Published Works
These are my most important works that have been published:
This article was derived from my Masters Thesis and appeared in the well known journal Vigiliae Christianae 53.3 (1999): 289-304.
The article proposes to trace the origin of the early Christian doctrine of deification in the East in large part to the use of Psalm 82 as a Christological proof text in the early Christian testimonia collections.
This article: "De servo arbitrio and the Patristic Discussion of Freedom, Fate, and Grace" represents my interest in Martin Luther and his work's relation to earlier patristic labors. It appeared in Logia 7,4 (1998): 13-22.
This article traces Luther's language in de servo arbitrio and examines his usage of phraseology and his doctrine expressed thereby and compares him to Augustine and the later Lutheran confessions.
This article, "Lutheran and Patristic Doctrine-The Keys as ecclesiae datae and potestas episcoporum", appeared in Concordia Journal 26,2 (2000): 115-137.
It is one of my favorites among my efforts. The article is again part of my work in the area of church and ministry. It demonstrates how Luther and the Lutheran church in this area took over traditional arguments of Western non-Roman patristic authors regarding the keys and used these in the context of the sixteenth century controversy with Rome in this area.
More importantly, the article suggests that the theological category of the "keys" provides a place to start understanding the theological relationship between church and ministers - a topic that has been so controversial in North American Lutheranism for 150 years.
This article, "Office and Offices, Some Basic Lutheran Philology," appeared in Logia 6,3 (1997): 5-11. It represents work I've done in the area of the theological doctrines of church and ministry and also represents my basic interest in language.
The article attempts to clarify the origins and fundamental meanings of the terminology of "office" used so frequently in the theology of church and ministry. Such frequented terminology often becomes trampled down in debate and loses precision while being used in slightly different ways in different doctrinal presentations.
It is basically an investigation into the fundamentals of the word "office" in Lutheran theology so to help clarify usage in future work in this area.
This article, "Does a Congregation Ordinarily have the Right to Temporarily Commit an Essential Part of the Holy Preaching Office to a Layman?", appeared in Lehre und Wehre 20,9 (1874): 257-268. I translated it before 1992 although it has undergone some revision a couple of times.
The last revisions were made in the mid 1990s in conjunction with comments given me by Prof. Kurt Marquart of Concordia Seminary in Ft. Wayne, IN, who subsequently made use of the article in his book The church, and her fellowship, ministry, and governance, 1995 (see his footnote on page 144).
The article is also available here: