[1] There are three questions I would like to explore, working from a different angle than that Christine Helmer examined regarding the relation between the theological doctrine of justification by faith and ethics. While she critiqued a separation between theology and ethics, I will ponder questions that address temptations to conflate theology and ethics. First, what can theology accomplish that ethics alone cannot? Second, how can Christian theology be practiced in a way that enhances rather than endangers ethical debates? Third, given that ethical debates can themselves be endangered when those with political power seek to shut them down entirely, what are theological resources for resisting authoritarian tyranny and polarization at the same time?
[2] First: what can theology accomplish that ethics alone cannot? The invitation to be part of this year’s Lutherans Ethicists’ Gathering led me to recall a conversation I had years ago with one of my dissertation committee members at the University of Chicago, Bill Schweiker. Talking with him—a theological ethicist—clarified for me why I identified my scholarly orientation as more that of a theologian than an ethicist. I told him that theological ethicists assume theological claims, like the goodness of God, as a kind of background premise. But how to affirm a doctrinal claim like divine goodness was what interested me.
[3] Luther did assume that God is good, but he didn’t always experience God as good—and he wrestled with how to interpret that difficult experience of God theologically. In his commentaries on stories of Hagar, Jacob, and Joseph in Genesis, Luther even offered more than one way of interpreting Anfechtung or tentatio—seemingly unwarranted senses of divine affliction.[1] Pondering Luther’s contradictory interpretations was fruitful in thinking about how to both affirm and deny the sense of divine providence at play in the seemingly God-given sense of distrust and alienation that follow in the wake of undergoing harms like sexual abuse or domestic violence. Simply stating that such harms are wrong and should be prevented did not do the kind of theological work I was seeking. Ethics alone did not suffice. To name what was wrong is vital, but doesn’t itself address the spiritual effects of intimate violence.
[4] In the book Christine and I wrote, another set of questions came to the fore regarding the relation between theology and ethics. One question concerns the use of Christian theology to empower a certain set of moral claims about right and wrong in a way that casts any dissent as “not truly Christian.” This seems to be the approach of Mark D. Leiderbach and Evan Lenow’s Ethics as Worship: The Pursuit of Moral Discipleship.[2] They argue that the scripture conveys a “revealed morality” so that “when understood through a theocentric lens, the pursuit of justice is ethics as worship.”[3] By associating theocentrism with scriptural revelation read through a lens of biblical inerrancy, they argue that there are absolutist positions on all manner of ethical topics, and that any “moral dilemmas are existentially/experientially ‘real’ to non-believers” because of sin, but that in Christ they can be regenerated to resolve these conflicts by coming to identify with the right ethical position.[4]
[5] We see this way of scripting theology to fund the abidingly right ethical views in the work of the Religious Freedom Institute, which associates personhood with claims about the true nature of human gender. For example, in his review of Thomas Berg’s Religious Liberty in a Polarized Age, Todd Huizinga argues that the problem isn’t “political polarization,” but “worldview polarization.” In response to Berg’s claim that a depolarizing, mutual empathy requires conservative Christians to “defend the right to same-sex marriage” and supporters of same-sex marriage to “defend traditional Christians’ religious freedom,” Huizinga writes, “The pluralism we face today is a comprehensive world-and-life-view split between traditionalists who believe in the Judeo-Christian Western tradition and secularist progressives who reject religion and view the common good as the right of everyone to decide for himself what is true and what is good, rejecting as oppressive the very idea of pursuing a set of objective truths and goods that might help bind us all together.”[5]
[6] When theology is seen as a means to convey a superpower charge behind one side of a polarized ethical debate, opponents cannot be seen as members of the same religion; they are cast as secular at best, or demonic at worst. Theology then funds a zeal for the power to institutionalize ethical positions as God-willed, with opponents as existential threats rather than possibly members of the same faith. We can see this attitude in Russ Vought, whom President Trump re-appointed as director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought calls himself a Christian nationalist, and in addition to co-crafting Project 2025, founded the “Cent[er] for Renewing America” to “renew a consensus of America as a nation under God,” which for him means prioritizing Christian immigrants, opposing “diversity policies,” and abolishing abortion under any circumstances. He also paints the Democratic party as “’increasingly evil’ because it forces secularism on families.”[6]
[7] Likewise, in another context, a Palestinian activist in Gaza who had been released from prison after the 1990’s Oslo peace process describes a formally similar Muslim use of theology to supercharge an ethical vision—here in a two-year development in the leadership of Hamas that led to the October 7 massacre of Israelis. He states, “So strongly did they believe in the idea that Allah was with them, and that they were going to bring Israel down, that they started dividing Israel into cantons, for the day after the conquest.” This was seen as part of “’the last promise’—a divine promise regarding the end of days, when all human beings will accept Islam”—if necessary, by forced conversion (even though other Muslims point out that this is forbidden in the Qur’an).[7] Well-organized groups of Jews, Christians, and Muslims have drawn straight lines between theology and a normative ethical vision in a way that justifies the use of coercive power over bodies and land—and construes dissenters as not even conceivably being part of their own religious community.
