How Can Preachers Use Luther in a Decolonial Multicultural Context?

Abstract

This article seeks a way for preachers to use Martin Luther’s theology today without succumbing to Luther’s anti-Semitism. Its place in the discipline of homiletics is of hermeneutics and general sermon direction. I argue that Luther’s anti-Semitism is theological, and that in order to avoid anti-Semitism, Luther’s theology must be changed. I also argue that the concept of decoloniality offers a way forward, specifically in hybridizing Luther’s theology in today’s world.

1. Introduction

How can preachers use Martin Luther today? He stands as a towering figure over theology, and his name is lent to denominations descended from him, including my own Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). But how does a preacher today use Martin Luther, a notorious anti-Semite, in preaching? It is a question even more pointed since the war in Gaza broke out in October 2023 and Lutherans have called for peace. It is not a simple matter of ignoring the anti-Semitic bits of Luther’s theology, or following the popular and inaccurate explanation that Luther turned anti-Semitic later in life as he grew frustrated with the pace of reform. Luther’s theological method produces Jews and Judaism as stubborn, offensive, wicked, false, etc. Nonetheless, it is simplistic to suggest, as some have in the era since WWII, that Luther leads directly to Hitler. Meanwhile, it is rash to try to use Luther’s theology as it is and hope to avoid anti-Semitic results. As one who claims Luther’s legacy as part of their own, I face this conundrum with every sermon. Do I cite Luther, and, if so, what do I do about his anti-Semitism? I suggest that the concept of decoloniality offers a solution.

A fair question at this point is how a member of a mainline Christian denomination in the United States has any place using an epistemological framework developed by and for subaltern people. I will argue that Lutheranism in the United States exists within a reality of coloniality. Decolonial methods expose this reality, and reveal it to those of us living it. Of those who claim Luther’s legacy, more is required than an apology; if we wish to continue in the faith, we must do so in new ways. Decoloniality offers a way forward. It is a way that must be undertaken with the understanding that what we bring from our Eurocentric culture is going to be redefined in ways over which we have little control.

In this essay, I will provide an overview of how Luther’s theology and exegesis are anti-Jewish. Next, I will engage the concept of colonialism and explore three options for a decolonizing approach to Luther, favoring the approach of hybridity or what Grosfoguel calls “border thinking”. Then, I will argue how these options do or could appear in contemporary Lutheran approaches. Finally, I will press the decolonial, hybrid Christ into service in exegeting a text for proclamation.

2. From Luther Then to Luther Now

2.1. Martin Luther on the Jews

Martin Luther was an anti-Semite. He was not unique for his era, though he was harsh even for that era. His attacks on Jews should not be read apart from the commissions he earned for writing some of them, or from the burgeoning alliance between German Jews and the Habsburg Emperor. Steven Rowan suggests that in some cases, Luther’s attacks on Jews might have been surrogate attacks on the Emperor (Rowan 1985, p. 90). At the same time, Luther’s attacks embarrassed his own princes (Rowan 1985, p. 81).

Of paramount importance for this essay is the fact that Luther’s attacks on Jews were not afterthoughts. Robert Kolb observes that Luther’s anti-Semitic arguments “were to a significant extent exegetical” (Kolb 2009, p. 164). That is, Luther’s method of interpretation produced anti-Semitic outcomes.

Christians have read the Old Testament as Christian Scripture since the New Testament era. Kolb notes that Luther severed the traditional distinction of law and gospel from the sweep of salvation history. For Luther, the law did not reign until Christ to be replaced with the gospel. Rather, both law and gospel were found in both testaments, and “the proper distinction of law and gospel became God’s way of addressing the existential situation of fallen human beings” (Kolb 2009, p. 52). So, Luther can contend in “How Christians Should Regard Moses” that the Torah is useful to Christians once they dismiss the commandments given solely to Israel because the Torah contains gospel promises and examples of faith and love (Luther 1960b, pp. 168–70). And in “Against the Sabbatarians”, Luther can sever the Ten Commandments from Scripture!

“[T]he Ten Commandments had spread over the whole world not only before Moses but even before Abraham and all the patriarchs. For even if a Moses had never appeared and Abraham had never been born, the Ten Commandments would have had to rule in all men from the very beginning, as they indeed did and still do”.

(Luther 1971, p. 89)

The “Ten Commandments” for Luther are Natural Law, or what Lutherans call the “Second Use” of the law, which exposes existential shortcomings and drives us to Christ.

