Confessional Lutheran Theology
A Word From Outside Us
Why the Anxious Conscience Needs a Faith It Did Not Invent
Published
Everything distinctive about confessional Lutheranism — the binding subscription, the quarrel with enthusiasm, the forensic doctrine of justification, the stubborn realism about the sacraments — unfolds from a single pastoral commitment: that the terrified conscience needs a word from outside itself, spoken to it and accomplished without it. This essay is a defense of that faith, and of the particular comfort that is not available wherever the confession is abandoned.