Conclusion: Part Seven ofA Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions

Reflecting on the atomistic individualism of our contemporary Western “homelessness” (261), Hari reflects favorably on the communitarianism of some Orthodox Jews and the Amish, characterized by intergenerational family life, pro-child parenting by physical proximity, and the “village” it takes to raise a child. Yet he honestly observes also the apparent trade-off involved, with spouses admonished to return in submission to wife-beating husbands, as justified by an “often extreme and brutal theology” (187). In fact, modern Western individualism, which arose in tandem with the sovereign self, arose in part as a justified rebellion against the inbred, stifling parochialism of traditional cultures overseen often enough by a stern, if not brutal deity. If this is the necessary trade-off, however, we are simply reinforced in soul-numbing paralysis. Whence cometh our help?

Hari cautiously explores the need for a new birth, a rebirth of the soul whose desire is curved into itself. And he knows that this is the difficult and intangible matter of “spirituality.” In our culture of bread and circuses, the distractions which keep spiritual life on the surface for fear of being alone with one’s own [dark] thoughts (224,) the need of a new birth is for disillusioning and wrenching change in relation to one’s own ego (25).  A “spiritual” change means to value things differently (226), to break our addiction to self (235). Hari discusses this need most explicitly in his discussion of the “mystical” experience given in psychedelic drugs, whereby the ego is transcended and sees its connection with the whole (226): such ego death puts an end to judgment; all is grace (233).

Perhaps, but upon return to the earth all is not grace, not in the world where malicious envy the fuels structures of malice and injustice, demoralizing culture and afflicting too many individuals with soul killing depression. Here an intervention from outside of the system is needed, to break the grip of the tyranny and shed light in a very dark place that sets free its denizens. Hari brushes up to just this insight although professedly he has no resources with which to pursue it. “It’s thinking about you, you, you that’s helped to make you feel so lousy.” Right! So “yourself flow into other people’s stories” and let “their stories flow into yours.” (182) Salutary! But what if “their stories” are the stories of your oppressors and persecutors, your cheating spouse or petty dictator of a boss, of a drunken rapist or a Wall Street tycoon? And what if these kinds of stories are precisely the ones that have disabled you? How is that to be overcome apart from the interventions of repentance and reparation on their side and the intervention of an unworldly will to reconciliation on the my side? And when the counsel is no more than an imperative – “Don’t be you. Be us. Be we.” (182) – have we anything more here than an enlightened egotism that glosses over the fates of traditional tribalisms in mutually destructive competition up to and including warfare? Is the egotism overcome on the assumption that the imperative is within its own power to perform? Or does that assumption inscribe anew idolization of the self desiring itself?

To Become a Creature Again

Part Six of

A Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions

“We’re such an utterly disconnected culture, we just don’t get human suffering,” tells one of Hari’s researchers into the “grief exception” (43). As we have seen, the most basic connection that has been lost to modern consciousness for Hari is that there can be no brain without its body, no organism without its environment, no mind without other minds, no individual without its society. We are earthlings and cannot transcend this state of embodiment, even though it entails by the law of entropy our final dissolution in death and return to the earth. “You are dust and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3: 19). A corollary of this connection of human being to the humus from which we come, and to which we return, is an ineradicable state of vulnerability that attends any conceivable creature and so along with vulnerability, the problem of pain. Pain is a signal, a rough but vital indicator of danger for embodied earthlings. Imagine, if you will, that by reason alone a parent tried to persuade its child not to put its hand in the pretty blue flame; apart from the acute involuntary pain reaction, the lesson of reason would never be learned in time.

So to become a creature again in connection with one’s own body and through it to the social and natural webs of life, Hari admonishes in conclusion: “You are not a machine with broken parts. You are an animal whose needs are not being met. You need to have the community. You need to have meaningful values, not the junk values you’ve been pumped full of all your life, telling you happiness comes through money and buying objects. You need to have meaningful work. You need the natural world. You need to feel you are respected. You need a secure future. You need connections to all these things. You need to release any shame you might feel for having been mistreated… Pain isn’t your enemy, however much it hurts (and Jesus, I know how much it hurts). It’s your ally – leading you away from a wasted life and pointing the way toward a more fulfilling one” (256-7). “You need your nausea. You need your pain. It’s a message, and we must listen to the message… Stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain” (261).

The particular pain of loneliness precedes depression. Loneliness is an aversive state that can motivate to connect in a shared project in the world that will be meaningful to all involved – just as the Creator observed that it was not good for the man to be alone (Genesis 2: 18), that in all the animal kingdom there was not found for him a suitable partner (Genesis 1:20). And the man at last rejoiced in the Creator’s gift of the woman as “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 1:23). Absent such connection as here provided, loneliness descends into depression as an understandable generalization of hopelessness.

But our contemporary “loneliness isn’t just some inevitable human sadness, like death. It’s a product of the way we live now” (78). This begins with labor where we spend most of our waking hours. People say, Hari reports, that they shut themselves down to get through the work day since in any case they are irrelevant and no one cares what they do. In the former Soviet bloc, the cynical saying was everywhere popular, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Such obsequious cynicism is a “submission response” to the “sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us” who are in a state of “constant status anxiety” (120) since we work as readily replaceable cogs in a vast, impersonal machine of dubious purposes. According to a Gallup poll Hari cites from 2011-12 studying millions of workers across 142 countries, only 13% reported being engaged in their work, 63% said they were not engaged, and a further 23% claimed to be actively disengaged – a far cry from the idyllic tilling of the garden in which the creator placed the first couple.

The alternative, if we would become creatures again, would be to transform the station in life into a vocation of socially meaningful service and production, where one’s voice counts in collaborative projects for purposes of genuine, not junk value. The pertinent example of junk values corrupting economic life according to Hari’s research is seen in the role of big Pharma. “The vast majority of research into whether drugs work or not is funded by big pharmaceutical companies, and they do this research for a specific reason: they want to be able to market those drugs so they can make a profit out of them. That’s why the drug companies conduct their scientific studies in secret, and afterward, they only publish the results that make their drugs look good or make their rivals drugs look worse” (22). Junk values and economy produce junk science. Hari reports how, confronted with the “unvarnished” data he had uncovered, “one group of researchers wrote [to him] that had it had been a “dirty little secret” in the field for a long time that the effects of these drugs on depression itself were in reality tiny” (24).

Assuming the desire for honest science and meaningful vocation, Hari argues that we have a choice for work that would minimize hierarchy and maximize equal participation as opposed to ramping up the humiliation inflicted upon labor as we are doing today. Such a choice exists theoretically, but Hari himself acknowledges here a “huge obstacle,” the “mountain at the center of almost all our lives:” “meaningless work has to be done” (201). Indeed it is “essential” to the world of modernity.

Can drudgery be sugarcoated? Can we “infuse” it with meaning? Can we restore dignity to cogs in the machine? Or is top-down wage slavery with all the humiliation it inflicts upon laborers the necessary price of modernity? What an “amazing victory for their propaganda system,” in any case, “to make you work in an environment you often can’t stand, and to do it for most of your waking life, and see the proceeds of your labor get siphoned off by somebody at the top, and then to make you “think of yourself as a free person.”” (209). The ravenous appetite of neoliberal corporate capitalism for profit extraction as the supreme value reveals the operative deity, the omniscient hyper-efficient processor of information by unregulated markets facilitating the exchange of goods and services. This new Leviathan reduces “many middle-class people” to work “from task to task, without any contract or security,” and Leviathan’s  propaganda system gives it “fancy name: we call it being “self-employed” or the “gig economy” and as a stable sense of the future dissolves before their eyes workers are told “to see it as a form of liberation.” (141).

We can see with Hari’s help what the need is, not only of individuals in depression but of a demoralized culture, if we would become creatures again: satisfying intergenerational families, labor as vocation, each and every fragile life as equally precious, and a politics that values these pre-political forms of human culture and protects them with parental persuasion more than coercive bullying. But we have no idea how to get there from here, in so far as it is a broken and demoralized culture which shapes the perceptions of need (150). Hari puts forward some piecemeal solutions, small steps that can be taken. Fundamentally people can move from private to public understandings of their personal problems (177) and this reconnection with others empowers individuals to fight together (178) for better futures. When we grasp that depression and demoralization are not the fault of diseased brains or moral turpitude, but of a broken culture we see the need for “big changes” (151). One such big change Hari discusses would be universal basic income which would alleviate the constant stress and humiliation the poor experience and better enable the human agency needed to overcome the disconnections endemic to poverty. Big changes needed but how do the paralyzed, the depressed, the demoralized, the hopeless of today arise to affect such big change? Really, to become creatures again?

"Junk Values"

Part Five of a Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions

When the desire of the self becomes self-desire we become addicted to what Hari calls “junk values,” theologically, false loves. Here desire for life becomes envy, greed, lust, covetousness. As opposed to goodwill taking sympathetic joy in others, envy transforms others into enemy competitors for the scarce social resource of glory/recognition. As opposed to the ecstasy of the soul when self-consciousness fades away in the joy of being purely present with others in the fellowship of common work for common good, self-desire instrumentalizes others as stepping stones on the way to ephemeral but costly victories of ego-recognition. Curating and marketing one’s own ego in the consumerist treadmill of insatiable greed for the accumulation of material goods as status symbols only momentarily satisfies in the never-ending game of oneupsmanship.

These junk values are like junk food, says Hari: “materialism is KFC for the soul” (105). “You can have everything a person could possibly need by the standards of our culture – but those standards can badly misjudge what a human being actually needs in order to have a good or even tolerable life. The culture can create a picture of what you “need” to be happy – through all the junk values I had been taught about – that doesn’t fit with what you actually need.” (151). Once again we see how the crucial assumption surfaces that there is a natural and proper humanity of humble, animal needs underlying an alienated state of humanity awash in  a culture of envy. But again the troubling question arises: how are idol worshipers to recognize the clay feet undergirding their symbolizations of self-desire? How are they to break out?

“For thousands of years, philosophers have been suggesting that if you overvalue money and possessions, or if you think about life mainly in terms of how you look to other people, you will be unhappy…” (93) Unhappy? Is that all? It is true of course that Socrates’ love of wisdom, as Plato tells the tale, distracted young careerists in Athens from the lucrative path which parents had put them on and that this “corruption of the morals of youth” led the Athenians to condemn Socrates’ to death– not exactly a “happy” ending in the perspective of the Athenian culture. Augustine in his Confessions tells a similar story about the intervention of a “severe mercy:” how he had climbed to the pinnacle of worldly success as a rhetorician in the splendid Milan of Imperial Rome but found himself miserable, at the mercy of corrupt desires he could not overcome -- until supernatural grace extinguished lust by the gift of a new heart with new desires and true values. Also not, need it be said, a “happy” outcome by the lights of contemporary values as also our modern lights.

Thus I think it doubtful it that such the Socratic or Augustinian models can be sold, or ever were sold, as a ticket to “happiness,” especially as happiness is culturally defined by the junk values at work in “polluting advertising:” “happiness mean[s] being able to buy lots of the things on display.” It is not the utility or beauty of the merchandise in any case but the power of the purchaser as a source of social recognition that is sought here as “happiness.” Such pursuit of happiness by the self curved into itself is at the root of our cultural malaise. Hari himself sees this here as elsewhere when he echoes, probably unconsciously, not the philosophers so much as The Sermon On The Mount with its Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (99). Yet the object of desire here is precisely not “happiness,” but blessedness in relation to the kingdom of heaven as the value (“treasure”) of all values. In any case, the Sermon on the Mount juxtaposes its rule for blessedness to a competitor, the junk value, as Hari puts it, of the “I-want-golden things” rule. Either/or! As the Sermon says: “No one can serve two masters. He will love one and hate the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.”

Does this either/or map the path to breakout for the demoralized soul imprisoned in a corrupt culture just because it makes clear that mortal “happiness” is not the ultimate value? A severe mercy indeed! The objection sounds: must we serve masters at all? Is there a perverse desire underlying this either/or for one’s own subjugation? The sovereign self of modernity does not give up its dream of mastery so easily, not even to the imperatives of The Sermon on the Mount. To disbelieve the idols is to become a creature again, no longer a would-be deity striding on the earth victorious in the fantasy of its idols. But how can an alienated creature breakout of its false loves and love properly?

Breakout: Disbelieving the Idols Part Four of A Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions

Erected to keep the pain at bay but at the terrible, self-defeating cost of numbing all feeling, the prison wall of depression is, to be sure, a self-defeating strategy in the end; it is nonetheless real for that. Seeing that clearly, as those outsiders who would help do see, they urge that the state of depression is not a fixed destiny, that wholesome change is possible. A key concept in this connection for Hari lies in the notion of “neuroplasticity,” the adaptability of the brain to environmental changes. Neuroplasticity is a two-way street: the brain adapts badly to a world perceived as hostile, anesthetizing the unbearable pain that only increases in turn the deadly isolation. Depression is such a bad adaptation. Yet by virtue of neuroplasticity the same brain can in principle break out of this self-imposed prison by renewing or developing new connections, thus altering its relationship to the environment and even altering environment itself. So it is possible to become healthier physically and happier mentally. Because of neuroplasticity, the prison wall of depression is porous. It can be broken into and its redeemed prisoner can break out.

In discussing such possible solutions for breakout in a passage near the end of the book, Hari acknowledges that some people find healing reconnection in prayer. He comments that this would not work for him because he is an atheist. When I read this, I said to myself, “Not so fast!” Not that I would issue Hari an altar call, but rather I would recall contemporary Christians who would help the depressed to the truth expressed by Nietzsche. An atheist moment is integral to critical theology in the Christian tradition, as already the second century apologist Justin Martyr acknowledged in his critique of Roman imperium and its religious sacralization: “With respect to those whom you call gods,” he wrote to Emperor Marcus Aurelius in an open letter, “we are indeed atheists!” Later figures as important in the theological tradition as Martin Luther and Karl Barth also understood that to believe God is to disbelieve pretenders who hold demoralized humanity in thrall within a prison-system of mendacity. As Christopher Morse has taught us, “to believe God is to disbelieve the idols.” In other words, while depression certainly crystallizes and concentrates in afflicted individuals, it is first of all a sickness of culture which has become particularly evident today in the present death throes of the Western world.

In fact, then, much of what Hari exposes in his search for solutions can be seen as a contemporary “nothings,” theologically, idols (1 Corinthians 8:4-6) preferred to no meaning at all. These “nothings,” being exposed as vacuous include much vocationally meaningless contemporary labor, predatory relations in mass society, junk as, family life no haven in the heartless world, the artifices of urban existence as severing the human relationship to nature, and above all the myth of the atomized individual as sovereign master, captain of its own ship. All of these contemporary “nothings,” praised ideologically as liberating achievements of the contemporary Western world, share a common lineage. It is egotism in the philosophical sense of the modern project of the Cartesian-Kantian subject whose transcendent “thinking thing” ontologically subordinates its “extended thing” (its own body) in space and time as master to slave. Just this dualistic egotism is the root “broken connection,” if in reality the brain too is ontologically an extended thing in space and time where its actual relationships as creature to Creator, to other creatures and to the ecological web of life have physical effects for good or for ill.

To see how this is so, let us consider the experience of the sublime. In his third critique, Immanuel Kant discussed the human experience of the sublime precipitated by the overwhelming experience of the gigantic forces of nature: earthquake, volcanic corruption, tornado, hurricane and tsunami. All of these appear as physical threats overwhelming the human ego, stuck as it is in the puny, vulnerable body. What is apparently sublime in its natural majesty amounts to a humiliating display of the modern self’s physical impotence over against such natural forces. But what is truly sublime, Kant counters, is the power of mind. These physical forces can kill the body but not the soul, Kant retorts in effect, as if echoing a thought of Jesus with a quite different sense; for by virtue of the Faculty of Reason, Kant’s transcendental subject towers over the merely physical.

If I may indulge here in a little bit of parody: I may assert my human superiority and defiantly shake my fist at the avalanche as it descends on me because, unlike the avalanche, I know what is happening to me as I am crushed. Such retooling the thought of Jesus (which instructs believers to fear the judgment of God more than the death threats of the Empire) is the quintessence of the Christian Platonism which Nietzsche pilloried; idealism subtly but fatefully relocates the source of inalienable human dignity away from the vocational mandate of the Creator (Genesis 1:26-28) to his human image  and to the possession and exercise of a faculty of intelligence – a faculty, be it noted, which is unequally exercised among human creatures and which serves ideologically therefore to sanction the rule of experts, Kant’s so-called Tribunal of Reason, over base commoners motivated by lesser, merely bodily “inclinations.”

Contrast Kant’s sublime egotism and its political implications to Hari’s account of the sublime with its trajectory towards democratic egalitarianism. When you are depressed, he writes, “you become trapped in your own story, in your own thoughts, and they rattle around in your head with the dull, bitter insistence. Becoming depressed or anxious is a process of becoming a prisoner of your ego, where no air from the outside can get in. But a range of scientists have shown that a common reaction to being out in the natural world is the precise opposite of this sensation – a feeling of awe. Faced with the natural landscape you have a sense that you and your concerns are very small, and the world is very big – and that sensation can shrink the ego down to a manageable size… And this helps you see the deeper and wider ways in which you are connected to everything around you” (129) in the web of life.

But the still depressed Hari had objected to this insight into the sublime’s salutary decentering of the self, “I want my ego. I want to cling to it” (130). In a profound sense, it was all that he had left in his depressed state of mind, his only remaining connection. Two things are to be noticed in Hari’s protest from within his still depressed state, clinging to ego as the sole remaining dignity. First, it is a statement of “want,” of desire. Desire, whether as eros formed carnallly or intellectuallly (so Plato), or alternately, as the lust for domination or charity (so Augustine), is the root motive in all that we do as essentially embodied beings. And so, second, desire as such is a profound indication that no creature has life in and of itself. At the root of its biological being, the living creature is referred to what is outside of the self: to breathe the air, to eat one’s daily bread, to love and be loved and procreate. Thus to come to want one’s own ego represents a self-defeating alienation, because even the proper, healthy self, let alone the distressed and depressed self, cannot bear the burden of such unending desire. It is remains essentially needy so long as it lives; self-desire, the “glory” (so Hobbes) or “recognition” (so Hegel) sought, is a god that will fail. Unsurprisingly, upon failure, desire curved into itself spirals down in defeat onto a suicidal path. But it does a lot of social and ecological damage on the way down.  

The States of Nature and of Alienation Part Three of A Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions

The problem is as old and well-known as Plato’s parable of the cave. Like Plato and more modern discussions of alienation, Hari believes that underlying the alienated state of depression is a proper state of natural needs and desires. So, like Socrates, Hari argues that knowledge bringing insight can work therapeutically as a “midwife of the soul,” reawakening consciousness to natural needs and thus rekindling natural desires. Hari takes his clues here from anthropology and evolutionary theory. One researcher asked rhetorically, “Why would loneliness cause depression and anxiety so much?” And he answered: “You and I exist for one reason – because those [early] humans figured out how to cooperate… They only made sense as a group… That they survived at all they owed to the dense web of social contacts and the vast number of reciprocal commitments they maintained. In this state of nature, connection and social cooperation did not have to be imposed… Nature is connection.” (77).

Psychologically, “nature is connection” indicates that depression is to be understood as an alienation, i.e. that underlying depression “certain innate needs persist” (98), a proper humanity that can be awoken to rise up consciously against the alienated state of depression to reacquire “a more natural state – one where we are embodied, we are animal, we are moving, our endorphins are rushing” (128). To be sure, Hari’s embrace of the body as the natural state sharply diverges from the Socratic rationalism.

Invocation here of the proper “state of nature” as the body might call to mind Rousseau with his myth of the “noble savage” and decadent civilization. But that would be misleading. More instructive is the difference between Hobbes and Locke, the seminal theorists of Anglo-Saxon modernity. Notoriously for Hobbes the state of nature is nasty, brutish and short, a war of all against all in which alpha males, so to speak, compete violently for gain and glory until enlightened reason calls a truce to the mayhem in a sacrifice of natural freedom to political sovereignty under a monarch who provides security and a share in the goods of a civil society. The cost of this social contract, however, is the paradox that political sovereignty establishes a rule of law and rough justice within its jurisdiction by simultaneously elevating itself above that rule of law so that it may maintain the regime by hook or by crook against enemies foreign and domestic. That is why Hobbes named the quintessence of civilized existence taking shape in the early modern state the “god incarnate,” the Leviathan.

Hobbes, be it noted, was quite intentionally undermining the canonical narrative from the book of Genesis about a “fall” from the state of innocence in paradise into a state of violence in exile from paradise. For Hobbes over against Genesis, human beings are rising beasts, not fallen angels. (The German theorist of National Socialism, by the way, Carl Schmitt, picked up on Hobbes’s theory in his argument for state authoritarianism as justified by the “state of exception” (from the rule of law) justified by the “perpetual emergency” of society on the brink of collapse back into a free-for-all of violence).

By contrast, John Locke in his Second Treatise of Government sought philosophically to restore the canonical narrative: the state of nature is paradisiacal just because it is a pre-political sociality: an innocent and natural obedience to the creative mandate that the human beings be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it in partnership with their Creator (Genesis 1:26-29). Note how, in sharp distinction from Hobbes, the mandate of creation for human beings made in the image of God for likeness to God makes them essentially social, cooperative in the labor of gardening and in procreation, sharing dominion together as the partnership of male and female. From this idyllic state of nature, however, the human couple, motivated by envy of God as they imagine God to be (the serpent’s promise, “you shall be as God”) descends into violence. The violence which subsequently erupts physically in the story of the fratricide between their sons begins verbally: when confronted by their Creator, the envious man disowns the woman whom God gave to him and the disobedient woman scapegoats the lying serpent. Their society is thus ruptured and becomes a persisting problem for them as they have fatefully lost the original possibility of innocent obedience to the mandate of creation.

For Locke, then, human beings fall into violence. Nevertheless, the creative mandate of the state of nature for gardening, procreation and parenting persists and from this mandate continuously in force, Locke argues, all legitimate political authority is sanctioned. The state is a necessary expedient, given the fall into violence. It exists as a lawful monopoly on the means of violence by which lawless violence is roughly but justly suppressed. Even so, its purpose remains parental: to educate the young and inexperienced into a state of adult freedom and responsibility. Illustratively, Locke in the same treatise made the seminal case against slavery is a violation of “natural law,” as he conceived “nature” to be. To be sure, Locke’s account depends on a revelation just as much as Hobbes’ account depends on a retrojection of present experience of political sovereignty back into an imagined state of nature.

The foregoing foray into the tradition of political philosophy is in accord with Hari’s own realization that the source of the depression epidemic today lies in the way we live, i.e., anti-socially. Building upon Hari’s discovery of grief, and in accord with Locke’s correction of Hobbes, I will be urging that grief becomes depression just because – unlike the loss of a loved one acknowledged in the “grief exception” – the immediate social sources of alienation are hidden from consciousness. Liberating insight into one’s predicament, precipitated by intervention from outside the self which reveals what is really going on, is needed if one of the causes of snowballing depression is that the depressed cannot comprehend their own isolation nor see their own lost connections. Theologically, a break-in from outside the state of alienation (cf. Mark 3:7), a connection somehow breeching the prison walls erected in depression to assert itself redemptively is needed in order for its prisoner to break out.

