History

By the 19th century, the story of Lady Jane Grey, the young queen who succeeded Edward VI for less than two weeks, had already been heavily fictionalized, romanticized, politicized, and reinvented. The famous painting by Paul Delaroche, The Execution of Lady Jane Grey (1833), is a classic example...

This week on Theology on the Go, our host, Dr. Jonathan Master continues his conversation with Dr. Robert Kolb. Dr. Kolb was born and raised in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and attended Concordia College, St. Paul, Minn. (1959-1961); Concordia Senior College, Fort Wayne, Ind. (1961-1963); and Concordia...

In occasion of Father’s Day, I diverge from the usual mini-bios to peek into the lives of some fathers who lived during the Reformation, with all the struggles and joys this task embraced. Busy Homes Moving from the peaceful, regimented, and purely male environment of a monastery to a loud...

The name evangelical was early on attributed to the Reformers and to Luther himself, and it was of course a fitting title as it not only grasped their recovery of the gospel, but also their emphasis upon it and the good news it declared. For Luther that good news only made sense in light of the bad...

Three countries claim Anselm as their own. To the Italians, he is Anselmo d’Aosta (of Aosta, the Alpine city where he was born around 1033). To the French, he is Anselme du Bec (of Bec, where he first entered monastic life in 1060). To the English (and the English-speaking world), he is Anselm of...

The name “Martin Luther” tends to conjure up solitary images. Whether he was pinning his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, making speeches before an Imperial court at Worms, or hiding out in Wartburg Castle translating the Bible, we often picture Luther alone. But then there are the...

There is an episode from Luther’s life in which he played a prominent role. It is not a story with a happy ending, but we should be familiar with the Marburg Colloquy because it holds important lessons for the Reformed community today. In the middle of the 1520s, key Protestants desired a political...

“Whenever I pray, I pray for a curse upon Erasmus.” That quote appears in Martin Luther’s Table Talk, the same place where he called the Prince of the Humanists “the vilest miscreant that ever disgraced the earth” and quipped that those who do not hate Satan ought to love Erasmus. How did...

Michelangelo’s last sculpture is puzzling – two imprecise figures of Jesus and Mary melting into one, with a fragment of Jesus’s right arm detached from his body. It’s the Pietà Rondanini, the third and last pietà sculpted by the artist, very far from his first and meticulously detailed Vatican...

This week on Theology on the Go, our host, Dr. Jonathan Master is joined by Dr. Robert Kolb. Dr. Kolb was born and raised in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and attended Concordia College, St. Paul, Minn. (1959-1961); Concordia Senior College, Fort Wayne, Ind. (1961-1963); and Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Mo...