The

Ecumenical Vanguard

The History of the

Una Sancta Movement

BY

LEONARD J. SWIDLER

Foreword

BY

HANS KÜNG

DUQUESNE UNIVERSITY PRESS, PITTSBURGH, PA.

Editions E. Nauwelaerts, Louvain

Berneuchner

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 66-15156

All rights reserved

© 1966 by Duquesne University

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my thanks to all those who helped make the production of this book possible. Some few, however, should be thanked by name. It was the Deutsche Akademische Austausch Dienst of the Western German Federal Republic that made the research possible by generously giving me two grants—in 1967 and 1968. Professor Heinrich Fries of the University of Munich initiated me into the whole study and guided me much of the way. Professor Hans Küng of the University of Tübingen reviewed the first part of the book and offered valuable criticism, and later generously consented to writing a foreword. Professor George Mosse of the University of Wisconsin read an earlier version of the entire manuscript and contributed many constructive criticisms. To all these I wish to express my deep appreciation.

Often authors have been helped in their scholarly efforts by their wives; none could have been assisted more capably and selflessly than I was by my wife Arlene.

Duquesne University

Leonard Swidler

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD by Hans Küng .....

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER

ONE

THE CHANGE IN PROTESTANT THEOLOGY     

1

Early Periods of Protestant Theology . . . Dialectical Theology     . . . New Relation to Catholicism.

TWO

CATHOLIC REFORMATION SCHOLARSHIP

11

Shift From Polemical Approach . . . Lortz's Epoch-Making Work   . . . Lortz's Contribution To The Una Sancta . . . Herte, Hessen   And Others.

THREE

THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT

25

Nineteenth Century Background . . . Christian Unity and Rome . . . The Ecumenical Watershed . . . Faith and Order . . . Life And Work . . . World Council of Churches . . . Rome And The World Council.

FOUR

THE LITURGICAL MOVEMENT

39

Catholic Liturgical Movement: Aims and Means . . . Historical Developments in German Countries . . . Protestant Liturgical Movement . . . Confession, "Kirchentag' and Cloisters.

FIVE

THE BIBLE MOVEMENT

54

Scholarly Biblical Developments . . . Changing Catholic Attitudes.

SIX

LAY MOVEMENTS

62

The Laity In Catholicism . . . Lay Movements

In Protestantism.

SEVEN

THE FORERUNNERS OF THE UNA SANCTA MOVEMENT

68

The High Church Movement . . . Catholics And The High Church Movement . . . A Rejection By Rome . . . The Successors To The "Una Sancta" . . . Scattered Ecumenical Publications . . . Two Catholic Ecumenists . . . Hitler And The Churches . . . A Key Conferences In Berlin . . . Una Sancta Circles Spread.

EIGHT

MAX METZGER: UNA SANCTA FOUNDER AND MARTYR

89

Early Life . . . Work For Peace . . . Founder Of A Religious Society . . . Metzger And The Liturgical And Biblical Movements . . . The Ecumenical Movement . . . The Una Sancta Brotherhood . . . Letter To Pius XII . . . Skirmishes With The Nazis, . . Final Imprisonment And Death

NINE

POST-WAR EXPANSION OF THE UNA SANCTA MOVEMENT

105

The War And Post-War As Contributing Factors . . . Una Sancta Circles Develop . . . Una Sancta Activities Spread . . . International Una Sancta Conference . . . The Una Sancta And Other Organiza­tions . . . Una Sancta Publishing . . . The Una Sancta Vis-a-vis The Hierarchy And Theologians . . . The Una Sancta And Protestants . . . High-Level Support.

TEN

THE CRISIS YEARS

124

Papal Attitude Toward Una Sancta Movement . . . "Monitum" From Holy Office . . . Clarifications And Qualifications . . . Aftermath Of The "Monitum" . . . "Instructio" By Holy Office . . . Reaction To The "Instructio" . . . "Humani Generis" Condemns False Irenicism . . . Assumption Undermines Una Sancta Movement . . . Protestant Recoil From Assumption Dogma . . . Many Catholics Pained By Assumption Dogma.

ELEVEN

THE RECOVERY

144

Effects Of Crises On Una Sancta Circles . . . New Institutions Spring Up . . . Protestant Literature . . . The Gathering Of The "Sammlung" The League For Evangelical-Catholic Reunion . . . Catholic Una Sancta Literature . . . Attitude Of Catholic Hierarchy Toward Una Suu t.... Protestant Attitude Toward The Una Sand~ Movement . . . Prayer And Sacrifice For The Una Sancta . . . Additional Areas Of Cooperation . . . Conclusion.

APPENDIX

166

Foreword

How did it come about so suddenly, this amazing shift of the Catholic Church to a more open, more understanding, more ecumenical attitude? The question is asked often today, both within and without the Catholic Church. One refers to XIII, and rightly so, for he, a man of charisma in the office of Peter, provided the decisive spark. But the spark would not have ignited, nor would this far-shining fire of the Church, gripped anew by the Holy Spirit despite all its frailties, have kindled, were it not that already for decades the material had been piled up by many known and unknown men in the Church, so that the spark could take fire.

These forerunners of renewal suffered greatly. It would be wrong to forget this today. They suffered under the imperfection, the weakness, the darkness and unholiness of the holy Church of God which they loved. They suffered under the erroneous developments and erroneous attitudes which had crept into liturgy and pastoral work, into preaching and teaching, into discipline and piety, into the relationship to other Christians and to the world. But these solitary forerunners did not give up! Within the Church they were often suspected by fellow Christians and by some Church leaders, hindered in their work, disavowed, accused of heresy, persecuted. They were considered dangerous, extremist, radical, even revolutionary. But they did not give up. They went farther, as far as they were permitted and sometimes beyond—in persevering patience but at the same time in fearless courage. Often they stood in the foremost line of fire without any human protection with only the gospel of Jesus behind them. Only decades later was their work affirmed and acknowledged by Church authorities; some of them were rehabilitated only by the Second Vatican Council. Do not we of the younger generation. for whom all is easier and who may stand on their shoulders, have every reason to bow in gratitude and respect before the Christian contribution of these lonely heroes of the battle for the renewal of the Church and the reconciliation of Christians—a battle which often seemed hopeless?

History alone can teach us how modest and unpretentious was the beginning, how slow and laborious the progress: in the ecumenical movement, in liturgical reform, in biblical renewal, in the lay movement, in Reformation research, and in ecumenical theology. Anyone knowing this history will see the Church of the present in a different perspective. Some things he will judge more skeptically, some more positively. He will observe that the truth does not always lie with the majority, that often it is only a few who proclaim the future, and that some outsiders are not outsiders but the daring small vanguard of a sometimes rather sluggish and in any case slow main force which follows. He will perceive that some goals set decades ago are still far from being accomplished. And he wil1 above all gain the courage and hope, even though alone and unappreciated, to go ahead unwearied, despite all the so often well-intentioned and yet so unilluminated opposition, on the way which, if he will fulfill the task laid upon him, he must go.

In the ecclesiastical and ecumenical break-through of our century the land of the Reformation

has a special significance. Dr. Leonard Swidler, professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, is admirably prepared through his theological studies in Germany to conduct the American reader through the history of the ecumenical renewal in the German-speaking areas. As editor of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies, the first inter-confessional magazine in the United States, he stands in close contact with the present intellectual currents in ecumenism. In a German form, the first part of this book was accepted by the Catholic theological faculty of the University of Tübingen as a thesis for the Licentiate in Theology. With much labor and great professional knowledge the author has thoroughly acquainted himself with the complicated problematic, so that he is able to draw a detailed and plastic picture of the various movements of Church renewal in Germany which have become meaningful for the entire Church in these years.

I wish Dr. Swidler’s book a sensitive audience who, out of the Church’s past, will build in the present strength, courage and hope for the future.

Hans Küng

Tübingen, September 9, 1964

Introduction

Through the Second Vatican Council the Roman Catholic Church has suddenly been catapulted into prominence in the movement toward Christian unity. While it is true that Pope John and Vatican II have occasioned a “great leap” forward in this and many other areas, it would not have been even remotely possible had there not been a long and arduous preparation in at least one significant section of the Roman Catholic Church. If the promotion in Vatican II of Catholic involvement in ecumenism had depended, for example, on the American or English Catholic Church, it never would have materialized.

But the preparation was accomplished—in the country which also, ironically, was the source of one of the major divisions in the Christian Church: Germany. Germany has long been the locus of intellectual, cultural and other kinds of fermentation in the world—for evil as well as good. This one was good. The name given to this fermentation in Germany toward Christian unity is the Una Sancta Movement. It is to be distinguished from the ecumenical movement, which has broader historical roots but which did not, until Vatican II, substantively include Roman Catholics. The Catholic-Protestant dialogue was of the essence of the Una Sancta movement, which became vanguard of Roman Catholic involvement in ecumenism.

The term “Una Sancta,” (coming from the Nicene Creed, “Credo . . . unam sanctam . . . ecclesiam,”) was used by a number of people interested in reunification work, particularly in the decades following the first World War. But the term “Una Sancta Movement” seems to have crystallized only as a result of the work done by Father Max Metzger and to have gained general currency only after he founded his Una Sancta Brotherhood in 1938.

It was in Europe, after the devastation of World War I, that the several forces arose which greatly changed the religious situation and prepared the conditions necessary for the growth of the Una Sancta Movement. These forces be hind the Una Sancta Movement appear to fall into six major categories. In the past forty years, first of all, a very important element of Protestant theology has turned away from the liberalistic point of view to reemphasize the position of Scripture. The “Church” has grown in importance in Protestant theology, and the desire for reunion of the Church of Christ has been visibly exhibited in the extraordinary growth of the ecumenical movement. The Protestant Church has experienced a “Luther-renaissance” and in re-finding Luther has moved closer to the Catholic Church, while Catholics, in a searching reappraisal of Luther and the Reformation, have attained a much more sympathetic view of Protestantism. The liturgical movement within both Churches has brought them into a very intimate contact with each other, each benefitting from what have long been considered by many to be exclusive traits of the other. The Catholic Church has experienced a biblical renaissance which is attempting to place the Scriptures more readily in the hands of the layman. Again, the rise of the lay apostolate in the Catholic Church stresses the importance of the layman in the Church, thereby bringing the Catholic Church closer to the Protestant position. Added to these forces was that of the Nazi persecution, which drove the two Churches together in the face of a common enemy, and the displacement of the peoples after the war, which has led to unprecedented personal contact between Catholics and Protestants.

A number of pioneering attempts were made during the 1920's and 1930's to build bridges between the Protestant and Catholic Churches in Germany. Some of them grew directly out of the various background causes of the Una Sancta movement, such as the Hochkirchlich-ökumenische Bund which was both liturgical and ecumenical in inspiration and worked with both Catholics and Protestants for a while.

By the middle 1930's some Protestant-Catholic groups were being formed as a result of the cumulative force of the liturgical, biblical and other movements. The growth of these groups was accelerated by the Nazi persecution.

Just before the outbreak of World War II, Catholic-Protestant study groups of laymen and clergy began to mushroom throughout Germany. These were given a loose organization and further stimulation by the Catholic priest Max Metzger, who founded the Una Sancta Brotherhood in 1938. After the war the Una Sancta circles spread and grew so greatly that they were referred to as part of a popular movement. But this initial post-war period was followed by a period of uncertainty and suspicion, when several decrees from Rome greatly restricted the Movement’s activities. For a while it looked as if the Una Sancta Movement would disappear, but it recovered in the middle 1950's and has grown stronger than ever before.

Chapter One

The Change in Protestant Theology

Since the First World War there has arisen in Protestant theology a school which approaches the Catholic theological position to such an extent that many Catholic and Protestant theologians now find it possible to hold intelligent theological discussions with one another. This trend, called “dialectical theology,” has been led by Karl Barth and is still considered one of the strongest influences on contemporary Protestant theology.¹ Of course there were, during the same period, other less important and less dramatic tendencies in Protestant theology (such as the emphasis on “the Holy” by Rudolf Otto and Karl Heim’s “positive theology”), but these trends had no real influence on forming the historical conditions necessary for the Una Sancta Movement.

Early Periods of Protestant Theology

Historically, the first period of Protestant theology was the time of the confessional writings, when the distinguishing doctrines of the different confessions were crystallized and set down in writing either by the reformers themselves or their immediate followers. For Lutheranism the period lasted until 1588, when the Concordance Formula was established. In Reformed Protestantism it lasted somewhat longer, until the Synod of Dordrecht in 1619. Protestantism then entered the era of “orthodoxy,” when the dogmas were clothed in philosophical, often Aristotelian, formulas, and rigid submission to the “correct” interpretation and wording was demanded. This unbending dogmatism reached its zenith in the seventeenth century, and by its stringency called forth two strong countermovements, Pietism and the theology of the Aufklärung. Both of these countermovements, and particularly the latter, were of course parts of a much larger intellectual movement.

Pietism, springing up in the latter part of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century, placed great emphasis on finding personal sanctity by living Christianity in daily life, while quickly passing over doctrinal matters as not decisively important. From this stream of Christianity there have come many champions for peace and unity among the Christian Churches, starting with its great eighteenth century leader, Graf Zinzendorf. But because it stressed the personal and practical, Pietism had little effect on the development of dogma.

This was not the case with the theology of the Aufklärung, which was important in the latter half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Where orthodoxy had given man’s reason room to explain the meaning of divine revelation and to protect it from the attacks of non-believers, the Aufklärung theology attempted to subject the truth of revelation to critical judgments and empirical methods of research. Reason, and not the authoritative Church or the confessional writing, became the standard against which doctrines were measured.

