Cardigan and Collar

What do sixteenth-century confessions have to say to a culture shaped by TikTok, “spiritual but not religious,” and the language of self-fulfillment? More than we might expect.

This episode presents the fourth lecture from the 2025 NALC Clergy Retreat on generous confessionalism. The Rev. Lara Bhasin is a pastor at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Manhattan and a longtime middle and high school English teacher. She argues that much of what passes for Christianity today is Gnostic at heart: turned inward, suspicious of external authority, and cut off from the Christ who comes to us in Word and Sacrament. The Lutheran Confessions, she suggests, offer an answer by giving the church a way to speak about faith as true.

Before the lecture, hosts Maurice Lee and David Luy reflect on why being confessional is not a matter of being antiquarian, and how each culture that receives the Gospel can add to the church’s inheritance.

Themes

• The confessions as a tool of communication
• Modern Gnosticism and the “spiritual but not religious” impulse
• Narcissism, incurvatus in se, and self-chosen faith
• Moralistic therapeutic deism in our pews and homes
• Recovering the doctrine of creation and the distinction between Law and Gospel
• Truth claims in a culture of insinuation and labeling

Key Discussion Points

• Lara describes her path from a post-Christian upbringing and spiritual anxiety to finding a gracious God in a small Lutheran campus ministry.
• She explains why post-Christians, those with “just enough” Christianity, are often the hardest to reach.
• She makes the case that the gospel conversation may need to begin with “God created you” rather than “God loves you.”
• She contrasts the precise, propositional language of the confessions with modern argument by insinuation.
• She closes with a call for pastors to teach all the baptized to think and speak confessionally: within the community of faith, with an awareness of what is at stake, and as disciples.

Resources Mentioned

• Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, Christian Smith
• Religious Parenting, Christian Smith with co-authors Bridget Ritz and Michael Rotolo
• The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, Harold Bloom 
• Christless Christianity, Michael Horton
• C.S. Lewis on preaching Christianity because it is true, written in his collection of essays, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
• Reinhold Niebuhr on “the unknown God in America”
• The Book of Concord

Continue the Conversation
Upcoming episodes will feature Maurice and David in conversation with Pastor Lara about her lecture. Share this episode with a pastor, seminarian, or friend who is wrestling with how to speak about faith in today’s culture.

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What makes Christian mission Christian?

In this second conversation with the Rev. Dr. Jukka Kääriäinen, president of the North American Lutheran Seminary, Dr. David Luy and the Rev. Dr. Maurice Lee explore the argument in his book, Mission Shaped by Promise. Jukka argues that the Lutheran tradition has a distinct gift to offer the wider conversation about mission: the promise of God.

The argument in brief
For Lutherans, the gospel is pure promise. Mission should be shaped by the nature of the gospel. So for Lutherans, mission is shaped by promise. Jukka doesn’t present promise as a replacement for other themes in missiology. He presents it as a lens and a safeguard that keeps mission tethered to Christ.

Themes

• Promise as the Lutheran contribution to mission theology
• Identity before activity: who is doing mission matters as much as what is done
• Vocation, and the Lutheran conviction that there is no “secular” work
• Mission as something every congregation owns, not a program or a department
• The cost of faithful witness, held together with joy

Key discussion points

• How a dinner conversation with Ed Schroeder shaped a dissertation at Fordham
• Gustav Warneck’s claim that Lutherans have no resources for mission, and Stephen Neill’s warning that “if everything is mission, nothing is mission”
• The risks of a nature–grace framework for mission, and the “anonymous missionary”
• Acts 1:8 as a model for congregational witness: local, national, and global
• What it means to count the cost, and why being persecuted for being a jerk is not paying the price
• How this vision might shape seminary formation at NALS

Resources mentioned

• Jukka Kääriäinen, Mission Shaped by Promise
• David Bosch’s work on the characteristics of mission (Transforming Mission)
• The Lausanne Movement and John Stott on holistic mission
• Karl Rahner on the “anonymous Christian”
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer on costly and cheap grace
• Augsburg Confession, Article IV
• Scripture: 2 Corinthians 1:20, 2 Corinthians 5, Acts 1:8, Luke 4, Luke 14
• Dr. Kääriäinen’s article on the “anonymous missionary”

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In this episode, David and Maurice pause their series on the 2025 clergy retreat presentations to talk with Dr. Jukka Kääriäinen, president of the North American Lutheran Seminary. Born on the mission field as a missionary kid, Jukka has spent his life in mission. He has planted churches, taught missiology, and led a global Lutheran mission agency.