[8] Viewing theological claims about God as securing or endowing particular claims with unique authority is one well-publicized concern about ways of relating theology and ethics. A second, related concern is a turn to an ethics of justice that eclipses (if not replaces) theological claims in an account of Christian life. Here, too, Christian identity itself gets cast as being at heart about a moral mission: a participation in God’s own vision of how to create the Beloved Community in a particular way.
[9] Once again, I am drawn to ask how to both affirm and deny the sense in which this is true. On one hand, love of neighbor as oneself is one of the greatest commandments for all who hold a monotheistic worldview. As far back as Genesis 1, discipleship is never less than care for the flourishing of creation. On the other hand, centering an ethical vision as the heartbeat of Christian identity cannot itself account for dissenting views among Christians themselves about the shape of that ethical vision. Within this framing of Christian identity, where there is difference about ethical positions, there are also different perspectives about who is truly Christian in the first place. Certainly progressive Christians buck at the idea that the very definition of being Christian means to oppose the legality of abortion or to reject same-sex marriage and trans identities as possible expressions of neighbor love. But, again, many culturally conservative Christians paint progressive Christians as in fact “secular” (hence, not really Christian). One existential temptation we face today as Christians is to debate the nature of the moral law as if our very identity as Christian depended upon it.
[10] In addition, when a vision of justice is centered as the heart of Christian identity, we might ask about the need for either theology or for a uniquely Christian theology. On one hand, we might ask why it would be necessary to bother with reference to God or to love of God at all—especially when there is a secular version of Enlightenment-funded values like liberty, equality, and freedom. Those on the right and the left can appeal to these values with or without reference to a God who invests in them.
[11] Moreover, even when we presuppose a theistic worldview, if Christian identity is all about the mission of justice-seeking, we might ask: what, if anything, would be lost if Jesus is understood primarily as another Torah teacher, in a tradition like his contemporary Hillel, or the biblical prophets? We might then develop the lead of the 19th century German leader of the Jewish Reform movement, Abraham Geiger, who suggested this constructive move for Christian theology when he argued that the historical Jesus was a Reform Jew who stressed the ethical rather than ritual obligations of the Torah.[8] If neighbor love, accompanied by love of God, is the heart of Christian identity, why not consider Christianity a variant of Reform Judaism? If a vision of justice or a set of ethical norms is the basis of Christian identity, what would be lost if more Christians—perhaps especially Christians uncomfortable with the legacy of Christian anti-Judaism—openly made this move?
[12] Interestingly, even Christian exclusivists can take on an interfaith flavor wherever Christian identity codes with a particular politicized form of belonging. For instance, the word “evangelical” has come to mean “belonging to Trump’s GOP” when not only Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, and Orthodox Christians, but also some Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other non-Christians identify as born-again evangelicals, presumably because they identify with the MAGA movement.[9]
[13] Christine and I have argued that Christians can engage more effectively in meaningful ethical debates, within and beyond Christian circles, in interpersonal conversation and in the political realm, if we reaffirm a Pauline and Lutheran theological emphasis on justification by faith in the grace of Christ as the covenantal basis of Christian identity. From there, justice-seeking for and toward the Beloved Community is a messy, ongoing dynamic that accompanies baptismal belonging to Christ (and to the church as the corporate body of Christ). This implies that Christians with competing views on contested ethical and political topics can still view one another as fellow Christians, rather than as an oppressive, secular, or demonic other. An ecclesiology of baptismal belonging also draws Christians into taking our bearings for theological and ethical reflection from our unique charism as monotheists: to affirm a Triune God and find significance in Jesus’ death and resurrection.
[14] By recalling that justification by faith in Christ is what generates covenantal belonging for Christians, Christians can find a theological ground for depolarizing while we engage in honest debate and advocacy about our moral convictions and notions of justice—within the church and the nations in which we dwell. Here, I would like to engage this thesis from a generational lens, noting along the way how national elections can trigger differently weighted worries regarding polarization and tyranny, and suggesting an additional set of theological resources for navigating these worries amid politicized ethical debates.
