An Interview with Jared Wicks, S.J., Catholic scholar of Luther

Jared Wicks is a the­olo­gian and writer at John Car­roll Uni­ver­sity in Uni­ver­sity Heights, Ohio. We asked him a few ques­tions about his unusual vocation.

How did you as a Jesuit become a scholar of Luther?

My pre-ordination the­ol­ogy stud­ies were at West Baden in south­ern Indi­ana, some 45 miles from Louisville, Ken­tucky. From our school, in 1960–61, along with some fel­low Jesuits, I set up exchanges of vis­its with stu­dents at Louisville Pres­by­ter­ian Sem­i­nary and South­ern Bap­tist Sem­i­nary. This con­firmed me in want­ing to give my the­o­log­i­cal work a strong ecu­meni­cal dimen­sion. I did a Licen­ti­ate paper on Karl Barth and found in him fas­ci­nat­ing enrich­ments of the notion of rev­e­la­tion that we had stud­ied in our offi­cial course, focus­ing on the reason/faith divide inher­ited from the First Vat­i­can Coun­cil of 1869–70.

Dur­ing my prepa­ra­tion for grad­u­ate the­o­log­i­cal work in Ger­many, I met Fr. Kil­lian McDon­nell, O.S.B., who had just com­pleted his dis­ser­ta­tion on Calvin. He told me there was a topic for a good dis­ser­ta­tion on “cer­tainty of sal­va­tion” in Calvin. In the process of enrolling in the Catholic Fac­ulty of the Uni­ver­sity of Muen­ster, I vis­ited a pro­fes­sor whom oth­ers had urged me to talk to, Joseph Ratzinger. He proved help­ful, even though he was at the moment over­whelmed with work with doc­toral can­di­dates and had to be in Rome for months at a time as an expert at Vat­i­can Coun­cil II. He told me that Prof. Erwin Iser­loh was about to move from Trier to the Muen­ster fac­ulty and that Iser­loh would in all like­li­hood wel­come me for a dis­ser­ta­tion on a Ref­or­ma­tion the­o­log­i­cal topic. Also, 18 months later, I was relieved not to be a Ratzinger dis­ci­ple, since he packed up and moved to Tue­bin­gen, which would have been dis­rup­tive in my work.

When I met Iser­loh and men­tioned Calvin to him, he said that it might work out as a dis­ser­ta­tion topic, but I surely had to study Luther first. In those days Iser­loh was fin­ish­ing his chap­ters on the Ref­or­ma­tion vol­ume of the Ger­man Hand­book of Church His­tory and he was defend­ing in var­i­ous venues his view that Luther never posted the 95 The­ses pub­licly in 1517, but only sent them to the Arch­bishop of Mainz to show that the indul­gence doc­trine needed clar­i­fi­ca­tion and preach­ers had to tone down their preach­ing on indulgences.

In my read­ing of Luther I was quickly impressed by his con­cep­tion of the pen­i­ten­tial life as fun­da­men­tal in Chris­t­ian spir­i­tu­al­ity. Also, I had the good for­tune to dis­cover a text by Luther which sets forth an inge­nious the­ol­ogy of indul­gences, but which had been mis­tak­enly dated in the Weimar Edi­tion (in fact, it was from 1517 and sent in the packet to the Arch­bishop with the 95 The­ses). That text became a key to my dis­ser­ta­tion and I pub­lished it in Eng­lish with com­men­tary in The­o­log­i­cal Stud­ies at the time of the 1967 obser­vance of the 450th anniver­sary of the Reformation’s outbreak.

While in Muen­ster, I had good con­tact with Protes­tant the­olo­gians and stu­dents, who worked in the Evangelical-Lutheran sister-faculty of the Uni­ver­sity. Also, Iser­loh took me with him to Fin­land for the 1966 Luther Research Con­gress, where I met Berhard Lohse, Mar­tin Brecht, and Otto Her­mann Pesch, and watched from the back row while Ger­hard Ebel­ing and Hein­rich Bornkamm tried to demol­ish the the­sis of Ernst Bizer that Luther’s big insight into faith and jus­ti­fi­ca­tion came in early 1518. My dis­ser­ta­tion on the young Luther’s pen­i­ten­tial account of Chris­t­ian liv­ing left a num­ber of unre­solved ques­tions and when I began teach­ing near Chicago I found time to keep up pub­lish­ing. When I moved to Rome to teach at the Gre­go­rian in 1979, I had a lighter teach­ing sched­ule and greater ease of con­tact with Euro­pean cen­ters of work on Luther.

What do you think about Luther’s “Ref­or­ma­tion break­through”? How does it relate to the Catholic tradition?

I agree with Ernst Bizer and Oswald Bayer that Luther, in early 1518, came to fea­ture a new aspect of the pen­i­ten­tial life, namely, the pow­er­ful, clear, and certain-making word of sacra­men­tal abso­lu­tion spo­ken to the pen­i­tent. I worked this out for a sem­i­nar at the Luther Research Con­gress in Erfurt in 1983 and brought it out the next year in Gre­go­ri­anum, the jour­nal of my uni­ver­sity in Rome, under the title, Fides sacramenti—fides spe­cialis (also in Luther’s Reform, an essay col­lec­tion, pub­lished in Mainz in 1992).

