Verba Vitae – A Serious Christian Journal of Life and its Significance
Verba Vitae is committed to bringing the classical Christian tradition into conversation with life issues now confronting us. Modeling the reasoned logos of the theological tradition, Verba Vitae explores the truth-claims made by thinkers and examines the grounds upon which these assertions are made.
Lutherans For Life is proud and honored to be involved in the Verba Vitae project in fellowship and collaboration with the Institute of Lutheran Theology. We are especially delighted to bring the Church and the world the fine scholarship its contributors and their reflections represent.
Link to all editions: Verba Vitae
In the SPRING 2026 issue of Verba Vitae …
Articles
- Redemption, not Revolution: Human Flourishing through Cross-Shaped Love by Dan Lioy
- Alienation, Vocation and the Ontology of Life by Dennis Bielfeldt
- Vocational Balance: A Lutheran Vision for Human Flourishing by Eric Brinkert
- Calling a Thing What It Is: Disability as Ostracon and Schule Christi in a Lutheran Theologia Crucis by David Patterson
- When Reasons No Longer Persuade by Dennis Bielfeldt
Book Reviews
Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett
The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond
Reviewed by Nils I. Borquist
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity
Reviewed by Nils I. Borquist
Joe Dallas
Christians in a Cancel Culture: Speaking with Truth and Grace in a Hostile World
Reviewed by Nils I. Borquist
Welcome to the SPRING 2026 Issue
The essays gathered here take up a question that has become newly unavoidable for pastors, teachers, scholars, and thoughtful Christians generally: What kind of moral and intellectual formation can sustain humane life amid the centrifugal pressures of late-modern critique? Our theme—“Christian Vocation as an Antidote to Radical Contemporary Critical Theory”—does not ask readers to deny the reality of social injury, nor does it counsel retreat into private piety. It asks, rather, whether the Christian doctrine of vocation might offer a deeper grammar for truth-telling, public responsibility, neighbor-love, and the preservation of human life within the concrete relations in which God has placed us.
By “radical contemporary critical theory,” several contributors to this issue name a broad family of approaches that interpret human life primarily through the lens of power. Within such approaches, identities are often parsed into rival collectivities, institutions are treated as inherently oppressive, and truth claims are recast as strategies of domination. The attraction of such accounts is not difficult to understand. They can illuminate real patterns of exclusion, distortion, and misrecognition. They can expose the ways supposedly neutral norms are often sustained by social interests. Yet the essays in this volume press a deeper question: What must be true about human life if our language of alienation, injustice, domination, and liberation is to have genuine moral force? If critique is severed from any thicker account of creation, moral order, divine address, and human responsibility, it risks becoming self-consuming. It may still denounce injustice, but it struggles to say why injustice is truly unjust rather than merely an unwanted arrangement of forces. It may expose power, but it has difficulty explaining why power should be ordered toward truth, mercy, and the neighbor’s good.
Against this backdrop, vocation emerges not as a slogan for “finding one’s purpose,” nor merely as the religious sanctification of ordinary work. It is, more profoundly, a theological account of what human life is: life received from God, addressed by God, and given for the neighbor within concrete forms of creaturely existence. These forms include household, church, and political community; office and station; the duties that come with finitude; and the freedom that comes with the Gospel. Vocation resists the flattening of persons into autonomous self-creators on the one hand or politicized instances of group identity on the other. It is also, crucially, a doctrine of limits. It distinguishes God’s saving work from our temporal tasks, and thus it provides an eschatological reserve that refuses both utopian revolution and cynical resignation.
Dan Lioy’s opening essay, “Redemption, not Revolution: Human Flourishing through Cross-Shaped Love,” establishes a confessional frame by retrieving the Lutheran doctrines of the Two Kingdoms and vocation as an antidote to contemporary critical theory’s tendency toward totalizing power-analysis. Through sustained engagement with Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 7, and Matthew 22, Lioy argues that vocation names divinely ordered arenas of stewardship rather than intrinsically corrupt structures to be perpetually deconstructed. Justification by faith alone secures human identity apart from ideological performance; vocation then directs that freed life outward in embodied service to the neighbor.
