Lutheran-Catholic Pact Is Criticized

Officials of the Roman Catholic Church and most of the world’s Lutheran churches plan to sign an agreement next week that ends a 450-year theological dispute that helped spark the Protestant Reformation.

But the pact is being condemned by a conservative Lutheran denomination in the United States, which calls it “a surrender of the most important truth taught in God’s Word.”

According to leaders of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod, which has 2.6 million members in its affiliated churches, that truth is that individuals are saved by faith in Jesus Christ alone and are justified before God by Christ’s death and Resurrection.

Historically, Catholics have agreed on the importance of faith, but have emphasized that people must perform good works on Earth to earn salvation.

Known as the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, the Catholic-Lutheran agreement is to be signed by representatives of the Lutheran World Federation and its member churches and the Vatican in Augsburg, Germany, on Oct. 31, which in Lutheran churches is known as Reformation Sunday. The Lutheran World Federation includes the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the nation’s largest Lutheran body, with 5.5 million members.

The agreement “is probably the most significant advance in our relations between the two churches since the Reformation,” the Rev. George Anderson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said this week.

But the Missouri synod called the joint declaration fuzzy. “In truth it is an ambiguous statement whose careful wording makes it possible for the pope’s representatives to sign it without changing, retracting or correcting anything that has been taught by the Roman Catholic Church since the time of the Council of Trent in the 16th century,” the Missouri synod said.

“It is an opportunity for Rome to appear ecumenical without conceding a thing, and it is but the latest example of Lutherans sacrificing God’s truth on the altar of unity,” the Missouri synod said.