Word: luthers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Today, the vast majority of Catholic theologians concedes that Luther was a profound spiritual thinker who was driven into open revolt by the corruption of the Renaissance church and the intransigent stupidity of its Popes. Jesuit John Courtney Murray, for example, calls Luther "a religious genius-compassionate, rhetorical and full of insights...
Rudderless Ship. Several theologians, in fact, have quite soberly wondered aloud whether the situation of the church demands the shock of another Luther. Even as it gropes toward ecumenical union, Protestantism stands threatened by secular inroads and spiritual indifference. Ranking church leaders openly question the relevance of Christianity, while old denominational quarrels have been upstaged by a new threat of schism: crisis-centered activists who see the church's function as worldly service, against heaven-glancing traditionalists who argue that Christ's message was to save souls not nations...
...Reformation demands upon it, Roman Catholicism frequently seems like a ship that has lost its rudder in high seas: almost every week a priest defects and marries, a theologian challenges defined dogma, new evidence appears that laymen are putting aside authority-given moral guidance to take a stand, Luther-like, as conscience dictates...
Christian thoughts about a second Luther coincide with a remarkable surge of new interest in the first. Within the past 50 years, points out Theologian Pauck, there have been more books written about Luther than about any other Christian figure, including Jesus. According to Dean John Dillenberger of Berkeley's Graduate Theological Union, seminary students are showing a new interest in Luther's own writings, finding in them an existential kinship to that favored secular rebel with a cause, Albert Camus. During this anniversary year of the Reformation, there will be Luther-honoring services and seminars in Protestant...
Scorn Gone. The most remarkable aspect of the Luther renaissance is that it is enthusiastically endorsed by Roman Catholics, whose postconciliar hymnbooks are patently incomplete if they do not include his martial hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Less than a generation ago, Luther was scorned-even by Catholic scholars who should have known better-as a sensuous, psychotic, fallen monk, the deliberate destroyer of Christendom. Luther, wrote Jesuit Hartmann Grisar in his 1926 biography, suffered from "an extraordinary capacity for self-delusion...