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'To my knowledge,' Bruce D. Marshall notes in his foreword to this welcomed volume, 'no systematic theologian of his generation commented on the Bible as extensively as [Jenson] did.' Likewise, [...]

Robert Benne is clearly disappointed by the direction of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America--a disappointment many share ('The Trials of American Lutheranism,' May). Unfortunately, [...]

This essay uncovers certain salvation-history presuppositions of the Lutheran doctrine of justification and their implications for theological anthropology in dialogue with Orthodox understanding of the human vocation in the doctrine of theosis. The Lutheran doctrine of justification offers an Eastern answer to a Western question: Jesus Christ, in his person the divine Son of God, is our righteousness. He is the one who in obedience to his Father personally assumed the sin and death of humanity and triumphed over these enemies on behalf of helpless sinners, bestowing on them his own Spirit, so that, by the ecstasy of faith, they become liberated children of God in a renewed creation. While not asking the same question as in the West about divine righteousness, Orthodoxy's doctrine of theosis offers a genuinely theological anthropology, which strictly thinks of the human being as the unfinished creation of the triune God. The human being is never to be reduced to his or her 'nature' but is called as a person by the Person of Jesus Christ to become the concrete person united in love with other persons in the infinite, tri-personal life of God. Integrating these two anthropologies, we see that justifying faith wholly involves the human will and its uncoerced participation, yet not in any Pelagian sense in which the will retains its Adamic form of autonomy over against God. Justifying faith is the concrete, nonmeritorious synergy of the new person in Christ with the Holy Spirit, inasmuch as on this side of the reign of God's coming in fullness, the new person in Christ is nothing other than the sinner whom the Lord Jesus mercifully and effectively claims by the Spirit. In this light, the apparent dispute about the freedom of the will is shown largely to be the fruit of conceptual confusion. Yet, a baffling question about original sin remains for further reflection., Introduction It is arguable today that the historical-critical task of the convergence method in ecumenical studies is largely accomplished and that we are in a stage of reception, the results [...]

I. Slovak History: A Witness to Violent Proselytism and Intolerance 'It is unbelievable how many spiritual movements in the current of history have passed across the real life stage of [...]

I share Michael Root's lament that the understanding of Christian freedom in Between Autonomy and Dependence, the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland's recent statement on the family, would have Luther spinning [...]