Category: Faith Questions
-
Pray for the Scattered and Afflicted:
A Letter From the EditorFellow Intercessors, Consider this three-part prayer Philip Melanchthon prayed with his colleagues: “We shall commend our cause, therefore, to Christ, who some time will judge these controversies, and we beseech Him to look upon the afflicted and scattered churches, and to bring them back to godly and perpetual concord.” (Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Preface,…
-
Jesus has Secured the Universe
In Romans 13:11, Paul reminds you, “The hour has already come for you to wake up from your slumber, because our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed.” But how do we open our eyes from our sleep? What will secure us from our own nightmares of ignorance and sin? How do we…
-
God’s Word is Always the Solution:
A Letter From the EditorDear fellow servant of the Word, Has the ministry of our called workers changed over the past few decades? Perhaps it has in some ways. We certainly live in a broken world. That’s not new. It has been broken from the time Adam and Eve coveted the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good…
-
A Letter from the NPH Professional Books Editor on Doctor of Souls
Dear shepherds of God’s people, How many of you remember what we were taught on the first day in Dogmatics class as Middlers at the seminary? We learned that theology is a “habitus practicus,” that all (scriptural) theology is practical—it is for people (Romans 15:4; 2 Timothy 3:15,16). Perhaps at the time we did not…
-
Here We Stand: Teaching the Blessings of Our Shared Lutheran Heritage – A Letter From the Editor
Dear fellow servants of the Word, Our pluralistic society insists on blurring the differences between denominations under the guise of being more loving and tolerant. After being bombarded with this message for many years, we may all have loosened our grip a bit on why we are Lutheran. Some of the folks on our membership…
-
Being “Quick to Listen”: A Letter From the Editor
“That was more meaningful than any baptism in a church that I’ve been to.” “There’s a feeling I get [there] I never got at church.” “It was those moments when she realized that she didn’t need religion to tap into that feeling.” I finished reading a helpful book yesterday, written by an atheist mother of…
-
High Ground, Slippery Slopes, and Bottomlands (Part 2)
Haven’t read Part One yet? Find it here. Emperors and Elephants Someone once observed, “It only takes one person to produce speech, but it requires the cooperation of all to produce silence.”36 History has its share of corporate silences. The Holocaust, for example, will not be remembered so much for the extraordinary numbers of people…
-
High Ground, Slippery Slopes, and Bottomlands (Part 1)
T. S. Eliot wrote, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” How true. When conflict threatens to destroy us, we do our best to find a solution. But we do not always deal with our conflicts in the same way or employ the same strategies for untangling our hate-filled messes. In his book The Peacemaker, author…