After Fifteen Years

When I was young, I would listen to older people recall where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news that President Kennedy had been shot. I remember thinking, “That was so long ago!”– though I was two years old when it happened. Today’s freshmen and military recruits were three years…

The Eternal Generation of the Son

I thought Nicea settled the Trinitarian debate for Christians, for the most part.  But it seems that it has become fashionable in some circles (Evangelical and Adventist) to reject the “eternal generation of the Son.”  Those who reject it claim that it leads necessarily to Arianism and subordinationism–which is ridiculous, since it was a response…

Little Journeys with Martin Luther

When I was a student at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg some thirty years ago, a professor, Eric Gritsch, told us about a book of Lutheran satire, Little Journeys with Martin Luther, by William Nicholas Hardy (1916).  In it, the statue of Luther at Luther Place, in Washington, DC, comes alive, and wanders American Lutheranism looking…