The law did not reign until Christ; Moses did. Luther’s issue with Jews is that they fail to see Christ as their messiah and the Church as the true Israel. In his “Prefaces to the Old Testament”, Luther argues that “Moses himself has told us that his office and teaching should endure until Christ, then cease…”, a reference to Deuteronomy 18 read Christologically (Luther 1960c, p. 246). That office and teaching are not Law, but leadership of Israel. Thus, in “That Christ Jesus Was Born a Jew”, Luther contends that his reforms to the church are intended “to bring some of them [Jews] back to their own true faith, the one which their fathers held” (Luther 1962, p. 213). In other words, Luther contends that what he recognizes as the Christian faith is what Jews before Christ believed.

For Luther, Jewish failure to follow Christ combines with the incontrovertibility of Scripture to prove that Jews have no logical place in sixteenth-century Germany or anywhere else. Jesus was clearly the “prophet like Moses” in Deuteronomy 18 (Luther 1960c, p. 246). Jacob’s prophecy in Genesis 49—“the scepter shall not depart from Judah”—had been fulfilled because Jesus took that scepter before Jerusalem fell (Luther 1962, pp. 213ff.). Furthermore, the lack of any Jewish state in the sixteenth century was proof God and the true Israel had moved on. So, in the “New Prefaces to the Old Testament”, “The physical, earthly government they have not, for they have neither king nor lord, neither kingdom nor princedom; the spiritual too they have not, for they will not accept the new covenant and must thus remain without a priesthood” (Luther 1960a, p. 288).

Luther’s exegesis contends that since natural law is separate from salvation history, and since Jews cling to an outdated covenant, Jews exist in a kind of limbo. “[T]hey miss both covenants and hang between heaven and earth”, Luther says in his “New Prefaces to the Old Testament” (Luther 1960a, p. 288). And in “How Christians Should Regard Moses”, Luther contends that there are two kingdoms—the temporal and the spiritual—and “[b]etween the two kingdoms still another has been placed in the middle, half-spiritual and half-temporal. It is constituted by the Jews, with commandments and outward ceremonies which prescribe their conduct toward God and men” (Luther 1960b, p. 164). Most of these laws cannot be kept since the destruction of the Temple. This renders any attempt at observing Judaism futile. Luther says contemporary Jews “are no longer Jews, since they do not observe their law” (Luther 1971, p. 79). And again, “the Jews are no longer Israel” (Luther 1960a, p. 287).

Brooks Schramm summarizes the situation: “When Luther writes that Moses is dead, what he really means is that Judaism is dead” (Schramm 2014, p. 36). Luther’s reasoning is hermeneutical, exegetical, and doctrinal. Perhaps one may forgive Luther for such reasoning in the 1500s, but such reasoning today erases an entire religious tradition. Combine that with the baggage of subsequent anti-Semitism including the Third Reich’s embrace of Luther, and Luther’s hermeneutic cannot be accepted without some modification.

2.2. Coloniality and Decoloniality

The United States is a culture with “coloniality”. Douglas John Hall has long contended that North America is its own culture, with states originally founded as European colonies and receiving theologies from Europe (Hall 2003, p. 46). The end of the “colonial” period did not end colonialism. The US became (more of) a colonizer. Even as its own colonial administrations folded, e.g., in the Philippines, the US remained a colonial power. Ramon Grosfoguel contends, “One of the most powerful myths of the Twentieth Century was the notion that the elimination of colonial administrations amounted to the decolonization of the world. This led to the myth of a ‘postcolonial’ world” (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 7). Grosfoguel offers in place of the descriptor “postcolonial” the concept of “coloniality”, a reality that persists beyond the close of formal, official colonial status. “Coloniality allows us to understand the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations…” (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 7). Grosfoguel distinguishes his “decoloniality” from “postcoloniality”, believing the former term to be more accurate. Not everyone agrees. For my purposes, Grosfoguel’s category of “colonially” is what matters. Lutheranism in the United States exists within coloniality. The colonial administration of England and the regular importing of Lutheran theology in the form of pastors recruited in Europe is long over, but the coloniality of Lutheranism persists.

Decoloniality offers a response to coloniality. Walter Mignolo has argued that “decolonial thinking emerged at the very foundation of modernity/coloniality, as its counterpoint” (Mignolo 2011, p. 46). In order to be Lutheran and combat Luther’s anti-Semitism, I require more than a technical-sounding name for that endeavor. Grosfoguel notes two routes of decolonial thinking that he (and I) would rather avoid. The first approach Grosfoguel names “Third World Nationalism”, the creation of a European model nation-state on the site of the former colony (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 15). The ecclesiastical analog of this would be the persistence of Eurocentric denominations with Eurocentric power structures, and unmitigated theology from European sources. The second approach Grosfoguel names “Third World Fundamentalism”, the assertion of a pure space outside of modernity and coloniality. Such wholesale rejections of Europe are, Grosfoguel contends, further binary oppositions (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 15). By embracing only what is not Europe, “fundamentalism” still lets Europe define terms. The ecclesiastical analog of this would be rejections of denominations or even Christianity since they are colonizer religions, or even the embrace of any religious practice so long as it is not Christian.

Grosfoguel offers a third approach, which he calls “critical border thinking”. He writes, “border epistemologies subsume/redefine the emancipatory rhetoric of modernity from the cosmologies and epistemologies of the subaltern…” (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 16). The result is what Grosfoguel calls a “redefinition/subsumption of citizenship, democracy, human rights, humanity, economic relations beyond the narrow definitions imposed by European modernity” (Grosfoguel 2008, p. 16). It is not simply a matter of blending colonizer and colonized, or of taking the things we like from each to create a new thing. It is a changing of what terms mean.

Another way to describe what Grosfoguel calls “border thinking” is “hybridity” or “hybridization”.

Mona West says hybridization:

reflects a postcolonial reality that emerged from the relationship between and within the colonized and the colonizers’ cultures. The aspects of the dominant European culture are implanted in or grafted onto the colonized culture, submerging its beliefs and values within its own to create a hybrid culture that is neither one nor the other…hybridity is an identity that refuses a homogenous purity.

(West 2016, p. 51)

West applies the concept to LGBTQ faith communities. I believe it can be applicable within the ELCA as a way of reading Luther. Luther is grafted onto culture. What grows is something new.

HyeRan Kim-Cragg has described hybridity in terms of arkhe and repario. The colonizer kept the arkhe or official archive, having destroyed any other records. When it came time to do anything, the repario or repertoire never matched the archive. In worship, this manifested as official rites brought from Europe (arkhe) being enacted in new ways. Kim-Cragg even argues that every eucharistic act today is both archive and repertoire, a hybridization of the official order of things and what actually happens (Kim-Cragg 2016, pp. 79, 80). In this sense, I seek a non-anti-Semitic hybridization of Luther.

2.3. Decolonial Readings of Luther

What might a decolonial approach to Luther look like? If we take up Grosfoguel’s three approaches, we can first note what Grosfoguel calls fundamentalism, what I describe ecclesiologically as a rejection of Luther and Lutheranism. Naming everyone who has left the church and citing their reasons would take forever. What I describe here is a rejection of institutions, denominations, and theological legacies that nonetheless allows itself to be defined by what is being rejected. A potential example in contemporary Lutheranism is Lenny Duncan.

Duncan was part of the Decolonize Lutheranism social media project in the 2010s, as of 2024 a defunct web domain and a long untended Facebook page. Duncan was an ELCA pastor and wrote Dear Church as a “love letter” to the ELCA. In it he defines the ELCA as a radically loving and accepting community infected with racism. Duncan calls this racism a theological problem rooted in the way Lutherans are “trained to search for reconciliation” by circumventing repentance (Duncan 2019, pp. 6, 39). Duncan does not mention Luther or his theology in the book. Duncan quit the ELCA in 2022, stating publicly, “This is not the end of my story with the Divine…. It’s just the end of my story with the ELCA” (Duncan 2022). Ministers resign often for complex reasons, and Duncan names racism and frustration with institutions among his. My reason for mentioning Duncan is to offer him as an example of what Grosfoguel describes as assertion of a pure space outside of European modernity and coloniality. One could read Duncan’s exit from the ELCA—but not from faith in God—as an assertion of a religious space outside of religion. In Grosfoguel’s terms, the religion is still setting the agenda as that over against which the new space is defined. For those of us who wish to stay within Lutheranism, such departure is not an option.

Timothy Wengert’s work on Luther could represent an ecclesiastical analog to what Grosfoguel calls “Third World Nationalism”, the adoption of the European model as our own. In Reading the Bible with Martin Luther, Wengert presents Luther’s biblical hermeneutic as sound and perpetually efficacious. Wengert sums up Luther’s hermeneutic with Luther’s phrase Was Christum treibet, which Wengert translates, “What pushes Christ”. The key to any biblical passage is what pushes Christ (Wengert 2013, p. 6). The 21st-century preacher can employ Luther’s method without modification. They must deploy the proper distinction between law and gospel, revealing our sin and God’s promise of Christ (Wengert 2013, pp. 22–46). They must read from the proper center of Scripture: “the very weakness of the crucified and resurrected one”, also called the “theology of the cross” (Wengert 2013, pp. 67, 126). And they must read Scripture from “the experience of the God who justifies the ungodly” (Wengert 2013, p. 126). Such an approach takes Luther as he is. It trusts that his method will eschew problems like claiming Jews do not really exist. I have already argued that this does not work.

An example of a hybrid approach can be found in the work of Deanna Thompson. Thompson critiques Luther from the position of feminism. She expresses the challenge in personal terms. “Some days I encounter Luther basking in his and others’ sufferings in ways my feminist self rejects as masochistic. Other days I encounter feminist theologians who avoid women’s own chronic predisposition to sin, which my Lutheran self cannot affirm” (Thompson 2004, p. xi). Thompson’s project seeks not simply to blend Luther and feminism, or to take aspects she likes from each. It is a changing of what terms mean.

Thompson interrogates Luther and Feminism on matters of Sin, a Male Savior, and Atonement. She inverts the usual law–gospel order in discussing Sin, arguing that a better approach is starting with the gospel of hope without losing sight of the reality of Sin (Thompson 2004, p. 115). She suggests overcoming idolatry of Jesus’s maleness “by reasserting the image of the crucified woman as the location of Christ today” (Thompson 2004, p. 125). She advocates for the replacement of Luther’s classic “joyous exchange—in Luther presented as the marriage of Jesus to us the “wicked harlot”—with the model of Jesus befriending humanity (Thompson 2004, p. 136). These approaches exhibit what Grosfoguel describes as the redefinition of terms beyond the received European (Luther-an) thinking, and what West described as hybridity. It is a theology that is not Luther’s but also not feminism as Thompson receives it. It is a new thing.

2.4. Decolonizing Luther’s Anti-Semitism

Thompson’s interrogation of patriarchy provides some clues as to how one might approach Luther’s anti-Semitism. It bears mentioning that she also addresses Luther’s anti-Semitism directly, observing rightly that “because Luther viewed all Old Testament passages in light of how they preached the promises of Christ, he continuously found Jewish exegesis offensive to Christ” (Thompson 2004, p. 91). She argues that those who wish to use Luther must draw attention to his inconsistency in claiming all people put Jesus on the cross, but Jews alone bear responsibility for it. And, most tantalizingly, she suggests we push Luther’s “vision of the Old Testament as theologically significant in its own right to include Jewish interpretations of the text, as well as demanding a more nuanced dialectical approach to Israel and the Jews as integral to the Christian story” (Thompson 2004, p. 91).

How, then, may the preacher today subsume and redefine the theology received from Luther? It will, I believe, involve a redefinition of no less than Christ himself. The sticking point for Luther is not simply that the Old Testament pushes Christ or that Jewish exegesis is offensive to Christ. The sticking point for Luther is that Christ is everything. Luther personally depended upon Christ as he preached him. Before his “breakthrough” and (to him) new vision of a loving and gracious God, Luther would confess his sins for hours, despising the God who demanded so much (Thompson 2004, p. 8). Then, Luther realized God clothed the sinner in God’s own righteousness. “The magnitude of this realization for Luther cannot be underestimated…” (Thompson 2004, p. 9). Luther knows all depends on Christ because he experiences it personally. There is salvation in Christ alone.

A decolonial reading of Luther cannot hold this position. We imported Luther and his sixteenth-century Christ from Europe when we emigrated. This Christ does not tolerate difference. He is offended by Jews. For contemporary Lutherans (and for Christians who want to draw on Luther) who will not worship a Christ offended by Jews, there are choices such as those suggested by Grosfoguel: depart the tradition (but allow it to set the agenda), embrace the tradition (and reencode its problems), or hybridize. That is going to mean hybridizing the Christ we get from Luther.

Some prominent Lutherans already embrace the idea of Christ “among others” rather than Christ alone. Notably, Nadia Bolz-Weber has stated in her book Pastrix that she is open to other forms of revelation and spirituality besides Christianity (Bolz-Weber [2013] 2021, p. 15). For others, this is a dangerous direction to travel in as it challenges the bases of Christian doctrine.

The ELCA has already moved in this direction of Christ “among others”. The Good Friday liturgy in Evangelical Lutheran Worship embodies such a shift in its Bidding Prayers (traditionally offered after the sermon and hymn of the day). They include petitions “for our sisters and brothers who share our faith in Jesus Christ”, “for the Jewish people, the first to hear the word of God”, “for those who do not share our faith in Jesus Christ”, and “for those who do not believe in God”. Each prayer concludes, “We ask this through Christ our Lord” (ELCA 2006, pp. 636, 637). The decolonial emphasis in that conclusion rests on the first word: we ask this… It is the recognition that we who are praying are Christian, and that Christ is our Lord, but there are other possibilities. The language of the prayers has evolved from the 1978 Lutheran Book of Worship in which participants prayed that the Jewish people “may arrive with us at the fullness of redemption” (LBW 1978, p. 140). This clause has been struck. By the early 21st century, ELCA Lutherans recognized that prayers for the Jewish people should not impose Christian ideas upon them. Similar changes have been made to the other petitions referenced.

But that is not a complete changing of terms. It is still Luther’s sixteenth-century Christ “if you want him”, and if you do not want him, we will not make a big deal out of it. Hybridizing Christ might mean that when a preacher seeks to interpret Scripture by asking “what pushes Christ”, by “Christ” they mean someone who is Jewish, someone who loves and does not abandon his own people. By “Christ” they might mean someone who as a human did not know everything and therefore cannot be expected to know it now. By “Christ”, they might mean someone who as divine is beyond our comprehension and whose thoughts we cannot know exhaustively. Decolonizing Luther will mean hybridizing Christ.

2.5. An Exegetical Example

Saint Mark’s story of Jesus and the Syro-phoenician woman offers us a test case for pushing a hybrid Christ. The reading is paired in the Revised Common Lectionary with the healing of a man who is deaf and has impeded speech (Mark 7: 24–37). It follows a text in which Mark has inaccurately stated that all Jews of his day ritually wash their hands, their food, and their cookware and utensils. Jesus rejects the practice, and in the process, declares all foods clean (Mark 7: 1–23). Jesus’ wholesale rejection of Jewish identity markers contrasts sharply with his refusal to heal the Syro-phoenician woman’s daughter because she is a “dog”. The text is ripe for pushing Christ as one who creates a new reality in which Jewish identity markers mean nothing, and instead this gentile woman and her daughter belong. Interpreted this way, the text becomes Christ versus Judaism. Perhaps the preacher tries to draw a contemporary analogy—e.g., Judaism in Mark is like rule-based Christianity today, Jesus’ welcome of the woman and her daughter is like welcoming Christianity today. But such an analogy depends upon a certain presentation of Judaism, one that is dead compared to Christianity. Could hybridizing Christ help avoid this?

The hybrid Christ is Jewish. To the best of our knowledge, Jesus never left Judaism. When the New Testament Jesus attacks or insults Judaism, the first order of interpretation is to recognize that he does so from within. Paula Fredriksen observes that New Testament arguments over practice sound like typical intra-Jewish arguments. “Within a first-century intra-Jewish context, such arguments would and did sound like conflicting ideas about the right way to be Jewish” (Fredriksen 2010, p. 81). It is possible that Mark is simply wrong about Jewish practice, but even then his text must be understood as one about the right way to worship the God of Israel. Moreover, Mark specified that Jesus had been in an argument with “Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem”. The target is Pharisaism, and possibly more precisely that from Judea. (The phrase “all the Jews” could mean “all the Judeans”.) If this is typical intra-Jewish argument, then the whole scene preceding the encounter with the Syro-phoenician woman can and probably should be read as an argument over the right way to be Jewish. Jesus’ trip to Tyre in Mark 7: 24 is not the start of a gentile mission rejecting dead and legalistic Judaism; it is a trip to Tyre. Period.

