The first 25 trees are now growing in the Luther garden in Wittenberg

Here's a photo of the LWF general secretary Ishmael Noko planting one of the first 25 trees to grow in Wittenberg's Luthergarden in preparation for the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in 2017. You can read more here on evangelisch.de
Setri Nyomi general secretary of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches also planted one of the trees.

Commenting on the significance of planting trees, Nyomi said that the 16^th century Reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin were “bold agents of change such as a tree planted by water. The periods of heat and drought have come and gone, but the ‘trees’ they planted continue to bear fruit.”

“It is fitting that churches should plant trees as a symbol of commitment to God’s creation at this time when world attention turns towards the Climate Conference in Copenhagen in December with its focus on the impact of environmental destruction.”

Churches throughout the world have been invited to sponsor the planting of one of 500 trees in the garden on the Elbe River and to plant a tree in their home communities. The gesture is meant as a symbol of the influence of the Protestant Reformation throughout the world and as a sign of reconciliation and interconnectedness among the many branches of Christianity.

I've written before about this idea when it was launched last year and you can also find out more here. I think it's really great.

Was Calvin more Catholic than Luther?

That was the somewhat provocative question at the end of the second of two lectures- "Calvin et sa vision de l'Eglise" - by Pastor Alain Amoux to launch a Calvin exhibition at the Reformed church in Ferney-Voltaire (writes Dr B while Pastor Jane was in Rome meeting the UK ambassador to the Vatican). Alain Amoux pointed out that while for Luther the structure of the church was largely a matter of indifference, Calvin developed a highly structured theology of the church. (Ironically in the 19th century the position got reversed with Lutheran theologians more and more insisting on a high theology of the church and Reformed becoming more and more diverse, or as Amoux put it, "happy anarchists" as far as the church is concerned.) In part, suggested Amoux, Calvin took the church more seriously than Luther because Luther died before the start of the Council of Trent, while Calvin was active in Geneva while the council was taking place - he was therefore consciously or otherwise developing an alternative to the ecclesiology being developed in Rome to reconquor a Protestantised Europe. In the first lecture - "Calvin humaniste" - Amoux traced the contribution of Calvin to, among other things, the French language, ironically largely overlooked today in the "catho-laique" France. Calvin started off in a brilliant career as a writer and administrator and became a theologian of the church largely by accident, through the force of events.

Marking the Reformation in 2017

Dr B. writes: "There's an interesting piece in the latest issue of the Journal of Ecumenical Studies in which Paul Schreck of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America suggests a joint declaration by the Catholic and Lutheran Churches to mark the Reformation in 2017 on the Confessio Augustana (CA, or Augsburg Confession), the primary confessional document of Lutheran churches.* The Augsburg Confession was written in both German and Latin, and was presented by a number of German rulers and free-cities at the Diet of Augsburg on June 25, 1530. As Schreck points out, there was increasing Catholic interest in the 1970s in a Catholic recognition of the statements of faith in the CA. Schreck notes that in 1958, Joseph Ratzinger had already highlighted the importance of the CA, an idea developed further in Ratzinger's Graz lecture of 1967, and in his Principles of Catholic Theology:

Research in recent years has led to the conclusion that it was not just for diplomatic reasons that the Confessio Augustana [henceforth CA] was composed as the fundamental
Lutheran confessional text; it was intended to be interpreted under the law of the empire as a Catholic confession; it was understood with inner conviction as a search for evangelical Catholicity--an effort to filter the seething discontent of the early reform movement in a way that would make it a Catholic
reform. Efforts are being made, accordingly, to bring about a Catholic recognition of the CA--or more accurately, a recognition of the CA as Catholic--that would establish the Catholicity of the churches of the Augsburg Confession and thus make possible a corporate union despite existing differences. Certainly such a recognition of the CA by the Catholic Church would be far more than a theoretical theological action that could be worked out by historians and church politicians. It would be, rather, a
concrete historical step on both sides.

The idea was picked up also by Walter Kasper, who is now president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Unity, who suggested that Catholic recognition of the CA would not mean that it would become a Catholic confessional document, but that it would be seen as one legitimate expression of the Catholic faith.