Rediscovering Grief: Part Two of A Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

The biologically dysfunctional brain narrative protected him, so Hari testifies, from painful adult self-examination. Preeminent here is scrutiny of the sense of shame over one’s disability, as if it were one’s moral failing for being mentally incapacitated or fault for having been traumatized by childhood abuse. But adult inspection and mature reflection unveils a paradox: even such tacit shame is a phony if largely unconscious effort to maintain an impoverished control over one’s sorry state as provided by the broken-brain narrative. Such paradoxical hiding away of humiliation at one’s plight in order to maintain some semblance of control over it is manifestly self-defeating, as seems obvious to those who are not depressed, since it only reinforces the isolation which is at the root of depression. Overcoming it in the depressed person, however, comes about only by the painful work of courageous self-examination, equivalent, Hari remarks in passing, to the sacrament of confession.

Yet one wonders how those sunk in the pit can ever come to such courage, awareness and renewed agency. Perhaps out of this perplexity come some of the hostile reactions to Hari’s book that ironically mirror his own angry dismissal of the discovery of the placebo effect of antidepressant medications when first he came upon it. The loss of fictitious faith in a pharmacological explanation and solution is a wrenching experience, to be sure, particularly acute in that this authoritative fiction has given meaning to a life reeling in darkness under the loss of meaning.

It may be helpful then to note here that Hari explicitly acknowledges that there are in fact brain diseases like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and that medications for depression, moreover, can catalyze a path upward from out of the psychic pit of deep depression. There is some biological causation. Twin research reveals a genetic factor in the propensity to depression but at the same time indicates that the environmental triggers matter.

Granting all this, Hari’s discovery of the placebo effect was initiated when he learned of the “grief exception” in the diagnostic inventory used by therapists, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. At least some depression, in other words, was acknowledged in the prevailing narrative as occasioned externally by loss in life of something precious. “We grieve because we have loved” and therefore “to say that if grief lasts beyond an artificial time limit, then it is a pathology, a disease to be treated with drugs, is to deny the core of being human” (41). Love of and for others is what is truly valued in human life. Grief is the price we pay for love of mortal creatures such as ourselves. So it is that the grieving only reluctantly give up the pain of their loss because the pain is indexed to the love still connecting them to the departed. The sting of the pain diminishes with time but it remains until the bereaved’s own death extinguishes it.

This discovery caused Hari to ponder the problem of depression more deeply. Could the fact that “almost everybody who is grieving, it turns out, matches the clinical criteria for depression” (40) mean that depression more generally is grief variously disguised? Could depression in these unrecognized formations snowball, moreover, just because it is grief, unaware and unacknowledged, at lost connections to what is really humanly vital and thus valuable?

This discovery of grief and the research inquiries it generated issued in the basic claim argued in Hari’s book, that depression begins its snowball descent into psychic paralysis in unrecognized grief over lost connections to others, to nature and indeed to one’s own body and its signals, especially the signal of pain. Such grief is rational, not irrational; “it is sane to be depressed” if the problem is not a broken brain but the brain’s broken but vital relationship to its environment. Of course, it is not sane to remain depressed, if things can be changed. It is not sane to remain depressed because, as mentioned, the paradox of depression is that it is a self-defeating defense against the world perceived or experienced as hostile.

In a summary passage, Hari writes: “The evidence shows there are three different kinds of causes of depression – biological, psychological, and social. Right at the start I talked about how the biological interventions we currently have – antidepressants – don’t do too much for most of us. Then, up to now I’ve been talking about the environmental or social changes that might be able to help us” (223), since it is not sane to remain depressed. This summary leads him to discuss next the “psychological change” which can help the depressed, although the possibility of such self-change raises a daunting set of problems. How are the blind to see their own blindness, the bound to break free from their own bondage, the lost to find missing connections?

A Theological Reading of Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

[Towards the end of my teaching career at Roanoke College, I was increasingly distressed by the mental state of students. It seemed to me as if we suffered an epidemic of depression. Half the students were on medication. I kept asking about the etiology but got the same old answers about chemical imbalances in the brain. Well, I dug deeper: what’s causing these chemical imbalances? No one seemed to have answers, just the bromides about how great it was to have Big Pharma coming to the rescue with pills, coupled with the scolding that challenging its narrative about brain malfunction would be cruel, compounding the trauma of the sufferers. With some resources at my disposal, I invited faculty and staff colleagues to a reading group to discuss Johann Hari’s Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions.  I had stumbled upon this book in my own search for answers and found it to be an illuminating alternative to the Big Pharma narrative. Interweaved with his own personal journey through depression to mental health, he made the striking case that depression was most often misdiagnosed grief at loss – lost connections, as he titled his book.

Frankly, I was not aware at the time of the hit job that had been coordinated against Hari to discredit him as an amateur interloper into medical science who had been guilty early in his journalistic career of plagiarism. Hate the message? Discredit the messenger with personal attacks! When I read the book, however, I was quite impressed by his empirical and inductive method of research, the extensive documentation of his claims in the scientific literature and the nuanced claims he was actually making.

My faculty reading group included psychologists, brain scientists, sociologists, counselors and the campus chaplain among others. None of the scientists disputed the scientific claims made in the book. In fact, they expressed disappointment that the book broke no new ground i.e. that they already knew that antidepressant medications largely worked by the placebo effect and provided only temporary relief. The general conclusion we reached was that in the epidemic of depression in young lives we are confronted with the massive social problem which Hari identifies.

I thought after the reading group finished that I should put together my own reflections on the book and our conversation. Naturally, that would be a theological reading – interesting, not least of all because Hari-self identifies as an atheist. I shopped the following to First Things, which declined to publish on the grounds of its length. I was very busy with other things at the time, and let the project to drop. I will serialize my essay, posting installments weekly beginning now.]

A Wrenching Disillusionment

The iconoclastic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once observed that human beings would rather have nothing for a meaning than no meaning at all. The acerbic barb was aimed at 19th-century German Protestantism which Nietzsche (son of a Protestant pastor) pilloried as “Platonism for the people.” The pun mocked the liberal Protestant deity, parasitic upon the idealism of German philosophy’s transcendental turn a century before, as a “no-thing” i.e., something we know not what -- but assuredly Beyond this world. But for Nietzsche this idealist posit of empty transcendence as supreme object, moreover, of salutary devotion de facto slandered life on the earth. Nevertheless weak souls embrace this “nothing” as “God” in fear of the perceived alternative: that without it the life of this world, recently unveiled red in tooth and claw by Darwin, would have no meaning at all.

Johann Hari has written a popular but well-documented science book about depression. The richly detailed report on academic human science research is vividly animated by the interspersing of his personal memoir about a journey through depression to mental health. The punchline, however, comes as a punch in the gut for millions upon millions of innocent sufferers who have bought the narrative promoted by Big Pharma and dispensed by countless mental health therapists. It turns out that Nietzsche’s caustic poke at the bad faith of modern Protestantism’s “stillborn God” (Mark Lilla) applies quite directly to the story told in the recent generation about depression as a chemical imbalance of the brain, in other words, as a physical disease, whose repair consisted in brain-altering medications.

Hari tells how as a teenager this narrative provided at last an explanation for his mystifying distress and as such gave him hope that pharmacological intervention would restore a sense of well-being. And so, it seemed to have worked at first and then again at times. But inevitably (in a cycle familiar to 65-80% under such treatment, so the research shows), the soul-sorrow would return. Dosage would be adjusted and or alternative medications explored until again a relief that will prove only temporary would return… and then slip away again. Hari at wit’s end after years of this cycle posed to his experience the probing question of genuine science, the question more broadly of all critical thinking: what really is going on here?

And Hari uncovered a truth that had been but little known outside of academic circles of scientific psychological research: the medications work, so far as they actually do, primarily by the placebo effect! It seems, then, that because prescription from experts in mental health provides a meaningful and authoritative narrative of psychic distress in full sync with the truisms of our secular age –a diagnosis that locates the problem in malfunctioning brain machinery with a prognosis of chemical intervention to restore functionality – the narrative turns out to be the “nothing” desperately preferred to “no meaning at all.”

Hari’s uncovering of this truth by study of the “unvarnished” scientific research was at first so distressing to him that he angrily rejected it. It implied “no meaning at all,” neither to his suffering nor to his quest for well-being. It undermined his false faith in the “nothing” which had more or less kept him above water for years. Yet insidiously, it also kept him from digging deeper into his soul-sorrow, diverting attention “from figuring out what was making us so unhappy in our lives to trying to block the neurotransmitters in the brain that allow us to feel it” (53).

Truth be told, however, the prevailing pharmacological narrative had traction because it fitted perfectly the standards of current culture which Hari himself had internalized: “I wanted quick solutions to my depression and anxiety – ones that I could pursue on my own, fast. I wanted something that I could do now, for myself, to make me feel better… I wanted something as brisk as a pill” (181). Only in hindsight did Hari come to the realization that his “desire [was] for a solution that was private and personal… A symptom of the mindset that had caused [his] depression in the first place” (183). What precisely had this mindset obscured, the true source of his chronic sadness?

To be continued…

Revisiting Ellul on Propaganda

Jacque Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitude translated Conrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Vintage, 1965).

Why do we care about this old book? It predicts our present and makes this dire warning: “Propaganda is one of the most powerful factors of deChristianization in the world through the psychological modifications that it affects, through the ideological morass with which it has flooded the consciousness of the masses, through the reduction of Christianity to the level of an ideology, through the never-ending temptation held out to the church – all this is the creation of a mental universe foreign to Christianity. And this deChristianization through the effects of one instrument – propaganda – is much greater than through the anti-Christian doctrines.” 231-2.

Working definition of propaganda: “Propaganda is a set of methods employed by an organized group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organization.” 61

Thus, “the study of propaganda must be conducted within the context of the technological society. Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments, and to integrate the individual into the technological world. Propaganda is a good deal less the political weapon of the regime (it is that also) than the effect of the technological society that embraces the entire man...” xvii

Ellul says that he will “devote much space to the fact that propaganda has become an inescapable necessity for everyone.” This is the case just because progressive modern people worships “facts” – that is, they accept “facts” as the ultimate reality. They are convinced that what is, is good. “He believes that facts in themselves provide evidence and proof, and he willingly subordinates values to them; he obeys what he believes to be necessity, which he somehow connects with the idea of progress. The stereotyped ideological attitude inevitably results in a confusion between judgments of probability and judgments of value. Because fact is the sole criterion, it must be good.” xv

The problem is that there is a practical infinity of facts and whenever one appeals to facts one is in reality making a selection which is determined by a judgment of value. Namely the value of relevance to a particular agenda. It is easy to conceal the hidden value judgments behind a selection of facts claiming relevance. Propaganda conceals this value laden agenda-driven selection.

Ellul has a unique and compelling interpretation of secularization as the rise of technocracy

There are four great collective sociological presuppositions in the modern world… i.e, all the world that shares in modern technology and is structured into nations: that 1) “man’s aim in life is happiness, 2) that man is naturally good, 3) that history develops in endless progress, and 4) that everything is matter.” 39 Consequently, “the average individual, the ordinary man of our times… is not sensitive to what is tragic in life; he is not anguished by a question that God might put to him; he does not feel challenged except by current events, political or economic.” “At present, only isolated individuals are interested in religion. It is part of their private opinions, and no real public opinion exists on the subject.” 49.

The privatization of religion is an accommodation to mass society and the technological era. Religious conscience would interfere with the routinization of life required by the technological juggernaut claiming to organize all of society. The process of atomization wears down conscientious resistance by integrating people into cogs of its machine. See Paul R. Hinlicky, “Complicity and the Truth of the Christological Path of Ecclesial Resistance: Summons to a New Catechesis for a Time of Despair” in Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance edited by Christine Helmer (Lexington /Fortress Academic, 2021) 47-62.

Atomization. “In actual fact, an individualist society must be a mass society, because the first move towards liberation of the individual is to break up the small groups that are an organic fact of the entire society. In this process the individual frees himself completely from family, village, parish, or brotherhood bonds – only to find himself directly vis-à-vis the entire society. When individuals are not held together by local structures, the only form in which they can live together is in an unstructured mass society. Similarly, a mass society can only be based on individuals – that is, on men in their isolation, whose identities are determined by their relationships with one another. Precisely because the individual claims to be equal to all other individuals, he becomes an abstraction and is in effect reduced to a cipher.” 90

Mass society has, consequently, the great problem of “adjusting the normal man into a technological environment – to the increasing pace, the working hours, the noise, the crowded cities, the tempo of work, the housing shortage, and so on. Then there is the lack of personal accomplishment, the absence of an apparent meaning of life, the family insecurity provoked by these living conditions, the anonymity of the individual in the big cities and at work. The individual is not equipped to face these disturbing paralyzing traumatic influences. Here again he needs a psychological aid; to endure such a life, he needs to be given motivations that will restore his equilibrium. One cannot leave modern man alone in a situation such as this.”

The propagandist provides a needed service! 143

Thus the rise of identity politics

A delusion: “In individualist theory the individual has eminent value, man is the master of his life; in individualist reality each human being is subject to innumerable forces and influences, and is not the master of his own life.” 91. In reality, the atomized individual is forced to find a new identity/social cohesion over against mass society as a whole and other factions within it. The loneliness of modern people who feel “the most violent need to be reintegrated into a community, to have a setting, to experience ideological and effective communication. The loneliness inside the crowd is perhaps the most terrible ordeal of modern man; the loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances. For it, propaganda, encompassing human relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of the community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology…. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness.” 148. There is a felt need for the propaganda as identity politics.

 But the resulting delusion of resistance by identity politics is that one “can resist one particular propaganda, not the general phenomenon of propaganda, for the development of the groups takes place simultaneously with the development of propaganda. These groups develop inside of society propagandized to the extreme; they are themselves the loci of propaganda; they are instruments of propaganda and are integrated into its techniques.” 97

One utterly misunderstands Ellul’s argument, or deliberately misunderstands it, if one thinks that it is the other side, one’s opponents, who indulge in propaganda while my side objectively states the facts. Propaganda is a system embracing all.

The modernity of propaganda.

The myth of the Big Lie: “Therefore, propaganda must start with current events; it would not reach anybody if it tried to base itself on unhistorical facts.” 44 Yet there is an infinity of facts. Someone presents you with “the facts” which that someone has selected to call to your attention for a reason. This is what Ellul calls “integrative propaganda,” which serves to align you to an interest group by exploiting your modern belief in facts as truth.

Modern man, therefore, welcomes this service of propaganda. The best defensive of modern man against the infinity of information bombarding him in mass media is propaganda, it is “a necessary protection against being flooded with facts without being able to establish a perspective.” “News loses its frightening character when it offers information for which the listener already has a ready explanation in his mind, or for which she can easily find one. The great force of propaganda lies in giving modern man, all embracing, simple explanations and massive, doctrinal causes, without which he could not live with the news… Just as information is necessary for awareness, propaganda is necessary to prevent this awareness from becoming desperate.” 147.

Note: this is why as an educator I always required students to look for the difficulties, i.e. the facts that work against any thesis they were arguing. The quality of any genuine argument is shown by striving to deal with all the evidence, especially the evidence that goes against one’s thesis, and providing an argument that anticipates disagreement and speaks to the bad facts, even if the accomplishment is finally only achieving a qualitatively better disagreement with an opponent. Genuine educators do not simplify but in this way “complexify.” I have noticed with much dismay how certain current models of education reject precisely this procedure as “traumatizing” when educators for “liberation,” claim to be working to reinforce a fragile identity in a hostile environment. That move would be the triumph of  transforming education into high brow propaganda.

Modern man thus pays a high price for this palliative of propaganda. Addiction to propagandistic news helps him “to forget the preceding event. In doing so, man then denies his own continuity; to the same extent that he lives on the surface of events and makes today’s events his life by obliterating yesterday’s news, he refuses to see the contradictions in his own life and condemns himself to a life of successive moments, discontinuous and fragmented.” 47cf.

Witness Alastair McIntyre’s story of Paul LeMann the Belgian émigré who had a celebrated career at Yale as a postmodern literary critic, forgetting his deep collaboration with the Nazi occupation in the persecution of the Jews. He was simply able to shed his past as if it was no longer continuous with his present. Postmodernism as a propaganda liberated him for this chameleon behavior.

Deep Complicity. Thus “the propagandee is by no means just an innocent victim. He provokes the psychological action of propaganda, and not merely lends himself to it, but even derives satisfaction from it. Without this previous, implicit consent, without this need for propaganda experienced by practically every citizen of the technological age, propaganda could not spread. There is not just a wicked propagandist at work who sets up means to ensnare the innocent citizen. Rather, there is a citizen who craves propaganda from the bottom of his being and the propagandist to respond to this craving.” 121

Let me here simply quote from the Bible, Mark 13: "Take heed that no one leads you astray. 6 Many will come in my name, saying, `I am he!' and they will lead many astray… And then if any one says to you, `Look, here is the Christ!' or `Look, there he is!' do not believe it. False Christs and false prophets will arise and show signs and wonders, to lead astray, if possible, the elect.” 

The hypocrisy of propagandistic self-justification

“Finally, as a result of all the threats and contradictions in contemporary society, man feels accused, guilty. He cannot feel that he is right and good as long as he is exposed to contradictions, which placed him in conflict with one of his group’s imperatives no matter which solution he adopts…”

The rise of the concept of “intersectionality” reflects Ellul’s analysis but what the concept uncovers in truth is a moral morass of multilayered levels of oppression from which there is no exit or solution. Revolutionary violence inevitably emerges as the need for a cathartic purge from all the entanglements in injustice and this flame is fueled by increasingly more strident propaganda.

 “Man needs to be right in his own eyes… He feels the need to belong to a group. What matters is not to be just, or to act just, or that the group to which one belongs is just – but to seem just, to find reasons for asserting that one is just, and to have these reason shared by one’s audience. This corresponds to man’s refusal to see reality – his own reality first of all – as it is, for that would be intolerable; it also corresponds to his refusal to acknowledge that he may be wrong. Before himself and others, man is constantly pleading his own case and working to find good reasons for what he does and has done. Of course, the whole process is unconscious… What American psychologists call rationalization…” 155.

This too is the fruit of our secularization: one no longer fears the judgment of God but wants to be on the so-called “right side of history,” as if history were God.

Note: if the foregoing is right, how mistaken is the theological cliché that modern man no longer asks the question of justification. In fact, the question of justification is urgent but also unanswerable in the total world of modern propaganda just because the answers which propaganda provides cannot allow anyone to see the truth about themselves which comes from the scrutiny of the Father in heaven according to Jesus, who sees in secret and knows in secret the hidden desires of the human heart. Preaching to the modern man, therefore, would excavate hermeneutically this divine pressure on the human creature which is experienced in the felt need for some justification and to expose all the false answers to that need provided by propaganda. It would penetrate to this underlying hopelessness of finding justification by surrender to propaganda and its group identities. It would raise the very provocative question that it is in fact God who is accusing the man who “needs to be right in his own eyes.” In this way it would challenge all the foregoing assumptions of the world of modern propaganda about happiness in this life, the authority of “facts,” the moral goodness of humanity and the myth of human progress.

The Churches: “Obviously, church members are caught in the net of propaganda and react pretty much like everyone else. As a result, an almost complete disassociation takes place between their Christianity and their behavior. Their Christianity remains a spiritual and purely internal thing. But their behavior is dictated by various appurtenances, and particularly by propaganda.” 228 “They take the panorama of the various propagandas for living political reality, and do not see where they can insert their Christianity in that fictitious panorama. Thus, like all the others, they are stumped, and this fact removes all weight from their belief. At the same time, because of its psychological effects, propaganda makes the propagation of Christianity increasingly difficult. The psychological structures built by propaganda are not propitious to Christian beliefs.…” 229

Propaganda faces the church with the following dilemma: either not to make propaganda – but, then, while the church slowly and carefully wins a man to Christianity, the mass media quickly mobilize the masses, and churchmen gain the impression of being “out of step,” on the fringes of history, and without power to change a thing. Or to make propaganda – this dilemma is surely one of the most cruel with which the churches are faced at present for it seems that people manipulated by propaganda become increasingly impervious to spiritual realities, less and less suited for the autonomy of Christian life.” 229

“Propaganda is a total system that one must accept or reject in its entirety. If the church accepts it, two important consequences follow. First of all, Christianity disseminated by such means is not Christianity.… Christianity ceases to be an overwhelming power and spiritual adventure and becomes institutionalized in all of its expressions and compromised in all its actions. It serves everybody as an ideology with the greatest of ease, and tends to be a hoax. In such times there appear innumerable sweetenings and adaptations, which denature Christianity by adjusting to the mileu.” 230

The moral of the story: “No one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his goods unless he first ties up the strongman.” Breaking free within the world of modern propaganda will require a deep reformation for churches who have spent everything for the last several centuries on accommodating themselves to it. Such a church will not “take sides” in the world of modern propaganda, but make sides. Propagating the gospel will not be an exercise of propaganda, but a proclamation in word and deed of the God of the gospel who has his own agenda which cuts through the claims and counterclaims of identity politics to create beloved community inclusive of those polarized or alienated by the technocratic juggernaut.

Draft of an Open Letter That Was Never Sent

[In the past several blogs I have been publishing documents from my twenty-two years of teaching at Roanoke College. I have done this rather than compose essays about these years from my retirement perspective, for I am still too close to it to have digested my sojourn. As late as 2015, when I published my book, Divine Simplicity, I dedicated it with great gratitude to the administration and faculty of Roanoke College and especially to the students whom I had taught. That was perhaps the high point. This will be the final installment in this series as it articulates some of the disillusionment with which my career ended.

During the tumultuous summer of 2020 I joined with like-minded faculty colleagues at Roanoke College who were distressed about a memorial to the Confederacy which to all appearances was situated prominently on college property as if to represent its history and mission. In fact, the monument belongs to Roanoke County. As we deliberated the problem, I undertook the task of composing the following open letter for the signature of faculty colleagues who wished to make a public witness.

I am not by nature nor conviction an iconoclast. But I am an educator and historicist, who wishes to see relics from the past treated as the museum pieces that they deserve to be. Our working group was ready to go forward with this open letter when in good faith we shared it with the College’s Administration. They literally pleaded with us not to do it for the trouble it would cause with community relations.

So far as I can see, this pleading was a monumental act of moral cowardice and hypocrisy. I say hypocrisy, because every year in orientation exercises for incoming students, the College celebrates the moral and intellectual courage of John Alfred Morehead who during his presidency of the college (1903-1920) defended the teaching of Civil War history and the theory of evolution against hostile public sentiment at a precarious time when the college’s existence was threatened. But in the present case, the Administration chose moral and intellectual cowardice.

Even as I dissented, our working group succumbed to the Administration’s special pleading. Perhaps my dissent was empowered by the nearness of my impending retirement, while my colleagues in the working group still needed years of future employment and did not want to jeopardize the viability of the college.. So I’ve hardly blame them. But this was the last straw for me personally in my disillusionment with the pretensions of current academia which will make brave moral stands, if, and only if, there is no cost involved. With this blog, I am done for now on my reflections on twenty-two years at Roanoke College.]

An Open Letter to the Citizens of Roanoke County regarding the Confederate Monument at the intersection of Main Street and College Avenue in Salem.

