Concordia Publishing House

As the church moves through Holy Week and toward the glorious resurrection of Christ on Easter, we reflect on Christ’s sacrifice for our sins. Read this excerpt from Luther’s Works, Volume 63 (Exodus 20–34 and Prophets), which showcases Martin Luther’s insights into Christ’s death and resurrection and how He forgives our sins.

In the Letter of James, we see most clearly how constant and severe the struggle for renewal of strength and purpose must have been among the first Christians. The high qualities of this new life were not the once-for-all and static possession of the Church. They had to be constantly reclaimed and reasserted in repentance under the implanted Word of the Lord. The letter also shows how vigorously the leaders of the Judaic churches aided those churches in that struggle, with what agonized and conscientious consecration they strove to keep the Word once implanted in the Church implanted and active in the hearts of the members of the Church. We see what a concentrated energy of inspired pastoral wisdom, “wisdom from above,” went into the human word that ensured the growth of the Word of the Lord and gave it firm and deep roots in the lives and words and deeds of people.

Beginning in the 2000s, Concordia Publishing House committed to the publication of Johann Gerhard’s monumental Theological Commonplaces. This effort would become the most extensive work of confessional, conservative Lutheran theology in the English language. Addressing the chief points of doctrine—the persons of the Trinity, sin and the Law, justification and the Gospel, the church and ministry, the end times, and more—the thousands of pages open the window into the early days of Lutheran Orthodoxy.

The Wittenberg Old Latin School is one of the city’s heralded institutions for secondary education. It laid the groundwork for Western education and shaped the lives of countless students throughout the Reformation, the wars of religion, the rise of the Enlightenment, and the ascendancy of Prussian control. Learn more in this blog post adapted from The History of the Gymnasium and Educational Institutions of Wittenberg. 

Peter, James, John, and Paul wrote letters to individual Christians, churches, regions, and groups of Christians to give encouragement, correct errors, and help Christ’s people better understand the faith. The book of Hebrews is one of those letters, meant to strengthen the faith of those who receive it and quell any fear or unease amongst believers. Discover the academic discussion surrounding the claims of authorship, historical setting, and key points from each chapter in this blog post adapted from Lutheran Bible Companion, Volume 2: Intertestamental Era, New Testament, and Bible Dictionary. 

“When you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers. … You received from us how you ought to walk and to please God. … For you know what instructions we gave you through the Lord Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 2:13; 4:1, 2).

Paul’s experience under house arrest at Rome is well described by his frequent companion, Luke, in the last chapter of Acts (cf Phm 24). Paul had to pay his own expenses for the house while being allowed to receive guests and to teach them about Jesus, the Messiah. He wrote this letter to Philemon, who lived in Colossae, Asia Minor. One of Paul’s prison companions, Epaphras, was also from Colossae.

It seems generally assumed that preachers want hearers to remember at least the main idea and purpose of the biblical truth considered in the sermon, as well as to reflect it in their lives. Here is a question that has not really been posed. How may preachers use new knowledge about the actual functioning of their hearers’ brains to help the hearers remember the biblical truths—ways that are more direct and beneficial than by just hoping the biblical truths will be remembered? How may the preachers’ expressions and explanations of God’s Word best reach this memory in hearers’ brains?

Nicopolis was a Roman colony on the west coast of Greece, on the isthmus separating the Ambracian Gulf from the Ionian Sea. The city would serve as winter quarters for Paul and his colleagues in AD 68 before his arrest and second imprisonment at Rome. Paul was on his way to Nicopolis, perhaps along the road from Macedonia, when he paused to write this letter to Titus, his representative serving congregations on the island of Crete. Paul urged Titus to sail to Nicopolis and join him for the winter (3:12).

While searching for Paul, Onesiphorus would tread the broad streets of Rome, passing beneath the archways of its aqueducts and walking beside its grand colonnaded porticos. But the prison where Paul was held would be out of the way, along an alley or even in a cave, requiring all of Onesiphorus’s diligence to find his colleague.