Together they explore how a confident, open-handed Lutheran identity shapes the church's witness. They also discuss why joy, not obligation, lies at the heart of mission, and why theology must come before strategy in an unpredictable world.

Themes

• Generous confessionalism as an ecumenical posture borne of missionary partnerships
• Joy as the origin and goal of creation and of mission
• Honest expectations in gospel proclamation
• Theological clarity as the source of missional resilience

Key Discussion Points

• Why the twentieth-century mission movement gave birth to the ecumenical movement
• "True but not exhaustive" knowledge of God, and the openness it creates
• Leading with Jesus Christ, borne witness to from a Lutheran stance
• Jukka's path from Taiwan to New York to Finland to the NALS
• Joy in Scripture's narrative arc, from Genesis to the marriage feast of the Lamb
• Avoiding both the prosperity gospel and a joyless asceticism
• Why Jukka's strategy document offers guidelines rather than an action plan
• "Hospitable Lutheranism" versus confessional rigidity

Resources Mentioned

• The Joy of the Gospel Inspires Us to Mission, a strategy document by the Rev. Dr. Jukka Kääriäinen for the Finnish Lutheran Overseas Mission
• Lesslie Newbigin on mission beginning with an explosion of joy
• Pope Francis on the joy of the gospel
• Scripture: Genesis 1; Luke 15; Luke 24 (Emmaus); Hebrews 13:8; James 4; Revelation 19–21

Coming Up
In part two, the conversation turns to Jukka's theology of mission and what it means for the NALC to become a mission-driven church with a seminary that forms mission-driven pastors.

If this conversation was meaningful to you, share it with a pastor, friend, or study group. Subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss part two.

Augustine's writings against the Pelagians are some of the most debated texts in the Christian tradition. Many readers treat them as the place where Augustine went too far. Luther read them and was captivated. Dr. Alex Pierce explains why.

Episode summary

In their second conversation with Dr. Pierce, David and Maurice turn to Augustine, one of Alex's areas of expertise. Alex describes how he first found in Augustine a thinker who holds the faith together, and why many scholars read him instead as a dualist shaped by his Manichaean past and his Platonist sources. Alex argues that Augustine was a creative and faithful receiver of the tradition before him.

The conversation then turns to the Pelagian controversy. Alex walks through Augustine's life, from his baptism in Milan to his ordination in Hippo, and shows that Augustine affirmed the priority of grace years before the controversy began. He takes up the charge that the anti-Pelagian Augustine is a pessimist, and makes the case that a strong theology of creation requires a strong theology of sin. The episode closes with how the Lutheran confessions receive Augustine, setting guardrails against both Pelagianism and Manichaeism.

Main themes

• Augustine as a receiver and synthesizer of the tradition
• The priority of grace at the beginning of faith
• The relationship between the doctrines of sin and creation
• Human agency as most fully itself in dependence on God
• How the Lutheran confessions receive the Augustinian tradition

Key discussion points

• Why many scholars read Augustine as a dualist, and why Alex disagrees
• Neoplatonism, causality, and what is at stake for the sacraments
• Augustine's reply to Simplician and his change of mind on grace
• How the Pelagian controversy reached North Africa
• Pelagius's reaction to a line in Augustine's Confessions
• Augustine on Romans 7 and our daily need for grace
• “100% of God's grace and 100% of the human will”
• Christ as gift and example in Luther, and as sacrament and example in Augustine

Mentioned in this episode

• Augustine: Confessions, On the Trinity, On Christian Teaching, On the Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins, On the Spirit and the Letter, Retractations
• Martin Luther, A Brief Instruction on What to Look For and Expect in the Gospels
• Philip Melanchthon, Apology of the Augsburg Confession
• Dr. Alex Pierce, Augustine on the Mystery of Christ and the Sacramental Economy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Coming up

The season continues as we keep company with the lecturers from the 2025 NALC Clergy Retreat, turning to the next voice on the theme of the confessions as a way into the riches of Scripture.

Next episode: Lara Bhasin’s lecture: Confessions as Missional Engagement with Culture, releasing October 9.