[15] Ever since the Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v Wade, I have been conscious of being a Gen X theologian—a woman who came of age when women in my denomination could be ordained as pastors, and when legal access to abortion was taken for granted. While I was aware as a teenager that the 20th century’s two World Wars disrupted any notion of “modern progress” as inevitable, I also felt acutely aware when young that I was born in the 1960’s, in the midst of the civil rights movement and second-wave feminism. Theologically speaking, my educational locations from college through graduate school equipped students to articulate progressive interpretations of scripture and tradition to support racial and gender equality and ecological responsibility, and to name as structural sin destructive social patterns like patriarchy, racism, heterosexism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of systemic discrimination. To participate as a woman in Christian theology and ethics was made possible by feminist and other liberation-minded ethical projects within the church. They helped make the church a more hospitable space for many—ideally, if not always in practice.
[16] At least with regard to gender, these developments are largely beyond the radar of culturally conservative Christians, who seem ignorant of progressive Christian arguments at best, and belittle or ignore them at worst. But when we set the formation of my generation in the ELCA alongside the formation of Christian nationalists, we see a picture of the church as defining itself around disputes about the exact nature of the moral law. Our identities can get so existentially wound up with these disputes that we cannot imagine belonging to a church that does not recognize the values we hold as central. To do so would constitute an existential threat.
[17] Yet electorally speaking, the ELCA is a purple church, not a blue one. According to political scientist Ryan Burge’s analysis of a 2022 survey, in the 2020 election, 52% of ELCA members voted for Trump, while only 6% of the predominantly Black AME denomination did.[10] It is hard not to connect this particular comparison to perceptions about racism—at least to a lack of sensitivity about racism mattering. We could also ask: how many ELCA Lutherans identify openly with Christian nationalism? Or how many have simply always voted Republican, and see Trump as problematic but preferable to Democrats? In my west central Illinois town, I know my own congregation has many who might identify politically as Republican in the sense of being fiscal conservatives but social liberals or moderates, who presuppose gender egalitarianism (our pastor is female) and have welcomed a trans woman who moved to town to care for her grandparents.
[18] For the moment, as a whole, ELCA congregations reflect the political division of the country. This suggests that Christian identity for most ELCA Lutherans is not primarily about political affiliation. In my current congregation, this often takes the form of wanting the church to be a space without politics in the forefront. Such a lack of interest in connecting faith to politically fraught discussions can prevent acquiring the kind of theological literacy that could inform ethical reflection about public policies. But a politically purple church also flies under the radar of national media accounts of who Christians are in the US. And perhaps Christian theologians and ethicists would do well to lean into the liturgical formation that does hold together a purple denomination.
[19] When I was coming into a sense of my religious and political orientation while a student at Carleton College in the late 1980’s, I recall how a Lutheran liturgical formation shaped my reception of a progressive activist orientation to which I was introduced in a class on grassroots organizing and social change movements, taught by political scientist Paul Wellstone before he became a Minnesota U.S. Senator. He asked us to journal about our readings on civil rights, anti-poverty, and anti-war movements, and about our immersion in conversations with homeless persons, or protests at Honeywell, a military-industrial complex company. But I also found myself paying attention to my classmates who had been raised in wealthy Republican homes, and who were asking one another if they should distance themselves from their friendships back home with Republicans, now that they were undergoing what would be for many a lifelong conversion into progressive political activism.
[20] As I listened to them, I found myself remembering and writing about the memory of taking communion together in my hometown church in Upper Michigan. I thought about the characterization of communion as a “foretaste of the feast to come,” and wondered if we might go about political activism in a different spirit if we held in our consciousness that we are gathered together both now, and in a future in which we are reconciled across our wounds and our wounding of one another. This experience of the sacrament seeded a theological orientation to belonging that rested upon our unity in Christ, as the basis from which we could then work together toward a Beloved Community that is somehow already present as well—as if God’s vision of flourishing is what does and will ultimately shape the common good. Participating proleptically in this vision isn’t about escapism or indifference, but about proceeding with a fundamental trust that our foibles as a species are not the final word, and that we are together in the mess of our efforts to come to terms with our collective lives, toward reconciliation and right relation in a new creation that is somehow both here and still ahead.