The application of critical reason and critical historical method to the Bible was led by J. S. Semler (1725-91), “the father of German rationalism,” whose popularity lasted until 1779, when he attacked the views of Reimarus and Bahrdt, who carried rationalistic biblical criticism further than he thought justified. Reimarus (1694-1768) took a purely deistic position, denying the necessity or possibility of revelation. Bahrdt (1741-92), following Reimarus’ lead in biblical criticism, eventually set up a natural religion “moral system” to replace supernatural Christianity. He stated, “I looked upon Moses and Jesus, Confucius, Socinius, Luther, and myself as the instruments of Providence through which he is working for the welfare of men.”²

The most radical and rationalistic elements of the Aufklärung theology were continued in the work of Philippe Henke (1752-1809), Heinrich Paulus ( 1761-1851) and, even later, in the work of David Strauss (1808-74), who interpreted the biblical life of Jesus as a myth made up more or less consciously by the followers of Jesus. The divinity of Christ and propitiary power of his crucifixion were denied. The importance of the doctrine of original sin was greatly lessened or disappeared altogether as the other side of the balance, the importance of man and his reason, surged upwards. The deemphasis of sin naturally eliminated the necessity for Luther’s prime doctrine of justification by faith alone, as there was nothing from which man needed to be redeemed except possibly his own ignorance and subservience to authority, and this reason could do. While the old Protestantism focused on the visible Church as the community of believers, the Aufklärung theology declared the autonomy of the individual. Luther and Calvin were seen as champions of the freedom of the individual from the Church, and this principle of freedom was then used to free the individual from Luther and Calvin themselves. All of these positions in Protestant theology were met by strong counter-movements, however, and after World War I there was a return to the earlier stress on the Bible as the Word of God, on Luther and on the supernatural, and a corresponding deemphasis suspicion of the self-sufficient reason of man.

Not that the Aufklärung theology had held the field of dogmatics uncontested after the beginning of the nineteenth century. As a general intellectual and cultural movement the Aufklärung with its stress on the abstract and rational, provoked the rise of its antithesis, romanticism, with its

emphasis on the feelings and emotions of man, so also the rationalistic theology was met by the theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher as he worked to free Protestant theology from the abstraction and naturalism of rationalistic theology and yet avoid what he considered the sterile dogmatism of Protestant orthodoxy. Like the Pietists, Schleiermacher made the personal experience of faith the sine qua non of true religion. He accepted Kant’s denial of the ability of the pure reason really to know any thing of a metaphysical nature or anything about God, or even the fact of His existence, but at the same time rejected his moralism under the direction of the practical reason. Schleiermacher thus made religion nota thing of knowing or of doing but, under the influence of romanticism, a thing of feeling. “Piety is neither a knowing nor a doing, but rather a definiteness of feeling or immediate awareness of self.”³

For Schleiermacher, feeling as the center of religion meant that when man becomes conscious of his own being and the universe about him, he becomes aware of, he feels, his and its utter dependence on something “other,” something non-finite and therefore infinite. This infinite “other” on whom man feels absolutely dependent is called God. Thus the religious man grasps and holds on to God by personal intuition and feeling not, as the rationalists held, by intellectual knowledge. “If man is not one with the Eternal in the unity of intuition and feeling which is immediate, he remains, in the unity of consciousness which is derived, forever apart.”⁴ What then are dogmas and what is the purpose of the theologian? Dogmas are nothing but the expression and description of the communal feelings resulting from a people’s experience of the infinite, of God. The work of the theologian is not to investigate the truth or falsity of these expressions, for neither can be proved, but rather to study their origin in the history of the Church. It is this emphasis on the subjective and historical, and his distrust of the speculative powers of man that made Schleiermacher the father of “liberal theology.”

In nineteenth century Protestant theology there were two main currents. The first was liberal theology, which flowed out of Schleiermacher’s subjectivism, rationalism, liberalism and the development of the critical historical methods of the time. The second was the “awakening theology” (Erweckungstheologie), which sprang from Pietism and the confessional theology which stressed the Bible as interpreted by the confessional writings. In addition a Vermittlungstheologie attempted to combine the advantages of both movements by maintaining a belief in the Bible and at the same time giving free rein to scientific research and thought. However, it was the first, liberal theology, that became dominant by the end of the century.

 Liberal theology in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century was influenced by Kant and Schleiermacher particularly through the theology of Albrecht Ritschl (d. 1889) and the religious-historical school. Ritschl saw in the truths of Christianity not objective religious facts but, in the final analysis, only phenomena of the subjective consciousness. This subjective and historical approach was carried even farther by his student Ernst Troeltsch (d. 1923) and by Adolph Harnach (d. 1930). Harnack looked upon Christian dogma as a product of the Greek spirit built upon the foundation of the gospel, as a falling away from pristine Christianity.⁵ Troeltsch, with his religious-historical and religious-philosophical method, denied any absolute character to Christianity. Christian dogma could make no unqualified claim to truth but had to be tested and interpreted by religious psychology and Troeltsch’s own philosophy of history.⁶

In thus applying modern historical and philosophical thought and methods to religion, Ritschl and his followers drew censure as well as applause.⁷ But by the turn of the century and up to the first World War, liberal theology was dominant in the Protestant world, or at least appeared to be engaged in a final heavy battle against rapidly disappearing opponents.

Dialectical Theology

Then came World War I and all civilization seemed to be bankrupt. Progress, the nineteenth century’s god, now appeared a phantasy and both reason and liberalism were discredited. This same reaction showed up strongly in Protestant theology, where Troeltsch, Harnack and like-minded liberal theologians found themselves violently attack by the new “dialectical” theology under the leadership of Karl Barth. Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans was the first effective salvo in this attack, and he and similar thinkers like Emil Brunner and Eduard Thurneyson wore, at least for a time, the mantles of prophets. They announced that the old ways of theology lead to death; that theology must seek a new way of life, and give its allegiance once again to the one true God, the God of revelation, and traffic no longer with false gods of this world.

Thus Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans “fell 1ike a bomb on the playground of the theologians.”⁸ Liberal theology had attempted to accommodate itself to the thought and world view of modern man with his new discoveries of science, psychology, philosophy and historical criticism. Christian theology was to be the crowning of the spiritual evolution of man, the highest development of the naturally religious man; theology was the apex placed on and based on the pyramid of all man’s achievements. But Barth declared that if theology lived by a worldly, merely natural civilization, it would also die by it-and in the eyes of many modern Europeans, civilization was certainly in its death throes.

Barth maintained that theology needed to speak not the language of the history of religions or psychology, but rather the language of revelation, of the Bible. Here too was its proper subject matter: the revealed acts of God, not the philosophy of religion and the historical evolution of man’s spirit. There was a need for a new dogmatics which would be exclusively a theology of the Word of God in its content, method and vocabulary. For when man attempts to synthesize revelation with “reason,” theology suffers both from malformation—casting revelation in a particular intellectual form—and from constant change, since man’s knowledge is always being remolded to new shapes or even cast aside completely.

