Bertram deserves to be known better. He gave his life to being a church theologian, yet that life was disrupted by the trauma of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s fundamentalist turn and the resulting schism. The Crossings Community has codified his literary legacy and you can access it here.
I benefited enormously from his friendship and mentoring, even though our first encounters were not happy.
After taking a gap year upon completing my undergraduate work at Concordia Senior College, I entered Concordia Seminary in Exile (“Seminex”) in St. Louis in the fall of 1975. Ellen and I had married in the summer of 1974. I came home from class in September 1975 to the news that we were pregnant with our first child. The plan had been to complete the required academic courses for the M.Div. degree in two years. We stuck to the plan. I was working 20 hours a week, and we were actively involved in the Slovak heritage church, St. Lucas, in south St Louis. My memory is that I studied or was in class 16 hours a day, including summer classes. All this is background for a request I made of Bertram in my first semester, after attending the first several classes of his required introductory course in theology.
I thought his lectures were insightful but not time-efficient for me. I asked him to grant me an independent study for the course. I proposed that I would work through the Latin and German of the Augsburg Confession, with reference to the Apology, and write a paper about it. This was motivated in part by my dislike of his own theological inspiration, Werner Elert, and in part because my head was full of Paul Tillich, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann. I wanted to make my own independent evaluation of the Lutheran Confession.
Reluctantly, Bertram granted my request, but when my paper was due at the end of the semester, and I was behind on finishing it, I was avoiding him. He caught me in the hallway. I tried to fake it, saying, “I have been looking for you.” He saw through me and said, “No you haven’t. I’m easy to find. Where’s your paper?” When I turned it in, I didn’t get the A which I thought I deserved.
I had argued that AC Article XXVIII on the “spiritual” power of bishops “to judge doctrine and condemn doctrine which is contrary to the gospel” in distinction from the coercive power of the magistrate to punish criminals was the key to the whole confession. In the context of the Missouri Synod trauma, however, that did not sell well, as the faculty majority of Concordia Seminary had been condemned for teaching false doctrine, not by a bishop, of course, but by a politicized church convention. In any case, I didn’t echo the themes from Elert about the contradictory words of God in the law and in the gospel. So Bertram and I were off to a rocky start.
But to my amazement and in testament to his generosity of spirit, Bertram nevertheless enlisted me to be a teaching assistant in the Lutheran Confessions for my second year at Seminex. In the peer cohort of assistants, we discussed the weekly readings in advance of meeting with the students, and I think my understanding of the material was helped very much by that dialogue. It was in this time that I read many of Bertram’s brilliant essays, above all the excerpt from his doctoral dissertation on Luther’s second Galatians commentary, the section entitled, “How our sins were Christ’s.” I was convinced; this was something special.
I learned the Christological key to the signature Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith from Bertram’s explanation of Luther’s “joyful exchange:” not the usual quid pro quo, tit for tat exchange according to merit under the law, but an astonishing exchange that gives precisely what is not deserved: Christ takes all our negatives to give in exchange all his positives: sin and death in exchange for righteousness and life. As I studied Luther I realize that this joyful exchange was the dramatic, narrative plotline that runs through all of his thinking. To be sure, justification is by faith, indeed faith alone holds true just –only--because it is faith in such a singularly self-donating Christ. For grasping this, which has remain central to my own thought, I am forever in the debt of Robert Bertram.
There were tensions within the Seminex faculty. For some, exile meant freedom for liberal Protestantism, joining the (then) mainstream in America and leaving behind the insular world of the German immigrant refugees from the Prussian Union in the 19th century. It meant freedom to criticize the Bible and open up new socio-ethical possibilities. But for Bertram, it meant freedom to confess Christ alone even when the church wants assurances other than Christ alone. It was through this confession of Christ that Bertram engaged social questions, as in his essay on the cultural captivity of American churches confronted by the witness of Martin Luther King Jr. and his later approach to apartheid in South Africa.
I remember the pull of the first motive. In exploring other seminary possibilities prior to Seminex I often said that I did not want to waste my time fighting over something so patently false and theologically trivial as Missouri’s doctrine of scriptural inerrancy, which made the historicity of Jonah and his whale a litmus test of orthodoxy. But Bertram convinced me of the second motivation, and thusly mitigated the allure of transitory cultural acceptance by way of joining up with liberal Protestantism.
When I left St. Louis for my vicarage in Long Island, Bertram knew of my plans to apply for a PhD program in theology or philosophy. But in the institutionless state of exile, I got little guidance, other than his reflex recommendation of the University of Chicago, where Bertram had earned his PhD under Tillich and Pelikan. I thought about Chicago, but thought instead of Carl Braaten. So I applied to the THD program at LSTC and was accepted. But for entirely petty reasons of regional chauvinism, this inveterate Easterner wanted to live in New York City. It was to be a PhD either in philosophy or in theology. I wanted to do philosophy at the New School for Social Research where Hannah Arendt was still active -- as a freshman at Bard College I had read her Origins Of Totalitarianism (but I’d also read Reinhold Niebuhr there). When the New School shut down its graduate program and Union Theological Seminary accepted me with a scholarship, the school of Niebuhr won out. Interestingly this led to my next connection with Robert Bertram.
