Book Review: Grace and Social Ethics: Gift as the Foundation of Our Life Together by Angela Carpenter

[1] On Sunday, July 20, 2025, my Lutheran congregation sang these lines from “Lord You Give the Great Commission” (ELW #579):

Lord, you show us love’s true measure: “Father, what they do, forgive.”

Yet we hoard as private treasure all that you so freely give.

May your care and mercy lead us to a just society.

With the Spirit’s gifts empow’r us for the work of ministry.

This fourth verse of the hymn names what Dietrich Bonhoeffer calls cheap grace—namely, the temptation to rest self-assured in God’s immeasurable gift, or worse, to hoard it as private treasure. The true telos of grace is to empower us for the work of ministry. Here, that work is linked with the pursuit of “a just society.”

[2] If I hadn’t read Angela Carpenter’s latest book, Grace and Social Ethics: Gift as the Foundation of Our Life Together (Baker Academic, 2024), I would have sung the verse without notice or pause. But Carpenter, in this very helpful and thoughtful monograph on Lutheran and Reformed social ethics, does make us pause. How often do Protestant Christians assume that grace is a private affair—if not something to be privately hoarded, at least something that is about personal forgiveness and transformation rather than that after which we should pattern our relations with one another? What if God’s immeasurable, unfathomable gift-giving is meant to structure social relations, our own giving and receiving? Against the quietism of ages past and the still-too-common assumptions about Christianity’s allegedly a-political nature and function, what if grace really does call us toward a just society of right relations patterned on the gospel and coordinated through political and social structures?

[3] Carpenter is the Leonard and Marjorie Maas Associate Professor of Reformed Theology at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. Her previous book, Responsive Becoming, correlated religious and moral formation with the findings of evolutionary biology and developmental psychology. In Part 1 of Grace and Social Ethics, she again corroborates Christian responses to God’s free grace with key findings from evolutionary anthropology and contemporary psychology. According to both the theological and secular perspectives, each person is utterly dependent on the gifts of God and/or others to become who she is, including a free, autonomous, and unique (although never solitary or self-sufficient) person.

[4] Before turning to the scientific perspectives, Carpenter plumbs central gospel insights by Martin Luther and John Calvin in the first chapter, “Christian Grace and the Reformation Psychology.” She gives a lineage of God’s grace from Paul through Augustine to the late medieval “intense scrutiny of the human role in salvation,” which itself was the product of a profound “anxiety surrounding salvation,” (22). As the response to this widespread anxiety, of which Luther had more than his fair share, the Reformers emphasized that a person’s status before God—her justification—is entirely a gift by God through Christ; it depends in no way on the merits of the one so gifted and justified. Most Lutheran confirmands could tell you as much. What is less well understood, and that which Carpenter highlights, is that the gift of grace reveals humanity to be a particular kind of creature—one who is gifted through and through, and so utterly dependent on others for one’s very identity. Recognizing this distinctive theological anthropology also bring about a distinctive psychology and should issue in a particular way of looking and acting toward ourselves and others. Carpenter thus emphasizes that a Christian’s faith is not only that through which justification by grace becomes available for the believer. Grace through faith also bring about a distinctive psychological state or self-concept—and what Carpenter calls the “psychology of grace.”

[5] This deep disposition or existential posture is constitutive of the way people see themselves and their relations to others. Consciously recognizing my indebtedness to God for all that I am, I can now love God and the neighbor freely, without one eye open for the merits that my acts might accumulate. Actively aware of being constitutively gifted, I now enjoy a “posture toward others that is understanding of the human condition, compassionate, and willing to forgive.” For perhaps the first time, I can be “unsparing in care and generosity toward others,” (35).

[6] The next two chapters on scientific and secular accounts of humanity are meant to show that that essential giftedness is not limited to one’s relationship with the capital G Giver of every good and perfect gift. Recent scientific accounts of the evolution of humans from earlier hominins show that we have evolved not according to cutthroat competition and a survival of the fittest but from and as cooperative communities.[1]  Likewise, one predominant strand of social psychology confirms that the need to belong and be accepted by others is essential to an individual’s flourishing, including her flourishing as an individual. In fact, both evolutionary biology and psychological studies demonstrate that individual autonomy and agency itself develops from and is grounded in the care and concern of others. As Carpenter puts it: “interdependence is not a threat to notions like autonomy or personal accomplishment but, rather, facilitates them,” (78).

