Dad discusses the upcoming lectionary reading from Joshua 24 with Rachel Wrenn and Tim McNinch of the First Reading podcast!

After giving Tillich his due in the last episode, in this one Sarah goes off, more or less blaming Tillich and his book The Courage to Be for everything that has gone wrong in American Lutheranism for the past 75 years. Overwrought and unjust? Probably. Dad makes the case for Tillich at least asking the right questions, and not accepting certain false solutions. But we both agree there is a more excellent way. If nothing else, you'll enjoy hearing the generation gap on display as you've never before heard it on this podcast!

Notes:

1. Tillich, The Courage to Be

2. Related episodes: Oh, Anselm!!!, Reinhold Niebuhr, Barth Ain't So Bad, Bonhoeffer's Christology

3. For universality from specificity rather than the other way around, consider my novel A-Tumblin' Down

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Dad and I respond to the Hamas terror attack on Israel.

Notes:

1. Related episodes: Good Tillich, Before Auschwitz, Luther and the Jews

2. Please read Dad's Before Auschwitz; I also commend Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews

3. Statement from Presiding Bishop Elizabeth Eaton of the ELCA

The little-known story of expatriate German theologian Paul Tillich's radio addresses from America to the German people in the depths of World War II, exhorting them to name and reject the false idol that was holding them hostage and driving millions of people to death. In this episode Dad and I explore how Tillich drew on the depths of the Bible's prophetic speech to analyze the Third Reich and the Germans' own complicity with it, the uniqueness of that situation, and what we might be able to learn from it.

Notes:

1. Tillich, Against the Third Reich

2. If you read no other book by Dad, be sure to read this one: Before Auschwitz

3. Related episode: Before Auschwitz, Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr

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Sarah discusses premillennialism, postmillennialism, amillennialism, and Revelation 20 with Katie Langston and Kathryn Schifferdecker of the Enter the Bible podcast. Check out Katie's memoir of leaving Mormonism and becoming a Christian, Sealed: An Unexpected Journey into the Heart of Grace, and listen to Dad's and my discussion of it on a bonus episode of Queen of the Sciences!

Christ the center, Christ for me, Christ for us, Christ as church, Christ the humiliated and exalted one, Christ the Lord who is nothing like der Führer who reigned over Berlin at the time a young Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave these university lectures. In this episode we sift through Bonhoeffer's appropriation of Luther's christology, lightly inflected by Karl Barth, as well as his own corrections and innovations, in the service of a community centered on Christ... and no one else.

Notes:

1. You may know these lectures as Christ the Center but we worked from the new translation in DBWE 12.

2. DeJonge, Bonhoeffer's Reception of Luther

3. See Dad's "Luther's Anti-Docetism in the Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi (1540)," pp. 139-185 in Creator est creatura

4. Luther, "Confession Concerning Christ's Supper," in LW 37

5. Sarah mentioned her novel A-Tumblin' Down

6. Related episode: Bonhoeffer's "Life Together"

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Sarah discusses why God heals infections and cancers, but doesn't regrow amputated limbs, on this episode of Enter the Bible with Kathryn Schifferdecker and Katie Langston! Check out related episodes Illness and Healing and Miracles (with Some Help from C. S. Lewis).

Elect exiles, spirits in prison, slaves, wives, the devil qua prowling lion, but above all lots and lots of the risen Lord Jesus... the First Epistle of Peter has it all! Dad and I get so carried away with this brief letter than we sort of rush to finish at the end, and even so have an outsized episode. But don't worry, we get into that bit about Christ preaching to the dead. Plus, Dad mispronounces French again, and Sarah goes off on Bible-believin' Christians who deny that baptism saves, when it says so right here.

Notes:

1. Related episodes: How To Be a Congregation, Baptism: Infant and Otherwise

2. Davids, The First Epistle of Peter

3. Harink, 1 & 2 Peter

4. My sermon on the "elect exiles" of I Peter 1

5. And my book To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide to Clergy

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Dad discusses just what the phrase "faith of Christ" in St. Paul's letters means on this episode of Enter the Bible with Kathryn Schifferdecker and Katie Langston!

Or, the one in which Sarah at long last reads the first work of Protestant dogmatics, and has an existential/vocational crisis as a result. Dad talks her off the ledge.

Notes:

1. Melanchthon, Loci Communes (1521 edition) and Loci Communes (1559 edition) (there are lots of other editions in-between)

2. Quere, Melanchthon's Christum Cognoscere

3. Sarah's To Baptize or Not to Baptize and Small Catechism: Memorizing Edition

4. Related episodes: Bondage of the Will, Before Auschwitz

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