Tuesday, July 13, 2004 AD
Final Score
Well, I finally finished the Book of Concord, so I guess I can now update my post from March and announce that I am now officially 100% Lutheran :-)
Originally I had hoped to finish the BoC before being received into the Lutheran Church, but in the end I decided I was unlikely to come across any "deal-breakers" in the last 40 pages or so that remained unread by the time we were received into membership a week last Sunday. Ironically, the penultimate section (XI, on Election) then caused me the most difficulty of anything I'd read in the entire book. Not that I disagreed with it - and there was some very helpful material in there, particularly on the hardening of Pharaoh's heart - but some aspects of it (especially the foreknowledge/predestination distinction) involve quite a change of perspective for a "recovering Calvinist", and I'll need to go through parts of it again, Bible in hand, to get fully to grips with what it's saying.
But I'm over the finish line (another meaningless self-imposed personal target accomplished - ah, what joy it is to be male!); and appropriately (and coincidentally) enough, on the same day I found a clear-GIF version of the ELCE seal - an ingenious combination of Luther's Rose and the Tudor Rose - to adorn my blog (found on the Westfield House homepage). Makes a change from using one of these, and helps with one of the meaningless self-imposed personal goals of this site, namely to help increase the profile of the ELCE. Clicking the logo takes you to the ELCE homepage.
Originally I had hoped to finish the BoC before being received into the Lutheran Church, but in the end I decided I was unlikely to come across any "deal-breakers" in the last 40 pages or so that remained unread by the time we were received into membership a week last Sunday. Ironically, the penultimate section (XI, on Election) then caused me the most difficulty of anything I'd read in the entire book. Not that I disagreed with it - and there was some very helpful material in there, particularly on the hardening of Pharaoh's heart - but some aspects of it (especially the foreknowledge/predestination distinction) involve quite a change of perspective for a "recovering Calvinist", and I'll need to go through parts of it again, Bible in hand, to get fully to grips with what it's saying.
But I'm over the finish line (another meaningless self-imposed personal target accomplished - ah, what joy it is to be male!); and appropriately (and coincidentally) enough, on the same day I found a clear-GIF version of the ELCE seal - an ingenious combination of Luther's Rose and the Tudor Rose - to adorn my blog (found on the Westfield House homepage). Makes a change from using one of these, and helps with one of the meaningless self-imposed personal goals of this site, namely to help increase the profile of the ELCE. Clicking the logo takes you to the ELCE homepage.
