I will also speak of your testimonies before kings and shall not be put to shame.
I will also speak of your testimonies before kings and shall not be put to shame.
Ping.
I think when the chips are down, a lot of churches that were looking down their own noses at one another will suddenly find out that gospel was living at their neighbors after all, and that they had considered mountains what the Lord barely regarded as molehills.
The most faithful churches, I believe, are found at the corner of Liberality and Holiness streets.
Yes, I said Liberality in addition to Holiness. Because God is not just a demanding Judge, He is also a supplying Savior. We don’t serve a Miser in Heaven. We have found the term “liberal” applied to things that are actually licentious, that hold sin as not simply abundantly pardonable (that is God’s true liberality), but as a valid steady state in the Christian existence.
Ping!
Amen
Youngest child in our family is the only one with two middle names. We added “Augustana” because she was baptized near this date (June 23).
“Our churches teach . . . .”
“Our churches condemn . . . .”
This pattern recurs in the Augsburg Confession. But what is the weight of this condemnation? How is it executed and applied? Our churches state, as does the living Christ, what is already in effect. They say, as part of confessing the truth, “No. That is wrong. That is false.” What attaches to speaking wrongly and falsely concerning what God says of Himself?
Example, Article II on Original Sin:
“Our churches condemn the Pelagians and others who deny that original depravity is sin, thus obscuring the glory of Christ’s merit and benefits. Pelagians argue that a person can be justified before God by his own strength and reason.”
Not exactly a good way to become popular, but then popularity in the world’s terms is not what the Church is about. Suffering under the Cross is what the Church is about, along with the life of the world to come.
It was 3:00 PM on a Saturday, the time most people are watching golf on CBS Wide World of Sports, when the *Unaltered* Augsburg Confession was first read aloud publicly. It took about two hours.
Here are a few questions for Lutherans:
1) Is Baptism necessary or not? If it’s necessary, then surely it does something. What does it do?
2) If it does nothing, then why would it be required?
3) If it does something, it must be unseen rather than just a nice ceremony, so what does it do to a soul?
4) If it does something to a soul, and one would have to believe it does something positive for a soul, then why believe in sola fide since no faith is necessary on the part of the infant being baptized?