Are Lutherans Catholic?

My article from this week's edition of the Rockford Squire:

In our tradition of Christianity, we recite the Athanasian Creed on Trinity Sunday (8 weeks after Easter), and every year, at least a couple of people respond with shock because in that creed, we say, “Whoever desires to be saved must, above all, hold the catholic faith.  Whoever does not keep it whole and undefiled will without doubt perish eternally.  And the catholic faith is this, that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity…” and “…This is the catholic faith; whoever does not believe it faithfully and firmly cannot be saved.”

For some of those observers, their response is, “But we’re not Catholic, we’re Lutheran!”  That’s accurate in the sense that we Lutherans are not Roman Catholic.  On the other hand, we are very much catholic, because the word, translated from Greek and Latin, literally means “according to the whole,” and early Christians adopted this word because it expressed the fact that the Church encompasses all Christians throughout the whole world, and embraces the whole body of doctrine taught by Jesus. 

So, the Lutheran Reformers thoroughly embraced the name catholic.  In fact, they considered themselves to be restoring historic catholic teaching, while they saw the Pope as having departed from the truth.  We English-speakers often express this distinction by using “catholic” (with a small “c”) to refer to the worldwide, all-encompassing nature of the church while using “Catholic” (with a capital “C”) as a shorthand for Roman Catholic. 

Some also wonder why this creed says “catholic” while our translations of the other two creeds, the Apostles and Nicene, use the word “Christian” instead.  This is because our tribe of Lutherans was originally a German-speaking denomination.  When Luther translated the liturgy from Latin into German, there was no equivalent German word to use for catholic, so he used the German equivalent of “Christian.”  As a result, when our liturgies were translated from German into English about a hundred years ago, these creeds confessed the “holy Christian church.”  If they had been translated directly from Latin to English, they would have likely confessed the “holy catholic church” instead, much like our Athanasian Creed which didn’t take this detour through German before being translated into English among us. 

Something similar occurs with other words like Orthodox/orthodox and Protestant/protestant.  We Lutherans consider ourselves orthodox in that we have “straight teaching,” but we are not a part of the Eastern Orthodox Church.  Similarly, some consider us protestant in that we have our origins in the Reformation, but we didn’t voluntarily abandon the Western catholic church in “protest” in the same way as the other wings of the Reformation.  So, we Lutherans consider ourselves orthodox without being Eastern Orthodox, protestant without being Protestants, and catholic without being Roman Catholic.