Toward a Better Worldliness

Book excerpt: Current entanglements of ecology, economy, and the Protestant tradition demand a fresh analysis. Implications of the Protestant doctrine of grace for concepts of the self emerge as a particularly significant node in need of critical analysis. Late twentieth century research by Protestant theologians, ethicists, and historians demonstrates neglected awareness of the significant social and economic justice implications of Reformation theology. Several scholars thus interpret the Reformers' message of grace as unambiguously liberating from both spiritual and material modes of oppression. This dissertation will nuance this claim in a way that takes seriously economic and ecological justice alongside the complex ways the tradition unfolded, beyond the Reformer's intentions, as interconnected with neoliberal capitalism and pervasive modern individualism. Engaging twentieth century theories of the gift as they generate debates about the nature of the ideal gift and its role in normative conceptions of the self in social, economic, and other-than-human relations, this dissertation demonstrates a consistent tendency among Protestant theologians to presume a unilateral gift structure. This structure entails pernicious ecological implications: separative individualism, commodification, and a view of grace as fundamentally or structurally at odds with ecologically interdependent systems of nature. The proposed alternative is a mode of multilateral giving where the gift may not be capitalized by returning to its origin, and also embraces the ecological exchanges of the world rather than working against them. Furthermore, this form of unconditioned and multilaterally exchangist giving characterizes one of the more marginalized aspects of Luther's theology: his often scandalous interpretation of the communicatio idiomatum. Finally, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "better worldliness" inspires a model of grace that assumes a mode of being where the exchanges of the world are affirmed and the self only becomes sacramentally, in, with, and through the communication of a multiplicity of divine and creaturely gifts.