Citizens of Roanoke County! Do you know that you own the monument with its representation of a Confederate sentry standing guard before the old County Courthouse in Salem? Do you understand the history of this monument and what it represents? It is not simply or even chiefly a memorial of brave soldiers and lives tragically lost in the Civil War as its engraved caption, “Love Makes Memory Eternal,” suggests.

In 1987, Roanoke College purchased the old Roanoke County Courthouse in Salem and converted it into classrooms and office spaces renamed West Hall.  The property transfer, however, included an important exception: the small square of land containing the 1910 Confederate Monument was not part of the purchase agreement.  Since 1987 Roanoke County has continued to own the title to this land upon which the 28 foot granite form of the Confederate sentry stands. Yet, for anyone who visits or attends Roanoke College, the monument makes an inescapable statement of love for the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. As such, it seems to project the public face of the college on the corner of Main Street and College Avenue. Roanoke College cannot escape this appearance which deeply troubles us for reasons we are about to explain. In providing this historical knowledge, we appeal to your collective conscience to take up moral ownership for what is in fact your own property.

Our historians have uncovered disturbing facts about the erection and political purpose of the monument. As the 50th anniversary of the Civil War approached during the second decade of the 20th century obelisks and statues honoring Confederate soldiers were erected throughout the former Confederacy. Over twenty Confederate monuments were erected in Southwest Virginia between 1883 and 1920. Upon examination, we can see that these monuments served a present day political purpose over and above that of honoring the memory of the fallen, their widow and their orphan.

What we have learned about the monument in Salem in particular is disturbing. First, the statue was put up in 1910, i.e. 45 years after the end of the Civil War when there were few surviving veterans remaining to be consoled or honored by it. Life expectancy for those born at the end of the war in 1865 was 35 years, certainly much less for veterans. Thus the monument served another – present day political – purpose other than consolation or honoring of veterans.

Second, it was placed in front of the brand-new at the time County Courthouse in Salem at the very spot where Confederate soldiers had mustered. The date of June 3, 1910 was chosen when 5,000 people gathered in Salem for its dedication because this was the birthday of Jefferson Davis, president of the defeated Confederacy. The unveiling ceremony culminated when members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy - dressed all in white - simultaneously pulled 26 ribbons – a reference to Confederate Memorial Day, April 26th.

Conspicuous by its absence is any accompanying text that says ‘the Confederate States of America committed treason and lost.’  Instead, the representation normalizes the idea that Confederate soldiers were part of a just cause worthy of love.  To any viewer, the monument commemorates a victory rather than a defeat.

So what was the victory presently being celebrated? The political purpose of the monument was the perpetuation in a new form of the "lost cause" of the Confederacy. What was the new form? The segregation laws known as Jim Crow which came into force throughout this time period. Placed in front of the courthouse, it was as if the Confederate sentry were saying loudly and publicly: this is the kind of justice that will be dispensed here.

Standing in highly visible locations and often on public property, Salem’s Confederate monument together with the others in Southwest Virginia collectively gave the appearance of a united historical memory in honoring the Confederacy as such. In fact Southwest Virginia, on the border of breakaway West Virginia which joined the Union, was not a unified region during the Civil War. By omission such monuments tell nothing of the experiences of the enslaved people who lived hereabouts throughout the war nor of the role played by the defense of the race-based system slavery in the “lost cause” of the Confederacy. These painful divisions of real history in society are deliberately obscured by the monuments because in fact they are contrary to their political purpose. Surely today we all want fuller and more accurate understanding of what happened.

Our present discomfort with the memorial has a significant precedent in Roanoke College’s history. Presiding in the brand-new courthouse of 1910 was Judge William Walter Moffett who was also a member of the College’s Board of Trustees. In 1911, Moffett loudly and publicly objected to Roanoke College professor Thorstenberg’s decision to assign Henry Elson’s book History of the United States. The book contained information about the defense of slavery as the reason for secession that did not suit the Lost Cause narrative Moffett wanted to promote.  Moffett threatened the college, called for the book’s banning, and endangered the college’s very existence until he finally resigned as a Board member. Faithful to its mission, however, Roanoke College weathered the storm and persevered in educating the young for true knowledge of the past and a more hopeful vision of the future. 

In the light of the foregoing historical evidence, our appeal therefore is that citizens of Roanoke County own up morally to what is in fact their own possession. If Roanoke County is proud of the statue and its historical purpose, let it take moral responsibility and move the statue to the front of the current County Courthouse as an emblem of public justice. If Roanoke County is ashamed to honor the actual intentions of those who erected them monument by doing this, it should have the decency to recognize the shame we feel about it at Roanoke College and move it elsewhere where its history can be explained and its lessons taught.

Undersigned faculty of Roanoke College who live in the Roanoke Valley

Happiness, Despair and Hope in 22 Years at Roanoke College

[Because of the Covid pandemic, the usual retirement celebrations were delayed. I gave this swansong speech one year after retirement in my sole return appearance to the campus since.]

 Faith and Learning October 25, 2022

Paul R Hinlicky

Autobiographical reflections are always in danger of being exercises in self-justification. I cannot claim in advance that I will succeed in skirting this danger, but I will try to give an honest reflection of personal thanksgiving, loyal criticism and abiding hope for the mission of Roanoke College. I am grateful to Jim Peterson for this Covid-belated opportunity to relate to colleagues considered reflections on my experience of faith and learning in 22 years at Roanoke College. I offer no prescriptions for the present or the future but only observations from my experience for what they are worth.

Faith and Learning

First, then, to the topic of my self-understanding in regard to faith and learning. As is well known, I am a Lutheran which in my case does not mean that I am partial to the bombast and recklessness of the historical Martin Luther although I am deeply influenced by his constructive theology. Indeed his constructive theology is a specific correlation of faith and learning which we who are educators forget, I fear, to our own peril. I recently composed a study of Luther’s commentary on the skeptical book of the Hebrew Bible known in English as Ecclesiastes. In it I find the following statement which captures my own view on faith and learning.

Luther criticizes pious know-nothingism, i.e. when interpreters of Ecclesiastes “suppose that the knowledge of nature, the study of astronomy or of all of philosophy, is being condemned here and to teach that such things are to be despised as vain and useless speculations. For the benefits of these arts are many and great, as is plain to see every day. In addition, there is not only utility, but also great pleasure in them in investigating the nature of things” (9, cf. 18). I certainly encountered such willful ignorance among religious students in my teaching experience here and I sought to embody the alternative model for them of a critical dialogue between faith and reason. I was greatly honored in this connection when my colleagues in the department acknowledged my wide-ranging intellectual curiosity in the lovely retirement resolution they composed on my behalf. I have never cottoned to a circle-the-wagons theology of Christ against culture. With Rowan Williams, I think that “Christ is at the heart of creation.” For me, “being in Christ” entails critical openness to the world which must always be received in faith as the world which God is creating. In other words, one cannot understand Christ without a concomitant understanding of the world into which he comes presently – and just these are mandates for ongoing learning and reflection which is the academic work of the discipline of theology.

My vocational debt as an educator in the field of the liberal arts are equally profound. Philip Melanchthon was known as the “teacher of Germany,” and it is increasingly recognized that the Renaissance humanism which he and Luther shared was not an ideology but a method of inquiry protesting against the cherry picking treatment of authoritative texts in medieval scholasticism. The motto, “back to the sources,” was not then a fundamentalist back to the Bible alone dogmatism but rather a hermeneutical demand for the holistic interpretation of texts in context in order, as our former colleague Monica Vilhauer put it following Hans George Gadamer, to stand-under, i.e. experience  a text’s “claim to truth.” Luther was in this sense a “humanist” educator as I am also. For pertinent example, in his commentary on Ecclesiastes Luther insists we fasten upon “the purpose and aim of the author, which it is important to keep in mind and to follow in every kind of writing and even more important here” (7). For Luther the key text in this regard is 2:24: “There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God.” Luther comments that this claim to truth “is the principle conclusion, in fact the point, of the whole book… A remarkable passage, one which explains everything preceding and following it” (24).

This “claim to truth” regarding holy secularity for the life of faith in the world has been vocationally important for me. To be sure, holy secularity is not a blanket blessing of the way things are but rather designates the field of battle over which and for which an apocalyptic contest between good and evil is being waged with the fate of the creation at stake. Into this battle the Christian people of faith are called and enlisted: “Christians should be exhorted to live in the very midst of the crowd, to marry, to govern their household, etc. Moreover, when their efforts are hindered by the malice of men, they should bear it patiently and not cease their good works. Do not desert the battlefield but stick it out.” (106). Such spiritual warfare includes – pointedly – drinking one’s beer or changing the baby’s diaper to glorify God and to spite the devil! And if that is true, it certainly also includes college teaching of 18-year-old Americans! So much then for my self-understanding as an educator critically integrating faith and reason.

Happiness

I came to Roanoke College from a secure, tenured position at an central European University after earning there the second European doctorate, the habilitation – to be sure, mine was a humble theological faculty in need as it emerged from a 45 year period of repression. I had become fluent in the difficult Slavic language and was much appreciated, especially by the students with whom I have maintained relations to the present day, including a number who enjoyed study and later sabbatical replacement teaching opportunities here. But I was restless intellectually and for family reasons we needed to return to the United States. I had options at the time but I was happy to choose Roanoke College just because it had a more “secular” atmosphere than the alternatives. I longed for conversation with smart people outside of the smaller world of a theological faculty. Moreover, I was being offered, after a year’s probation, appointment to the endowed Jordan Trexler chair. The privileges of this chair would bring to fruition the kind of large scholarly projects I had been nurturing for decades. And this expectation was rewarded greatly in my first decade from 1999 to 2009. The reason for this dating will become apparent in my next section on Despair. But for the moment I wish to emphasize the vocational happiness I experienced in this first decade at Roanoke College.

The Dean and the President of the time of my appointment emphasized to me that my task was to make the department known nationally as a center for undergraduate theological education in the Lutheran tradition. I was encouraged to embrace the task of “public theology” and I memorably articulated that understanding in an address on Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address on the occasion of my appointment to the Jordan Trexler chair. In that address I argued for the kind of “critical pluralism” which I had learned from my teacher, Cornel West. But in the course of time the increasing polarization, if not Weimarization of political discourse in the United States, made interventions as a so-called public theologian increasingly unpalatable to me. I had published a lot of columns in the Roanoke Times as a public theologian, but the shrinkage to a 700 word limit on opinion pieces reduced essays to little more than a series of spicy assertions with no space for nuance or argument or evidence. After a few years of this I quit trying and turned to the internal dialogue of the Roanoke College community.

Like many Americans at the time, I was shocked by the 9/11 attack and in acknowledgment of my ignorance I generated an honors upper level course that I taught for a number of years with the title “Islam in the Eyes of the West.” I debated on campus with a cherished opponent and frequent participant in these faith and learning discussions, the physicist Frank Munley, about what the American response to 9/11 should be. This kind of deep and nuanced intellectual engagement over pressing public problems I found exhilarating. Frank allowed me to argue as the Christian that I am just as I allowed Frank to argue as the scientific naturalist that he is. Much of my happiness during these years at Roanoke College was in less formal exchanges with a variety of faculty colleagues who shall go unnamed, but whose perspectives on faith and learning, ranging from atheism to Protestant Pietism and serious Catholicism, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, were enriching for me. These relationships also broadened my horizons as I played a role in the development of the new INQ curriculum which wanted to highlight intellectual inquiry and critical thinking skills and also to broaden the teaching of ethics out of the exclusive possession of the Religion and Philosophy Department. To me this development coincided with a desire to see our department offer more courses in what at the time was called “world religions.”

A significant change occurred during these years when the Dean of that time, John Day, asked me to move to the newly created chair, the Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies. To this point in my academic career, I had not thought of myself as a specialist in Luther, important though he was to me. Accepting the appointment, I had to retool. Above all, I had to relearn medieval Latin and I did so with the help of my wonderful student assistant, Roy Mackenzie, who excelled in Latin. We spent hours together in my office translating Latin texts. It was the kind of faculty-student relationship of mentoring that I enjoyed tremendously in these years. I was also regularly taking students in the May term to Europe on tours of that part of the world where we had lived during the 1990s to study the intersections of religion, politics and violence. We even organized a semester long stay at my former institution in 2009, which was the high point of my vocational happiness (though I didn’t like being away from home so long). In these years, I never had any trouble making my classes, even as I worried that the more narrow focus on Lutheran studies would have less general appeal to students. I was several times nominated for the Dean’s teaching award by students and several further times by the College for the Virginia teaching award. Although I never won, the nominations in themselves were sufficient acknowledgment of success in teaching and for me personally also recognition of the loving, I daresay pastoral interest I had in students. I add, however, as a point of pride that I had a reputation for being a demanding professor who never pandered or dumbed things down for the sake of popularity.  

During the ill-fated presidency of Sabine O’Hara, my wife Ellen and I developed a friendship with her and Phil. We had in common that we were clergy couples and they knew well the German theological scene, which was an area of my expertise as a systematic theologian. Phil even joined me on a trip to Denmark for a conference on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We often attended the midweek chapel service when it was available in the daytime for faculty. Having taught in a second language myself, however, I recognized a syndrome with Sabine. When speech in another language becomes fast and idiomatic and depends upon nonverbal signals, understanding fails. To avoid this, a second language speaker is tempted to dominate the conversation and to take silence, including embarrassed silence, as assent to what one is saying. I fear that this syndrome played a role in her failure as president for which I was greatly saddened.

Despair

My decade of happiness at Roanoke College ended after the year 2009 with the Great Recession and the extraordinary financial pressures it put on our institution. What a change in atmosphere occurred! Possibilities like team teaching, for example when Marwood Larson Harris and Bruce Parton and I collaborated on an INQ course, or the previously mentioned semester abroad in Bratislava, on down to more modest but helpful amenities like providing pizza for students, shrunk dramatically if not totally disappeared. An increasing load of administrative responsibilities were loaded on to teaching faculty, particularly with regard to the convoluted business of assessment, while the administrative staff seemed to grow exponentially as faculty salaries and hiring freezes failed to keep pace with announced goals. Any number of times I was drafted into teaching extra courses to the extent that I felt like I had become the utility infielder of the department. All of this was demoralizing in general.

After the defeat of a reformatory proposal to create a Faculty Senate which could exercise real power, I noticed that faculty meetings increasingly became extended infomercials as the faculty subtly but steadily yielded self-governance, deferring important decisions about the future of the college to the board and the administration. In any case, so it seemed to me. And the increased attention to student retention to pay for the dramatic expansion of facilities, along with the continued reliance on the economic model of attracting wealthy students from the Northeast in competition with every other institution looking for a piece of that shrinking pie, did little in my view to improve campus culture or faculty morale. I regularly protested to anyone who would listen that it is unjust to admit students who can be predicted to fail if we do not provide the remedial resources to make them competitive. The fear of stigmatization of course is genuine, and I asked for a faculty discussion of grading policy to get at the problems but to no avail. The injustice of burdening predictable dropouts with piles of student debt was in my view worse than the danger of stigmatization. Throughout the last decade I was talking also to graduates with $60,000 or $80,000 in college debt. I recall saying to a sympathetic President Maxey in a conversation about this at one point that I thought this student debt situation was “sinful.” Thus it was that despair attacked me, especially when two former beloved students, the previously mentioned Roy Mackenzie, and Joshua Bailey died, Roy a suicide and Josh, who had climbed his way out of incarceration to graduate, probably from an overdose.

From the beginning of my career I had been an advocate of the ordination of women to the ministry of the church, a vocation into which my daughter followed me. She and I at her initiative began a podcast now finishing its fourth season which has over 50,000 downloads. I have been pleased with the professional progress women in general have made in my lifetime. But for the reasons just mentioned, I have become deeply worried about alienation among young men and I wish that there could be an honest conversation about it which is not immediately stigmatized as antifeminist. I report without approval the sentiment which I have often heard from the alienated that Trump is the bully who bullies the bullies who have bullied us. At a certain point in the semester I got to asking students in a class whether they found their social relationships predatory. Almost all, both male and female, would raise their hands yes. And what are the social sources of the epidemic of depression among these young adults?

I coped with this time of despair by turning to my authorship with full energy and devotion. This second decade at Roanoke College saw the publication of 12 monographs, including one co-authored with colleague Brent Adkins, along with numerous other chapter contributions to books, peer-reviewed journal articles and review essays. With one exception, my books have received numerous and highly favorable critical reviews. The crowning achievement was to be senior editor of the three volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther appearing in 2017. But I paid a price. As I drew near to retirement, I joked that I had spent the last 10 years living like a monk. Truth be told, I burned the candle at both ends culminating in the stroke I suffered in 2017 when I was at Loyola in Baltimore with our students attending a theological conference. This happened on the cusp of the grand academic observation of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation which I had planned for several years and was determined to steward in spite of my new disabilities. I was sincerely cheered by the outpouring of support for me after my stroke. But then Covid struck in my final year and a half of teaching – via Zoom, a miserable way to exit the scene for one who so much enjoyed the in-person classroom.

But the more pertinent reflection to make, building upon the above remarks about the institutional challenges during my decade of institutional despair, is that I became more aware of the privileges I enjoyed in holding an endowed chair and the envy, if not resentment that could inspire among overworked and underpaid faculty colleagues. I used my resources accordingly in these years to sponsor a series of well attended book discussions for a cross-section of faculty in acknowledgment of an ethical obligation to give back. I recall, however, how one colleague whom I greatly respect gently told me after a discussion of one of my new books that many of us would like to have the same opportunity for scholarly production that the reduced teaching load and conference travel stipend had provided me.  
On reflection, I think that this complaint has some justice. I do believe that most of us aspire to college teaching for love of our subject matter and enthusiasm for communicating it to young people. But I fear that the model of the scholar-teacher is being priced out of the market. While I wouldn’t abolish all elements of merit any more than I would abolish grading or endowed chairs, I do think that faculty today are underpaid and overburdened with tasks and expectations extraneous to scholarship and teaching. Politically they hang on at the cost of surrendering more and more of their traditional power to direct the future of the institution. So I have major questions about the pressures the neoliberal political economy places on the private liberal arts college to instrumentalize learning, bringing many of its traditional values under siege. For me this includes above all Roanoke College’s mission statement about the critical dialogue between faith and reason which, as previously mentioned, I sought to embody in my work. The current commoditization of all things which Karl Marx predicted is occurring before our eyes, also in the academy.

It is perhaps well-known that by the end I had become estranged from my department after a botched job search which has made me highly skeptical as a result of the ability of the institution to honor the intention of donors in establishing endowed chairs. I will not air any dirty laundry here. And no doubt I am also at fault in ways of which I am conscious but probably also unconscious. Suffice it to say that my stroke and the disabilities that it left me with, and my entering phased retirement, reinforced my isolation from the department. Ironically, it simultaneously engineered a line of flight into renewed and expanded relationships to faculty colleagues outside of the department. In these final years I began to call the Olde Salem Brewing Company my “second office.” I still drink beer with colleagues there to the glory of God and to spite the devil.

Hope

Eighteen months of retirement have been very good for me, although having turned 70 in September I have the usual aches and pains and medical challenges of a man of my age. But we love our St. Gall Farm, growing our own food and feeding 8 to 10 other families with healthy and nutritious honey, eggs and beef, sustainably and humanely raised on marginal farmland, the soil of which is being regeneratively restored to health. Ecological theology, a manifestation of holy secularity, has become increasingly important to me for whom Christ is at the heart of creation. And indeed my concerns about the health of the private liberal arts college in the neoliberal industrialization of education in the United States mirrors my worries about the state of industrialized agriculture. So I tend my little garden as a public witness of hope in what appears to me to be increasingly an apocalyptic world situation.

Likewise vocationally as an educator retirement has been good. I teach as a PhD fellow for the Institute of Lutheran Theology’s graduate program – it’s been a long time since I have had graduate students as I did in Bratislava. I am the senior editor of a new series of books, Reconstructions in Lutheran Theology, which has under contract 30 authors and titles forthcoming in the next five years or so. I am in perpetual demand as a supply preacher, a book review essayist, a peer reviewer, and a chapter length contributor to books and encyclopedias. I am still writing recommendations for former students and for grant proposals by younger scholars. I have a couple of new monographs on the horizon. Thus I continue in retirement to embody and model the scholar-teacher.

The medieval monks kept the light of learning alive during the so-called dark ages, and this light was relit in the Reformation’s synthesis with Renaissance humanism to generate the doctrine of holy secularity, a.k.a. the priesthood of all believers and it has been handed down through the generations to the founding of Roanoke College. Hope in this respect for me consists in sustaining certain intellectual virtues, which students of mine have come to call the “Hinlicky Rule” (google it), although in fact I learned it from my doctor father, Christopher Morse, who learned it from Thomas Aquinas. It goes something like this: “You are not permitted to criticize an opponent until you can state the opponent’s position with such clarity and charity that the opponent would exclaim, “That’s it! I could not have said it better myself!” Then, and only then, may you criticize because then, and only then, are you dealing with the real thing and not a convenient fiction of your own imagination.” Imagine what obedience to that rule would do to the barbaric state of discourse in this country! I certainly have not always lived up to my own rule which is why I also agree with St. Augustine that in this life our righteousness consists for the most part in the forgiveness of sins.

But my hope does not lie in my own righteousness, real though inchoate. Rather, at the heart of creation Christ brings clarity and charity into a world of conflict giving us a way of reconciliation in a virtuous contest for truth. That is why in spite of all I live in hope, and have hope for Roanoke College. Roanoke College has been good to me and my hope is that it will be good increasingly for scholar-teachers devoted to the intellectual virtues of the search for truth in critical and charitable dialogue. So in this hope I bow as I fade from the stage, grateful for my 22 years in service of our common mission.

RETIREMENT RESOLUTION

It was magnanimous on the part of my Roanoke College colleagues in the Department of Religion and Philosophy to compose the following retirement resolution in my honor. It would’ve been magnanimous in any case, but especially so because in my final years at Roanoke College I had become estranged from the Department for reasons just and unjust that I need not rehearse. It is a testimony from peers about the quality and intensity of my contributions to the College over twenty two years. For this I am both grateful and gratified. Since retirement, I have stayed away from the Department and indeed the Campus. I have not wanted to meddle in matters that are no longer my business. From this distance, I do watch in dismay, however, as theology has virtually disappeared from the program and the liberal arts commitment appears to have entered a death spiral – so it seems from this distance, in any case. There’s a theological moral in this which the apostle Paul articulates in 1 Corinthians 15, namely, that our “labor in the Lord is not in vain.” It is a temptation to securing a false immortality to want to leave behind an enduring legacy in honor of one’s memory. It is comfort to know that the Lord remembers, cherishes but also purifies our labor to his glory, woven for human good into the fabric things.

