Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
I belong to a tradition that claims God is primarily present among us in the spoken Word. It acknowledges the importance of the sacraments, but thinks they are ordinary water, bread, and wine unless accompanied by the Word. So, too, it recognizes the Bible as God’s Word in a secondary sort of way until someone […]
I’ve been suggesting that our primary two considerations about the divine presence among us are God’s promise and our accurate testimony. A sacrament by definition involves the promise of God’s presence. Baptism, like Communion, is a means of grace because Jesus promised that he would be there participating in the action. The Church witnesses to […]
If you asked most Christians about God’s presence, I suspect they would think you were talking about the Sacrament of Holy Communion. That is a good thing in as much as the meal is the central act of our worship and therefore should be where the divine is most manifest. However, it is also terribly […]
This series has not gone as I expected. My original plan was to critique as many theories about God’s presence in this world as I could find. I was thinking of word and sacrament, grain of the universe, Body of Christ, and that sort of thing. Things ran amok when I began by reading Ellul […]
As I have previously confessed, these online lessons have addressed my own questions. Finding myself recently echoing the psalmists’ pleas for God to speak up and reveal himself in our present brutal society, I decided to do a series on God’s presence. As I was preparing by reviewing Jacques Ellul’s book, Presence in Modern Society, […]
A friend sent this letter Gandhi sent Hitler at Christmas in 1940. I think it is worth contemplating with an open and honest heart. It reminds me of an article my son and I read in Foreign Affairs while writing our book. It documented that far more international and national conflicts have been settled by […]
NB: I decided to post this sermon as it is somewhat of a response to the lessons on Bonhoeffer. A friend challenged me to address the present political situation in a sermon to a peace church. This was the result. Luke 17: 11-19 — On the way to Jerusalem Jesus was going through the region […]
I really have been overwhelmed rereading Bonhoeffer. As I have repeatedly reported, I was not that impressed when I first studied him in divinity school. At that time, I was caught up in the civil rights movement and naively felt we had learned how to speak truth to power. Now, I feel he has a […]
Throughout his writings, Bonhoeffer repeatedly contends the Church must commit herself to living in complete honesty and by the standards found in the scriptures if she is to save the world from self-destruction. Only in this way can she avoid the sickening religiosity that ignores the real dangers in a modern evil culture. In the […]
The second chapter in Bonhoeffer’s proposed book on religionless Christianity in our world come of age examines the real meaning of faith. He repeatedly claims this demands the absolute honesty of repentance that admits our failures and accepts divine guidance as well as an accurate reading of the Biblical message. The latter acknowledges that the […]
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