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The Orders Of Creation-Some Reflections On The History And Place Of The Term In Systematic Theology, Edward H. Schroeder

Concordia Theological Monthly

In this article, he argues that the concept associated, with the term "orders of creation" in current Missouri Synod, discussions of the ordination of women is not Lutheran but Calvinist in origin, and not a Biblical concept.

Apostolicity And Ministry, Reginald H. Fuller

Concordia Theological Monthly

This article was delivered in substantially this form at the Episcopal-Lutheran dialog on April 15, 1971, together with the one by Dr. Carl S. Meyer. Dr. Fuller surveys the evidence of the New Testament and concludes that the historic episcopate belongs to the essential marks of the church in the same way that the authoritative, historical canon of the Word does.

Charisma In The New Testament And The Apostolic Fathers, Arthur Carl Piepkorn

Concordia Theological Monthly

This article is an inquiry into the meaning of Charisma in the Sacred Scriptures and the early church, with special reference to the relation of charisma to the "things having to do with the Spirit" (pneumatika) of 1 Cor. 12-14, to the Christian community, to "prophecy," and to the sacred ministry.

Preserve The Unity Of The Spirit, Richard R. Caemmerer Sr.

Concordia Theological Monthly

Surely there is no gift for the human race that we desire more at this hour than unity. Nations fight nations, classes stand embattled against classes, spouses and children draw apart from each other. The most deadly illness of the individual today is alienation, the sense of being alone. Would that there could be unity to draw us together!

Freedom In Christ-Gift And Demand, Edgar Krentz

Concordia Theological Monthly

"Freedom," a word we often hear and a concept we highly prize, is surprisingly rare in the New Testament. A rapid survey of the words eleutheria, eleutheria, and eleutheros in a concordance will show that in any sense other than the sociological (free man as opposed to slave) the term is practically confined to Paul. He is the only one to use freedom consistently in a religious sense.

Legalism In An Evangelical Church, J. P. Koehler

Concordia Theological Monthly

The essay that follows developed from a remark that the author made at one of the larger intersynodical conferences. The remark was to the effect that there is much legalism rampant in our circles, that the result is stagnation and retrogression in all areas of church life, and that for this reason sincere and general repentance is necessary before we may anticipate a turn for the better. The expression "legalism in our circles" was not generally understood. It was intended to describe one aspect of all our activity in thought, speech, and endeavor, based on a comprehensive observation of life …

Notes On "Spirit-Baptism" And "Prophetic Utterance", Victor Bartling

Concordia Theological Monthly

The two subjects in the title fall into the difficult area of Pneumatology and are prompted by what is called the modern "charismatic" or "Pentecostal" movement. Both subjects deal with the exceptional gifts of the Holy Spirit in the early church usually called "charisms" (charismata). Strictly speaking all gifts of the Spirit are supernatural, Spirit-given, hence charismatic, so, for example, also the three basic endowments granted to all Christians: faith, hope, love. In the following notes, for the sake of convenience, we shall call the exceptional gifts (for example, "speaking in tongues" and "prophecy") "charismatic," and the spiritual endowments granted …

St. Paul's Ideology For The Urbanized Roman Empire, Saul Levin

Concordia Theological Monthly

No one is likely to equal the sensation which Gibbon produced with the 15th and 16th chapters of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, where he viewed the rise of Christianity from the perspective of secular history. While he adhered on the surface to a pious, naive, and conventional veneration of the early church, at the same time he pierced the aura of holiness and taught his readers-in the name of philosophy-to understand religious movements realistically. It is unnecessary for us now to review the human causes which an 18th-century historian found for the success of Christianity.

Pleroma And Christology, Harold A. Merklinger

Concordia Theological Monthly

Theologically, πλήϱωμα is among St. Paul's basic concepts. This is particularly true in his epistles to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. In them he uses the term freighted with Christological content.