In honor of Professor Paul R. Hinlicky

As we approach the occasion of his retirement, the faculty, staff and students of Roanoke College and the Religion and Philosophy department do hereby offer the following resolution honoring Professor Paul R. Hinlicky:

WHEREAS, Paul received his B.A. from Concordia Senior College, his M.Div. from Christ Seminary-Seminex, and his Ph.D. from Union Theology Seminary,

and WHEREAS, having been ordained, Paul began his career as a Lutheran pastor, a calling he has continued to respond to throughout his life,

and WHEREAS, before coming to Roanoke College in 1999, he held the position of Visiting Professor of Systematic Theology at Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia,

and WHEREAS, Paul realized what he wanted to do with his life when his college professor told him, “in theology everything is relevant,”

and WHEREAS, Paul then found the guiding star of that everything in Martin Luther and the beloved community, from the 16th century to Josiah Royce, Martin Luther King, the Trinity, and human destiny,

and WHEREAS, Paul’s intellectual curiosity knows no bounds ranging from the Filioque Controversy to Contemporary French Philosophy,

and WHEREAS, Paul has been enormously productive, publishing over 120 books, book chapters, and scholarly articles,

 and WHEREAS, Paul has written and recorded on his podcast over 95 theses in which he continues to nail Luther's truths to the walls of Christian teaching,

and WHEREAS, Paul ensured that Cicero, Augustine, Luther, and Martin Luther King, Jr. received their just share of attention in the Roanoke College curriculum,

and WHEREAS, having written them unbidden, Paul bestowed on his fellow committee members the joy of reading his white papers,

and WHEREAS, Paul enriched campus intellectual life by bringing lecturers from far and wide to speak on topics historical and contemporary,

and WHEREAS, Paul arrives a minute before class and lectures for an hour from memory, without any notes,

and  WHEREAS, to his students were required to observe the Hinlicky rule: never criticize authors until you can state their position so well that they would agree with your description,

and WHEREAS, to listen to Paul lecture on Christian theology is to find yourself is the middle of a sweeping drama with the fate of Western civilization hanging in the balance,

and WHEREAS, Paul encouraged and expected his students who would become church leaders to have top-tier theological education in order to serve God's people and preach the gospel of Jesus Christ,

and WHEREAS, in his academic persona Paul relishes nothing so much as a good fight, in his off hours his inclinations lead him more toward the bucolic life of a gentleman farmer,

and WHEREAS, Paul restored part of a mountain in Catawba to its natural state, creating a habitat for numerous species of wildlife; raised cows and chickens, grown a garden, and kept bees,

and WHEREAS, he has frequently welcomed faculty and students to explore this earth-first ecosystem and taught students how to live out their theology in nature,

and WHEREAS, we extend our sincere hopes to Paul and Ellen for a healthy and peaceful retirement spent at their beloved Saint Gall Farm,

BE IT THERFORE RESOLVED that the Faculty of Roanoke College, on this 12th day of May 2021, express our profound appreciation to Professor Paul R. Hinlicky for his 22 years of dedicated service and contributions to our institution and its Religion and Philosophy program.

My philosophy of teaching

I am still too close to my 22 years of teaching and Roanoke College to try to write essays about what I learned in these years. In the interim, I want to post a few documents illustrative of those years. The first comes from the academic year 2015-16 when I was nominated by the College for an award and asked to submit my statement. I probably sabotaged any hope of being selected by my admittedly curmudgeonly stance on what constitutes good teaching. In a couple of weeks I will post a blog on Jacques Ellul’s analysis of modern propaganda and how my approach intended to confront head-on our new and terrible world in which it is propaganda all the way up and all th way down.

My philosophy of teaching

It is a great honor to be nominated for the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award. I respectfully submit this personal statement of my philosophy of teaching in support of it. In a nutshell, my philosophy holds that an outstanding teacher models the life of the mind.

I am not a great fan of “innovative” teaching; in fact, I am so old fashioned that I could fairly be described as a pedagogical curmudgeon. I demand, expect, and motivate intensive reading and sustained reflection on texts that yield meaning only to continual re-reading. I reward rigorous, vigorous writing that demonstrates close engagement with significant texts and critical thinking about them. I cultivate in myself the intellectual virtues of curiosity, the passion to communicate well and fearless pursuit of truth. An outstanding teacher, according to my philosophy, is not a conduit who merely finds ways of passing on nuggets of information in a palatable mode. Certainly, conveying information is a sine qua non of teaching, just as is winning students over to the subject-matter. But this has little to do with popularity contests. In today’s stressful economic climate, you can peddle some pretty thin wares and finds students willing to pay for bargain basement goods. But this almost always comes at the cost of content.

Especially at a liberal arts college, an outstanding teacher instead models the life of the mind that loves the content in all its complexity and difficulty; thus she mentors the joy and creativity of life-long learning. Ergo, I employ no shortcuts or gimmicks, just hard work that earns the grade, where a C really means “satisfactory” and an A really means “outstanding.” As one honor student famously (in Roanoke College circles) commented to complaining peers: “Dr. Hinlicky does not hand out As like lollipops.” But I have succeeded enough in this old fashioned way that my students earn their Bs. I am told that my students “love me” for that. I sense this myself. I enjoy adult friendships with many former students.

A glance at my syllabi would reveal the heavy load of reading in primary texts that I require, together with the regular demand for students to demonstrate their comprehension by routine reading quizzes and frequent interpretive writing assignments. I believe that speedy grading of writing assignments is a key to motivating student progress in mastering demanding content and developing sophisticated writing skills, so I make the effort to return papers by the next class period. If a student turns in a paper with more than three mechanical errors per page, however, it is returned with half-grade loss per day until the paper is revised and re-submitted without errors. This policy is based on the supposition that, with some important exceptions which fairly beg for remedial aid, students come to college with basic reading and writing skills and need only be incentivized to practice and refine them. What they do not come to college with, however, is love for learning, curiosity about content, intrigue with complexity or confidence to master difficulty. Accordingly, we grade immediately the routine reading quizzes in class, which, with some discussion, provides a segue to the hour of interactive lecture on the topic of the day. If students can convince me that I question was misleading or otherwise poorly formulated, I express gratitude for the correction and toss the question from the scoring.

If, as has happened on occasion, most of the class is discovered not to have done the homework, the class is invited to exit and warned never again to return to my classroom unprepared for the day’s work. The same draconian policy applies to a student nodding off: I invite him to return home for needed bed rest, with an unexcused absence for the day. My mantra is, “We are all adults here,” and I mean it. I risk a higher initial drop rate, not to mention a “meanie” award in the beauty contests that bargain-basement shoppers conduct to avoid demanding teachers. But I deliberately make the first two weeks of the semester as demanding as I can in order to establish a healthy classroom, conducive to genuine learning.

What is truly “innovative,” then, is a teacher who never ceases to learn, and so continually updates, renews, and renovates the courses he teaches, in this way confidently displaying before students the joys of on-going discovery. For the same reason, I have especially enjoyed directing senior theses with our majors, which combines face-to-face mentoring with exploration of new material. Within the Department I have been happy to assume the role of utility infielder, taking on new courses and general education assignments as needs dictate, which I make into vehicles of my own scholarly inquiry, so that I learn as I teach and teach as I learn. My kind of “innovative” teaching also recognizes that each new class is really new, a unique combination of personalities which develops its own special chemistry. Relying on whatever worked in the past is not always possible; sometimes one has to think on one’s feet and innovate on the spot. But the capacity to pull this “innovation” off is not intuition; such discernment is the product of experience that has been reflected on continuously.

For the sake of periodic and deliberate reflection on the art of teaching, I have taken advantage of Faculty Development programs which have teachers share their experiences with each other, and in the process discover alternative pedagogical techniques. As hinted above, I am a tad skeptical about the latest techno-gadgetry as cure for what ails teaching and learning; frankly, I think these tools can work more as a distraction from the kind of concentration that is needed to learn to listen to, or read, new content well and to think or write about it beyond the superficial sound-bites that populate the blogosphere. But I make the effort to remain apprized and equipped with technological innovations that I deem helpful, for example, the way that the Internet has made visuals and illustrations readily available. That being said, I do not think that there is any substitute for being alive as an intellectual, both as teacher who instructs and as a living model of learning and scholarship. To evoke the liberal arts vision of the “life of the mind” has been my philosophical passion as a teacher.

When I came to Roanoke College in 1999 and was awarded an endowed chair the following year, it was our mutual understanding that the privilege was granted for the sake of scholarship. Coming from a fascinating but traumatic six years in the 1990s teaching in post-Communist Slovakia, where I had to acquire university-level facility in a difficult Slavic language, I brought back with me a host of writing projects begun but interrupted and postponed. The freedom afforded me by the endowed chair has blossomed into a record of well-regarded scholarly works. As a result, I am now much in demand as a guest lecturer and speaker, with writing contracts stretching years ahead. My discipline, systematic theology in the Christian tradition, has been much humbled in modern times. But its ancient passion to know all things in and under the love of God for the sake of the suffering world fuels my living of the life of the mind. And happily, it fits with Roanoke College’s “Freedom with Purpose” philosophy and its “Statement of Purpose.” It has been a happy as well as fruitful relationship.

I have tried to share this vision by way of interdisciplinary conversations. I have worked hard to host, sponsor, instigate and otherwise stimulate conversation across the divisions by leading the Dean’s Faith and Learning series and moderating my Department’s Religion and Philosophy Colloquium. I have organized numerous guest lectures and semester–long guest professorships. Perhaps the best attestation of that search for synthesis and integration is the co-authored book with my colleague philosopher, Dr. Brent Adkins, Rethinking Philosophy and Theology with Deleuze, which deliberately takes up a dialogue between philosophy and theology at the point of greatest apparent divergence. Whether we have succeeded in our intended integration is for the reader to judge; but the labor to “keep the conversation going” (Richard Rorty) in this highly and even dangerously polarized society is one to which I have committed considerable personal resources.

As an ordained minister of 35+ years, service is in my bones. As a pastor, I have found myself shading into that kind of in loco parentis care for students. I have served the church community with various tenures in part-time pastoral ministry during my sixteen years at Roanoke College; I serve my bishop as an educator of clergy and laity. I have also been involved in the local civic community’s grassroots organization, Catawba Landcare, dedicated to making rural life economically and ecologically sustainable. I am active in several professional societies, making presentations and panel appearances at the American Academy of Religion and the 16th Century Society conferences. I led a seminar at the prestigious International Congress of Luther Research in Helsinki in 2012 and participated in others in Sao Paulo in 2007 and Copenhagen in 2002. I write reviews frequently for peer reviewed journals (Lutheran Quarterly, Renaissance Journal, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Pro Ecclesia, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and others). I have served as external advisor to international PhD candidates (Aarhus, Bratislava and Adelaide) and have written evaluations for tenure and promotion for junior faculty (Marquette). I continue to aid my former institution in Bratislava in these ways and others. I take students to Central Europe every three years for May Term Travel Courses. I served the year before last on the campus wide committee advising the President of the College on the appointment of a new chaplain and I am now entrusted by the college administration with the responsibility for organizing the academic observance of the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation in 2017. I anticipate continuing to serve at this level of engagement in the communities that have treated me so well for as long as I live.

Remembering Paul Brndjar

In this blog post I wish to pay a debt of gratitude to the man who by the providential grace of God accompanied me throughout my adult journey in ministry and theology.  If you’ve been reading my blogs, you have seen how often the name of Paul Brndjar reoccurs throughout. When Paul passed away early on the morning of February 17, I began my announcement of his death on Facebook with these words, “Myself being the oldest of five brothers, Paul Brndjar was the elder brother that I never had.” His memorial service will be held on March 23 at 11 AM at the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit, 3461 S. Cedar Crest Blvd., Emmaus, PA.   

We were getting desperate. Facing a deadline to vacate our student apartment at Union Theological Seminary in New York, we looked out upon a bleak employment landscape in my field of systematic theology. I had applied for a position at Bright Divinity School in Texas but they offered only a one-year sabbatical replacement. I didn’t think it would be a good match and, in any case, the prospect of uprooting the family year after year to take temporary positions was tremendously unappealing. Ellen had sacrificed to put me through four years at Union and I felt strongly that I should now return the favor. Soon she would be pregnant with our second child, adding to the urgency. She roused me out of my stupor and helped me send out about 100 inquiries with my CV attached to anybody and everyone we could think of. When I expressed skepticism about this fishing expedition, she announced a rule that has become legendary in our family over the years: “You can always say no. But you can’t always say yes.”

There seemed to be little if any response to our mailing campaign until a letter arrived from right down below us in Manhattan, where the Lutheran Church in America had its national headquarters on Madison and 34th. It was signed by Paul Brndjar and it was an invitation to come for an interview. I later found out that Paul recognized my last name, as he had been a pastor of a Slovak Zion Synod congregation in North New Jersey and he knew my father’s name from the Missouri Synod-associated Slovak Synod congregation in central New Jersey. For the first time in my life the Slovak connection was helpful! But Paul was in fact impressed with the CV and the geographical proximity was convenient. I did well in the interviews, and when the director of the division, Rev. Kenneth Senft, offered me the position of a research associate for Church in Society, I remember saying incredulously, “You mean you’re going to pay me to sit in my office here and read books and write about them?” That was an offer I could not refuse! That employment is how a friendship began with Paul and his wife Pam and their children.

Paul was a good and patient boss, who assembled an excellent team and invested in teambuilding with in-house brainstorming and off-site retreats. We needed this solidarity, because we faced daunting issues in the early years of the Reagan administration, which I have written about in previous blogs. But personally, I was impressed right off the bat with Paul’s moral courage. He was willing to travel to Moscow to attend a Soviet “World Religions Peace Conference.” As Jacques Ellul pointed out in his devastating book on propaganda, the Soviets had perfected the fine art of preparing for war while posturing for peace. Paul knew the risks involved. As a bishop, he had pioneered opening relations between the Slovak Zion Synod and the Lutheran Church in Slovakia behind the Iron Curtain. On one occasion I recall sitting at a restaurant with a visiting Russian bishop in NYC on another such “peace mission,” as Paul stretched from his native Slovak into the Russian language to sustain hours of dialogue. His tremendous facility in language, as well as savvy gained through such personal experience, equipped him for this trip to the Soviet peace conference.

Paul went as the representative of LCA Bishop James Crumley and was photographed side-by-side with ALC Bishop David Preus, the Kremlin churches in the background. This image was published as the cover for an issue of The Lutheran. The accompanying article recorded Paul’s courageous (and lonely!) dissent from the alternately blatant and subtle Soviet propaganda that framed the conference. That witness signaled the battle to come over the social statement Peace and Politics.

Paul tasked me with writing the background theological study, which I entitled The Nuclear Morass. It argued the painful truth that weapons of mass destruction cannot be disinvented, only managed, and that the reality, not the ideology, of mutually assured destruction has actually functioned since World War II to constrain war between the two great powers. I brought such Christian realism with me from the Union tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr, but Paul helped me to see clearly and think clearly about what Reagan unartfully but truthfully called “the evil empire.” Interestingly, my otherwise friendly theological advocate, Robert Jenson, profoundly disagreed with my position as he supported unilateral nuclear disarmament (although his close comrade at Gettysburg Theological Seminary at the time, Eric Gritsch, an émigré from postwar Germany, endorsed my position with equal passion). Jenson and I ended up publishing a literary debate between us on the topic of nuclear deterrence in the journal Currents in Theology and Mission.

The struggle over the social statement Peace and Politics exhausted Paul, who had previously been the very young Bishop of the Slovak Zion Synod. He was not only feeling burnt out but realizing that he had been neglecting his family. He agreed to be the godfather of our son Will, but some obligation kept him from attending the baptism at St. Peter in Manhattan. As this happened to us, you can imagine what his work obligations had done to his family life. To my great sorrow but not surprise, he announced his resignation and return to parish ministry in northern New Jersey. Around the same time, we had to leave our student housing at Union and found a strange little house in polluted Jersey City, which was, however, affordable, and a reasonable one hour commute under the Hudson River back to Madison Avenue. At some point here, Pastor Paul visited us in this hovel and almost immediately proposed that we move to Garfield, where his congregation had a vacant parsonage. We jumped at the chance, not only for better housing, but to deepen our friendship with Paul and Pam.

Living in Garfield, we attended his Zion Lutheran Church across the street from the parsonage and, as I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, he became a model for me as I was reconsidering pastoral ministry as a possible future. He consoled Ellen when news of a former boyfriend’s suicide caused her distress. In these years, Ellen and Pam grew their friendship into a partnership in preparing food for a caterer, work they enjoyed doing from home and also a nice supplemental income. Paul and I were able now to pal around in the fun but iffy Slovak tradition of drinking, typically a six pack of Rheingold beer to chase down a fifth of Scotch between us. We would talk and talk and talk until late in the night. We enjoyed many gatherings and celebrations in their Montclair home. The first time Slovak Zion Synod Bishop John Adam met Ellen at a party there, he followed my pretty young lady around the room saying, “God is a Slovak.” Finally Ellen turned around on him and said, “Yes, Bishop, I’m sure She is.” Bishop Adam wasn’t expecting that! The otherwise loquacious bishop fell speechless.

Our daughter, Sarah, and the Brndjars’ daughter, Elizabeth, were the same age and developed a friendship. After we had moved upstate to Delhi, Sarah received a letter from Elizabeth which disturbed her. She decided to show me the letter. I sealed it back up and sent it back to Paul, simply noting that he should be aware of this. I think we talked on the phone a little about it. They were realizing that precious Elizabeth was troubled and needed special attention. Ironically, many years later Ellen and I had to deal with a similar situation with our son Will. It is very hard for parents to realize that a precious and beautiful child has problems. But in the Brndjars’ case and in ours, thanks be to God, we woke up soon enough to love a troubled child back into stability and health. This was a shared parental experience which Paul and I had talked about but especially just before his death. He was above all grateful to God that his Elizabeth was faring well, living on her own nearby, and he could leave the scene in peace.

Naturally, when we moved to Delhi NY the frequency and intensity of our meetings decreased, but never the goodwill. Paul and Pam have been the kind of friends that, after even long intervals, one could resume face-to-face conversation as if no time had expired. I had been at Immanuel Delhi for four years or so when I called Paul to ask if he had any kind of project from his knowledge of the church in Slovakia which I could work on with my retired but disabled father to get him intellectually engaged. Paul gave me a copy of Slovak Bishop Jan Michalko’s dogmatics. My father knew Slovak and I knew dogmatics, so we made a team translating it into English (a lengthy section of this was published as “The Doctrine of the Church" Parts One and Two, by Ján Michalko, translated by William Hinlicky, edited and with an Introduction by Paul R. Hinlicky, Lutheran Quarterly (Autumn 1990: 4/3) 271-316: (Winter 1990: 4/4) 439-469)..

After we had worked on the translation for about a year, Paul told us that Michalko was coming to the USA to receive an honorary doctorate at Muhlenberg University in Pennsylvania. He invited my father and me to attend a reception for him. (A Judas in our midst photographed my father with a glass of wine in his hand, looking as if a little tipsy, side-by-side with the “communist” Bishop, and published the picture in Herman Otten’s scandal sheet, Christian News.) It was on this occasion that the arrangements were made for us to receive an official invitation to Slovakia to visit Michalko in order to discuss the translation work. We needed this invitation to secure a visa. So in the spring of 1989--just months before the fall of the Berlin wall – my mother, father and I traveled to our ancestral land, both to look up long-lost relatives and to meet with the church and seminary authorities in Bratislava.

Several years later, when the possibility of my coming to the seminary in Bratislava to teach became actual, Paul was again indispensable. We didn’t want to wait and go through the laborious process of getting recognition and funding from the brand new church’s Division for Global Mission, so we went through the Slovak Zion Synod to obtain the call. Paul found a volunteer in his congregation to manage the funding of our mission. I appealed for support to my large network of readers and, astonishingly, we received enough in pledges to make the move viable, even though we were right back to where we started at Immanuel Delhi eight years earlier in terms of absolute dollars in salary. (Thankfully, the cost of living in Slovakia in that post-communist time was affordable on that salary and, after three years, the ELCA Division for Global Mission saw fit to adopt us into their roster of overseas missionaries). We couldn’t have done this without Paul’s direct advocacy and ongoing support.

During our six years in Slovakia we saw Paul frequently once again, as he regularly flew the Atlantic to visit the church in Slovakia. Paul was good friends with my Slovak mentor, Július Filo, so he had a double reason for stopping to visit the both of us. And during this period, Paul’s son Mark and his new bride Teresa came to Slovakia as DGM volunteers, teaching English in the Lutheran Church’s high school system. So we got to know them as well. And a tremendous blessing fell upon us when Paul’s retired sister, Judy, also came to the seminary as a volunteer to teach English. Judy had excellent facility in Slovak and she was a great friend during these years. She relieved me of the English language program so that I could focus on teaching in Slovak. We had many good times together.

At one memorable Christmas party we gathered with another couple volunteering in the school system to teach English, Rev. Dean Lueking, pastor emeritus at Grace Riverside outside of Chicago and his wife Bev, sister, if I remember correctly, of Jaroslav Pelikan. We sang together from childhood memory the Slovak carol, Čas radosti. Dean and Ellen looked on with wonder at the tenacity of Slovak tradition erupting from the lips of Judy, Bev, and me--although I sometimes think Ellen has become more of a Slovak than I, with all the zeal of a convert!

I mentioned earlier the particular pastoral care Paul gave to Ellen when she was grieving. In 1996 he performed that same pastoral service for hurting me when my mother died tragically and prematurely at the age of 71 from a botched carotid artery surgery. We took an emergency flight in early November to her bedside and stayed for almost three weeks, while she lingered as her organs slowly shut down. When it was obvious that there was no hope, we returned to Slovakia with a stopover in Newark airport where Paul met us. He had a knack for saying just the right thing. After I had poured out my heart detailing the tragic missteps that were taking away our mother and my father’s life partner, I was feeling a little embarrassed and said something like, “I know the world has been much bigger problems. This is not the end of the world.” And Paul gently said the hard truth back to me, “But it is the end of your little world.” No sidestepping or sugarcoating, but the truth spoken in love. How he thus helped me face my grief at real loss! We flew back to Slovakia to await word of my mother’s death, which came the day after we returned home.

Paul had never been robustly healthy. He retired from parish ministry and with Pam moved to a condo in Northeastern Pennsylvania. We talked on and off through these past twenty-some years and after we built our home at St Gall Farm, he would say regularly how they hoped to get here to visit us and see our place. We still traveled regularly to upstate New York to visit family and friends and tried as often as possible to stop in Pennsylvania to visit Paul and Pam along the way. Two years ago, Paul was waylaid by Covid. He became a victim of long Covid and his pulmonary function was increasingly compromised. The last time we visited them, he was dependent upon oxygen. Still, it came as a shock when Pam let us know two months ago that Paul had gone on home hospice care. After checking with Pam about it, I began to call Paul weekly until the time of his death.

We would talk just like in the old days for as long as his energy and wind would hold out. We talked about our battle times together, we talked about the sorry state of the Church, we talked about pastoral ministry, we talked about politics and international affairs, we talked about Slovakia and all our mutual friends, we talked about our children and what it meant for us to be fathers. When he once expressed to me some diffidence about his path in life and whether he was already a forgotten man, I told him that in my experience wherever he had gone he had left a trail of goodwill. We agreed that in our brokenness Christ is for us, lives in us and in spite of all works through us. Toward the end, Ellen and I talked with Pam to lend strength and courage for the death that was approaching.

In the final conversation I had with Paul, he was excited to share with me in detail the memorial service that he had just planned with his pastor. With astonishing energy, he lingered over the hymns he had chosen. His joy radiated through the phone and his labored breathing as he recounted a recent gathering of his children and their children – his daughter Leah published a picture from this occasion on Facebook showing Paul pointing at the first martini he had taken in three years to make sure that the class was properly filled! So in response to this final great joy in his earthly sojourn, I told him a story about my own father, two weeks before he died, when all of his sons and their families and also a nephew gathered in his hospital room for the Lord’s Supper. And how he interrupted the pastor’s benediction declaring, “Now I want to say something.” And Dad began to pray, saying, “Lord, I thank you that I have been able to be a part of my own funeral…” Paul liked the story and recognized himself in it. We are pastors to the end of our days, a vocation, not a job.

