The First Year in Basel (corrected edition is up)

Corrected edition is up, just as the last days of 2023 (500th anniversary of Oecolampadius' first year in Basel) tick down. 

The First Year in Basel contains the earliest German mass (published three years before Luther's), the next nine letters between Oecolampadius and Zwingli (the first two having appeared in previous volume: The Sermon on the Vernacular and the Correspondence with Hedio), excerpts from the famous Isaiah lectures, three prefaces to his Chrysostom translations (including those to the Psegmata and the 66 Genesis homilies), the four Theses for a Disputation, a painful rant from Capito against his colleague Hedio and Oecolampadius' pastor response, and his long letter to Bernhard Adelmann On the Distributions of Alms (or not discriminating among the poor). All (or most of it) "first-time-in-English" stuff. Perhaps the latter might make for instructive reading in Basel at the Bank of International Settlements? That may be too much to hope for. But certainly Presbyterian "Matthew 25" churches should read this.

499 years old, now going on 500

This historical and pivotal sermon series began on December 1, 1523. It evidently ran right up through Christmas Eve.

2023 would be a great time to have a Bible study on 1John, with Oecolampadius' sermon series to guide you. 

Here is a playlist of 17 videos consisting of a 30-min Introduction and sixteen short summaries by Oecolampadius' leading biographer, Ernst Staehelin (a contemporary colleague of Karl Barth); the summaries are newly translated and read as introductions to Bible Study sessions.

Meanwhile, as further evidence of just how groundbreaking this series was, check out this link; notice whose name appears first and notice the categories:

Tradition = Reformed and Genre = Sermon / Sort = Date (Oldest)

The title in question is the third on the list. The first is Oecolampadius' translation of a patristic sermon, the second is a collection of three sermons from 1521, which merit translation, but do not quite represent the full breakthrough to the Reformation, as they were produced while he was still in the monastery.

For the hardcover version of the Sermons on the First Epistle of John, and also for additional translations of related material, ... these Works of Oecolampadius are appearing at Barnes & Noble.

In memory of Hughes Oliphant Old

I was saddened to read of the recent death of Dr. Hughes Oliphant Old, late Dean of Erskine Seminary and a rare historian of preaching and worship in the Reformed tradition. His textbook on worship ever a staple of the classroom, Dr. Old's scholarship on preaching crossed my radar screen again lately in the form of his contribution to Communio Sanctorum, a 1982 festschrift for J.-J. von Allmen, Old's essay being a study of the preaching of John Oecolampadius on the 500th anniversary of the birth of the Basel Reformer.

May the coming General Assembly in Portland not come and go without notice of Old's valuable work and his passing. In my own small way, and hopefully on the way to other projects related to the homiletics of the "house lamp" of the Reformation, I would honor the memory of both Dr. Old and the Basel Reformer, with this translation of Theophil Stähelin's mid-19th c. biography of John Oecolampadius.