Luther on Ubiquity and a Theology of the Public

Abstract

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.

Eating and Being Eaten: Interspecies Vulnerability as Eucharist

“…That is, might this language of Luther's provide a more traditionally inflected (if, admittedly, also not universally accepted) way to speak of Jesus' resurrection into the physicality of all that is, the entire biosphere? On Luther and ubiquity, see Harold Ristau, "Ubiquity and Epiphany: Luther's Doctrine of the Lord's Presence in Space and Time" (Ristau 2013); Allen G. Jorgenson, "Luther, Ubiquity, and a Theology of the Public" (Jorgenson 2004). 28 Timothy Robinson, unscripted public comments (13 September 2019) following presentation of his paper, "Christian Hope (lessness) in the Anthropocene," at the BYU symposium, "On Being Vulnerable, Part II: Faith after the Anthropocene," at which the work gathered in this volume of Religions originated.…”