Disturbed by a vanishing spirit of civil discussion about difficult topics, whether it be the protracted abortion conflict or the long endeavor to make America a more just society, this book by two trained Lutheran theologians addresses not just academic colleagues but all Christian believers—those people of ordinary faith—urging them to seek new pathways to more open, measured, and reasonable debate of such topics. 

I am one of those ordinary Christians, a Catholic Benedictine Sister, with degrees in German Literature and Canon Law. I am keenly interested in the arguments Carr and Helmer make to ease the harsh conditions of conflict our society faces. They diagnose “a sickness in the body of Christ” and hope to work out a theological model for turning intense conflict into productive justice-seeking (p. 5). At stake is the transformation of the body of Christ into an agent of reconciliation, even in a world and church as “messy” as this one. 

As the book points out, the term ‘justification by faith,” so important to Protestant churches, is central to this task: it is “the unique work of the Christian God who takes action on behalf of sinners in order to forgive them their sins.” Justification is more than a cliché—it matters today as a “forensic” public speech act that declares God’s powerful activity and forgiveness (37-39). But it needs updating, they write. The challenge is “how to make sense of God’s restorative word of life in the context of devastation, death, and disputes about how to name and address injustice” (39).

When the authors speak about “updating” justification, I as a Catholic Christian want to cite the historic 1999 Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification between the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation. As the Declaration states, Catholic and Lutheran churches are now able to “articulate a common understanding of our justification by God’s grace in Christ” as a sound basis of dialogue (pp. 8-9). Justification “always remains the unmerited gift of grace” (18). The document does not cover all teachings on justification, but it does encompass a crucial “common understanding” about the basic truth of the doctrine. Remaining differences are no longer cause “for doctrinal condemnations” (9).

To me this joint Lutheran-Catholic Declaration is a perhaps neglected ecumenical piece of the argument that Carr and Helmer make about the way justification creates a foundation for honest dialogue even in discouraging, polarized times. Mention of the Joint Declaration would sharpen their point by including Catholic Christians more directly.

Elsewhere in their book, Helmer and Carr helpfully underscore the practice of listening and discerning. Catholic Christians are familiar with the impact of this practice on ethics and empathy. Discernment can be individual, communal, or “collective and ethical,” as the authors note (10-14); it is the effort to listen to God and the Holy Spirit before we act. In Catholic tradition, attentive listening has not only shaped St. Benedict’s Rule for monastics but continues to be used by Benedictines as well as by contemporary Christians in Latin American base communities; it was used also at the 2023 Bishops’ Synod in Rome. In practice, around a table, eight or so participants take turns stating a personal opinion; this is followed by a period of prayer before the next person speaks. Discussion takes place only after all table participants have spoken. This ensures mutual listening before any discussion. Remembering our baptism—honoring personally our initial belonging to Christ—is the first step toward a larger, mutual listening as we seek to learn how we can serve our neighbors best in our justice-seeking.

Identifying barriers to mutual listening and mutual discernment, the authors revisit the dynamics of heresy and idolatry. It is a useful reminder. They define heresy as “selectively attending to a particular truth to the exclusion of others” (61), and idolatry as “mistaking the finite for the infinite” (211)—for example, taking one particular attitude toward abortion as the ultimate mark of any Christian stance. Idolatry shows up “in our viscerally holding on to partial truths”; it can be found in the refusal to honor the other, or in a stubborn doubling-down in the name of justice (241). I hope the work of Carr and Helmer serves to induce us to use more care and precision when we deploy a word like “heretical” against someone else.

Of special interest in this regard is the authors’ attempt to reframe the abortion debate. The abortion conflict in the last 30 years has degenerated into a war of words in which an ever more rancorous anti-abortion camp claims that their defense of the unborn is the only “Christian” position. The authors talk about “incommensurable ontologies”: the “right to choose abortion” vs. the right to insist on the life of the unborn (108-116). Legal access to abortion and the right to choose abortion regard the pregnant woman as capable of dealing with the complex moral dilemma raised by an unplanned pregnancy. Or as Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg stated: a “feminist worldview implies that navigating reproductive rights is integral to women’s social and political rights” (114). While Christian anti-abortion groups often call their opponents “heretical,” they seem to me to be practicing heresy themselves, “selectively attending to a particular truth to the exclusion of others.”

