Religion: Luther

Lutherans were having a dreadful row over nothing less than the soundness of Martin Luther himself. Last month, in the Christian Century, Lutheran Martin Schroeder, onetime Nebraska legislator, commemorated the 400th anniversary of Luther’s death by echoing London’s “Gloomy Dean” William R. Inge, who in 1944 declared that not Hitler but Luther was Germany’s “worst evil genius.” Charged Inge: “Lutheranism is essentially German. . . . It worships a God who is neither just nor merciful.”

“These are acid words and blasphemy to Lutheran ears,” admitted Schroeder—but added that he agreed. Luther, he said,

1) made the church servile to the state,

2) taught that the state’s laws must be obeyed even if they are bad or unjust,

3) had, through separation of church and state, made his followers in the U.S. indifferent to the social implications of the Gospel.

Other Lutherans at once flooded the Christian Century with letters branding the attack “repulsive,” “tactless,” “inconsistent.” Highlights of the rebuttals:

¶ “It certainly was not wise . . . to help instill in the minds of the unthinking mob the aspersion that Lutheranism is on the side of capital . . . and consistently anti-labor.”

¶ “Why did the evil fruit of fascism first appear on the tree of Roman Catholic culture?”

¶ “Why did the doctrine of divine-right absolutism originate in non-Lutheran countries?”

Last week the prosecution got the last word. The Century printed a letter (from a Presbyterian) reminding the Lutherans of the “classic discussion of this topic” by the eminent Lutheran theologian, Ernst Troeltsch, who in his Social Teaching of the Christian Churches (1912) “agrees with Schroeder and the Gloomy Dean.”