Religion: Lutherans & Unity

Lutheranism in the U. S. has no more unity than a basket of eggs. To give it the unity of an omelet has long been the dream of many a Lutheran—a dream partly realized in 1918, when several Lutheran bodies were merged into the United Lutheran Church, largest (1,599,102 baptized members) in the land. Last week United Lutherans held their 11th biennial conference in Baltimore. As always, they elected bald, goateed, precise Dr. Frederick Hermann Knubel of Manhattan to be their president. As always, Dr. Knubel, now 68, accepted.

Dr. Knubel cautioned United Lutherans against finding “more pleasure in disagreeing with other Lutherans than in agreeing with them.” He urged them to “discern our three-fold responsibility today, for our inner unity, for unity with all Lutherans and for unity with all Christians.” But unity, he declared, should be on a basis of “extremely studious discrimination.” In the Lutheran basket, the chief egg upon which the United Lutheran Church looks with favor is the American Lutheran Church (some 500,000 members).

Commissions of the two churches have explored bases for unity, have narrowed the differences in their beliefs considerably—but have not eliminated them. Although both believe that the Bible is the Word of God, American Lutherans believe it more fully, their commission holding that Scripture is “one organic whole without contradiction and error.” United Lutherans go no farther than to concede that the Bible is “a complete, perfect, unbreakable whole of which Christ is the centre.” This week the Baltimore conference votes on (and is expected to accept) a statement of faith, prepared by Lutheran theologians, which will place their church on record as more liberal than most other Lutheran bodies. Chief point: “We [do not] place all parts of Scripture on one plane. They have their more important and their less important parts, and the measure of their importance must always be the closeness of their relation to Christ, our Lord.”