Carr and Helmer further show that the anti-abortion view of women only as birthing and child-rearing is based on patriarchal and essentialist views that exclude women’s actual experiences of complex life situations (113f.), their pain of having been raped or sexually abused, or their dire poverty making it virtually impossible to raise another child besides those they already have. The anti-abortion argument’s exclusive focus on bringing a fetus to full birth effectively denies women the possibility of dealing responsibly with their complex situation, which can include the mother’s own precarious health, her impoverished condition, or her own call to serve society as a mother and a professional woman.

The reversal of Roe vs. Wade exposes what was lost when legal access to safe abortions was discontinued in many states—consider the 64,565 women who were raped in 2022-23 in the 14 states that don’t allow abortions (Internal Medicine research letter, Jan. 24, 2024), or the 50-60 percent of women who get pregnant after their contraceptive malfunctioned (139, n. 49). The latter group includes many women who feel it would be financially and/or emotionally irresponsible to add another child to their family.

The authors’ constructive solution to this bitter impasse is to turn to narrative concepts that involve ideals, icons, archetypes, and other sacred imagery. Community storytelling can become a “search for something akin to a capacious orthodoxy” (153) that leads people on both sides to “a capacity to listen to the full range and register of pregnant women’s lives” and resist on the basis of justification by faith any one-sided positioning—those absolutist, heretical judgments—on either side. In this sense, the authors rescued for me the word orthodoxy, which I had regarded in mostly negative terms. They show how early Christians in a time of high conflict practiced listening, found common elements of agreement, and so were able to find a formulation in the Nicene Creed that was—after a long time of searching—acceptable to both sides.

The book’s last two chapters deal with “political justice-seeking … as a practice of Christian freedom” based on the spacious freedom of the Christian’s baptism into the Body of Christ. The “spiritual discipline of ordinary faith” frees the believer from centering Christian identity on political ideology left or right. Justification by faith decenters all such finite and divisive identities. Then a recentering becomes possible to correct the imbalance: a recentering that “calls out for divine aid to rectify the injustice of our own self-quarantined thinking and action” (230). Jesus himself moved back and forth between the rough-and-tumble world and his prayer in solitude (229f.) Moves between decentering and recentering help to avoid the danger of one-sided ideological faith concepts and support a non-idolatrous search for true justice.

Once again, I find various points of contact between Ordinary Faith in Polarized Times and Pope Francis’ approaches to the problem of conflict. He said recently, “A society without conflicts is a dead society. A society that hides conflicts is a suicidal society. A society that takes conflicts by the hand is a society of the future,” In his book Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (2020), he shows how an “isolated Christian conscience” can end up in rigid heretical thinking because of the temptation to a pride that makes them feel superior to the Body of Christ, the Church (p. 69), or any Christians of different beliefs. Christ did not found the Church “as a citadel of purity” but rather as a “dynamic school of conversion, a place of spiritual combat and discernment where grace abounds along with sin and temptation” (72). Rather than flee from polarization, we, as concerned Christians, are “to engage with conflict and disagreement in ways that prevent us from descending into polarization” and so allow “new thinking that can transcend division” (77f.). To Pope Francis this requires practicing the “art of civic dialogue that synthesizes different views on a higher plane” (78). 

To me, this is “mutual listening” as Helmer and Carr would have it—a process that integrates insights from many conversations and includes “taking responsibility for the consequences of one’s own positions.” In this way one can create “new measures, new formulations” that enrich orthodoxy (209). As Francis put it in Let Us Dream, the success of this mission depends on “the humility to dispense with what we came to see as wrong,” and the courage to accept views other than our own that “contain elements of truth” (78).

Thus we can find rich parallels between Francis’ analysis of polarization and that of our two Protestant theologians. In his epilogue, Pope Francis declares: “Open yourself … decenter … transcend” (137). Carr and Helmer state on their final page: “aware of our decentering, we need the recentering that comes with being reminded of our primary belonging to the Beloved Community conjured in Christ” (256). This is the great hope in the power of justification by faith to make Christians—all of us—agents of healing in a fraught political era.