Well done, good and faithful servant! You rest in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria.

What I learned in pastoral ministry – Bratislava

When I arrived at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Comenius University in Bratislava in August 1993, I thought I knew Slovak. I was wrong. What I knew was a basket of words and phrases from the peasant language of my paternal grandparents from around 100 years ago. Now I was expected to speak on a university level. And I didn’t have an ear yet for contemporary spoken Slovak. As I stumbled around in this challenging language, accustomed to my own complex forms of English expression, I felt condemned to baby talk. For the first year, I taught entirely in English. I had an audience because following liberation there was an enormous hunger to acquire this world language. I also studied Slovak intensively. By my third year I could lecture fluently enough in Slovak.

Pastoral experiences in Slovakia at the beginning were little because of this limitation in language. It is one thing to speak more or less fluently and it is quite another to understand the subtleties of a native speaker deploying the language quickly and idiomatically. Since pastoral care really begins with careful listening and cautious probing to see that one has actually understood, I remained handicapped despite steady progress in the language. Often I had to awkwardly intervene and ask whether I had understood X, Y or Z. Without the unconscious informal tools of communication of native speakers, such explicit questioning was too often an embarrassing conversation stopper. So I did what I could pastorally for the first several years, and that was to preach, and to teach about preaching and about the liturgy.

One of my first sermons in the Slovak language was on the good Shepherd text of John 10. Woodenly projecting my very American-style into the Slovak language was often amusing, especially when I dramatically announced in Slovak to the congregation on this occasion, “You are not dumb sheep!” My point, of course, was that they are smart sheep, who know the voice of their Shepherd and don’t go after the voice of a stranger. But I’m afraid the point was lost with my clumsy expression.

But I got better at this and became able to speak spontaneously to church groups, though not without linguistic misadventures. There was a rather risqué billboard popular at the time for sunscreen with semi-exposed bikini bottoms illustrating various degrees of tanning. The caption read, “Everyone has their own factor,” i.e. their own degree of sunscreen strength needed. You could use this expression to say something like, “To each their own.” And so I used it in front of a church audience to the snickering of the teenagers who found the risqué reference very funny in front of their elders still formed by the puritanical years of Marxism-Leninism (one of the few things pietists liked about that bygone regime).

By the first semester of my third year I was feeling confident enough to lecture spontaneously rather than from a prepared manuscript. It was the final meeting of the class and my summation of the course. The lecture moved to a kind of dramatic rhetorical finish when I said (or thought I said), “And you, as future preachers of the word of God…” The word for preacher is kazetel, but what I said was kazitel. And to my great surprise the students interrupted my lecture then and there with a roar of prolonged laughter. Befuddled, I had no idea why. What I had said with the wrong word, kazitel was, “And you, as future destroyers of the word of God…” I had many other such mishaps in language, too numerous to recall, and almost always involving some sexual faux pas.

My mentor, Julius Filo, was chair of the Department of Practical Theology. He had spent years in Geneva with the Lutheran World Federation and was very keen on liturgical renewal in Slovakia. He was author and promoter of a modernization of the Agenda updating church rituals. But his proposed modernization experienced the most extraordinary backlash. Communion was typically celebrated four or five times a year and when it was celebrated, it was prefaced by a lengthy service of confession and absolution after the sermon which consisted in a series of questions and answers. I thought upon experiencing this that it was rather profound and in principle provided for serious self-examination. I remembered how this had been my mother’s childhood practice at her Slovak-American church in Streator Illinois!

But following the model of the LBW, Filo moved confession and absolution to the beginning of the service and abbreviated the form dramatically. The motive was in part to encourage more frequent communion. A colleague on the faculty in Church History had a fiery temperament -- with reason. He had been betrayed by a cowardly fellow student during the Stalin years, expelled from the theological faculty and after release from prison drove a tractor on a collective farm for another decade before he was permitted to finish his seminary education. You might say he had a chip on his shoulder as a result. And he furiously opposed Filo’s revision of the confession of sins and absolution. I patiently tried to understand what was behind his ferocious objections, more rage than reason, which was making life miserable in the church and on the faculty. It finally came out that he was worried that it’s a long time from the beginning of the service to communion and in between he might have a sinful thought. I was dumbstruck. I have sinful thoughts on the minute!

Although I did learn to sing the beautiful Otče naš (Our Father) in the minor key typical of Slavic liturgical music, I never acquired competency in liturgical leadership. This involved a great deal of training for chanting; for example, the gospel in its entirety is sung. But I was able to teach students to think about what they were doing liturgically. For example, I once asked the students why they believed in the sacrifice of the mass. They were indignant. “We are not Catholics, we are Lutherans!” “Why then,” I asked, “do you face the altar when you chant the words of institution? To whom are you speaking/singing?” Another time I was teaching the history of doctrine through the patristic period and I could see that my students were bored and uninterested in the topic. So I hit upon a dramatization. I told them that from now on every week I would come to class in the role of a classical heretic and I would give ten American dollars to any student who could refute me. That was a barrel of laughs. I can still see the grimaced frustration on the faces of my  young theological jocks when my Arius or Nestorius or Pelagius bested their orthodoxy and left them tongue-tied in defeat.

More seriously, my kind of pastoral engagement and care for their learning came to them as a breath of fresh air. Typical instruction was that the professor provided a typescript of his lectures and when students came to class, he would simply open to the daily lesson and read it. I could see on this model why students could avoid attending class all semester and still show up to pass a perfunctory oral examination. Students were astonished when I gave them reading assignments as homework and expected discussion in class! But most of them liked it and actually attended. I was greatly assisted every year by a student with competency in English to back me up in the classroom, and who often translated my lectures into better Slovak than I was able to.

I gradually learned that my faculty colleagues were at each other’s throats, a simmering conflict between those who had cozied up to the communist regime and the so-called “prison pastors” who had suffered for their resistance. I once endured a three hour meeting of the academic council filled with angry and irrational arguments, as it seemed to me, about nothing at all. When I asked a trusted colleague what that was all about, he simply replied, “That one has blood on his hands.”

Even more discouragingly, the faculty colleagues were desperate for recognition after so many years of isolation and humiliation under the Marxist regime. They took this need for recognition out on the students, who in their eyes were not sufficiently grateful nor deferential. It seemed to me that they resented this new and upcoming generation, free in a way that they had never been. Indeed, it seemed to me that they needed more from the students than they were willing to give, complaining about them constantly. I had become so popular with the students as a result of my pastoral care approach to teaching that I was beginning to be the object of envy on the part of these colleagues, who found occasion to attack my American dress (cardigan sweaters rather than a three-piece suit!) and other such substantive faults on public display in my persona.

But I developed a working relationship with Igor Kišš, an unforgettable personality whom lovingly described as a “naïve narcissist.” He was a man without resentment or bitterness but a live and in living color example of the extraordinary need for recognition in those who had suffered lifelong repression and humiliation for Christian conviction. Kišš had been in line to become the chief systematic theologian but got himself in trouble with the authorities, probably manipulated by others on the faculy, and was banished to a small congregation near the Tatra Mountains. There he continued his scholarship on Luther’s social ethics and after liberation was reappointed to the theological faculty. When Julius Filo left to become the general bishop of the church, Kišš became the Academic Dean in his place. It was in this capacity that I became a “partner in crime,” so to speak, with his attempts to modernize the curriculum. I would come to him with ideas which he would initially scoff at, but I knew how to back off until a little bit later he would produce the same ideas as if they were his own. And I would repeatedly joke with him, “You are the brains, I am the muscles.” On a return trip to Slovakia several years after I had left, I visited him just before he died. He begged me to take his book on social ethics back to America to have it translated and published. I made no promise because I knew the effort and expense would not be worth it. Tragically, a judgment not on his effort, but on the repressive circumstances in which he had lived and worked.

Julius Filo as mentioned, was elected bishop of the church after the third year of our stay and thus my mentor left the faculty. He needed to delegate responsibilities and he laid upon me the role of student pastor. I very reluctantly accepted this responsibility, fearing (rightly!) that my cultural distance would make effective pastoral conversation an on-going trial. While the students loved me and forgave my inadequacies generously, I do not count my time in this role as very successful. The students were young adults between the ages of 18 and 23; their hormones were raging. How was I to negotiate sensitive questions about sexual behavior?

I found funding several times to take a busload of students on a trip, once to Wittenberg, Germany and another time to Auschwitz in Poland. On the trip to Germany we stayed overnight in inexpensive lodging. But the students were raucous until late in the night. I finally stepped out of my room and screamed spontaneously in Slovak, “Quiet! You are making so much noise that not even the devil can sleep!” On the way home, we got into a traffic jam because of freezing rain on the highway. The students had snuck beer on board the Soviet era bus without a restroom. As we were stalled on the road, one young lady came up to me and said, “I can’t make it anymore.” She ran out the door into the field. Thank God, she returned before the bus rolled on.

The trip to Auschwitz by contrast was quite somber. In their education under Marxism-Leninism, they had been taught that the primary victims of the death camps had been Communists. It was new information that the primary target had been the Jews. In fact, most of 120,000 Jews in Slovakia were driven in rail cars to nearby Auschwitz, Slovakia being the only nation which actually reimbursed the Nazis for the cost of transportation. All this was new information in the 1990s, although throughout the country one could see abandoned and desecrated synagogues and Jewish cemeteries. My teaching point was Emil Fackenheim’s so-called 914th commandment, “Thou shalt not give Nazism a posthumous victory.”

I also tried to teach the fruits of the post-Vatican II Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, which included sponsoring interactions with Catholic seminarians. This was very challenging, because in the time after the Reformation, more than 70% of the Slovak people were Lutheran, until around 1670 when the Counter-Reformation struck violently. Bitter memories of this haunted the imagination of Lutherans; crude suspicion of the Catholic Church was endemic. But my habilitation was written on Lutheran-Catholic dialogue, successfully defended in the Slovak language and I was awarded the status of docent for it. It was published as a book in Slovakia under the title, The Future of the Church: What the Lutheran-Catholic Dialogue Should Mean for Us. But I suspect it has not been popular there on any side.

Another bridge I tried to build even less successfully was the historic enmity between Slovaks and Hungarians. For centuries Slovakia had been colonized by the Hungarian Empire with all the indignities incumbent thereunto. (My own grandfather recalled to us how he was beaten as a child in school when the Hungarian teacher heard him speaking in Slovak). So I arranged for a delegation of Hungarian Lutheran seminary students in Budapest to visit us in Bratislava. It was a fiasco for the same reason of a continuing Hungarian assumption of cultural superiority.

In my ministry to the students, I sought opportunities to bring them into our apartment for evening discussions or classes. A memorable but also painful example of this occurred on the night when NATO began to bomb Serbia. Our faculty had students from the former Yugoslavia, where some 100,000 Slovak peasants had emigrated three centuries before after the defeated Turks vacated, leaving rich farmland in need of reclamation. In my class that evening was a student from the town of Novi Sad. When the class had formally concluded around 9pm, I got the unusual request from the students that they could remain for a while to watch CNN on my television. Only when I turned it on, did I grasp what the interest was. The student from Novi Sad shrieked when the reports of bombing there came across the television. We handed him our phone as he desperately tried to call his parents. I was entirely skeptical of this attack engineered by the Clinton administration, so it seemed to me, to change the subject from Monica. I was also never more ashamed of being an American.

In spite of my inadequacies, the pastoral nature of my teaching and the personal care with which I taught was blessed and touched the lives of many. When we made the decision to leave Slovakia, we felt very guilty. The resistance of the old guard to the young generation was painful and I had become the object of their resentment. The farewell the students gave me was extraordinary; indeed, one year later when I returned to give a guest lecture at the faculty, it was boycotted by the professors under the pretext of having an important meeting scheduled at exactly the same time. The students filled the auditorium, and knowing that their cheering would be heard in the faculty meeting; they demonstrated like delegates at a political convention cheering a returning hero.

I had told them on leaving that they needed to endure, that nothing would really change until the old generation died off, that the scars of 45 years of Marxism Leninism on top of the previous decade of Fascism would not heal overnight. I cultivated many relationships among the students which have lasted to this very day. I am proud to say that two of my best students are now established theologians at the faculty. I follow with delight on Facebook the pastoral ministries of many of my former students. When I lived there, the Sunday services were sparsely populated, mainly with babushkas. Today with joy I admire the photographs and videos of well populated church services with intergenerational congregations.  

When I left the students presented me with a drawing, made by one of their artists, of the parable of the sower on the soil of our campus with the signatures and best wishes of the students beneath. They blessed me for sowing the seed and I am blessed to see those seeds come to fruition. In my six years there I learned to be a pastoral teacher. Soli Deo Gloria!

What I learned as editor of Lutheran Forum (1988-1993)

My appointment as editor of Lutheran Forum came as a big surprise. I was happy enough pastoring my rebounding congregation in the beautiful foothills of the Catskill Mountains. We found the winters beautiful too -- at least for the first several years! I was busy too with my side career in the Naval Reserve as a chaplain, and enjoying enough leisure to cast hand-tied dry flies for brown trout on the upper West Branch of the Delaware River. But my interest in the position was queried and, as Richard O. Johnson reports in his excellent account of these years, my frank declaration that I would set “a more urgent tone” addressing the “crisis in American Lutheranism” was well received and in short order I was appointed.

Johnson highlights the “crisis” mode of my “apocalyptic” editorship. No doubt, that is a fair description of much that I did and I can happily refer the reader to his two chapters concerning my work at the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau (1988-1993) for that side of the story. Suffice it to say, however, I have remained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America all these years since. I don’t retract any of the critical things I published about the ELCA during its first years and indeed I see in this denomination’s slow and painful tailspin confirmation of many of those dire diagnoses.

But as a churchman according to my evangelical catholic convictions, and despite being sorely tempted, I was resolved never again be part of a schism (such as was forced upon us by the J.A.O. Preus putsch in the Missouri-Synod). And I haven’t see that the alternatives are any better. The Missouri Synod has become increasingly reactionary – it is the party of Trump at prayer. The breakaway North American Lutheran Church is a small denomination in self-contradiction, trying to cozy up to the Missouri Synod but quite paralyzed, having grand-mothered in ordained women. Junior Missouri, the NALC seems forced to draw boundaries ever more tightly. And in reaction against the ELCA’s drawing boundaries ever more loosely, those many of my erstwhile comrades-in-arms from Lutheran Forum days who swam the Tiber, thinking to escape the ELCA protestantization of Lutheranism and find succor in the bosom of unchanging Mother Church, have rudely awoken to life under Francis, as liberal Protestant a Pope as has ever reigned.

I confess that I spilled considerable ink attacking what I polemically named “the wacky left.” I had read Herbert Marcuse already in seminary days and basically did not buy the argument of this champion of a “New Left” that, after the workers went for Hitler and Fascism, progressives should turn from class to sex and gender for the root analysis of oppression. I was coming from a certain sympathy with the tough-minded “old left.” I mean sympathy with the plight of poor and working-class people and particularly in the USA of African-Americans. But this sympathy inclined me to suspicion about the class-blindness of liberal feminism. I regarded radical feminism – we were all reading Mary Daly – to be hopelessly sectarian and utopian. In fact, I learned suspicion of affluent, elite liberal feminism from the early expressions of African-American “womanist” theology: at Union I had known Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown, Dolores Williams and perhaps Linda Thomas too (but my memory of her is foggy).

When I worked for the division of Mission in North America I had been tasked with producing a theological study on “Women and Men in the Body of Christ.” As I had been an advocate for the ordination of women from the beginning of my ministry, I gladly accepted the assignment. I did considerable reading in feminist literature which has stayed with me all these year.  In particular, I drew upon drew upon Ann Douglas’s remarkable study of 19th century America, The Feminization of American Culture, which exposed how industrialization actually robbed women of their important economic roles in the premodern household and at least initially rendered women economically superfluous, producing a soft minded culture of sentimentalism. I loved and highlighted the statement I found in Douglas of the 19th century proto-feminist, Margaret Fuller, “Cheat me with no illusion! Tell me the truth!” Douglas simultaneously told a story about “the loss of theology” that became profoundly important for my study. I was particularly impressed with Jacqueline Jones’s book, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow about Black women at work and in the family from slavery to the present. I read the parallel Marxist analysis of Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class.  Simone de Beauvoir’s, The Second Sex, however, struck me as overly influenced by her lover Sartre’s existentialism in railing against woman’s biological role as the root of oppression, in my view a profoundly misogynist stance. I found Barbara Ehrenreich’s dissection of Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment to be an honest lament, significantly voiced by a prominent liberal feminist. Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and The Minotaur, recommended to me by my colleague Kate Kidd (a valuable conversation partner through the whole project), provided a psychoanalytic perspective, arguing that second wave feminism unfortunately contributed to the neoliberal economy’s discrediting and disabling  of long-standing, generation-spanning, primary relationships (a.k.a. family). And I rounded out this reading with the several studies of the inimitable Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism and Havens from the Heartless World. Along with consideration of much other literature, I produced the study.

But the Management Committee rejected it, acknowledging its tremendous “erudition,” but saying, politely, that it wasn’t what liberal feminists were looking for. I shopped the manuscript for a publishing contract. Stanley Hauerwas was excited about it but his series partner, Alisdair McIntyre, was a touch uncomfortable, I think, with my reliance on Luther, wanted a more favorable view of the medieval period, and required more revision than I was capable of doing at the time. In this experience, in any event, my animus hardened against “the wacky left” especially at against the class blindness of liberal feminism and the anarcho-nihilism of radical feminism. I found such views being promoted in the new ELCA with reckless abandon regarding their implications for theology in the tradition of Luther, not to mention for Christianity as congregational life. The devastating problem in contemporary culture was not “the patriarchy” but the flight from fatherhood.

That is what I cared about. What Johnson overlooks, I think, is that I devoted considerable energy in editorials and in curating the articles solicited and selected for publication to defining theologically and describing practically the vocation of pastoral ministry in a decaying culture being raped by neoliberalism. As I related in my previous post, I was learning how to be a pastor at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Delhi, New York. Much of this learning entailed some unlearning of things I had been taught in seminary, particularly in so-called Practical Theology. I’m not referring to the great teaching I got from George Hoyer or Richard Caemmerer but to the kind of instruction that has since become required in Clinical Pastoral Education.

I began my editorship recruiting a great team of advisors: Rebecca Frey, Steve Bouman, Leonard Klein, Paul Brndjar and Christian von Dehsen. Unexcelled proof-reader, Rebecca was a devoted student of George Lindbeck and a sophisticated theological thinker, especially about the interfaces of theology, aesthetics, and liturgy. The men were all either working pastors or had had intensive previous pastoral experience. Steve Bouman produced an excellent regular column, “From the Parish,” and Leonard Klein continued to articulate the themes of liturgical and sacramental renewal in articles or editorials. Chris von Dehsen saw to it that biblical scholarship was brought to bear. And Paul Brndjar’s judgment on whether and how articles would engage contemporary congregational life was indispensable.  We had lively editorial group meetings, hosted by Steve Bouman, planning and processing every issue that I edited. There was a real focus on pastor and parish.  The presupposition of the whole was Christianity as congregational life. I was greatly interested personally in lifting up pastoral ministry as a sacrificial vocation the reward of which is quite literally “in heaven.”   

I can think of several contemporaneous experiences that pushed me in this direction. I have mentioned in previous blogs how often I came in on the heels of clergy sexual misconduct and witnessed the devastation this appalling breach of trust brought upon congregational life. I stood in line at a “new” church hearing on ministry behind a fellow who went on and on about how he’s just a regular guy who walks into the hospital room dressed California casual, introducing himself with, “Hi, my name’s Joe and I like to visit patients. What’s your name?” What is the point of such aggressive disowning of pastoral identity? While I thought that adoption of the ecumenical proposal of a threefold ministry could be helpful for sorting out a diaconal ministry of the word for service from pastoral ministry to Word and Sacrament, in that it would channel differently those interested in social ministry but not called to pastoral ministry, I wonder whether adoption of it has actually worked well to accomplish this.

Above all, I had been around long enough to witness incompetent liturgies with the presiding minister kibitzing through any and all portions with which he or she felt uncomfortable, signaling disbelief in what is being said. Likewise I had heard a multitude of sermons offering nutrient-poor pottage, as if the preacher were at a loss about what actually to say from the assigned Scripture lessons and simply wanted to fill up 10 minutes with jokes or anecdotes. And I should mention, in passing, the woeful attempts at children’s sermons that, if not spent entirely on childish entertainment, went way beyond age-appropriate attention spans and frequently non-too-subtly pitched to the adults watching. I thought then, and I still do, that the most telling “compliment” to be received after service goes, “Pastor, I got more out of your children’s sermon than out of your regular sermon.” From the beginning of my editorship with my first issue themed on The Small Catechism and the Formation of Piety, I advocated dispensing with “children’s sermons” in favor of “children’s catechism” as a first step in re-forming piety for Christianity as congregational life.

Richard Johnson describes the foregoing as the turn of my editorship inward away from attention to social justice issues to church and ministry problems. Anyone in the ELCA in these years could count on the denomination urgently to demand attention to social issues (and little of my complaint in any event had to do with raising these issues as such). But what we could not count on in the ELCA was attention to the genuine crisis occurring in pastoral ministry. Least of all could we expect cognizance of the way the “new” Lutheran church was in fact driving the pastoral crisis with its pretentious self-understanding of “church-wide” as a significant political player, employing corporate management strategies at home on Higgins Road, viewing congregations more and more as branded local franchises. Today we see the outcome of this generation-long, religion-business “marketing” in hemorrhaging membership, depressing rates of pastoral burnout, paralleled by the failure to recruit a new generation of pastors for training at ever weaker seminaries. There is such a confusion of role and expectations surrounding pastoral ministry that it has become a thankless job that few in their right mind would undertake. I hate to say, “I told you so,” but, well, we told you so.

In any case, the pastoral vocation for Christianity as congregational life was a major focus of my editorship of Lutheran Forum. What did I learn from this experience?

Surprise at how controversial this focus was! My major take away personally is that the editorship catapulted me into a celebrity/notoriety that I did not enjoy and was quite willing to leave behind by the time I resigned. Illustrative of this, Johnson reports my dramatic protest at the first Call to Faithfulness Conference (initiated by Lutheran Forum and cosponsored with the journals dialog and Lutheran Quarterly) when I cast a copy of The Lutheran from the pulpit in the middle of my sermon before the congregation of 1000 or so who had come to Northfield Minnesota. I wish Johnson had pointed out what I was actually doing, and said I was doing in the sermon, namely casting down an article promoting “entertainment evangelism,” if I remember correctly, from the “Church of Joy” in Arizona. I further wish he had reported how I rebuked from the pulpit those cheering my action with a sharp reminder that we are all implicated in our ecclesiastical disaster.

