Word: lutheran
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Ironically, re-examination of this central Protestant doctrine could some day lead to a gradual healing of the breach between Rome and Reformation. Dr. Johannes Witte of Rome's Gregorian University, one of two Roman Catholic observers at the assembly, argued that many modern Lutheran interpretations of justification, by stressing the life of faith rather than the initial encounter with God, are moving closer to Catholic doctrine. And Catholic scholars are quick to notice the similarities: in a 1957 book that rocked German theological circles, Father Hans Kiing of Tiibingen argued that Karl Earth's understanding of justification...
Today other Roman Catholic theologians are exploring anew the literature of the Reformation in an attempt to discover where disagreement may have been due to a misunderstanding of terms. So unpolemical is this exploration, reports Yale Theologian George Lindbeck, a Lutheran observer at the Vatican Council, that in Germany, "Lutherans feel right now that the Roman Catholic theologians are so enthusiastic about dissolving differences that they feel they must remind the Roman Catholics that some outstanding differences still remain...
Despite their quarrels over justification, the delegates at Helsinki had no trouble in picking a successor to Dr. Franklin Clark Fry as president of the Lutheran World Federation for the next six years. He is shy, solemn Dr. Fredrik Axel Schiotz, 62, president of the 2,300,000-member American Lutheran Church, which has its greatest strength among Midwesterners of Scandinavian and German origins...
Schiotz is a self-effacing pastor, and thus is one of the least-known important Lutherans in the country. Nevertheless, he has been a key man in much of the behind-the-scenes conciliation that makes ecumenicism work. In 1956 he led the old Evangelical Lutheran Church into the World Council of Churches. Next he played a major role in the negotiations that brought the Evangelical Lutherans into the A.L.C. The target now: intercommunion with Fry's Lutheran Church in America...
...Beware of false prophets," Jesus warned, and St. Paul urged the church at Ephesus to "mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them." For the 350,000 members of the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, these injunctions forbid taking part in the "false ecumenicism" of modern Christianity, and even sharing worship with other Lutherans who interpret differently the doctrines of the Reformation. Carrying out this belief, the Wisconsiners at their biennial convention in Milwaukee last week broke away from their oldest ally among the nation's conservative Lutheran churches...