Notes

Pastoral Decency and Busyness

John Updike’s Pastor Fritz Kruppenbach lectures a younger clergyman on ministry.

“Do you think,” Kruppenbach at last interrupts, “do you think this is your job, to meddle in these people’s lives? I know what they teach you at seminary now: this psychology and that. But I don’t agree with it. You think now your job is to be an unpaid doctor, to run around and plug up the holes and make everything smooth. I don’t think that. I don’t think that’s your job.” … “When on Sunday morning then, when we go before their faces, we must walk up not worn out with misery but full of Christ, hot”—he clenches his hairy fists—“with Christ, on fire: burn them with the force of our belief. That is why they come; why else would they pay us? Anything else we can do or say anyone can do and say. They have doctors and lawyers for that. It’s all in the Book—a thief with faith is worth all the Pharisees. Make no mistake. Now I’m serious. Make no mistake. There is nothing but Christ for us. All the rest, all this decency and busyness, is nothing. It is devil’s work.”

John Updike, Rabbit Run (New York: Random House, 1960), p. 179f.

Reading

Whether a scroll or a codex or a screen, what matters is what and how we read.

Two centuries after Gutenberg, Rembrandt painted an old woman reading, her face illuminated by light shining from the Bible in her hands. Substitute a screen for the book, and that symbolic image is now literally accurate. But in the twenty-first century, as in Rembrandt’s seventeenth, the illumination we receive depends on the words we choose to read and the ways we choose to read them.

Edward Mendelson, “In the Depths of the Digital Age,” The New York Review of Books LXIII, Number 11 (June 23, 2016), p. 38.

Black Lutheran Lives Matter

Back in 1996, Karl E. Johnson, Jr., and Joseph A. Romeo brought to light the career of “Jehu Jones (1786–1852), the First African American Lutheran Minister,” LQ 10 (1996): 425–444. They identified the church he built on Quince Street in Philadelphia, with the cornerstone still visible: “St. Paul’ E. L. Church 1834.” Since the Pennsylvania Historical Commission restored the historical marker at the site on November 19, 2016, we have posted the essay and further information about the pioneer pastor on our website, www.lutheranquarterly.com.

LQ Books at Fortress

Now that Lutheran Quarterly Books have moved from Eerdmans to Fortress, we can celebrate the first title and promote the list as well. Appearing this spring is The Life and Witness of Tsehay Tolessa and Gudima Tumsa, the Ethiopian Bonhoeffer, comprising her personal memoir and his theological writings. Edited and introduced by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson and Samuel Deressa, this volume will be the definitive resource on this remarkable couple. Further, Fortress Press is now offering a special sale on the back titles in our series, once Eerdmans imprints but now available from Fortress: www.fortresspress.com.