 In any case, I subsequently became notorious, if not already so, in the eyes of ELCA cheerleaders who actually felt the pain inflicted by my “ragged-edged axe” on the pages of Lutheran Forum. I accepted this role and this notoriety because I could see that my academic equals with the same credentials and, presumably, responsibility were paralyzed into silence by the precarious positions they held within ELCA institutions. One professor, a significant historian of the Reformation, chastised me for the editorial counsel that dissidents should “starve the beast,” transparently worried about his own salary. More typical was another seminary professor who wrote to me a long, handwritten, late-night letter stained with tears, thanking me for what I was doing in Lutheran Forum in calling out the madness and bemoaning his suffering at the hands of “new church” cheerleaders. Sort of like Nicodemus. When I challenged him to go public with his story, the conversation dried up. The last straw personally came when an anonymous editorial in Lutheran Commentator alleged that Paul Hinlicky had appointed himself the judge of everyone else’s orthodoxy. In fact, we were pleading in hope against hope for a generous and churchly orthodoxy against the protestantization of Lutheranism. Alas, Peter Berger has proved correct in seeing a “heretical imperative” at work in American culture to which the ELCA was fully accommodating.

Another take away in the end, accordingly, was the sorrowful conclusion that institutional reform of a denomination, be it the Missouri Synod or the ELCA, was a hopeless task. The inertia of institutions, especially in the state of decline, only causes them to step on the gas and continue to drive on all eight cylinders into the same brick wall. I had hoped for a pastors’ revolt but the decline in vocational consciousness had already, like an acid, eaten away this potential, and by the time of the formation of the ELCA, the Ministerium had been abolished. The ELCA bishops were bishops in name and regalia only, real power being ceded to the national bureaucracy which could easily manipulate the lay-dominated synod and church wide assemblies. So, by the end of my editorship, I had resigned myself to the unhappy fact that the Lord had placed me in a dying denomination, where I was to conduct a ministry to Word and Sacrament as I had sworn at my ordination.

Yet perception of the ecclesiastical crisis was real at the time and Lutheran Forum effectively addressed it. I was serving as Executive Director of the ALPB simultaneously with my editorship, and the subscription office had been relocated to my congregation in Delhi, New York. So I know as a first-person witness that paid subscription circulation peaked at over 4000 (today it is at 1300). Richard Johnson disputes this number because he is relying on a source on the ALPB Board who was never friendly to my leadership. It is water under the bridge now, and there is no way to adjudicate the question, so I mention it merely as counter testimony. In any event, when I left behind stewardship of Lutheran Forum, the entire ALPB enterprise was in a reinvigorated state, as Johnson also reports. So another take away was that I learned entrepreneurship, a practical skill that perhaps is increasingly important for the future of pastoral ministry. This entrepreneurship included the ALPB sponsoring the launch of the new theological journal Pro Ecclesia, of which I became an associate editor.

The final take away I would like to mention, which follows from the foregoing, is that there was a real hunger for adult-level theological discussion. While Lutheran Forum had the definite editorial perspective of evangelical catholicism under my editorship, I was careful to print alternative points of view, provided that they satisfied criteria of intellectual honesty, scholarly credibility and some kind of confessional commitment. At one point I indulged the tongue-in-cheek brag that we published more of the “Radical Lutheran/Word Alone” material than the “prairie populists” (of the future LCMC) did! Of course, this policy excluded a lot of the “Christianity-lite” (as Leonard Klein put it) literature coming out of official ELCA platforms. As a PhD in systematic theology, I was acutely aware that the kind of writing published in academic journals would not fly for our projected audience in Lutheran Forum of pastors and educated laypeople. Given the steep decline in the standards of seminary education, however, and the ensuing infantilizing of the laity by the theology-lite products of such seminary education, even our carefully selected and edited articles were sometimes perceived as too academic. The truth is, we were trying to fill a real void with, in this respect I suppose, varying levels of success.

What I learned, then, from those five years was that I had to retire from the celebrity/notoriety and return to my first love, scholarly theology. In these years I had twice competed (and according to inside sources clearly won) searches for tenure-track positions in systematic theology at two different ELCA seminaries. In the first case, I ruined my chance at the last minute with an egregious, even arrogant response to a question at the faculty interview from someone in Practical Theology about how I would connect with the social sciences. To this I replied all too flippantly, “That’s assuming that the social sciences are science.” The comment triggered a civil war on that faculty which eventually led to my chief advocate’s resignation and departure for more favorable pastures. The second time around it was my notoriety that triggered adamant opposition from the leading voice of liberal Protestant theology on the faculty. I note that even the “radical Lutherans” took my side in this case, but it was a bridge too far to cross for the president to appoint me.

When I told the ALPB in 1992 that I was looking to resign and that they should prepare for a transition, I had no idea what would come next. We were settling down at Immanuel in Delhi. We had purchased five acres, put up a house and moved out of the parsonage. I told the congregation that I just had to quit smoking and would predictably be a real grump so everyone should leave me alone as much as possible for the summer in 1992. Putting myself on the spot that way helped and I have not touched a cigarette ever since – 32 years as of this writing!

I made friends with a young Slovak theologian, Ondrej Prostrednik, who had excellent English and visited us in Delhi while on a USA church tour. The possibility of my coming to his theological faculty in Bratislava came up. With the fall of communism, the young generation was flooding into the churches. The short-staffed faculty was overwhelmed after all the years of communist suppression. I turned from this conversation to my friend Paul Brndjar: would he, with the Slovak Zion Synod of which I had been a member in New York City days, sponsor me? After some discussions about fundraising, the answer came back in the affirmative. So in my final year at Immanuel, I began again to study the Slovak language and daughter Sarah finished high school a year ahead of time. By August 1993, we were packed up and ready to fly off to the greatest adventure of our lives.

My final issue as editor of Lutheran Forum was titled The Lutheran Bonhoeffer. In those days, this was still a controversial proposal. Most scholarship had fallen into a simplistic juxtaposition between two poles: quietist, politically passive Lutheran churches pining after the lost patronage of the Imperial Reich, coupled with authoritarian tendencies inherited from Luther, to accept, if not favor the Nazis; on the other side, the politically activist Reformed churches leading the opposition to Hitler. Two Kingdoms vs. Lordship of Christ. Bonhoeffer was interpreted as a theologian of secularity who broke free from Lutheran passivity rationalized by the Two Kingdoms doctrine to participate courageously in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Thankfully, today, we have the scholarship of Michael DeJonge to set the record straight. I personally had been studying Bonhoeffer, starting with Letters and Papers from Prison, already from college days. I knew that the prevailing opinion about Bonhoeffer was wrong and in this final issue I solicited articles that would indicate Bonhoeffer’s serious appropriation of the Lutheran legacy in theology and ethics. In my parting editorial, after thanking the readers for their support over the years and announcing our impending move to Slovakia, I left with the parting thought that Bonhoeffer points the way forward to the renewal of Lutheran theology in the church: “Christ-existing-as-community.” When one surveys the scene in seriously Lutheran theology today, that counsel seems to have been well received.

Soli Deo Gloria!

What I have learned in pastoral ministry: The Lutheran Parish of Delaware County

In November of 1985, Immanuel Lutheran Church offered a large parsonage, a winter supply of firewood and an annual salary of $13,000 with benefits. This was about a 65% cut in income for us. The congregation was struggling, having endured a fight over the introduction of the new Lutheran Book of Worship which led to the previous pastor’s departure under less than happy circumstances. And the pastor before him had also resigned under unhappy circumstances! So we knew it was going to be a challenge. The congregation in turn accepted that I would be a Naval Reservist drilling monthly. And Ellen would need to find employment as soon as we could arrange childcare for toddler Will.

It turned out to be the happiest eight years of our lives thus far, with a blessed ministry that saw the congregation rebound. I dived into the Manual on the Liturgy, recalibrated my preaching to focus on the event of Christ-for-us speaking from the assigned Scriptures, and moved the congregation to weekly communion. The most important work during the week was home visitation. These visits were often chatty, tension-reducing sessions as I tried to learn about my people. I often had to absorb the anger or dismay over the preceding conflict about the LBW. And as I gained trust, like many other pastors, I would come home to tell Ellen how I spent the day soaking up human pain. Delaware County was beautiful, but it was poor, and folks struggled to make a living. Geographically Delaware County is also huge, larger than Rhode Island, and our people were scattered throughout it. So visitation was time consuming. Early on we organized a tape ministry recording the services for shut-ins, which we would hand deliver. From this immersion experience in visitation, I remembered as a teenager how another pastor, friend to my father, commented, “In terms of human interest, you can’t beat being a pastor.” I can certainly echo this thought from my own experience of pastoral visitation!

Early on, a parishioner called me with the news that her kin was on his deathbed about 100 miles away and had no pastor to pray with him. As I drove through the Catskill Mountains, I ruminated and finally resolved to defy my training in Rogerian psychology from seminary, above all the malignant counsel that pastors avoid “God talk.” I was going to figure out how to give voice before God to a man I did not know who was facing death. Consequently, I began also, during these years, regularly to talk with my father about pastoral care based on his many years of experience.

Ellen eased into her new role as pastor’s wife with enthusiasm. She asked my mother for her advice. She tells me that Mom gave her three pointers: first, never be an officer in a women’s church group; second, after a church dinner stay out of the kitchen cleanup to avoid the gossip, including rivalry about whose food was best; and third, whenever anybody gives you a gift take it with gratitude, whether you need it or not. Ellen says that counsel served her well. To the delight of the congregation, she became a celebrity in the local newspaper for winning a recipe prize for her sinfully rich No Bake Brownies.

I in turn relished my new life in the country. At the headwaters of the Delaware River, trout fishing was at my fingertips and I learned how to tie flies and cast them. A parishioner had a creek dammed up by beavers, into which someone had thrown a bucket of largemouth bass years before and forgotten about. There I had a honey hole of a fishing spot. Without much success, I tried deer hunting in the abominable cold of an upstate New York winter. After all those years living in the city, a love for rural life was thus kindled in us. I was fascinated by the farm operations of the several parishioners who were still active in that difficult vocation.

The congregation had an interesting history. After the trauma of World War I and the hyperinflation of the 1920s, German families were emigrating. Some made it to Brazil, others to South Texas, and still others to Nebraska and New York City. Through various connections these families were in communication with one another. Someone discovered cheap farmland outside of Delhi, New York – cheap because the soil, as it was said, is “two rocks for every dirt.” Initially they worked dairy, but many discovered that growing cabbage and cauliflower for the New York City market was more profitable. In the 1930s these families began to worship together and search for a pastor. The Missouri Synod pastor in Kingston, New York, Ernest L. Witte, traveled the 90 miles to Delhi on his bimonthly “mission to the Catskills.” So the congregation was established, purchasing a large Victorian house in centrally located Delhi that had most recently been in use as a maternity hospital. When the church was built in the early1960s, the house became the parsonage in which we lived. To honor this history I offered a German language liturgy on occasion, and was gratified when exiting parishioners announced, “Sehr gut gesprochen!” Towards the end of my years in Delhi I gathered up documents and photos, and interviewed the seniors in order to write the history of the congregation, a little book in which I took a great deal of satisfaction.

Of course, it was not all roses with no thorns. I had disappointments as a pastor trying to build up the congregation, investing considerable time and energy into evangelism, with mixed results. Once, a lapsed Catholic divorced woman had been attending for some time, so I asked to visit her. When the conversation got around to it, I asked whether she wanted to join the church. She replied with a tone of false intensity, “Oh, pastor, I like you very much. But it’s just all those hypocrites I can’t stand.” I decided to call her bluff, “Okay, why don’t you just join the church and you and I together will straighten out all those hypocrites?” One must challenge the hypocrisy of those who easily chastise others for hypocrisy!

Another time a weepy wife called me on the phone to say she had just discovered that her husband was cheating on her. This was a couple that I had brought into the church and whose baby I had recently baptized. I went right down to the man’s place of work and said, “You, right now, with me, behind the building!” I wasn’t challenging him to a fistfight but rather seeking a place of privacy to confront him with his adultery.

One faithful leader in the congregation had some years ago befriended a mentally disabled man who now lived in the County Infirmary. Our parishioner picked him up every Sunday and brought him to the church service where he sat in the middle aisle on his wheelchair, disheveled and sometimes drooling. His speech was difficult to understand. When I visited a new couple who had been attending church, the man finally said to me, “Pastor, if you want to grow the church you can’t have that unseemly sight. It turns people off.” I told him that so long as I was pastor the church would never back off from welcoming, indeed celebrating, the broken of this world.

Another time, after reading one of my columns in the newspaper, a woman asked to talk with me and complained about the arid preaching in her church with its constant partisan political commentary. I urged her to go back to her pastor with her unhappiness. And I told her she was more interested in politics than religion. I thought that would be the end of it. But she and her husband, having dealt honestly with their church and its pastor, came to Immanuel and became leading members. When they asked to join the congregation, they told me that they were indeed more interested in religion than partisan politics.

I learned a valuable lesson: it’s comparatively easy to bring someone into the church, but not so easy to incorporate new folks. Unless you have a caring and welcoming community of people, i.e., a community that embodies the Christ proclaimed, newcomers will rarely connect. Immanuel became that community, but all the same, I felt betrayed when people in whom I had invested left the church for entirely petty reasons (as it seemed to me). I experienced the sheep stealing of a new Pentecostal pastor in town. I had several people turn on me when, with the growth and success of the congregation, my compensation grew up to the Synod standard. I learned that all a pastor really has is his or her reputation, a very soft target in times of discord. Despite such slings and arrows, the genuine affection and support of the congregation never wavered and we weathered these little storms. I was particularly proud of the response to a challenge I made to reinforce the choir for the singing of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus on Easter Sundays. We were never perfect but we filled the church with joyful praise befitting the Day of the Resurrection.

I am no fan of what you might call the dominant trend among pastors in my lifetime: the “professionalization” of the ministry as “rostered leaders.” Pastoral ministry is a vocation, not a job. It is a sacrificial vocation whose reward, quite literally, “is in heaven.” You are never off the clock and are on call 24/7. All you’ve got is the Gospel in Word and Sacraments by which you shepherd the flock. Without this conviction and commitment, it is no wonder to me that contemporary pastors, with their theology-light seminary education, burn out -- and burn their congregations to the ground in the process of burning out. Rather than strategic plans, programming, mission statements and all the other jerry-rigged devices borrowed from business school thinking that surround the ministry today, we simply insisted on quality Sunday worship in the gathering of our Eucharistic community that sends folks into the world refreshed and equipped for their baptismal vocations.

Accordingly, we emphasized lay leadership. I trained our Sunday school teachers, meeting with them monthly to prepare for the coming Sundays with the children. We chucked the canned Sunday school lessons from the publishing houses and taught the children the lectionary’s Scripture lessons of the Sunday. In place of cheesy “children’s sermons” we brought the children forward for brief recitation of a portion of the catechism and a prayer and then send them downstairs for Sunday school, but back in time for the Eucharist. We elected laypeople to be home visitors, whom I trained. Later, we folded this into diaconal training, which involved specific ecclesiastical ministries, including liturgical leadership.

This diaconal training emerged out of cooperation between rural and town congregations in our part of upstate New York after the Synod’s bishop warned small churches that they would not be getting pastors anymore. Hartwick College in Oneonta had originated two centuries ago as a Lutheran seminary and was willing to host a week-long training of laypeople in the summer, which we called the Hartwick Institute of Theology. It is still going strong after all these years -- and it is a model that has been imitated by many other jurisdictions.

As a result of this cultivated churchly leadership, many initiatives for various kinds of charitable outreach were initiated. An especially enthusiastic project was Christmas time food baskets for the needy, which we took great joy in gathering and distributing. I remember thinking to myself when I started at Immanuel in Delhi that my ministry would be a test whether my “evangelical catholic” convictions could actually prosper congregational ministry. The proof was in the pudding. When I left after eight years, the congregation was in better shape than we found it, and was able to call a new pastor quickly. It was also our happy family time of the childhood of William and the teen years of Sarah. No doubt the loving Christian family at Immanuel sowed the seeds in Sarah of her own pastoral vocation.

As mentioned, during these years I went on monthly drills (two full Saturdays rather than a weekend), and during the summer for a two week activation. My first assignment was at a Naval Reserve Center in Binghamton, New York, about 80 miles away. All I did for a year was sit in my office and read training manuals – the CO didn’t know what to do with me. The only time he employed me was to work as “good cop” to his “bad cop” at Captain’s Mast, which is a disciplinary hearing. I was expected to give character testimony incriminating some poor sailor for some petty offense. As you can imagine, I hated this. I was able to transfer to a Chaplain’s Unit on the other side of the state near the Hudson River. This was a much better experience, with a group of clergy. We could train together and I could learn from more experienced officers.

My last and most enjoyable gig was an assignment to a Marine Corps unit headquartered under the Throgs Neck Bridge in New York City. It was grueling to travel there and to exercises, even further away, in New Jersey. I spent four weeks in the hot summer at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina in this connection. But as my congregation had grown and was demanding more of my time and energy, I gradually began to deactivate and finished out my eight year commitment (just as the Kuwait war erupted and we worried that I would get activated for it). I was never very comfortable with the expectation that I stifle my Christian voice before the military public. Those who have a genuine chaplaincy ministry have a skill for negotiation that I evidently lack.

When we first drove into Delhi to unload our rental truck at the parsonage, we were welcomed by what seemed to us a large group of folks eager for our arrival. We found the pantry chock-full of goods waiting for us, including a gallon of maple syrup from the sugar house of one of the members. I remember telling the people at that moment how I expected the bond of love to grow between pastor and people. Eight years later, when I announced that I was taking the call to teach theology at the newly liberated theological faculty in Bratislava, Slovakia, the chorus of sorrow touched me deeply. I embraced one and all as they departed that service. They sent us off with a rollicking party, and to this day, thirty years later, I remain in touch with many of them. At Immanuel in Delhi I learned to be a pastor. Soli Deo Gloria!

What I have learned in pastoral ministry: New York City

From the beginning of my decision to devote my life to theology, I made a concurrent decision always to be involved in pastoral ministry to Word and Sacrament. There was a tradition in the Missouri Synod that no one could teach theology unless he (sic!) had a number of years in pastoral ministry. I thought this was a good policy, if indeed theology is a discipline of the church necessary for the integrity and health of Christian community. In my lifetime I have seen these kinds of commitments wane. But I cannot imagine being the kind of theologian I am without the learning I experienced in pastoral ministry.

My vicarage on Long Island at the nine hundred member Redeemer Lutheran Church in Seaford was a baptism by fire. I believe I buried about thirty people during that year, including the tragic death of a couple in a small plane crash. The reason I did so many funerals was that, just before I arrived, the pastor who was supposed to be my supervisor left town in a hurry when his affair with a staff person was discovered. My quickly appointed supervisor in a neighboring parish did little other than to prevent me from preaching more than once a month. It was sink or swim otherwise.  I grooved immediately on being back east but my midwestern bride experienced some culture shock dealing with the thick Long Island accident -- she was quite alarmed later when our little daughter began speaking in Longislandese! But we greatly enjoyed the people and the youth group. They were supportive of us, even as they were dealing with the scandal of the previous pastor’s behavior.

When I entered Union Theological Seminary as a graduate student in the fall of 1978, having received the M.Div. degree and certification for ministry from the Seminex faculty, I discovered that James Thomas, a Seminex graduate a year or two older than me, had become the pastor of Mount Zion Lutheran Church on 145th St. and Convent Avenue in the heart of Harlem. Somehow the possibility of my being called to Mount Zion as assistant to the pastor came up. The AELC bishop, Rudy Ressmeyer approved, and I was ordained in my home congregation, St. Paul Lutheran Church in Raritan, New Jersey in October 1978.

Thereafter Sunday upon Sunday, Ellen and I, with toddler Sarah in a stroller, trudged off to the uptown subway line on Broadway at 110th street, riding to the exit at 145th street. From there we walked long blocks east through a devastated city-scape to Mount Zion. We had some harrowing experiences on these travels. The worst was when an obviously crazed man started shouting at us as we waited on the platform for the subway, “Why do you want to throw that child in front of the train?” I put myself between the man and little Sarah and nervously talked him down. This kind of madness, I realized, formed the environment in which my parishioners lived daily.  

We were graciously received and enjoyed the people immensely, even though the social justice accent in my preaching, now on steroids fueled from my Union experience, was sometimes disturbing for these Missouri Synod-formed Christians. The congregation was led by middle-class professionals whose community outreach was a Christian day school. I remember preaching a pretty radical sermon, “Who Are the Thieves?” It called out the deflection tactic of the powerful turning the spotlight away from their institutionalized thievery to focus on the petty thievery of the desperate poor.

On our first Thanksgiving there, James Thomas asked me to attend the ecumenical community service held in a large theater that had been converted into a Baptist Church. Ellen and I and little Sarah were the only white faces in the sea of a thousand or more black ones. As we clergy were marching down the aisle to the melodious sounds of a congregation already in full rhythm, James turned to me and said, “Oh, by the way, they want you to give the invocation.” In the African-American church tradition, the invocation is not the brief naming of the Triune God, but more or less a warm-up sermon in the form of a prayer. As the “Hallelujahs,” “Amens,” “Preacher’s got the word!” and “Rap on, preacher!” responded to my faux-accented extemporizing, “Oh Laawwd, in whom we live and move and have our being…” I felt like Steve Martin at the beginning of the movie, The Jerk. I later told Ellen that “I never felt so white in my life.” But it was a happy experience, featuring a memorable soloist performing, His Eye is on the Sparrow and I Know His Eye is on Me. I had many such wonderful experiences getting to know the Christian people of Harlem. Only later did I learn how this experience of Christians in Harlem had also positively influenced Dietrich Bonhoeffer during his American stays.

Not so happy was when I got tricked by a ghetto hustler, who told me that he had a fabulous slideshow of the Holy Land and would be happy to bring it to our church. So I made the arrangements, including a potluck dinner for people to watch the slideshow. But it turned out that he was hawking pilgrimages so that in your lifetime “You could walk where Jesus walked.” My poor people were humiliated at the sticker price and I was humiliated for having catalyzed this humiliation. After I escorted the guy out, I was feeling deeply embarrassed. As I helped to clean up the dishes, an old saint in the kitchen consoled me, “Pastor, don’t you worry. I don’t need to go where Jesus walked. Jesus walks with me every day.” My ministry there ended when our political preaching got James in trouble with the congregational leadership. When they besieged him, I resigned. Eventually the congregation returned to the Missouri Synod and James moved on. With my encouragement, he enrolled for a postgraduate degree at Union and went on to have a career in seminary teaching.

For the next several years at Union I supply preached throughout New York City. Towards the end of my graduate studies, I was assigned as the interim pastor of St. Jacobus Lutheran Church in Woodside, Queens. I had the difficult pastoral experiences of counseling a teenage girl who I surmised had been in a relationship with the previous pastor who had resigned and left in a hurry. He left the ministry but hung up a sign as a counselor. When I shared this suspicion with the bishop, he decided just to let it pass. I did not know what else to do, so I too let it pass. Another time I had been visiting a young woman in her early 20s who was very sick with leukemia and very angry at God. But I persisted and she welcomed my visits. On a Sunday afternoon, after we had gotten home from a long day at the church her mother called to say she was in bad shape and that I ought to visit. I thought it could wait till the morning but when I arrived her corpse lay there in the bed stiff and cold. I was very angry with myself that I did not find the energy to go on Sunday evening to see her. But all things considered, we really liked this neighborhood and this congregation. As there were no tenure-track positions in systematic theology available at this time, and as I was unwilling to drag my family back and forth across the country taking one year sabbatical replacement gigs, we began to imagine life in Woodside at St. Jacobus. We thought that we were a shoo-in to fill the vacancy, but the congregational council turned us down. We were crestfallen and the only explanation we got from a sympathetic couple on the council was that my political preaching was too edgy.

