On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther famously offered for debate 95 pithy protests against the sale of plenary indulgences, publicly posting the theses (at least by legend) to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church. The history of offering indulgences goes back to the Crusades. Christian soldiers marching into battle were extended an indulgence, literally a “leniency” or “generosity,” that would free them from making full satisfaction for sins incurred in battle. By the sixteenth century, however, indulgences became extracted from the sacrament of penance altogether. Also, one could now buy them to offset penance owed in purgatory as well as on earth. What is more, the indulgence was made transferable—you could use it for yourself or apply it to a loved one. Finally, the indulgences were now considered “plenary,” that is, able to forgive the entire debt of the soul. Having become purchasable, extractable, transferable, and a damn good deal, the indulgences hawked throughout Germany quickly became a hot commodity.
Many assume that Luther critiqued these practices of the church for demanding too much of its parishioners, for confusing simple faith and trust with arduous “works righteousness.” While this side of the critique is true, Luther frames the 95 Theses by showing how the commodification of indulgences curtail not only God’s grace, but also human striving; it makes both into quantifiable goods that can be exchanged, transferred, or withdrawn. The first thesis announces that “when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ [Matt 4:17, translated in the vulgate as “do penance”], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” Uncoupling Christ’s command from a codified system of exchange demands a whole life of turning around.
Luther here critiques any closed economy of salvation that presumes to balance countable human works against a treasury of God’s graces. Such spiritual book-keeping errs not in valuing human efforts or God’s grace too highly or too little, but in the very assumption that they can be measured. Such accountings offer false security—the security of assumed objectivity, of faith as eternal life insurance.
Fast-forward 500 years and we still find more than a little spiritual bartering and moral book-keeping. Just last week, awaiting a diagnosis from doctors about my son’s acute leg pain, I found myself half-consciously bartering with God: “If only you’ll heal him, I’ll…” Perhaps many of us fall back into deal-making with God and score-keeping with spouses, colleagues, and students. Our American meritocracy—where at least the privileged presume to get what they deserve—denies the giftedness of life no less than sixteenth-century church practices. Might we still embody the freedom that comes when we cease to keep score? Might we work from a sense of being gifted and graced rather than trying to earn recognition, embark on careers, and otherwise make something of ourselves? Or more institutionally, might not Lutheran colleges and universities remain or become places where the gifts of employees, students, and the organization itself are recognized and used as gifts, rather than resources or even human “capital”?
By the time of this publication, there will have been countless celebrations of the 500 year anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation in churches around the world. Certainly colleges have celebrated and commemorated as well, but their approach to the Reformation anniversary also includes careful assessment and creative re-appropriation of this 500 year-old tradition. The essays that follow will spark and sustain that consideration. Please be in touch about how you might continue it.
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Mark Wilhelm
Wilhelm reflects on how NECU’s focused work on Lutheran identity in higher education — including the forthcoming document Rooted and Open: Our Common Institutional Calling — turns out to be a fitting commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, even though it did not arise from anniversary planning.
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Article
Why Martin Luther and the Reformation Matter 500 Years Later
Kathryn A. Kleinhans
Adapted from a 2017 address to Wartburg College’s entering class, Kleinhans surveys Luther’s lasting impact in vocation, education, social service, and the necessary work of repentance — closing with the Lutheran World Federation’s Windhoek assembly and the Reformation World Exhibition’s call to live reform forward into the next 500 years.
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Article
Celebrating the Reformation: The Lutheran Foundation of a Called Life
Mark D. Tranvik
Tranvik traces vocation from the monastic impulse through Luther’s rejection of the monk’s vow as the only true calling, and translates the “called life” for twenty-first-century Lutheran colleges — institutions that see students as made in the image of God, enlist the whole community in discernment, and make room for faith and its convictions.
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Article
Reforming Our Visions of City Nature
Lea F. Schweitz
Through a Chicago story of Canada geese at North Pond, Schweitz takes up two Reformation-era ways of reading the “Book of Nature” — Konrad Rosbach’s moral readings and Philip Melanchthon’s scientific ones — and proposes a third: Luther’s sacramental principle that the finite is capable of the infinite, worn as “reading glasses” for an urban planet.
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Article
Both Priest and Beggar: Luther among the Poor
Martha E. Stortz
Reading Luther’s deathbed remark “We are all beggars” against his “priesthood of all believers,” Stortz argues that priest and beggar are two sides of a human reality — one that locates civic responsibility for the poor at the heart of the Reformation legacy and that pushes beyond paternalistic service toward the systemic question of justice.
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Article
In the Beginning of the Reformation Was the Word
George Connell
Drawing on a Concordia faculty pilgrimage to German Luther sites, Connell appropriates John’s prologue to frame the Reformation as a movement about words — the printed page, the university classroom, the Marburg confession, the Wartburg translation, Bach’s music, and the dining-room conversations of Table Talk — while soberly noting that words can wound as well as heal.
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Article
Luther's Sutra: An Indian, Subaltern (Dalit) Perspective
Surekha Nelavala
Nelavala traces how Luther’s “sutra” — grace alone, faith alone, scripture alone, Christ alone — reached the mud hut of her Dalit grandparents in rural India, transforming three generations, and then reads the parable of the vineyard laborers from a subaltern perspective in which grace for all is the heart of God’s alternative kingdom.
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Article
Reforming Lutheran Higher Education: Ecclesiological Reflection and Theological Leadership
Brian Beckstrom
Beckstrom diagnoses an “identity crisis” at ELCA colleges and universities rooted in inherited Enlightenment assumptions and a thin functional ecclesiology, and proposes that a Trinitarian, perichoretic understanding of God offers an ecclesiological foundation that holds together unity and diversity in a pluralistic, post-Christian context.
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Article
Vocation at Full Stretch: Reflections on Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling and its Use among College Students
Jason A. Mahn
No. 61 · Spring 2025
Mahn engages Bonnie Miller-McLemore’s Follow Your Bliss and Other Lies about Calling as required reading in a sophomore religion course, showing how her categories of missed, blocked, conflicted, fractured, unexpected, and relinquished callings empower young adults to perceive embodied, unplanned, and often painful dimensions of life as essential parts of vocation — and help close the gap between mission-driven and tuition-driven realities.
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Article
On Recruiting Diverse Students, Rooted in Mission
Eric Rowell, Jason A. Mahn
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Jason Mahn interviews Eric Rowell, Assistant Director of Admissions and Diversity Outreach at Augustana College, about how recruiting students from a wide variety of backgrounds — rooted in Augustana’s Lutheran commitment to vocation and educating across difference — remains essentially unchanged in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decisions on affirmative action.
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Editorial
From the Outgoing Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 55 · Spring 2022
Mahn closes out a decade of editing Intersections, passes the duties to Colleen Windham-Hughes, gives thanks to Mark Wilhelm and Augustana College, and introduces an issue largely drawn from comments by Lutheran faculty, staff, and administrators at the 2022 NetVUE national gathering.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 54 · Fall 2021
Mahn introduces the “Called to Place” theme of the 2021 VLHE Conference, arguing that Lutheran higher education’s emphasis on vocation must be grounded in particular geographies and embodied communities — for, as Wallace Stegner put it, “If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are.”
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Reflection
Shelter in Place: Reflections from March 22, 2020
Jason A. Mahn
No. 53 · Spring 2021
On the fourth Sunday of Lent in 2020, Mahn meditates on the etymology of “shelter” (from shield) and on an email from a former student in Boston whose mutual-aid organizing models a Lutheran understanding of vocation: the upending of ego by divine love that frees us, finally, to see and serve the neighbor.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 52 · Fall 2020
Mahn narrates a year of crisscrossing pandemics — Covid-19, economic collapse, partisan politics, and the long pandemic of white supremacy revealed anew by the murder of George Floyd — and argues that Lutheran liberal arts schools, by educating for vocation, are uniquely poised to help students respond with character and capable callings.
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Article
Well, Well…Plumbing Our Depths, Telling Our Stories
Ann Boaden
No. 40 · Fall 2014
Beginning with a college visit that turned into a grieving mother’s confidence about her daughter’s last moments, Boaden uses John 4’s well of living water to argue that an interfaith education worthy of the name requires Lutherans to plumb the depths of their own tradition’s wells — with rituals, stories, and seasons intact — before they can see, respectfully, into the wells from which others drink.
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Reflection
“Miracles are no longer required”—Life Writing as a Healing Tool
Barbara Reul
No. 57 · Spring 2023
A music historian and cancer survivor chronicles how a uterine cancer diagnosis in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted her vocation as a university professor, and how writing two open-access memoirs became an unexpected tool for healing body, mind, and soul.
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Institutional Focus
Embodying the Tradition: The Case of Wittenberg University
Baird Tipson
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Tipson, President of Wittenberg University, locates Wittenberg in the “American” strain of Ohio Lutheranism founded in 1845 under Ezra Keller (a Pennsylvania College and Gettysburg Seminary graduate and disciple of Samuel Simon Schmucker), with English-language preaching, financial support from the pan-Protestant New England Society, Presbyterians on the Board, and an Episcopalian teaching Latin. He names two ongoing challenges—remaining authentically Lutheran while welcoming a pluralistic student body (just under a quarter are Lutheran in a primary service area that is 5% Lutheran), and making the tradition clear and compelling to non-Lutheran or lukewarm Lutheran students—and presents the five things every Wittenberg graduate should be able to do (respond to the human condition; recognize, define, and solve problems; develop a sense of vocation; assume servant-leadership; take moral responsibility) as authentic expressions of the Gospel and of the university’s ELCA relationship.
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Article
Holy Odors
John P. Trump
No. 14 · Summer 2002
A one-act play by John P. Trump, premiered at Pacific Lutheran University, in which Maggie, a senior studying Reformation history in the library stacks, falls asleep over the Apology of Augsburg and dreams a 16th-century pickled-herring merchant—Herr Leonard Kopp, the man who smuggled Katie von Bora and eight other nuns out of the convent—into existence to argue that her call to archaeology (“digging up old bones”) is as holy as ordained ministry, with Luther’s joke that the church burns incense to insulate priests from the “holy odors” (not holy orders) of everyday life.
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Article
Vocation and Dharma throughout Life's Stages: A Hindu Perspective
Vidya Thirumurthy
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Thirumurthy traces her own attempt as a Hindu faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University to grasp the Lutheran concept of vocation, finding in the Bhagavad Gita’s teaching on dharma — duty fulfilled without expectation of reward — an equivalent that, like vocation, varies across the four stages of life and calls individuals to transform others through selfless service.
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Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
No. 43 · Spring 2016
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.