Epiphany 2013, Volume XXII, Number 1
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(A feature article from the journal: A Conversation between Mark Noll and Hermann Sasse by John T. Pless)

Mark Noll is a sharp-eyed watcher of American Lutheranism from the outside. In numerous essays he has spoken of the ambiguity surrounding what it means to be Lutheran in America. In “American Lutherans Yesterday and Today,” Noll observes: “The history of Lutheranism in America is complex primarily because Lutherans seem to have both easily accommodated to American ways of life, including religious ways of life, and never accommodated to American ways.” How about that for the proverbial Lutheran paradox? A new twist on the simul — American and un-American!

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Reformation 2012, Volume XXI, Number 4
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(A feature article from the journal: Luther’s Alleged Anti-Semitism by Ronald F. Marshall)

Many American Lutherans have rejected Luther because of his alleged anti-Semitism or supposed hatred of the Jews — even formally condemning him twice for this at national conventions in 1974 (American Lutheran Church) and 1994 (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America). These critics believe that Luther spews forth his hatred in his famous 1543 treatise The Jews and Their Lies (AE 47:137–306), a book that supposedly inspired Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) as he devised his plan to kill off the Jews throughout Europe.

It has become fairly common to suppose that “Luther’s diatribes in the sixteenth century are an eerie foreshadowing of Nazi practices four centuries later.” Even “Thomas Mann linked Luther to Hitler as did Lord Vansittart, once the highest civil servant in the British Foreign Office, Archbishop Temple and the Very Reverend R. W. Inge of the Church of England shared this opinion, and so did William L. Shirer, the author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a bestseller.” The prestigious Luther scholar George Wolfgang Forell concludes that in Luther’s critique of the Jews, “the great theologian of the cross revealed his triumphalist Achilles’ heel.”  Other scholars agree. James M. Kittelson says this treatise is a “poison” in the church. Heiko A. Oberman says Luther’s attitude towards the Jews, expressed in the 1543 treatise, “becomes a pawn of modern anti-Semitism.”  Martin Marty says that Luther is at his worst when writing this treatise. The treatise contributes to Marty’s overall judgment that Luther is an unjustifiably “extreme” thinker. And Eric W. Gritsch argues that Luther “is not just ‘anti-Judaic’ (as some Luther researchlabeled him), but genuinely ‘anti-Semitic.’ . . . Moreover, Luther himself was willing to kill ‘a blaspheming Jew.’”

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Holy Trinity 2012, Volume XXI, Number 3
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(A feature article from the journal: Lured from the Water, the Little Fish Perish by Norman Nagel)

Which birthday are we celebrating? How many birthdays has Logia had? Of water or of the Spirit? There is evidence of the Spirit. Is that then “born again”? How many years to “the age of discretion”? With that might come the recognition that a Christian surely knows his birth from his baptism. There is no mention of water in volume 1of 1989, sometimes called Urlogia. If we were to do it over again, would we not begin with the water and Name of holy baptism? While not undertaking to do others’ repentances, something might yet be attempted to relieve this waterlessness. The Large Catechism says we can never finish extolling what it calls “a water of God” [ein Gotteswasser] (LC IV,14), but we might nevertheless perhaps attempt a belated, aetiological, beginning.

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Eastertide 2012, Volume XXI, Number 2
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(A feature article from the journal: The Greco-Roman Savior: Jesus in the Age of Augustus by Peter Scaer)

God speaks Hebrew. Of course, our holy book consists, by and large, of the Hebrew Scriptures. To understand Jesus, you must know him as Yahweh, the Lord of Israel. For good reason, then, Matthew proclaims Jesus to be the promised seed of Abraham, the fulfillment of Israel’s history. But the roots of the Old Testament run deeper. The call of Abraham does not appear until after the Tower of Babel. Previously people and things were not set apart by language. There was no Levitical Law or kosher foods. God created all things and saw that they were good. There was no Holy Land; all the land was a fit for God’s people. Salvation’s story thus requires a new Adam, a truly universal figure for a newly universal outreach. Enter Luke’s Gospel, at once more modern and more ancient, which introduces Christ as the new Adam (Luke 3:23–37) and the whole world as a fit dwelling place for the Lord and his followers.

Luke’s infancy narrative serves as a type of time machine, transporting us back to Jerusalem, where we meet faithful Zechariah. Along the way, we encounter an entire cast of Old Testament characters. But upon closer examination, Luke begins his Gospel not really in Jerusalem at all, but in the same place his second volume ends, in Rome, the heart of the Greco-Roman world. Indeed, the first four verses of Luke’s Gospel are strikingly devoid of Semitisms. Addressing his treatise to the “most excellent Theophilus,” Luke writes as a Greco-Roman historian, in the line of Herodotus and Polybius, composing the finest of periodic sentences.1 As Frederick Danker puts it, the opening sentence is meant to “make a favorable impression on Greco-Romans across a broad cultural front,” and “is intended for the Greco-Roman public square.”2 If we are to enter Luke’s world, we must enroll in the Gymnasium and make it our own.3 The first four verses of Luke’s Gospel proclaim it to be a cosmopolitan gospel for a cosmopolitan people, on the verge of turningthe whole world upside down (Acts 17:28).

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Epiphany 2012, Volume XXI, Number 1
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(A feature article from the journal: Confessional Fidelity by Bo Giertz)

Ruben Josefson takes the designation “confessional” from those in the current debate concerning women pastors who have incorrectly taken the title for themselves, and gives it back to those who deserve to wear it.

So says Ingmar Strom in Woman, Society, Church concerning Ruben Josefson’s essay, “The Evangelical-Lutheran Position,” in the same book. Thus, those are truly “confessional” who find no opposition in the Bible or the Confessions to opening the office of the ministry to women. One who honestly desires to be faithful to the Confessions naturally listens with interest. More so, his own faith and work as a pastor stand endlessly in debt to the Confessions. If it is true that it can be shown with good reason that our Confessions represent a view of Christianity and biblical interpretation that naturally leads to introducing women pastors at an appropriate time, then this whole controversy can be ended — certainly a relief for all parties involved. What are the reasons, then?

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Reformation 2011, Volume XX, Number 4
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(A feature article from the journal: The Lutheran Codicil: From Augustine’s Grace to Luther’s Gospel by Phillip Cary)

Because Luther’s doctrine of justification belongs to the broad stream of the Augustinian doctrine of grace in the West, we can see what is distinctive about it by noticing how it differs from Augustine’s teaching. The best way to do that, I propose, is to observe that where Luther distinguishes law and gospel, Augustine distinguishes law and grace. The difference is encapsulated in what I call “the Lutheran codicil to the Augustinian heritage,” in which Augustine’s insistence on fleeing for grace becomes Luther’s insistence on fleeing to the gospel.

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Holy Trinity 2011, Volume XX, Number 3
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(A feature article from the journal: The “Third Sacrament:” Confession and Repentance in the Confessions of the Lutheran Church by Werner Klän)

In recent years the subject of forgiveness in its theological context has again become a topic of discussion. [1] This discussion has concentrated on the forgiveness that takes place between individuals, [2] without neglecting totally the divine dimension of forgiveness. [3] So it is appropriate to recall this divine dimension as it is presented in the Confessions of the Lutheran Church and summarized in the Book of Concord of 1580. [4]

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