What, then, is Jesus doing in the argument? Warren Carter notes that Mark identifies the Syro-phoenician woman as a Hellene, an elite Greek (Carter 2019, p. 192). Tyre itself is an economically powerful city, and her location in it could mark her as simultaneously elite (unlike Jesus) and under Roman rule (like Jesus). Sharon Ringe contends that the woman is “portrayed as part of the group in the region whose policies and lifestyle would have been a source of suffering for her mostly poorer, Jewish neighbors” (Ringe 2001, p. 86). Jesus, “not wanting anyone to know he was there”, is met by an elite woman who asks for an exorcism. Jesus reacts to her wealth and power the way we might expect from the brother of St. James (James 2: 6–7, “Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?”). Here, in St. Mark’s Tyre, Jesus tells the elite woman, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7: 27). What is Jesus doing in the argument? Insulting a rich woman. He is also going to lose. Her response—“Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs”—is perhaps rephrased: if I was your dog, you would feed me. She wins with that. A hybrid Christ can lose arguments! There is more.

This scene and the one following it are connected by the Greek word “to throw”. The woman asks Jesus to throw out the demon. Jesus says it is not right to throw children’s food to dogs. After Jesus concedes defeat, the woman goes home and “finds the child having been thrown on the bed”. The NRSV’s choice of “lying” misses the divine passive, and the sense that there has been an altercation—a struggle—inside the daughter between Jesus and the demon. Jesus won.

The demonic is not mere superstition. It is not a pre-scientific explanation for illness in general or mental illness in particular. Recent studies in trauma have shown “demons and spirits” to be among known symptoms of dissociation in response to trauma (Van der Hart et al. 2006, p. 79). Before Franz Fanon became known for his anti-racism and anti-colonialism, he studied psychology and worked with psychiatric patients (both colonizers and colonized) with disorders that arose from the reality of French colonial violence. Patients with delusions, horrifying impulses, committing acts of violence of which they were unaware, could with therapy trace their difficulty to a brutal encounter between colonizer and colonized (Fanon 2021, pp. 181–233). Richard Horsley observes a correlation between an increase in episodes of spirit possession and exorcism cults and foreign invasions in Africa. The case for colonization and its demons is a subject for another study. Suffice it to say, with Horsley, that the “appearance of destructive heavenly or other spiritual forces (‘fallen angels’, ‘demons’) in Judean scribal texts coincides with the increase in military invasions by Hellenistic and then Roman imperial armies” (Horsley 2021, p. 69). When Jesus throws the demon out of the Syro-phoenician girl, perhaps he throws out damage done by imperial Rome. Mark does not tell us specifics, but imperial armies use the same playbook from place to place. The mother’s sight of her daughter’s “having been thrown” is evidence of Jesus having fought colonial violence.

In the following scene, Jesus meets a man who is deaf and has impeded speech. He “throws” his fingers into the man’s ears, connecting this encounter to the previous one. Then, Mark says, Jesus looks up to heaven and says, “to him”: “be opened”. To whom was Christ speaking? A hybrid Christ does not know everything and cannot be expected to. He has just seen what colonialism did to a girl—a girl from a wealthy and powerful family—and has thrown it out. Now, he looks up to heaven and says to God, “be opened”. He is not leaving Judaism or declaring it dead. He is thoroughly Jewish and has argued with fellow Jews about how to be Jewish. Thoroughly Jewish, he now places himself in solidarity with the world before God. He is crying to his God to be open, open to this man, open to a Syro-phoenician girl and her mother, and yes, to Jesus’ own people. He is crying to a God whose thoughts he does not know, not exhaustively. And he is crying to us—the readers, the listeners, the preachers—to be opened to those around us affected by violence or trauma. Perhaps such a hybrid Christ opens up a new space. He is not Luther’s Christ, nor is he simply the opposite of Luther’s Christ. He is a new thing. Perhaps.

3. Conclusions

This is but a beginning. It is a beginning in the sense that proposing a hybrid Christ opens up many possibilities (and perhaps a large can of worms). It is also a beginning in the sense that the encounter with Christ who justifies the ungodly creates new beginnings. With every justification, with every human loved, Christ challenges what we think we know of him. Preachers can allow the imported European sixteenth-century Christ with his anti-Semitism to set the agenda, either by defining what we are or what we are not. Or preachers can let Christ do what he does: become incarnate in the preachers’ world, be subsumed and redefined, be “grafted” onto the world and allowed to hybridize. The resulting theology is neither Luther nor anti-Luther. It is a new thing.