[21] I tried to flesh out this intuition in an essay called “Resisting Tyranny and Polarization: An Ecclesiology of Word and Sacrament from the Midwestern Heartland.” It was published in a 2021 volume called Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance—a volume that built on a Lutheran Scholars Network conversation that took place during the last Trump administration.[11] One impulse for this conversation was worry about a turn to authoritarianism or fascism in our country, and the importance of speaking truthfully about our past and present in order to resist rather than accommodate efforts to dismantle democracy by playing on fears and resentments, especially those based on untruths about immigrants, or denials of climate change and our historical and living legacies of racism and colonialism.
[22] In my contribution to this conversation, I recalled that sacramental experience of Christian unity amid brokenness and reconciliation, along with our words that confess hard truths, and the Word of God made flesh to confront those hard truths for the well-being of the world. Drawing on the theme in Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation of “calling a thing what it is,” on his Small and Large Catechism commentary on the eighth commandment against bearing false witness about our neighbors, and on his appropriation of the monastic tradition of distinguishing between sins of presumption and despair, I identified four kinds of truth-telling to pay attention to as part of the proclaimed word, where it regards truth-telling about nations and our neighbors.
[23] The first is naming “empirical facts and resisting efforts to suppress them.”[12] A “second practice of truth-telling is the ideological sort that reveals underlying structures or patterns in our collective lives,” such as naming structural sins like racism, patriarchy, homophobia, economic injustice, and ecological degradation.
[24] A third kind of truth-telling involves speaking truthfully and accurately about our neighbors—what I call “[e]thnographic or narrative truth-telling” that begins not with ideological depictions of entire groups of people, but “with the ways our neighbors make meaning of their everyday lives.”[13] For example, having grown up in a reservation town, I am always uncomfortable when I hear non-Native scholars or activists seem to describe Native Americans as a kind of romanticized, two-dimensional ideology that is inherently ecological and free of the taint of Western organized religion. Native American individuals and communities have a spectrum of attitudes about their identities, values, and relation to Christianity. We can embrace the ideological insights of contextual theologies while also attending to the fuller complexion of stories of actual persons and groups who inhabit a particular context or social location.
[25] Finally, a fourth kind of truth-telling is the eschatological truth of the gospel: “[s]eeing our lives, past and present, in relationship to eschatological redemption”—a redemption glimpsed in the sacrament of communion.[14]
[26] A backdrop to my sketch of these four sorts of truth-telling is the question: if truth-telling is necessary to resist tyranny, can we name the truths of injustice in a way that resists polarization at the same time? For example, in the context of calls for public confession of sin for complicity in racism, hetero/sexism, or settler colonialism, how do we ask for—or practice—such confession in a way that avoids characterizing certain individuals, groups, or the character of an entire country as essentially sinful, or turning confession into an act of virtue signaling to show our own moral purity—such as our own anti-racism—as if that were the primary concern? The first danger is to fall into what Luther calls the sin of despair: despair that our political opponents (or entire groups of people) can ever be trustworthy partners in the work toward social justice. The second danger reflects the corresponding sin of presumption—presuming that we ourselves are righteous, with an underlying anxiety about maintaining an image of our own goodness.
[27] A Lutheran and Pauline emphasis on justification by faith reminds us that our belonging to the body of Christ is not conditioned upon our own or anyone else’s prior sanctification—which frees us to love our neighbors for their own sake, not as proof of our own worthiness. In this context, truth-telling that builds up the Beloved Community begins by “announcing—beholding—the truth of our unity in Christ” as a gift.[15] It is in remembrance of this theological claim that we might broach prophetic truth-telling about various forms of interpersonal and structural injustice that need redress among us, as well as call out versions of Christian nationalism that many of us find blasphemous.
[28] This brings me to a final theological resource for addressing polarization. It is not uncommon for culturally conservative Christians to accuse progressive Christians of heresy. Feminism, affirming LGBTQ identities, and support for legal abortion are among the progressive perspectives called “heretical.” The irony, though, is that historically heresy has had less to do with a manifestly false belief and more to do with holding onto a partial truth without seeing the larger picture.
