Transcript

In his 2013 Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, our Holy Father Pope Francis reminded us of what he called the fundamental message of the Gospel.

That message is, quote, the personal love of God who became man.

Now, in popular usage, friendship has come to denote something like acquaintance or familiarity.

These days, it might even mean something like mild interest and or approval, as in a Facebook friend.

To friend has become a verb, one that can be accomplished with a single impersonal click, and so too can its undoing unfriend.

Today, technology connects human beings in ways that only decades ago were the stuff of science fiction.

And yet, social media has too often proved itself to be, in many respects, an obstacle to the intimacy of real friendship.

When we think of the language of friendship, then I think it's safe to say the currency has been debased.

If we're going to appreciate the significance of Pope Francis's summary of the gospel, we need to recognize friendship's true meaning.

Friendship in the fullest sense involves far more than benign acquaintance, shared interests, or even sincere well-wishing.

It entails reciprocity.

Indeed, a genuine sharing of life, that is, communion.

God's friendship, then, which the Holy Father tells us is basic to the gospel's message, is more than acquaintance with the divine.

It is the startling claim that God wishes to share his life with us.

Aristotle famously denied that human beings could be friends with God.

This is eminently reasonable.

God, after all, is not much like me.

God is infinite, eternal, perfect, and all powerful.

I am annoyingly bound by space and time, painfully limited in physical strength, intellectual ability, and moral virtue.

Modern astronomy has shown me to be far punier than Aristotle could have guessed.

Who could God be to me?

Creator, of course.

Benevolent provider, why not?

Righteous lawgiver, yes.

Even magnanimous and patient forgiver of faults.

But friend?

It's hard to imagine what friendship with God could possibly look like.

Yet, biblical revelation, which perfects and far surpasses that which even the most brilliant exercise of human reason can attain, presents us with the startling claim that God makes friends Abraham, our father in faith, believed God and dramatically proved his faith, and he thereby gained the title friend of God.

The book of Exodus tells us that the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face as a man speaks to his friend.

In the biblical narrative, Abraham and Moses are more than private, privileged individuals.

They are representatives.

Joseph Ratzinger, whom we now know as Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, once noted that as we trace the progression of the Old Testament, we encounter the striking convergence of two apparently conflicting general trajectories.

On the one hand, the infinite gap between the transcendent creator of the universe and us human beings, is recognized ever more deeply.

On the other hand, at the very same time, the metaphorical language that describes the covenant relationship between God and Israel becomes ever more intimate.

It is like the relationship between father and son, between mother and child, between husband and wife.

Indeed, it surpasses these.

Jeremiah 31.3 And the prophets are replete with such moving declarations.

The Book of Wisdom helps us to see that this covenant relationship is itself a privileged expression of the divine wisdom by which God orders all things sweetly.

Friendship with God is granted by wisdom, which in every generation passes into holy souls.

That's Wisdom chapter 7. In the fullness of time, This covenantal plan of divine wisdom came to its culmination when eternal wisdom himself became one of us, loved us to the end by laying down his life for us, and invited us to share in the friendship of his love.

Most stunning of all, this friendship, lavished on us by Jesus and identified as the decisive characteristic of his followers, is itself a communication of the very love that God himself is as a trinity of persons.

The Father, Jesus tells us, loves us with the very love with which he loves the Son.

Jesus loves us with the very love with which he loves the Father.

The Holy Spirit unites us to Christ and pours God's love into our hearts, enabling us to love God and one another with charity, which is divine friendship.

This is so amazing that the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls it God's innermost secret.

Quote, The ultimate goal of the covenant relationship we see unfolded in the pages of the Bible is to mediate to us human beings, puny as we are, a participation in the eternal friendship of the Blessed Trinity.

The offer of friendship with God is at the very heart of Christian faith and life, and the account we give of this friendship will have profound consequences.

What are the conditions of this friendship?

How does God make us his friends?

How do we make friends with him?

How is this friendship nourished?

What does it look like lived out in Christian life as individual believers and as the church, the body of Christ?

These questions are important in their own right.

