Book Reviews

[1] To judge by the current volume, the enterprise of “Lutheran ethics” is alive and well. Indeed, it’s a growth industry. The exhaustive bibliography provided by co-editor John Stumme lists some 45 books and articles on the subject by recognizably Lutheran scholars in the first 50 years of the present century (1900-1949), 115 in the […]

[1] Whoever is worried that Lutheranism as a living tradition is at risk should take heart from the publication of The Promise of Lutheran Ethics. Even before one assays its substance, the book is remarkable. It is a collection of seven thoughtfully drawn essays by eight disparate writers, introduced by two short reflections by the […]

[1] Lutheran theological ethics has often seemed more impoverished than full of promise. Core concepts of the Lutheran tradition – justification by faith, the law-gospel distinction, the so-called “two kingdoms” doctrine, and the concept of vocation – have been read in ways that bifurcate Christian faith from social and personal ethics. Justification is an act […]

1] This volume, a Festschrift for Charles Louis Manske, a decades-long leader in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS), reads as a veritable “Who’s Who” of LCMS theologians. However, the volume is, shall we say, “inter-synodical,” containing essays by ELCA theologians George Forell, Ben Johnson, William Russell, and Trygve Skarsten. Naturally, the collection of essays […]

[1] At one point in his discussion of the interaction between the Bible and its readers, Paul Jersild acknowledges the inevitable reality that “…what each of us brings to the text has a bearing on what we receive from it . . .” (53). While his point is to caution against “self-interested interpretations” of Scripture, […]

[1] From the initial planning for this book, the intent was not to set forth one normative Lutheran approach, against which other approaches could summarily be dismissed as “inferior.” Nor was it to suggest that there are no distinctive commonalities and emphases among those whose moral life has been shaped by Lutheran theology, centered in […]

[1] Gary Simpson poses a question both timely and crucial, and responds to it by engaging seminal theorists of critical social theory as it emerged and developed in the Frankfurt School: In the face of disturbing, even enraging circumstances of suffering and injustice that appear as givens, how might Christians congregations in North America today […]

[1] “This daunting challenge”! Just so has John Stumme aptly christened The Promise of Lutheran Ethics1 (hereafter PLE). The Division for Church in Society of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America commissioned this volume “to examine in a fundamental way the nature of Lutheran ethics today” (4). Daunting, indeed! Seven major essays make up the […]

[1] This collection of essays by eight different authors in addition to the editors, who are the director and associate director of studies in the division for Church in Society of the ELCA respectively, is an effort to establish “What is distinctive about Lutheran ethics?” The first chapter offers a short introductory statement by John […]

[1] One need only read the respective introductions by the editors of this volume to appreciate the instabilities of the task they have undertaken. John Stumme struggles manfully (as, perhaps, one may still be allowed to say) to suggest that, while the several authors whose essays appear in this volume have not “produce[d] a single […]