Preface: Protestants, Sì! Reformation, No!

October 31, 2017, marked the 500th anniversary of the symbolic beginning of the event known as the Protestant Reformation. Legend suggests, though history might debate its veracity, that on this date the Augustinian monk Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the church door at Wittenburg. Many Protestants with a historic sensibility, even if they are not Lutheran, look back on Luther's reaction to Catholic authority as something ordained by God to reform the Catholic Church. A Presbyterian pastor friend of mine posted on his Facebook page an announcement that over the next weekend his congregation "welcomes the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther to our pulpit in honor of the 500th anniversary of his 95 Theses. His sermon will be from John 3:16." There is a bit of an apology involved in this invitation: "Many of Luther's sermons are rather polemical, with lots of jabs at the Pope and other Roman Catholic doctrines and practices. I chose this one because it clearly and beautifully sets forth the doctrine of justification by faith alone without all the polemical barbs."

It is clear from my friend's announcement that drinking Luther straight (even in sermons) is a bit of a difficult thing in our more ecumenical age, since so much of his purported rediscovery of the Gospel of Grace was communicated in a format that, to modern ears, often sounds rather graceless. Readers can consult the "Luther Insult Generator" online to get as large a sampling of barbs as they can handle by reading the barb on screen and then clicking on the "Insult Me Again!" button.¹ A nice example from Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil (wherein the titled work is itself an insult): "I was frightened and thought I was dreaming, it was such a thunderclap, such a great horrid fart did you let go here! You certainly pressed with great might to let out such a thunderous fart—it is a wonder that it did not tear your hole and belly apart!"

To focus on the harshness or crassness of Luther is somewhat beside the point in ecumenical discussions, however, since late medieval debate had standards of politeness in language that would not necessarily be foreign to today's cable news shows or even the polemics of Pope Francis. Like Luther, who was extremely focused on grace and yet found his tongue running to insults, The Pope Francis Little Book of Insults shows that our modern "pope of mercy" has a talent for abuse that can tend toward the philosophical but also toward the potty: "self-absorbed Promethean neo-Pelagian" and "fomenter of coprophagia" flow out of the contemporary papal mouth one after the other.² (I confess to a bit of trepidation when I see "Specialist of the Logos!" listed at the site, but remind myself that I am merely "Editor of Logos," exclamation point not included.)

Aside from the throwing-stones-from-glass-houses problem, attacking Luther personally doesn't work because most Protestants don't consider him a saint or imitable except insofar as they think that he "rediscovered" the original Pauline understanding of justification by faith and rejected an overweening papacy and a Catholic Church that had lost sight of scriptural faith. As the late French convert priest Louis Bouyer observed, "Luther is not looked on as a model in every detail of his life and teaching, but only in the manner in which, at a certain period of his life, he resolved a particular problem."³ For Protestants, a proper understanding of justification is the doctrine by which the Church stands or falls. Given that Luther wrote so much over such a long period of time, what Protestants make of his insights regarding that doctrine can vary greatly. Modern historical scholarship has found that Luther's own understanding of the workings of grace, faith, and love prior to 1530 were much more Catholic than were his later, more radicalized writings. A school of Finnish Lutheran scholars working over the last few decades has focused on the early Luther and found that the essence...