As we approach October 31st, 2017, the 500th anniversary of what we conventionally identify as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, I would also suggest that they are decisive for understanding central divergences between the teaching of Martin Luther and the Catholic and Apostolic faith.

Exploring Luther's view of friendship with God helps illuminate just what was at stake in his defiance of the Church's teaching authority and in her response.

A couple of notes before proceeding.

First, I'm going to focus almost exclusively on Martin Luther himself.

Luther shouldn't be confused with Lutheranism, which is a complex, diverse, and evolving tradition or set of traditions.

much less does Luther speak for all Protestants.

Still, much is to be gained in the service of Christian dialogue and the search for unity by looking for the roots of Protestantism in its seminal figure.

Second, I'm going to approach these questions from a theological point of view rather than a historical one.

By 1513, Luther began working out his distinctive theology.

While there were certainly developments and wrinkles that needed further ironing out, Luther's convictions were established in their essentials by 1517, and they reached a certain maturity by 1522 or so.

The historical picture is muddied a bit in the 1520s by the emergence of Protestant theologies that appealed to Luther's own principles but came to conclusions far more radical than his own.

This prompted Luther to place an even more pronounced emphasis on the role of legitimate authority and sacramental piety.

Nonetheless, Luther's foundational theological convictions and the structure of his thought about matters touching on friendship with God remained largely consistent from the mid-1510s to his death in 1546. How then does Luther think about friendship with God?

So first, how do we come to know God and enter into friendship with Him?

What are the ongoing dynamics of this friendship?

And third, what is the role of the sacraments and of the church in this friendship?

Now, the first step toward a friendship is, of course, the introductions.

To be friends with someone, we need to get to know one another.

Naturally, God knows us more intimately than we know ourselves, so there's no problem on that side.

But to love God, we must come to know God.

How do we come to know God?

Luther distinguishes between two ways in which human beings seek to know God, the theology of glory and the theology of the cross.

Luther's theology of the cross, laid out in the theses of the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, is sometimes popularly interpreted as simply reminding us that human reason is insufficient to know God as God wishes to be known.

In fact, it is far more than this.

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that God's special self-disclosure in the history of the people of Israel, culminating in Christ and the apostles, completed and transcended what could be known by human reason unaided by grace.

The ability of human reason to know God in at least a limited way has been damaged by the Fall, but not totally destroyed.

Grace does not destroy nature.

It heals, perfects, and elevates nature.

In this, the angelic doctor stood on the shoulders of a millennium of explicit reflection that we can trace in Christian literature beginning with the apologists of the second century.

This is true to the very form of divine revelation.

The relationship between philosophy and those revealed truths that surpass philosophy is already being creatively negotiated in the pages of both Testaments of the Bible.

Two centuries after Aquinas' death, Luther felt with some justification, no pun intended, that certain strands of rationalism had come to choke off and deaden a living, biblically invigorated theology in the schools.

He reacted in the strongest terms.

Classically, The first chapter of St. Paul's letter to the Romans had provided a key warrant for the legitimacy of natural theology.

In verses 19 and 20, the Apostle writes, what can be known about God is plain to human beings because God has shown it to them.

Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.

God's existence and creative power can be known then by means of thoughtful observation of creation itself.

And this is indeed what the church teaches.

Not so fast, says Luther.

Look what St. Paul goes on to say human beings do with this knowledge.

Quote, Although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him.

Instead, according to verses 22 and 23, they turned to idolatry.

Sure, human reason helped them know a little about God, but a fat lot of good it did them, and a fat lot of good it can do to us.

Luther diagnoses this tendency to idolatry as rooted in the difference between human love, which leads to the theology of glory, and divine love, which gives us the theology of the cross.

We humans are needy, incomplete creatures, and so we reach out to the good we perceive in another This kind of self-interested human love stands in starkest contrast with divine charity, which loves completely freely, with no self-interest.

As long as we seek to know God according to human love, we may accurately discern God's power, majesty, and beauty, but we will inevitably distort this knowledge, for we will refer God's glory That is, our search for God and his glory is really a pursuit of self-realization, self-fulfillment, self-satisfaction.

