No “Lions of Gory Mane” (Concordia Journal, Fall 2015): In 1522 Luther wrote, “It is the nature of the divine word to be heartily received by a few, but to be persecuted ruthlessly by many.” Today some voices in the United States are calling for American Christians to make a similar shift in their thinking. The church must carefully discern whether these individual experiences of persecution are normative for the entire church, and accordingly, whether or not the church in the United States should publically claim that it is enduring persecution.
