7. Phillipp Melanchthon Is SO Greek to Me!

I've always liked this sixteenth century church reformer's NAME; apparently it's the Greek version of Schwartzerdt, the last name he was born with in 1497. Anyway, Melanchthon's a contemporary of Martin Luther and got hired at the University of Wittenberg as a professor of … Greek on his recommendation, and there he began teaching at twenty-one. When I was twenty-one I was still doing my junior field experience in education at Stetson.




A few years later, M.'s (I am not going to keep spelling out his name) studies of the Gospel of Matthew and Paul's letter to the Romans – tell me, do I sound stuffy when I refer to reading from “Paul's letter to the Romans” as opposed to just Romans? – garnered him a bachelor's degree of theology and a transfer to that faculty. And during the fifteen-tens and fifteen-twenties of our era when the Reformation was being hammered out, M. first defended Luther, then wavered against him, then came to his side again.

 

 

Perhaps the reason we refer to Lutheran theology and not Melanchthonian theology today is a little more than that, but the commemoration of M. (who died in 1560) in the Lutheran Church today along with the 484^th anniversary of the public Presentation of the Augsburg Confession – twenty-eight articles of what Lutherans believe, teach, and confess as well as believed, taught, and confessed that the then-prevalent Catholic Church had wrong – is something that I need to review myself.

 

 

 

And check my own beliefs, David