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Review of "The Deliverance of God" by Douglas A. Campbell
Salvation has been understood in terms of “justification by faith” for a long time. While the phrase itself is important in a few of Paul’s letters, what is “justification by faith” in all of its complexity? And is it the best or even most Biblically accurate construal of salvation? According to Douglas Campbell “justification by faith” has taken on a particular yet very complex form—one that cannot be pinned to one tradition, but touches all in some way. It has developed over time and influences the very bedrock of commonplace Christian thought and practice. It is married to a particular reading of Romans 1-4, yet it is fundamentally not Pauline. For Douglas Campbell, this understanding of salvation which shapes Christian existence has several problems as it has come to be understood and needs to go. This is the burden of Campbell’s book, The Deliverance of God, which contains 936 pages of text and 241 pages of endnotes—both full of complex argumentation—toward this end...
Prayers for Pentecost (C)
Richard Bansemer, former Bishop of the Virginia Synod of the ELCA, and author of the ALPB's devotional books O Lord, Teach Me to Pray based on the Small Catechism, and We Believe based on the Augsburg Confession, has graciously provided prayers of the church for the Pentecost season, series C. All of the prayers reflect the lessons of the day...
Theological Reading Challenge 2013: Cyril of Alexandria
St. Cyril of Alexandria was the great champion of the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). But that doesn’t mean he was a straightforward hero. He was among the least pleasant of human beings ever to get canonized, politically wily, sometimes outright violent. If Lutherans ever wanted proof that our ultimate rightness with God does not depend on our moral perfection, St. Cyril is it...
Review of "Luther and the Beloved Community" by Paul R. Hinlicky
I am writing in the hope of persuading pastors to read Paul R. Hinlicky’s recent books. They meet a crying need for the sort of books that were published in previous generations by authors like Gustaf Wingren, William Lazareth, Gerhard Forde, David Scaer, and Robert Jenson. Their books have helped pastors to orient themselves and their flocks, and Hinlicky’s books do, too. I recommend that you begin with Luther and the Beloved Community...
2013 Theological Reading Challenge: On the Soul and Resurrection
And you thought Leviticus was a tough slog! Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise is an intriguing piece of work, and in some ways its inaccessibility is all the more reason for us to read it. For one thing, it gives us a window into the apologetics of a far distant time and place. It is almost impossible to overestimate how parochial our thinking is, how much we project our own particular set of issues onto the whole church throughout its history. The nature of the arguments here shows how flexible but also how impermanent the apologetic project is, which is why apologetics in itself cannot be our foundation. (George Lindbeck gave us the handy concept of “ad-hoc apologetics”: what works to remove unnecessary stumbling blocks in a particular time and place, as opposed to an entire edifice that will crumble with cultural movement away from those particular stumbling blocks.) At the same time, we see recurring questions that need to be addressed generation after generation, and we discover resources for our own apologetic task that we might not have lit upon otherwise. As with all good reading, tackling this text should be a horizon-expanding experience...