Dennis Bielfeldt’s “Alienation, Vocation, and the Ontology of Life” meets critical theory on its own terrain and presses a fundamental question: What must be true about human life for the language of alienation, reification, and misrecognition to carry genuine moral force? The essay argues that even the Frankfurt tradition’s powerful diagnoses tacitly rely upon an integrity of life that postmetaphysical critique cannot finally underwrite. Vocation is retrieved here as an ontological claim: human life is constituted by divine address and givenness. Grace, therefore, does not mute critique. It makes critique’s deepest seriousness possible by grounding the life whose distortion critique seeks to name.
Eric Brinkert’s “Vocational Balance: A Lutheran Vision for Human Flourishing” turns to the pastoral and cultural consequences of contemporary individualism. If utilitarian and expressive accounts of the self increasingly fail to secure human well-being, especially among the young, Brinkert argues that a Lutheran doctrine of vocation—shaped by Luther’s teaching on the Three Estates—offers a more credible account of flourishing. By emphasizing givenness and giftedness, and by proposing “vocational balance” across the stages and callings of life, the essay commends a practical wisdom that resists the idolization of professional achievement without retreating from responsibility.
David Patterson’s “Calling a Thing What It Is: Disability as Ostracon and Schule Christi in a Lutheran Theologia Crucis” addresses a domain in which liberationist critique has often done important work, yet can still remain captive to what it op-poses. Patterson argues that protest alone may remain dependent upon a “normate” imagination that treats disability primarily as deficit. Against this, the theologia crucis teaches the church to speak truthfully—to “call a thing what it is”—and to receive disability as a cruciform pedagogy, a Schule Christi that trains the community in dependence, patience, mutual care, and truthful love. The image of the ostracon—the broken shard that becomes the surface for inscription—becomes an invitation to recognize how God writes the Gospel upon creaturely fracture.
Finally, Bielfeldt’s “When Reasons No Longer Persuade” examines a marked shift in public life: the erosion of shared practices of giving and asking for reasons. Engaging Wilfrid Sellars alongside Marx, Mannheim, the Frankfurt School, and standpoint epistemologies, the essay traces how beliefs are increasingly construed less as conclusions responsive to reasons and more as manifestations of social location. The implications are profound. When argument gives way to disclosure, and persuasion to the presentation of standpoint, the “space of reasons” that makes intelligible disagreement possible begins to collapse. In such a world, theological speech is endangered as well, for theology depends upon the possibility that claims may be made, tested, clarified, and judged according to reasons rather than merely located within competing regimes of power.
Taken together, these essays do not offer a single program, nor do they treat crit-ical theory as a monolith. They share, however, a common conviction: the church’s most faithful response to contemporary critique is neither anxious accommodation nor reactionary dismissal, but renewed confidence in the Gospel’s freedom and in the realism of vocation. Vocation is an antidote not because it silences grievance, excuses injustice, or baptizes the status quo, but because it names the form of a hu-man life that is first received from God and then given for the neighbor. It reminds us that truth is not reducible to power, that persons are not exhausted by social position, and that love is not an abstraction, but a concrete practice enacted within the ordinary places where God has bound us to one another.
We invite our readers, therefore, to engage these essays carefully, to test their claims, and to consider anew how the doctrine of vocation might restore moral seriousness, public intelligibility, and Christian hope in an age increasingly tempted to construe life itself through suspicion alone.
Dennis Bielfeldt General Editor, Verba Vitae
A Call for Papers
Verba Vitae is seeking essay submissions for the following upcoming issues:
- Volume 3, No. 2 (Summer 2026): “Christian Medical Ethics in a Secular Medical Environment”
- Volume 3, No. 3 (Autumn 2026): “Christianity and Transhumanism: Ethical Considerations”
- Volume 3, No. 4 (Winter 2026): “Artificial Intelligence: A Rigorous Examination”
- Volume 4, No. 1 (Spring 2027): “The Issue of Gender: Old and New Perspectives in Conflict”
- Volume 4, No. 2 (Summer 2027): “The Dawn of Life: Pre and Neonatal Life in Modern Society”
- Volume 4, No. 3 (Autumn 2027): “The Power of Language: Navigating Ethical Communication in the Era of Newspeak”
- Volume 4, No. 4 (Winter 2027): “Facing the Final Frontier: Divine Perspectives and Social Narratives on Mortality”
All essay submissions (on any life-related topic) should be made at:
https://verba-vitae.org/index.php/vvj/index
Submitting authors need to register with a Verba Vitae account.
Please see the Submissions Guidelines for important information!
Any questions should be directed to:
Douglas V. Morton, Associate Editor | dmorton@ilt.edu
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