Christine Helmer

Professor of Religion

Department of Religious Studies

Office: Crowe Hall, 1860 Campus Drive, 4-148
Phone: (847) 491-2616
E-Mail: c-helmer@northwestern.edu

Office Hours: Fridays 12-2 (Winter 2010)

Christine Helmer teaches Christian theology. Her areas of specialization are the sixteenth-century religious reformations (particularly the theology of Martin Luther), nineteenth-century German intellectual thought (particularly the philosophy and theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher), biblical theology, and contemporary systematic theology. After completing her doctorate at Yale, and holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Tübingen, she taught at the Claremont School of Theology and at Harvard Divinity School.

Her first book was The Trinity and Martin Luther:  A Study on the Relationship between Genre, Language and the Trinity in Luther’s Works (1523-1546) (Philipp von Zabern, 1999).  She is completing The Dialektik and the Canon:  Schleiermacher’s Theological Systematicity.  She is also editor or co-editor of Biblischer Text und theologische Theoriebildung (Neukirchener Verlag, 2001), Schleiermachers Dialektik:  Die Liebe zum Wissen in Philosophie und Theologie (Mohr Siebeck, 2003), Truth:  Interdisciplinary Dialogues in a Pluralist Age (Peeters, 2003), One Scripture or Many?  Canon from Biblical, Theological, and Philosophical Perspectives (Oxford, 2004), Schleiermacher and Whitehead:  Open Systems in Dialogue (Walter de Gruyter, 2004), Biblical Interpretation:  History, Context, and Reality (SBL, 2005), and The Multivalence of Biblical Texts and Theological Meanings (SBL, 2006).  She has translated numerous theological articles from German into English.  She is founder and chair of the Liberal Theologies Consultation for the American Academy of Religion.

Professor Helmer has most recently published The Global
Luther: A Theologian for Modern Times with Fortress Press, an exciting collection of essays written by internationally known Luther scholars. You can also see the conference The Global Luther: Reconsidering the Contributions of Martin Luther on the web. Dr. Helmer will give a keynote address at the conference Reformation Theology: Reception and Transformation in Aarhus in August 2009.

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