Skip to main content

My Beliefs

My beliefs are summed up in the founding doctrinal statement of the church I pastor.

We take the Bible as the only and infallible rule of conduct of our faith and life, and we guide ourselves by the symbolical books of the Evangelical Church listed as most important: the Augsburg Confession, Luther's Catechism, and the Heidelberg Catechism, in so far as these agree, and where there are differences, however, we hold ourselves to the relevant passages of Scripture and to the prevailing understanding of them in the Evangelical Church.

(Constitution of the German Evangelical Salem Church in Scott Township, Vanderburgh County, Indiana)

I stand in the interpretive trajectory of the United Lutheran-Reformed tradition coming out of Germany (a.k.a., German Evangelical).  The Evangelical Catechism is an excellent summary of this tradition.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why We Need Lent - March 2020 Newsletter Article

No one expected it. There was no one, to my knowledge, who believed God would become human and identify with us in our misery. That, however, is the message of Lent. God entered our world to stand with us not against us. Lent is forty days because Jesus was forty days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil. This trial is a picture of his whole mission, shouldering the human condition, standing with us, not apart from us. At that time there was a community, where the Dead Sea scrolls were later found, that separated itself from the rest of the world. It saw the world as "us and them". The religious leaders who lived among the people still stood apart from the people and also thought in terms of "us and them". Jesus came and turned everything upside down. He said he came to set the world on fire. He was going to burn down all that set itself against God's true purpose. God is love, one of his disciples would later write. Another would say, Love bears a
Post a Comment
Read more

JUNE 2020 Newsletter Article

They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness (Romans 2:15a NIV). Our souls are “constituted and formed”, as Luther says, to know God, in this case God in his law. I say God because there is no law outside and separate from God. This is a confession that human beings are fitted for their environment and so we can trust our sense that there is an oughtness to existence, a sense of an intentional order, a way we are meant to act. Intention, of course, implies an intender, a personal will behind the things we sense we ought to do. Everyone knows this, Luther says, and this knowledge “is aroused by the preaching of the Word, so that the heart cannot help confessing that we must, as the Commandments read, honor, love, and serve God, for He alone is good and does good not only to the pious, but also to the wicked” (St.L. III:1053). The great good news we have to proclaim, the thing people could not know except in this
Post a Comment
Read more

The true power of Compounded Returns (June 2019 Newsletter Article)

Somebody told me once, half in jest, that while the big houses are in MCCUTCHANVILLE the real money is in DARMSTADT. Now like I say, there was an element of jesting in what they were saying. No doubt there are people in Darmstadt who are overextended when it comes to their lifestyle and there are people in McCutchanville who are savers. They were alluding, however, to the long-standing German heritage of Darmstadt with its culture of debt avoidance and frugal living. I found that this remains the culture in Germany today. While preparing for our trip to Germany we were told cash is king over there because Germans generally avoid debt. There is an old word for living within one’s means and saving for the future, prudence. It is related to the word “wise”. It has to do with living in such a way that your actions lead to a better life. Now that my kids are grown and preparing for life on their own I’ve told them that if they begin saving now, investing while they’re young, they can have
Post a Comment
Read more