Sermons of Consequence is a collection of sermons preached at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest, Illinois. Although the places and people have named have local familiarity, the sermons set forth here speak to the wider human condition, which makes this book applicable to people everywhere. These sermons provide a model for broader witness to ......
Gerhard O. Forde wrote and taught powerfully about the primary importance of proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. In an article in the Lutheran Quarterly, he wrote: "Let us be . . . radical preachers and practitioners of the gospel by justification by faith without the deeds of the law. . . . What is at stake is the radical gospel, radical ......
In the later Middle Ages, preachers learned how to structure a sermon from technical treatises called artes praedicandi. These treatises taught and illustrated how to select a biblical text for the sermon of a given day and then develop it by means of divisions and various kinds of expansion. Their exposition is highly technical and sometimes can ......
Ricoeur and the Possibility of Postliberal Preaching
The Christian sermon--once the chief symbol of authority in Western culture--often appears in the postmodern imagination as synonymous with irrelevancy, biased judgment, and a rejection of absolute truth. While Christian preachers mourn the cultural disintegration of their hallowed practice, Lance B. Pape believes this modern turn enables the ......
In an age when the so-called prosperity gospel holds sway in many Christian communities or the good news of Christ is reduced to feel-good bromides, it would seem that death has little place in contemporary preaching. Embracing the vision of the valley of dry bones in Ezekiel 37 as a metaphor for preaching in the Spirit, acclaimed homiletician ......
Eusebius, the bishop of Emesa (c. 300-359) is today not a well-known figure of late ancient Christianity. Yet he achieved apparent notoriety in antiquity: he was a student of the famous Eusebius of Caesarea, he was connected to the entourage of the emperor Constantius, he had earned the respect of prominent ecclesiastical figures in the mid-fourth ......
Baptist Prophetesses in Seventeenth-Century England
When the Baptist movement began four centuries ago, revolutionary forces had destabilized the centers of social control that had long kept women in their place. In the early seventeenth century, Baptist women began to speak their minds. Through their prophetic writings, these women came to exercise considerable influence and authority among the ......
Pluralism as such is not the enemy of the gospel. Preaching the Christian message will always encounter a world with many religions, world-views, ideologies, and lifestyles. The earliest generation of Christians found themselves in a pluralistic situation. They were witnessing to Jews as well as to Greeks and Romans in the great melting pot of ......
