Below is a listing of DOXOLOGY’s lectures and videos from our 2013 Grand Reunion.
Lecture 1 – Luthers at Home – Dr. Nestingen
Using the example of Martin and Katie Luther, Dr. Nestingen talks about repentance, and the huge shift in how it is understood in the Lutheran Church.
1. The Luthers at Home – Dr. James Nestigen
James Nestingen tells the story of Martin Luther and Katharina von Bora—her escape from the convent among barrels of pickled herring, their arranged marriage that grew into deep love, and Katharina’s remarkable competence running the Black Cloister as brewer, farmer, and physician. Using their earthy household, he contrasts the medieval scheme, where sin was framed as carnal and repentance meant fleeing the flesh for the spiritual, with the Reformation’s recovery of repentance as something that happens to us in the ordinary drownings of daily life. Repentance, he insists, is not a project we control but a real dying—with our children, spouses, and congregations—that Christ overlaps with a real resurrection, as He did when He pulled sinking Peter from the water and walked through the locked door to say “Peace be with you.” He roots this cross-and-resurrection rhythm in Luther’s explanation of baptism, where the sinful self is drowned daily so a new self rises in Christ. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. Dying and Rising in a Parsonage – Dr. James Nestigen
James Nestingen applies the pattern of dying and rising to the pastor’s own household and vocation. He surveys the crosses of parsonage life—the goldfish-bowl scrutiny, neglected houses, meager pensions and widows left in poverty, the shift to housing allowances and seminary debt—and the deeper crosses of a ministry that has only the Word to give, no visible tally of accomplishment, and the burden of standing in the place of a “disputed sovereign” amid constant exposure to sin and death. Yet he insists Christ’s hand carries these crosses with the pastor and never tempts beyond endurance, turning what the devil means for evil to good. He then points to foretastes of the resurrection breaking into the present—grace overflowing and overheard, forgiveness ripened in old couples, sinners lining up at the rail—commending Bo Giertz’s The Hammer of God and Robinson’s Gilead, and offering particular encouragement to pastors’ wives who bear the vocation at one remove. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. Embodied Humanity: Biblical and Theological Reflections – Dr. William Weinrich
William Weinrich traces how the modern redefinition of marriage grew from a long philosophical debasing of the body, running from Engels and Sartre through de Beauvoir to present-day transhumanism, all of which abstract the “person” from the concrete male and female flesh God created. Against this, he reads Genesis 2 and Ephesians 5 to argue that marriage is not first a natural or social contract but an ecclesial and eschatological reality: two made one flesh, an icon of Christ and His Church, ordered toward the life of the kingdom. Drawing on Chrysostom’s image of the family as a little church, he shows the spouse as a God-given “other” whose limit is not a threat to freedom but the very place love, patience, and holiness are worked. He draws on Eastern marriage rites, where crowning and enthroning display marriage as royal and children as gifts who teach humility and carry the faith forward. Divorce, he grants, may sometimes be permitted, but it always tears the one flesh and so remains a wound answered only by repentance and forgiveness. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. Project Management for Pastors – Rev. Bryan Wolfmueller
Bryan Wolfmueller sets aside doctrine for what he calls advanced common sense: how a pastor handles the flood of demands, big and small, that comes with the office. He describes his own near-collapse under the mental fuzz of things half-remembered at the wrong hours, and how David Allen’s Getting Things Done gave him a way to move each task from vague and internal to clear and external. The method turns on two moves, clarifying the actual next physical action for anything on your mind, and capturing it in one of eight fixed baskets (calendar, next actions, waiting-for, projects, someday/maybe, reference, support, trash) so nothing lives in your head or in piles on the desk. He walks a Sunday’s worth of handshake requests, from “I’ve got cancer” to “we’re out of ice,” and shows each one routed to its place, then stresses the weekly review that keeps the whole system trustworthy. His aim is pastoral: an unburdened mind so the pastor can be fully present with his people rather than distracted by what he might be forgetting. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
5. Addiction and Absolution: Moving from Penance to Repentance – Dr. James Nestigen
James Nestingen takes up why absolution so often seems to fail with addicts, who hear the word joyfully and are drunk again a week later. He distinguishes two dimensions of forgiveness: the therapeutic, which restores a self lost to alcohol, gambling, or a destructive relationship, and the eschatological, which is oriented not to a guilty past but to the future Christ opens. Drawing on John 20 and Luther’s catechism, he argues that absolution is the resurrection in its present form, so that speaking “your sin is forgiven” is raising the dead and setting the prisoner free. He reads addiction as a broken narrative stuck circling back on remorse and revenge, held there by an original lie, and shows that only when that story is joined to Christ’s, under the cross and resurrection, does it find its ending. The whole weight falls on the concrete words: not “because you feel bad” but “for Jesus’ sake,” because He loves sinners and has found another one. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
6. Freed and Freeing The Absolution
Nestingen takes up two classical questions about absolution, its authority and its use. He shows that for Luther the authority rests wholly in Christ’s word, which does what it says when it crosses the lips, so that every baptized Christian is authorized and even obligated to forgive another, though there are good reasons (confidentiality, guarding against the word dissolving into mere friendship) to entrust much of it to the pastoral office. Where absolution has fallen out of use, he warns, people still confess, but to bartenders and taxi drivers who have no word of pardon to give. He presses its eschatological character: forgiveness is not merely therapy for guilt but the present form of the resurrection, freedom for the future, so it belongs at home, spoken between spouses, to children, to friends, and never separated from the Lord’s Supper. Illustrating with confessions heard from a rough logger and a Vietnam veteran on a plane, he urges pastors and laity alike to tend the absolution and simply say it: “your sin is forgiven, for Jesus’ sake.” Watch the lecture and read the transcript →