[1] In Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice, Amy Carr and Christine Helmer are concerned with the polarization that runs through our country and congregations.[1] Though this polarization’s content is most often political—think of the red-blue state divide, or our siloing mediated by social media and cable news—Carr and Helmer regard this polarization as a theological problem. As such, they argue we should address it in theological terms. Hence, there is an emphasis on justification as the real mark of Christian identity rather than any specific position we take on the vexing political issues of our times or the wider vision of a just society by which we ground these positions.
[2] This theological framing is a welcomed re-description of our fractured political life. Likewise, their account of justification is helpfully attentive to our troubled times. Their turn towards a description of the justified life—glossed in the title and elsewhere as the pursuit of justice—proves a trickier move, however.
[3] In what follows, I argue that Carr and Helmer too narrowly define justice in legal and civil terms. This definition, which they assert rather than justify, prevents them from staging the sort of moral dialogue they otherwise commend to congregations. In making this claim, my argument has two basic steps. First, I review and commend their framing of Christian identity in terms of justification and the moral dialogue that such framing opens up. Second, I analyze their account of justice. In this analysis, I show that the way they posit their definition does not meet their own norms for the church’s moral dialogue. It also limits the sort of moral examples they offer readers. Along the way, I show how a broader definition of justice would benefit the moral dialogue on offer. Next, I entertain and counter possible objections to my argument. I conclude that the broader definition I propose supports rather than undermines the main argument of the book.
Christian Identity and Justification
[4] Carr and Helmer begin their account of justification with the problem of identity, and the way this problem feeds all manner of political division in the church. They write: “Our current church and political divisions have to do with precisely this issue, namely, how particular commitments to church identity are worked out in the social and political spheres.”[2] Regarding the question of church identity, Carr and Helmer argue that we are prone to a fundamental category mistake. Rather than taking our Christian identity as primary, we conflate that identity with our political commitments, so that to be Christian is to take a particular stance on any number of hot-button political and social issues. Expressed in Lutheran language, this means we hang our hearts on both the living God and our political identities. For instance, one person might say that to be a Christian is to be opposed to abortion in all cases, or another might argue that to be a Christian is to be opposed to robust regulation of immigration. In other words, it is too often suggested that one’s identity as a Christian necessarily comes packaged with certain, specific political commitments.
[5] This conflation is itself a problem, traditionally called idolatry, which leads to two others. First, in regards to the relationship between our Christian identity and our political identities, we not only conflate these identities, we also test our Christian identity in light of our political commitments, so that “[w]hat it means to be a ‘Christian’ . . . is all too often evaluated by whether one adheres to one side or another side of a moral or political issue.”[3] Notice this is a second step beyond the mere conflation of theological and political identities. It is also a prioritizing of our political identities. If our political identities can cast serious doubt on our Christian identities, it follows that we take our political identities as primary in an important sense. This is not a conflation of equals, in other words.
[6] The second problem regards the church’s internal life and external witness. This conflation has a harmful impact on the way we talk or fail to talk to one another within the church. Our conflation of identity bears rotten fruit. Because we associate Christian identity with specific political identities, we do not recognize that our fellow Christians may have different political commitments and be Christians, or that Christ’s body, the church, is diverse by design. We do not give other Christians their due; we also fail to acknowledge that we may have something to learn from them. Such an approach makes dialogue around important political issues virtually impossible. Dialogue, at a minimum, requires an openness to hearing from another person. Absent this openness, we leave ourselves with a series of monologues aimed at one another. A grim picture, indeed. Carr and Helmer ask rhetorically, “How can it be that the ‘body of Christ,’ the church is so deeply divided that the most basic conversation is impossible?”[4]
[7] Further, the church broadcasts this distortion to the rest of world. In Carr and Helmer’s language: “How a particular church understands itself in a plurally religious world has to do with how that church expresses its central commitments in the world.”[5] Our distortion does not remain internal, in order words. Instead, the church communicates that our basic identity is both theological and politically partisan. Think of the way that the ELCA, at least in its synodical and church-wide expressions, is sometimes characterized as politically left-leaning, or how the opposite holds for the LCMS. A basic message of the Gospel is that Christ, as our peace, has broken down the walls of hostility, political walls included. It is self-evident how our conflation of identities distorts this message and creates deeper divisions
[8] So described, political polarization and its impact are theological problems in need of theological solutions. Carr and Helmer return us to justification by grace through faith as the remedy. Contrary to the conflation of Christian and political identities, they remind us of Christianity’s central message, at least as Lutheran Christians understand it: “belief in Christ’s action of the forgiveness of sinners that is motivated by God’s compassion for the human condition.”[6] God’s forgiveness in Christ gifts us our ultimate identity: beloved children of God; it also relativizes our other identities, important as they might be. A Christian can only claim one ultimate identity: God’s beloved in Christ.
[9] While Carr and Helmer are committed to justification’s central role in the church’s life and witness, not just any account of justification will do. They argue that the doctrine needs to be expressed in “ways in which people actually experience a particular reality.”[7] This commitment entails several others. First, it means moving beyond overly-forensic accounts of justification and returning to the stories and experiences from which the doctrine arises.[8]
[10] Second, it means “practicing justification,” by returning daily to baptism, frequent partaking of holy communion, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, among other spiritual practices. Such practices are not meant to enable a linear growth in righteousness, but rather to “remind us of a vision of a reconciled and reconciling community that persists even amid our sinful failings of one another and our own open or scarred-over wounds.”[9]
[11] Finally and perhaps most significantly for their account, justification is, at root, a communal affair.
Far from being only about a single individual’s rescue from a damned future, then, justification draws us into a world of rightly aligned creaturely relationships that extend across time, across all that is to be preserved or redeemed, holding us accountable while releasing us from bondage to sin and its wounds.[10]
Justification’s communal nature gives faith its “ordinary quality,” as life in community, with its give and take, differences, and compromises, keeps us from viewing ourselves as extraordinary, isolated moral actors. For Carr and Helmer, God’s justifying work in Christ joins us to the Beloved Community, sets right the relationships in that community, and then invites us to the further work of setting right relationships in the world. All of this comes as divine gift before it is divine permission and invitation, and none of it is dependent on individual political identity. The following quote summarizes well justification and its import for our life together: “[W]e belong to God and one another, not on the basis of our virtues, but unconditionally on the basis of the gift of God’s own journeying with us in the power of the Spirit animating the body of Christ.[11]
[12] Carr and Helmer’s account of justification is both faithful and timely. It is faithful in that we should always ground the church’s ultimate identity in Christ’s gracious work. It is timely in that it names well current forces that obscure that identity. Political polarization malforms all of us. As sinners, we are all prone to the idolatrous conflation of theological and political identities. It is therefore a good and needful thing to remind Christian readers that Christ alone graces us with our ultimate identities, prior to the ways we live out this Christian identity in the world.
The Pursuit of Justice
[13] With their account of justification by grace through faith in place, Carr and Helmer turn to how we live our communal identity in Christ. Their description builds on their account of justification, particularly in how it makes room for the messiness of life together, amid competing claims on the most basic questions of communal justice-seeking.[12] Because Christ secures our ultimate identities, we can make room for real and lively disagreement about the life to which He calls us. We can open ourselves up to hear different accounts of the good and just life, a process that necessarily involves drawing on experiences from outside the church.[13] This dialogue requires a robust sense of reason giving; that is, describing what our beliefs are and explaining why we hold these beliefs. We also listen as fellow Christians do the same. For Carr and Helmer, this process, what they dub justification in a second sense,[14] entails sustained attention to the stories, imagination, affect, and theological practices by which we come to, and justify, our moral beliefs.[15] Each of these categories deserves more attention than I can offer.[16] A more general point, though, is that the way we come to beliefs and then justify those beliefs is a less a practice in objective rationality and more an exercise of our whole humanity.
[14] The above description of Christian communal life is salutary in many ways. In particular, the focus on communal reason-giving, and the sort of forms these reasons take, is a welcomed description of communal Christian life and pursuits of justice. Here, Carr and Helmer hint at an important aspect of Christian communal life. As those joined together in faith, we owe one another certain things, this by virtue of the relationships into which Christ has brought us. Among those things are the reasons for why we believe what we believe, just as surely as we owe a listening ear as others speak the same.
[15] Carr and Helmer observe a second important aspect of our moral lives. We arrive at beliefs not simply because of cold, hard data, or abstract moral principles, but also because we are affected by stories that spur our imagination. It is one thing to read food insecurity statistics. It is quite another to hear stories while serving at a food bank or soup kitchen. Carr and Helmer do well to give this reality an important role in our moral formation and justification.
[16] Carr and Helmer remind us that our ultimate identities are in Christ; they name the processes by which we come to justify our beliefs about justice to one another, and they envision the church as a place wherein we can voice differing accounts of justice and justice-seeking activities. Trouble comes when they expand on their notion of justice, which they gloss minimally as “right relations.”[17] Carr and Helmer have specific relations in mind, evident in their use of “justice-seeking” in place of the traditional language of “good works.”[18] Noting that readers likely will be more familiar with the language of good works, they nevertheless justify this substitution because “for Paul and (Luther) is that good works are ‘good’ because they serve the neighbor’s justice. The good of the neighbor can occur when we they (and we) reside in relations of justice.”[19]
[17] For Carr and Helmer, justice-seeking regards only relationships mediated by formal social structures. Their focus on justice-seeking entails moving beyond consideration of individual good works into questions about distribution of resources, degrees of political, social, and economic power. Such work is necessarily legal and civil, as it bears on the laws by which we set-up certain relationships between people. In this legal and civil realm, “we practice collective justice-seeking and identify what counts as justice for policy purposes.”[20] Gathering these claims together, Carr and Helmer’s account of justice-seeking, which replaces “good works,” involves structural, economic, and legal questions. It speaks to how we should express our love of neighbor in legal and civil ways. Though Carr and Helmer note that justice-seeking activity often overlaps with direct service, they also want the church “to stretch beyond the direct service realm.”[21] When Carr and Helmer speak of justice-seeking, they concentrate on what we commonly refer to as legal or civil justice.
[18] There are a few problems with this singular concentration. The first regards their quick move from justice to legal or civil justice. Carr and Helmer simply assert that justice-seeking entails setting right relationships in legal or structural ways. They do not argue for this definition. They instead describe what justice looks like when pursued at a legal or structural level. Yet, in view of common usage, there is no need to suppose that we can only pursue justice at the legal or social-structural level. If we take their minimal definition of justice, “the setting right of relationships,” as a starting place, one can conceive all sorts of relationships that Christians endeavor to set right. Some of them are legal, social-structural in the way Carr and Helmer describe, but a great many are not. I wonder if it would be better to speak of legal or civil justice-seeking as a species of good works, rather than defining good works as legal or civil justice-seeking. Defining one in terms of the other eliminates certain acts that we would want to call good works but also go beyond justice’s requirements or mediate justice in non-legal or formal ways. These types of relationships also deserve discussion and might serve as a foundation where there is consensus when there is division at the political level.
[18] The second problem regards how this definition relates to Carr and Helmer’s other commitments. They assert that owing to Christ’s justification of us, our ultimate identities are distinct from our social-political identities. We need not agree on politics in order to recognize one another as Christians. A happy consequence is that the church is a place, ideally at least, for robust discussions of the Christian life. This line of argument is among the strongest in the text. It also puts a question mark over the definitional move they make regarding good works, justice, and justice-seeking. Given Carr and Helmer’s commitment to differing accounts of what makes up the Christian life in the world, it seems odd to restrict descriptions of the Christian life in this way.
[19] The freedom given to us in Christ may prompt debate over what big, structural issues we should address or what would count as just policy. It also extends to the very question of which relationships we attempt to set right and how we attempt to do so. Simply put, there are many Christians who would not agree with the definition of justice-seeking as necessarily legal or civil in the way that Carr and Helmer describe. Based on their own skills, interests, social location, and a host of other factors, they would argue that their vocations are not political in the way Carr and Helmer describe. Perhaps they understand themselves as called to tutor in an after-school program, rather than organizing around a specific candidate for the school board. They can conceive of this work as the setting right of a relationship between neighbors, even if this setting right takes the form of direct care and service. Carr and Helmer’s commitment to justification by grace through faith means giving such Christians the space to speak their piece and offer reasons for it. Recognizing this as a viable Christian perspective would also mean making room in their text for those who believe that justice-seeking need not always take the form they propose.
