Dialog-A Journal of Theology最新文献

The 2019 ELCA Declaration of Inter-religious Commitments, like its predecessor the 1991 Declaration of Ecumenical Commitments, set forth broad-based considerations for the engagement of ELCA Lutherans with other religious communities. In this article, I briefly outline how Christians and Muslims stand on important common ground when it comes to the foundations of our calling to care for our world and our neighbors for the common good. However, the Qur'an asks fundamental questions about several classical Christian beliefs: the Trinity, the incarnation, and the crucifixion of Jesus. The Qur'anic claims and Christian responses are not theologically neutral. They are challenging but not necessarily contradictory.

Lutherans have a special responsibility to actively engage with Jewish communities to clear some issues—about the past, about Luther, and then about possible paths forward, and while at it, to learn about and from the Jewish religion today. Some of the central topics deserving ongoing attention and dialogue are: the many meanings of salvation, different approaches to the Scriptures, and the beliefs about Jesus.

In recent decades, consent has become a central ethical guideline for navigating sex in a diverse and imperfect world. Increasingly, however, many feminists are charging that consent cannot carry the weight we have asked it to carry. A critical legal criterion, consent has fallen short as an ethic. But what would a sexual ethics beyond consent look like? This paper suggests that the writings of Martin Luther might have something to offer contemporary feminist debates over consent and desire, and, conversely, that contemporary debates in sexual ethics might have something to offer Luther studies. In this paper, I develop a Lutheran critique of consent-based ethics and advocate for a turn from an ethic of choice to an ethic of attention.

Disability studies and disabled activists critique involuntary sterilization and prenatal screening as products of the idea that disabled people lack worth. In recent history, proponents of legislation that restricts abortion access argue the reverse. They defend disabled personhood by showing how those with intellectual disabilities contribute to society. Despite competing ends, each claim reinforces associations between human value and a capacity to work. In this essay, I argue that the Lutheran tradition, surprisingly, contains resources to unhitch ethical visions of human dignity from demands for productivity, contribution, and work. Luther's emphases on human dependence, incapacity, and the need for God's help show an affinity with the Disability Justice Movement without undermining demands for bodily autonomy.

The reasoning of the court in what is called “the Dobbs decision” is rooted in rights related to the 14^th Amendment of the US Constitution. A problem from a Lutheran perspective is that the context for the court's majority decision about rights is rooted in a heritage of patriarchy and white supremacy. The values of patriarchy and white supremacy are hierarchy and control, particularly of bodies and reproduction. The result is that Dobbs reinforces limited moral agency and primarily prioritizes flourishing of embryos and fetuses without asking what pregnant neighbors need. The social teaching of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) stands against the Dobbs decision.

“A Declaration of Inter-Religious Commitment,” a policy statement of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is not shy about telling us how to act toward our interreligious neighbor; but it does not want to tell us how to think theologically about her. To support this statement, this article makes three points. First, the Declaration's descriptions of “evangelism” leave us wanting, especially as we might seek to move beyond the “exclusive/inclusive” binary when it comes to theological articulation of the salvation of those who are not Christian. Second, we should lean more optimistically, rather than so cautiously, into the idea that there are “limits on our knowing,” such that we can be eagerly inquisitive rather than “neutral.” Third, we can adopt a posture of hopeful anticipation regarding salvation, in light of the relational character of Lutheran theology described in the Declaration.

Within the area of Lutheran theology and ethics, recent scholarship has shed light on important horizons in gender, sexuality, politics and church. Five articles in this edition of Dialog (Lowe, Latour, Streufert, Micale and Lahtinen) address the ethics of consent, LGBTQ+ religious trauma, reproductive justice and the intersections of abortion politics with work and disability studies. They connect interdisciplinary methods to Lutheran theology, history, ethics and ecclesiology in order to develop relational and embodied understandings of justice. In particular, they ask how the Lutheran tradition addresses consent, moral agency, abortion access, disability and ecclesial or ecological justice in distinctive ways. They address questions such as: How does Lutheran theological language engage themes of gender and sexuality justice in diverse contexts? How might Lutheran themes contribute to, be challenged by, or transformed with perspectives from diverse and intersectional politics?