In this article, I contest Milbank's critiques of Luther by underscoring the participatory theme in his treatment of faith. After considering faith's relation to the presence of Christ, I explore Luther's treatment of real presence in his theology of the Lord's Supper. His appeal to ubiquity in this regard functions doxologically to counter the possibility of the orchestration of Christ's presence. The promised nature of that presence, however, emphasizes that God graciously elicits a faith which apprehends absence as a profound mode of presence and so grounds a theology of the public in which the church, by theosis, shares Christ's definitive, rather than ubiquitous, presence.
In this chapter I revisit construals of sin and shame, beginning with a moment of auto‐investigation. I then set this data in conversation with historical, theological, and philosophical configurations of shame to reconceive sin and shame. I describe sin as curvatus ex carne (turning from the flesh) to signal sin as a refusal of both our embodied existence and a commodification of the land on which it lives. I then use a carnal hermeneutic to argue for a positive understanding of discerning shame as a resource for an ethical life that contrasts with shame of disgrace.
This article examines Luther's theology of the cross in relation to his treatment of vocation and explores the contemporary utility of both. It is argued that theologians who reduce Luther's theology of the cross to an existential descriptor fail on two accounts. First, they do not comprehend the manner in which a theology of the cross does not describe anxiety but rather induces it so as to create theologians of the cross out of theologians of glory. Second, a reduction of a theology of the cross to an existential descriptor fails to apprehend the public significance of the same insofar as a theology of the cross is intimately related to Luther's treatment of vocation and its concomitant explication of the two reigns of God. Luther's treatment of vocation points to the manner in which the Christian is shaped by the cross in the give and take of human community. This is not to gainsay certain deficiencies in Luther's treatment of vocation. Chief among these are Luther's tendency to restrict language of vocation to individuals and his insistence on vocational intransigence. A contemporary engagement of the cross and vocation entails both a critical analysis of the manner in which the private has now eclipsed the public and an attempt to move beyond Luther by way of Luther in underscoring the gift of ecclesial vocation.
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