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Cardigan & Collar is a podcast of the North American Lutheran Seminary. Find us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Episode summary

Dr. David Luy and the Rev. Dr. Maurice Lee sit down with Dr. Alex Pierce to follow up on his clergy retreat lecture. Alex argues that the Lutheran confessions do not limit our relationship to the broader Christian tradition. They open it up and give us a way into those riches with guidance and a framework in hand. When we confess the articles of faith, we take on terms and judgments that assume a great deal of the reader. Alex says this should leave us curious and eager to deepen our understanding.

The conversation then turns to the common pitfalls. Some readers look at the depth of the tradition and feel paralyzed. Others find a striking idea in the early church and take it out of proportion, letting it replace something central to our confession. Alex uses deification as a test case, showing how keeping Christ as sole mediator lets us venture out without becoming unmoored.

The second half explores Alex's own story. He studied at a pan-evangelical seminary and worked backward through the tradition, finding an Augustinianism within the Lutheran confessions that he found deeply satisfying. The episode closes with advice for pastors and lay leaders looking for a starting point: read the sermons of the early church.

Main themes

• The confessions as a path into the tradition rather than a replacement for it
• The breadth of the catholic faith held together with the gospel at its center
• Two common challenges: feeling overwhelmed, and losing a sense of proportion
• Christ as sole mediator, and how that fixes our coordinates for exploration
• The difference between being formed by history and mining it for proof texts
• Bringing the early church into the daily life of a congregation

Key discussion points

• "I only need the Bible" mirrors the attitude of "I only need the confessions"
• The confessions function like links pointing outward toward Augustine, Ambrose, and Gregory of Nyssa
• The student Marty and the two ditches on either side of the road
  Maximus the Confessor's cosmic vision, and the distance between a universalizing tendency and a universalist position
• Deification as an empty jar without historical context, and what the Smalcald Articles bring to bear
• Albrecht Ritschl's claim that the ecumenical creeds entered the Book of Concord as a political move
• Melanchthon placing Wittenberg teaching alongside Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure in Apology Article 2
• How a confessional tradition opens space for Lutherans to explore and disagree with integrity
• The reformers working midstream rather than starting a new theology from the ground up
• How retrieval theology can turn into another form of proof texting
• Bringing the cloud of witnesses into parish life through the worship folder, the liturgical year, and daily devotions

Mentioned in this episode

• The Augsburg Confession, the Apology, the Smalcald Articles, and the Small and Large Catechisms
• Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms
• Origen's commentaries on the Gospels
• Athanasius on the Psalms
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies
• Maximus the Confessor
• B. B. Warfield and the old Princeton theologians
• Albrecht Ritschl
• For All the Saints: A Prayer Book For and By the Church

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Cardigan & Collar is a podcast of the North American Lutheran Seminary. Find us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Part two of our conversation with Dr. Pierce is coming next.

Episode Summary

“We all revert to patterns of trying to be good enough. Trying to earn our way, trying to pull up our bootstraps. This is the Pelagian temptation.”

Recorded at the NALC Clergy Retreat, this week's episode features a lecture from Dr. Alex Pierce of the North American Lutheran Seminary: “Confessions and the Christian Tradition.” Hosts Dr. David Luy and the Rev. Dr. Maurice Lee introduce the lecture and reflect on what makes it worth a pastor's close attention.

Dr. Pierce begins with the relationship between the Lutheran confessions and the whole of the Christian tradition. The confessions, he argues, affirm the catholic tradition and depend on it. Like a pointing finger, they only make sense in light of the things to which they point. At the same time, they leave many rich veins untapped. They tell us what doorbells to ring, and ringing them leads us on a journey of deep theological enrichment.

From that wide view, the lecture moves into a single episode in the church's memory: Augustine and the Pelagian controversy. Dr. Pierce walks through the history, from Pelagius and Caelestius in Rome to the councils and condemnations of the early fifth century, and then draws out three soul-nourishing truths the church inherited from it, each woven into the confessions themselves:

1. Sin exerts a subversive power over human nature, placing us in a position of desperation.
2. In baptism we are united with Jesus Christ, our perfect mediator, who is full of grace and truth.
3. All of our faith and love are gifts of the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Along the way, the lecture considers the dangers of reading the tradition unprepared, including paralysis, getting over one's skis, and losing proportionality. Guided by the confessions, pastors and students can enter these deep waters with confidence, receiving the riches of the tradition as spiritual nourishment for ministry today.

In the coming weeks, David and Maurice sit down with Dr. Pierce to explore the lecture in greater depth.

