Material Theology

A collection of essays voicing "nontraditional" perspectives in Lutheran theology emerging from and for the Global South on a variety of studies and topics.

Traditionally, the Lutheran family of churches has been associated historically and geographically with German and Scandinavian peoples and cultures. Yet the largest Lutheran university operates in Brazil and the largest Lutheran churches are now in Ethiopia and Tanzania. A sector of Lutheranism has now become a microcosm of the momentous gravitational shift of Christianity to the Global South, sharing and appropriating in unique ways many of its features, tensions, and negotiations. However, students, teachers, and religious leaders in the West or the Global North are seldom familiar with the voices of seasoned and emerging Lutheran scholars doing theology from and for churches and communities in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and among the children of the Global South in North America. This lack of familiarity with southern cast Lutheranism leads to little or no integration of its insights and proposals into curriculum and scholarship at universities, seminaries, and other centers of higher learning and continuing education.

This collection studies the intersection of Global South Christianity and Lutheran ecclesial traditions. Divided into four major areas of research, the chapters introduce western readers to significant contributions of Global South authors writing on Lutheran identity, theological themes, worship and the arts, and missions and society. Using frameworks from fields of study ranging from systematic theology to musicology and from patristics to theologies of migration, authors deal with issues such as confessional commitment, justification and cultural hybridity, religious nationalism, catholicity and migration, public theology amid persecution, devotional modes of theological discourse, the intersection of ritual and justice, the interplay of tradition and innovation in worship, the postcolonial retrieval of African dance in worship, religious pluralism, urban missiology, and human trafficking.