Baptismal Waters

The playwright Henrik Ibsen once wrote of a Norwegian Lutheran newsboy whose take on the Christian faith was refreshingly honest. A lot of us see the Faith the same way. "I like to commit sins," Ibsen quoted the young man as saying, "and God likes to forgive them. Really, the world is admirably arranged!" As transparently superficial and even hypocritical as that way of looking at things is, it nevertheless has a following. In my days as a seminarian and pastor in The ALC and ELCA, I found myself among theologians and seminarians and pastors who spoke about the Law with contempt, convinced that it had no role to play in the Christian life. That this was based on a superficial and distorted reading of Paul,  who wrote of Christ as the end of the Law for righteousness but openly championed its ongoing significance in the life of the Christian, somehow escaped them. So did the fact that Luther, who admittedly never spelled out a "Third Use of the Law" (...

When Martin Luther lay dying, he was asked, "Reverend Father, are you ready to die trusting in your Lord Jesus Christ and to confess the doctrine which you have taught in his name?" "Yes!," he replied. Shortly afterward, a stroke deprived him of the power of speech. But following his death, a piece of paper was found on his person which contained what are usually thought of as his last words. They also, in many ways, sum up a great deal of his theology: "We are beggars. This is true." Beggars. People utterly dependent on the generosity of Another. People without resources of their own.  People whose plea is for mercy, not for justice; whose prayer is not, "Lord, I thank You that I am not as others are," but rather "God, be merciful to me, a sinner," uttered in the painful awareness that the Christian in himself is exactly as others are, and no better. Yet Christians still presume to look down our noses at people who differ from...

Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign Lord. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live? --Ezekiel 18:23 (ESV) Hugh Hefner, the high priest of the sexual revolution and the founder of Playboy magazine, is dead at age 91. Reactions are varied. I can honestly say that I have not seen or heard any Christian come right out and openly gloat about Hef entering eternity, but there is no shortage of smug speculation in Christian circles concerning his eternal fate. Not surprisingly- and not without justification- atheists and the anti-religious take this of further evidence of the self-righteousness, judgementalism, and lack of compassion which supposedly characterize Christians and therefore Christianity. Once again, we seem literally hell-bent on confirming the world's impression that the Faith, and by extension Jesus, have an agenda one hundred eighty degrees the opposite of what it really is. Few people in the history...