Jon Diefenthaler

Power, Politics, and the Missouri Synod

History & Biography

“James Burkee has done a commendable job of providing not only a rich measure of historical background and perspective on 'Seminex,' a controversy of the 1970s that continues to impact the Missouri–Synod as a Lutheran church body, but also a case–study example of the Christ–and–culture battle line that runs through all of American Christianity.”

The Art of Exegesis

History & Biography

“While Martin Luther was the one to state that the Scriptures do not belong to anyone except God alone, it was Martin Franzmann who applied this truth with his doxological approach to interpreting them. In this book, rising Lutheran scholar Matthew Borrasso masterfully explicates how this respected seminary professor, who also possessed the heart of a poet, came to regard the exegesis of biblical texts as more of an art than a science. In the process, he succeeds in shedding additional light on related twentieth-century conflicts over the Bible that swept through not only the Wisconsin Lutheran Synod in which Franzmann was reared and the Missouri Synod he tried to save from schism, but most all of American Protestantism.”

These Words We Speak

Theology

“In an age of suffocating divisiveness, Matthew E. Borrasso provides a breath of fresh air. Instead of attacking or defending the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod and the progressive Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on their use of the law-gospel hermeneutic, he invites us to view these Lutherans as two kinds of voices in an ongoing conversation, one that calls for a humble and charitable form of "intellectual hospitality." His book not only effectively applies such hospitality to hot-button issues like homosexuality and abortion but, in the process, humanizes often-sterile theological abstractions and offers a more Christlike way of engaging those who differ from us on all such topics in today's society, and of rediscovering common ground.”