To browse Academia. Louis: The Luther Academy, This paper is a response to John T. In three points I have reviewed his main ideas, identified what is helpful in terms of distinguishing Law from Gospel, including ideas that are fruitful and noteworthy. In addition I have acknowledged any shortcomings and made recommendations as to what I thought would have or could have been said better regarding unhelpful information.
I found the discussion questions beneficial for reflection but distracting in terms of the main corpus of information that is being communicated. When I thought the book would get better, it got worse, or when clarity concerning ambiguous terms was needed, as a reader I felt a bit lost. Regardless, there was indeed much more that I would have liked to comment on but was quite simply too pressed for word space.
On the other hand I have made recommendations as to how this book could be improved and what other resources would best serve a young preacher learning the difficult art of discerning Law from Gospel. Evangelicals should actively appropriate central themes from the Protestant Reformation that provide a unified structure for faith, life, and proclamation: the nuanced relation between law and gospel. A largely unified but not woodenly identical perspective can be learned from a comparison of Martin Luther with John Calvin Their significant similarity on these questions established patterns for quality teaching and preaching in the Protestant tradition.
This complementarity offers evangelicals a proven tool for understanding the Bible, for proclamation in church and society, for balanced and authentic pastoral care, and for relating the Christian faith to questions of culture and politics.
It is interesting that since when Luther placed the 95 theses on the Wittenberg chapel door, debates ensued with vitality and freshness. Many aspects of the Reformation movement were debated by scholars of all persuasions, including even Roman Catholic theologians. The debates have become contextualised according to regions and countries and the end of the 20th century and the turn of the 21st have seen the deepening of the debates as scholars wrestle with the issues.
