Forgiveness denied
A link to this ER clip was added to Theology of the Cross: the Faith Luther Confessed. See this reaction by Higher Things.
The Historic Lectionary
A link to HistoricLectionary.com as a frame makes Dawning Realm’s prayer page (“Worship in the kingdom”) more helpful as an aid to daily worship.
Scripture alone but interpreted by tradition?
Roman Catholic theologians have traditionally attributed doctrinal differences among Protestants to Scripture’s lack of clarity, claiming that doctrinal unity cannot be achieved without an authoritative interpreter of Scripture. Denying that such an interpreter exists in an ecclesiastical hierarchy, Lutherans have maintained that although many passages of Scripture are unclear in themselves, many of them are interpreted according to the rule of faith, the set of perfectly clear statements in Scripture that teach all truly catholic doctrine; this is what the term perspicuity of Scripture means. Rather than placing interpretive authority in human traditions or, at the opposite extreme, ignoring or despising the writings of earlier Christians, Luther and his followers rejoiced in the extent to which those writings agreed with the clear words of Scripture. Without explicitly denying the perspicuity of Scripture, Keith Mathison, in his Shape of Sola Scriptura, advocated a middle course in which the writings of early but post-apostolic Christians have a real authority alongside and yet subordinate to that of the Scriptures. His arguments have influenced not only his fellow Calvinists, but even some Lutherans, in spite of the stand of Luther, the Augsburg Confession, and the Formula of Concord…
If God exists, why doesn’t he prove it?
The author of The End of Faith asked, “How is it fair for God to have designed a world which gives such ambiguous testimony to his existence?” Christians typically respond to the new atheists with answers from the Intelligent Design movement or from other developments of Thomas Aquinas’s “proofs” of God’s existence. By contrast, orthodox Christians of the first century, far from advancing philosophical arguments for the existence of God, maintained that those who deny his existence suppress the knowledge they already have of him from the things he created…