[29] At least with regard to the creedal debates of the fourth and fifth centuries, the perspectives that came to be called “orthodox” were those that encompassed truths on competing sides of a genuine debate. In the Arian controversy behind the Nicene Creed, Arians lost out with respect to their claim that the Father is greater than the Son. But the final version of the Nicene Creed, in 381, reflected a movement among some in the Arian camp—the Cappadocians in Turkey—who developed the doctrine of the Trinity. This doctrine allowed one Arian insight to be preserved: that the Father is distinct from the Son. The Nicene champion Athanasius grasped that the Arians had a point: simply saying that the Son was fully divine could suggest that the Son is the Father. So, the Trinitarian doctrine that God is one being in three persons ultimately brought together the most enduring insights of both the proponents and opponents of the Nicene Creed of 325. The views rejected as anathema, or heretical, were those that embraced only a partial truth. In this respect, orthodoxy is capacious, the product of generations of contentious but mutual listening and debate. This recognition about Christian orthodoxy was articulated by a Jewish sociologist of conflict resolution, Richard E. Rubenstein, who took time to investigate church archives about how Christians resolved the Arian controversy and wrote about what he learned in When Jesus Became God.[16]
[30] How much can the theological distinction between orthodoxy and heresy be brought to bear with regard to contested ethical topics? Can there be a synthesis of the most enduring moral insights from each side? The theological practice of creating orthodox tradition might not always translate readily into the realm of ethics. And Christians still manage to splinter, despite (and through) ecumenical councils. But the practice of mutual listening across differences better reflects the process that created orthodox Christian doctrines of God than a set of one-sided denunciations could ever do. Indeed, a refusal to listen deeply to what is at stake for someone with whom we disagree is itself the spirit of heresy.
[31] In this sense, creedal orthodoxy shares with justification by faith in Christ the feature of being theologically spacious enough to hold together Christians who are sorting out what is true and what is just. Beginning with a theological understanding of Christian identity attunes us to one another as we figure out how to navigate our more particular identities within the body of Christ, including the perplexingly divergent ways we might be inclined to tack with regard to profound ethical questions and their adjudication in political law-making.
[1] For some of the relevant references in Luther’s multi-volume Lectures on Genesis, see Amy Carr, “Hermeneutics of Providence amid Affliction: Contributions by Luther and Weil to a Cruciform Doctrine of Providence,” Pro Ecclesia XVI, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 44-64.
[2] Mark D. Leiderbach and Evan Lenow, Ethics as Worship: The Pursuit of Moral Discipleship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2021).
[3] Leiderbach and Lenow, 308. “Revealed Morality” is in the title for Part 3.
[4] Leiderbach and Lenow, 270. For an engagement with this text, see also Amy Carr and Christine Helmer, Ordinary Fatih in Polarized Times: Justification and the Pursuit of Justice (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2023), 244-245.
[5] Todd Huizinga, “Political Polarization, Same-Sex Marriage, and Religious Freedom,” Religious Freedom Institute Blog, December 12, 2024, https://religiousfreedominstitute.org/political-polarization-same-sex-marriage-and-religious-liberty/
[6] “Russ Vought: Donald Trump’s Holy Warrior,” The Economist, January 3, 2025, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2025/01/03/russ-vought-donald-trumps-holy-warrior
[7] Shlomi Eldar, “Hamas Actually Believed It Would Conquer Israel. In Preparation, It Divided the Country into Cantons,” Haaretz, April 5, 2024, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-05/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/hamas-actually-believed-it-would-conquer-israel-and-divided-it-into-cantons/0000018e-ab4a-dc42-a3de-abfad6fe0000 Surah Al-Baqarah 2:256: “There is no compulsion in religion.”
[8] Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
[9] Ryan Burge: “In this survey, everyone gets ask if they self-ID as ‘born-again’ or evangelical Christian. Even Jews and Muslims. There are non-Christians who ID as evangelical. And I don’t think it’s survey error. Because it’s strongly related to partisanship. GOP = Evangelical.” — Bluesky 9% of Jewish Republicans; 32% of Republican Muslims; 16% of Republican Buddhists; 18% of Republican Hindus; 3% each of Republican atheists and agnostics; 19% of Republican ‘Nothing in Particular’: 52% of Republican “Something Else.” Also 15% of Republican Catholics; 23% of R. Mormons; 27% of R Orthodox.
[10] Ryan Burge: “The two party vote for Donald Trump in 2020 among forty Protestant denominations. From this metric, the Assemblies of God is the most right-leaning group. Lots of evangelicals and pentecostals at the top. At the bottom? The Black Church. Just 6% of AME folks voted for Trump.” — Bluesky
[11] Amy Carr, “Resisting Tyranny and Polarization: An Ecclesiology of Word and Sacrament from the Midwestern Heartland,” in Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance, edited by Christine Helmer (Lanham, MD: Lexington/Fortress Press, 2021), 75-95.
[12] Carr, Truth-Telling, 88.
[13] Carr, Truth-Telling, 90.
[14] Carr, Truth-Telling, 92.
[15] Carr, Truth-Telling, 87.
[16] Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God: The Epic Fight over Christ’s Divinity in the Last Days of Rome. (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1999).
