Luke’s Reviews > The Augsburg Confession: Renewing Lutheran Faith and Practice > Status Update

"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."