Barth himself led the way by attempting to reshape his thought along biblical lines. However, his first attempt at writing a prologue to a new dogmatics (Die Lehre vom Worte Gottes, Prolegomena zur christlichen Dogmatik, 1927) was so sharply attacked for basing its theology on a new anthropology—exactly what he was trying to avoid—that Barth dropped the project and started anew in 1932 with his Church Dogmatics, the first book of a series not yet finished. In 1939 he said, “. . . in these years I have had to, rid myself of the last remnants of a philosophical (in America one says ‘humanistic’ or ‘naturalistic’) foundation and exposition of Christian doctrine.”⁹

In calling theology back to the Bible and insisting on its own norms and ends, Barth was emphasizing God as transcendent, as “completely other.” The proper study of theology is not the inner self, nor is it the development of the forms of expression of the inner selves of a group or groups of people, as it was to the historical school following Schleiermacher. Rather, it is God Himself, as He is revealed in Christ.

In the meantime we have lost sight of the Almighty God before whom we are as nothing, who is praised in the truly religious language of the Psalms. Here is the note which is un mistakable in all the great religions; it is what gives force to the Institutes of Calvin, however much we may dislike some of his doctrines, and it has been restored in the teaching of Karl Barth . . . He is convinced that this tradition makes far too little of the transcendence of God, that it is not sufficiently theocentric.¹⁰

Along with his return to the Bible and a transcendent God who has manifested Himself in Jesus Christ, Barth and others returned to the reformers. At the beginning of this century a renewed interest, particularly in Luther, had arisen in an attempt to use modern historical methods to recreate the image and message of the reformer in their original forms; this “Luther renaissance” has continued to grow even to the present. Partly as an effect of this general growing concern with the reformers, dialectical theology, and Barth in particular, tried to reach back beyond the “New Protestantism” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, beyond the period of rigid orthodoxy to the spirit and often letter of Luther and, for Barth as a Reformed Protestant, also Calvin. However, the theology of Barth was arrived at not only through a radical return to the sources, to Calvin and Luther straight through all the “developments,” misrepresentations and watered down versions of New Protestantism, “but more essentially still through a cleansing and radicalization of these sources themselves.... Barth avoids a certain ‘orthodoxy’ just as decisively as he does ‘Liberalism.’”¹¹

Lastly, Barth asserted that theology is the teaching by the Church of the revelation of Jesus Christ as found in the Scriptures. It is the purpose and duty of the Church to transmit the “Word” of God to men. “Theology follows the word of the Church”¹² Barth took special pains to point out that his protest against the Catholic Church’s concept was not at all like the objection of the modern “educated” man who rejected the very idea of authority. “Protestantism protests not against, but for the Church. . . . Protestant Church not only means not less, but more, not only not weaker, but stronger, than the Catholic Church—it means precisely Church.”¹³ Such positive emphasis on the Church had been quite alien to liberal theology, which rather stressed the individual, who should be made as free from all limitations as possible: “We want for ourselves still more freedom, stil1 more individuality still more expression and teaching.”¹⁴

New Relation to Catholicism

It is just these essential characteristics of the dialectical, especially Barthian, theology that have gradually created a new relationship to the Catholic Church. The whole psychological and historical approach so typical of the liberal theology had found a very determined opponent in the Catholic Church. But Barth had this in common with the Catholic Church: he too was an opponent of the liberal theology. He went so far as to say:

If today I became convinced that the interpretation of the Reformation developed in the direction of Schleiermacher-Ritschl-Troeltsch . . . were correct, that Luther and Calvin in their efforts had really meant things so, I would indeed not become a Catholic tomorrow, but at the same time I probably would have to take leave of the would-be Evangelical Church. Faced with the choice between the two evils, I would in fact rather become a Catholic.¹⁵

Likewise, the turning back to Luther by Protestant theology has ipso facto brought it much closer to the Catholic Church than it was under the aegis of liberal theology. Luther himself was much nearer to Catholicism in his notions of the Church, the Bible and dogma. A reemphasis on his advocacy of a liturgy similar to the Catholic Mass and such things as private confession and morning and evening prayers has led many Protestants into teaching and doing things often thought to be exclusively Catholic. Karl Adam even felt that a “rapprochement between Catholicism and Protestantism will only be possible if it takes Luther as its starting point.”¹⁶

With this shift of theology away from psychological, historical and philosophical approaches to a biblical theology and a greater cooperation between exegesis and systematic theology, Protestantism has again perforce drawn closer to Catholicism. The Scriptures are one essential constituent of faith that both confessions have in common—even though they may be differently interpreted. The unifying force of the Bible, moreover, has been strengthened by the growing interest of the Catholic Church in spreading the use and understanding of the Bible more and more widely, as is shown by the Bible movement. Bishop Besson has said, “Through the Gospel our fathers were divided. Through the Gospel we must find each other again.”¹⁷

From this intensive biblical study has arisen a greater concentration of Protestant theology on the “Church.” This is particularly true of the dialectical theology which sees “the Church as the unique bearer in history of God’s purpose and grace,”¹⁸ and “not merely another social institution since it is also the Body of Christ in history.”¹⁹ In addition German Protestant concern about the Church was greatly intensified by the development of the ecumenical movement and the collapse of the monarchy in the first World War (the Protestant Churches had been very closely connected with the individual princely states) and the Kirchenkampf during the Nazi time. As a result “today Protestantism works with a concept of Church which is continually coming ever closer to that of Catholicism.”²⁰ The Catholic Church had been accused of being a “juridical Church,” it being assumed that the Church of Christ should be something other. But the Lutheran Church in the twentieth century, because of the collapse after the first World War and the Kirchenkampf, has also found itself in the position of having to emphasize the juridical aspect of the Church, along with renewing the stress of the Church’s teaching office.

A whole new emphasis on the position of dogma and tradition has flowed from the new concept of Church. In Protestant theology since the Enlightenment, dogma had a primarily historical significance. Not only the formulations but also the essence of church doctrines were thought to be conditioned by the circumstances under which they arose. Although the pejorative connotation of dogma—which reached a high point with Adolph Harnach who said, “The history of dogma is the dissolution of dogma”²¹—has by no means completely disappeared, Protestants especially Lutherans, are again emphasizing the importance of being precise in the meaning of doctrine and firm in its adherence. “Advocates of a ‘dogma-free Christianity’ can no longer be considered by us as representative of the Evangelical Church.”²²

Another old quarrel, the problem of Scripture and tradition, has grown milder. Protestant theologians no longer rigidly insist on the “Scriptures alone” principle in opposition to the Roman Catholic formula, “Scripture and tradition.” They acknowledge that the New Testament itself arose out of an oral tradition, and that it was this oral tradition that brought about the formation of the canon of the New Testament. The oral tradition preceded the written. And with a new sense of their own past, Protestants have become aware that through the past four hundred years there has grown up a vital Protestant tradition.²³ All this brings the Protestant Church much closer to the Catholic position, that the source of the Christian faith is found in both Scripture and tradition. On the Catholic side there recently has been much research and thought given to this problem, particularly in the ex- tended discussions at two sessions of Vatican Council II. Many theologians have insisted that the teaching of Trent was that the whole content of faith is found in both Scripture and tradition rather than partly in one and partly in the other, and that until Trent there was no sharp distinction between the two. Thus, a growing Catholic opinion now holds that “Scripture” means the Bible as read by the Church, and hence includes “tradition.” This position is, of course, more acceptable to Protestants.²⁴

