So fellow Chicago-land pastor, Jonathan Fisk posted this video today. In it he argues that Lutherans aren’t protestants in the same way that most people think about it. He essentially says that they are Catholics who fought to keep believing the “Gospel” instead of submitting to the Pope, who Jonathan believes subverted the Gospel by burying it under lots of false doctrines and such… As any regular reader of this blog knows, Catholics and Lutherans are two of the groups... Read more

This is a great little diagram that maps out the great commission (Matthew 28:19-20) and how it ACTUALLY functions in the Greek… Let me break it down a little for you: The command is not GO, that is simply describing what’s going on while you are doing  (it’s in an aorist, passive deponent, participle for those of you keeping score at home) there is no conjunction in the Greek denoting 2 separate commands. The actual imperative is “make disciples” (aorist,... Read more

One of the great tragedies of the reformation is the loss of history within the churches that count themselves it’s children. Within many traditions there was a movement to distance the emerging churches of the reformation from the historical continuity of the Catholic Church. People began to look exclusively at the leaders in the first century of the church’s existence for inspiration, and abandoned devotion to anyone who didn’t fall under the umbrella of the apostolic age. If the Bible... Read more

Yesterday I posted about how I need spiritual classics to help me see a God bigger then my presuppositions. [The Virtue of the Antiquated] One example of this is a spiritual classic that I read for the first time in January. The book was called The Story of a Soul. It is the record of of the life of Thérèse of Lisieux. Thérèse was a 19th century Carmelite nun. She wrote down the book that we know today at The... Read more

For much of my Christian life I have suffered from having a limited perspective. Most of my thoughts have been formed from my own perspective and social location. As a result, my theology has made a lot of sense to me. It fits well into the world of a middle-class white american male in the twenty-first century. I have seen Jesus as primarily concerned with the kinds of problems that I am concerned with and interested in my own interests.... Read more

Some scholars argue that wisdom literature is a different kind of revelation from, say, that in the Psalms. Hence, they believe, the former has less absolute authority in religious matters than the latter book.  I was recently asked the question, “are these scholars right?” I think this question is impossible to answer without clarifying a couple of things. No book of the Bible has “absolute authority in religious matters”. When Christians talk about the authority of scripture they do so... Read more

I remember a conversation I had over a decade ago with a friend of mine about the book of proverbs compared to the book of Job. We were sitting at a Burger King and wrestling with how it could be that the book of Job could be included in the Bible along with the book of Proverbs. The two of them seem to be fighting with one another. Let me explain. In the book of Proverbs there is a series... Read more

How is resurrection different? This is an excerpt from a lesson I did yesterday for my Sunday School class. Reanimation vs Resuscitation vs Resurrection   Read more

The Book of Psalms is probably the most read book in the Bible. I know that I read it more then anything else. My prayer habits generally revolve around reading Psalms throughout the day as part of the “divine office” which makes up the backbone of my own prayer life, which I got from Catholic chruch. If a Catholic prays the offices every day they will read thrugh all the psalms at least once a month. The Lutheran Treasury of... Read more

If one were to pick up a Jewish Old Testament and compare it to a Protestant Old Testament one would find there were some interesting differences in the Table of Context. The first seven books are the same in both, but after that things start to look a little different. Protestant Bibles include “Ruth” but Jewish Bibles go onto I and II Samuel. The reason for this is because there are different redactional values that have come to be employed... Read more