Wade Johnston, Life Under the Cross: A Biography of the Reformer Matthias Flacius Illyricus, Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis: MO, 2025.
This ancient “tale of two mothers” concerns far more than theological semantics—it is the difference between a God who sends and a God who comes.
This story points us from our unlikely heroes to the even more unlikely, and joyous, good news that Jesus’ birth for us was just as unlikely and unexpected.

All Articles

God’s words do things. When God blesses you, you are blessed.
The Lion of Judah, Christ the King, Jesus of Nazareth, will not be away from us for one night.
This is an excerpt from the Chapter 12 of Hitchhiking with the Prophets: A Ride Through the Salvation Story of the Old Testament written by Chad Bird (1517 Publishing, 2024). Now available!
It is Jesus himself who is the ladder by which sinners get to God, not by them climbing up but by God climbing down.
If your faith is rooted in the gospel of Zion, in the good news of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection on your behalf, you are already a member of the “heavenly Jerusalem”
This is an excerpt from “Confession and Absolution” by John T. Pless in Common Places in Theology: A Curated Collection of Essays from Lutheran Quarterly, edited by Mark Mattes, (1517 Publishing 2023).
It is your privilege—we may even say “right”—to call upon this Father and to call him Father.
Success is emphatically not your primary identity.
God does not give us an undebatable answer to suffering. Instead, God suffers, too.
Like Jacob, sinners approach the Heavenly Father wearing the clothes of their older brother, Jesus.
What we do much less of, even in Christian circles, is recognize just how pervasive sin is, such that it has thoroughly corrupted us.
Now that the Lord of Sabaoth has involved himself, something ends, something is born.