“Friendship and Sanctification:” Cambria Kaltwasser at LATC 2025

Cambria Kaltwasser will be at LATC 2025 in March presenting a paper that uses friendship as a theological category for thinking about the dynamics of salvation. Her work will feature one of the closest engagements with the thought of Karl Barth at the conference, which will add a lot to the mix. I asked her a few questions about the paper; here are her answrs.

Q: LATC 2025’s theme is Receiving Redemption, and it focuses on how salvation is received by human persons and communities. Why did this aspect of soteriology catch your attention and make you propose a paper on it?

A: The conference theme evokes questions that have long animated me regarding grace and human agency. Like many of my fellow Reformed theologians, I inherited a certain allergy toward anything smacking of works righteousness, which too often included any concrete account of personal regeneration in Christ. For me, seminary began a decades-long process of reconciling Luther’s alien righteousness with an embodied experience of the faith that is liberatory and that involves growth. This conference immediately appealed to me for how its themes might shed light on confusions about grace that cut to the heart of divisions between Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians.

Q: The title of your paper is “Friendship and Sanctification: An Ecumenical Account of Growth in the Christian Life.”  How will you be approaching the conference theme in this paper?

A:  My paper will focus on a puzzle about sanctification that animates Lutheran and Reformed soteriologies: How can we do justice to the transformative character of the Christian life without undermining the unconditional nature of grace by making Christ’s work appear to hinge on human agency? Drawing particularly from Karl Barth, I will propose that friendship is a helpful metaphor for reframing the Christian life, and questions of sanctification, in particular. Friendships are by their very nature gratuitous and unearned, while also involving growth and transformation. One can grow in a friendship without ever having a claim to it.  As a paradigm for the Christian life, “friendship with God” averts both the logic of commodification and the suggestion of self-sufficiency while also safeguarding the intelligibility of growth in the Christian life.

Q: Can you describe how this paper fits in with your previous theological work, or with your recent scholarship?

A: Since my doctoral work, I’ve been thinking about internal discrepancies within Barth’s theology, above all when it comes to human agency. Recently, I’ve been focused on Barth’s use of the motif of friendship to make sense of what he got right about our life with God as well as what he may have gotten wrong about it. Sanctification is at the heart of my inquiries.