Luther neither removed the Apocrypha from the Bible nor discouraged its use. Rather, he received and preserved the ancient distinction inherited from the fathers: the Apocrypha is valuable, edifying, and worthy of reading, but it is not Holy Scripture and therefore cannot serve as the foundation of Christian doctrine.
The confessors at Augsburg remind us that every generation of Christians is called to bear witness to the gospel amid the challenges and pressures of its own age. As they confessed Christ before emperors and kingdoms, so the Church continues to confess Him before the world today.
When Jesus washes you with baptismal water, you can rest assured that the Lion of Judah is on the move.

All Articles

We believe in a Savior who raises the dead: this is why the church is the one place on earth that can speak plainly about abortion without collapsing into despair.
Confession isn’t a detour in the liturgy. It’s the doorway.
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
This is the first in a series meant to let the Christian tradition speak for itself, the way it has carried Christians through long winters, confusion, and joy for centuries.
The crisis is not merely that people are leaving. The crisis is that we have relinquished what is uniquely Lutheran and deeply needed.
Merry Christmas, Christ has spoken, and his verdict stands.
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.
The unity of God’s people is grounded not in lineage nor land but in the promise of the coming Christ.
“The well that washes what it shows” captures the essence of Linebaugh’s project, which aims to give the paradigmatic law-gospel hermeneutic a colloquial and visual language.
Caesar gets your taxes. Christ gets your heart.
Every age has its emergencies, and the church must never ignore them. Yet, our response cannot be one of panic or propaganda.
On this, the birthday of Martin Luther, I will pause to thank God for his birth.