Religion: Christianity Writ Large

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.

—Matthew 5:9

For Christians of different communions, the beam and the mote might sometimes seem a more appropriate symbol than the cross. Protestants and Catholics, jealous for their own particular form of Christianity and suspicious of the others’, appear to the world as more Protestant or Catholic than Christian. But last week a Christian (who also happens to be a Roman Catholic priest) showed that Christianity can be writ large, for all Christians.

The Christian was an old man of 75, a famed theologian, a Bavarian named Karl Adam, now in retirement in Germany. In the Catholic weekly, Commonweal, Father Adam blamed his own church as well as the Protestants for the cleavage in Christendom. He even called a Pope to witness, Adrian VI, who wrote in 1523, two years after Luther’s break at the Diet of Worms: “We freely acknowledge that God has allowed this chastisement to come upon His Church because of the sins of men and especially because of the sins of priests and prelates . . . We know well that for many years much that must be regarded with horror has come to pass in this Holy See.”

Blind Obedience. The Catholics have lost much to Protestantism, said Theologian Adam, “all those precious constructive powers, all those souls of deep religious aspiration who have since then worked so fruitfully and creatively within the separated communions.” But a still deeper damage was Catholicism’s apparent shrinkage from a world-wide church to a community of Celtic and Latin peoples. Catholic theology and practical piety suffered, too, by concentrating too much on being anti-Lutheran.

“So it came about that the believing Catholic, over against Lutheran individualism, set special store by the principle of the Church’s authority . . . that he was in danger of regarding the whole of Christianity as a matter of mere blind obedience to the Church . . .” Luther’s doctrine of faith and grace, thinks Adam, frequently led Catholics to overemphasize the importance of works and externals.

No Further. Christian unity, says Father Adam, must be founded on three principles. First, a man must take his own religion seriously, whether Catholic or non-Catholic. “He has no right to look towards another church if he has never taken the trouble to penetrate into the religious life and structure of his own communion and to satisfy his religious needs there first.”

Adam’s second principle is that the striving for unity must not be “a matter of politics or culture or aesthetics or romanticism” but a movement simply of prayer. In the light of Christ, the Catholic will no longer see Luther merely as an apostate. “He will recognize the many lights in his character; his unfathomable reverence for the mystery of God; his tremendous consciousness of his own sin; the holy defiance with which . . . he faced abuse and simony; the heroism with which he risked his life for Christ’s cause; and . . . the natural simplicity and childlike quality of his whole manner of life and his personal piety.”

And, by the same token, Protestants will “realize that it was precisely the Papal power at its fullest development which gathered the world into the dominion of Christ; . . . that without Papal infallibility in matters of faith and morals, the divine revelation would be forever at the mercy of human error and extravagance; that the inner kernel of Papal power . . . is nothing but service of the Church, nothing but a perpetual washing of the feet of the disciples . . .”

Father Adam’s third principle is that “Trusting love, loving trust must be the animating principle of all our relations with each other.”