[7] These careful summaries of scientific research corroborate and confirm the Pauline/Reformation psychology of grace that she described in the first chapter. Carpenter admits that such correlation can be of limited use. She take pains to treat human evolution and social psychology fairly, admitting that theories about the former are sometimes speculative and that experiments in the latter sometimes fail to be reproducible (70-72). Furthermore, she is not unaware of dialectical theologians for whom such correlations are unhelpful (or worse) for understanding the gifts of Christ and grace. She even notes that Christian readers who are skeptical of evolution can skip that chapter without losing the main theological argument about gift as foundational for social ethics (42).

[8] Why then these ostensible forays into science and social science in a work about theological anthropology and social ethics? The answer comes in Chapter 4, “Grace and Interdependence in Human Society,” where Carpenter again admits that empirical studies cannot prove a theological anthropology to be true, but they can “increase our confidence that the creaturely relationship we have to God is consistent with who we are in relationship to our fellow human beings,” (94). Carpenter here returns to the science, and also to Paul, Luther, and Calvin, who each understand the reception of the gift of grace to redouble as gratitude, generosity, and forgiveness within the community’s economic and social relations. The chapter fleshes out her central claim—that justification by gift is about God’s gift-giving, yes, but also about our essential giftedness. Humans are inherently interdependent social creatures. Only by consciously recognizing this and treating one another accordingly can they fully become who they are.

[9] The second half of the book then employs this theological anthropology and psychology of grace to respond to three pressing contemporary social issues in the United States: our meritocratic culture and ideologies around paid work/careers (Chapter 5); a criminal justice system that equates justice with retribution, often ignoring healing and restoration (Chapter 6); and a gun culture and seemingly futile debates about gun control (Chapter 7). In each chapter, Carpenter shows how leading frameworks for understanding work, prison, and gun ownership rely on frameworks of merit, scapegoating, and fear—each which runs counter to the anthropology and psychology of grace that can and should structure our social relations. While not overstating the Trinitarian superstructure here, she also notes that her theological critiques of our meritocratic work culture depend on the Creator’s gift-giving in and through creation, that of mass incarceration and retributive justice on the forgiveness of sin made possible by God through Christ, and that of gun violence on Christians’ eschatological hope for a final healing.

[10] Carpenter faithfully researches trends related to each social problem and creatively reframes them according to the Reformer’s anthropology and psychology of giftedness/grace. Each chapter could have been a book in itself.  For the remainder of this essay, I can will name some deep and personal appreciations for the chapter on criminal justice and offer an appreciative critique of Carpenter’s understanding of work and vocation.

[11] Over the past several years, I have assisted Sharon Varallo, executive director of the Augustana Prison Education program, in helping to build that program and teach within it. In 2022, I created a new course to be taught as an “inside/out” course populated by both incarcerated (“inside”) students and non-incarcerated students traveling to the classroom prison from the outside for class. The class is called “Redemption, Reconciliation, and Restorative Justice.” It broadly moves from grappling with Christian understandings of personal and systemic sin and the kind of salvation (from salus, meaning healing) that might respond to the broader forms of that restoration might take in the face of Indigenous boarding schools, the theft of Black bodies and wealth, and an extractive industrial economy under which the soil cries out for healing/salvation.[2]

[12] I mention all this because Carpenter’s chapter on criminal justice is unique and invaluable for understanding criminal justice and mass incarceration within wider American culture. Her case for extending just mercy[3] flows from her claim that each of us is broken and capable of healing only and always as social creatures who mediate harm and hope to one another. Before reading her chapter, I intuited why a course bringing incarcerated and free students to learn beside one another must move from personal sin to the national structural sins (poverty, racism, settler colonialism) that frame and occasion those personal sins, and from personal salvation and healing to nation-wide discussions of reparation and reconciliation. Only by seeing sin and salvation at full stretch could students with very different life experiences recognize one another as interdependent moral agents in the same social fabric. Carpenter helps me to put these intuitions into words and to defend them theologically. The gift of grace is always already mediated through other people and the social structures that configure them. Together, we must understand crime within wider sinful social structures, and then criminal justice within the wider movement for the restoration of whole nations.

