Under Observation

The trademark of the great modern religious assemblies is the "observer" from another faith, peering friendly and fascinated at the proceedings and often heralding a closer relationship. It was the observers who last week gave the Helsinki meeting of the Lutheran World Federation its unique flavor and suggestiveness. On hand was the first delegation ever sent by the Vatican to a conference of a world Protestant organization. The presence of the Roman Catholic observers brought up a basic ecumenical question: Is there a weakening in the historic split between Rome and the original Protestant church?

As if to keep the observers listening, no one said or did anything that would really put them off. The World Federation gave a healthy account of its numbers: 52 million of the world's 72 million Lutherans, making it the third largest confessional grouping (after Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy). It reported a respectable worldwide expansion, perhaps symbolized by the rueful recollection of the delegate from Indonesia, Andar Lumbantobing, that only 130 years ago his ancestors ate two Boston missionaries.

Lutheran churches have sprung up in almost all Latin American countries, have 862,000 members. Since the last federation assembly in 1957, Lutheran membership has tripled in Asia and Africa to 3,000,000. And the federation admitted the first Lutherans from the Soviet Union--the 750,000 communicants still living in Soviet Estonia and Latvia--over the objections of their churches in exile.

Recognizing that Lutherans cannot live by the 400-year-old Reformation alone, the assembly is slated to re-examine Martin Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone. Luther proclaimed that Christ already had atoned for the sins of mankind; some of the federation's theological leaders believe that Lutheran churches are now straying too much toward the belief that good works make the good man.

Luther himself, when he tacked his 95 theses on the door of a Wittenberg church in 1517, had no wish to split from the catholic and apostolic church in Rome. In a report to the assembly, the federation's commission on theology reported that "we cannot today casually dismiss the theological teaching of the Roman Church as patently false, unbiblical and unevangelical." Said Franklin Clark Fry, outgoing president of the federation: "Lutheran churches are prepared in spirit to reach out to brethren everywhere in a search for the fuller oneness of all who call Christ Lord in the midst of a hostile world."

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