I have to admit that these experiences at Mount Zion and St. Jacobus sent me back to the drawing board. By what right did I politically opinionate from the pulpit? What kind of new clericalism was this? How infantilizing in a democratic culture for a pastor to tell adults, as if the very word of God, what to think, what to say, how to feel on matters of public concern! Was not the place for such concerns of Christian social responsibility in the classroom, where there can be give-and-take, rather than from the pulpit, where a conscientious dissenter would practically be forced to walk out in protest? The predictable result would force schism along the lines of political partisanship (which is exactly what we see today in American Christianity).

How untrue to Lutheran Christian political realism, in any case, requiring humility in politics, cognizant that our judgments are only ventured, in as much as they are limited by one’s finite perspective with its blind spots and the subtle but sinful egocentrism that inevitably attends them. Particularly disturbing to me was a slowly joining realization about the class-blindness that often attends members of the knowledge class (of which I am a card-carrying member). Regular restraint, by contrast, would lend gravity to occasions of genuine urgency, when a bold intervention is required.

Brooding over such self-criticism, more broadly, I asked myself what really was the purpose of pastoral ministry, the task of preaching and sacramental leadership. Ordination is service to Word and Sacrament – one is set aside to see to it that the gospel is rightly proclaimed and the sacraments administered accordingly, so that in this way the community is properly shepherded and people are sent out from Word and Sacrament to their Christian vocations in the world including the political vocation of citizenship. Should a pastor not trust the Holy Spirit to ferment the word proclaimed in the conscience of the baptized – and respect unpredictable outcomes, outside of clerical control?

So I did a lot of soul-searching at this point. I remember preaching to the folks at Mount Zion in Harlem that it was escapist to flee the city for better living in the suburbs. Now after four years in upper Manhattan, I was feeling the very same need to get out of the crime, the chaos, and the constant humiliation of the poor (in whose ranks at this time we belonged). After I finished at Union, we moved across the Hudson River to Jersey City, where our son William was born. A Lutheran layman rented a very humble (but affordable) house to us. My former boss at the LCA, Paul Brndjar, now happily pastoring, had pity on us when he saw how we were living and invited us to move into the unused parsonage in Garfield, New Jersey. Until this time we were members of St. Peter Lutheran Church in Manhattan, where little William was baptized by Pastor John Damm (who I had known at Seminex where he was the Academic Dean). The LCA was closing down shop in Manhattan, but we were unwilling to migrate to Chicago where the “new” Lutheran Church would set up headquarters. There were still no jobs available in academia. And so we began to think about parish ministry as a new possibility while we enjoyed membership in Brndjar’s congregation in Garfield. He was a positive role model for me as I was rethinking pastoral ministry.

In my last year at the LCA’s Department of Church and Society, worrying about how I was going to be able to support my family, and having had a change of heart after the hard work on the social statement, Peace and Politics, and thusly feeling repentant for taking the college deferment from the draft to avoid Vietnam - I got permission from the Division for Mission in North America to enter the chaplaincy program of the US Naval Reserve. I was almost too old to enlist at this point. But I was accepted and spent eight weeks over the two summers of 1983-84 at Chaplain School in Newport, Rhode Island. I’ll have more to say about this experience in pastoral ministry next time.

My father, a pastor in central New Jersey, became disabled with acute circulation problems in one of his legs, aggravated by a lifetime of cigarette smoking. When he retired early he moved with my mother to their country property outside of Norwich, New York. It was an old farmhouse in need of a lot of repair and modernizing and they, ill prepared, were facing the brutal winters of upstate New York. Because of his disability, we had grave concerns about their safety. So when I heard that a neighboring congregation in Delhi, New York had become vacant, I called Bishop Rudy Ressmeyer to inquire whether I might fit their needs. In spite of my chain-smoking through the interview, Immanuel Lutheran Church seemed happy to call me. And in November 1985 we left the metro-NYC area and moved to the beautiful landscape of the northern foothills of the Catskill Mountains.

To be continued… Soli Deo Gloria!

Remembering my graduate education at Union Theological Seminary

In this blog post, I would like to pay a debt of gratitude to those who took time to form me at Union Theological Seminary. In previous posts, I’ve already described my debts to J. Louis Martyn and Paul Lehmann, which I will not repeat here.

I had no idea what I was getting into. There were no precedents in my own family background to guide me, and with the loss of any institutional support after Seminex, all I knew was that I wanted to live in the Big Apple. I was naïve enough to think that Union remained the school of Niebuhr and Tillich and was unaware of the transition going on, as J. Louis Martyn put it, between Union A and Union B. Union A was the school of Niebuhr and Tillich. Union B was the school of Driver, Harrison and Sőlle. In between, at least during my time there, were the African American scholars Cornel West and James Cone. I was able to tiptoe my way through this divide and come out with a valuable education.

In my first semester at Union, in the fall of 1978, I took David Lotz’s course on the “historical theologians” of the 19th century, namely Ritschl, Harnack and Troeltsch. Coming out of my positive encounter with historical criticism at Seminex, and knowing that Lotz likewise came out of the Missouri Synod and was sympathetic to Seminex, I was eager to understand liberal theology at its best. Without doubt, this was a most demanding but also valuable introduction to my PhD studies. Lotz had written an important book on Ritschl which contained a penetrating comparison of Ritschl’s portrait of Luther to Luther himself – showing how Ritschl idealized and moralized the Reformer’s apocalyptic theology. Lotz also, ahead of and independently of the Finnish research, lifted up the importance of union with Christ to Luther’s signature doctrine of justification by faith.  Reading Ritschl under Lotz, I learned suspicion of the Kantianization of German Lutheran theology.

Valuable, additionally, were deep dives into Harnack’s History of Dogma, which to this day reward reading on any particular topic or episode, even if, like Strauss before him, he strove to show step by painful step that “the history of dogma is the refutation of dogma.” Intellectually the most powerful thinker of the three, it was instructive to observe Troeltsch in his relentless historicism coming to a dead-end theologically. I left my paper for this class to the deadline and pulled an all-nighter writing it. When Lotz returned it to me, there was more red on the page than black! Certainly a paper produced overnight with no proofreading contained an avalanche of infelicities. In spite of that he gave me a good grade. It was an important wake-up call to work on my writing.

I also took my first course with Christopher Morse in the fall of 1978, who in the end supervised my doctoral dissertation. The course was on “Moltmann’s Theological Trilogy.” So we read the books Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, and The Church in the Power of the Spirit. Morse was friendly with Moltmann and had published his first book under the title The Logic of Promise in Moltmann’s Theology. This affinity provided me for the first time with a sympathetic understanding of modern Reformed theology. I especially resonated to Moltmann’s biblical argumentation and his critique of the transcendental idealism governing the theologies both of Barth and Bultmann. Morse’s insistence on logical precision and clarity in expression were an invaluable check on my penchant for theatrical expression. In fact, I did not like the rhetorical excesses I found in Moltmann’s Crucified God, despite the precedent for such rhetoric in Martin Luther. Luther retained in principle the classic Chalcedonian distinction, namely, that the suffering of the divine Son of God was according to his assumed humanity, even if on the basis of the communication of attributes in Christ he ventured some provocative statements about divine suffering as the voluntary passion of love. I found this distinction effaced if not obliterated in Moltmann’s Hegelian discourse amounting to a positive commendation of pathetic divine suffering, i.e. patripassionism. From Morse himself I imbibed his methodological “dogmatics of Christian disbelief,” as he frequently reminded, “to believe God is to disbelieve the idols.”

Also in that first semester, I took a course on Immanuel Kant with Wunderkind Cornel West, just a year or two older than me. We really hit it off. I began trying hard to appreciate Kant, knowing of his enormous influence on modern theology. West’s instruction was helpful in exposing the philosophy of Kant as the climax of the modernist search for a knowledge of knowledge, for a foundational “epistemology,” as had been launched by René Descartes. Coming as he did from Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism at Princeton, West revealed step-by-step his own anti-foundationalism. It took me some time to grasp this move to put philosophy’s feet back down on terra firma, but West won me over. In the second semester I did an independent study with him based upon Jürgen Habermas’s book Knowledge and Human Interests. What a tremendous education in modern thought I got from Cornel West! He served on my dissertation committee.

I also began work with the rising star and founder of Black theology, James Cone. At this point in his career, Cone was in a state of transition. He had been influenced early on by a Canadian Lutheran theologian, William Hordern, and had written his dissertation on Karl Barth. When I read his very interesting book Malcolm and Martin I sensed that background expressing itself in the way that he related these two significant religious thinkers as law and gospel: distinct messages yet equally necessary in a kind of dialectic. His early books, like Black Theology and Black Power and God of the Oppressed, were written in this early, still intensely theological phase of his career. When I TA-ed for him, I detected a subtle shift away from Barth to Niebuhr, as he was looking for a more realistic and down to earth theology for the oppressed of the earth. I once heard him remark that the most important book for students to read was Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. He was still enough of a Barthian, however, to remind that his provocative assertions that “Christ is black” or “God is black” were symbols not to be taken literally, subject then to Feuerbach’s critique of human projection. So, contrary to the way in which Feuerbach interpreted Luther, Cone meant these provocative predications as contemporary articulations of the biblical God taking sides with the downtrodden of the earth. Early on we got along well and eventually he served on my dissertation committee. But as I mentioned, he was moving away from theology to history, seeking resources in the traditions of the African-American churches. At times, consequently, I doubted that he was giving his students as good an education as he himself had received. In fact, it was just a different education.

In my second semester, I took Morse’s course reading the dogmatics of Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. Much as I tried, I could work up little enthusiasm for this tedious read. In the process I read Karl Barth’s lectures on Schleiermacher, which were far from tedious! Schleiermacher’s interpreters, and perhaps Schleiermacher himself, thought he was founding a modern Christian theology epistemologically in a way that sidestepped Kant’s proscription of cognitive claims about God based on revelation. The side-step moved on from the dubious claim to revelation as the Bible, miraculously produced, to the empirical fact of piety. Scientific theology henceforth attended to the human experience of the religious. As pious feeling became the subject matter of theology, theology argued indirectly from effect back to the presumed divine cause.

Pondering this, I found Barth’s statement of the problem for modern theology supposedly created by Kant’s critical philosophy far more insightful: the theologian is a sinful and finite creature, incapable of speaking truly of God, and yet is called to speak about God. That divine calling and its claim on conscience is what Schleiermacher fudges in relocating the discourse of theology from the church community to the modern university as its field of accountability. Instead of instead of responsibility to God for speech about God theology is now responsible for God to the academic world. Barth in correcting this nails the predicament of any theology which does not concede to Kant’s “tribunal of reason” proscription of cognitive discourse regarding God. Here theology rather ventures in faith to begin ever anew with the Deus dixit from its socially precarious platform in the real existing church. Yet, on reflection over many years, I wonder whether Barth’s starting point in the positive fact that the Christian church exists and calls theologians to speak of God is still an attempt to found a modern Christian theology epistemologically. In other words, Barth still swims, albeit downstream, in Kantian waters. I have spent most of my career since trying to overcome Kantianism by moving philosophically to pragmatism, akin to the path my friend Ron Thiemann was charting before his premature death.

I also took Tom Driver’s course on the theology of Paul Tillich, reading his Systematic Theology. I was very interested in Tillich and had already read a great deal of him, but hunkered down to work through the entirety of the three volume system. Tom was my assigned academic advisor. He was a cool dude and we were both nicotine addicts, chain-smoking as we chatted in his office. But I should have realized early on that ultimately we would not blend very well. Foolishly, I decided that I would try to influence this Bohemian gadfly for the good. I was the teaching assistant for a course he created on Christology and Ethics.

This was one of the most bizarre experiences I had at Union. A third of the way into the semester Tom was waylaid by a heart attack. At his hospital bed, he put me in charge of the class. The students had other ideas, and I ended up dividing the sessions among the various factions, who were not yet interested in intersectionality, but rather competed for time in the spotlight, trying to turn their respective grievances into some kind of religious discourse expressive of their ultimate concerns.

I came to the class on Christology and Sexuality to discover that the chairs and desks had been removed from the room. We were all asked to sit on the floor. After a “lecture” about how repressed we were, newsprint and colored markers were handed out with the instruction that we were to draw our sexual self-images. Repressed white male that I was, I drew a realistic representation of myself in the embrace of Ellen (which she has kept all these years as something like a love letter). When it was time to share our pictures, I discovered that every other one of the “liberated” students in the room had drawn abstract art with no visible relationship to their actual bodies. And I was supposed to be the repressed agent of the patriarchy! I vowed that I would never again be buffaloed by such ideological bullying.

In any event, my relationship with Driver did not end well. Supposedly he was advising my dissertation, and when I turned in a first draft of 500 disorganized pages, he called a defense immediately: “Obviously,” he said, “it’s a book.” In hindsight, I gathered that he said this without having read the draft. Needless to say the committee rebelled. Driver was relieved of duty and I was reassigned to Christopher Morse. I spent another year refining (and reducing to 200 pages) before Morse was ready to call a defense.

Back to Tillich. I find it very hard to pigeonhole him. He is not simply a liberal theologian. Like his philosophical hero, Schelling, he has a profound account of the ambiguity of the human experience of God, no doubt reflected in his own experience of life. We know today that after his trauma as a military chaplain in the trenches of the First World War, he virtually left the ministry of the church to make a living as a philosopher of religion. And we know from the autobiography of his wife Hannah that he imposed on her what we call today an “open marriage.” Years later, Reinhold Niebuhr became incensed at Tillich’s exuberant promiscuity at Union Theological Seminary. Wilhelm Pauck, in his biography of Tillich, reports as an eye witness that on his deathbed Tillich despaired that he was a sinner who would not enter the kingdom of God. Theology does not reduce to biography, but biography can illuminate theology.

As I was reading simultaneously in Karl Barth, the problem of Tillich’s method of correlation became more and more evident to me, namely, that the tail begins to wag the dog as context swallows up text. Although Tillich was far from being a Thomist in dynamizing “Being Itself” as the “power of being overcoming nonbeing,” he was deeply influenced in his “ontology” by the tradition of philosophical theology that emerged in the Enlightenment with Spinoza, passed through Schelling, and found existentialist expression in Nietzsche. He sought some “God beyond God” which effectively reduced the biblical God of the economy of salvation into a set of symbols alongside other symbols. When we got to discussion of the systematic theology where Tillich provocatively denies that God “exists” – meaning that God is not a finite being along other side finite beings to whom the category of existence applies – Driver asked us why we thought Tillich said that. I blurted out, tongue half in cheek, “I think he just likes to blow people’s minds.” Driver snorted with laughter. My disillusionment with the theology that once helped me through the Missouri Synod’s turn to fundamentalism had set in.

I had other profound learning experiences at Union. One was a class with Phyllis Trible on the problem of “biblical theology” in light of the penetrating critique of that notion by James Barr. It was an exploration of some of the attempts since the 19th century to write “biblical theology,” meaning a scientific exposition of the theology found in the Bible, i.e., prior to and apart from, as it were, ecclesiastical contamination. But this project seemed to have failed for several reasons. First, the concentration of historical criticism on the specific theology of any particular piece of biblical literature (or of any particular strand within a biblical book) yielded the Humpty Dumpty problem: no one knew how to put it all back together again. Second, the very project unwittingly presupposed the illicit dogmatic decision of normative Judaism and/or early Catholicism, namely canonization, which well after the fact included some literature and excluded others, turning those selected into sacred Scripture. But on what grounds? From the get-go, “the Bible” as a canon is ecclesiastically contaminated.  The status of “biblical” in “biblical theology” was the illicit product of church/synagogue! 

When, consequently, when challenged on this matter of canonical selection, scholars inevitably betrayed their own extra-biblical, often theological/ecclesiastical commitments, undermining any academic pretension to a putatively scientific “biblical theology.” Trible, who was famous for expositing certain “texts of terror” in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, particularly in the representations of women, nevertheless wanted to do biblical theology. The outcome of the seminar, as I recall, was that biblical theology would have to do exhaustive hermeneutical work, proceeding backwards through the history of interpretation to encounter the text now found in “the book of faith.” But who could manage that? The lesson I drew? “Biblical theology” can only be a sub-discipline of a critical dogmatics, as I have tried to show in my own theology.

I’m very grateful that I took a class with the theologian Geoffrey Wainwright on his book Doxology as he passed through Union, on what turned out to be a one year stay, from which he fled in horror at the end has Union B rubbed him the wrong way. This book of liturgical theology solidified in me my own growing commitment to an evangelical and catholic interpretation of the Christian faith. How delicious that I learned this, not from Arthur Carl Piepkorn, who died before I got to Seminex (although his legacy reached me through George Hoyer), but from – of all sources – a British Methodist! He went on to have an important career at Duke. I said he fled Union in horror. I witnessed the spectacle, after his excellent presentation to the theological colloquium, of Dorothea Sőlle’s scathing attack nailing the polite Brit to the wall for “all that is wrong with theology.” What an embarrassment -- although this kind of public shaming at the expense of actual argument has become only more common these days. I have treasured Wainwright’s comment on the paper I wrote for his class, “A Hinlicky contra mundum is a sight to behold!” I may ask that to be engraved upon my tombstone!

One class that has had a lasting impact on me I took with Richard Norris on the Cappadocian Fathers. This very fine scholar was working hard at the time on Theodore of Mopsuestia, an Antiochene theologian who was enjoying some new appreciation for his Christological interest in the lived humanity of Jesus in a logos/anthropos Christological model as opposed to the dominant Alexandrian logos/sarx model. I found some resonance with this concern in Gregory Nazianzus, who emerged as my favorite of the three Cappadocians. But I became acutely aware from this class how the Council of Chalcedon did not solve the Christological problem, but merely erected outside boundaries for orthodoxy: neither the two sons of Nestorius nor the one nature of Eutyches.

I took away the insight that any solution to the opaque Chalcedonian requirement of “one person of two natures” could not take this unstable compromise as an abstract starting point. In the West, I have since discovered, we have been overly influenced by Pope Leo’s intervention at Chalcedon with his Christological Tome, treating the abstract natures as if they were living  agents, i.e. persons each doing their own things in harmony somehow with the other. But this is virtually Nestorian. With further learning, I have maintained that one had to realize on the basis of the preceding three ecumenical councils that the Christological problem is a subset of the Trinitarian consensus achieved at the First Council in Constantinople in 381, something that the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 attempted to clarify after Chalcedon with its statement that “One of the Three suffered.” We are still looking for an appropriately divine pathos befitting the fully divine Son i.e., that is not the projection of an abjectly pathetic creaturely suffering but the passion of voluntary love, capable of vulnerability, expressing the “patience of God” for the dying and the sinful.

I might mention also what I learned as a teaching assistant. While I enjoyed this very much, and ever since have treasured immensely the classroom, the experience with students was something of a mixed bag of concerns and delights. Working for Cone, I got into a conflict with an Episcopalian who self-identified as a Fabian Socialist and took offense at the particularity which Cone insisted upon with respect to the suffering of African-Americans. I think my own working class background played a role in this conflict as I found this student’s paper snooty and told him so. In reviewing the student’s paper with my comments, Cone simply added, “I think you should take Hinlicky’s comments seriously.” (I had commented something equally snooty to the student: “Were you drinking a martini and smoking a cigar when you wrote this?”)

Another time teaching for Christopher Morse I had an outspoken gay student; mind you, this was at the time of the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic which was devastating gay men in New York City. Christopher Morse included reading Anselm of Canterbury’s Why God Became Human. Morse required this because he wanted students to wrestle with the question of the justice of God’s mercy. But my poor student, gripped with existential angst and terror at the epidemic, was grieved by the very thought of rendering satisfaction to God for our sins, even if the satisfaction of the debt was given to us freely from the treasury of infinite merit acquired by Christ for innocently suffering a death he did not deserve. And predictably, he latched upon the untheological critique that Anselm was simply reflecting feudal social relations. I persisted with this guy through the semester, but after the course he disappeared. Sad. I most enjoyed the assignment to teach the Lutheran Confessions course which Union provided for students needing that credit (but that was after I had graduated).

As mentioned, my doctoral dissertation passed through a fiasco before the matter was settled. Morse required that I focus and write clearly, even though I was already working full time for the LCA. Tremendous help came into my head at this point with the reading of Robert Jenson’s Triune Identity and Eberhard Jüngel’s God as the Mystery of the World. I attempted in the dissertation a “post-liberal” (as George Lindbeck would soon articulate) reading of the Gospel of Mark, invoking his theology of the cross to argue toward some doctrine of the “temporality of God.” This is the root of my mature critique of the metaphysical doctrine of divine simplicity in favor of a rule version of simplicity (which really amounts to lifting up the first three of the Ten Commandments as rules for discourse about God). The defense was successful, and I was congratulated by Lou Martin, Cornel West and Christopher Morse; James Cone actually said that he was “shocked” when he read it, although he never told me why, leaving me to speculate. I will avoid that temptation here. I myself was not satisfied with the dissertation. For me it was simply the culminating statement of what I’d passed through at Union Theological Seminary, setting an agenda for the future.

Finally, I would like to mention some mates whose camaraderie sustained me through the four years we lived on campus at Union. George Cummings went on to have an important career in Oakland, California as a professor of theology and founding pastor of the progressive African-American Imani Community Church. James Kay had a career at Princeton Theological Seminary and wrote a wonderful book on the theology of Rudolph Bultmann, Christus Praesens. Nancy Duff also had a career at Princeton Theological and has published in areas of Christian ethics; she has been a major interpreter of the legacy of Paul Lehmann. Christian von Dehsen had a career at Carthage College in Wisconsin teaching New Testament and serving as Dean of the faculty.

I am grateful to my teachers, most of whom are still alive. For all teachers, now including myself, it is rich consolation to hear such expressions of gratitude from their former students. Soli Deo Gloria!

Remembering Seminex (and Reflecting on Its Aftermath)

50 years ago – February 19, 1974 to be exact – Concordia Seminary In Exile (Seminex) came into existence when the students, followed by the faculty majority, left the campus at 801 DeMun Avenue in St. Louis, to continue classes at Eden Seminary of the United Church of Christ and the St Louis University Jesuit faculty. It was a voluntary, student-initiated “exile,” even if provoked by outrageous violations of due process, not to mention moral violence against what Prof. Fred Danker later titled Christian “brotherhood.” At that time I was in my final year at Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

In this blog I venture into troubled waters – still, after all these years. Just a decade ago, Carl Braaten in his memoir asked a penetrating question about the aftermath of the LC-MS break-up – specifically the ultimate absorption of many Seminex faculty into the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC): What is the sense of costly confession for the sake of the gospel, he asked pointedly, when the confessors abandoned the witness stand to resume business as usual elsewhere? Even though Braaten, and later Bob Benne in a similar 2011 First Things article, mixed up this penetrating theological question with inside baseball grievances of their own, from the beginning I often reflected that the student-initiated walkout handed the institution over on a silver platter to the forces of reaction. Staying put would have forced the sorry spectacle of heresy trials and exposed the reactionaries to public scrutiny. It’s all water under the bridge now. I wish in this post to recount my existential experience of Seminex and to offer my own reflection on the aftermath.

