Christine Helmer is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University, where she is also Professor of German and Religious Studies. She holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on the philosophy and theology of Martin Luther and Friedrich Schleiermacher as well as on the nature of theology in the university. She founded the Lutheran Scholars Network, which includes a subgroup “Logic and Luther.” Her most recent monograph is How Luther Became the Reformer (Westminster John Knox 2019) and she is completing a book (with co-author Amy Carr), Justification and Justice: A Theology of Ordinary Faith.
Journal of Lutheran Ethics: The Podcast Episode 2 “Unpacking Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times”
October/November 2024: Ordinary Faith as an Antidote to Polarization (Volume 24 Issue 5)
Amy Carr, Christine Helmer, Matthew Best
Americans are more divided from one another than at any point in recent history. The divisions that we feel individually are even seen in recent research. Even faith communities are not free of sharp polarization. But that doesn’t have to be the case. In this episode, host Matthew Best talks with Amy Carr and Christine […]
Justification and Justice-Seeking: Beyond a Dualist Inheritance
October/November 2024: Ordinary Faith as an Antidote to Polarization (Volume 24 Issue 5)
[1] Our book Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times offers conversation as the intersubjective mode we have as persons and Christians for exchanging our respective positions on difficult topics. We thank our interlocutors in this issue of the Journal of Lutheran Ethics for engaging with themes in our book that resonated with them. We began writing […]
Luther Scholarship Under the Conditions of Patriarchy
August/September 2022: Gender Identity, Gender Expression, and Sexuality (Volume 22 Issue 4)
[1] Martin Luther’s doctorate in theology, earned at the University of Wittenberg on October 19, 1512, granted him, as it did to all who earned the degree, the license to uphold church teaching and preside over disputations by either writing the theses in one’s role as “opponens” or to participate in them as “respondens.” Luther […]
Theological Touchstones for Disagreeing in the Body of Christ
October/November 2019: The Ethics of Dialogue and Debate (Volume 19 Issue 5)
[1] Martin Luther wrote his Small Catechism after traveling and observing how little of Christian teaching most people knew. Four hundred years later, one of us (Amy) had a Missouri Synod Lutheran grandmother who was not permitted to move from lower to upper Michigan with the rest of her family until she had finished memorizing the Small […]
The Author’s Response
July/August 2015: Book Review Issue (Volume 15 Issue 7)
Is doctrine of interest anymore to theologians and ethicists? If the answer to this is no, if doctrine ceases to incite curiosity and inspire questions, then the work of Christian theology and ethics too, will end. If the answer is no, then theologians will no longer inquire into the nature of doctrine, study doctrinal formulations from the past, and figure out how to best construct doctrine. Ethicists will no longer ask how human behavior relates to God; they will not prescribe action in community that is predicated on the doctrine of redemption. The end of doctrine would be the end of both theology and ethics.