Steps in Publishing The Sermons of Martin Luther. Volume V Printing - Finishing My Part of Volume VI Today.

Today, God willing, I am finishing up Volume VI of The Sermons of Martin Luther. At the moment I am mining the gems of this volume, which is one of the most enjoyable of all writing efforts. I get to copy and paste the best from each volume. When Volume VIII is finished, I will gather all the gems for the final volume - Gems Mined from the Sermons of Martin Luther.

Here are the steps in getting one volume into production:

1. I copied and pasted the 8 volumes of Lenker's edition into this blog, using an unlikely source, which used lots of open source material for promoting ads.
2. When I realized the old Lenker sets were hard to find and expensive, I decided to recreate the set with illustrations. Norma A. Boeckler was happy to illustrate them.
3. Various people volunteered to edit the blogged sermons, which I pasted into 8 Word files. Scanning errors were varied, strange, and tedious to locate. Laity and a pastor agreed to help.
4. First I use control-f to find typical format errors. I look for other mistakes and send that to someone to edit.
5. The edit suggestions come back on emails, spreadsheets, whatever works.
6. I go over each suggestion and make the changes needed.
7. I created a table of contents and collect the gems from suggestions made. Virginia Roberts and Mrs. Ichabod mine the gems.
8. Norma A. Boeckler inserts her art into the sermon volume. We use DropBox to send these large files back and forth.
9. I make "final" corrections and send them to Janie Sullivan.
10. Janie does her work for Amazon and Kindle, and I approve the proofs.
11. Amazon may raise issues with production, so I have to deal with those. 
12. The first printings begin to go out, first in color, then in black and white. Each volume has a color version, a BW version, and a Kindle.
13. Donations make it possible to send a box of Luther and Lutheran books to African seminaries. Two have been sent and a third is being prepared for sending. The box costs about $90 to print and send to our contact, $100 to mail to Africa, for a total of $190. 

When the Temps Are Down - The Birds Flock to us

More examples of Norma A. Boeckler's art can be found here.

Last night the wind chill was -7 or worse. The faucets were set to drip all night. Plumbing was exposed, with cupboard doors open. We counted ourselves blessed that the furnace conked earlier in the week, before the deep freeze arrived. We had two repair visits to make sure everything was working.

Yesterday, the birds ate all day at our feeders, where they can get kernel corn, cracked corn, sunflower seeds, Nyjer (thistle), and suet, with dried berries still available on Poke bushes and other plants.

This morning, the feeders were almost empty, so birds were clustered around to see what was left for them to eat. Sassy wanted her walk, so she went out with me for a quick walk. I have not been that cold since Minnesota. I looked at the rose cones packed with leaves - "That was a good year to do that."

When we returned, Sassy took up her post on the bed, and I fed the birds outside. They have many places to feed from, and all were nearly empty. Birds seldom wipe out the supply, even in weather like this. The flocking birds will arrive in an armada, eat a bit, then leave for a new location.

I added sunflower seeds and cracked corn in a total of seven places. Soon the backyard was Action Alley again. But lo, I saw for the first time - pigeons joining their cousins, the mourning doves, finding food on the ground.

Famine of the Word

10 And I will turn your feasts into mourning, and all your songs into lamentation; and I will bring up sackcloth upon all loins, and baldness upon every head; and I will make it as the mourning of an only son, and the end thereof as a bitter day.

Amos 8:11 Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the Words of the Lord:12 And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the Word of the Lord, and shall not find it.

People are starting to realize that the Lutheran leaders have been replacing sound doctrine with false doctrine - for decades. That was not so clear in the heady days of the 1980s, when money was plentiful and men were attending seminary in large numbers. How great and glorious all sides felt. The Preus brothers had replaced the liberals. The biggest liars of Seminex had their own little seminary - and free to be, whatever that meant. The WELS pastors bragged about how they saw it coming decades before that, and the ELS declared they stood up to Missouri even before that.

But now alarm, insecurity, and fears are growing. Their money is all gone because the Lutheran leaders spent their Schwan indulgence loot like congressmen on a junket. And yet, the object of their UOJ doctrine remains where he belongs, because he thought he really could buy absolution from all three synds. Maybe he was not born forgiven, as they taught.

Sound doctrine is like investments in this sense. I can easily find people who have gambled everything on a particular sure-fire fund. One man borrowed $300,000 equity from his insurance to win big and ended up with about $1,100. He is unlikely to reverse that and turn the paltry remainder into a fortune.

The mainline seminaries are emptying out. They find creative ways to make their enrollments seem larger, such as calculating "full-time equivalents." Some of the FTEs are online students living far away. Some are graduate students. Bottom line - they are all shrinking faster than cheap socks in a hot drier. That not only includes the worst  - ELCA seminaries - but also the ELCA wannabees like LCMS, ELS, WELS. The ELDONUTs are in danger of losing 100% of their enrollment when Heimbigner's son-in-law graduates.

