The Christian Hope and Our Fellow Man

The New Testament is a book of hope, an eschatological book from beginning to end, from John the Baptist to John the Divine, the Seer of Patmos. And this hope of the New Testament is throughout a practical hope; it is always related to life and action; the eschatological future indicative is never without its here-and-now present imperative. When John the Baptist announces that the long-foretold and long-awaited reign of God has drawn nigh, that God has laid bare His arm to these last days to interpose finally and definitively in history in the Person of the Mightier One, who shall bring catastrophic judgment in consuming fire and shall bring the creative afflatus of the Spirit of God, that herald\u27s cry is but the causal clause to his prophetic imperative: Repent ye! Since God\u27s reign is drawing near, John calls upon all men to turn to the God who is turning to them, to turn in absolute aversion from all sin, self-assertion, and pride, to turn in obedience, trust, and total devotion. Let God plant you, John cries, and bring forth fruit in keeping with His planting

Book Review. - Literatur

Book Review. - Literatu

The Inclusiveness and the Exclusiveness of the Gospel, as Seen in the Apostolate of Paul

Our Lord promised the Spirit to His Apostles and said that when He came, He would convict the world concerning sin and concerning righteousness and concerning judgment (John 16:8). He was indicating thereby that the work of His Apostles would involve the same conflict and struggle with self-assertive man that had taken place in His own disputes with the Pharisees; for, as Schlatter has pointed out, these three: sin, righteousness, and judgment, are central concerns of Pharisaic piety. The Epistle of St. Paul to the Galatians is the chief document of the struggle within the church between the Gospel of Jesus Christ and Pharisaism, now a Christian Pharisaism

Three Aspects of the Way of Christ and the Church

In 1 Cor. 1:9 St. Paul characterizes the members of the Church as those who have been called by God into fellowship (communion) with His Son Jesus Christ, our Lord. This fellowship is a total participation in the whole Christ, a participation which takes a peculiarly vivid and experiential form in Holy Communion (1 Cor.10:16 ff.)

A New Lexicon

This is not to be a review of the new lexicon -is there such a thing as a new lexicon? The survey of New Testament lexicography from 1522 to 1957 given by the editors of this lexicon in their Introduction (pp. v-viii) shows how relative the term new is in this connection; lexicographers stand strictly in a succession. Much less is this to be a critical review. We shall have to leave critical reviews to men who are less bound up with this work, emotionally and otherwise, than we of The Lutheran Church- Missouri Synod are. It is hardly to be expected that we can be strictly objective regarding this work, which is certainly one of the most significant ecumenical gestures ever to be made by our church. We could hardly have spelled out our allegiance to sola Scriptura more eloquently before men than in this way. And objectivity would be doubly difficult for us who stood close to Dr. Arndt, his colleagues, his students, his host of friends. Our grief at his recent departure is still too fresh to permit an objective, critical judgment on this last work of his, even though we know that he has gone into that bright realm where all God\u27s golden words are bright with a more than lexical light and all their significance is fully and forever clear

Quick and Powerful

The object of preaching and teaching in the Church is, quite simply, to move men. We preach in order that men may be stirred into newness of life; and we teach in order that men may continue, in the Spirit-moved pulsation of repentance and faith, to grow, to increase, to live and move under the continued and inevitable forward tension of the grace of God that dare not be received in vain. This is a commonplace, and there is nothing startling about it; the startling thing is that so many of our sermons (good sermons, carefully constructed sermons, and not altogether unedifying sermons) themselves are not in motion, do not go anywhere. They hover statically above the living and moving text, like a helicopter above a torrent, at a safe remove from the stream\u27s rapid and rapacious onflow, unaffected by its persistent din, and unflecked by its cool and stinging spray. This is bad psychology: our wandering wits leave the preacher for little side excursions into trivia with the comfortable assurance that they can come back any time and find the preacher where they left him; there is no sense of urgency that compels us to stay with him

Approved Workman: In Memoriam John Theodore Mueller

God uses the men with whom we live and work to write things into our lives; He works their message into the stuff of our biographies. Not all men qualify as pens of the Ready Writer; not all have hearts that indite a goodly matter. These fill our pages with the futile tracery of their flattery, the evanescent lines of amusement, the easy curves of casual camaraderie, or the acid etchings of their spite. But there are those who are good and honest pens in the Almighty Hand, and God says notable things to us through them. He uses men to underscore and incarnately rehearse His Word to us

A Ransom for Many

In the ransom saying Jesus tells how the Church, the new people of God, is to be built by His death. Here, too, it becomes clear that the way which Jesus is going is diametrically opposed to the thinking and planning of the heart of man, that it brings with it an inversion of all accepted values. The Church is not a fruit upon the tree of history ; it is wholly and exclusively the creation of the Christ; it is God\u27s deed

Book Review. - Literatur

Book Review. - Literatu

The Apostolic Psha!

Memory plays us scurvy tricks. I remember that Hilaire Belloc says somewhere that there are three things that a real man must be capable of saying. I remember also that the first one is: Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem; and that the third one is: Psha