In this episode, David and Maurice pause their series on the 2025 clergy retreat presentations to talk with Dr. Jukka Kääriäinen, president of the North American Lutheran Seminary. Born on the mission field as a missionary kid, Jukka has spent his life in mission. He has planted churches, taught missiology, and led a global Lutheran mission agency.

Together they explore how a confident, open-handed Lutheran identity shapes the church's witness. They also discuss why joy, not obligation, lies at the heart of mission, and why theology must come before strategy in an unpredictable world.

Themes

• Generous confessionalism as an ecumenical posture borne of missionary partnerships
• Joy as the origin and goal of creation and of mission
• Honest expectations in gospel proclamation
• Theological clarity as the source of missional resilience

Key Discussion Points

• Why the twentieth-century mission movement gave birth to the ecumenical movement
• "True but not exhaustive" knowledge of God, and the openness it creates
• Leading with Jesus Christ, borne witness to from a Lutheran stance
• Jukka's path from Taiwan to New York to Finland to the NALS
• Joy in Scripture's narrative arc, from Genesis to the marriage feast of the Lamb
• Avoiding both the prosperity gospel and a joyless asceticism
• Why Jukka's strategy document offers guidelines rather than an action plan
• "Hospitable Lutheranism" versus confessional rigidity

Resources Mentioned

• The Joy of the Gospel Inspires Us to Mission, a strategy document by the Rev. Dr. Jukka Kääriäinen for the Finnish Lutheran Overseas Mission
• Lesslie Newbigin on mission beginning with an explosion of joy
• Pope Francis on the joy of the gospel
• Scripture: Genesis 1; Luke 15; Luke 24 (Emmaus); Hebrews 13:8; James 4; Revelation 19–21

Coming Up
In part two, the conversation turns to Jukka's theology of mission and what it means for the NALC to become a mission-driven church with a seminary that forms mission-driven pastors.

If this conversation was meaningful to you, share it with a pastor, friend, or study group. Subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss part two.

Augustine's writings against the Pelagians are some of the most debated texts in the Christian tradition. Many readers treat them as the place where Augustine went too far. Luther read them and was captivated. Dr. Alex Pierce explains why.

Episode summary

In their second conversation with Dr. Pierce, David and Maurice turn to Augustine, one of Alex's areas of expertise. Alex describes how he first found in Augustine a thinker who holds the faith together, and why many scholars read him instead as a dualist shaped by his Manichaean past and his Platonist sources. Alex argues that Augustine was a creative and faithful receiver of the tradition before him.

The conversation then turns to the Pelagian controversy. Alex walks through Augustine's life, from his baptism in Milan to his ordination in Hippo, and shows that Augustine affirmed the priority of grace years before the controversy began. He takes up the charge that the anti-Pelagian Augustine is a pessimist, and makes the case that a strong theology of creation requires a strong theology of sin. The episode closes with how the Lutheran confessions receive Augustine, setting guardrails against both Pelagianism and Manichaeism.

Main themes

• Augustine as a receiver and synthesizer of the tradition
• The priority of grace at the beginning of faith
• The relationship between the doctrines of sin and creation
• Human agency as most fully itself in dependence on God
• How the Lutheran confessions receive the Augustinian tradition

Key discussion points

• Why many scholars read Augustine as a dualist, and why Alex disagrees
• Neoplatonism, causality, and what is at stake for the sacraments
• Augustine's reply to Simplician and his change of mind on grace
• How the Pelagian controversy reached North Africa
• Pelagius's reaction to a line in Augustine's Confessions
• Augustine on Romans 7 and our daily need for grace
• “100% of God's grace and 100% of the human will”
• Christ as gift and example in Luther, and as sacrament and example in Augustine

Mentioned in this episode

• Augustine: Confessions, On the Trinity, On Christian Teaching, On the Punishment and Forgiveness of Sins, On the Spirit and the Letter, Retractations
• Martin Luther, A Brief Instruction on What to Look For and Expect in the Gospels
• Philip Melanchthon, Apology of the Augsburg Confession
• Dr. Alex Pierce, Augustine on the Mystery of Christ and the Sacramental Economy (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Coming up

The season continues as we keep company with the lecturers from the 2025 NALC Clergy Retreat, turning to the next voice on the theme of the confessions as a way into the riches of Scripture.

Next episode: Lara Bhasin’s lecture: Confessions as Missional Engagement with Culture, releasing October 9.

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Cardigan & Collar is a podcast of the North American Lutheran Seminary. Find us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Episode summary

Dr. David Luy and the Rev. Dr. Maurice Lee sit down with Dr. Alex Pierce to follow up on his clergy retreat lecture. Alex argues that the Lutheran confessions do not limit our relationship to the broader Christian tradition. They open it up and give us a way into those riches with guidance and a framework in hand. When we confess the articles of faith, we take on terms and judgments that assume a great deal of the reader. Alex says this should leave us curious and eager to deepen our understanding.

The conversation then turns to the common pitfalls. Some readers look at the depth of the tradition and feel paralyzed. Others find a striking idea in the early church and take it out of proportion, letting it replace something central to our confession. Alex uses deification as a test case, showing how keeping Christ as sole mediator lets us venture out without becoming unmoored.

The second half explores Alex's own story. He studied at a pan-evangelical seminary and worked backward through the tradition, finding an Augustinianism within the Lutheran confessions that he found deeply satisfying. The episode closes with advice for pastors and lay leaders looking for a starting point: read the sermons of the early church.

Main themes

• The confessions as a path into the tradition rather than a replacement for it
• The breadth of the catholic faith held together with the gospel at its center
• Two common challenges: feeling overwhelmed, and losing a sense of proportion
• Christ as sole mediator, and how that fixes our coordinates for exploration
• The difference between being formed by history and mining it for proof texts
• Bringing the early church into the daily life of a congregation

Key discussion points

• "I only need the Bible" mirrors the attitude of "I only need the confessions"
• The confessions function like links pointing outward toward Augustine, Ambrose, and Gregory of Nyssa
• The student Marty and the two ditches on either side of the road
  Maximus the Confessor's cosmic vision, and the distance between a universalizing tendency and a universalist position
• Deification as an empty jar without historical context, and what the Smalcald Articles bring to bear
• Albrecht Ritschl's claim that the ecumenical creeds entered the Book of Concord as a political move
• Melanchthon placing Wittenberg teaching alongside Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure in Apology Article 2
• How a confessional tradition opens space for Lutherans to explore and disagree with integrity
• The reformers working midstream rather than starting a new theology from the ground up
• How retrieval theology can turn into another form of proof texting
• Bringing the cloud of witnesses into parish life through the worship folder, the liturgical year, and daily devotions

Mentioned in this episode

• The Augsburg Confession, the Apology, the Smalcald Articles, and the Small and Large Catechisms
• Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms
• Origen's commentaries on the Gospels
• Athanasius on the Psalms
• Irenaeus, Against Heresies
• Maximus the Confessor
• B. B. Warfield and the old Princeton theologians
• Albrecht Ritschl
• For All the Saints: A Prayer Book For and By the Church

Listen and subscribe

Cardigan & Collar is a podcast of the North American Lutheran Seminary. Find us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Part two of our conversation with Dr. Pierce is coming next.