However there is also the other side of the coin. The opposite of relativism is absolutism. Truth is not always best served by only one end of the spectrum. The opposite of libertarianism is authoritarianism. Authority is not always best served if it is concentrated at either extreme. We may revel in the elegance found in the authority of the Magisterium, but that authority, I believe, has been corrupted at times in history. Lutherans lost the good, but they also lost some of the bad (paying indulgences) and I don’t think the Magisterium was very helpful to Galileo or moral when killing heretics, so we need to be honest. As much as it pains me to say this, I think our constitution might not have been nearly as revolutionary or democratic if it had been more influenced by the Magisterium of the day.

I may be wrong about this, but modern capitalism and limited government comes more from Protestant than Catholic traditions.

That said I see the limitations of the solas, moral relativism and I look forward to learning more from the links that Christopher supplied, thank you!

Carl Braaten is among those who emphasize the ‘catholicity’ of the Reformation (see The Catholicity of the Reformation) and what we have in common. My former teachers were of the same mind; one of them, Bishop Michael McDaniel (RIP) founded the ongoing Aquinas-Luther conference. He was also a good friend of Fr. Neuhaus. His memoirs — “ELCA Journeys: Personal Reflections on the Last Forty Years” — is a chronicle of the organization’s decline. I expect if McDaniel were alive today he’d have a few choice words for what was happening.

As Carl Braaten also observed in 2005, the ELCA has experienced something of a ‘brain drain’ with the sheer number of distinguished Lutheran scholars moving either to Eastern Orthodoxy or the Catholic Church. His anguished ‘open letter’ to Bishop Mark Hanson on the current state of the ELCA in 2005 is heart-breaking:

… All of these colleagues have given candid explanations of their decisions to their families, colleagues, and friends. While the individuals involved have provided a variety of reasons, there is one thread that runs throughout the stories they tell. It is not merely the pull of Orthodoxy or Catholicism that enchants them, but also the push from the ELCA, as they witness with alarm the drift of their church into the morass of what some have called Liberal Protestantism. They are convinced that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has become just another liberal protestant denomination. Hence, they have decided that they can no longer be a part of that. Especially, they say, they are not willing to raise their children in a church that they believe has lost its moorings in the great tradition of evangelical (small e) and catholic (small c) orthodoxy (small o), which was at the heart of Luther’s reformatory teaching and the Lutheran Confessional Writings. They are saying that the Roman Catholic Church is now more hospitable to confessional Lutheran teaching than the church in which they were baptized and confirmed. Can this possibly be true?

As Bratten acknowledges, a number of theologians have answered that question in the affirmative.