The so-called “International House,” which provided room to traveling ecclesiastics, was immediately next-door to the Van Dusen student apartment building where we lived. As Bertram traveled regularly to Europe for Lutheran World Federation gigs, Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue meetings, and sundry other engagements, he would overnight at the International House and we would host him for dinner. Over Scotch on the rocks we talked about all things theological till the wee hours many times. The relationship grew warmer personally as well as intellectually. He invited me to come to St. Louis for a summer teaching opportunity. In addition, I was invited to give a lecture about a Lutheran interpretation of the liberation theology which was all the rage at Union. He assured me that he would be looking for a teaching position for me, and I believe that he actually intervened on my behalf in several cases, although nothing ever came of it. That was the fate of many of us Seminexers. We had no church home. The loss, as also the decay, of an institution is a grievous matter.
In so far as liberation theology is actually a theology, and not just religious window-dressing on New Left ideology, it has to be reflection on Christ the liberator who, as Luther famously put it, snatched us poor lost sinners from the jaws of hell triumphantly to bring us to the Father’s embrace in the power of the Spirit. But that account of divine action in Christ in human time and space ill comports with the basic idealism of liberation theology which, unlike cold, hard-headed, unsentimental, old-fashioned materialist Marxism, imagines that liberating ideas about God can enable or empower human liberation.
In these Union years on account of my working class roots I was wrestling with the almost enchanting attraction that old-fashioned Marxism can have. Being of Slovak descent and knowing the oppressive reality of “real existing socialism” behind the Iron Curtain, however, I was not able to be drawn fully into the chic mystique, for example, when Union classmates returned from study trips to Cuba or East Germany singing the praises of the “workers’ paradise.” Niebuhr’s Christian realism help me here.
I don’t think Bertram was overly happy about this growing reluctance in me concerning liberation theology. I was simultaneously engaging Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thought and urging Bertram to consider him as an alternative to his beloved Elert. But Bertram worried about Bonhoeffer’s more Barthian take on law and gospel (although later he warmed up to Bonhoeffer). He once tried to explain Elert as a kind of German “liberation theologian;” but for me, that was exactly what was wrong with Elert’s theology! It was such presumptive insight into the workings of the hidden God which led him to condemn the Barmen Declaration and embrace Adolf Hitler as the pious prince sent by Providence to rescue the Germans.
The title of Bertram’s dissertation was “The Human Subject as Object of Theology.” So neither was Bertram happy with my increasing interest in Karl Barth, for whom the sole object of theology is God. Theology is knowledge of God or it is nothing. I know that Bertram’s colleague, Edward Schroeder (with whom I had an on and off relationship for years), finally concluded that under the influence of Bonhoeffer and Barth, Hinlicky “was weak on law and gospel.” In a way, I plead guilty. Barth and later Jenson convinced me that there is no ethical difference between law and gospel; the ethical content of both is the double love commandment. The difference between law and gospel is that when love is demanded of me, I am exposed as a failure but when love is lavished upon me, even in my failure to love, I am beloved – that is the gospel. And so beloved, I get as a “little Christ” to lavish love upon the neighbor in need.
I think Bertram remained irritated about these deviations of mine. When I started reading the Finnish Luther research – I invited Simo Peura, Sammeli Juntunen and Antti Raunio to Bratislava in the 1990s and enjoyed excellent conversations with them-- I wrote about this encounter to Schroeder. He passed my letter over to Bertram who hand wrote in the margin, commenting on my enthusiasm regarding faith as union with Christ, “what does Hinlicky think we have been saying all these years?” My reaction when Schroeder sent that letter back to me: “Well, you could have fooled me!”
I don’t think Bertram ever succeeded in fully disentangling the joyful exchange as union with Christ from the dominant forensic model in Formula of Concord Lutheranism --of a heavenly law court assigning alien righteousness to the hapless sinner by divine fiat-- as that emerged following the Osiander controversy. Both models involve "imputation," but in the joyful exchange Christ gives (“imputes”) himself, crucified and risen, to the sinner while in the law court it is an extrinsic benefit acquired by Christ that is credited to the sinner. Sadly, that marginal comment in the late 1990s was the last word I received from Bertram, who died shortly after I returned to the United States to teach at Roanoke College.
Bertram sacrificed his potential as an academic theologian to the demands of his historical hour which was the Missouri Synod catastrophe. Just so, his neglected literary legacy makes for much enlightenment, perhaps precisely because he worked it out through trauma. Neglected are his substantial contributions to the Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue, which are of enduring value. I remember him fondly from those great evenings together in New York City.
He rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria!