January 1964

Dear Brother: It was exactly 1:25 pun. CST on Friday, November 22, when the news hit the campus: President Kennedy is dead. Professors closed their books, and students filed dazedly out of classrooms. Death was only a vague word to many of them — and this was the first time it had come to one whom every one of them knew

October 1970

My dear Brother: The key to good Lutheran theology is the doctrine of the Incarnation. Often I have told students, worried about the miracles, to concentrate first, completely, and humbly on the miracle of miracles, the decisive touchstone of all Christian dogma — the dogmatic, ringing, even arrogant affirmation of the In carnation, of the simple yet infinitely mysterious fact that the Nazarene carpenter, the friend of little children, was also the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the Alpha and Omega of life and time and history and eternity

May 1961

Dear Brother: You were probably busy at 9:00 a.m. on Easter Sunday morning when the television set brought a beautiful choir concert from the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Cross at Boston, Massachusetts. The high point of the program undoubtedly was the Bach setting of Christ lag in Todesbanden. It was sung with precision, spirit, understanding and pro found reverence. Suddenly I remembered that about ten years ago I had written somewhere: Confronted by Bach the twentieth century man must be bewildered. The gap between the Rhapsody in Blue and the Mass in B Minor is too great. But even more tragic is the amazement of the modern mind when it is confronted by Bach, the man of faith