters are to be judged.] Luther believed in the collective holiness of the Church, but he could not countenance what the Church was doing with indulgences. Cajetan from the start had badly underestimated Luther’s academic acumen, and with no intention of conducting a long debate, he sprung a surprise on his opponent by producing an obscure 1343 papal bull from Clement VI, an authorization for the practice of indulgences to which Luther objected. He waved it about with repeated cries of “Do you believe this or don’t you?” Cajetan was certain he had thrown his knockout punch.

Unfortunately for Cajetan, Luther was familiar with the 1343 document, probably more so than the Cardinal. More to the point, Luther was growing conscious of the influence and direction of his arguments for the future of the Church. He would not give Cajetan a yes-or-no answer, but instead he asked for time to consider a nuanced response. This was not the response Cajetan had hoped for. His mandate from Rome called for the eliciting a yes-or-no on the question of obedience to the pope. Frustrated, the Cardinal waited for several days until Luther resumed their meeting. In this second encounter, Luther pointed out that the 1347 papal bull did not say what the Cardinal claimed it did. Luther later wrote that “Cajetan was all of a sudden confused, and since he did not want to appear confused, he pushed on to other things and shrewdly wanted to bypass this subject.”

But as they continued, Luther came to a shocking realization. Metaxas records it this way: “And yet in all of this, Luther’s greatest fears were realized. He saw that the Cardinal cared not a fig for the Holy Scriptures, and quite seriously maintained that church decrees superseded them. The theological foolishness of this, and the disturbing evidence of it, were horrifying to Luther. He saw now what he had deep down feared but desperately hoped could not be true: that the greatest minds of the church were genuinely unaware of having become unmoored from the rock of the Scriptures and were even indifferent to this.” [p. 150]

Cajetan’s second point of contention with Luther in this meeting was Luther’s contention that it was one’s faith that produced God’s forgiveness. Luther had begun his reform with the idea that forgiveness and redemption could not be purchased; now he was progressing to more radical examination of the redemptive process within the sacrament of Penance. The Church taught, and still teaches, that forgiveness is rendered by the mediating absolution of the priest. Luther contended “it was the faith that mattered more than the priest’s actions,” [p. 151], basing his argument on Romans 1:17.

If Caesar had crossed the Rubicon, Luther was now crossing the Tiber…in the opposite direction.

The Reformation 36: Luther's Friends and Enemies

5/30/2019

Thanks to wholesale and generally unauthorized publication of Luther’s 95 theses of 1517—which, thanks to the printing press, had reached as far as the attention of Henry VIII in England and Erasmus of Rotterdam within a year—the authorities in Rome became aware of its “German problem” and began to generate a response. The actual date remains unknown. Technically speaking, the Curia was formally notified of Luther’s writings by his local bishop, Albrecht of Mainz, who sought papal advice when his own university advisors stepped back from the controversial issues in play. But it is very likely that Johannes Tetzel, the Dominican whose indulgence crusade had stirred the ire of Luther in the first place, was reporting circumstances to Rome in a fashion certainly unfavorable to Luther. Tetzel, in fact, had already published his own retort to Luther, arguing that his foe was simply a disobedient cleric.

Rome, eventually apprised, took the simple position that Luther must recant his theses, and assigned the response to a Dominican curial official, Sylvester Prierias. His response, which he bragged he had written in three days, is an excellent template of the most unfortunate miscommunication that would mark all of Luther’s subsequent dealings with Rome. Prierias did not address any of Luther’s theological concerns but focused instead upon the simple question of obedience. The Dominican wrote “He who does not accept the Doctrine of the Church of Rome and pontiff of Rome, as an infallible rule of faith, from which the Holy Scriptures, too, draw their strength and authority, is a heretic.” (Metaxas, pp. 133ff)

Over three centuries later the council Vatican I (1869-1870) would define the precise workings of papal authority and declare the pope infallible in certain prescribed circumstances. Theologians of the twentieth century would judge Prierias’ working definition of papal authority as “creeping infallibility” or the tendency to regard everything spoken by the pope to be infallible. (The “creeping infallibility” debate evidently continues to this day.) Luther never denied the power of the pope, and early in the Reformation he hoped that the pope himself would hear his case. The Vatican, time and again, would avoid direct discussion of the issues of reform and identify Luther as a disobedient son who needed to bring his thinking into conformity with the office of the papacy.

Prierias dashed off his rebuttal to Luther with a summons to appear in Rome in 60 days. Luther found Prierias’ arguments [or better, argument, since obedience seemed to be the only agenda] dumbfounding, almost humorous. He eventually responded to his Dominican opponent, and in doing so, he introduced Scripture into his defense for the first time. “Like an insidious devil you pervert the Scriptures. You say that the Church consists virtually in the pope.” [p. 134] It is easy to look back with the hindsight of history and postulate that history might have evolved differently had a more civil and academic approach been taken by Rome, for in 1518 this was exactly what Luther wanted to do, plead his case before the pope and his academics.

Had this controversy occurred two centuries earlier {John Wycliffe) or even one century earlier (Jan Hus), the matter would have been relatively easily solved—Rome would instruct the civil ruler of the place to seize a suspected heretic and deliver him or her to appropriate trial and possible imprisonment or death. But the playing field in 1518 was more complex; Luther concluded his hard correspondence with Prierias with a not-so-subtle reminder: “You make the pope into an emperor in power and violence. The Emperor Maximilian and the Germans will not tolerate this.” [p. 134]

Luther, to his good fortune, enjoyed a reasonably good relationship with the most powerful civil ruler in his region, the elector Frederick III of Saxony (1463-1525), known as “Frederick the Wise.” Luther’s story cannot be told without Frederick, who respected Luther as a scholar. It is ironic that Frederick agreed with Luther’s position on indulgences; the elector possessed a large collection of relics (thousands, according to various sources) for which he charged visitors and tourists fees for access, and he believed that the indulgence crusades were cutting into his profit margins.

The papal court, in its dealings with Luther, was careful to tread lightly with Frederick, who with other princes in German lands was growing fatigued of papal taxes, particularly a levy to raise an army to halt the advance of the Turks in Eastern Europe. Moreover, Frederick held a vote in an upcoming congress to elect a new emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, an election with vital papal interests, and there was concern in Rome to curry favor with Frederick for his vote. Frederick himself, in his dealings with Luther and Rome, seems to have understood his dilemma (as well as the reasons his university advisors had shied away from going on record, one way or the other.)

Under demand to appear in Rome, Luther feared that he would not get a fair hearing, and more to the point that he might be arrested and burned at the stake. On the other hand, he welcomed the opportunity to put forward his belief in the act of dive justification, the preeminence of Scripture, and the need for reform. Metaxas believes that at this juncture of his life Luther came to grips with the idea that he might become a martyr for his reform mission and made spiritual peace in trusting God, ready to accept whatever fate lie ahead in God’s providence.

In August 1518 Frederick decided to keep Luther safe in Saxony and successfully lobbied the Emperor Maximilian to cancel the order for Luther to appear in Rome. Luther would be judged in his homeland. Maximilian was not enamored with Luther, but he was favorable to the request on the grounds that it was advisable to remind Italians that there were limits on their power. As it happened, a regional meeting (or “diet”) was scheduled for September 1518 at Augsburg. Cardinal Cajetan would be participating as Vatican representative, and the Emperor Maximilian (no less opposed to Luther) determined that the Augsburg gathering would be an ideal time for Luther to face the Vatican directly for assessment and judgment. He ordered that Luther attend the Diet of Augsburg and address the full force of Church authority for the first time.

The Reformation 35: Luther Goes Viral

4/4/2019

Despite contemporary popular belief to the contrary, Martin Luther was not “spoiling for a fight” when in 1517 he sent his 95 theses to his bishop, Albrecht of Mainz. He was requesting an orderly discussion of many Church practices, notably the sale of indulgences. Albrecht was not pleased to receive the correspondence; as noted in the last post, he himself was compromised by debt which he hoped to repay with a portion of the profits. However, he sympathized with certain of Luther’s points, even more surprising since Albrecht had purchased the bishop’s chair in Mainz, a sin known as simony. While Luther was well informed of the indulgence abuses, it is not clear if he knew that Albrecht had indulged in a purchase of his office.

While Luther’s passions were driven by concerns for the universal Church, discussion of them began as a local attempt. It took Albrecht some time to respond, primarily because of his conflicted feelings. Luther at the time was a popular and gifted Scripture scholar, head of theological studies at the University of Wittenberg and the vicar general of eleven monasteries in the region. The bishop could hardly ignore the public work and influence of this Augustinian monk, but for conflicting reasons he was confused about how to proceed, and he passed the letter and theses to the theology faculty of the University of Mainz, which also deliberated for quite some time. It would be June of 1518 before true organized discussion took place, and by this time passions had been inflamed such that “debate” suffered at the hands of polemic.

[The actual 95 theses conflicted just about everyone who read them. If you have never read them yourself, here is the list of propositions, and ask yourself how you would have responded if you were a catechist or church officer at that time.]

In the year following the October 1517 local release, Luther corresponded with friends, passing along copies of the theses. One of its readers, a Humanist and printer Christopher Scheurl, was impressed and set about to reprint the theses in for bulk distribution “without the fussy legality of needing to obtain copyright permissions.” [Metaxas, p. 123f] Translated from Latin into German, more printers in Germany produced volumes that eventually spread to diverse readers and populations throughout Europe. The invention of the printing press less than a century before had made possible a sixteenth century version of “going viral.” From our own time, we know that social media reaches friend, foe, and the indifferent alike. Luther would write to Scheurl later stating that the printer’s taking of matters in his own hand had put Luther at a disadvantage, as the theological issues of the theses had outraced Luther’s opportunity to define them or develop them further.

By March 1518, Erasmus of Rotterdam, one of the greatest of the Renaissance thinkers, had come to possess a copy. Another made its way to [St.] Thomas More, future Chancellor of England at the service of Henry VIII prior to England’s break from Rome. Henry himself read the theses and was angered and disturbed; in 1521 the king was awarded the title “Defender of the Faith” for his writings against Luther. Closer to home, a copy made its way to Johannes Tetzel, the Dominican friar and promoter of the sale of indulgences that had so enraged Luther in the first place. Predictably, Tetzel was enraged. His work was not progressing well. As he and Bishop Albrecht were discovering to their chagrin, the cities of Mainz and Wittenberg had been “played out” by a series of indulgence sales prior to Tetzel’s. In truth, there was a growing popular cynicism in Luther’s region to the degree that the elector Frederick of Saxony refused to permit Tetzel to engage his region for fear of troubling his citizenry.

But Tetzel discovered another indicator of trouble with the threat of more serious upset of the Church. Observing how Luther’s theses had been promulgated by printed pamphlets, Tetzel decided to fight fire with fire with a rebuttal pamphlet of his own. When he sought printers to contract for the work in Luther’s town of Wittenberg, none would take the offer, an indication that Luther enjoyed the support of the printers’ guild—in fact, university students there burned 800 copies of Tetzel’s work printed elsewhere in a city square public bonfire. Luther correctly ascertained that the act would be blamed upon him; in truth, he was quite unprepared—academically and personally—for what was shaping up as a major confrontation with the Church.

Meanwhile, Luther’s bishop Albrecht finally received a report on the theses from the faculty of the University of Mainz, which by now had come to realize what a hot potato it was asked to evaluate. With more than an abundance of caution, the faculty stated that the Wittenberg University faculty was within its rights to discuss and debate the matters of the 95 theses. But as to the questions raised by the theses, it was best to let the pope decide. Albrecht, upon their advice, wrote to Rome [and no doubt Tetzel communicated as well]. The mind and apparatus of the papacy would now begin serious involvement in what we refer to today as the Reformation.

The Reformation Page 34: "Lock Him Up!"

2/14/2019

Back in a November post on this stream I summarized Luther’s radical insights into the nature of Scripture, conscience and the Church, an enlightenment focused in time with his famous posting of 95 theses or contentions in 1517. The language of his contentions—provoked by the selling of indulgences as “guarantees of salvation” was brusque, notably thesis 86, “Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than with the money of poor believers?” And, his theological views were radical in multiple senses. Not only did he question absolute Church authority, as in the matter of indulgences, but he placed ultimate determination of salvation in the disposition of the heart, above the claims of canonical jurisprudence. As Eric Metaxas [see home page] puts it well, for Luther “the Christian faith was an affair of the heart and the whole person.” [p. 78] So it is not a ridiculous question to ask why the Church did not “lock him up?”

For all of that, Luther set forth his ideas as matters for academic and ecclesiastical debate, not marching orders to rebel bands. He was not the first to call for radical renewal; the famous monk Hildebrand—later to become Pope [St.] Gregory VII, led a wholesale reform against church ills, including clerical concubinage, in the eleventh century. Around 1200 Francis of Assisi experienced a vision from God in which he is told “Go, Francis, and repair my house which, as you see, is well-nigh in ruins.” Francis’ movement of reform, based upon his rule drawn from the evangelical counsels of Jesus, was never threatened by Rome because Francis cultivated close relationships with cardinals and popes, including the mighty Innocent III.

Even in his own day there were other Catholic thinkers who agreed with the general ideas of Luther’s writing and preaching. Probably the most noted of these was the Dutch humanist theologian Desiderius Erasmus [1469-1536]. Erasmus may have been best mind produced by the humanist Renaissance. His scholarship in Church history, particularly the Patristic era or the age of the early Church Fathers, convinced him that Church reform rested upon a return to its ancient wisdom, practice, and spirituality [a method today called Ressourcement, employed by the fathers of Vatican II.] Erasmus was also an unequalled philologer and translator; he discovered errors in the 1100-year-old Latin Vulgate Bible then in use, which Luther would have found very useful as a biblical scholar. Erasmus saw himself in later years as a unifier in the growing divisions of Protestant and Roman Catholic adherents, a position which brought suspicion upon him from both sides, though he always professed loyalty to the Catholic Church and died in the Church.

What Luther was calling for was a local academic and community discussion of the issues raised by the sale of indulgences in his region, a discussion we might compare to “peer evaluation.” Universities throughout Europe were Catholic to varying degrees of intensity, and the places where such discussions were normally conducted. Nor would it be unusual to invite the local bishop and even the local prince of the region. The famous Halloween posting on the cathedral door in Wittenberg is a later embellishment of Luther’s presentation of the 95 theses to Bishop Albrecht of Mainz, who had authorized the sale of indulgences in Luther’s region in the first place. Luther explained to the archbishop that the trafficking in indulgences was causing scandal to the faithful, and that Albrecht had the influence to protect the faithful.

As Metaxas observes, “…what Luther had no idea about when he wrote and sent this letter—and what his correspondent [Albrecht] had no idea about either—was that Luther had now put his finger on an issue that was but the uppermost excrescence of something else, something that was at least enormous, something with a root system so very deep and exceedingly vast that it stretched to the nethermost blind crevasses of hell itself.” [p. 110] That Luther’s theses would divide all of Christendom was something no one could see in 1517, and certainly not an outcome Luther would have joyfully longed for.

Albrecht, unfortunately, had ugly secrets far beyond the indulgence scandal that touched upon the legitimacy of Church governance and authority itself. Albrecht, a very ambitious churchman, much desired the see of Mainz, and after considerable wrangling, Pope Leo offered the title to Albrecht for a price, 23,000 ducats, a “staggering sum” per Metaxas. [For an overview of Pope Leo in this affair, see the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Leo X, particularly the “Conflict with Luther” section.] Albrecht had no significant funds at this time, and thus turned to the wealthy bank, The House of Fugger, for a massive loan request with virtually no collateral. It was Pope Leo himself who provided a solution: Albrecht would authorize an aggressive campaign of the sale of indulgences in his own region, of which he would retain 50% of the proceeds to repay the House of Fugger.

Luther, ironically, was taking on greater corruption than he knew. He was incensed that Catholic faithful were being charged for a guarantee of salvation that only God could grant. But worse, and unknown to Luther and the purchasers, 50% of their offering was being siphoned off to pay for the political ambitions of their own episcopal shepherd.

One would think that, all things considered, Luther would have been at the very least silenced, or arrested and delivered to the Inquisition. But this did not happen because the governing prince [elector] of Saxony, Frederick, interjected his own agenda and in the process prolonged and gave wider exposure to Luther’s concerns. Luther would not suffer the fate of reformers before him such as Jan Huss and John Wycliffe, for he would have civil protection.

The Reformation Page 33: What Would Luther Say About The Abuse Crisis?

1/3/2019

Sad as it is to admit, there are probably a fair number of Catholics in the United States who have come to realize in recent years that the sacraments celebrated in their parishes or communities were presided over by bishops and priests who were later discovered to have molested children and minors. As the American bishops are in retreat this week to pray about the abuse scandal, it seemed appropriate to me that, since I have neglected the Reformation/Luther stream of posts for some time, I might reflect upon a major question that Luther addressed in the sixteenth century and that some Catholics, at least, may have pondered in the twenty-first century: does the faith of the presider affect the validity and effectiveness of the sacrament itself? This was a major concern of Lutheran theology in its sparring with Roman Catholic doctrine.

It was the November 8, 2018 post on this stream where I discussed Luther’s spiritual awakening: that the Word of God [Scriptural Revelation] was the provenance of every Christian conscience, that God’s active will to save extended to every man or woman of sincere and searching heart. This revelation of Luther’s comes forth from a Catholic age where “doing” could easily outrun “believing.” The sale of indulgences was offensive to Luther because of its optics as much as its questionable theology, with the appearance that salvation could be purchased in cash without the necessary change of heart. Moreover, the Augustinian reformer questioned whether the Church, as an institution, could “guarantee” salvation; for Luther, imposing middlemen and ritual between the direct revelation of God to the individual soul who opened his Bible and personally embraced the saving power of God.

Luther did not intend to destroy the Church but to return it to its pristine holiness in the Renaissance thinking of Ressourcement, i.e., a return to the ancient sources and practices of the early Church. For Luther the discoveries of ancient Church writings and particularly the new and much improved translations of the Bible gave him much to compare with the contemporary Church in which he lived. The sacraments of the Church itself were of significance. Luther did not believe that biblical justification existed for many of the Catholic sacraments; he identified only two, Baptism and Eucharist, as being directly commanded by Christ. Given his adamant belief on this subject, it is nearly impossible to imagine his remaining in the Roman Catholic Communion, but his theology of sacraments contains a powerful pastoral message worthy of consideration in the Catholic Church’s present moment of trial.

Luther, to put it directly, believed that all the works of religion—most notably the sacraments—must have an existential reality of experience of God. It is no accident that Luther, among his many achievements, composed a German hymnal of powerful songs which gathered up the full experience of the faithful. One of the most famous of his works is “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” There was a window in the 1960’s when the new Catholic English Mass hymnals borrowed very heavily from Lutherans. For whatever reason, the American experience of Catholic song was quickly drained of its Lutheran testosterone and has devolved into cruise ship lounge singing. But I digress…

Luther believed, too, that the reception of holy communion should likewise be experienced as a powerful encounter with Jesus Christ. For this reason, he promoted the reception of the Precious Blood for all the faithful, a cause which Catholicism embraced after Vatican II. It will be argued in some texts and catechetical sources that Luther denied Real Presence, or the reality of Christ in the bread and the wine. This is not exactly true. What Luther objected to was the medieval or scholastic use of the term “transubstantiation” to describe what happens at the consecration. Traditional Catholic belief to this day holds that at the words of consecration the reality of the bread is changed into Christ’s living presence while the “externals” such as taste and appearance remain the same. Luther preferred the term “consubstantiation” which implied that the bread itself did not change from bread, but rather that the living Christ was present to each believer in the receiving experience of bread and cup.

Another way to put this is that Luther shuddered at any Catholic ritual which looked like human magic, in this case saying words that made the bread something else. In the Latin Mass of Luther’s day, the phrasing for the consecration of the bread is rendered “Hoc est enim corpus meum” or “For this is my body….” It is worth noting that the magician’s phrase, “hocus pocus,” is a play on the Latin words of consecration, as well as a barb at the idea of sinful men working “magic” on altars for sizeable Mass stipends.

Luther believed very strongly that the Mass must be “authentic” in terms of faith and intention, and that the priest must believe in what he is doing and bring an authentic Biblical faith to worship. If Luther were alive today, he might surprise us by his reaction to our current difficulties as considerably less widespread compared to his day, because it is hard to imagine the state of clergy in the sixteenth century. It is no accident that in response to the Lutheran Reformation, Roman Catholicism—in the Council of Trent 1543-63-- mandated the existence of diocesan seminaries where future priests could be screened, educated, and spiritually formed.

If you Google “Luther and priesthood,” you will come upon long lists of entries entitled “Luther and the Priesthood of the Faithful,” a term which expresses a line of demarcation between Lutheran and Roman Catholic thought on the nature and meaning of priests. For Luther, the primordial ordination sacrament was baptism. In his day Luther despaired of the Western Catholic Church’s leadership and clergy to reform themselves from within, and in his later years he turned to German princes telling them that “they must now be the rulers of the spiritual realm, too.” [Metaxas, p. 186]

There is a curious parallel here between Luther’s assertion that clergy could not police themselves in the 1500’s and the call throughout the United States today that civil law enforcement and states’ attorneys are the only legitimate and trustworthy authorities to purge the priesthood of pedophiles. While there is a considerable argument for this position, based upon decades of frustration in the United States, it is also important to recall that Luther’s thinking also led the way to the extremes of John Calvin’s church-state where police patrolled the aisles and arrested anyone dozing off during the sermon.

If I can speak for Luther, I think he would remind us—correctly—that baptism does render us priests in the sense that every one of us is responsible for the holiness of the Church and the integrity of our leadership. One of my Catholic professors, looking back on the Reformation era, described it as the “democratization of the Dark Night of Soul.” That is, all the baptized entered the mysteries of the faith that had previously been the world of clerics and cloisters.

In that sense, the baptized Catholic needs to take a loving but critical eye toward oneself and the priests with whom we live and worship. In the United States, for example, honesty and transparency are often in short supply. I am happy to report that my home diocese received the honor of maximum score across the U.S. among all 187 dioceses for available public examination of finances. This enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat by the reality that nearly 50% of American dioceses reveal nothing of their finances publicly. Do Catholics in these dioceses simply pay, pray, and obey, and thus are they tacitly accepting the veil of secrecy behind which a good deal of mischief and ungodly deed may be taking place? Luther would lay this responsibility for reform on our heads as a responsibility of baptism.

The Reformation Page 32: Luther's Revelation

11/8/2018

For all of Luther’s personal and spiritual difficulties, the young Augustinian monk was nothing short of a prodigy in the discipline of the sacred sciences, and his Augustinian superior Johannes Staupitz exercised his authority to situate Luther in university placements where he might expand his scholarship and original thought. For two years (1513-1515) Luther lectured at the Wittenberg university about the Psalms, that part of sacred revelation most familiar to a monk, as monasteries prayed all 150 psalms in a perpetual cycle (as would anyone today who prays the full Liturgy of the Hours.)

In this timeframe Luther came to understand that, as Eric Metaxas puts it, “the only way to read the Word of God properly involved seeing beyond the mere words.” (p. 77) To approach the text without nuance, as some fundamental approaches tend to do, is to limit the power of Scripture to the level of any other written book. Again, Metaxas summarizes this well: “Therefore, one must not merely see what the devil could see, which is to say the words on a page, but see what only God could see and would reveal to those who desired it, which was in the words and around them, too.”

Clearly Luther is drawing from his own experience, one that is common even today to any priest or religious bound to the daily recitation of the Hours. As a monk Luther had already recited or sung the Psalms in common with his monastic brothers for some years, but this recitation was obviously bringing him no religious peace of mind, most likely because the common prayer was a duty of monks and approached in routine fashion. As a duty, the recitation of the 150 Psalms that composed the Hours was viewed as an obligation to God, but no one expected to experience God or undergo anything resembling a profound religious experience except, perhaps, over the long run of a lifetime of fidelity. When I was in training and taking up the common praying of the Hours [or praying the “breviary” as it was called then], my superior told a story—most likely apocryphal—about a community of friars reciting the psalms in San Francisco when the great earthquake struck. The local superior supposedly halted the recitation and emotionally ordered the friars to start praying.]

Luther was putting forward the reality of a dynamic encounter with the written Word of God. His principle here is the power of every Scriptural encounter. The Bible was given to be experienced, not used. He came to regard the thoughtless routine of monastic recitation, for example, as blasphemous in the sense that constant repetition without a profound encounter of the divine would, over time, harden the heart against any future possibilities of being touched by God. He cited how the devil had quoted Scripture flawlessly for his nefarious purposes and he placed much greater emphasis upon the reader of sacred texts to approach the Bible with purity of heart and, equally important, the hope and expectation of being filled with God’s life.

Luther had history at his back. The medieval Church was not biblically oriented. In fact, history books will make the argument that most Christians were not aware that there was such a thing as the Bible at this juncture, at least until the invention of printing in the 1400’s when a peasant coming through town might actually see one, in the imperfect Latin translation of St. Jerome from 400 A.D. In the early thirteenth century, when Francis of Assisi wished to model his young community after the Gospel, he selected at random texts from the local church’s altar missal, which was as close to the Bible as anyone of that time could come.

Luther, in his reflections on the Psalms, was unconsciously pursuing the same route as Francis three centuries earlier, another tortured soul looking for an intense experience of God in a time when the Church was underperforming and in need of renewal. Curiously, Francis’s conversion involved mystical experience, direct inspiration from God, [“Rebuild my House”] that in turn made the Gospel understandable in its command to give up all riches and “come follow me.” The most powerful stirrings of faith and renewal in medieval times came through the experiences of mystics and the communities they inspired.

Luther’s true conversion moment came in his study and his class notes. Less dramatic than Francis’s, perhaps, but no less real and essential: salvation would come through a living encounter with the Word of God. It is hard to imagine how much hope Luther’s future preaching and writing would bring to a broad swath of Europe. I have posted on this stream at several points that Catholicism in 1500 was divided between those who despaired that any good works could save them, those who sought salvation by any means including monetary, and a growing class of cynics who turned to pagan classics and philosophers as more reliable source of discussion and speculation.

Luther would say that there is no chaining of the Word of God. He had rediscovered the depth and meaning of Hebrews 4:12, the famous “two-edged sword” biblical analogy. A struggling believer would hear three reasons for newfound optimism: (1) There is no limit to the forgiving power of God’s Word; anyone of pure intention who approached the Word in humility would be justified or saved by faith; (2) The heart of the salvation process rested in conscience, the good intention to live as guided by constant communion with the Word of God, and (3) there was now a clear roadmap for Church reform, conformity of practice to God’s living word.

I have simplified the Lutheran reformation here, and much discourse, contention, and bloodshed would follow from the implications of Luther’s thought as will be chronicled in future blog posts. But I can make this very personal, too. I read the bulk of Eric Metaxas’s biography of Luther [see home page] during the breaking scandals in the American Catholic Church and the anguishing division in our country during this recently concluded election campaign. When the Tree of Life Synagogue massacre took place, I was stunned that my own Church mumbled along in routine worship like the monks at choir in Luther’s monastery. I have many moments where I ask myself, “What kind of a game are we playing here?”

I have to say that following Luther’s life story and reflecting on his work has brought me back to reflective sanity. I realized afresh that the Bible is alive, and God is present there to sustain me and give me hope. I believe it was the twentieth-century Trappist monk and mystic Thomas Merton who observed that for all of us there is the great temptation to go out into the woods and build a one-man chapel. I could never do that as a lifestyle because I cannot pretend to know the mind of God on my own. I remain a Catholic because in my formative years I had the good fortune to learn the Scripture from giants just as Luther’s students had five centuries ago.

But yes, I can still take up the Bible and hold it close to my heart, in times of joy and times of pain, in the knowledge that the Promise of Israel and the Coming of the Christ wrap me up in a world that never ends. And I can move on constructively.