Even the externals, the form and manner, of much of the new Protestant theology is strikingly like traditional Catholic theology. Barth’s monumental Church Dogmatics, for example, is very much like the great medieval Summae. Barth has not restricted himself to the Bible, Reformation and post-Reformation writers, but has drawn from the scholastics and Fathers, so much so that his co-theologians quickly accused him of rationalism and philosophism, and of giving up the reformed fiducial faith and falling back into the middle ages. A Catholic finds that the theology of Barth’s dogmatics has a breadth in subject matter and history that is as extensive as his own.²⁵ In Barth’s own words:

We must direct our attention to a Thomas and Bonaventure and also an Anselm and even further back to an Augustine just as keenly to the much attacked characteristics of the then  still not “reformed” [verbesserten] Church. We must concern ourselves with the recognized teaching of a Church which is also ours, at least in so far as it had not then avoided reform. They have the right to be heard by us along with the Reformers. And it would have gone better with Evangelical dogmatics if they had been listened to more instead of acting as if the Reformation m its well known tumultuousness were the beginning of all wisdom.²⁶

Barth has often spoken out clearly against the divisions within Christianity. For him a plurality of Churches cannot be justified. It must be “carried about as one carries one’s own and another’s sins. . . . It should be seen as guilt.”²⁷ One must work for the unity of the Church of Christ at the express command of Jesus. And there can be no escape into the subterfuge that the unity of the Church is meant to be found only in the invisible Church, as if the multiplicity of the Churches were a necessary characteristic of the visible, empirical Church in contrast to the invisible, ideal, essential Church. “There is no flight from the visible to the invisible Church.”²⁸

Like the Catholic Church, Barth believes that unity between the Churches can come about only on a theological basis, not on a practical-social basis. As a consequence, he was distrustful of the union at the time of Friedrich Wilhelm III in the nineteenth century, when a fusing of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches in Prussian lands was forced politically. Barth was also skeptical of the early efforts of the ecumenical movement, at least until the founding of the World Council of Churches at Amsterdam in 1948.

Despite his early reluctance to involve himself with the ecumenical movement, Barth had already in the 1920's entered into an earnest theological discussion with the Catholic Church, delivering a lecture, for example, on the “Concept of Church” before the Hochschulgruppe of the Catholic Zentrum party in 1927 at Münster.²⁹ Elsewhere he stated that it must in principle be possible “to come to an understanding” even with a Catholic theologian, for the Christian gospel will in the last analysis also stand behind the post-Tridentine Roman Church. “There remains enough of the Catholic in us Protestants that we are forced to assume that the goals and hopes of the Reformation also cannot be completely dead on the other side.”³⁰

Among the Catholic theologians who have entered into public, non-polemical exchange with Karl Barth in periodicals and books is Hans Küng, who has compared in great detail the doctrine of justification as explained by the Council of Trent with Barth’s teaching on the matter.³¹ The startling conclusion is that they are identical: In a letter to Küng, which was printed along with his analysis, Barth says: “If that which you unfold in your second half as the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church really is her teaching, then I must certainly grant that my doctrine of justification agrees with hers.”³² He then asks that similar attempts at mutual understanding be made in other areas of theology.

This does not mean, of course, that Barth has only praise for the Catholic Church, that he has no criticism to direct at it. At times his criticism becomes strong, even bitter, as at the Amsterdam ecumenical conference, where he took note of the Catholic Church’s absence: “We are not disappointed that no cardinal delegated by the Vatican is here to sit at our head table. And I suggest that no useless tears be shed over Rome’s absence among us, as some have attempted to make an appearance of doing.”³³ But these criticisms are more than balanced by exchanges like the one with Küng.

Since the sixteenth century there has been little opportunity for a non-polemical discussion between the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Certainly there was no such chance in the first fury of the battle, nor in the period of strict “orthodoxy” that followed it. The conditions were not improved by the theologies of the Aufklärung, of Schleiermacher, or of the liberal school. However, with the break toward dialectical theory at the time of World War I, the theological situation has become more favorable for a fruitful and more irenic exchange. The turning away from the rationalistic, psychological and historical approach in theology to a bible- centered approach, stressing a common possession of both confessions; the return to Luther, who was vastly closer to Catholicism than was the New Protestantism; and the renewed stress on the importance of the Church, the cornerstone of Catholic doctrine, have helped set the stage on the theological level for an Una Sancta Movement.

Chapter  Two

Catholic Reformation Scholarship

Polemical Period

Since the time of Johannes Cochlaeus in the sixteenth century, Catholic Reformation scholarship has not been disposed to look upon the Reformation in a very favorable light. Johannes Cochlaeus (1479-1552), one of the bitterest and, in the long run, most influential opponents of Luther’s acts and writings. His Commentaria  de Actis et Scriptis Martini Lutheri Saxonis came out in 1549, three years after Luther’s death. Cochlaeus did not go about his difficult work with the coolness and detachment of a non-partisan historian, nor did he think it a fault not to do so. He felt his readers should not only be informed about Lutheranism, but also made fully aware that Luther had devastated the Church and brought unutterable misery to his German homeland. Every deprecation, slander and evil legend was snatched up by the author. He asserted, for example, that Luther entered into the indulgence battle against Tetzel because, as an Augustinian, he was jealous of the lucrative indulgence trade enjoyed by Tetzel and the Dominicans. Another story had it that Luther, already as a fifteen year old lad, was indulging in immoral relations with his benefactress, Frau Cotta zu Eisenach; that he lived a riotous student life in Erfurt; and that during his first period in the cloister, Luther lived in concubinage with three nuns, from which experience he contracted venereal disease. Some of the stories about Luther, because they are handed on in all seriousness, take on an air of humor. For example, when Luther wanted to emphasize a statement he might say, “I am not drunk now—I know what I am saying,” which was immediately taken by his calumniators as an admission that he often was drunk and did not know what he was saying.¹ Only the completely baseless legend of Luther’s suicide, which Paul Majunke revived as late as 1890, is missing in Cochlaeus. Any really first-hand reports coming from Protestants, especially Luther’s close companions Melanchthon and Mathesius, are conspicuously absent, since they would be favorably to Luther.