From this shift of 1518, the pen­i­ten­tial life con­tin­ues to unfold in daily self-denial, but Luther has it firmly anchored in God’s gra­cious word which applies Christ’s sav­ing grace in moments of clear, unam­bigu­ous com­mu­ni­ca­tion. From 1519 on, it is no acci­dent that Luther turned out engag­ing short pam­phlets on the sacra­ments, in which the certain-making word resounds in its vari­ant expres­sions. This had not been present in his works on pen­i­ten­tial liv­ing and prayer down through 1517.

When I worked out in 1983–84 this momen­tous shift in Luther’s teach­ing, I added a series of con­sid­er­a­tions in favor of a nuanced or even pos­i­tive Catholic assess­ment of Luther’s point. Luther did not fea­ture aspects ascribed to him by crit­ics like Car­di­nal Caje­tan (1518) and Paul Hacker (The Ego in Faith, 1970). He appealed to Bernard of Clair­vaux as hold­ing some­thing very similar—which gives us pause. We Catholics also take the sacra­ments very seri­ously and should rec­og­nize in Luther an ally against reli­giosi­ties of sub­jec­tive experience.

Does this mean that Luther has some­thing to offer to Catholics today?

Yes, and I said this in June 2008 in Que­bec, at a the­o­log­i­cal sym­po­sium on eucharis­tic the­ol­ogy. My paper reviewed recent ecu­meni­cal agree­ments and con­ver­gences on the Lord’s Sup­per, as in the Anglican-Catholic dia­logue and in Bap­tism, Eucharist and Min­istry (1982) of Faith and Order. But I noted that Lutheran reac­tions to BEM were in some cases note­wor­thy in their cri­tique of a dom­i­nant “eucharis­tiz­ing” of the Lord’s Supper—which deserves our atten­tion too. Also, the Lutheran the­olo­gian Albrecht Peters, made an inci­sive crit­i­cal com­ment about the 1978 Lutheran/Catholic study, Das Her­ren­mahl (= The Eucharist) for the way it so empha­sizes the upward move­ment of thanks and glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of God that the descend­ing grace of Christ’s death for us and for our sal­va­tion is obscured.

As a Catholic the­olo­gian, I feel obliged to go against the grain of our dom­i­nant liturgically-based con­cep­tion of eucharis­tic wor­ship and ecu­meni­cal the­ol­ogy. That is, I am con­vinced that we, espe­cially Catholics, need to bring out just what the sacra­ment memo­ri­al­izes, namely, the Lord’s giv­ing of him­self in death, with his body bro­ken and his blood shed “for you”—pro vobis, fuer euch!

What do you see as the main ecu­meni­cal exchange in the other direc­tion, namely, in ele­ments of Catholic tra­di­tion that can enrich Lutheran faith and life?

In this I reflect on the expe­ri­ence of three extended Lutheran-Catholic dia­logues in which I took part: (1) the 1986–94 world-level dia­logue that pro­duced The Church and Jus­ti­fi­ca­tion; (2) the 1996–2005 dia­logue lead­ing to The Apos­tolic­ity of the Church, and (3) the dia­logue in the USA on “The Hope of Eter­nal Life,” begun 2005 and about to end later in this year of 2010.

Clearly, we Catholic mem­bers have a notable advan­tage in these exchanges, since we draw repeat­edly on clearly elab­o­rated, and some­times recent, dec­la­ra­tions of doc­trine by the Catholic teach­ing office. Our work on apos­tolic­ity was emblem­atic, in the way that the con­cil­iar teach­ing office, not that of the popes, but of the Coun­cils (Trent, Vat­i­can I, and Vat­i­can II) repeat­edly gave us doc­tri­nal ori­en­ta­tions. The Lutheran side had its Book of Con­cord and did good work in draw­ing on it. But you can see the asym­me­try in bind­ing clar­i­fi­ca­tions of what the word of God means and how it should be applied to emerg­ing questions.

Our Catholic side also had the advan­tage of schol­ar­ship based on the papers of these Coun­cils, such as that of Joseph Fre­itag on Trent’s con­cep­tion of the pas­toral min­istry or of Her­mann J. Pottmeyer on the back­ground of Vat­i­can I on papal author­ity. It was not a case of sim­ply cit­ing con­cil­iar texts as shut­ting down any fur­ther dis­cus­sion, but of find­ing in them valu­able point­ers toward the future. Luther­ans seem to see Catholics as bound to a teach­ing office “monop­o­lized” by the bishop of Rome as a sole teacher issu­ing his man­dated doc­trines. I think a care­ful review of how the Catholic teach­ing office func­tions would show that this is a car­i­ca­ture put up to make its rejec­tion easy.

I know this is a dif­fi­cult area for Luther­ans. It comes out in the account of how Luther­ans see the church main­tained in the truth in The Apos­tolic­ity of the Church, nos. 355–389, which is his­tor­i­cally infor­ma­tive and lucid on the com­plex inter­ac­tion of fac­tors when Luther­ans work toward an updated state­ment of doc­trine or morality.

From my his­tor­i­cal knowl­edge of the Ref­or­ma­tion, I think that the state-based con­sti­tu­tions of the first Lutheran ter­ri­to­r­ial churches left Luther­ans with an endemic weak­ness that has not been over­come. Lutheran bish­ops are far from being fig­ures of mag­is­te­r­ial impact and author­ity; they could never assem­ble as a body able to pro­duce what came of the great coun­cils. I recall how Melanchthon fore­saw this result at Augs­burg in 1530 when the pow­er­ful rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Nurem­burg began exer­cis­ing con­trol over the issues of doc­tri­nal dia­logue with the Catholic side.

franz posset says:
November 20, 2010 at 7:52 pm
great inter­view!
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