Response to Hinlicky’s “Paths Not Taken”
May 2010: Public or Private? (Volume 10 Issue 5)
[1] In Paths Not Taken: Fates of Theology from Luther to Leibniz1 Paul Hinlicky seeks to retrieve a number of features from Leibniz’s (1646-1716) philosophy for today’s theology, particularly his metaphysics, his doctrine of the compatibility of divine freedom and human freedom, and his theodicy (this world as the best of all possible worlds) in […]
A Radical Lutheran Response to My Reviewers
[1] Allow me first to express my gratitude to the Journal of Lutheran Ethics and particularly the efforts of Book Review Editor, Michael Shahan, for assembling these courteous and thoughtful responses to The Role of Justification in Contemporary Theology. I am honored that the Journal of Lutheran Ethics would find this book important enough to […]
Delivering the Goods: A Radical Lutheran Response to Deus Caritas Est
August 2006: Deus Caritas Est - Lutherans (Volume 6 Issue 8)
[1] In his first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI offers a vision of the Christian life with specific directives for the mission of the Roman Catholic Church. His argument is straightforward: God’s love given most concretely in Jesus Christ ought to be manifest in specific practices, such as charity, within the church. […]
A Review of Law, Life, and the Living God: The Third Use of the Law in Modern American Lutheranism by Scott R. Murray
September 2003 (Volume 3 Issue 9)
[1] Scott R. Murray, currently a Lutheran Church Missouri Synod pastor in Houston, Texas, began this book as a dissertation at New Orleans Baptist Seminary. His work was motivated initially by what he perceived as an ethical libertinism in the ELCA’s human sexuality studies of the early 1990s. The goal of this book is to […]
A Review of Let Christ be Christ: Theology, Ethics & World Religions in the Two Kingdoms. Essays in Honor of the Sixty-Fifth Birthday of Charles L. Manske
1] This volume, a Festschrift for Charles Louis Manske, a decades-long leader in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS), reads as a veritable “Who’s Who” of LCMS theologians. However, the volume is, shall we say, “inter-synodical,” containing essays by ELCA theologians George Forell, Ben Johnson, William Russell, and Trygve Skarsten. Naturally, the collection of essays […]