Quote of the day:

“Lutheranism, or as Luther called it, the ‘evangelical teaching,’ began as a preaching movement. Luther’s student, colleague, and successor, Philip Melanchthon, summarized the project to his students at Wittenberg in lectures that became the first textbook of the Reformation, Loci Communes (1521), by saying: ‘God wishes to be know in a new way, i.e., through the foolishness of preaching.’ There were certainly other preaching movements in the church before Luther’s, but none broke out so far into the public, an none was resisted so stoutly as ‘another church’ (Cardinal Cajetan) and excommunicated by the law of the Empire, the Edict of Worms (1521).  What was so upsetting about this preaching?  It distinguished the law and gospel and refused any confusion of these two words from God.  The law was given in letters in order to kill, and the gospel was given in promises to raise the dead.  God first assaulted the pious, then created them a second time – from nothing – by merely sending a preacher to say, ‘I forgive you.'”

– Steven D. Paulson (2011), Lutheran Theology