Gottesblog

It's been a while since I ran the stats from Call Day, but this year I’m feeling nostalgic as this marks the tenth year since I was one of those fourth year students waiting to hear of his fate. And how things have changed in that decade! There were 144 (an even gross) in my first year class. By the time we made it to call day, that had been culled down to 120 or so. This year saw 57 men placed from our Synod’s larger seminary.

Here is another fine example of why I have been on an Anglican kick in my theology readings. This short piece was penned by Rev. Dr. Thomas Swadlin in 1657. He puts Presbyterians to one side, Romanists to the other, and asserts that he stands in the middle as a "Catholique."

Aristotle's definition of justice is still hard to beat for its simplicity and succinctness: giving everyone his due. An English corollary: a place for everything and everything in its place. The House of God is no place for irreverence. But surely there must be a place for it - as irreverence is the foundation of all comedy. Why do we laugh at grown man chasing his hat in the wind if not because of irreverence? If he has any sense, he will also laugh at himself while he does it.

An alert reader sends along this paragraph from the US Army's new regulations regarding uniforms. St. Paul, of course, famously drew the analogy between the service of the minister and a soldier's service under his commanding officer. There is much common sense here that applies to the clergy and our attire both in worship and in day to day ministry.

In recent years I have learned more theology from classical, conservative Anglican sources than any other. They share enough of our history and theology for me to be able to understand the language and concepts, and yet they differ from us enough to provide truly fresh insights that have helped me clarify my own thinking. I've reviewed Mascall's Corpus Christi in the past, and still can't recommend it highly enough. Today I give you an essay on Transubstantiation from the folks over at The Continuum.

This is a shameless plug for an endeavor that some of our editors are involved in: Wittenberg Academy, the online Lutheran high school. Really it's more than a high school: we've got students of many levels. For example in Latin (which I teach) we run everything from Elementary Latin for grade schoolers up through Latin Readings and Latin for Adults. Father Beane and Father Braaten also teach for the school.

This is a very round about book review of James C. Russell's The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation. (Oxford University Press, 1996. 272 pages. Find it used for more like $23 instead of the list price of $60).