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Tim Walz, Progressive Lutheran

Robert Benne

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

Robert Benne

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

Robert Benne

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

Robert Benne

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

Robert Benne

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...

ELCA Hits Bottom

Robert Benne

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

Robert Benne

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 Trials of American Lutheranism

Robert Benne

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 Undefined

Robert Benne

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...

Reinventing Sexual Ethics

Robert Benne

I am reliably informed that there is a Neuhaus’ Law to the effect that, where orthodoxy is optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed. There are, of course,...