What the Lutherans and the Reformed can learn from one another

Christian Century, June 4, 1997 by Gabriel Fackre

Ecumenical decisions will be made in North America this summer that could "begin a dramatic new chapter in the near five-century history of the Reformation." So says Gunther Gassmann, former director of the World Council of Churches' Faith and Order Commission. Gassman was contemplating the proposals before the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America which call for establishing "full communion" with the Episcopal Church and with three Reformed churches--the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Reformed Church in America and the United-Church of Christ--and which would mutually lift the Lutheran-Roman Catholic condemnations of the 16th century.

The Lutheran-Reformed Formula of Agreement requires approval from the four churches involved, all of which will meet in assembly this summer--the RCA and PCUSA in June, the UCC in July, and the ELCA in August. If any one of the church bodies votes the proposal down the agreement will be scuttled.

Why, from this Reformed participant's viewpoint, is the Lutheran-Reformed agreement so important? The document spelling out the Lutheran-Reformed discussions, A Common Calling, speaks of "mutual affirmation and mutual admonition." Mutual affirmation means the two parties have enough in common to take the stipulated steps forward. Mutual admonition means they acknowledge the positive import of historic differences.

Can the differences which heretofore have been the cause of separation be viewed in a new ecumenical context as legitimate varying perspectives on the commonalities and thus not church-dividing? More than that, are the differences needed emphases, charisma in the church catholic, brought to the fore by historical circumstance? And even more: can these historic differences be regarded as complementary to, and even corrective of, one another?

Mutual affirmation is a standard theme in ecumenical negotiations, and is integral also to the Lutheran-Reformed proposal: "If you hold to these essentials, we can take a step toward you." Mutual admonition goes further, requiring the partners to affirm the differences as well as the similarities, thus forswearing inordinate claims that have said to the other, "I have no need of you" (1 Cor. 12:21). While we may be right in what we affirm, we may be wrong in what we deny or ignore. Thus, if one's own Corinthian charism does not, in principle, preclude the other, the time has come to cease denying or ignoring it.

By the same token, admonition is the warning to the other that the exclusion of one's own gift is a wound in the Body of Christ and an impoverishment of the gospel. The tough-mindedness in this proposal prompts ecumenist Harding Myer to say that "there is definitely something new about it. This `new' clement is that now a clearly positive function is being attributed to the differences, the function of mutual admonition, or mutual correction, of being `no-trespassing signs'" (Ecumenical Trends, September 1994).

Lutheran-Reformed diversity is manifest in matters that run from sacramental theology, worship practice, confessional subscription and understandings of grace to concepts of social witness and personal piety. One way to sum up the differences is by utilizing some historic fighting words: the Lutheran finitum capax infiniti (the finite is capable of receiving the infinite) vs. the Reformed finitum non capax infiniti (the finite is not capable of receiving the infinite). Put otherwise, Lutherans have accented Christ's continuing solidarity with us in ecclesial tangibilities. The Reformed stress Christ's continuing sovereignty over us in both church and world.

Some early remarks by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth develop just this distinction. Identifying his own Lutheran perspective, Bonhoeffer contrasts Barth's stress on God's "freedom on the far side of us" with his own view of God in Christ as "haveable, graspable within his Word within the Church" (Act and Being). Barth, on the other hand, in a discussion of confessions, asserts the Reformed non capax, contending that historic texts, while a resource for interpreting scripture, are accountable to a sovereignty beyond them and thus reformable. For Barth, therefore, there is "no Augsburg Confession . . . no Formula of Concord . . . which might later, like the Lutheran, come to possess the odor of sanctity" (The Word of God and the Word of Man).

The difference between the Lutheran emphasis on Christ's solidarity with us and the Reformed emphasis on divine sovereignty over us can be tracked in several key issues:

* Debates on the Eucharist: Lutherans insist on the ubiquity of Christ's human nature, which means that Christ's body and blood are present "in, with and under" the elements. In contrast, the Reformed insist that believers participate in the body and blood by an ascent through the power of the Spirit to the divine-human person who sits at the right hand of God, "above" the elements. Mutual admonition means that Lutherans have a right to worry that the Reformed stress on sovereignty will lead to the dissolution of the eucharistic Presence. The Reformed have a right to be concerned that the Lutheran stress on Christ's "haveability" will domesticate the Presence. The differences are real. They are necessary testimonies to an aspect of eucharistic teaching and are warnings about the other's reductionist temptations.