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What they aren’t telling you is that when you receive Aristotelian Christianity, when you recover Thomist theology, particularly in the Protestant Reformed scholastic flavor, for our purposes, you’re getting a doctrine of grace, and thus God, that thinks grace as a quality, a substance. Grace is depersonalized in this frame, as such the person of Christ is ruptured from the work of Christ allowing for a ‘natural’ space to obtain within a God-world relation. This is the combine of ‘grace perfecting nature’ ‘revelation perfecting reason.’ This is what the scholastic Reformed are pushing onto the “unbeknowing” masses, particularly the younger…

These prompts are provided for worship leaders as they prepare the prayers of intercession for weekly worship. The prompts are prepared by several leaders in the ELCA and reflect current world and national events. You are encouraged to adapt and add other concerns for your local context, including staying informed of events and concerns in your synod. Intercession prompts: March 6, 2022 For the people of Ukraine, for conscripted Russian soldiers, for war zone reporters, for the leaders of the nations…that all your beloved might live in safety and freedom from fear… For bold, adaptive leadership in the face of…

By the Rev. Amy E. Reumann, ELCA Senior Director for Witness in Society “Why should it be said among the peoples, ‘Where is their God?’” (Joel 2:17) The prophet Joel doesn’t hold back when sounding the alarm about the coming Day of the Lord in today’s Ash Wednesday reading. It will be “a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.” Joel goes on to remind…

I used to do these more frequently; especially back in the good ole’ days of blogging, when the blogosphere was actually alive. If you’re a reader of the blog who just lurks here, and even if you don’t just lurk (Richard ) this is your chance to reveal yourself. I always like to know who is reading here. According to my stats many still are, but you don’t let me know by saying hi. How rude ! As a heads up I have my comments set to moderate, which means I have to manually approve each comment (which is easy)….

  After heads of churches in the Holy Land voiced their objections to a proposal to expand Jerusalem Walls National Park to include property owned by several churches in the city, Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority announced on February 21 that it was freezing the plan. The text of the Feb 18 letter from Patriarchs about the Mount of Olives can be found here. The Feb 23 World Council of Churches article about the situation can be found here.   ELCA Blogs

These prompts are provided for worship leaders as they prepare the prayers of intercession for weekly worship. The prompts are prepared by several leaders in the ELCA and reflect current world and national events. You are encouraged to adapt and add other concerns for your local context, including staying informed of events and concerns in your synod. Intercession prompts: For peace to prevail, especially between Russia and Ukraine… For all firefighters working to contain destructive wildfires in Argentina… For all members of the LGBTQIA+ community, especially beloved transgender women and girls at the heart of recent legislation… For an end…

Helmut Thielicke offers an important anthropological distinction, one that stems early on from someone as astute as Irenaeus, and then becomes appropriated and modified by someone as seismic, in the Latin church, as Thomas Aquinas. If this is not understood as a basic theological-anthropological datum vis-à-vis some form of classical theism, engaging with the theological past into the present will become immediately unintelligible—which I would suggest is why so much of popular apologetics and theologics that we see pervasive, particularly in the online theological world, ends up being an exercise in futility. I digress. Let’s hear from Thielicke on this all-important…

from the ELCA advocacy office in Washington, D.C. – the Rev. Amy E. Reumann, Senior Director Partial expanded content from Advocacy Connections: February 2022 2022 ELCA FEDERAL POLICY PRIORITIES  |  HOUSING IN FEDERAL BUDGET  |  AFGHAN REFUGEE ADVOCACY   |  FOREIGN ASSISTANCE  |  HOLY LAND CHURCH LEADERS’ CONCERN   2022 ELCA FEDERAL POLICY PRIORITIES:  Our annual identification of policy priorities on the federal horizon for ELCA advocacy action is available. Find listing on the ELCA Advocacy Blog, with a downloadable version from the ELCA advocacy resource page. Shaped by the ELCA’s social teaching documents and the experiences of its congregations, ministries…

  Maggie Falenschrek, St. Peter, MN Warm-up Question Think back on the last week. What were some of the high points? What were some of the low points? Highs and Lows The 2022 Beijing Olympics wrap up this week. The last few weeks have been full of amazing moments: great displays of jaw-dropping talent, individuals and teams who are at the absolute top of their game, even heart-warming displays of camaraderie and sportsmanship. When we watch the competition as viewers we tend to only see the highlights— those mountaintop moments of triumph. We don’t often get a full view of…

At the end of the day all theological discourse must reduce to some reality. If the reality isn’t ultimately Jesus Christ, and the triune God He mediates, then you, by definition do not have a genuinely Christian theology. People can spend all their days, all their energies recovering natural law, natural theology so on and so forth, merely because they think this provides for the orthodox way of Protestant theology that history has to offer. Ultimately, though, Christian theology isn’t judged by a historicism like this, for that is what this mode is operating from. Christian theology, instead, is judged…