Word: faithfulness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tendency to think together has been growing in Lutheranism during the past decade. For generations, most U.S. Lutherans were ethnically centered, holding their services in German or Dutch or Scandinavian, and seeing to it that their children grew in the faith and folkways of their fathers. This exclusive attitude put Lutheranism in a special position among U.S. Protestants. It protected the Lutheran churches from the excessive emotion in the wave of revivalism that swept America in the late 19th century. As for the theological liberalism of the early 20th century, it barely touched the Lutherans at all. But the Lutherans...
Against Rome, Luther denied the church's administration over God's grace -either to grant it or withhold it. Not church, he held, but scripture is the true channel of grace-the Word and man's will lead to faith, and faith in Jesus Christ will redeem man from his sins. So sure did he feel of "justification by faith" that in his translation of the Bible he dared to insert the word "alone"' on his own authority. Against what he saw as a privileged caste of priests, he maintained "the priesthood of all believers...
Luther recognized only two sacraments: baptism and communion. And in the Lord's Supper he insisted that the bread was not changed into Christ's body by the priest but revealed as Christ's body by the faith of the recipient. Nevertheless. Luther did not give an inch to those who saw- the Eucharist as symbolic only. ''This is my body,'' he wrote in chalk on the conference table at which he met with his fellow reformer Zwingli in 1529. and Luther always maintained that when the Christian believer received the host...
...bureau were engaged, although the chapter on "Espionage and Sabotage" would seem to call for it (Don Whitehead's The FBI Story, which Hoover underwrote, dealt with the case in some detail). Hoover's conclusion is a convincingly humble plea for Americans, particularly intellectuals, to restate the faith of their fathers. He does not mention the plain fact that a great many of these intellectuals have wanted the same thing the Communists themselves wanted-Utopia -but failed to see the secret policeman who lurks behind all schemes to legislate the world into goodness...
...simple, straightforward way, Hoover perhaps gives more true answers to the "problem of Communism" than many of his more sophisticated critics. His contempt for the addled notion that Communism is essentially a response to economic inequalities is soundly based. As he sees it, there are two faiths at war in the world, and his notion that only a true faith will defeat a false one may be so plain and old-fashioned as to be right...