Status Updates From The Augsburg Confession: Re...

"Lutheran churches around the globe continue to center their proclamation in the unmerited, free mercy of God in Christ for the life of the world as a function of this Confession of faith and its ongoing witness to justification by grace through faith on account of Christ alone."

"comforting the terrified!...This, finally, is the criterion for judging all ordinances in congregations, synods, and the wider church. Does it burden people and crush them, tearing them down with laws rather than building them up with mercy?"

"Luther ... taught a far more radical form of equality than any democratic institution may boast of today. Equality in all walks of life completely undermines American worship of affluence. ...All such distinctions disappear when we stand before God wholly dependent upon God's mercy and not upon our works."

"The goal of preaching and teaching is not to remove people from their daily lives or protect them from it, but to equip them in those very walks of lives with faith, cross, and hope: faith in trusting God for mercy; cross in seeing through the sufferings of this 'valley of tears' to the Savior; hope in God's promise of a new world in which sin, death, and evil will be vanquished for good."

"many churches boasting of prophecies and special revelations from God have no clue about the one thing that God really wants to say, namely, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.' ...the true prophets in the church are neither those who boast special revelations nor those who are concerned for social justice... but precisely those who announce the most unbelievable news of all: 'You are forgiven; you belong to Christ."

"The point of the sacrament... is always to create and strengthen faith through the application of God's promise directly to the participants. Here all human works melt in the warm sun of God's grace. And yet, the Old Creature continually searches for ways to make the sacraments into works that we perform or to make faith into a commitment we undertake. Either way, human actions swallow God's mercy and Christ's love.

The book has more than 240 pages! 343! I'm being shortchanged!

Author is ELCA and it is an ELCA publisher. Differing views of communion practice from LCMS.

"Lutheran went to great lengths to preserve existing patterns of worship and church life, such as the shape of the Mass, the liturgical calendar and lectionary, the various church offices, and the like. ...Lutherans defined these things as adiaphora (undifferentiated matters) and thus worth keeping, as long as they served the common good of the Christian assembly."

"'The whole company of heaven may well be praying for us, joining the chorus of our own voices in begging God for mercy..., but that act dare not obscure the far more important fact that all our prayers - for ourselves or our neighbors - occur ... in Christ. Without him, we are nothing."

"'Faith alone' ...casts the human creature back onto the never-ending, all-encompassing grace and mercy of God in Christ. Otherwise, Christ might as well have stayed in heaven, sitting on a satin cushion and drinking lotus tea. ... it is not merit but gift - thanks be to God!"
"One may talk all one wants about the importance of good works, but without Christ they will never truly happen."

"God creates and preserves; evil is our own fault. ... we cannot answer but can only cry with Paul, 'O the depth of God's wisdom!' and with the whole church, cry 'Maranatha! (Come, Lord Jesus!). Anything more forces us to abandon God's promises for the safety of our own reason. ...Luther called 'Deliver us from evil' the sum of all the petitions of the Lord's Prayer. ...In the face of evil, that prayer is all we have

"When we encounter either Christian leaders who insist that people "decide for Jesus" or people who have been duped by this message, we can help them most by clearly defining grace as God's mercy in Christ and by eliminating works from faith.... Those who "do what is in them" sin! Absent the Holy Spirit, our actions are always twisted by our addiction to ourselves."

"Perhaps in times of uncertainty, when facing the destruction of war, disease, economic collapse, and death (the four horsemen of the Apocalypse), Christians once again discover that they are not in control of their own future but that their lives and the life of the whole world and creation itself rest in God's hands, not ours."

"God is at work in every land and nation through government, public order, and family life. The gospel neither takes a person out of daily life nor insists that daily life need conform to some special, 'Christian' ethic. ...This revolutionizes Christian good works by taking them out of the world of hyper-piety and placing them squarely in the world."

"That the assembly of believers and saints should and must employ human regulations and rules is no sin but rather an important way of maintaining peace and good order. But as soon as these rules become burdens to consciences or are proposed as ways to obtain, maintain, or improve one's relation to God, then even the very best regulations become demonic..."

"What gives the pastoral offices authority lies precisely in God's intention to create a new world through preaching, baptizing, presiding at the Lord's Supper, forgiving sin, and teaching. The authority of the pastoral office does not stem from the ways that the Christian assembly places a person in the office but in the divinely sanctioned office itself and its proper exercise."

"The sacraments are really all about what God is doing for us, specifically what God's will is toward us. In baptism, God wills to declare us children; in the Supper, Christ wills to feed us with his body and blood for the forgiveness of sin; in absolution, the Holy Spirit continues our daily baptism by putting the Old Creature to death and raising up the New Creature of faith."

..."the gospel, which the Holy Spirit uses to make believers (good trees) capable of bearing good fruit. ...Quite often the preachers' lack of faith makes them blind to the actual good works that their hearers are doing all the time - good works that may also be hidden from the believers themselves."

"God's mercy, revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, is now poured out upon the baptized. This mercy stands at the heart of the New Testament's passive depictions of the baptism as new birth, a joining to Christ's death and resurrection, a dying and rising, salvation in the ark, the disciple-making presence of the Trinity, forgiveness, or a clothing in Christ."

"Our clergy and our congregations are filled with dying sinners. There is nothing more comforting than to know that sin and death ... do not block God's work, God's intent to declare us (sinners) what we are not (righteous) and, in the end, to make us children."

"Pure teaching of the gospel...is not rocket science. It is the message of God's comfort in Christ to the terrified: ...It is the message of God's forgiveness in Christ to the sinner: ... It is life to the dying: ... What both creates and unites the entire church of all times and places, then, are these 'tidings of comfort and joy: to you is born a savior." It is pure grace!"

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"If a preacher talks about works in a sermon in such a way that people go out whistling, laughing, and dancing (generally signs of that 'free and merry spirit'), then all is well. But if such preaching or teaching only results in more burdens heaped upon a captive audience, then all is lost."

"If a preacher talks about works in a sermon in such a way that people go out whistling, laughing, and dancing (generally signs of that 'free and merry spirit'), then all is well. But if such preaching or teaching only results in more burdens heaped upon a captive audience, then all is lost."

"Faith is not ours to produce; only the Holy Spirit uses the means of grace to make us believers. 'But at least we can say no,' ...First, we are, on our own, always saying no - that is what it means to be a sinner. ...second, such a question is purely theoretical so that is one asked such a whiner 'Why would you want to do that?' the answer is always, "Well, I wouldn't. But it could.'"