Week for week preachers are faced with the task of helping their listeners to read the Bible with its wide range of different texts. The so-called dualities of law and gospel, faith and works, old and new covenant, promise and fulfilment are a key to understanding these texts. They have long been taken in the Lutheran churches as an aid to understanding the Bible. However, they have often been misunderstood and in particular used as criticism of Jewish theology. This manual deals openly with this history of interpretation. It encourages a contemporary and critical approach to the dualities by describing their different theological backgrounds and illuminating their significance for the present. It explains how the dualities can encourage a lively preaching culture that combines theological understanding of the Bible with an interpretation that is suitable for the contemporary situation. The book was written in the context of the United Evangelical Lutheran Church of Germany and supplemented by a preface for the English-language edition.

We Believe in the Holy Spirit: Global Perspectives on Lutheran Identities Today the concept of "identity" is contested against the backdrop of myriad forms of social, political, economic and ecological exclusion. How is identity expressed in a global Lutheran tradition whose members share common biblical, liturgical, confessional, theological and spiritual foundations, yet represent diverse cultures and traditions? At the end of 2019, the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) hosted a global consultation on contemporary Lutheran identities, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The result is the papers presented in this publication. The authors – church leaders, young Christians, theologians, lay and ordained practitioners in local communities – explore the Spirit's work to revive and equip the faithful for vocation through the ministry of the church today and into the future of the Lutheran communion. [Wir glauben an den Heiligen Geist: Lutherische Identitäten aus weltweiter Perspektive] Vor dem Hintergrund der vielfältigen Formen von gesellschaftlicher, politischer, wirtschaftlicher und ökologischer Ausgrenzung ist das Konzept einer "Identität" in unserer aktuellen Zeit höchst umstritten. Wie wird Identität in einer globalen lutherischen Glaubenstradition zum Ausdruck gebracht, deren Anhängerinnen und Anhänger zwar gemeinsame biblische, gottesdienstliche, konfessionelle, theologische und spirituelle Grundfeste haben, aber gleichzeitig aus ganz unterschiedlichen Kulturen und Traditionen kommen? Ende 2019 hat der Lutherische Weltbund (LWB)in Addis Abeba, Äthiopien, eine globale Konsultation zu lutherischen Identitäten von heute veranstaltet. Das Ergebnis dieser Konsultation sind die Abhandlungen in dieser Publikation. Die Autorenschaft – Kirchenleitende, junge Erwachsene, Theologie-Fachleute, ordinierte und nicht-ordinierten Fachleute aus Ortsgemeinden – untersucht das Wirken des Heiligen Geistes, der die Gläubigen für ihre Berufung durch den Dienst der Kirche von heute und die Zukunft der lutherischen Kirchengemeinschaft neu belebt und zurüstet.

Philosophy and theology have each struggled with the problem of dualismùthe conviction that reality comprises material arid nonmaterial entities. Too often, this split places God, spirit, mind, and the masculine in opposition to evil, body, matter, and the feminine. These intellectual divisions support social structures that oppress rather than embrace women, the poor, people of color, and others. With this volume, Voss Roberts expertly shows how comparative theology uproots dualism and fosters new modes of community built on cooperation instead of oppression.

For some fields such as econometrics (Shore, 1980), oil prospecting (Claerbout, 1976), speech recognition (Levinson and Lieberman, 1981), satellite monitoring (Lavergnat et al., 1980), epilepsy diagnosis (Gersch and Tharp, 1977), and plasma physics (Bloomfield, 1976), there is a need to obtain an estimate of the spectral density (when it exists) in order to gain at least a crude understanding of the frequency content of time series data. An outstanding tutorial on the classical problem of spectral density estimation is given by Kay and Marple (1981). For an excellent collection of fundamental papers dealing with modern spec tral density estimation as well as an extensive bibliography on other fields of application, see Childers (1978). To devise a high-performance sample spectral density estimator, one must develop a rational basis for its construction, provide a feasible algorithm, and demonstrate its performance with respect to prescribed criteria. An algorithm is certainly feasible if it can be implemented on a computer, possesses computational efficiency (as measured by compu tational complexity analysis), and exhibits numerical stability. An estimator shows high performance if it is insensitive to violations of its underlying assumptions (i.e., robust), consistently shows excellent frequency resolutipn under realistic sample sizes and signal-to-noise power ratios, possesses a demonstrable numerical rate of convergence to the true population spectral density, and/or enjoys demonstrable asymp totic statistical properties such as consistency and efficiency.

One of the jewels in the crown of Johann Sebastian Bach's sacred music is its use of astonishingly subtle and complex allegorical and representational devices. But when similar devices appear in the context of one of Bach's untexted, secular, instrumental collections such as the Six Solos (sonatas and partitas) for violin, the question arises whether he might be intending to embed discernible theological significances there as well, thus infusing the secular with the sacred. Such designs would be reasonably plausible within Bach's musical, cultural, and religious context. Shute carefully investigates the extent to which musical features of the Six Solos that seem to invite theological parallels might indeed have been intended to do so. Although the precise extent of Bach's intentions cannot be ascertained with certainty, the degree of correlation among strong potential signifiers would seem to suggest that they, and many other features of the Six Solos, are best explained as the product of extensive theological-allegorical designs on Bach's part, like those evident in his texted vocal music.

This useful guide offers a critical appraisal of a theological movement within the church catholic. The authors, a church historian and a systematic theologian, describe Lutheranism as centered in the fundamental principle of the Reformation, "justification by faith apart from works of law."The book focuses on the emergence of this chief article of faith as a proposal of dogma to the church ecumenical, its theological formulation, and its significance for the shaping of piety and doctrine. Each issue is treated in terms of both confessional history and systematic theology. Seminarians, pastors, teachers, and interested laypersons of all traditions will gain ecumenical insights as well as pertinent information from this work.

Over the last several decades, perceptive observers of Western civilization have documented what virtually everyone has perceived: as the old foundations of society have toppled, morality and personal character have been set adrift and often vanished altogether. How can character be cultivated when it seems no one is willing or able to provide a definitive description of character to which humans should aspire? While the reasons for this are many and complicated, one of the more potent singular factors is actually theological, says Biermann. Contemporary Lutheranism, in particular, has struggled with the appropriate place of morality and character formation, as these pursuits often have been perceived as being at odds with the central Christian doctrine of justification. A Case for Character explores this problem and argues that Christian doctrine, specifically as articulated within a Lutheran framework, is altogether capable of encouraging a robust pursuit of character formation while maintaining a faithful expression of justification by grace alone through faith alone.