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Review of Feasts, Fasts and Seasons in Early Christianity
The past is always changing, which is rather confusing for us since we think of it as fixed and finished. But it does change, in the sense that what we know about it and how we interpret it changes. In particular, it is separating out our interpretations based on our contemporary notions from “the way it really happened” that makes a regular reassessment of evidence about the past an extremely necessary task. This is what Paul F. Bradshaw and Maxwell E. Johnson (the latter an ELCA pastor and professor at Notre Dame) set out to do...
Prayers for The Season of Lent (Series B)
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 Season of Lent, series B. All of the prayers reflect the lessons of the day...
Review of Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Meditations and Hymns
This latest in the massive Classics of Western Spirituality Series helps to fill in a hole in the anglophone world’s knowledge of Lutheranism after the Reformation. The three devotional writers featured here—Johann Gerhard, Heinrich Müller, and Christian Scriver—as well as the assorted hymnwriters were all seventeenth-century men, well after the Reformation but just before the flowering of Pietism. They held their own, Gerhard in particular, in the confessionalization of European Christianity, but, as editor Eric Lund is at pains to point out, that didn’t mean they were dry-as-dust concretizers of orthodoxy, penning erudite but irrelevant volumes on esoteric themes. Quite the contrary, living in one of the most traumatic periods of European history, and dealing with the fallout in their parishioners’ lives, they were very much concerned with the personal faith of Lutherans and how it was expressed in daily life...
Prayers for The Post-Christmas and Epiphany Season (Series B)
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 post-Christmas and Epiphany Season, series B. All of the prayers reflect the lessons of the day...
Good Friday and Easter in Christmas
In “Away in a Manger” we sing “the little Lord Jesus, no crying he makes,” but I doubt it’s true. And I hope it’s not true. It’s meant as nothing more serious than an expression of children’s piety, but doctrinally we don’t want to draw back an inch from the implications of the communicatio idiomatum, the full exchange between Christ’s human and divine natures. Anything less, Luther passionately argued, and our salvation is a lie. I am feeling particularly grateful for the incarnation and the attendant communicatio idiomatum this Christmas. At the beginning of December I had an invasive surgery that has left me still, three and a half weeks later, exhausted, bent over, aching, and weak...