We turn God's glory, which is the end of all things, into a means, an instrument in our self-centered pursuit of happiness.

This, for Luther, is the theology of glory.

The theology of the cross, in contrast, Seeks God in a way commensurate with divine love, which, because it is not needy, is radically self-emptying.

Rather than stretching out toward God through the exercise of reason and the accomplishment of good works, the theology of the cross teaches us to embrace the darkness of faith and to acknowledge the worthlessness, indeed the mortal sinfulness, of all of our best efforts to please God.

If we followed Luther's train of thought this far, we can see how it leads directly to his signature teaching that we are justified, that is, made friends of God, Luther sought always to ensure absolute clarity about the fact that God loves us, as he loves all things, absolutely freely.

Unlike human beings, who seek the real, the good, the lovable, and then love it, God's love turns sovereignly toward non-being, wickedness, unloveliness.

As long as we cling to the presumption that we are already lovely or can possibly make ourselves lovely through good works, we are turned in on ourselves, to use a vivid expression of St. Augustine's, that Luther makes his own.

We thereby effectively resist the advances of God's love.

Let us recall that Luther was reacting to a theological and monastic formation that appears contrary to the Church's officially defined doctrine.

to have inculcated a version of the Pelagian heresy, the idea that we must, by piling up works of piety and self-denial, adorn ourselves with the beauty of virtue so that God will look on us with love and favor.

The righteousness or justice of God meant only one thing to the young Luther, and he claims that no Catholic ever told him otherwise.

The righteousness of God means that God is a just judge who unfailingly punishes sin.

In a conscientious monk like Luther, this was a disastrous recipe for scrupulosity.

Apparently, he once made a confession that to his confessor's exasperation lasted for six hours, as he agonizingly searched his conscience for every trace of divine wrath-inducing sin.

The pathos of such a misguided formation is still palpable many years later.

In 1535, quote, by forcing many to go on doing good works until they would not feel any sin at all, Catholic teachers drove to the point of insanity many who tried with all their might to become completely righteous in a formal sense but could not accomplish it.

Innumerable persons, even among the authors of this wicked dogma, were driven into despair at the hour of death "...which is what would have happened to me if Christ had not looked at me with mercy and liberated me from my error."

It is absolutely essential to note that the error Luther refers to here is not the fear and despair that he experienced as a result of trying and failing to keep the law, but rather the notion that one's efforts could bring one to a place of not feeling any sin at all.

Fear and despair are precisely what one should feel when one looks into the mirror of the law.

As Luther explains in his 1520 treatise, The Freedom of a Christian, quote, The entire scripture of God is divided into two parts, commandments and promises.

The commandments are intended to teach man to know himself.

"...that through them he may recognize his inability to do good and may despair of his own ability."

It is only when we are thus humbled and reduced to nothing in our own eyes that we are prepared for the second part of Scripture, the promise of the Gospel.

The only way to be freed from the insanity and despair produced by attempting to make oneself acceptable to God by means of works is to respond to the promise of mercy by faith alone.

By letting go of any and all claim to justice by works, that is, a righteousness found in oneself, one finally opens oneself up to the free gifts of God's love, to know God as a friend, a forgiving and loving Father, rather than as an enemy, a vengeful judge.

Secure in this undeserved divine favor, which in this life is never in any way predicated upon one's own righteousness.

The Christian is in fact enabled to love God and neighbor freely, without the threat or coercion of the law, without seeking his own salvation.

The Christian is finally able, Luther says, quote, to serve God joyfully and without thought of gain, in love that is not constrained.

He does the works out of spontaneous love in obedience to God.

Close quote.

Human self-seeking love, the theology of the cross, is hereby overcome.

Faith unites the believer to Christ as to a spouse, and since spouses share everything, the Christian already possesses all divine goodness.

There is therefore no need to pursue self-fulfillment, and we are freed to love as God loves.

Now, I suspect that many of us might at this point imagine Luther's conception of Christian life to go something like this.

Step 1. Be confronted with the word of God's law and realize that you are utterly incapable of fulfilling it.