The practice of seeing Luther as all evil and the Catholic Church as all good continued through the centuries. The nineteenth century historian, Johannes Janssen, for example, maintained that the Church had already begun a brilliant and profound reform in the fifteenth century, and that this reform was suddenly disturbed in a most unwarranted manner by Luther’s revolution.² But the high point in controversial literature was reached in the writings of Heinrich Denifle and Hartmann Grisar shortly after the turn of the century. The Dominican Denifle attempted to perform a “moral and scholarly execution” of Luther as a fallen-away monk with unbridled lust and a theological ignoramus. Luther was an evil man, and the Reformation fundamentally sprang from immorality. Denifle wrote “Luther, there is nothing godly in you!”³ Luther was

an ordinary, or if you will, an extraordinary destroyer, a revolutionary, who went through his age like a demon, ruthlessly trampling to earth what had been reverenced a thousand years before him. He was a seducer who carried away hundreds of thousands with him in his fateful errors, a false prophet who in his contradiction- burdened teaching as in his sin-laden life manifested the exact opposite of what one should expect and demand from one sent from God. He was a liar and deceiver who, through the very overthrowing of all moral limitations under the banner of Christian freedom, attracted to himself so many deluded souls.⁴

The violence of this attack on Luther came about as a reaction to the Luther-cult which, growing out of the then rising Luther renaissance, did not hesitate to speak of a “sanctus et divinus Lutherus”; Denifle wanted to attack this cult and destroy it once and for all.

For the Jesuit Hartmann Grisar,⁵ Luther was not so much a morally evil man as a mentally sick man. We should turn not our hate but our pity toward Luther the psychopath, who was subject to illusory visits by the devil and terrible fits of depression. It is granted by Protestants that Grisar went about his work with a great deal of scholarly zeal and that his work “contains a powerful denial of the old Catholic Luther-fables and calumniations as well as the deep-rooted view, most lately upheld by Denifle, according to which Luther was driven down the path of the Reformer by lust of the flesh.”⁶ However, this improvement over Denifle was hardly satisfying to Protestants. Grisar’s polished style merely poured salt in the wound, and his apparent objectivity convinced no one. Without a doubt all the terrible words of Luther, full of hate, anger, “Wildheit und Rohheit” are actually found in Luther’s writings. But the complaint was raised that this was far from all that was in Luther’s writings. This was only a one-sided picture, and therefore a distortion, though one with a certain refinement. In the end, “Grisar, just as Denifle, wishes to annihilate Luther.”⁷  

Grisar and Denifle, of course were supported in their attitudes by the highest church authorities. Pope Leo XIII in the encyclical Militantis ecclesiae, written for the Canisius-jubilaeum August 1, 1897, described the Reformation as the “rebellio lutherana,” which brought about the ultimate ruin of morals. St. Pius X in his encyclical on St. Charles Borromaeo, Editae suepe, May 26, 1910, said:  

There arose haughty and rebellious men, ‘enemies of the cross of Christ . . . men with worldly . . . minds whose god is the belly.’ They strove not for the betterment of morals but rather for the denial of the foundations of faith. They cast everything into confusion and cleared for themselves and others a broad path of undisciplined wilfulness, or sought, indeed openly at the bidding of the most depraved princes and peoples and under the disapproval of the ecclesiastical authority and leadership, forcibly to obliterate the Church’s teaching, constitution and discipline.⁸  

Shift From Polemical Approach

This polemical approach to Luther and the Reformation, particularly by Denifle, soon found critics among German Catholics. Already in 1906, historian Hermann Mauert accused Denifle of wanting not to find the truth but only to win his argument. “With Denifle one finds oneself all too often listening to the prosecution of the state attorney who wants to subject the accused to an unconditional condemnation, and one misses the just, all-around careful weighing, objective probing of the non-partisan judge, and in this case of the calm, collected historian.”⁹ In 1929 Sebastian Merkle said that to contend that such a completely base Luther was able to cause such a deep-going and long-lasting split in Christendom is “to stand all philosophy of history on its head and to view the entire history of humanity through the eyes of a worm.”¹⁰ And by 1931 Hubert Jedin stated that no Catholic church historian in Germany any longer shared Denifle’s view of Luther’s moral personality.¹¹

A change occurred in Catholic Luther scholarship with the appearance of an article in the Hochland in 1917 entitled “Martin Luther’s Religious Psyche as the Root of a New Philosophical World View.”¹² Like Grisar, the author, Franz Xaver Kiefl, formerly a theology professor at Würzburg and the Dean of the cathedral of Regensburg, treated the psyche of Luther. However, as the title indicates, he treated it not as the object of depth psychology, but rather as a religious soul. He maintained that Luther’s starting point and his main interest were religious. It was from Luther’s religious psyche, as the “most profound and vital source,” that “as out of a seed everything later grew.”¹³ The trend toward a more favorable interpretation of Luther continued to grow gradually in the next years.¹⁴  

The editing of Luther in ökumenischer Sicht in 1929 by Alfred von Martin was among other things an extraordinary attempt to foster among Catholics a new attitude toward Luther and the Reformation. The book originally was to be a supplement to the fourth volume of the periodical Una Sancta, edited by von Martin with both Protestants and Catholic contributors, but because of difficulties with Rome it did not appear as a part of the Una Sancta. Von Martin said, “What is presented here is no longer an ‘Una Sancta’ periodical. It forgoes for the time the attempt to find a united objective ground on which the Christians of the separated confessions can meet each other.”¹⁵ Rather, the book is a series of individual essays by both Catholics and Protestants which can claim only the individual conviction and responsibility of the several authors. Nevertheless, von Martin maintained that there was a certain perceptible unity within the volume and that the book would serve as a step toward reconciliation.

In one of the essays within the volume, Sebastian Merkle attempted to redress what he considered wrongs done to Luther and the Reformation. He pointed out that while Luther and many of his biographers exaggerated both the seriousness and the extent of the bad conditions in the Church—or Janssen would not have been able to bring up so much opposing documentation —it was at the same time true that there were a great many abuses rampant—or Luther would not have found such an enthusiastic following among strongly religious circles. “He would have to appear much more as the greatest wonder-worker of history, if he had brought about the mass defection from a flourishing Church, a Church on Martin, at the zenith of fulfilling its task.”¹⁶ He quoted with approval the statement St. Clemens Maria Hofbauer made in 1816:  

Since I have been a papal delegate in Poland I have become certain that the defection from the Church has come about because the Germans had and still have a need to be pious. The Reformation was not spread and held by heretics and philosophers, but by men who were really searching for a religion for the heart.¹⁷  

In the same collection of essays Johannes Albani asked the question, “Did Luther break with the Church? Did the Church break with him?” His answer was Luther broke not with the Church but with the priesthood, and then only after the priesthood had first broken with him. Although Luther made the mistake of thinking the hierarchy was dispensable, he was correct in recognizing that too little attention was given the individual soul.¹⁸ In another essay in the same collection, Albani outlined five types of subjectivism: scholastic, springing from Occam; rationalistic, coming from Zwingli; mystic, from Meister Eckhart; enthusiastic (schwärmgeistige), led by Thomas Münzer; and humanistic. Luther’s subjectivism was none of these, for revelation stood before him with “incorruptible objectivity.”¹⁹

