This is generally met with counter arguments drawn from liturgy snippets or sermon bytes. When we were installed into our respective teaching calls we each promised to teach in line with the Lutheran Confessions. I do not intend for one minute that we live and teach as intellectual Amish. We are teaching students and serving one another in love after the Enlightenment, after Kant and Mills and Darwin and Einstein, in an age when we kill our own children by the millions and lobby to grant civil rights to monkeys. Prior to the questions of carrying Lutheran colleges into the twenty-first century technologically or programmatically we need to define and embody what it means to be Lutheran professors.
Communion precedes communication.
Indicators of our current confessional a-literacy include not merely expressed misunderstandings regarding our own nature and regarding the two natures in Christ, and other instances of doctrinal misunderstandings in print and in conferences and conversations, but the unwillingness to address these misunderstandings in a confessional mode . When the syntax of our work together in synods or in faculties starts to unravel, check the grammar. We cannot be Lutheran professors with compassionate minds if we do not have a Lutheran mindset. The Gospel is affective, making us affective professors. Now let me explain why I'm working to get a bead on these distinctions.