[20] As another example, take the chapter “Ordinary Faith in Political-Justice Seeking.” Carr and Helmer begin this chapter by reprising Martin Luther’s account of gospel freedom and then distinguishing gospel freedom from its common semblances.[22] They invite their readers to assess various Christian pursuits of justice-seeking in the political realm from the standpoint of Christian freedom. These pursuits live up to gospel freedom by not limiting debate or confusing one’s own position with the only Christian position.[23] Rather, Christian freedom “makes a space for justifying before others one’s beliefs about the nature of justice—whether as an interpretation of the moral law or in the enactment of local, state, and federal laws.”[24] Again, note the quick move from debates about the nature of justice to questions of legality. Carr and Helmer again ask the reader to think of her Christian life, her pursuit of justice, in legal and social-structural terms. Martin Luther King, Jr., the current debate regarding Critical Race Theory, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s stand against Nazism are their examples, and their readings of these figures and movements are meant to show how gospel freedom can help us make sense of these figures and movements as instances of Christian justice-seeking.
[21] Even if not moral heroes, in the sense that Carr and Helmer wish to avoid, these leaders are moral giants and exemplars. However, Carr and Helmer, in view of their own commitment to justification, cannot hold them up as the only instances of the sort of justice worth pursuing. If we are to have a capacious conversation about the Christian life, about the sorts of relationships we attempt to set right, the reader needs more and varied examples, and particularly examples that do not so quickly link justice with legal questions. Ironically, this seems a matter of justice towards the reader. Alongside King and Bonhoeffer, how about a description of a public school teacher who patiently attends to the needs of a developmentally delayed child? Or descriptions of a retired person who, out of her Christian convictions, volunteers at the local hospital? Readers could learn much about the setting right of the student-teacher relationship, or the relationship between the infirm and the healthy, from such examples. These are important instances of Christians setting right relationships. They, too, deserve our attention.
[22] Carr and Helmer could object to my critique in at least two ways. They could ask if their focus on justice in terms of legal, social-structural questions is exclusive in the way I claim. They could point to passages, like the one quoted above, in which debate over justice includes debate over the moral law itself, this prior to and distinct from the legal, social-structural move. Gospel freedoms “makes a space for justifying before others one’s beliefs about the nature of justice—whether as an interpretation of the moral law or in the enactment of local, state, and federal laws.”[25] They would have a point. There are moments in the text that gesture towards the sort of debate I claim is largely absent. In the quote, they leave room for debate about the moral law as distinct from its legal enactment. Presumably, this debate makes space for taking up the issues I have named. Likewise, asking the church to stretch beyond direct service need not mean asking the church to leave behind direct service, entirely. For what else do I ask? The issue is that they do not follow through on these gestures. As the reader will recall, this quote sets-up a chapter devoted to King, Critical Race Theory, and Bonhoeffer, all of which Carr and Helmer frame as pursuits of justice as pursuits of legal justice. The debates they offer all assume that justice and legal or civil justice are mutually inclusive.
[23] A second objection might be more serious. With my concerns over the framing of justice and the examples they use to support it, I am not so covertly counseling Lutheran Christians back towards the quietism that haunts our tradition. I ask for an account of justice that does not move so quickly to legal and social-structural questions. I offer distinctly non-political examples. This can sound a lot like a call to quietism, in which we live our vocations in such a way as to never question or fight against legal or social-structural injustices. If I am offering that sort of quietism, then one would do much better by signing on for Carr and Helmer’s account.