The Hermeneutical Dilemma: Dualism In The Interpretation Of Holy Scripture, Martin H. Franzmann

Concordia Theological Monthly

The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod ought to have a special interest in hermeneutical questions. It is surely a great gift of God to our church that the authority of Scripture is for us still an unquestioned authority, that in all theological discussion in our midst it can be assumed that all participants are the '"humble readers" of whom Luther speaks, that each man '"trembles at the speech of God and continually cries, Teach me! Teach me!'" Of all church bodies we perhaps are, by the grace of God, the least corroded by the '"acids of modernity," the most "naive" in our …

The Scope Of The Redemptive Task, Martin H. Scharlemann

Concordia Theological Monthly

"When I open the chapel door of the Epistle to the Colossians,'" Adolf Deissmann once observed, "it is as if Johann Sebastian Bach himself sat at the organ." The intricate craftsmanship and majestic chords of this short letter are bound to elicit this kind of response in any one engaged in its study, particularly of that pericope which is sometimes called ''The Great Christology'" (Col 1:15-20). Our reflection on the six verses which constitute this unit will bring also us to the place where we stand in breathless adoration before the apostle's staggering description of the redemptive task which God …

Dangerous Trends In Modern Theological Thought, K. Runia

Concordia Theological Monthly

In an article on “The Development of Theological Thought;” contributed to the symposium Twentieth Century Christianity, Dr. Walter Marshall Horton distinguishes four phases during the first six decades of this century.

The Body Of Christ, Richard R. Caemmerer

Concordia Theological Monthly

The Apology of the Augsburg Confession warns against two distortions in the meaning of the church. The one is that the church be viewed as an outward organization in which believers and hypocrites are mingled. In the days of the Reformation this distortion implied that the church was a political organization to which men adhered through the carrying out of rites and obligations. In our own time it may take the form of stress on extending and financing the church's business to the point of devaluating its other concerns. The other distortion is that the church is regarded as a …

Motivation In Paul's Epistles, M. H. Grumm

Concordia Theological Monthly

There is no pastor worthy of the name who does not keep the perennial question of motivation at least simmering at the back of the stove. A problem not only of pastors but of teachers, parents, psychiatrists, salesmen, advertising men, and politicians is this: How do you move people? move them not only to do something but to want to do something? The pastor, of course, is concerned with more than a job by which he earns his bread and butter and with more than a specific job for a specific aim, for this office covers the whole range of …

Able Ministers In The New Year, Lorenz Wunderlich

Concordia Theological Monthly

This Word of God through St. Paul the apostle is preeminently for those who are privileged to stand in the diaconate of our Lord and who perform diaconal functions for Him. To be sure, it does not offer the catena of one and one-half dozen qualifications which the same apostolic writer forges in his letters to Timothy and Titus.

The Natural Knowledge Of God, Ralph A. Bohlmann

Concordia Theological Monthly

This study grows out of a request for guidance from the Commission on Fraternal Organizations of The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Over the years this commission has been meeting with leaders of a number of fraternal organizations in an effort both to explain our synod's position on lodgery as well as to encourage the removal of objectionable features from lodge rituals. These groups have shown readiness to make many of the ritualistic changes suggested by our commission. In one area, however, these groups refuse to yield. They insist that requiring belief in the existence of a Supreme Being of their members …

Pauline Allusions To The Sayings Of Jesus, John Theodore Mueller

Concordia Theological Monthly

The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, (January 1961), under this heading, subjects the problem of Paul’s allusions to sayings of Jesus to a critical but constructive scrutiny, examining not only specific allusions to some logion of Jesus but also entire doctrinal parallels to logia of our Lord, finding a rewarding field especially in the apostle's allusions to Christ's parables.

Report On Spiritual Speaking. Reprint From The Living Church, Bishop Burrill, William H. Nes

Concordia Theological Monthly

From age to age the Church, in her fulfillment of the mission committed to her by our Lord, must seek with fervent effort to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit. From the point of view of history in its totality, the Church must have made plain the wholeness and the fullness of God's truth and of God's love, and it is our faith that God will give his Church power to do this.

The Posture Of The Interpreter, Martin H. Franzmann

Concordia Theological Monthly

Practically everybody in Christendom claims to be in some sense under Scripture. The Liberal feels that he is being "true to the deepest intentions" of Jesus or of Paul when he treats Scripture in his own fashion. Bultmann claims to be dealing so radially with the form of the New Testament message merely in order to confront modern man with what he considers the essential content of the New Testament message. And certainly the Fundamentalist, for all his frequent failure to make the most basic and radical distinction that the Bible itself knows, the distinction between law and Gospel, interprets …

Christian Love According To 1 Cor. 13, George Klien

Concordia Theological Monthly

The cry for love is heard today particularly in connection with the union movements.

