In this series of reminiscences, I wish to pay a debt of gratitude to those who have gone before me but took the time to form me on my life’s way.
I was never William Lazareth’s student, and I only got to know him after having finished my PhD studies and begun to work for the Division for Mission in North America, Department of Church and Society, in the old headquarters of the LCA in Manhattan. Bill had been the director of that department for the three years prior to my time. After he went to Geneva to work for the World Council of Churches, Paul Brndjar, Bishop of the Slovak Zion Synod of the LCA, was appointed director. It was Paul who hired me as a research assistant.
With his large personality and domineering command of the best scholarship of the 20th century Luther renaissance, however, Bill’s afterglow permeated my four years at Church and Society. Bill later joined the Management Committee, elected by the LCA in convention, to oversee our work. It was in that capacity that I got to know him, when he returned to Manhattan to pastor Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on the Upper West Side.
Bill was a force of nature, a Brooklyn kid with the street smarts to face down and/or talk down anyone in his way. One time Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been invited to lecture at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, also in Manhattan. I was in attendance with my friend and colleague Christian von Dehsen. Bill, fresh from his important ecumenical work in Geneva which produced the ecumenical convergence document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, was among the Lutheran clergy welcoming Ratzinger. In the middle of Ratzinger’s speech, however, a group of gay rights protesters staged a disruption. Like a military policeman, Bill immediately took up a bulldog posture between the protesters and Ratzinger, staring them down and asking them to leave in peace. In his day, in his way, ecumenism trumped identity politics.
He was noted for his powerful preaching at Holy Trinity, which did not shy from the bombast and scatology of his beloved Luther. Exaggeration to make a point was to be expected. Not that his preaching lacked logical precision or exegetical depth, but it was most definitely a robust performance unusual for sophisticated Manhattanites. After all, he grew up in Brooklyn. But as we were members of St. Peter’s and our pastor was John Damm, listening to his sermons was not chiefly how I connected with him.
Immersed in the literature of the Luther renaissance, as mentioned, and having taken deep dives into the modern critical edition of Luther’s Works, the Weimar Ausgabe, the erudite Lazareth argued effortlessly and eloquently from the 16th century sources for an updated Lutheran social ethic. The 2005 Christians in Society is Lazareth’s best book, the final fruit of many years of research, teaching, and critical reflection. Yet the material it contains was already the starting point for all of our work in Church and Society on social issues and controversies.
In the early 1980s, these ranged from the threat of the nuclear arms race through the emerging status of women in church and society, to the smoldering crisis of apartheid in South Africa. Lazareth’s work was chiefly notable for correcting the modern dualistic misunderstanding of Luther’s two kingdoms doctrine, i.e. that religion is private and politics are public, and these two should be segregated as if existing in different realms, never to be mixed. Such dualism is the perfect recipe, however, for a denatured church and a godless secularism, each needing the other in sick symbiosis. Lazarus proposed to bring the church back into public life in a disciplined and coherent way, well-grounded theologically. His path was “forward to Luther”—well, anyway, to his Luther!
Like his contemporary in Europe, Ulrich Duchrow, Lazareth saw in Luther a more complex and interactive scheme than the static dualism in the minds of many moderns. There is an overarching battle for the creation between God and the devil, which God engages in both civil government and the church; these are God’s left and right hands, operating by law and by gospel, respectively. Unlike Duchrow, however, Lazareth was careful to specify that the regime of the state, working rough justice by the measurement of visible works, is backed by coercive punishment. As such it cannot analogize the kingdom of grace. This mode of operation is thus in sharp distinction from the regime of the gospel which works by faith backed only by the Holy Spirit. The two regimes, however, intersect in the locations/vocations of Christians in society. And the church as a public institution guides its people through serious study and analysis in its social statements. Equipped with this more complex and dynamic scheme, the contemporary church’s engagement with questions of justice in democratic society was to be both authorized and guided. Lazareth had hoped his book would become the textbook on social justice in Lutheran seminaries, but I doubt today that it is remembered, let alone taught.