Referenced in this episode:

• The Book of Concord, ed. Robert Kolb and Timothy Wengert
• The Augsburg Confession, Articles 2, 3, and 4
• The Apology of the Augsburg Confession
• The Formula of Concord on original sin and free will
• Augustine's anti-Pelagian writings
• Martin Luther, “A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels”
• Romans 5:12; Galatians 5:6

Cardigan & Collar is a podcast of the North American Lutheran Seminary: theological conversations for the enrichment of pastoral ministry. Learn more at thenals.org.

Subscribe wherever you listen, and share this episode with a pastor, student, colleague, or layperson who would enjoy it.

Episode summary

In the second half of our conversation with Rev. Dr. Orrey McFarland, we take the five principles from his retreat lecture and press into each one, asking how the confessions function less like a fence around Lutheran identity and more like a door into the riches of Scripture.

The Rev. Dr. McFarland is pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, and convener of Lutheran Theologians for the Church. In his lecture "Confessions and the Scriptures," delivered at the 2025 NALC Clergy Retreat, he makes a pastoral case for what confessional faithfulness looks like. It is measured less by how sharply we defend our boundaries and more by how deeply the confessions form us in the love of God and neighbor.

In this conversation

Hosts the Rev. Dr. Maurice Lee and Dr. David Luy walk with the Rev. Dr. McFarland through all five principles: reading the confessions in conversation with other traditions, moving past clichés and slogans into a close reading of Scripture, engaging the confessions both critically and charitably, and approaching Scripture with quiet confidence rather than defensiveness. Along the way they consider what all of this asks of the preacher, and why a confessing church is finally called to be a certain kind of people.

Key discussion points

• Why engaging other traditions sharpens rather than dilutes Lutheran conviction
• Receiving the confessions as a gift rather than treating them mainly as a boundary
• How useful slogans ("remember your baptism," "law and gospel") can drift loose from Scripture
• Why a slogan can't bear the weight of grief, shame, or death unless it's rooted in the Word
• The pastor as gardener: slow, patient work over quick answers
• Being bound to the confessions' doctrinal judgments without endorsing every exegetical move
• Preaching that lets Scripture speak rather than laying one template over every text
• A confessionalism whose end is character and the consolation of sinners

Mentioned in the episode

• "Confessions and the Scriptures,” The Rev. Dr. McFarland's 2025 NALC Clergy Retreat lecture
• Lutheran Theologians for the Church (NALC)
• Arthur Carl Piepkorn and Edmund Schlink on confessional subscription
• Robert Jenson on the role of theological slogans
• Stanley Hauerwas on attending to "how the words run"

Coming up

The season continues as we keep company with the lecturers from the 2025 NALC Clergy Retreat, turning to the next voice on the theme of the confessions as a way into the riches of Scripture.

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How do the confessions lead us deeper into the Bible?

Episode summary
In the second part of our arc on the confessions as a way into scripture, Maurice Lee and David Luy welcome the Rev. Dr. Orrey McFarland—pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, and a New Testament scholar trained under John Barclay at the University of Durham.

Following his clergy retreat lecture, this conversation traces how a Pauline scholar came to make his home in the confessions, and what that home looks like in practice.

Orrey describes arriving at Lutheranism through, rather than despite, his study of Paul. Working with Barclay on grace as the "incongruity" of God's gift—favor given to the unworthy—opened a door into justification, Christology, and the sacraments that made sense of both the text and his own life.

From there the conversation turns to a posture Orrey commends for pastors: engaged, enriched by serious scholarship, and quietly confident in what the confessions hand on. He and David name the alternative: a fortress mentality that keeps to "safe" sources and grows brittle. The goal, Orrey argues, is a durable faith that can meet hard questions with generosity instead of anxiety.

At the heart of the episode is the idea of the endpoint. When the confessions become the destination, scripture quietly slips into a supporting role—cited often, but no longer allowed to work on us. When scripture is the endpoint, the confessions do what they are meant to do: they give us a grammar for reading, set faithful boundaries, and lead us toward Christ.

The hosts and guest close with a shared image: the confessions as the placard beside a great painting. The caption tells you what the work is about, then invites you to stand before the art itself and be changed by it.