[13] Carpenter’s chapter on work is incredibly helpful as well. She critiques the way our work positions and net worth have become the fragile sources of our very identities and self-worth. This directly conflicts with the Reformation insight that our worth relies on the gift of grace, as well as with scientific evidence for being inherently interdependent, never solely deserving of what we get. She catalogues the inequity, indignity, and precarity characterizing low-skilled work (129-139), noting that social safety programs such as Medicaid often come with work requirements, presumably to flush “freeloaders” out of the system and ensure that “gifts” are only given to those who deserve them (132). (Carpenter wrote her book long before President Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill” made access to Medicaid and SNAP benefits increasingly dependent on a person’s willingness to work—and, more honestly, on their ability to navigate the reporting and surveillance structure that is designed to make such “entitlements” unavailable.)

[14] Professional workers are not as vulnerable and exploitable as low-skilled workers, but there are ample problems for them as well. The widespread assumption that our worth as people equals our worth as earners affects them most acutely, and quickly leads to overwork, anxiety, depression, and burnout (140-41). This is a profound social ill, and also a theological mistake: “the particular confluence of identity, meaning, and productive work among the professional classes does stand in complex tension with the theological understanding of grace,” (142).

[15] As an answer to this problem, Carpenter encourages us to invest less in work, and more in our status as beloved children of God. She understands the theological-turned-secular language of vocation to be part of the problem. According to her, vocation is first and foremost about discipleship of Jesus (127, 152). To associate a particular career with one’s vocation—with the meaning and purpose of one’s life—plays into American meritocratic assumptions, idealizes work, and undercuts a Christian account of giftedness.

[16] While all this can be true, I think that a theological understanding of vocation is more helpful than harmful for Carpenter’s own project of understanding gift as the foundation of social ethics. True, having a vocation has become a sign of having worth in many quarters today, just as “industriousness” quite ironically became a sign of being among God’s elect in early capitalistic/Calvinistic America.[4] But as we move from Calvin on predestination and vocation to Luther on grace and vocation, a different configuration is available. For Luther, a person’s particular vocation, which includes career but is not limited to it, emerges directly from the person’s recognition of divine grace. Knowing that I am entirely gifted and loved by God—that my worth as a person is entirely unmerited and yet firmly established through God’s free gift of love and care—I can, for perhaps the first time, attend to the needs of my neighbor, that is, to anyone who needs my particular gifts.

[17] Vocation for Lutherans is nothing other than this freely giving of one’s freely given gifts for the flourishing of others. By emphasizing the categorical difference between our essential giftedness and any merits we accumulate through work, Carpenter might just downplay the vital link between grace and social ethics that we find in vocation as the free response to a free gift.[5] What is more, since Lutheran understandings of vocation are rooted in a doctrine of creation, the cycles of gift-giving and receiving of the natural world (otherwise known as ecology) can provide the model upon which human gifts are patterned.[6]

[18] This small critique from the Lutheran side of a Reformation theology of grace to a writer more at home in Calvin and Reformed theology should not overshadow my indebtedness to this book. I commend it to all Christians wanting to put grace to work in an unjust world, as well as to non-Christians willing to join them in public conversation about the kinds of creatures we are and the kind of society within which we might flourish.

[1] In the words of indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, whom Carpenter does not reference but who shares much with her understanding of communal interdependence and reciprocity and their emergence within evolutionary biology: “Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has found that competition makes sense only when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus shifts to the level of a group, cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving, but for thriving.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance,” Emergence Magazine, October 26, 2022, available at https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-serviceberry/. Kimmerer’s essay has been expanded and republished in book format: The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner 2024).

[2] Sadly, the East Moline Correctional Center and Illinois Department of Corrections have twice denied clearance for free students to enter the prison to participate in the class. I’ve taught the course exclusively to incarcerated students and added units on mass incarceration to other courses I teach on Augustana’s main campus.

[3] See Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy:  A Story of Justice and Redemption (One World, 2015), especially Chapter 15: “Broken.”

[4] See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 1992).

[5] For my own reflections of gift as a foundation for vocation/calling within American higher education, see my recent blog postings on NetVUE’s Vocation Matters site, including: Gifted!: Repaying Education With Good Work and Care – vocation matters.

[6] For this connection to ecological/environmental ethics, see my “Learning to See the Planet as Gift,” Christian Century, February, 2025: Learning to see the planet as gift | The Christian Century, as well “You: Radicalizing Life’s Calling,” in Radical Lutherans/Lutheran Radicals, ed. Jason Mahn (Cascade, 2017), 121-45.