INTRODUCTION

The year 1983 marks the five-hundreth anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther the Augustinian priest who became an outstanding religious figure in that sixteenth-century movement known as the Protestant Reformation. So great was Luther's influence that his thought remains very much a living part of our world today. Sizeable numbers of Christians who call themselves Evangelicals trace their inspiration back to this heritage.

Traditionally Catholics have considered the basic point of departure in Luther's teaching to be his doctrine of justification and faith. This is not surprising since Cardinal Cajetan who was sent by Pope Leo X to meet Luther at Augsburg, made note of the fact that he thought this doctrine as it stood would indeed institute a new church. It would, he thought, take a lot of discussion to round it out into Catholic teaching. But Rome had a prior concern and it was this concern that Cajetan was to present to Luther first, namely the authority of the Roman Pontiff. Luther refused to consider this first and some historians say the reason was Luther's suspicion that he was being used as a pawn in papal politics. Whatever the reason, from that point on efforts at reconciliation between Catholic and reform positions met with little success.

At the present time a vastly changed world has replaced that of the sixteenth century and Catholic-Lutheran ecumenical dialogue may be looked upon as the contemporary Cajetan-Luther discussions. Without going into detail, it is interesting to note that in the dialogue on doctrine great strides have been made in resolving the differences that exist between the two traditions. Perhaps this is not surprising because from the very start Lutherans thought their doctrine was indeed the traditional Catholic faith. They saw what they were doing as simply pruning away nonessentials that had become attached to essential Catholic doctrine. Present-day dialogue usually begins from this position and seeks to clarify the basic common faith that stands beneath any particular theological expression of that faith. At the same time, the dialogue takes a second look at some of the so-called nonessentials of the sixteenth century to see whether these may have been misunderstandings rather than points of actual contention. Results of these common doctrinal dialogues have been published both in Europe and in the United States.

Although dialogue on Church authority remains a difficult ecumenical issue, it provides an interesting perspective for Catholic theologians to reflect upon the tradition of authority as it developed in the Catholic Church. It is well to note at the beginning that we are talking about here is not ministry but rather Church order. The discussion on ministry in the Catholic-Lutheran dialogue basically has been part of the doctrinal reflection. Within that context it concerns certain Christians rightly carrying out the various function that exist within the Christian community on behalf of the whole community and its individual members. Church order, on the other hand, concerns the place or position that members of the Christian community have within that community and whereby they are related to and distinguished from one another. It was on the question of Church order that Luther's thought offered a different perspective that has had its effect on more recent Catholic thinking. What this paper will do in broad outline, then, is place the thinking of Luther on Church order within the context of the development of Catholic thought.