[24] I do not think that objection is warranted, however. My question of Carr and Helmer is not whether our justice-seeking should involve legal, social-structural questions. It should. My question is whether our justice-seeking should only involve legal, social-structural questions, as their text often does. I have raised this question in light of Carr and Helmer’s commitments to justification by grace through faith and the capacious moral conversation that follows. Here, I raise this question in view of a concern for vocation. Like individuals, the Spirit gives many and varied gifts to Christian communities. Some communities are called to the sort justice-seeking pursuits Carr and Helmer name. Others, though, are called to justice-seeking pursuits in ways that do not move so quickly, or at all, to legal questions. Communities of faith will discern their vocations as they ponder any number of questions, including the interests, skills, and commitments of their members. Absent such diverse vocations, we may fail to serve our neighbor as we should.
[25] While Carr and Helmer note that direct service and justice, as they understand it, can overlap, they do not use this overlapping to as a reason to continue thinking of direct-service as the setting right of relationships. The following example shows why we should. Imagine a church located in a food desert. How should churches and others of good will address this injustice? In various ways. Some will address this injustice at a legal, social-structural level. This would mean showing up at zoning board meetings, talking with local grocery stores, raising public awareness, and the like. Others, though, will continue to grow or collect healthy food for the community, if only because of the immediacy of need and the slow slog of legal, social-structural justice. All of this work, from growing or collecting food to raising public awareness is an attempt to set right relationships with our neighbors. Some of it is legal and social-structural; some of it is direct service. All of it is the work of justice. We need not pose false choices to ourselves or to the church. There is indeed enough work to go around.
Conclusion
[26] Amy Carr and Christine Helmer have written an important and timely book. In these polarized and troubled times, their reminder that our ultimate identity comes from Christ is welcomed news. So, too, is their call to making space for a wide range of views on moral issues as Christ’s body, without conflating those views with our ultimate identities. I have argued that, owing to the way they define justice-seeking and the sort of examples they provide, there is room for more conversation concerning more definitions of justice and examples of justice-seeking that are missing from the text. In all this, I am grateful for the conversation into which Carr and Helmer invite us.
[1] Amy Carr and Christine Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice, Waco, TX, Baylor University Press, 2023.
[2] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 31.
[3] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 31. Italics mine.
[4] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 31.
[5] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 31.
[6] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 34.
[7] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 39.
[8] Carr and Helmer’s contemporary exemplars of forensic justification are George Lindbeck and Oswald Bayer, owing to their focus on words and the power of words to do things in the world. Carr and Helmer imply that Lindbeck and Bayer’s accounts of justification do not allow us to experience it as a lived reality in which our lives are rooted in God’s grace and lived in pursuit of our neighbor’s good. I am not so sure. Consider Oswald Bayer’s work. There are important material differences between Bayer’s and Carr and Helmer’s accounts of justification. Nevertheless, he, too, focuses on the lived experience of faith, grounded in the preaching and distribution of the Word, also ecclesial practices. Likewise, Bayer notes the way that God’s justifying and merciful Word returns us to our status as creatures and to the rich web of creaturely relationships as the place of our vocations. In view of this one example, a more tempered judgement regarding forensic justification is warranted. This exegetical question does not take away from the power of Carr and Helmer’s account of justification, however. See Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Lutheran Quarterly Books (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2003), pp. 27-28.
Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 39. See Oswald Bayer, Living by Faith: Justification and Sanctification trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Lutheran Quarterly Books (Grand Rapids, Mi: William B. Eardmans Publishing, 2003), pp. 27-28.
[9] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 47.
[10] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 51.
[11] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 44.
[12] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, pp. 64-65.
[13] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, pp. 64-65
[14] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, pp. 69-72.
[15] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, pp. 72-92.
[16] This is particularly true their description of orthodoxy as an attempt to hold together as many truth claims as possible, and heresy as an attempt to “claim the moral purity of one’s position in a way that becomes defensive and accusatory.” So understood, doctrinal orthodoxy is a lesson in broad-minded listening and belief integration. Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 93.
[17] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 52.
[18] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 13.
[19] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 13.
[20] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 13. Italics original.
[21] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 13.
[22] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, pp. 160-164.
[23] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 164.
[24] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 165.
[25] Carr and Helmer, Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times, p. 165. Italics mine.
