Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
We have a hard time with confession these days. Traditionally, it served as the first step in repentance, acknowledging our failure to fully live according to the Gospel. Both John the Baptist and Jesus called people to repentance. The gospels picture them as prophets who ask us to rethink the way we live and change […]
I found this so important, I decided to send it on in this lesson. An outlandish hope by Roy Howard In our Sunday School class, we are exploring the work of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, through a small collection of his writings with the title Jesus Changes Everything. It’s a bracing book, as Hauerwas himself is […]
I decided to write on the need for repentance when reading Jacques Ellul’s Theology and Technique. The statement that stopped me short was, “The principles, values, and morals taught to children are in contradiction to what is demanded of adults.” My first reaction was “Yes, this is definitely true”; my second, “This is a critical […]
One of the best sermons I ever heard was delivered by H. Richard Niebuhr when I entered divinity school. I can still see and hear him musing in the pulpit. He began simply saying, “Repent…. to rethink. Repent … to rethink. To repent is to rethink.” Once that sunk in, he elaborated with different ideas. […]
Let me end this series by noting again that people mean all sorts of things when they try to define spirituality. That goes for academic writing as well as personal identification. When they say, “I am spiritual” they mean anything from being emotional to the passionate practice of a religion. Considering that this is such […]
A missing element in spirituality today is community. Throughout the ages, many individuals have written about their spiritual thoughts and experiences, and almost all, in one way or another, were connected to a community of faith. Yes, there have been hermit monks and isolated mystics, but overwhelmingly, being spiritual meant participating with a certain kind […]
Although I’ve gone all over the place with this study, I’ve found only vague descriptions of spirituality. Let me humbly attempt my own. Traditionally, people have spoken about five areas of the human life: physical, mental, emotional, ethical, and spiritual. Although they overlapped, you could assign functions to each. The spiritual dealt with meaning and […]
I have written and put aside five essays for this post. Each time I finished one, someone brought up concerns I had not addressed. I finally decided to simply report what friends were telling me, as their questions seemed more important than my intellectual answers. They reveal we are in a period of great change. […]
I started this series hoping to understand what people mean when they use the word “spiritual.” Many who say they want no affiliation with an established religion still consider themselves spiritual. Some theologians predict that churches will become spiritual centers in the future. I found myself getting very uneasy about this and couldn’t figure out […]
Throughout the years, being spiritual has usually referred to experiencing God’s presence in one’s life. When the early church spoke of Jesus’ Spirit living on after His death, they meant more than merely recalling past experiences and reports, more than simply adhering to what He taught during His ministry. They insisted that after the resurrection, […]
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