Dissent as a Means of Salvation? Soteriological Dimensions of Dissent

This selected session sought to respond to the conference theme of "Social Salvation" by drawing on work being done at KU Leuven as part of the "Dissenting Church" research project.The panelists considered dissent's relationship to salvation from historical, empirical, and philosophical perspectives.The panel featured three papers and a robust question and answer portion.Ryszard Bobrowicz's paper, "Truth or Obedience?Dissent as a Conflict Between Individual and Communal Soteriology," examined three cases of medieval dissent (St.Francis of Assisi, Jan Hus, and Martin Luther) and the institutional responses to them.Bobrowicz argued that these episodes were not just conflicts over power, but over competing conceptions of salvation, with the dissenters understanding salvation from an "individual perspective" and the hierarchy viewing salvation as a "collective responsibility" (albeit one held in trust by the magisterium).Dissent threatens those in power by calling into question their role as the authors of "legible" categories of salvation.The three cases also highlight different possible outcomes to dissent: St. Francis's dissent, while radical, still sought to remain loyal to magisterial authority and so was eventually domesticated by the church; Hus rejected both magisterial and secular authority, appealing directly to Christ and divine law, and was ultimately destroyed (he was burned at the stake in 1415); but in the case of Luther, dissent created permanent disruption in the form of Protestant schism, in large part because he enjoyed the ongoing support and protection of secular authorities while publicly and powerfully rejecting magisterial authority.This latter case is "extremely important in the contemporary context," Bobrowicz claimed, because many contemporary Catholic dissenters "align themselves with the broader society" and "its legal/moral framework(s)."Avoiding future schism will require balancing the magisterium's "collective responsibility" with the voices of individual dissenters.Travis LaCouter's paper, "When Doctrine Wounds: Dissent as Response to Feelings of Ontological Disjunction," developed the Foucauldian concept of "ontological harmony" in light of church teaching on sexuality and gender.For Michel Foucault, "ontological harmony" consists of a reasonably coherent alignment between bios and logos, that is, between one's life and the account one is able to give of one's life.The church, however, presents an account of the human person that many experience as alienating and disjunctive with their lived experience, thus giving rise to ontological disjunction.LaCouter demonstrated this through three case studies drawn from original interviews (namely, an out gay priest, a Roman Catholic Woman Priest, and a young trans Catholic).In each of these cases, the individual felt a serious misalignment of bios and logos such that their lives were rendered more or less