Experience terror and despair before the demands of God's righteousness.

Step 2. Let your terrorized conscience drive you to the mercy of Christ.

This isn't totally wrong, but there's more to it than this.

Recall that the righteousness received by faith is precisely Christ God reckons it as ours because of our marriage by faith with Christ, but it is not and never becomes truly our own.

As long as we're in this body of death, we remain in ourselves sinful and therefore hateful to God.

Even after we place our faith in Christ, says Luther, Sin remains in us which God particularly hates.

Because of the Christian's marriage to Christ through faith alone, God considers the righteousness and holiness that belong to Christ to belong also to the believer.

But insofar as our good works, even as Christians, are tainted by some degree of self-love, human love, we remain in ourselves utterly sinful.

Thus the Christian person Consider the dynamics a Christian's relationship with God, as Luther describes it here, will take on.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Christ protects the Christian from God.

And yet, at the very same time, it is in Christ that we receive the love of that very same God.

This tension, this struggle, is for Luther at the very heart of Christian life, and it remains true throughout our life on earth.

This is why, as Luther scholar Timothy J. Wengert notes, Luther alters the standard itinerary of Lectio Divina.

Back in the 12th century, a Carthusian monk named Guigo crystallized the monastic tradition of encountering God's Word in Scripture.

We listen carefully and repeatedly for God's voice in the text through reading.

We meditate on it.

We respond to it in prayer.

And finally, we open ourselves up to contemplation, in which by grace we rest in God's loving presence.

Luther was suspicious of contemplative solitude, which he worried lent itself to the theology of glory, to a false spirituality of self-satisfaction before God that was unsuitable for human beings who, though righteous by faith, remain simultaneously sinners and enemies of God.

In Wengert's words, quote, neither illumination nor contemplation, but rather spiritual attack, tentatio, Concluded Luther's engagement with Scripture.

This is as it should be, as it must be, for Christian life is lived as a dance between despair and hope, a constant and arduous dynamic tension between the terror of God's law and the consolation of God's promise of forgiveness in Christ.

Lose the terror and you lose the consolation, for you are no longer driven to Christ's mercy.

Put otherwise, in Luther's view, you can't be God's friend unless you recognize that you are, in fact, his enemy.

This is fundamental to Luther's teaching.

Well before his break with the church, already in 1516, a year and a half before the posting of the 95 Theses, Luther wrote to a fellow Augustinian monk, quote, Watch out for yourself that you do not one day strive for such purity that you do not even see yourself as a sinner This dialectical approach to the Christian life can even lead Luther on occasion to dispense spiritual counsel that we can only describe as shocking.

Jerome Veller was a protege of Luther's, who for a period of eight years lived with Luther and his wife, the ex-nun Katharina von Bora, and served as tutor to the Luther children.

Like Luther, Veller had a tender conscience, and he suffered terribly from temptations to despair and blasphemy.

In 1530, Luther wrote Veller a letter containing the following advice to handle the situation.

I quote, Whenever the devil vexes you with these thoughts, seek the company of others, or drink more, joke, make nonsense, or engage in some other form of merriment.

Sometimes one must drink more, play, or make nonsense.

Close quote.

Now Luther is usually careful to make it clear that he doesn't want to encourage sin as such, but notice how much sense his counsel to Jerome Veller makes in light of Luther's understanding of the Christian's fellowship with God.

That fellowship is grounded solely, that friendship, excuse me, is grounded solely in faith, which is produced only by constant recognition of our enmity with God because of our inability to keep the law.

This paves the way for a moral calculus that makes some sin an effective way to remind us of what we must never forget, that we are always in sin no matter how much good we do.

That's a quote from Luther.

Luther thus makes the mind-bending assertion that in some situations to sin impudently is what is needed to stick it in the devil's eye.

For it drives us back to faith alone in Christ's mercy.

And this is all that finally matters.

For as Luther puts it, quote, Only ungodliness and unbelief of heart and no outer work make a Christian guilty and a damnable servant of sin.

