Church History

There is an episode from Luther’s life in which he played a prominent role. It is not a story with a happy ending, but we should be familiar with the Marburg Colloquy because it holds important lessons for the Reformed community today. In the middle of the 1520s, key Protestants desired a political...

“Whenever I pray, I pray for a curse upon Erasmus.” That quote appears in Martin Luther’s Table Talk, the same place where he called the Prince of the Humanists “the vilest miscreant that ever disgraced the earth” and quipped that those who do not hate Satan ought to love Erasmus. How did...

This week on Theology on the Go, our host, Dr. Jonathan Master is joined by Dr. Robert Kolb. Dr. Kolb was born and raised in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and attended Concordia College, St. Paul, Minn. (1959-1961); Concordia Senior College, Fort Wayne, Ind. (1961-1963); and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Mo...

The Minister has been in the forefront of Protestant church leadership since the Reformers recovered the primacy of preaching as the means of creating and deepening faith, having dethroned the priest, who was seen by Rome as the central actor in sacrificing Christ anew. But the Reformation...

Today, the title First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women evokes images of an approaching army of terrifying woman-like creatures. Its author, John Knox, meant something quite different. It was the title of a short treatise on government (regiment = rule) held by women, a...

In the summer of 1542, Peter Martyr Vermigli reached the northern side of the Alps with mixed emotions: thankfulness, excitement, relief, but also homesickness, concern, and occasional doubts. Born to Teach Born in Florence, Italy, in 1499, he had entered the Augustinian order at the young age of...

When Martin Luther took his stand at the Diet of Worms, proclaiming, “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Scriptures or by clear reason…, I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God,” [i] he affirmed that divine revelation is the only...

When Satan tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden his angle of attack was to bring into question the sufficiency of God’s word. “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?” Not only did Satan, like a good legalist, subtly add on to God’s word by adding the command 'any tree in...

The Lord through the prophet Jeremiah prophesied of a day when He would establish a new covenant for His people, a covenant unlike the old one enacted under Moses. It was under the Old Covenant where Israel was called to be a nation of priests to a watching world, a mediatorial son who would make...

As we contemplate the 500 th anniversary of the beginning of the Protestant Reformation we are reminded of the glorious truths (and their entailed spiritual experiences) rediscovered and recovered that had been long lost under centuries of encrusted extra-biblical tradition. Clericalism was one...