Healing Christianity's 500-Year Rift Is Worth a Try

Pope Francis is continuing along his remarkably liberal path, most recently by praising Martin Luther at a ceremony in Sweden beginning a yearlong 500th anniversary commemoration of the Reformation. Yet despite the pope’s openness, and the corresponding good faith of the Lutherans, the two sides were unable to effect a reconciliation. The episode raises two questions: Why try? And how is it that, in this post-theological age, not even Christian believers can get past their own wars of religion?

To start with the obvious, it’s moving that the pope would speak positively about Martin Luther, who is technically speaking still under a ban of excommunication issued by Pope Leo X in 1521. In 2011, Benedict XVI offered some mild approbation of “Luther’s burning question” -- about the nature of justification, or salvation, in Christ. But Francis went further, saying that Luther’s issue is “the decisive question of our lives,” and that his doctrine of justification “expresses the essence of human existence before God.”