Yet more clearly, quote, Even if he wanted to, a baptized Christian could not lose his salvation, however much he sinned, "...unless he refused to believe, for no sin can condemn him save unbelief alone."

What is always and everywhere the one thing necessary in the Christian life, therefore, is the exercise of trusting faith in response to the word of God's promise.

This is the sum total, Luther insists, of God's dealings with human beings.

In a 1519 letter to George Spallatin, Luther writes, quote, This fundamental conviction is the basis for Luther's thoroughgoing reevaluation of the sacraments.

It is well known that though he thought they were useful and even important as ecclesiastical rites, Luther rejected the sacramental nature of confirmation, the anointing of the sick, matrimony, holy orders, and eventually penance.

But it is perhaps less well known why Luther did so.

I take it that most assume it has to do with the principle of sola scriptura, and the question of how securely one can establish each of these rights in the text of the New Testament.

This is part of the story, but it's not the whole story, nor even the most important part.

Sacraments are traditionally defined as efficacious signs of grace.

But for Luther, grace refers to nothing real in us.

It isn't something properly given to us.

It is God's favorable disposition towards us.

As a sign of grace, then, a sacrament is by definition an announcement of that favorable disposition, the word of grace, the word of the promise of mercy, a proclamation under a visible sign of the mercy of Christ in the gospel for the remission of sins.

The sacraments for Luther thus conform to his principle that all God's dealings with human beings are in the word of promise and the reception of that word by faith.

The sacraments then are nothing more Luther would in fact have preferred to speak of just one sacrament celebrated under three or two signs.

Baptism is the primordial sign by which a human being is marked with the promise of God.

Now, infant baptism was a neuralgic point for Luther.

One way of understanding why he clung to it Even when Anabaptist views may appear to be more rigorous applications of Luther's own teaching on the sacraments, is that by means of infant baptism, one's entire life can be lived under this sign of faith, emphasizing the gratuity of God's gift of salvation.

Of course, that last point is one with which we as Catholics can certainly agree.

Penance, insofar as Luther accepted it provisionally and for a time as a sacrament, As for the Mass, Luther held, again, that all that is truly essential is the promise of mercy, of the Lord's self-sacrifice for us, and our response of faith.

Despite his denial of the doctrine of transubstantiation, Luther did believe Jesus was really present in the bread and wine of the Lord's Supper.

And because it is so precious, he reserved a special pitch of fulmination for the Catholic belief in the sacrificial character of the Mass.

For in Luther's mind, this was an enormous perversion of the Gospel.

This is my body given for you.

This cup is the New Testament in my blood, which is poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.

This is a word of promise to which we must, we can only come as empty-handed beggars to receive mercy.

Seeing it as a sacrifice for Luther was to transform it into a work to be offered to God.

This turns the gospel on its head for Luther.

We sinners become the givers, the merciful God the recipient.

Now Luther never abandoned his personal devotion to baptism and the Lord's Supper, and he had nothing but impatience for other Protestants who downplayed them.

His hostility toward the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, who held the supper to be purely symbolic, is famous.

At a meeting with him at Marburg in 1529, Luther pointedly wrote on the tablecloth, Hoc est enim corpus meum, for this is my body.

Yet it seems undeniable that Luther planted the seeds for such devaluation by denying the sacraments any objective or unique mediation.

Recall, all divine human interaction takes place in the interface of word and faith.

Luther himself asserts that, quote, can have and use the Word or Testament apart from the sign or sacrament, so that one can even hold Mass every day, every hour.

At the end of the day, sacramental mediation is effaced, and the sacraments themselves become dispensable.

Plenty of Protestants drew that conclusion.

At the conclusion of a brand new book by a Lutheran that presents itself as friendly to the sacraments, We read that sacraments are essentially pictures, God's flannelgraph, if you know what that means.

It's a Sunday school tool where you have sort of felt figurines that you put on a flannel background and tell the story this way.

They're God's flannelgraph, portraying the gospel story in ways those with childlike understanding can comprehend.

This position avoids what the author calls the pitfalls of mechanical ritualism, which seems to mean Catholicism.

