The Calvinist International
Fake Luther quotes are not as numerous as fake Augustine ones, but they are pretty close. Justin Taylor summarizes 6 quotes that Martin Luther never said: 1. If I believed the world were to end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today. 2. The maid who sweeps her kitchen is doing the will of God just […]
Martin Luther, that is, the great reformer of the church. We commemorate his life and teaching this day, and it seems fitting that we emphasize his foundational teaching, the justification of the sinner only by faith in Christ. Here is a portion of Dr. Luther’s famous Two Kinds of Righteousness: Through faith in Christ, therefore, Christ’s […]
Dr. Hutchinson’s recent reflections on Augustine caused me to notice something similar in Augustine’s On Marriage and Concupiscence, which I had stumbled across quite independently. The same notion of simul iustus et peccator applied to sanctification appears there, but it also seems to press further, making the Protestant distinction between justification and sanctification perfectly intelligible. Indeed […]
Martin Luther is famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) for his insistence that redeemed man is simul iustus et peccator, at once righteous and sinner. The doctrine is especially useful for coming to terms with how one can be fully justified before God and yet struggle with remaining sin. Henry Chadwick, in his delightful Augustine: A […]
Readers of TCI will undoubtedly be interested to know about the upcoming publication of a volume of collected essays covering various topics related to the transition from Medieval to Early Modern concepts of “mediation.” Though all of the articles in this volume are well-researched and together make the volume worth the price (cf. the two […]
The question in our title really ought to yield only the obvious answers. If by “Catholic,” one means, holding the catholic faith of Biblical Christianity, then yes, of course; in fact, Martin Luther rediscovered the shape of that catholic faith. If we mean however Roman Catholic, then a two-part answer is inevitable: “Yes, of course, […]
In his preface to The German Mass and Order of Divine Service, Martin Luther lays out his philosophy of worship and gives three examples of liturgy that he would like to see implemented. Two of these were actually created, while the third remained only an ideal, to be attempted by later groups with varying degrees of […]
Church history and hagiography are not always so easy to distinguish. We paint certain pictures of personalities with little or no solid evidence, but rather base them on sentiments formed much later (sometimes even sentiments we form internally). An obvious case in point is the way in which Martin Luther is typically thought of as […]
Treated nearly exclusively from the literary point of view these days, John Donne was actually a capable theologian and clergyman of the Church of England under James I, and his sermons reveal his theological skill as much as his rhetorical prowess. His sermon on Psalm 63, preached at St. Paul’s in 1625, is a great […]
Dr. Jordan Ballor recently linked to this older article on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It gives a very helpful overview of Bonhoeffer’s career, as well as his explicitly Lutheran theology. I found this section on Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the two kingdoms to be very interesting (and not a little contrary to the typical portrait of Bonhoeffer that […]