A blog of the Evangelical Lutheran Liturgy
The world wants us to believe that deviant sexuality is just another shade of normalcy, that two men or two women in a sexual relationship can be a “marriage” and the source of a stable, moral, and wholesome environment for raising children. And liberal Christians have every manner of workaround to explain away “fundamentalist” passages in the Scriptures that say things that conflict with our postmodern permissive take on sexuality.
Read MoreI have read some foolish, naïve, and stupid responses, borne of ignorance and romantic illusions. The one response that I think is spot-on was offered by Ad Crucem News. You can read it here. I highly recommend that you do so! My thoughts on this are based on my own encounters with Antifa mobs over the course of the summer of 2017 in New Orleans. I received a quick and immersive education on the subject.
Read MoreAnd yes, finding an authentic Lutheran liturgy can seem like groping about in the dark, and can be frustrating, demoralizing, and discouraging, there is a resource that can help.
Read MoreLeave off, I say, the folly of modern day ‘witnessing’ of Jesus, and confess, rather, the testimony of these Apostles. Let the pure light of the Apostolic witness shine forth. Ponder instead in your heart their witness to you, and if you would speak about the Lord Jesus, speak of their witness.
Read MoreThe above video is, at the same time, funny, tragic, illustrative, and instructive.
Read MoreWe Lutherans sometimes fall victim to the “too Catholic” superstition. We are ashamed of our venerable traditions of blessing people and objects, even when they appear in our Small Catechism,
Read MoreIf we only had more koinonia and conversations…
Read MoreThe point of having a synod is that we “walk together.” We all confess the Bible and the Lutheran confessions. But this confession is more than a cerebral and intellectual acceptance of propositional truths. To be a synod requires unity of practice that binds us together. So in addition to the Bible and the Confessions, we have other agreed-upon conditions for being in the LCMS.
Read MoreIn the previous part of our series, we saw how political and economic pressures brought a decisive end to the traditional understanding of usury championed by Luther. The Andreae-Gerhard position prevailed throughout the seventeenth century, thereby establishing a way for interest to be regarded, under certain conditions, as morally licit for Christians. As the distinction between the Zinskauf trade and ordinary lending gradually collapsed, the charging of interest on loans of every kind soon became widely accepted, provided, at least in theory, that the poor were still protected from economic harm.
Read MoreAlso in the late 1990s, I was a layman in my young thirties in the Florida-Georgia District - which at the time was in open rebellion against closed communion by means of an adopted 1997 district convention resolution called “A Declaration of Eucharistic Understanding and Practice” (DEUP) - which was aptly acronymned if you sound it out. You can read about it here. Anyway, a big confab to rally the troops to the unbiblical practice was arranged. I naively went to one of their dog and pony shows - and as one would expect, dogs and ponies produce a plethora of excrement.
Read MoreOur Liturgical Calendar at your fingertips!
Read MoreThe Lutheran liturgical calendar, like the Lutheran Reformation, is intrinsically conservative, retaining the inheritance of our forebears in Western Christendom. As such, it is comprised of both a temporal cycle, containing the seasonal offices from Advent through the end of Trinitytide, and a sanctoral cycle, which contains the feasts of Christ, of the Blessed Virgin Mary, of the apostles, and of other martyrs, confessors, and virgins.
Read MoreThe desire for “conversation” seems innocent. And sometimes it is.
But sometimes it isn’t.
This calls for discernment and strategic self-awareness. For every error that has gotten a toehold in the church began with “conversation.” Now is a good time to review the trenchant and ever-relevant analysis by the Rev. Charles Porterfield Krauth, from back in 1871.
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