Does this mean that those who have advanced beyond childlike understanding may not need the sacraments?

The great 20th century Catholic theologian and former Lutheran minister, Father Louis Bouyer, worried about this very thing.

At least in his experience and estimation of the varieties of Protestantism, quote, the more spiritual Protestants are, the more they tend, in fact, to neglect the sacraments, close quote.

This view of the sacraments, in turn, affects how Luther views the church.

The church is not, in the first place, the body of Christ that mediates Christ's life to her individual members.

Instead, Luther teaches, quote, The church exists where God's word, by such faith, is rightly preached and confessed.

The church, then, is essentially an aggregation, the sum total of individual believers Remember, Luther does assert over and over that Christians can and will abound in good works done in the spontaneous freedom of those who have been liberated from the law's coercion, and so can love God and others without self-interest.

This is to love like God loves.

Luther teaches that believers are thus enabled to love one another as Christ has loved them, purely, with no ulterior motive.

Like Christ, we can empty ourselves and be Christ to our neighbors and thus form a society of friendship built on friendship with Christ.

Now that I've sketched out Luther's teaching on friendship with God, we've sort of traced it from how we know and love God, to how we receive it, and then to how it is nourished in the sacraments and expressed in the Church.

Let me offer a brief commentary on how Catholics might respond to Luther's distinctive theology on at least some of these points.

Like Luther, Catholics believe that the glory of God is revealed uniquely and supremely in the self-giving love of Christ's sacrifice on the cross.

and vindicated in his resurrection and ascension.

God is love, writes St. John.

In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through him.

In this is love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins.

Natural human conceptions of love will fall short of the character of divine love, which is visible to quote Paul in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself.

The New Testament scholar Michael Gorman has pointed out that the Greek behind that line, though he was in the form of God, can equally be translated because.

Our human expectations, distorted as they are by sin, tell us that self-emptying love is an inappropriate, a shocking way for a deity to behave, and so we naturally interpret the hymn as meaning exclusively that Christ humbled himself even though he was God, in spite of his divinity.

Gorman suggests that as we grow in our knowledge of God through the crucified Christ, our expectations are rearranged.

And we begin to see that, quote, at the deepest level, the although is in fact a because.

Christ Jesus did what he did because that is what it means to be in the form of God, close quote.

Jesus thus exposes Satan's error, which became also the error of our first parents.

The error is that divinity is something to be grasped for oneself, to be seized and exploited.

This insight, it seems to me, guards against Luther's concern about a theology of glory.

Or better, it points the way to a synthesis of what Luther saw as simple opposition.

Is it really the case that we mustn't, as St. Paul says in Romans 2.7, seek for glory and honor and immortality?

Paul says we should there.

Does this involve us in an inescapably sinful search for self-fulfillment?

Or is it rather the case that instead of abandoning the search for glory, we learn to recognize it in and as the love revealed on the cross.

It is true that in a sinful world, the downward movement of God's self-emptying, loving humility and the upward movement of our entrance into a share in the life of the Blessed Trinity places a paradox at the heart of Christian faith and spirituality.

God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom.

His power is made perfect in weakness.

We must lose our lives to save them.

One worries, though, that in Luther, paradox hardens into contradiction.

Additionally, I would suggest that acceptance of our need for self-fulfillment is part and parcel of accepting our creatureliness.

You have made us for yourself, Saint Augustine famously prayed, and our heart is restless Until it rests in you.

Made in His image and likeness, we are to love with God's love, but in a creaturely way.

We are not God, and we cannot love like Him in every respect.

In the words of C.S. Lewis, quote, Close quote.

This, of course, was not Luther's intention.

He insists, famously, we are beggars.

But it does expose a deep theme in the fabric of his analysis of our condition and calling as creatures made in God's image.

Reflecting on St. Thomas Aquinas' teaching on the love of God, Jean-Pierre Tourel makes a point that might have assuaged Luther's anxieties about turning God into a tool of our self-satisfaction.

Quote, To will God for myself If human beings as human beings can love with God's love, then we can understand why, in classical Christian teaching, It is not faith alone, but faith informed by charity that justifies, that makes us truly friends of God, not simultaneously friends and enemies, by giving us a participation in his life.

