LUTHERAN QUARTERLY

VDMA: Verbum Domini Manet in Aeternum . . . the Word of the Lord remains forever.

SPRING 2003 Issue

Volume XVII, Number 1

Time and language, together, frame the essential theological question: how does the eternal divine Word meet and indeed become temporal human words?  Vitor Westhelle probes the philosophical subtlety and political impact of “Communication and the Transgression of Language in Martin Luther.”  Recently elected to our Council of Editorial Advisors, Westhelle teaches systematic theology at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, 1100 East 55th Street, Chicago, IL 60615.

Again the headlines raise issues of politics and morality, and again the Lutheran tradition of realistic engagement provides resources for today’s public square.  As “the most political of all sixteenth-century Reformers,” Philip Melanchthon is Timothy J. Wengert’s subject in an annotated adaptation of his inaugural lecture (April 16, 2002) as the Ministerium of Pennsylvania Professor of Reformation History at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, 7301 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19119.

Oswald Bayer shows yet again why theology and ethics are inseparable.  Bayer’s first book in English is also the first in our new series of Lutheran Quarterly Books, appearing this spring from Eerdmans.  Living By Faith: Justification and Sanctification parallels this essay on “Law and Morality,” in that daily life flows from faith in God.  Liebermeisterstrasse 18, D-72076 Tübingen.

The first Lutheran missionaries to India (1706) were Danes but they had been A.H. Francke’s students in Halle, Germany.  Daniel Jeyaraj is an ordained deacon of the Diocese of Tirunelveli, Church of South India, but he spent years of research (Dr.theol.habil) in the Halle archives on these and other missionaries. In this essay he traces the Lutheran history in coastal Tranquebar from those early missionaries through the end of the eighteenth century. Jeyaraj is the Aaron Professor of the History of Christianity in India and Dean of the Lutheran Heritage Archives at the Gurunkul Lutheran Theological College and Research Institute in Madras.  Currently he is a visiting Research Professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, P.O. Box 821, Princeton, NJ 08542-0803.

“Lutherans” often remind each other that Martin Luther objected to this use of his name, at least in one famous comment. James Kittelson, however, presents the fuller picture wherein this one (early) quotation is followed by dozens of occasions when the Reformer embraced the growing use of the term “Lutheran” to mean something definitely theological. Kittelson recently published “Historical and Systematic Theology in the Mirror of Church History: The Lessons of ‘Ordination’ in Sixteenth-Century Saxony,” Church History 71 (2002): 743–773.  Luther Seminary, 2481 Como Avenue, St. Paul, MN 55108.