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.

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Take heart: God is near and he is here for you.
At the heart of The Idiot is Dostoevsky's confession of faith and the confession of all Christians.
Faith is like a horse with blinders because it only beholds God’s promise. It is obsessed with what God has already said.
Cyril’s fervor for pure explication of the gospel was present throughout his career.
Finding the balance between indifferentism and obsessiveness has never been easy, and it’s especially difficult in our environment.
Vilification of the other is married to the justification of the self.
The spirit indeed is willing and desires bodily death as a gentle sleep. It does not consider it to be death; it knows no such thing as death.
History is the painful realization that we aren’t the ones who can save the world but, rather, we’re the ones who get saved.
In Jesus, the most totalizing summary of the law becomes the gospel of the one made perfect through obedience.
In the place of God, Marx sets the material, autonomous, self-creating man.
Whatever body part you are, the body of Christ is no pod person. Together, we’re a living, breathing, deathless whole.
Neomonasticism—that is, the idea that church work is more important than regular work—implies that God cares more about the spiritual than the physical.