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Theologically Specific. What do the Lutheran converts find in their new churches? They find, above all. two things still relatively unchanged—liturgy and theology. Martin Luther, a prolific composer, himself handed down the most famous Lutheran hymn: A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. Bach is the pride of musical Lutherans, and the tradition continues. Just off the press, with a sellout first edition of 635,000 copies, is a brand-new Service Book and Hymnal more than twelve years in the making, with 602 hymns, many of them new.
The new Lutherans also find an emphasis on disciplined thinking about the nature of God and man that is anything but typical of U.S. Protestantism. Says Lutheran Jaroslav Pelikan. professor of Historical Christianity at the University of Chicago's Federated Theological Faculty: "We are theologically specific and theologically concerned. We are not concerned with positive thinking, with hustle-bustle for its own sake. We are not just a chummy group. The interesting thing is that while the historic differences remain. Lutherans have begun to recognize that they are closer to Roman Catholics in many ways than they are to other Protestants."
the Word. Lutherans' "theological specifics" come directly from Martin Luther. who through his stormy life faced up to the problems that Protestantism has been coping with ever since.
Against Rome, Luther denied the church's administration over God's grace —either to grant it or withhold it. Not church, he held, but scripture is the true channel of grace—the Word and man's will lead to faith, and faith in Jesus Christ will redeem man from his sins. So sure did he feel of "justification by faith" that in his translation of the Bible he dared to insert the word "alone"' on his own authority. Against what he saw as a privileged caste of priests, he maintained "the priesthood of all believers.'' and against the Roman institution of canon law. he held that each Christian had a vocation to change the world with his own daily life.
Luther recognized only two sacraments: baptism and communion. And in the Lord's Supper he insisted that the bread was not changed into Christ's body by the priest but revealed as Christ's body by the faith of the recipient. Nevertheless. Luther did not give an inch to those who saw- the Eucharist as symbolic only. ''This is my body,'' he wrote in chalk on the conference table at which he met with his fellow reformer Zwingli in 1529. and Luther always maintained that when the Christian believer received the host, the bread contained the body of Christ as a glove contains a hand. Luther also stood fast against such other variants of Protestantism as the humanists represented by Erasmus, and the radicals like Nicolaus Storch and Marcus Stubner, who wanted to do away with the apparatus of the church altogether. The ordained minister and the liturgy. Luther maintained, were necessary to the sacraments and the sacraments were necessary to the Christian.