Andrew J. Peterson

Research Fellow

Project: “The Justice of Grace”

When early modern Protestant Christians thought about how we should live, they thought about a horrific death. In Jesus’s sacrificial embrace of his gruesome torture and execution, they found ideals which shaped their understanding of how religious and civic communities should conceptualize God’s love and forgiveness. From these commitments, they drew inferences about how to pursue harmony and address grievous injustice. Convinced that these early modern accounts of forgiveness, love, and sacrifice fare poorly, Dr. Peterson’s research develops alternative accounts of these concepts in order to construct a more ethically satisfying description of God’s saving grace. These, in turn, furnish practical ideals which can better serve religious communities, helping them resist domination and instead ally virtuous religion to the promotion of our collective flourishing.

Bio: Dr. Peterson is a scholar of Protestant theology and ethics and is a graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary (Ph.D. and M.Div.) and Hope College. He was a Fulbright Fellow at the Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen, Germany and has taught in the Philosophy and Religion Department at Rowan University since 2017. Dr. Peterson’s research lies at the intersection of Christian theology, moral philosophy, and philosophy of religion.