A third Catholic theologian, Anton Fischer, wrote what was probably the most positive estimate of Luther of the time. Fischer presented a side of Luther seldom seen by Catholics. He called Luther a “great Christian man of prayer,”²⁰ and maintained that it was through Luther as a man of prayer that an understanding of his great religious genius was to be found. Although Luther as a fighter belonged only to a part of Christianity, as a man of prayer he belonged to all, and he had something to say to all Christian groups. “Though a Church be ever so rich in truly great Christian men of prayer, it should not pass by without noticing this great man of prayer, his priceless statements on prayer and his incisive instructions on how to pray.”²¹ Even Catholics must admit that there are few masters of prayer like Luther, with his “quickening freshness, genuine popular appeal and biblical vitality.”²²

“The fighting Luther wounds—even today after four hundred years,” Fischer writes. “The praying Luther heals: The fighting Luther divides; the praying Luther unites Luther the fighter belongs to the past; Luther the man of prayer—may his mission begin in the present.”²³

In 1929, the same year he edited Luther in ökumenischer Sicht, von Martin joined with another Protestant, Friedrich Heiler, in calling for a Roman Catholic historian who would write a Luther biography “which presents to us the real, whole Luther, the Luther who destroys and renews, who has brought misery and blessing.”²⁴ Ten years later their wish was to a very large extent fulfilled in the work of the Catholic church historian, Father Josef Lortz. Lortz, born in Luxemburg in 1887, became deeply involved in Reformation history when in 1917 he was made the scientific secretary for the “Corpus Catholicorum” at the University of Bonn. The “Corpus Catholicorum” is an organization whose aim is to publish significant documents of Catholic tradition. It did much to lay a scholarly foundation for later works, not least for the work of Lortz himself.  

Lortz’s Epoch-Making Work

Josef Lortz published his epoch-making work, Die Reformation in Deutschland, in 1939 and 1940. The trend in Catholic Reformation and Luther scholarship, which had gradually departed from the Denifle and Grisar-like approach, took, with the appearance of Lortz’s work, the most decidedly irenic direction it has had in its entire history. Just how very different this new direction was and what a stir it caused-and still causes-can be appreciated to some extent from the comments of the editors of the Protestant journal Zeit im Querschnitt in 1941, a year after the second volume was published. They wrote that Die Reformation in Deutschland had excited both Catholic and Protestant minds intensely as was indicated by the very numerous stands, pro and con taken toward the work, and this not just in professional magazines, nor just in Germany.²⁵

In the foreword Lortz indicated that he took for his guiding aims the overcoming of the much too prevalent “counter-Reformation” attitude toward his subject matter, the maintaining of an openness and sensitivity for the religious goals of the Reformation and, in conjunction with this, a substantial, though not polemical, criticism of the weaknesses of the Reformation. Critics pointed out that though these aims were not particularly new, the manner with which Lortz carried them out was new indeed, and that on every page it was evident that “here history has become the object of Christian meditation and examination of conscience.”²⁶ They noted that it was not just the divisive and differentiating that was brought into focus, but also the shared and unifying. The result was a work “characterized by a rigid scientific objectivity born out of a deep religious sense of responsibility, and it is exactly this combining of these two elements which can become effective religiously if it be accepted in the same spirit.”²⁷

Two aspects of Lortz’s book have drawn the main attention: his description of the late-medieval conditions leading to the Reformation, and his description and estimation of Luther. One Protestant writer described it thus: “Any Evangelical Christian who reads Lortz’s Reformation in Deutschland carefully will be pleased by Lortz’s willingness both to acknowledge the sins and failings of the Catholic Church and because of his readiness to give the aims of Luther their just due . . .”²⁸

Lortz drew a picture of a late medieval Christendom filled with strong forces tending toward the break-up of its unity. Medieval Europe was long in need of a reform. The prestige and power of the papacy were shattered with the “Babylonian captivity,” the long schism that followed it, and the conciliar movement that grew out of the situation. All of Bohemia was a heretical land. But even more destructive than these were the intellectual and spiritual forces that had been eating at the very foundation of medieval civilization, theology.

Lortz laid the degeneration of the medieval theology at the feet of William of Occam, or more exactly, Occamism. This Occamism taught the doctrine not of a paternal God, but rather of an arbitrary one, a God who on no “objective basis” orders one soul to hell and another to heaven, a God who by mere accident calls one thing good and another evil, commands and praises something today and forbids and condemns the same thing tomorrow. This same Occamism placed an extraordinarily heavy emphasis on the part man played in the process of salvation, leaving a smaller role to be played by grace. (It is easy to see how Luther later reacted against this doctrine by moving to his position of “sola gratia.”) Occamism also split nature and supernature apart almost to the point of erecting a double standard of truth. Revelation could declare something true in theology, at the same time that reason declared it false or impossible in philosophy, by reason. This led to Luther’s fight against philosophy and reason.²⁹

Lortz also discussed another intellectual movement undermining the Church’s strength in the pre-Reformation period, that of Humanism, which made man rather than God the center of attention. Humanism was by nature subjective and anthropocentric. In Lortz’s words, “It is premeated to its foundation with an outspoken spiritual, moral and—if the expression is permissible—religious secularization.”³⁰ Often and especially in the cases of the Erfurt Humanists and Erasmus, it took the form of an undervaluing of dogma and of dogmatics; but it was the lack of definiteness in theology, the relativeness of Erasmus and those influenced by him, that was one of the “most important pre-conditions of an ecclesiastical revolution. It is one of the keys that explain to a large extent the riddle of the terrible defection..³¹ It is the finding of the root of the Reformation here rather than in the evil of Luther that particularly distinguishes Lortz from his polemical Catholic predecessors.

Lortz showed how these and other disintegrating forces had their effect even in the highest places of Christendom: the pope, his curia and the hierarchy. The abuses of the renaissance papacy were well known, reaching their zenith, or nadir, in the last three reigns before the breaking of the storm, those of Alexander VI, Julius II and Leo X. The first, of course, was known for his scandals concerning sex, the second for his warring intrigues, and the third for his all-consuming concern for humanism. As was then said: “First Venus reigned, then Mars, and now Pallas Athene.”³² It was the last, Leo X, who had to meet the first religious challenge of Luther, and it was he who chose as a motto, “Let us enjoy the papacy since God has granted it to us.”³³ From this Renaissance papacy there flowed the Roman “supercurialism,” with its arbitrary multiplication of clerical privileges, its actions approaching simony, its wealth spent in a luxurious life. Just as the curia was ruled by the desire for money, the members of the hierarchy also engaged too often in a hunt for as many lucrative benefices as possible, leaving the care of souls connected with the benefices in the hands of a poorly paid substitute, a “hireling.”

