Joseph Sittler on preaching beyond personal experience It is only honest to say that I have never known fully that kind of life within the full, warm power of that faith for whose declaration I am an ordained minister. The very term “Christian experience” as generally understood, has small meaning for me. I have not seen […]
Rowan Williams on self-judgment Bonhoeffer writes [in a poem on his imprisonment], “They often tell me / I would step from my cell’s confinement / calmly, cheerfully, firmly, / like a squire from his country-house.” … But the poem is about the great gulf between what “they” see – a confident, adult, rational, prayerful, faithful, […]
Michael J. Buckley on Weakness For there is a different question, one proper to any form of Christian ministry: Is this person weak enough to be a servant of the gospel of Christ? [81] What is meant by weakness? Not the experience of sin. Indeed, almost its opposite. Weakness is the experience of a peculiar […]
On the Role of Justification in Lutheran Theology Today’s post is prompted by the following remark from the contemporary American Lutheran moral theologian Gilbert Meilaender. However much some contemporary Lutherans have attempted to think of Lutheranism as a freestanding theological system, it can really be understood only as a correction within the Catholic tradition. It degenerates […]
In Defense of a Hymn Or, when was the vice of worldliness dropped from our vocabulary? There is a hymn that I’ve witnessed a number of times now, and for the same reason each time, get short shrift among theological compatriots of mine. This is something of an unhappy occurrence for me. The hymn is one […]
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