I was the editor of the Senior College student newspaper, The Spire, and I wrote a sharp editorial in support of Seminex in the spring of 1974, urging my graduating classmates to attend there. When word of my planned editorial, however, got to the ears of the college's president, my editorial colleagues and I were summoned to his office. He pleaded with us not to go forward publishing my editorial because it would damage the college’s prospects of survival in the denominational civil war underway. At length I agreed to a compromise. My editorial would appear alongside two others supporting different options for graduates, including enrollment at the remnant of Concordia Seminary that remained at “801” (as we called it). I regret succumbing to this compromise. Predictably, it did no good in saving the college, which was shuttered within several years by the same forces which had accused the seminary faculty in St. Louis of false teaching "not to be tolerated in the church of God." Concordia Senior College was, in their eyes, the notorious "seedbed of liberalism" feeding the heretical seminary.

I did not then and I do not now dispute that there is such a thing as false teaching. In fact I think the real existing Christian churches are quite full of it. But the standard and the modality by which this judgment was made – through demagoguery and skullduggery (as historian James Burkee has shown) via a church convention vote prevailing by a 60/40% margin, without due process for the accused (according to a newly formulated document which stipulated such things as the historicity of Adam and Eve and Jonah and his whale as touchstones of orthodoxy, as you can read here) – missed the mark by a mile.

On the other side, however, the underlying concern of the accusers was rarely if ever acknowledged honestly or taken up in good faith on the Seminex side, as it seems to me. Their concern was rather met with scornful mockery of Missouri’s inheritance from 17th century Lutheran Orthodoxy. That legacy is this: in the polemical antithesis between Roman Catholicism and the magisterial Reformation, the Bible had to be treated as the Protestant “paper pope” over against the living one in Rome. Undermining its authority as the divinely revealed and inerrant word of God would collapse Protestantism into rudderless chaos and interminable fragmentation. Over against this danger, moreover, how could one deny to a Protestant church the ecclesiastical authority to judge doctrine, especially about its fundament, the Bible?

To be sure, the fundament was fundamentalism. The doctrine of the Bible’s miraculous inerrancy was an implausible reach for sheer authority in 1974 as also it was in the 17th century. What was really needed was a “back to the drawing boards” ecumenical turn (which, to his great credit, Seminex’s Robert Bertram undertook by his significant participation in the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue). But deeply settled into the “ecumenical winter,” as we are today 50 years later, the eminently predictable Protestant decline into chaos is there for those with eyes to see. The Missouri Synod’s civil war signaled this multisided decline aforetime.

In any event, Concordia Senior College was both “seedbed” and in a highly qualified sense "liberal," that is, in the context of the 1970s Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. It was liberal as in the liberal arts: academic excellence on the one hand, especially in the humanities, and openness on the other hand to the big world of God's creating and redeeming. I knew academic excellence as a freshman at Bard College in 1970. After an intellectually wasted sophomore year at Concordia Junior College in Bronxville, New York, I tasted that excellence again in Fort Wayne. But the know-nothing faction of the Missourians (“The Bible says it! I believe it! That settles it! End of discussion!”) feared open, curious, inquiring minds willing to see the huge trouble our human world is in and thus to challenge the status quo in the church as well as the world. In their eyes we were "rebels." In their eyes, we were “freethinkers’” but in our own, we were “freedthinkers” – freed in Christ, the church’s one foundation.

In many ways, as mentioned, that church conflict 50 years ago foreshadowed our contemporary culture wars. I definitely sided, to speak anachronistically, with the "progressives" of the day, especially on the burning issue of the time about the ordination of women. I mention this background to my memories of our years at Seminex, 1975-77, of which I shall write shortly. Yet the background is for me of central importance, because what happened to the faculty majority that precipitated the student walkout in St. Louis was continuous with the threatened destruction of Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, the place where I personally experienced the trauma of cruel demagoguery destroying something precious.

This continuity with Fort Wayne became a bone of some contention during our difficult and exhilarating years at Seminex. I have already reminisced about my many debts to the Seminex faculty in the previous post, and further back to the training in Paulinism I received at Seminex from Edgar Krentz, in my blog on J. Louis Martyn. I have also paid tribute to my Seminex mentor in theology, Robert Bertram, in a blog about the soteriological Christology of Luther I learned from him. But there were tensions. This is how the late Prof. Edward H. Schroeder described them, looking back in 1998:

Bob [Bertram] and I sometimes were labeled as "Elertians" [disciples of German theologian Werner Elert] with our LGH [Law/Gospel Hermeneutic] and thus seen as not ecumenical enough within the world of Lutheranism. "There are other equally valid Lutheran theologies that we are not getting from Bob and Ed" was the complaint. One year our LGH "narrowness" provoked a student initiative "to get different Lutheran voices into the systematics department." The students pressing for this had already chosen their candidate from the good teacher they'd had at the Senior College. [The editor rightly identifies James Childs here]. Our department – all three of us – officially went on record approving the idea, even the preselected candidate, but finances had the last word, and it never happened. One of the students leading that movement, now a respected international theologian himself, still wonders if systematic theology at Seminex didn't really support the American religious establishment, and that what Bob and I have been doing since then, e. g. in Crossings, is but more of the same. Who knows?" (Edward H. Schroeder, Seminex Remembered, ed. Michael Hoy with an afterword by Kurt K. Hendel (St. Louis, MO: The Crossings Community, 2024): 32-3.)

In an endnote the editor correctly identifies yours truly as that student protagonist in Ed’s account.

The rhetorical question, Who knows?, indicates some level of humility regarding the failure of Seminex described in Schroeder’s remembrance. I appreciate that. It is telling to note here that Ed and his wife Marie had, about the same time as writing this remembrance of our conflict, visited us in Bratislava, staying in an adjacent small apartment we arranged for them. We talked a lot then, and had always corresponded. Ours was a hot-and-cold relationship through many years as this thick-skinned Jersey boy clashed culturally with the Missourian farm boy whose skin was made ever thinner by his battle with diabetes (as he admitted to me once).  

In fact we had a substantive disagreement about the tacit anti-Judaism embedded in his version of the LGH. He once complained to me that the Old Testament professors could not, on account of their subject matter, understand LGH. I tried to raise with him the logical problem of distinguishing between what substantively the law is as divine instruction, the Torah, and the uses of the law, whether to constrain injustice or to reveal sinfulness. My problem with his theology was not the conservative accusation of "gospel reductionism" but rather "law reductionism," i.e. reducing the law of God to its several functions, thus obscuring its substantive reality as divine instruction in the twofold law of love: of God above all and of all God's creatures in and under God our creator, as explicated (by Luther! in his Catechisms!) in the two tables of the Decalogue.   

This was a debate between Ed and me that began in Seminex days and lasted till the end of his life. I find it gratifying, however, that in the above-cited 1998 reminiscence he acknowledged the danger I sensed in his theology, namely, of co-optation by the (decaying!) American liberal Protestant establishment with its antinomian and neo-Gnostic tendencies. I say this is a danger, not an intention, because he and Bertram were capable of the Pauline-apocalyptic move in theology of which I am partisan. Indeed Schroeder’s lament over failure is that Seminex did not persevere in the apocalyptic travail but grew weary of suffering witness and longed after the fleshpots of Egypt. To my ears, this rings similar to Braaten’s query mentioned at the beginning: what is a confessing movement that abandons battle stations to take safe harbor?

But my Seminex experience extended well beyond that particular bone of contention, both exhilarating and depressing. It was exhilarating to be dispersed into the city of St. Louis, to find our own housing solutions and experience urban life in that profoundly racialized city. We experienced existentially the criminal dangers afflicting the north side and the Bud-and-brats ethos of the white working class on the south side. Once I stupidly volunteered to referee a church league basketball game (for which I was in no way competent!) between an all-black Northside team and an all-white Southside team. I was lucky to get out of that clash with my life, and never refereed again. Depressing.

We connected with a Slovak heritage congregation and a generation of young adults our own age, as our first born daughter Sarah arrived in the 1976 bicentennial year. Exhilarating. But to get through school with our newborn, Ellen had to work full time and I had to work 20 hours a week at a variety of low-paying jobs. We were so poor that the day before payday I would regularly turn out the couch cushions looking for change to buy a pack of cigarettes. Depressing. The individual professors were excellent in their fields. Exhilarating. But there was little coherence to the program as a whole. Depressing. Seminex quickly became a quasi-institution in search of a mission (as well as students, placements for graduates, and funding) as any lines back to Missouri hardened into roadblocks. Loss of the institution at 801 was not trivial. Many of us were simply adrift. Personally, I couldn't wait to get back East for my vicarage, which was at a viable Long Island congregation, and then on to graduate school the following year in Manhattan at a solid (at least at the time) institution, Union Theological Seminary.

Coming out of the 1960s, there was a spirit of radical democracy, if not anarchy, among us Seminex students. As in my experience with the president of Concordia Senior College, this expectation of freedom ran headlong into conflict with corporate management models of leadership, with their mission statements, branding ploys, lobbying for patronage and ostentatious strategic plans. The managers always won and the results were always the same. Seminex died by suicide after 10 years, just as the Senior College fell victim to murder. So the Age of Aquarius morphed into a new, but hip conformism in the disco-dancing Me Generation’s “culture of narcissism.”

Kurt Hendel’s Afterword to the Schroeder remembrance tells another tale about Seminex’s fulfillment, counter to Ed’s story of failure. To me it is one of triumphalism, inversely mirroring Missouri's ballyhooed triumph over liberalism. I dispute this. The exhilaration of defiance gone as constraining reality set in, the meaning of the exile came to be seen by Hendel and the many in his camp as realization of the dream of “Lutheran Union” – well, sort of, if you leave out the fulsome third of American Lutheranism left behind as dark Babylon. "It was readily apparent to most members of the Seminex community that the seminaries that welcomed us and the anticipated ELCA were the home that God had been preparing for us" (Hendel p. 53). I think this is a rationalization of a bad situation. Truth be told, the faculty redeployment was more like "any port in a storm."

Once, when I was pastor in upstate New York, rostered in the Missouri-refugee Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, I met Seminex president John Tietjen at a pastoral conference. Tietjen was playing a catalytic role cheerleading the claim that our exile from Missouri was God’s signal to unite the rest of American Lutheranism into a “new” Lutheran Church. In the fellowship evening talking with him, I said somewhat reluctantly, "We are going in different directions." He did not like that at all, denied that we were at loggerheads, and eventually we found ourselves faced off like gladiators in a ring with a large crowd circling around us late into the evening as we debated my proposition. How sad - though in my view regarding the “new” Lutheran Church, how predictable-- that his own initial term as Bishop of the Metro Chicago Synod ended abruptly and prematurely in the “new” denomination he had helped to engineer. What a denouement to his claim that the ELCA represents the triumphant fulfillment of Seminex.

How quickly the “new” Lutheran Church melted into the already rapidly decaying mainline of American liberal Protestantism! In this observation I agree with Braaten and Benne. I don't see Missouri's civil war as anything other than another tragedy of decaying Christendom. I don’t put the blame on Seminex, however, as they did. This is blaming the victim for the fallout from Missouri’s cowardly turn to fundamentalism. In my view, however, a disastrous role was played by the Elwyn Ewald contingent of the AELC on the Commission for a New Lutheran Church; these pushed the utopian dream of supposed radical democracy onto the “new” Lutheran Church. Seminex and this anticlerical clique (which emerged years later) were not the same thing. The clique, moreover, found plenty of allies in the old ALC and LCA, indeed enough to prevail.

We were right, in the terrible hour, to protest the authoritarian populism of the Preus putsch, and to foresee the sectarian dynamic of ever more narrow boundaries being drawn in the 50 years of the Missouri Synod since. But we were not right to imagine a church without boundaries or, for that matter, to project the viability of any separated communion, even one ostentatiously pretending to be “new,” in divided Christianity, contrary to the will of Christ that all be one. After thirty-some years, the ELCA, plain to see, is nothing new, hardly a church in any thick sense, just another troubled American denomination. The victorious reign of God in its fulfillment will be a city with open borders. But we are not yet in heaven. Nor are we ruled directly and purely by God alone. Far from it. Existentially, that is the bitter lesson I draw from my Seminex experience.

Remembering my Seminex (Concordia Seminary-in-Exile) education

In this reminiscence, I want to pay a debt of gratitude for what I learned at this remarkable theological event which went by the name Seminex. For a brief passing moment in time, the Seminex education was captured in the battle hymn we sang: The Church’s One Foundation. The education was not only intellectual but profoundly existential. I’ll have more to say about the latter in the next blog. For the present I just want to recall significant teachers and the learning that occurred under their watch in my years in residence there: 1975-77.

I took homiletics from Richard R. Caemmerer. By this time, he was already one of our grand old men, impressive for being willing to join the seminary in exile. I learned from him and his colleague in Practical Theology, George Hoyer, something crucial, namely, not to preach only the gospel. That sounds surprising because our uncomprehending critics accused us of “gospel reductionism.” But they taught us that sermons that only repeat in countless variations a nice idea, say, that “God is love,” are not true to life, and become saccharine. Preaching is not primarily a communication of such airy information but the event which confronts us with a word not our own, the Word of God who is Jesus Christ, crucified and risen to be present “for you.” That is divine love in action meeting people where they really are (i.e., not where they fancy themselves to be). Thus the preached, i.e. enacted word of God judges us with the law in order to justify us with the gospel.  Caemmerer in this mode preached a famous sermon early on at Seminex on the theme from Hebrews that a confessing church has “no continuing city” on its pilgrim way. It is still worth studying today as it remains an excellent diagnostic for churches today in dismay at institutional collapse.

As Hoyer characteristically emphasized, the most important part of the sermon is the diagnosis to which the gospel is to be addressed. And of course to do diagnostics well, the preacher has to be living with the people, feeling with them in their challenges and experiences, discerning the demons which haunt and the idolatries which enthrall by the measuring stick of divine law. I took Worship with Hoyer. For the first time in my life, I gained from him a theological understanding of liturgy and of pastoral leadership in liturgy. Sometimes we students joked about “chancel prancing” – a nervous worry that liturgical renewal would be alienating for our presumed parishioners, long indoctrinated in anti-Catholicism. But what I actually learned here was an alternative to the Herr Pastor as hired Christian lording over a passive audience. As the work of the whole people of God, the liturgy, by its melodious repetition, sung Scripture into heart and mind. And preaching, rather than being a lecture or rhetorical performance pontificating on whatever whim of the preacher, was rather integrated into the day of the church calendar on lectionary texts pertinent thereto. I was ready for the LBW when it appeared a few years later.

I learned American Church History from Dr. John W. Constable. This was an eye-opening exposure to the essentially Calvinist religious formation of the United States, along with all the anti-Calvinist dissent it generated, and how those earlier conflicts evolved into the fundamentalist-modernist controversies which wracked Protestantism from the time of Charles Darwin onward (and had now engulfed the Missouri Synod). At the time, it reinforced a growing conviction that (well, our kind of) Lutheranism could provide a healing bridge between these Protestant factions and forge a new relationship with the Church of Rome. In church history I also took coursework with Erwin L. Lueker, editor-in-chief of the Lutheran Cyclopedia. I think this was a course in comparative symbolics, but I don’t remember much about it. From Herbert T. Mayer I got a working knowledge of patristic theology.  With Gill Thiele I took a meaty elective reading the doctor gratiae, Augustine, particularly his City of God, which made a profound impression on me – I had found Martin Luther’s real teacher in the 5th century “doctor of grace!”

My most significant learning from a church historian, however, came from an independent study with John Groh. I don’t remember how this came about, but we drew up a reading list on Reformation theology. He directed me to Luther’s great theological treatises from the second half of 1520s: This Is My Body and Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper. This reading sealed in me the conviction that the doctrine of justification by faith was applied Christology (Käsemann), not general ideas about trust or grace, or the mere idea of a loving God. Corresponding to this, the ministry of the church is service of the risen-to-be-present Lord, not the vicarage of an absent one. And in counterpoint to this learning from Luther, Groh had me read all four books of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. I remember expressing the wonderment at the end of my paper: how could a theologian be so biblical and yet so unevangelical (in the better sense of that adjective, i.e. pastoral, merciful). That is perhaps unfair to Calvin, but in the context of the Missouri Synod conflict, so it seemed to me: our opponents were not the true blue Lutherans they claimed to be but crypto Calvinists!

Groh, by the way, saw the writing on the wall and left Seminex for Arizona where he had a career in real estate. He has published some devotional books and a novel. What a loss of a good scholar for the church! Before he left, he also steered me to Martin Marty’s studies of American fundamentalism. I read a book he recommended from his University of Chicago circle about “Protestant Primitivism” in American history which for the first time enlightened me about Mormonism.

When I decided to attend Seminex, my study plan was to learn the Bible. At this time I was still thinking that I might want to do philosophy instead of systematic theology after seminary, and in either case I wanted a strong foundation in the Bible. And what of wealth we had in this department! I had my basic introductory course with Profs. Ralph Klein and Everett Kalin. I still remember the opening exercise in which we were required to compare the biblical citation in Mark 1:3 to its source in Isaiah 40:3. We discovered that Mark’s Greek refers to John the Baptizer as “the voice of one in the wilderness crying out: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’” But the Hebrew of Isaiah reads, “Prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness …” referring to the forthcoming Exodus through the wilderness from Babylon back to Zion. The Greek translation, presumably from the Septuagint, misunderstood the Hebrew. Klein and Kalin were teaching us to take what is actually written more seriously than any preconceived ideas. A most valuable lesson! Face difficulties! Don’t artificially harmonize!

Old Testament I learned from Carl Graesser, an archaeologist associated with the F. W. Albright Institute of Archeological Research. We read John Bright and the commentaries of Brevard Childs, with Gerhard von Rad in the background (on my own I did read the latter’s two-volume Theology of the Old Testament). I also learned from Alfred von Rohr Sauer, who looked like Moses himself with his long locks and flowing white beard. I accompanied von Rohr Sauer on the mission trip Seminex students took in order to interpret our exile to Missouri Synod congregations. I vividly recall visiting the Slovak (SELC) Synod congregation in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where I knew Pastor Paul Visoky from Luther League. Visoky pointed at the Moses-like von Rohr Sauer and asking the congregation, “Does this look like a heretic!?”

I learned sensitivity from Ralph Klein to the problem of Christian anti-Judaism embedded in the history of Christian biblical scholarship, and also lessons on the literature and theology of the Babylonian exile that were quite relevant to our existential situation at Seminex. The most impressive learning I experienced in Old Testament, however, was an elective in the Hebrew exegesis of the prophets Amos and Hosea which I took with Arlis Ehlen. I focused on the dramatic passage of Hosea 11:9: “I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” I argued that the Hebrew noun choice translated here by the NRSV as no mortal was actually the word for “male.” In the context of Hosea’s symbolic marriage to Gomer, the faithless spouse, as a symbol for wayward Israel, the connotation of the word choice was that the Holy One of Israel is finally not like an enraged male in a jealous fit at a cheating wife. I made the case but I don’t think Ehlen was convinced. Ehlen, by the way, had been the target and first victim of the Preus purge, after years of hounding by Herman Otten’s yellow journalism for questioning the historicity of Adam and Eve and other such “heresies.” 

In a previous post on J. Louis Martyn, I reminisced fondly on what I learned from Prof. Edgar Krentz, who had studied with the German Ernst Käsemann and made me aware of his work. Of course we had the prodigious scholar, our so-called “Red” Fred Danker, thus nicknamed not only for his red hair but also for his politics. I profited from his interpretation of the location of the gospel of Luke in the cultural world of Hellenism (including Hellenistic Judaism), as we all have profited from his prodigious labor on the comprehensive BAGD Greek lexicon.

Years later, I had a very disappointing encounter with Dr. Robert Smith, long after he had migrated to Pacific Lutheran Seminary where he taught New Testament. He was a guest lecturer for the ELCA’s annual missionary conference when I was in the USA for the summer. I knew that he was a popularizer-type from Seminex days, but when he – announcing “I have a problem with authority” – went off on a tirade about Ignatius of Antioch as the cruel instigator of oppressive episcopacy (popularizing the profoundly skewed thesis of Walter Bauer on orthodoxy and heresy in the early church), I actually rose to embarrass him in front of the assembly. I protested that Ignatius was arrested for being a “bishop” (= an overseer, i.e. a pastor) of an early Christian community who was being marched to Rome in chains to die in the Coliseum for confession of the name of Jesus Christ when he wrote his letters. Substantively, the letters were critiquing the first early Christological deviation that was denying the true, i.e., bodily humanity of Jesus Christ, turning him into a spirit. What then would be the point of Ignatius being shackled bodily in chains for naming Jesus (not Caesar!) as Lord? If only we had such “bishops,” I concluded, today! My intervention left him speechless, but also left me wondering about some of the fallout from Seminex, witnessing such ill-informed posturing from a supposed scholar, not to mention the California-vibe outburst of anticlericalism – strange for a teacher preparing pastors for ministry.

In my so-called “hospital course,” we were instructed to avoid religious language and simply be present to listen on the model of Rogerian psychology. It took me some time in actual pastoral ministry to unlearn this awful indoctrination. Listening, yes, but listening in order to pray well with the sick and the dying, the lost and the lonely. Somehow I clashed with Prof. Paul Goetting -- my own fault, because I was impatient with practical ministry courses that took up a lot of time when I wanted to finish my academic work in two years to get on with life. Years later I knew Goetting in New York when he and I worked for the LCA. Memorable, however, was an episode when I shared what I was learning from the reading of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization in a small group discussion that he was monitoring. The book is the charter document of the so-called “New Left,” a fresh start for Marxism with the help of Freud after the working class went for Hitler instead of the revolution, turning now to sexuality and race instead of class conflict. These were the ideas in the air at the time and so I channeled Marcuse to the palpable discomfort of my still rather conservative classmates. After class, Goetting took me aside to warn me about the dangers of “blowing minds,” as we used to say in those days. 

I have discussed what I learned from Robert Bertram in a separate blog and I will discuss my relationship to Edward Schroeder in the next one. I finished my academic work at Seminex in two years and then accomplished my one year of internship at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Seaford, New York. That too was a learning experience, as the supervising pastor had fled town the week before we arrived with the kindergarten teacher, when their affair was discovered. (This was the beginning of a depressing pattern. About ten years down the road I counted up some seventeen different congregations I had served as vice pastor or supply pastor and found that in ten of those cases I came in on the heels of clergy sexual misconduct. And I testified about this at the hearings for the “new” Lutheran Church going on at the time). I conducted something like thirty funerals during that vicarage year. The local undertaker was a member of the congregation and took pity on our poverty, so he sent for me every time a grieving family was looking for someone to officiate final farewells. This was existential learning. After repeating Paul Tillich’s “love is stronger than death” to uncomprehending or, rather, disbelieving families a number of times, I went back to the drawing boards in search of a stronger theology in face of death. I was awarded the M.Div. degree in abstentia in 1978, when I entered the PhD program in systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

All things considered, I am grateful for what I learned intellectually at Seminex. What I learned existentially, however, is another matter -- for next time.