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Up one levelReflecting on the Bad Guys in Lent: Judas
There’s actually quite a number of Judases in the New Testament: Judas the brother of Jesus (Matthew 13:55), Judas the son of James (Luke 6:16, Acts 1:13), Judas not Iscariot (John 14:22), Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37), the Judas who sheltered Paul (Acts 9:11), Judas called Barsabbas (mentioned three times in Acts 15), and the epistle-writer Judas whom we in English prefer to call Jude, most of whom are basically good guys, but you won’t find Christians naming their sons after any of them. When we say Judas we mean Judas Iscariot, the sneaky low-down traitor, so oily that he betrays the Son of Man with a kiss, so cheap that it’s Mary of Bethany’s extravagant anointing of Jesus with nard that drives him as thief and keeper of the moneybag to bargain with the chief priests for thirty pieces of silver in exchange for his teacher...
Reflecting on the Bad Guys in Lent: Peter
Peter is the icon of the sinner-saint. We always find ourselves in his shoes. He’s the one who leaps out onto the water because of his great faith in Christ, and then halfway there—when the miracle is evidently working just fine—that’s when he panics and starts to sink. He’s the one who confesses first that Jesus is the Messiah, not a prophet or Elijah or John the Baptist, for which the Lord praises him and the blessing of divine revelation that granted Peter this insight; yet within three verses Peter’s telling the Messiah that he’s not allowed to go to the cross, which is Satan speaking from within him...
Reflecting on the Bad Guys in Lent
When I was little, I took comfort in an early theological certainty: that Judas, Pontius Pilate, and Hitler were all in hell. I think this must have been, among other things, assurance in an unpredictable and uncontrollable world that righteousness and order would reign in the end. Now I am older and, as often happens, past assurances have ceased to be comforting...
Occult America
Three is a tendency for individuals to assume that the days in which they are living are the apex of spiritual decline. That with the preponderance of new religions and religious philosophies and the decline of the old mainline Christian faiths, a new religious order will be established and Christians will be pre-Constantinian outcasts once more. History tends to generalize and sanitize and as a result the past often becomes homogeneous and the glory days become perhaps a little more glorious than they may have in actual fact been... Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation provides a helpful corrective to the view that America was once a unified Christian (at least in the traditional creedal sense of the word) nation.
Bible Studies for Lent
One of the earliest decisions that the church made, as a whole, was that there would be four gospels telling the One Gospel. The four would not be smoothed out into one streamlined account; each would be allowed its own voice, its own emphases and peculiarities. Almost as early, systematically-minded and earnest theologians tried to iron out the wrinkles and force the four into one. Tatian in the second century tried to do just this with his Diatesseron. The church didn’t think much of it and stuck with the four...
Worth a Look and Worth Your Support
Odds and ends of recent interest!
Talking about the Seminaries
It had been my hope when I wrote “The Best of Times the Worst of Times for the LCMS Seminaries,” that it would start a Synod-wide dialog on how best to organize our residential seminaries to ensure that they continued to be a source of academic pride for the Synod. Sadly, despite initially hopeful responses, the discussion quickly devolved into defensiveness about why one seminary or the other should stay open and the overall benefits of residential seminary education versus non-residential education. Even those misguided arguments have now run their course with a joint statement released by the president of synod, the presidents of each residential seminary, and other pastoral education leaders...
Christmas Break
Dear readers, we'll be taking a break from the web for Christmas, and we hope you will too. We wish you a peaceful and blessed celebration of the Word made flesh. See you after Epiphany!
Thank You
Dear Friends, It is that time of year. As the book closes on a turbulent year for American Lutheranism, we are grateful that you have journeyed through this difficult time with us here on Lutheranforum.org. We hope that you have found the commentary and postings timely and enlightening, but also challenging and thought-provoking as we seek a way forward for our Lutheran churches that is both evangelical and catholic
Christmas Hymns Off the Beaten Track
There are some times of year when liturgical creativity is undesirable and Christmas is surely one of them. The faithful who show up for every service no matter how minor or inconveniently timed, as well as the once-a-year folks whose mixture of sentiment, superstition, and longing for the true God brings them in, both want and need "Joy to the World," "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," and "O Come, All Ye Faithful." For that matter, so do I. But that's also why I've always been particularly fond of the First Sunday after Christmas and even more, if we are so lucky, the Second Sunday after Christmas, as a chance to enjoy the fringe of Christmas hymnody. Here are three favorites of mine...