 Our Army Ranger neighbor loved seeing all the finches
feeding at the kitchen window.

Points about the Robert Preus Essay on UOJ

 WELS Seminary professor John Brenner made similar points in his Marquette University dissertation.

The Robert Preus essay promoting UOJ can be found here.

I am just going to provide some summary statements about the Preus UOJ claims, then finish with graphics made from his last book, Justification and Rome.

1. Jack Cascione presented the material dishonestly, as if I denied Robert Preus had been a UOJ salesman. In fact, I often made that point to show how Preus changed in his last book, Justification and Rome.
2. Robert Preus was following a Preus family tradition in promoting UOJ, a divisive issue in the Synodical Conference in the 19th century. Pastor Herman Preus was kicked out of his congregation on Good Friday for sticking to UOJ.
3. Preus clearly stated in Paragraph #1 that UOJ is a declaration by God - "declared the entire world of sinners for whom Christ died to be righteous." He cited Romans 5, a blatant error used by UOJists.
4. Robert Preus distinguished Objective Justification from the Atonement - "Objective justification which is God’s verdict of acquittal over the whole world is not identical with the atonement..." Paragraph #2 - The President's Message. Many people mistakenly believe OJ is just another term for the Atonement (as I did in the very first edition of Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant).
5. The LCMS seminaries currently teach UOJ and wonder why some of their graduates become Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox priests soon after graduation. 
6. In paragraph #3, Preus promoted the Easter absolution of the world exegesis from 1 Timothy 3:16, taught by Rambach (a Halle Pietist) but not by Martin Chemnitz. Please check this account of Rambach versus Chemnitz. Walther learned this Easter absolution of the entire world from Bishop Martin Stephan, who studied at Halle, never graduated from any school, and was known as a Pietist managing cell groups.
7. In paragraph #4, Robert Preus dishonestly offered Edward Preuss as an authority on UOJ - "an old Lutheran." But Robert's distant relative left his teaching post at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, becoming Roman Catholic, baptized a Roman Catholic, and serving as their great scholar. Notre Dame gave Preuss a medal for his efforts in Mariology. Ludwig Fuerbringer also referenced the Preuss papal conversion - it was never a secret.
8. Here is a detailed account of UOJ at work in WELS.
9. Paragraph #5 is Preus' effort to insert UOJ into Luther's doctrine, where the terms cannot be found, where the UOJ claims are constantly refuted with faithful teaching from the Scriptures.
10. Paragraph #5 also names Stoeckhardt as a great expert (UOJ) on Romans but fails to mention Luther's Galatians Lectures as recommended by the Book of Concord itself. Preus might have defined the Chief Article - as Melanchthon, Luther, and the Concordists did - as Justification by Faith. All citations in this essay are from the UOJ mob - certainly not an example of scholarship.
11. Paragraph #6 is nothing but confusion, claims without any evidence to support them. "No, objective justification is a clear teaching of Scripture, it is an article of faith which no Lutheran has any right to deny or pervert any more than the article of the Trinity or of the vicarious atonement." The first time UOJ came up among Lutherans, Samuel Huber ("former" Calvinist) was teaching it at Wittenberg University. He was examined carefully about his doctrine and expelled from the school. The next time UOJ hid its fangs behind fleece, it came from Halle Pietists like Rambach, Stephan, and Walther.
12. Paragraph #7 proves that Walther was a bonafide Enthusiast who got high on his own supply of babble: "No, when His Son had accomplished all that He had to do and suffer in order to earn and acquire grace and life and blessedness for us, then God, in His burning love to speak to us sinners, could not wait until we would come to Him and request His grace in Christ, but no sooner had His Son fulfilled everything than He immediately hastened to confer to men the grace which had been acquired through the resurrection of His Son, to declare openly, really and solemnly to all men that they were acquitted of all their sins, and to declare before heaven and earth that they are redeemed, reconciled, pure, innocent and righteous in Christ." So orthodoxy is grace without the Means of Grace, without the Word, and yet somehow received without faith!
13. The shameful public execution of Walther Maier began with Paragraph #8. The carefully chosen words are painful to read, even today. UOJ is not in the Bible, just as Maier said. UOJ is not in Luther or the Book of Concord. Most importantly, because the LCMS is the expert on everything, UOJ has never been found in the catechisms of the sect. One Missouri DP said as much when he received a "UOJ-denier" into the ministerium.

PS - Need I say it? The UOJ clowns treat Justification and Rome as a nuclear waste dump, staying so far away from it that one suspects they cannot grasp the truth of his clear and compelling final words.

 Should we follow Stephan into syphilitic insanity
or Luther to eternal life?