Martin Luther's revolutionary insight concerning the location of the event of justification in the “bottom of the heart” contained, as is well known, some ancillary results toward the displacing of external activities—”works”—from a central position in the quest for salvation. One effect of his theology was a radical redistribution of weight in his anthropological understanding, a shifting of focus away from a person's active participation in liturgy and the sacraments, asceticism and good works, and toward the event of justification in the “consciousness,” “depths of the heart,” or “the inmost heart.” Moreover, a new understanding of the psychological situation in which the Gospel can operate involved Luther in new methods for preparing and reinforcing the justification event. This article will examine Luther's description of the psychological situation in which justification occurs; his revised anthropology, especially as it affected his view of the human body; his identification of the ear as the direct access to the “bottom of the heart”; and, finally, the consequences of Luther's anthropology for the understanding of asceticism, death, and the sacraments.

In several passages in the Hebrew Bible, we find similar phrases used to describe the punishment the authors hope the deity will mete out to those who are their enemies. In Psalm 3, the psalmist's situation is described in this way:

Form criticism has enjoyed great success in providing tangible insights into the social life and liturgical practices of Hellenistic Judaism and early Christianity, but until now there has not been forthcoming a clear idea of what Jewish and Christian preaching was like before the middle of the second century CE Scholars are generally agreed that we have little, if any, direct evidence of sermons from this period. The sermons in Acts would seem to be excellent sources, but as Alexander Mac-Donald has pointed out, these are almost all missionary sermons or speeches to outsiders, and are therefore of little use in determining the nature of sermons addressed to coreligionists in the synagogue or church. Morton Smith attempted to isolate sermons in the synoptic gospels, but there he admits that the passages adduced—largely collections of sayings—may not constitute the actual form of oral preaching, but instead reflect a consistent pattern of literary sermon reports. As for Jewish sermons, the midrashic collections were edited later than the period in question, and it is generally unwise to extrapolate backward from these texts. Recent attempts to compare rabbinic homiletical forms with NT texts have been strongly criticized.

Every student of Christianity learns how the Protestant Reformation wrested the bible from the clutches of priests and monks. Luther's insistence on scripture's preeminent authority, the spate of vernacular translations, and the invention of movable type all combined to draw literate laypeople to the biblical texts. Once the clerical monoply was broken, Christianity entered a new phase of its history.

The Western Messenger (1835–41) has often been given honorable mention in American literary history and has some reputation as one of the best-written magazines to appear in the early American West. Many scholars who are at all familiar with the Messenger associate it primarily with American Transcendentalism and often mention it as a precursor of the Dial. Indeed, it did defend the right of Ralph Waldo Emerson and several others to express the “New Views,” and a few articles which did so were excerpted by Perry Miller for his authoritative anthology The Transcendentalists. However, the material appearing in its five full years of monthly publication cannot so easily be reduced to a single theme. The magazine's original intention was to serve as an organ of Unitarian missionizing, and several of its most supportive writers, wary of the claims of Transcendentalism, continued to contribute articles that emphasized the scriptural basis for a Unitarian interpretation of Christianity. This persistent identification with traditional Unitarianism, alongside support for an open-minded examination of the ideas being put forward by Emerson, William Henry Furness, George Ripley, and Bronson Alcott, illustrates how Transcendentalist thought could be incorporated into a Unitarian forum without the recrimination associated with Andrews Norton's attack on Emerson's Divinity School Address. The denomination, even in its fledgling Western development, was far more diverse and dynamic than has usually been appreciated.

On a foggy evening in the spring of 1906, nine days before the San Francisco earthquake, several black saints gathered in a small house in Los Angeles to seek the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Before the night was over, a frightened child ran from the house to tell a neighbor that the people inside were singing and shouting in strange languages.Several days later the group moved to an abandoned warehouse on Azusa Street in a run-down section of the city. Soon they were discovered by a Los Angeles Times reporter. The “night is made hideous … by the howlings of the worshippers,” he wrote. “The devotees of the weird doctrine practice the most fanatical rites, preach the wildest theories and work themselves into a state of mad excitement.”

During 1933 and 1934 the German Protestant church produced a “high tide” of confessions and ecclesiastical pronouncements. Among these the well-known Barmen Declaration is of prime importance. The first of these confessions, the Confession of Altona of January 1933, however, is hardly known at all, and no English translation has ever been published.

Despite the dilution of contemporary ethical substance by the triumph of the therapeutic, the problem of evil continues to bite. A postwar optimism that saw in technology a potential solution for every problem has been overtaken and eclipsed by a pessimism which now perceives the same technology as threatening the existence and survival of human life. The current mood has a tragic strain manifesting itself in some secular negative theodicies that see “life as unfair” and the universe run by a malevolent creator. Theology and philosophy of religion have not been entirely insulated from such perceptions. There has been considerable discussion of, and dissatisfaction with, traditional theologies and theodocies, which have prompted further investigation and search for alternatives. Two popular and widely read texts manifest the contemporary theological mood. John Hick and Paul Ricoeur discuss and criticize the classical Augustinian scheme as a theodicy. When the classical scheme is taken critically as an account of evil, it is seen to contain serious antinomies. Hence both Hick and Ricoeur seek an alternative account of evil.