A matter of love, not certainty

My religious imagination, like that of many Americans, was shaped by Protestant Christianity. I was taught that 16th-century theology, by returning to biblical truth, corrected errors that arose during the dark Middle Ages. The community that raised me identified directly with the first-century church, and it was sure that it knew divine truth while others definitely did not.

In recent years, this theological tradition has come into conflict with democratic pluralism. Evangelical Protestantism is an explicit force in electoral politics, and it implicitly influences the American moral imagination. Despite deep disagreements, other groups have adopted evangelical patterns of thought—whether they are Catholic, atheist, or otherwise. The difficulty is that when some citizens are certain that they know God’s will, they may be tempted to rule in God’s name.

Carl Hughes, who teaches at Texas Lutheran University, addresses the theological roots of this crisis in Clouds of the Cross in Luther and Kierkegaard. Hughes acknowledges the Protestant tendency to treat Christianity as a source of authoritative knowledge, and he shows that there is another side to this tradition that runs just as deep. By retrieving Lutheran theology with exceptional care, Hughes suggests that Christian faith is a matter not of certainty but of love.