Lortz maintained that this was not a one-sided picture he had outlined. He offered as one proof of this the statement that Pope Adrian VI, the last Germanic and non-Italian pope, made through his delegate Chierigati at the Reichstag in Nuremburg in 1522/23. “We know well that for many years there have come forth also from this Holy See itself many despicable things: abuses of spiritual things, transgressions of commandments. Indeed, in everything there has been a turn for the worse. Therefore it is not surprising that the illness has transplanted itself from the head to the members, from the popes to the hierarchy.”³⁴ Lortz granted that there were bright spots as well as shadows, that on all levels one could find “a correct Church life.” But if mediocre correctness was the best one could find, if “exemplary heroic life of faith was almost everywhere lacking,” then the religious situation was indeed bad.³⁵

Lortz drew this startling conclusion: “A ‘Reformation’ had become historically necessary.”³⁶ It was hardly possible for the Church to avoid an uprising; the split was already latent. Lortz went further and laid part of the blame for the evil of the Reformation on Catholics. “. . . The Reformation is a Catholic affair in the sense of a partly Catholic causation, and thus a partly Catholic guilt.”³⁷

The central point of Lortz’s Reformation history is the figure of Martin Luther. Some 300 of the first volume’s 437 pages are concerned mainly with him. Lortz, following in the twentieth-century Catholic tradition, studied the soul of Luther, but with a much different perspective. Luther was no longer the ignorant and lustful monk or pitiable psychopath, but a sea of inexhaustible power, a genius, an “Urkraft.” Above all, Luther was a fundamentally religious man, a “homo religiosus,” a man who stood alone with his conscience before God. In referring to the years of deep depression in Luther’s life, 1527-37, called a period of spiritual illness by the Danish psychiatrist Paul Reiter, Lortz refused to extend the diagnosis of “spiritually ill” to Luther’s entire life. One could fill a thick volume with examples of Luther’s idiosyncracies but, if correct proportion is to be kept, then ten more volumes would have to be added to bear witness to the intellectual, spiritual and religious sanity of Luther.³⁸  

According to Lortz, Luther was a “cascading fullness.” He had within himself a great power of prayer. In fact, he was a master of prayer, which he centered and fed on the Scriptures and particularly on the Lord’s Prayer. His power of speech and pen was often that of a genius, a vulcanic genius. It is not just his translation of the Bible that gives testimony of this power with words; many of his books, sermons and verses do likewise.

On the other hand, Lortz saw Luther’s main fault as subjectivism, though not an “autonomous arbitrariness” as the eighteenth and even more the nineteenth and twentieth centuries understood the term, for tradition was still very strong in Luther. He fought, for example, the attempts of the Enthusiasts and Zwingli to empty the Divine Service of the sacred. His attachment to the “Word” was so strong that one can speak of an objective subjectivism, or even of a subjective objectivism. Nevertheless, at root it was the subjective element that ruled Luther. For him there was no living teaching office of the Church, but only the individual conscience standing before the word of the Bible. “Luther’s objectivism is a self-deception. . . ,”³⁹ because his principle of explaining the Scriptures according to one’s own conscience was fundamentally a revolutionary elimination of the objective teaching office, without which every attempt at being objective really becomes subjective.

Despite this accusation of radical subjectivism Lortz has made a revolutionary approach to Luther, acknowledging his greatness, depth and fundamentally religious character. “They are poor students of history who believe that a superficial spirit without religious depth would have sufficed to deliver the terrific blow which ripped open the Church. That would be a severe accusation against the holy Church were it possible.”⁴⁰  

The reception of Lortz’s work in Catholic circles was for the most part favorable, though often tempered with criticisms of one or several aspects of his work.⁴¹ Lortz called attention to some of these reviews himself when, in the preface to the third edition of Die Reformation in Deutschland, he listed a goodly number of favorable reviews, including foreign and even Roman periodicals. Many of these contained constructive criticisms which Lortz attempted to utilize in this edition. Even the sharpest critics of Lortz’s work almost always began with strong praise of his book.⁴²

Protestants received Lortz’s two volumes with approval that approached jubilation. Readers on almost any intellectual level were bound to come across references to it. There was, of course, occasional adverse criticism, some quite brief and some quite detailed; but even more than the Catholics, the Protestant writers maintained a laudatory tone throughout their discussion of Die Reformation in Deutschland.⁴³

In writing his two-volume work Lortz hoped that his efforts would result in more than mere description and interpretation of a past period for its own sake. He wanted to prepare a common ground on which the two confessions could meet in ecumenica1 discussions, to break a path to- ward the Una Sancta. In the conclusion he restated this. “If something of the deepest aims of this book lies beyond its scholarly task, or better is only accomplished through it, it is this, that it might participate in the discussion between the confessions, and might give this discussion new possibilities.”⁴⁴

Lortz’s Contribution to the to the Una Sancta

Lortz’s interest in the Reformation went beyond writing and publication on the specifically academic level. Already since the 1920's he had been giving lectures throughout Germany on the Reformation, attempting to eliminate the inter-confessional polemics so prevalent in this field. One Protestant, in relating how Lortz spoke all over Germany at Una Sancta meetings in the late 1930's, referred to Lortz as “the wandering preacher of the Una Sancta.”⁴⁵

Following his writing and lecturing in the interest of the Una Sancta Movement, Professor Lortz, with the urging of Father Max Metzger, published at the beginning of the war a small booklet of forty-eight theses. The theses contained certain main points based on an historical analysis of the Reformation and its consequences, whose discussion would be especially important and fruitful in an ecumenical sense. Typical of the theses might be the third and the last. “A particular guilt weighs on Catholics in that especially in the beginning of the Reformation the real religious aim of the Evangelicals were not taken seriously enough..”⁴⁶ “Those returning home lose nothing, but rather are enriched; they in turn enrich those to whom they return, namely ‘in all that of positive value which they have embraced and cherished with particular love.’”⁴⁷ Later on in the war, when the Nazis no longer allowed the theses to be printed because of the alleged paper shortage, they were copied and spread by many individual typists and by hectograph.

A second publication flowing directly from Lortz’s lecturing came out in 1948: Die Reformation als religiöses Anliegen Heute, Vier Vorträge im Dienst der Una Sancta ( The Reformation: A Problem for Today, Westminster, Md.: Newman, 1964). This is a group of four lectures on the sources of the Reformation in relationship to Catholicism today. Later, Lortz continued his support of the Una Sancta Movement by publishing in 1950 the fruit of further lectures as Wie Kam es zur Reformation (How the Reformation Came, New York: Herder and Herder, 1964), in which the basic facts and conclusions found in the first part of his earlier larger work are reiterated.

In 1949 Lortz’s reputation was so great that the leader of the Una Sancta Movement, Matthias Laros, addressed to the government a request which he considered absolutely necessary “for the unity of the confessions and internal peace among Germans.” He urged the establishment of a “Reformation History Institute” at one of the universities for the consideration of scholarly questions concerning unity in a comprehensive and objective manner. And Father Lortz, according to Laros, was the one man from either side of the confessional line best suited to direct such an institute. “Lortz must be freed for this great task. This is certainly the desire of all those who have any insight, of those who are intimately concerned with the intellectual-religious unity of our people.”