Schreck's research leads him to the conclusion that at some point a joint Lutheran-Catholic attempt to attest to the Catholic nature of the CA was simply set aside. However, he suggests that with the signing of the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification by the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation, there is now the basis for the issue of the CA to be picked up again. Moreover, he suggests, such a step would have significance beyond the LWF:

The ecumenical importance of such a recognition of the CA would not belimited to Lutherans. John Calvin accepted a revised version of the CAin 1541; in 1684 the Peace of Westphalia recognized Calvinists as members of the Augustan community. Thomas Cranmer based many of his forty-two articles upon the CA, so recognition of the CA would presumably have some bearing on the Thirty-nine articles of the Church of England."

* Paul A Schreck, "Under One Christ: Implications of a Roman Catholic Recognition of the Confessio Augustana in CE 1017", Journal of Ecumenical Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, Winter 2008, pp. 90-110.

Martin Luther rehabilitated?

A guest blogger writes:

So, The Times is reporting that Pope Benedict XVI is planning to rehabilitate Martin Luther. A Times beat-up, at first sight, with the only person quoted directly being Cardinal Kasper, and even then without it being clear in exactly what context the good German cardinal was pronouncing these words. The Vatican meanwhile has issued a denial of the story. At least though it has got the blogosphere going.

(PS: Philip Pullella on the Reuters FaithWorld blog has explained the genesis of the Times piece, which then went round the world.)

And yet, it is less than ten years to the 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 theses being nailed, so the story goes, to the door of the Wittenberg Schlosskirche. Back in 1983, at the celebrations in Leipzig of the 500th anniversary of the birth of Luther, the then president of the Secretariat for Christian Unity, Cardinal Willebrands, said the following:

... notwithstanding the contrasts that separate us, it is worthwhile to enter into an open and factual dialogue with Martin Luther. This is a difficult road, but a necessary one. We have to follow it, firstly in an endeavour to obtain a better insight into truth, and also out of love for those of our brothers and sisters who today seek to shape their Christian life in accordance with Luther's fundamental theological insights and convictions of faith; lastly and above all we have to follow it for the sake of the one holy Gospel of Jesus Christ and for the sake of His coming Kingdom. We have to proclaim Christ in all the untimeliness of this world, and we have to do this trusting in all the embracing force of the Holy Spirit and to the greater glory of God.

In 1985, when asked if the Catholic Church would lift the excommunication on Luther, Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) responded, "Luther's excommunication terminated with his death because judgement after death is reserved to God alone. Luther's excommunication does not have to be lifted; it has long ceased to exist." He added, however, "it is an entirely different matter when we ask if Luther's teachings still separate the churches and thus preclude joint communion." Ratzinger himself has in the past shown himself to be interested in a serious, if critical, dialogue with the thought of the Protestant Reformer, and has been credited with rescuing the 1999 Catholic-Lutheran Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, one of the central and contentious issues of Lutheran theology, in which the two sides declared that the condemnations of the past did not apply to the teaching on justification as set down in the document. In his "Principles of Catholic Theology", Ratzinger referred to research that concluded that the fundamental Lutheran confessional text, the Confessio Augustana, "was understood with inner conviction as a search for evangelical Catholicity--an effort to filter the seething discontent of the early reform movement in a way that would make it a Catholic reform".

Yet, looking towards the 2017 anniversary as a Lutheran-Catholic event is perhaps casting the net too narrowly. Luther was not, of course, the first or the last reformer, yet the events of 1517 are symbolic not only of the founding of a denomination but mark a massive break not only in Western Christianity but also in Western culture as a whole: literature, language, politics. economy. Yet it also extended beyond the West, and in the 16th century there were contacts between the Protestant reformation of the West and the Orthodox Church of the East, which was coming to terms with the sack of Constantinople 40 years before the birth of Luther (there was even a translation of the Confessio Augustana into Greek). The Reformers felt a certain kinship with the Orthodox since Rome considered both the Christian East and the Reformers to be heretics.

On the other hand, various anabaptist movements were themselves persecuted by Lutherans, while Lutherans and Calvinists pronounced mutual condemnations that were overcome formally only in 1973 in Europe with the Leuenberg Agreement. Walter Altmann, a Brazilian Lutheran who is moderator of the World Council of Churches, has recently spoken of the anniversary of 1517 serving as an ecumenical opportunity (translated press release here). The German political authorities have already started preparing for 2017, yet the churches worldwide seem not to have caught up (the Evangelical Church in Germany has nominated a "Beauftragter" ). Still, it's not too late for someone to take the initiative to start a process to use the 2017 anniversary for a new look at the Reformation from a genuinely ecumenical perspective - the legacy of the Reformation is too important to be left to Lutherans and Catholics alone!