54 articles from 34 issues, 1998 to 2026 · Page 3 of 5
Luther was supposed to become a lawyer; his ambitious father had a plan. A thunderstorm changed the plan. Barnes follows the personal story of how an unlikely candidate became the central figure of European Christianity in the 1500s, and what we still learn from his unexpected calling.
A tomato plant's tag promised that 'deep roots produce abundant fruits,' which Hurley took as a parable of Reformation heritage. The piece is a pastor's reflection on how five-century-old roots actually feed the present, and what fruits a Reformed congregation might still expect to see.
Selderhuis traces Reformation commemorations all the way back to 1617, when Friedrich V of the Palatinate first proposed a centennial celebration. What the jubilees have meant has shifted with each generation; this one looks back from the vantage of a Europe that no longer assumes Christian assumptions.
'Here I stand, I can do no other' is one of the most famous lines in Christian history, and Luther probably never said it. Thompson untangles three things popular memory has gotten wrong about the Diet of Worms, and recovers what Luther actually meant by Christian conscience.
Luther had a mistress, or thought he did, and he sometimes called her Reason. Burnett uses Luther's polemic to recover something the Reformers actually believed about reason: a gift of God to be cherished and exercised, but never the master of revelation.
October 31, 1517 was meant to be a scholarly debate among theologians at the University of Wittenberg. McGlasson works back into the local controversy over indulgences, finds an early version of the modern prosperity gospel, and argues the first thesis still says the load-bearing thing.
Sixteenth-century Reformers worked in a vacuum where ancient heresies clamored for reconsideration. Finch shows how Calvin held to Nicene and Chalcedonian Christology even while insisting on sola scriptura, and what his way of speaking carefully about Jesus has to teach a church facing similar pressures today.
A Reformation Day sermon on Ephesians 2:8-9 that opens with the surprisingly theological politics of tipping. McKechnie uses the everyday transaction to set up the very different logic of grace, and Luther's recovery of it after centuries of religious tipping had buried the gospel.
Ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda gets translated as 'the church reformed, always reforming,' but the original Latin has more bite than that. Bush traces the saying's actual provenance and argues the Reformed tradition's understanding of reform is more disciplined, and more demanding, than the slogan suggests.
Karl Barth once described Calvin as 'a cataract, a primeval forest, a demonic power.' Goodloe doesn't disagree but finds, like Barth, that one could profitably spend a lifetime there. The piece reads Calvin on church unity for what he still has to teach a fragmenting PCUSA.
What would Augustine say to a culture that chases fulfillment through fame, sex and shopping? In an opening statement for a staged debate with Bertrand Russell, Carl Trueman argues that Augustine would read our hunger as love turned in on itself.
What does a prayer written sixteen hundred years ago say about a restless heart? Herbert Jacobsen reads Augustine’s Confessions through three themes, human restlessness, the mystery of God and the affections, and finds each held together by grace.
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