The Supper doesn’t depend on the faithfulness of the Church. It depends on the faithfulness of Christ.
A rightly-oriented heart and a rightly-oriented love will consistently do what is best for God and best for our neighbor, which is why St. Augustine speaks of sin as a disordered love.
For Bonhoeffer, Christ crucified, and the cross of the Christian life were not of peripheral importance, but foundational.

All Articles

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).
Success is emphatically not your primary identity.
Moltmann is gone now, but his theology will continue to provoke and provide.
If you are a Christian, you already have what you need to give a reason for the hope within you. That reason, though, is not you.
We know we are made for something great. We humans were created in God’s image and restored through Christ in his perfect image.
The cross not only stands as the measure of our hatred of God but also as the measure of God’s love for us.
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these early Lutheran hymns – and their physical availability in hymnals – in the piety of common people living in Lutheran towns and territories.
The gospel is for sinners – both the tax collector and Pharisee, both in need of the Great Physician.
For you who are struggling to navigate grief, to cope with pain, or breathe through anxiety, the gospel announces that there is a person whose heart throbs for you.
Some part of us always wants our ability under the law to be just as important (or more) than grace.
The Good Shepherd doesn’t leave the sheep to fend for themselves.
A Christian story untethered from the reality of Christ and his mercy toward sinners becomes a mere fable, while a sermon disconnected from the hearts of its listeners remains a hollow oratory.