That's the meaning of grace, not just God's favorable disposition towards us, but the gift of a share in his very life.

This is what the grace of justification means for us.

Now let's be crystal clear.

The Catholic Church has taught repeatedly and with full dogmatic authority that we cannot justify ourselves by our efforts, nor can we earn the grace of justifying faith.

These are gifts of God.

But the grace he gives us is not simply his favor.

It is a real share in his own life of love, in the friendship of the Blessed Trinity.

In a 2008 Wednesday audience, Pope Benedict XVI said that, quote, Luther's phrase, faith alone, is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love, close quote.

And yet, when it comes to justification, Luther insists on this very opposition, quote, where they speak of charity, we speak of faith, close quote.

When Luther imagines our marriage with Christ by faith, he explicitly and emphatically excludes charity from the bridal chamber.

Faith alone goes in.

Charity must wait outside.

But in the teaching of the fathers and doctors of the church, I would argue of the apostles and of the Lord himself, what faith receives by grace is God himself, the Holy Spirit pouring his love As St. Thomas teaches, charity is our friendship with God.

This brings me now to my last couple of points on the sacraments and the church.

And I know I said I would avoid history, but I hope you'll allow me a brief excursus.

As you know, we're approaching October 31st, the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther's nailing of his 95 theses concerning the power of indulgences to the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church, the home, ironically enough, of Frederick the Wise's stupendous collection of indulgence-enriched relics.

You may not realize that today, October 12th, marks the 499th anniversary of another important moment early in the history of the Reformation.

In 1518, Luther was required to appear at an imperial diet in Augsburg to be examined by the papal legate Cardinal Tommaso de Vigo, better known as Cajetan after his birthplace in Gaeta.

The examination began on October 12th, today.

Now, Cajetan's acumen or lack thereof is to this day sometimes an object of Protestant scorn.

A clueless Romanist comes up against the biblical genius.

It is true that Cajetan wasn't and couldn't have been entirely prepared for what he was up against, but his future career defending the faith and seeking reconciliation from the Catholic side reflects very well on his intelligence and his holiness.

At the age of 50, for instance, he took it upon himself to learn Hebrew, the better to argue from Scripture.

In any case, even Luther himself admitted that Cajetan's demeanor at Augsburg The reason I mention this event, however, besides the historical interest of today's anniversary, is theological.

During the interviews, Cajetan told Luther, In other words, having carefully reviewed the material from Luther that was available to him, Cajetan concluded that everything could be ironed out with two exceptions.

They're likely to strike us as rather abstruse.

The first point had to do not with whether the Pope had authority to grant indulgences, but on what basis that authority was exercised.

Luther insisted that it was a simple use of the power of the keys that Jesus gave St. Peter.

By the power of the keys, penances are imposed.

By the power of the keys, they can be remitted.

Now the second point, that was the first point, the second point was that in order to receive valid absolution in the sacrament of penance, the faithful needed not only contrition, confession, and satisfaction, satisfaction, of course, meaning doing your penance, What are we to make of this?

For one thing, Luther's unwillingness to budge on such a seemingly minute pair of doctrinal disagreements tells, I think, against the claim that the entire blame for the 16th century schism is attributable to Rome's mystifying inflexibility.

In any case, Luther was happy to stand by his own inflexibility.

Contrary to some portraits of Luther, the great Dutch historian and theologian Heiko Obermann, himself a lifelong Protestant, rightly states that Luther by 1520 at the latest, quote, never set himself up as healer of the church and never regarded the renewal of the church as his task, close quote.

Instead, he saw himself as an end times prophet of a restored gospel that was obscured and distorted Now, whatever Cajetan could foresee at the time, in 1518, if we take a closer look at the two points, we'll recognize what turned out to be at stake in them, and perhaps why Luther refused to surrender them.

Small as they might seem, they touch upon the foundations of Luther's understanding of Christian faith, the shape First, in 1518, Luther still acknowledged the Church's authority for the sake of pastoral discipline to assign penances and so also to remit them through indulgences.

