[1] “The supper is ended. Oh, now be extended the fruits of this service in all who believe” (LW 247). Omer Westendorf’s popular hymn accents the linkage between the Lord’s Supper and our life in the world. The words of the hymn are echoed in the Introduction to Lutheran Worship where we are told “Our […]
[1] Two years ago, I attended a graduate seminar that surveyed the social ethics of foundational Christian thinkers, using Troeltsch’s Social Teachings of the Christian Churches as a roadmap. For our week on Martin Luther, we read “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants,” “Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved,” “Temporal Authority: To What […]
[1] At one point in his discussion of the interaction between the Bible and its readers, Paul Jersild acknowledges the inevitable reality that “…what each of us brings to the text has a bearing on what we receive from it . . .” (53). While his point is to caution against “self-interested interpretations” of Scripture, […]
[1] From the initial planning for this book, the intent was not to set forth one normative Lutheran approach, against which other approaches could summarily be dismissed as “inferior.” Nor was it to suggest that there are no distinctive commonalities and emphases among those whose moral life has been shaped by Lutheran theology, centered in […]
[1] Is this a question that needs to be answered? Isn’t it a bit like asking if the existence of God can be proved? Why do we need to prove it? Why do we need to know if Muslims worship the same God as do we? What difference might that make? Having said this, let […]
[1] I am discovering that there are mainly three occasions on which people seek my ethical counsel as a Lutheran pastor. The first is when the local newspaper is doing a story on something controversial: homosexuality, genetic research, etc. The phone rings, a reporter asks, “what does the Lutheran church say about thus and so” […]
[1] When the Journal of Lutheran Ethics invited me to consider how Lutheran theology informs ethical preaching, I was curious to know where this question came from, undoubtedly because I understand both preaching and ethics to be contextual. The background to the question is the ethical issues that surround the events of September 11, 2001. […]
[1] Gary Simpson poses a question both timely and crucial, and responds to it by engaging seminal theorists of critical social theory as it emerged and developed in the Frankfurt School: In the face of disturbing, even enraging circumstances of suffering and injustice that appear as givens, how might Christians congregations in North America today […]
[1] “This daunting challenge”! Just so has John Stumme aptly christened The Promise of Lutheran Ethics1 (hereafter PLE). The Division for Church in Society of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commissioned this volume “to examine in a fundamental way the nature of Lutheran ethics today” (4). Daunting, indeed! Seven major essays make up the […]
[1] This collection of essays by eight different authors in addition to the editors, who are the director and associate director of studies in the division for Church in Society of the ELCA respectively, is an effort to establish “What is distinctive about Lutheran ethics?” The first chapter offers a short introductory statement by John […]
