When Carl Braaten died several weeks ago, Doug Sweeney, the executive director of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, contacted me to write a tribute for the Center’s website. You can read it here. In this post on my own website I’d like to add a few more thoughts, personal and professional, about my friend and colleague through many years. As to friendship, Carl and Lavonne honored us with a memorable visit with us in Slovakia in the 1990s. Believe me, he was a fun partier!
Carl not only promoted my professional vocation as a theologian, he saved my physical life. When I was struck down suddenly by a stroke at the conclusion of the Pro Ecclesia conference in Baltimore in 2017, he was first to recognize the danger which I was in and summoned an ambulance. His second wife, Beryl, held my stricken body in her arms, comforting me until the ambulance arrived.
I first heard about Carl from my college professor, James Childs, at Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne. Childs was finishing his dissertation on the imago Dei under Braaten’s supervision as Childs was also introducing us to the exciting new theology emanating out of Germany in the figures of Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann. Braaten had emerged by then as a major interpreter in the USA of the so-called “theology of hope.”
In the turmoil of the Missouri Synod’s impending schism, I journeyed in 1974 as a college senior to check out the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. I don’t remember much about that visit except the experience of Braaten’s classroom: his dashing entrance, handsome and athletic appearance, the rhetorical flourishes as he lectured passionately for an hour without notes. Many students will recall how he would characteristically contrast the great world religions and philosophies as teaching how to ascend to the divine while Christianity proclaimed the divine descent to sinful and perishing humanity. By the time I entered seminary (at Seminex, not LSTC), Braaten was widely acclaimed as the most influential Lutheran theologian in America. I learned later, however, that disillusionment was already setting in.
In the processes for the merger of the AELC (the Missouri refugees), the ALC and the LCA, Braaten was instrumental in convening a theological discussion of the future contours of “the new Lutheran Church.” It was already clear from these discussions, however, that a new gospel of inclusivity was being generated for the ever-so-new Lutheran Church. In the spirit of the 1960s still percolating into the 1970s, many of us greeted this new gospel with great enthusiasm. We would come out of our immigrant ghettos to become a truly American denomination, reflecting authentically the ethnic and religious diversity of our contemporary social habitats.
But when a system of quotas was proposed and eventually adopted, unease began to set in. Was this not asking the law to do what only the gospel could accomplish? I posed this question sharply at the second of two Call to Faithfulness conferences in Northfield Minnesota in the early 1990s which I, as editor of Lutheran Forum, organized in collaboration with Jenson and Braaten’s journal, dialog, and Oliver Olson’s Lutheran Quarterly. Did not this reliance on legalism, moreover, exhibit a false consciousness in denial about our own denominational finitude, our actual history and our constituencies, which would spell real trouble in the future as these quotas were imposed upon real, howsoever flawed, existing church? Did this enthusiastic legalism not deflect attention away from the real scandal of Christian disunity and reinforce American denominationalism in a new guise? (“For the Church, Against the Quotas," Lutheran Forum (November 1992: 26/4) 64-68).
In fact after 35 years of the ELCA, and despite unrelenting top-down effort, the needle has hardly moved in terms of diversity while the denomination has hemorrhaged members, declining from an original 5.3 million to about 2 million today. In these ensuing years what began as the fairly benign gospel of inclusiveness has morphed into the strategic racism of identity politics, which has not a little to do with the ELCA’s backdoor loss of its traditional constituency.
That ecclesiastical background is not off-topic. Perception of it is what brought Braaten and I together years ago at the Call to Faithfulness conferences. Braaten at this time became disgusted with the “new” church consequences at LSTC which in the environs of the University of Chicago had prided itself on being the think-tank academic seminary. The decline in scholarly standards, the wacky-left ideologies increasingly masquerading as cutting edge theology, declining enrollment and unsustainable finances, combined to trigger Braaten’s early resignation/retirement. He devoted the rest of his career to the ecumenical theology project of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology.
His contributions to the tradition of theology stemming from Luther remain significant. He connected Christological dogma with a dynamic new missiology. He had done his doctoral work on Martin Kāhler’s rebuttal of the 19th century quest for the so-called historical Jesus, which basically he endorsed with the Pannenbergian twist that affirmations about the Jesus of history as an eschatological prophet making a claim to authority remain integral to Christology. This marked a significant departure from the neo-docetism of Rudolph Bultmann which prevailed especially in Lutheran circles at the time. I suspect Braaten would have been pleased with the recent evolution of so-called “Spirit Christology.” The emphasize on the integral role of the Holy Spirit in the humanity of Jesus refocuses understanding of the deity of Jesus away from abstract ideas of God-in-general somehow also being (an equally generic) human to the specific relationship of the Jew Jesus as Son to his heavenly Father, the God of Israel. The Spirit’s agency in Christology, moreover, provides the missing link in understanding the rise of early Christian Trinitarianism.
Given Braaten’s embrace of the eschatological proclamation of the imminent kingdom of God in the ministry of Jesus, is not surprising that in his missiology he expanded the notion of salvation from the rescue of lost souls to the holistic redemption of the creation. Politically, Braaten was in fact a lifelong socialist, but this didn’t prevent him from friendship and even alliances with political conservatives. What he cared about was the Christian authenticity of the churches, let the political chips fall as they may.
In his final years he lamented that “his name was mud” in ELCA circles because of his outspoken opposition to church blessing of same-sex unions. How quaint that seems today, however, when sexual revisionism has long since moved on to the rejection of biological heterosexuality as normative, inching towards the churchly embrace of polyamorism.
But Carl was a happy warrior and in that I have tried to emulate this mentor and my friend. He rests in peace to rise in glory.