As a recent Atlantic essay points out, Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber’s emphasis on sin and grace in Christ sounds downright conservative. Her congregation even utilizes orthodox Lutheran liturgy! In a sense, the claims to Lutheran orthodoxy are correct. Bolz-Weber’s approach is the natural end of the predominant understanding of Lutheran theology in the twentieth century, though this understanding is ultimately false both to Luther and to the broader Christian tradition he sought to reform.
Gilbert Meilaender, in an essay entitled “Hearts Set to Obey” (Dialog, 2004), remarks that contemporary Lutheranism presents a static account of the Christian life. While Catholicism presents a “linear” framework in which the Christian journeys in progress toward holiness, Lutheranism posits a “dialectic” one which precludes any self-perfecting tendencies. In this view, “Christians make no progress in righteousness; they simply return time and again to the word that announces pardon, a word that invites and elicits faith.”
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