The Gospel Luther’s Linchpin for Catholicity (original) (raw)

responded, "we are not catholic! That's why Luther changed the phrase of the creed to holy Christian Church." These reactions point to the need to explore again how Luther defined and used the words catholic and Christian within the context of his understanding of ecclesiology and its apostolic task. Some Lutherans might suggest an even bolder approach and heed the advice of James Atkinson. He suggested that it is now time to set Luther free from all the confessional Lutheranism that has accrued around him, and "set him in the centre of a new catholicity, where he once belonged and still belongs." 7 Would, and could, Lutherans dare take up this challenge? Before making such a decision, it would be helpful to explore how the word catholic was used in the period before the reformation, and how Luther himself used it in shaping his theology and developing his ecclesiology. The starting point is to look at how the word catholic was translated and used in the period immediately prior to the beginnings of the reformation. Matters of Language: Catholic or Christian? The common perception today asserts that Luther set about with clarity of purpose, almost from the outset, his task of promoting the gospel over the Catholic Church. The opposition he encountered in the first years of the reformation struggle merely strengthened his resolve. He was warned at Augsburg by Cardinal Cajetan in the fall of 1518 that his views on justifying faith amounted to "creating a new church." Further, when forced by his opponent Johann Eck at the Leipzig disputation in 1519 into admitting his belief that Jan Huss (†1415) was no heretic, Luther knew that he was firmly beyond the Catholic pale even before the papal condemnations started arriving on his desk. Any residual desire he might have had to claim the title Catholic in his attempts to restore the church to its original calling was finally abandoned when he translated the creeds into German, removing the word catholic as a defining adjective of the church. This is the common perception of Luther's view. This perception is partially correct. Luther did indeed delete catholic as a descriptor and definer of the church in the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, and substituted, in its place, the word Christian. Furthermore, he was entirely consistent in this substitution-which is in itself remarkable because unwavering consistency is not a characteristic one normally associates with Luther. One must therefore assume that replacing catholic with Christian in his translation of the creedal formulas into German was a deliberate decision on his part. Luther never gives a theological explanation for this translation, other than to claim that it was the best translation available. As he notes in his 1538 treatise on The Three Creeds: "[Catholic (Catholica)] can have no better translation than Christian (Christlich) as was done heretofore. That is, although Christians are to be found in the whole world, the pope rages against that and wants to have his court alone called the Christian Church. He lies, however, like his idol, the devil." 8 Here 2