His work also pushed forward Lutheran theology to new development, particularly by his rejection of the so-called “third use of the law” as a measuring stick for sanctification. Not only does this put Spirit-led Christians back under the law, its focus is narrowly individualistic. For Lazareth, by contrast, the first two uses of the law sufficed: 1) to curb manifest sin politically, and 2) to reveal sinfulness before God spiritually. Rather, what Lutherans need is a second use of the gospel (the imperative of the indicative, e.g. you have been freed in Christ; therefore live as free people). Thus Lazareth’s proposal for the second use of the gospel would evoke and guide the gift of new life for Christians in society as “secular saints.” So Lazareth was a renewer of the doctrine of vocation in identifying the secular but not godless arenas of society where discipleship is to be carried out.
I had one episode with him, which in hindsight I find more amusing than offensive. There were calls to declare apartheid South Africa “a state of confession.” No one really knew what the Latin term status confessionis meant, except that during the Nazi era certain Protestant Christians had invoked it to justify resistance. The Lutheran World Assembly in Dar es Salaam, without much study or reflection, went ahead and declared that such a state exists, which obligates Christians as a matter of confession to oppose apartheid. Now the member churches were being asked to say the same. So I was tasked to produce a historical-theological study of confession. What I learned, however, tended to immobilize this contemporary appropriation, at least so far as it wanted to claim the Reformation as its inspiration.
The proper 16th century Latin term, in the first place, is casus (or tempus) confessionis, “the case (or time) of confession.” And what constitutes such a case is persecution of the church by political authorities specifically on account of the name of Jesus Christ and his saving purpose. That is what the article in the Formula of Concord teaches. Casus confessionis is thus a matter of the right hand kingdom, when and where the gospel expressly is under political attack. But contemporary opposition to apartheid was not particularly about repression of the church for its confession of Jesus Christ. In fact, many white Christian churches in South Africa openly or tacitly supported apartheid and some even tried theologically to justify it. One could imagine then that racism in the name of Christ might be identified as heresy. But that is not what Dar es Salaam asked for. Instead, status confessionis was invoked to require as a matter of salvation political opposition apartheid’s racial injustice and its violent imposition and legal rationalization by the white minority upon the black majority in South Africa – a textbook case begging for Lazareth’s left-hand kingdom analysis. The latter analysis, of course, would lay it on the conscience of Christians in society politically to oppose apartheid in the manner in which citizenship allowed, just as in any other secular matter of grave ethical concern.
So naturally, Lazareth was attracted to my analysis when he read the paper I had presented on my research for DMNA. Much to my surprise, one day I opened the little journal Christianity and Crisis to read an article by Bill on the topic of apartheid and confession to find generous excerpts from my text taken over verbatim without attribution and published under his name, not mine. So I wrote a letter to Bill, laying out into two columns his text and mine and asking for an explanation. I tried to be humorous about this, suggesting that given infinite time two monkeys at typewriters would produce identical text. He very quickly replied inviting me to lunch to discuss the matter. He certainly didn’t want a junior staffer to go public with an accusation of plagiarism! I was mollified by his rather lame explanation that as a member of the Management Committee, he felt justified in using whatever material the staff had prepared. It would have been more gracious, however, for a man of his power and prestige to acknowledge an underling’s work. I let it pass.
