Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
Articles
Tim Walz, Progressive Lutheran
I share a hometown—West Point, Nebraska—with some prominent Lutherans: Martin Marty, the famed historian; Ralph Bohlmann, the former president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod; and now Tim Walz,...
Only the Orthodox Will Survive
In the 1990s, a number of Christian public intellectuals began to take note of the secularization of church-related higher education in America. Many of these scholars reflected on the...
Keeping the Main Things the Main Things
If I profess, with the loudest voice and the clearest exposition, every portion of the truth of God except precisely those points which the world and the devil are...
Another Narrative
In the early ’70s, one of my mentors at the University of Chicago told me there was a new theory of justice emerging in our country. “Bob,” he said,...
The Augsburg Concession
In 1869, the faithful of what was to be the Lutheran Free Church named their seminary and college in Minneapolis after the Augsburg Confession, because they believed the Confession...
Celebrity Theologian
Serious people on both left and right have wailed about the reality-show celebrity occupying the office of president of the United States. Trump’s crudity, impulsiveness, narcissism, shallowness, tawdry sexual...
ELCA Hits Bottom
Schism is a serious matter. Even though the leaders of the congregations that left the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to establish the North American Lutheran Church (NALC)...
Political Supersessionism
Last spring I attended a conference at the newly established St. Olaf Institute for Freedom and Community, which is dedicated to “free inquiry and meaningful debate of important political...
The De-Professionalization of the NFL
Not long ago I attended a college play that I really enjoyed. Between acts I noticed the stage-manager setting the stage for the next act. I went to the...
How a Decadent Culture Makes Me Think Like Sorokin
The more I am hit by the decadence and vulgarity of American culture, the more I return to the thought of Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). Now out of favor...
Love Appropriate to Form
“Pray for us,” asked a classmate from our long-ago college days who is awaiting a signal from his gay son that his artificially inseminated twins are born in Thailand....
The Trials of American Lutheranism
The two largest Lutheran churches in America have now broken up: the Lutheran Church“Missouri Synod (LCMS) in the 1960s and 1970s after a brutal conflict between insurgent conservatives and...
Lutherans in Search of a Church
In its August 2009 Churchwide Assembly, the Evangelical Lutheran Church decided formally to leave the Great Tradition of orthodox Christianity for a declining and desiccated liberal Protestantism. The decisions...
A Sexual Ethic for Teletubbies, or Lutherans Embrace a Formless World
In mid-March, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Task Force on Sexuality released a draft of what is supposed to become a Social Statement¯a basis for internal church...
Lutherans Undefined
This August, at its 2005 Churchwide Assembly in Orlando, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) sidestepped the decisions it needs to make on sexuality”and several pastors of large...
