Jesus is not a god that we can manipulate and mold. Christ is the true God, the one who is.
Yahweh tells his people that they “shall have no other gods before me,” he’s speaking into a culture whose very fabric is made up of the worship of other gods.
Auden understands Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith not as a mere theological platitude, a trick of biblical grammar, or a catchphrase for men to rally around.

All Articles

We try believing in more abstract concepts: justice, happiness, and self-improvement, only to find that we can never truly grasp which standards should be accepted and which should be rejected.
When we Christians shoehorn Creedal Christianity into any of these ideological positions we obscure the Gospel mingling it with the Law and strip the Good News of its catholicity.
The following is adapted from Called to Defend written by Valerie Locklair (1517 Publishing, 2017).
The following is an excerpt from A Path Strewn with Sinners: A Devotional Study of Mark’s Gospel and His Race to the Cross written by Wade Johnston (1517 Publishing, 2017).
All other wonderful teachings of Holy Scripture from creation to Christ’s coming again are absolutely worthless without being understood in light of Jesus, death, and resurrection for sinners.
I have a confession: I don’t believe the Bible is true because it says it’s true.
The following is an excerpt from Martin Luther’s Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1535), translated by Haroldo Camacho (1517 Publishing, 2018).
Your Big Brother, Yeshua… Joshua… Jesus, has done all things for your salvation.
There are a few occasions in the Bible where the curtain lifts, and we get to peer into the inner workings of the Divine Court.
We are no longer controlled by sin as He moves our lips to speak love and forgiveness. We are passive as He acts out His words and His salvation for us.
As sinful humans, we are adept at taking what God gives as gift and making it into a work. Nowhere is this made more evident than in the universally misunderstood doctrine of sanctification.
This reflection was adapted from Sexy: The Quest for Erotic Virtue in Perplexing Times (1517 Publishing, 2017).