My wife Ellen remembers one incident in this connection that I do not. She thinks it was Lazareth’s recompense for his aforementioned trespass. At some event in the City after I was appointed the editor of Lutheran Forum, Bill claimed to her that he had nominated and advocated for my appointment to the editorship. When she asked why, he, now Bishop of the Metro New York Synod, grinned and replied, “Tammany Hall, baby.” In any case, the standing joke among us underlings about this commanding officer/Brooklyn bulldog/no holds barred street fighter was a riff on what GIs said about Gen. George Patton during the war: “He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”
One of the most controversial projects of Church and Society was the social statement, Peace and Politics, which took up the approach of Lazareth’s left-hand kingdom analysis with some accents from the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. It argued that nuclear weapons could not be disinvented, but only managed for the sake of peace keeping, peace-building and peace-making. The political work for peace emerged as the path forward through the “nuclear morass,” as I entitled my background study. But this eminently sane path forward was denounced as antiquated 16th-century thinking incapable of confronting the imminent threat of catastrophic nuclear war. After considerable controversy, the social statement passed at the Toronto assembly of the Lutheran Church in America in 1983. Calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament were rejected decisively; passage also cast substantive doubt upon passionate calls for a “nuclear freeze.” Paul Brndjar remembers with great appreciation how, in this contentious atmosphere, Lazareth embraced him on the dais upon approval, publicly demonstrating his concurrence and support for all to see.
I am very grateful for the years I spent in Church and Society. It was an eye-opening but also disillusioning immersion into the unraveling democratic consensus of the postwar period in transition to what today we recognize in our polarized dysfunction as “post-modernity,” and in the church as “post-Christendom.” Both of these terms refer to the fact that the dominant culture in the West no longer recognizes the rock from which it was hewn, the quarry from which it was dug. The Western world has lost its story. Ignorant of what it owes to historical Western Christianity, it becomes indifferent if not hostile to the very idea of this heritage. For us Christians, this is an unprecedented situation which we face courageously or, like the proverbial ostrich, with our heads in the sand.
But this was not yet Bill Lazareth’s state of mind. He really thought that renewed knowledge of Luther’s social ethic according to his critical retrieval could win the day, at least in the Lutheran church. This conviction was evident in his participation in the thirty member Commission for a New Lutheran Church which engineered the emerging Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I had occasion to question him about some of the more controversial proposals coming forward from the Commission in terms of ethnic, gender and lay quotas which would in effect abolish the Ministerium, downgrading the role and status of ministers ordained to service of Word and Sacrament in the governance of the church. We would have bishops, miters and all, but they would have no role in governance and be subjected to periodic reelection. In other words, bishops in name only, albeit in ceremonial “historical succession.” I saw this abolition of the Ministerium as far-reaching in its implications and viewed it as something more attuned to the radical Reformation than the Magisterial one from which Lutherans historically descend. I saw an intimation of the future desired by many on the Commission when the name of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, only narrowly survived a vote.
But the Brooklyn bulldog confidently assured me that he could maneuver through the mess that was being created for the new Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Yet, for all his politicking, he was defeated in the first election for presiding Bishop by a narrow margin. His maneuvering had failed. I had heard one of the self-identified “progressive” members of the Commission aver that in the “new” Lutheran Church there would never again be theologians like Bill Lazareth, or his equivalent in the old ALC, George Forell, not to mention academics like Carl Braaten, Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert Jenson, George Lindbeck or Gerhard Forde having such sway. And after 35 years, we see that they got their way.
Therein lies a danger, I think, in Lazareth’s account of the left hand kingdom, in so far as it licensed a bare-knuckled kind of politics in the church qua institution. Bill’s opponents learned a lesson from Bill to fight this way. What I gathered from my years in the church bureaucracy was how easily it could manipulate a mass of theologically illiterate laypeople and company-owned and selected “rostered leaders” in that the bureaucracy possessed the unquestionable power both to stipulate and to frame the questions. But this manipulative behavior leads over time to what many church institutions are experiencing today: a loss of trust and growing sense of alienation. The ELCA is a church which no one loves but everyone uses. That is a very sad state of affairs.
But Bill was a happy warrior. He ended his career after being Bishop of the Metro New York Synod as a professor at Carthage College in Kenosha Wisconsin. His theological legacy abides for those who might be interested – very few, I think, in the denomination he helped to create.
He rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria.