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  • Historical Scholarship and Ecumenical Dialogue
  • Carter Lindberg
  • Journal: Horizons / Volume 44 / Issue 2 / December 2017
  • Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2017, pp. 420-424
  • Print publication: December 2017
  • View extract

    I am honored to participate in this theological roundtable on the five-hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. I do so as a lay Lutheran church historian. In spite of the editors’ “prompts,” the topic reminds me of that apocryphal final exam question: “Give a history of the universe with a couple of examples.” “What do we think are the possibilities for individual and ecclesial ecumenism between Protestants and Catholics? What are the possibilities for common prayer, shared worship, preaching the gospel, church union, and dialogue with those who are religiously unaffiliated? Why should we commemorate or celebrate this anniversary?” Each “prompt” warrants a few bookshelves of response. The “Protestant Reformation” itself is multivalent. The term “Protestant” derives from the 1529 Diet of Speyer where the evangelical estates responded to the imperial mandate to enforce the Edict of Worms outlawing them. Their response, Protestatio, “testified” or “witnessed to” (pro testari) the evangelical estates’ commitment to the gospel in the face of political coercion (see Acts 5:29). It was not a protest against the Roman Catholic Church and its doctrine. Unfortunately, “Protestant” quickly became a pejorative name and then facilitated an elastic “enemies list.” “Reformation,” traditionally associated with Luther's “Ninety-Five Theses” (1517, hence the five-hundredth anniversary), also encompasses many historical and theological interpretations. Perhaps the Roundtable title reflects the effort in From Conflict to Communion: Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017 (2013) to distinguish Luther's reformational concern from the long historical Reformation (Protestantism), so that this anniversary may be both “celebrated” and self-critically “commemorated.”

  • 10 - Luther’s struggle with social-ethical issues
  • from Part II - Luther’s work
  • Edited by Donald K. McKim, Memphis Theological Seminary
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Martin Luther
  • Published online: 28 May 2006
  • Print publication: 10 July 2003, pp 165-178
  • View extract

    Summary

    The crucial point to remember in discussing Luther's struggle with socialethical issues is that he understood himself to be a theologian and pastor not a sociologist or economist or politician. Indeed, Luther's ethics may be understood as pastoral care. For Luther, therefore, theology and ethics served the proclamation of the good news that salvation is received not achieved. Our justification before God “must be believed and cannot be obtained by any work, law, or merit.” In contrast to all pieties of achievement, then and now, Luther affirmed God's descent in Jesus to us rather than our striving to ascend to God. In opposition to the medieval renunciation of the world, epitomized by the image and metaphor of the ladder to heaven, Luther proclaimed that Christ could not be dragged too deeply into the flesh. Hence Luther criticized the religion of the Turks, Jews, and papists for prescribing “heavenward journeys on which the travelers will break their necks.”

    The subject of theology and ethics is not God in heaven, in his absolute majesty, the “naked God,” but rather God “clothed in HisWord and promises” for us.

    God says: “I do not choose to come to you in My majesty and in the company of angels but in the guise of a poor beggar asking for bread.” You may ask: “How do you know this?” Christ replies: “I have revealed to you in My Word what form I would assume and to whom you should give. You do not ascend into heaven, where I am seated at the right hand of My heavenly Father, to give Me something; no I come down to you in humility. I place flesh and blood before your door with the plea: ‘Give me a drink! . . . I do not need food in heaven. I have come all the way from Judea. Give me a drink!’ I have had it announced to all the world that whatever is done to the least of My brethren is done to me” (Matt. 25:40).

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