Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
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, […]
I am trying to develop an understanding of spirituality that makes sense in the 21st century. I started by examining what the Bible has to say. When I reached the New Testament, I found that Luke-Acts, John, and Paul make a significant point about Jesus’ resurrection, releasing the Holy Spirit in a new way. Paul […]
If you had asked me a year ago what it means to be spiritual, I would have begun discussing different classifications of life, such as physical, mental, and spiritual. Then I would’ve attempted to describe the characteristics of each. Over the past year, I’ve become increasingly intrigued by the number of people in various situations […]
Spirit is one of the most constant terms in the bible. It is used for God. It is used for humans. It is used to express the relationship between the two. Yet like the air we breathe, it is so prevalent we seldom notice it. In fact, Scripture often portrays the spirit as the air […]
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