Download e-book for kindle: Passionate Embrace: Luther on Love, Body, and Sensual by Elisabeth Gerle

Luther, ardour, and sensualism?
In an age of physique worship in addition to physique loathing, Elisabeth Gerle explores new paths. Protestant ethics has usually been linked to paintings and responsibility, except for sensuality, sexuality, and different pleasures. Gerle embarks on a talk with Martin Luther in discussion with modern theologians on attitudes towards physique, sensuality, wish, sexuality, lifestyles, and politics. She attracts on Eros theology to problem conventional Lutheran stereotypes, similar to the dichotomies among varied different types of love, in addition to among spirit and body.

Gerle argues that Luther's religious step forward, the place grace and presents of production turned valuable, presents new aspiring to intercourse and hope in addition to to paintings, physique, and traditional existence. girls are visible in new light--as partners, independent moral brokers, a part of the priesthood of all.

This had innovative outcomes in medieval Europe, and it represents a problem to modern theologies with a nostalgic urge for food for austerity, asceticism, and feminine submission.
Luther's erotic and gender-fluid language is a fit problem to oppressive political buildings established on greed, revenue, and pageant. A revised Scandinavian production theology and a deep feel of the incarnational secret are assets for modern theology and ethics.

"Elisabeth Gerle unearths the long-lost and lovable body in Luther's theology. Without muffling the interior contradictions and half-millennium distance, Gerle solicits during this step forward of sensual materiality, of bright cognizance moral and erotic to our physicality, an important ancestor for sexual politics and embodied spirituality this day. Her writing fantastically plays the eagerness it so lucidly describes." 
--Catherine Keller, Drew University
 
"Taking physique because the place to begin for theology sheds severe mild at the risks of physique cult vs. physique loathing this day, and the historical dualism with its many tentacles. Elisabeth Gerle returns to the basics of Christian religion: God mysteriously, but relatively, found in physique, and humans' sensory event of God in grief and pleasure. during this aesthetically and intellectually stimulating remedy, immersed in apt international discourse throughout disciplines, Martin Luther emerges as an best friend for a holistic spirituality with political outcomes. a different publication, written with passion."
--Kirsi Stjerna, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
 
"Lund ethicist Elisabeth Gerle's enthralling voice comes as a present to the North American public. Gerle recovers Luther's actually unique theological genius in bringing to the fore the consequences of the Reformer's view of God within the passions of the flesh. This paintings liberates love, physique, and sensuality from a self-discipline that for too many a century entrapped theological dogmas, perverting into sins of the flesh the loving sensuous fervors of the physique. With the aid of Luther's theological incarnational flip, eroticism gets its right position in theological language. This publication fills a long-standing lacuna. Passionate Embrace is certainly such a lot embraceable."
--Vitor Westhelle, writer of Eschatology and area: The misplaced size in Theology Past and Present

Elisabeth Gerle is Professor of Ethics at Lund collage and at Church of Sweden examine division. Her fresh books care for faith and politics, Luther, politics, and the erotic.