13 articles from seven issues, 2009 to 2018
Before the Reformation, Catholic worship had no congregational singing and no music in the language people actually spoke. Mills traces how Luther and Calvin recovered the song of the gathered people, and asks whether contemporary churches are quietly drifting back toward the silence the Reformers fought.
Gibbons grew up Catholic in Scotland, considered the priesthood as a teenager, and never imagined he would one day preach at the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt where Luther had taken his vows. The piece is a personal Reformation memoir written from inside the surprise.
Hylton encouraged his congregation to mark the Reformation's 500th anniversary, then noticed that the popular media coverage focused mostly on Luther's failings. He pulls three pastoral insights from Luther's example, the kind that hold up regardless of what we think of his weaker moments.
Does the Bible belong to the church or the church to the Bible? McConnell traces the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura from a time when most believers had no copy of the text to one in which everyone has free access and somehow no longer has time to read it.
October 31, 1517: Luther nails ninety-five theological challenges to a church door in Wittenberg, and the world soon catches fire. Dawson tells the story of the question that haunted Luther for years before that morning, and the answer that, once found, set everything in motion.
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.
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.
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