At the headwaters of the Reformed tradition

 ... we have this summary statement from Karl Barth's colleague on the Divinity faculty at the University of Basel: 

Luther becomes a reformer because he cannot reach the assurance of salvation in the system of the Roman Catholic church; Oecolampadius becomes a reformer because, in the Roman Catholic church, he does not find the new creature in Christ sufficiently realized. For Luther it is about justification; Oecolampadius says in connection with 1Thessalonians 4:3, “God’s will is our sanctification.” With Luther, faith stands in the foreground, with Oecolampadius, that which flows from faith, the “piety,” the “sanctity,” the “charity,” both individually and in the totality of the “mystical body of Christ.” Luther represents a Christianity more strongly characterized by Paul, Oecolampadius by John. 

—Ernst Staehelin, Breakthrough to the Reformation, pp. 128-129.

In case you were ever wondering what it means to belong to the Reformed tradition, this, I would suggest, is what it originally meant.

A Short Course in Preaching

Subtitle: Daily Reading as the Seedbed of Sermons.

It's looking like I'll be teaching preaching a lot to various constituencies and at various levels in the near and foreseeable future, so I figured it was time to boil down the basics, as I see them, into a "short course in preaching." Includes a "Second Short Course" in the form of a sermon on the Benedictus, and a first English translation of the ten summary paragraphs of Heinrich Bullinger's 1556 Summa, which was itself a summary of his famous sermon series, Decades. The Decades were as important and popular as Calvin's Institutes for several centuries and generations. So imagine having the Institutes boiled down—twice—into seven pages. I have included these paragraphs here as a way of (unofficially) supplementing the Book of Confessions as a tool for dogmatic testing. 

 

First Year in Basel

This latest volume in the series, The First Year in Basel, fills the gap between Sown on Rock: The Sermon on the Vernacular and the Correspondence with Hedio, and the Sermons on the First Epistle of John (A Handbook for the Christian Life).

[Links to images lead to paperbacks. Links in the paragraph above lead to hardcover options.]