What are Lutherans to do with a new pope?
Lutherans, like Evangelicals, don’t have a place for a pope in their ecclesiastical structure, but for somewhat different reasons. Evangelicals throw out the papacy with all things regarded as “too Catholic”. Whereas Lutherans deny any papal authority in the church precisely because it’s not catholic enough. We want an authority that has belonged to the whole church from the beginning and comes from Christ himself, not one which gradually accreted power across the centuries through political maneuvering.
