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| Happy Birthday, LI. |
Finishing The Faith of Jesus: Against the Faithless Lutherans was really a thrill. I was hoping that it would make sense to the laity, since the clergy are almost immune to study. That made it difficult to let go of the project, because justification by faith is countered by all the forces of modernist theology, Pietist dogma, and synodical apostasy. One must know the enemy well to refute false doctrine, so taking the argument back to Rambach is a challenge.
At Yale Divnity the professors mourned the lack of study by clergy, once they graduated. One Old Testament professor said, "If I look at a pastor's library, I can tell which year he graduated. They stop reading at graduation and still have the same books."
Abraham Malherbe took us through the study of a text with "Scripture interpreting Scripture,:" simply using the English text, although we we expected to know Hebrew and Greek. I wonder, as I read the published propaganda of synodical pugilists, if they have ever done that. In fact, after completing Thy Strong Word, I knew they had not. John Brug (Mequon) wrote The Ministry of the Word with one brief mention of the efficacy of the Word. And. Otten. Loved. It.
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| Nils A. Dahl said about LI, "What a remarkable baby!" His wife adored holding Martin - they lost their firstborn. |
Nils Dahl asked the doctoral New Testament class, which I got to take, what we knew for certain about the New Testament. He batted away all the lame answers and said, stuttering and shoving his eyeglasses into his mouth to garble his speech even more, "The text! The text! We have that for certain!" We loved his class, because many signed up, based on his world-wide fame as a conservative scholar, but left after trying to follow his quirky speech patterns. He always emphasized study of the text itself, not the study of the theories about the New Testament. Synodical standard bearers take note: copying past efforts is not faithful, scholarly, or wise.
I really enjoyed hearing from various laity, that they loved The Faith of Jesus and wanted multiple copies - 5, 10, and 15 copies at a time. Clergy are asking too, by the way, because there are some who continue to study and endure in the face of Thrivent-funded lethargy, confusion, and excess.
The great thing about the orders is this - each person has a group of people selected to read (or ignore) the book. Some people writing have simply popped up to request copies - they are not people I know otherwise.
I am now sending out thefull-color edition to donors, but I found that the $3 edition is still available for me to order at the author's price. So, continue to ask for it - bethanylutheranworship@gmail.com
I am not asking people to send money to get the black and white edition. People have already given toward it, so simply ask and a bunch will be sent your way.
The Lottery - Back to the Original Theme
I called this Local Lottery Winner because circumstances beyond my control placed me where I could first learn about Church Growth, UOJ, Luther, and the Book of Concord.
Notre Dame forced me to study the modernist theologians - Barth (woo woo Miss Kirschbaum), Tillich (bleh), Rahner, Kueng, and their predecessors, notably Schleiermacher of Halle University.
Serving in Columbus, Ohio placed me in a nest of WELS vipers who made Hillary Clinton seem honest and gracious in comparison. My academic knowledge of Luther and the Book of Concord was turned into a quest to find what was behind the clergy apostasy and adultery - if it only stopped there. One Catholic woman said, "Priests do not consider it a sin if they are with another man," a prescient statement.
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| Wayne, is he talking about you? |
Hilariously, Wayne Mueller claimed in print that WELS had no Church Programs, but if the synod did, they were Biblical. Only a graduate of WELS GA hazing could manufacture a twisted claim like that.
Megatron, the database I created to handle the quotations for Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant, became the storehouse for the WELS/LCMS Church Growth quotations and their refutations in Luther and the Book of Concord. More quotations were added for Thy Strong Wordand the total passed 3,000 quotations - with the proper citations. That storehouse of quotations is still a handy weapon today, and I used it to call up the statements of nincompoops yakking about disciples making disciples making disciples...
The Real Treasure
The greatest treasure has been the demand to prove, support, and add weight to justification by faith, the Chief Article of Christianity. The reader known only by his hexadecimal number, 29A, kept saying, "We need more justification by faith quotations."
I often thought, "Isn't that obvious by now?" But it was not, for good reason. That is why I call this a lottery win. I read Luther's entire, large Galatians Commentary to Mrs. Ichabod, out loud, page after page. She loved it, and I thought I knew the book. But for the last few books on justification I read it all over again, especially the key passages.
That book - and John 16:8 - really opened up justification by faith for me, and I could see how this was the great treasure distributed through the Means of Grace. And that concentrates me on sticking to the great works of Lutheran Biblical study and doctrine - Luther's sermons and the Book of Concord. I am shipping off various books from my library because I like to see others enjoy them. And - I would rather read more of fewer than a little of a lot. Northwestern Mutual's survey gives me only 24 years of writing and blogging left, God willing, and I am not going to spend it on minor league theologians.
More Treasure
The best part is seeing how much laity and clergy appreciate Luther and the Confessions, once the introductions have been made again. The soul-murdering magicians of the synods want to misdirect our eyes, so we look at recent, poorly-educated church politicians instead of Luther, Chemnitz, Gerhard, and Hunnius.
If you read Hunnius versus the Huberian UOJ, you will gasp and say, "He has destroyed Walther, Pieper, and Valleskey in one little volume!"
That is one little slice of post-Reformation, post-Concord history. Does anyone study that era now? I hope so, because the genius group that put together the Book of Concord was alive and kicking false doctrine in the but I was only saying late into the 16th century. I believe I can trace how that little book came to be published, but it is a long story. Short version - it was like the lottery.
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| We are the lottery winners, through the efficacious Word in the Means of Grace. |