The appeal to the principle of love in the life and work of the church is certainly in order within the Christian communion. It is well that we beseech all our brethren by the mercies of God to have fervent charity among themselves, whether in correcting those who would put a "strait jacket of legalism" on the church, or in rebuking those who would license the church to appear in the daring dress of "evangelical" liberalism. The admonition to evidence love has always been needed; the …

Pauline Charis: A Philological, Exegetical, And Dogmatical Study (Concluded), Raymond F. Surburg

Concordia Theological Monthly

Francisco Zorell gives two definitions of grace that are not warranted by the context in which χάϱις, appears in the epistles of Paul.

Pauline Charis: A Philological, Exegetical, And Dogmatical Study, Raymond F. Surburg

Concordia Theological Monthly

No word is more characteristic of Christian faith than the word χάϱις, grace. It conveys the central and fundamental idea of the Christian religion.1 In Lambert's opinion χάϱις is the distinctive watchword of the New Testament; in fact, the words "grace reigns" might be placed over every page. The New Testament scholar Moffatt asserts that the New Testament is a religion of grace, or it is nothing.

Justification By Faith In Modern Theology (Continued), Henry P. Hamann Jr.

Concordia Theological Monthly

We shall begin the final installment of this article with the judgment that one of the truths about justification that St. Paul holds is that justification is complete before there is such a thing as faith. This fact of Paul's teaching has been known, particularly in the theological literature of "Missouri Lutherans," as objective justification. The term is not a good one, chiefly for the reason that the counterpart to it, subjective justification, if it means anything, should mean a justification that goes on in the believer, a thing which no "Missourian" ever held.

Justification By Faith In Modern Theology (Continued), Henry P. Hamann Jr.

Concordia Theological Monthly

The LXX does not afford us much help as we try to understand what St. Paul means by faith, except in one respect, which will be clear later. There is, of course, in the Old Testament the apostle's great example of faith, the patriarch Abraham. The Psalms, moreover, are replete with expressions which are the accents of faith. As Stewart has well said, "The thing itself can be traced everywhere from Genesis to Malachi," and the same writer quite correctly points to Heb. 11 and its many examples of faith drawn from the Old Testament. But the term itself is …

Justification By Faith In Modern Theology (Continued), Henry P. Hamann Jr.

Concordia Theological Monthly

In accordance with the writer's convictions concerning the source of St. Paul's teachings mentioned in the previous article we begin the investigation of the present topic with the questions: What might Paul be expected to mean by words like "righteous" (δίχαιοζ), "righteousness" (διχαιοςύνη) , "justify" (διχαιοῦν) on the basis of his knowledge of the Old Testament? What effect would the use of these terms and related ones in Aramaic by the rabbis be expected to have on his own usage?

Faith Without Works, Frederic W. Danker

Concordia Theological Monthly

Demands for a creative outlet in an age of standardized production have been responsible for a rash of "do-it-yourself" hobby crafts. Such self-reliance displays itself also in the religious area. St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians amply testifies, however, that the "do-it-yourself" cult is not a modern development.

The Inclusiveness And The Exclusiveness Of The Gospel, As Seen In The Apostolate Of Paul, Martin H. Franzmann

Concordia Theological Monthly

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 …

The Christian Hope And Our Fellow Man, Martin H. Franzmann

Concordia Theological Monthly

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 …

The Doctrine Of The Call Into The Holy Ministry, William F. Arndt

Concordia Theological Monthly

In discussing the doctrine of the call, as we all know, we are not traveling on an uncharted sea, but the subject has been discussed in innumerable books, brochures, essays, lectures, and articles. A person would think that since so many navigators have been at work, surely the proper ocean lanes leading to the desired ports have been discovered. Sad to say, there is no unanimity here. Affirmations are hotly pursued by denials.

The Marks Of The Theologian, Martin H. Franzmann

Concordia Theological Monthly

A stewardess on a plane once asked me what I was. I answered, not quite without malice I am afraid, that I was a theologian. She didn't commit herself too strongly on that, merely opining that I was probably the first theologian that she had ever "carried"; but she seemed impressed. I have since wondered whether she should have been; by the standards that govern the creation of airlines and all the other streamlined paraphernalia, physical and spiritual, of our civilization, she shouldn't have been. For the theologian is by Biblical definition a fool, a child, and a slave; and …