Within two years, he will have completely rejected indulgences and regret that he had earlier, quote, clung with a mighty superstition to the tyranny of Rome.

But even in 1517 and 1518, he could see that the doctrine of the treasury of the merits of Christ and the saints suggested that it was charity infused in human beings, Christ and his saints, that covered a multitude of sins.

And that is incompatible with Luther's understanding of sin and grace.

Second, on the necessity of certain faith for absolution, let's be clear, in rejecting this, Cajetan was in no way suggesting that one may faithlessly or insincerely approach the sacraments and expect it to have some sort of a magical effect.

That would be a sacrilege.

What concerned him was the unprecedented requirement that the penitent experience subjective assurance of the effectiveness of the word of forgiveness in him or herself.

To doubt one's forgiveness, for Luther, is to forfeit forgiveness.

and to fall back into damnation.

Again, we can see how deeply embedded in Luther's basic understanding of the gospel this is.

Indeed, this is the gospel, the announcement of the promise of forgiveness and its reception by trusting faith alone.

We can only marvel at Cardinal Cabotin's foresight in a comment he made on Luther's view of penance.

Hoc est novum construere ecclesiam.

this is to construct a new church.

Insofar as Luther's understanding of the sacraments of penance follows naturally from his doctrine of justification by faith alone, Cajetan's remark foreshadows Luther's later claim that his doctrine of justification is the article of faith on which the church stands or falls.

The church for Luther is constituted by the dynamic of word and faith which is radically individualist.

It is the soul of the individual believer, not the church as such, that is the bride of Christ, married by faith.

The church's unity is subsequently forged out of individuals who, liberated by grace to love like Jesus, live as Christ to one another.

As a recent interpreter of Luther puts it, quote, faith receives the good deed of Christ, Now Catholics should agree wholeheartedly that our unity must be realized concretely in just this way.

This is what St. Paul, for instance, exhorts us to.

in so many beautiful passages from his epistles.

But for Catholics, the Church is prior to the believer.

She is our Mother.

As Saint Cyprian insisted in the third century, no one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother.

The unity of the Church is the unity of the Blessed Trinity, mediated to us, received through the church, through the visible bonds of the Orthodox faith, authoritatively taught and docilely believed, corporate worship of God above all in the sacraments, and fraternal concord under our shepherds, the successors of the apostles.

We are not given only the word and tasked with receiving it in faith as individuals who will then form the church.

No. In a popular biography of Luther that was published less than two weeks ago, a work that to be candid is disappointingly ill-informed and partisan.

Eric Metaxas writes that Luther's path, quote, will forever be debated either as heretical and ignominious or as orthodox and glorious, close quote.

Yet we know that can't be true.

When we speak of the religious upheavals of the 16th century and their enduring consequences today, We speak in the genre of tragedy.

And yet, ultimately, we are participants in a comedy, in the divine comedy.

For Christ has trampled down sin and death.

He has conquered the ancient enemy.

Meanwhile, how can we seek to heal the wounds of division among the baptized and permit the Holy Spirit to show forth Christ's victory among us?

We must fast and pray.

As we all know, in John 17, Jesus prayed fervently that his followers would be one, precisely so that the world might believe.

When we settle into complacent acceptance of our divisions, we settle for a weakened witness to the good news of God's friendship, his offer of divine life to fallen humanity.

Daily, we see human dignity undermined.

We see humanity's creaturely identity forgotten.

The world desperately needs the witness of the baptized to the friendship of God.

Let us fast and pray then, and without becoming unhinged or overly aggressive, let us not reconcile ourselves to our divisions.

Let us also examine ourselves.

Do we understand, live, and share our faith as a friendship with God?

Do we live our lives of sacramental worship, fellowship, and prayer as a joyful, arduous, too-good-to-be-true journey into the very life and love of the Blessed Trinity?

Let us pray daily with St. Paul.

I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord.

For his sake, I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as refuse.

In order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith, that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that if possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead, not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect, Friends, thank you for your attention.