In this conversation:

• Orrey's twin journey into Pauline scholarship and confessional Lutheranism
• John Barclay and the incongruity of grace
• The old and new perspectives on Paul—and scholarship's turn toward particularity
• Why reading beyond Lutheran sources strengthens rather than threatens confessional faith
• Teaching that moves from scripture to the confessions and back again
• The confessions as grammar, and scripture as the inexhaustible word

Key discussion points

• McFarland's account of Luther's status in post-New Perspective scholarship, and how it reshaped his path into the Lutheran tradition
• Five marks of what he calls a "generous confessionalism": conversation with other traditions, close scriptural reading, critical-but-charitable engagement with the confessions' use of Scripture, quiet confidence, and character over combat
• The distinction (from Arthur Carl Piepkorn) between binding doctrinal content and the confessions' individual exegetical judgments
• Augustine's rule that any reading of Scripture must build up love of God and neighbor

Mentioned in the episode:

• John Barclay, Paul and the Gift
• Krister Stendahl, "The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West"
• Robert Jenson on "filling the church with scripture"
• The old and new perspectives on Paul

Coming up
Next time (releasing August 12), Maurice and David sit down with Orrey again to press further into his lecture, turning to the particular ways he suggests the confessions open us to the riches of scripture.

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What are the confessions actually for? Not a fortress to defend, and not the final word—but, as the Rev. Dr. Orrey McFarland puts it, a way into the riches of Scripture itself.

Episode summary 

In this presentation episode, Maurice and David introduce the lecture that Rev. Dr. Orrey McFarland gave at the NALC's 2025 clergy retreat, “Confessions and the Scriptures.” McFarland begins with his own unlikely path into confessional Lutheranism—as a PhD student in Pauline studies at a moment when Luther's reading of Paul was widely dismissed by New Testament scholarship. Out of that experience, he offers five practices for relating the confessions to Scripture in a way that keeps Scripture, not the confessions, as the ultimate destination.

Main themes

• The confessions as a pathway into Scripture
• Subscribing to doctrinal content without treating every exegetical detail as beyond question
• Reading in conversation with other traditions rather than in a closed Lutheran silo
• Confidence in the confessions that produces charity rather than combativeness
• The goal of confessional reading: formation into the likeness of Christ, not winning arguments
  

Key discussion points

• McFarland's account of Luther's status in post-New Perspective Pauline scholarship, and how it reshaped his own path into the Lutheran tradition
• Five marks of what he calls a “generous confessionalism”: conversation with other traditions, close scriptural reading, critical-but-charitable engagement with the confessions’ use of Scripture, quiet confidence rather than defensiveness, and character over combat
• The distinction (drawn from Arthur Carl Piepkorn) between binding doctrinal content and the confessions' individual exegetical judgments
• Augustine's rule that any reading of Scripture must build up love of God and neighbor
• The closing analogy of visiting an art museum—neither ignoring the guide nor letting the guide replace the art
  

Resources and figures mentioned

• The Book of Concord
• Arthur Carl Piepkorn
• Edmund Schlink
• David Yeago
• Augustine, On Christian Teaching
• Kevin Vanhoozer
• Psalm 1

Coming up

Listen for the follow-up conversation episodes (releasing July 31st and August 14th), where Maurice and David sit down with Orrey to press further into this lecture.

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What do the Lutheran confessions actually do?

In this concluding conversation with Dr. David Luy, hosts Maurice Lee and Nathan Yoder press into some of the most generative questions raised by Dr. Luy's lecture, "Confessions as a Way into Riches." What are the doctrines so essential that to miss them is to lose the whole? What is a creed actually for? And why might a longer, richer confession actually create more freedom—not less?

Along the way: Origen and the mixed fruits of theological tradition, Augustine's surprising instruction to his future readers, the "depth grammar" of the Nicene Creed, the inexhaustibility of God as the ground of confessional generosity, and the personal story of how Dr. Luy—with a background spanning Bible church, Baptist, Jesuit, and pan-Protestant evangelicalism—found his theological home in the NALC.

This is Part 2 of the Luy conversation. We recommend listening to Episode 2 and Episode 3 first.

In this episode:

1. The confessions as navigational guide—what to seek, what to avoid, and how
2. "Can't-miss" doctrines and the integrative function of justification
3. The Nicene Creed as depth grammar, not a miniature canon
4. Enrichableness: the posture of remaining open to receive
5. The sturdiness and the dynamism—and why the NALC felt like home

Cardigan & Collar is a podcast of the North American Lutheran Seminary (NALS), pursuing theological conversations for the enrichment of pastoral ministry.

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