Captain Thin

Two pieces of news worth noting:

1) I’ve recently been named Editor for the International Lutheran Council’s (ILC) news service, a global association of confessional Lutheran church bodies. I’ll be taking on this position in addition to my current roles as Communications Manager for Lutheran Church–Canada and Editor of The Canadian Lutheran (making room for the new work by shuffling off some of my previous duties to others). For more information on what I’ll be doing with the ILC, check out this news release here.

2): In other ILC news, I’ve written an article for First Things discussing Catholic-Lutheran dialogue in light of a recent meeting at the Vatican between the ILC and the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity. While noting that some hopes in Catholic-Lutheran discussions have faded from the optimism of decades past, I suggest that the entrance of confessional Lutherans on a global level to dialogues with the Roman Catholic church may breathe new life into discussions. Check it out in my article “A New (Confessional) Direction in Catholic-Lutheran Dialogue.”

That’s all for now.

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My column for the September/October issue of The Canadian Lutheran is available online. That issue of the magazine had a dual focus on international missions and remembering the Reformation. I like to think I tied together those two focuses together in a fairly coherent way in my article, reflecting on St. Paul’s teaching that our faith moves us to share the Gospel. “We believe, therefore we have spoken.” The good news of salvation through God’s grace—the Reformation truth of justification—is not something we keep to ourselves. We can’t keep it to ourselves. It bursts forth from our lips—the Good News that Christ’s death and resurrection has accomplished our salvation.

Luther could not keep quiet about this discovery; the Good News that we are declared righteous through faith in the Gospel was something everyone needed to know. Like Luther, we too are motivated by the Spirit to tell others that God accepts them on the basis of Christ’s mercy, not their works. Indeed, our faith compels us to share the Gospel. St. Paul explains it well: “It is written: ‘I believed; therefore I have spoken.’ With that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therefore speak because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you in His presence. All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God” (2 Corinthians 4:13-15).

Read the whole article online here: We believe, therefore we speak.

As many of you are already aware, I recently did an interview for Issues Etc. on the subject of predestination (back on October 25, 2013). The invitation to speak came after an article I wrote for First Things entitled “Why Lutheran Predestination isn’t Calvinist Predestination.”

If you happened to miss it earlier, you can listen to the interview with Issues Etc. below:

2. The Biblical View of Predestination – Mathew Block, 10/25/13

Mathew Block of the Lutheran Church-Canada

Podcast: Download (Duration: 24:17 — 9.9MB)