The Creator’s Tapestry (Review Article)

By Matthew Becker The Creator’s Tapestry: Scriptural Perspectives on Man-Woman Relationships in Marriage and the Church arrived in today’s mail. This CTCR Report, adopted in Dec 2009, attempts to fulfill the 1995 LCMS Synod Resolution 3-10 that called upon the Commission “to prepare a comprehensive study of the scriptural relationship of man and woman.” One…
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On the Liberty of the Christian

By Robert Schmidt When Luther wrote his treatise in 1520, On the Liberty of the Christian Man, it was accepted by friend and foe alike.  Here was little of the thunder and polemic found in the Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, or The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.  Instead there breathed in it the quiet of the…
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The Experiment That Failed

By Eugene Brueggemann One of the most important speeches I ever heard was delivered at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, on the occasion of my graduation from grad school in 1951 –and I thought it was a terrible speech. The speaker was Dr. A.H. Grumm, a Vice-President of Synod. He had three books at the podium as…
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Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve (Review Article)

By Matthew Becker For those who were classically trained in the Missouri Synod (or almost classically trained; I graduated from Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, in 1988) and who stayed awake during Dogmatics 101, 102, and 103, where the main textbook was either Franz Pieper’s Christian dogmatics or J. T. Mueller’s compendium, there was no one…
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Informal Reflections on Women Pastors and Theologians

By Matthew Becker Those few Christians from previous centuries who appealed to Scripture to argue against the institution of slavery in Britain and the United States, and who opposed racial inequality, faced a difficult challenge. After all, there are few biblical texts that oppose slavery or that support liberal, egalitarian principles, and there are many…
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Appreciating Johannes von Hofmann*

By Matthew Becker *The following essay is based partly on the introduction to my book, The Self-Giving God and Salvation History: The Trinitarian Theology of Johannes von Hofmann (New York: T&T Clark, 2004).   Johannes Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810-1877) has been properly identified as “the greatest conservative theologian” of the nineteenth century and one…
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