A Pro-life Activist Reflects on the Death of George Tiller
When I heard the initial news teaser on the radio that an abortion provider had been shot at a church, I knew both the abortionist and the church before either were named. Few abortionists were as outspoken about the abortion services they provided as George Tiller. No other abortionist was as outspoken about his involvement in a church as George Tiller. The sickening part about waiting for the actual story was to see if I would recognize the name of the alleged gunman from my time as a college pro-life leader...
Breaking the Cycle of Poverty
Growing up I was always taught that with hard work anything is possible. Our lives were not determined by our origin or the circumstances of our birth. That is at the heart of the American dream - equal opportunity and possibility for all. It is at the heart of the message which I try and instill in my students here in the Bronx. A recent study of brain differences between rich and poor children by the University of California – Berkley shows that while opportunity may exist for all, we all don’t come from equal starting points. There may in fact be a cycle to poverty...
Grace Alone and Faith Alone
It happens not infrequently, in theological conversation with pastors or students, or while I’m editing a piece for LF, that I come across a statement claiming that Lutherans teach justification “by grace alone.” That is not wrong… not exactly. But it is also not quite right...
A Tough Week for Lutheranism
It was a tumultuous week for Lutherans in the United States. The ELCA released the long anticipated (dreaded among some) recommendations of the Sexuality Study. Meanwhile the LCMS was mired in their own controversy – a legal dispute of a trademark on the name of a radio show canceled by Synod...
Naaman the Syrian… Episode 2
The Lutheran church here in Alsace has a liturgy and church year quite similar to what we’re used to in the U.S. In fact, liturgy is one of the best ways to start learning a foreign language: the rhythms and vocabulary are so similar that your comprehension is much higher than in, say, the grocery store or the prefect’s office. So far the biggest difference in practice is that we celebrated Transfiguration two weeks ago: instead of being the last Sunday before Lent begins, here there are three more Sundays after it, culminating in “Invocavit Sunday,” still named for the opening words of the Psalm for the day in Latin...
Farewell to Richard John Neuhaus (1936-2009)
The Spring 2009 issue of Lutheran Forum and the March 2009 issue of Forum Letter will both pay tribute to the late Richard John Neuhaus, former editor of Forum Letter...
Race and the Body of Christ
It is perhaps a testament to how far our nation has come that, when I showed the following picture to my students in grades 4-12 recently, none of them thought anything about the photo was particularly noteworthy...
Christians by the Church Year
Once, in a class, an Anglican professor wrapped up a theological exposition with the triumphant conclusion, “And that is why, my friends, Christmas is the central festival of the church year, not Good Friday, as the Reformed would have it.” The salient point was the the crux of our salvation lay in the incarnation of the Word—the sovereign and gracious decision to be God-with-us—and not in the death of that Word in our place or on our behalf, in this Anglican view a secondary move in the drama of salvation...
Revisiting Seminex
This past week I was privileged to be one of the invited speakers to Concordia Theological Seminary’s 32nd Annual Theological Symposium. The topic was a look back at the major figures of the LCMS in the events leading up to formation of Seminex. Presentations were made by Robert Wilken on Jaroslav Pelikan, Phil Secker on Arthur Carl Piepkorn, Larry Rast Jr. on J.A.O Preus, David Scaer on Robert Preus, Dean Wenthe on Martin Scharlemann, Robert Shuta on Walter A Maier and David Schmidt on Richard Caemmerer. My presentation was on the least well known of all of the figures – Berthold von Schenk...
The End of Ecumenism, Part 2
Like Paul Sauer who posted on this topic last week, I’m an under-35 theologian engaged in ecumenical work. He’s right about the decreased interest in ecumenism and the reasons for it, though I think the problem extends upwards from our own generation, too. In my short time doing ecumenical work professionally, I’ve realized two things that perhaps will also shed some light on the issue. Both of them pertain to change...