Richard John Neuhaus was a larger than life character, as all who knew him will attest. My career in theology spiraled around his for many years. I say “spiraled,” because I could never quite get into full alignment with his trajectory, but neither could I simply escape it. He rightly diagnosed our “naked public square,” a cultural vacuum from which the demons of Inquisition and Witch Trials had been exorcised but were now in pressing danger of seven demons worse coming to occupy it. I did finally reject his version of catholicism as sophisticated nostalgia for Christendom, but it was a sad breach. Although he influenced me, I cannot say that I influenced him. Yet our hot and cold relationship finished personally with a grace-note, as I shall recount.
In the 1970s Neuhaus regularly hosted a gathering of New York City Lutheran clergy at his apartment in Gramercy Park. As a graduate student at Union, I was suspicious of his recent turn to then incipient neo-conservativism, after admiring his 1960s activism in the civil rights movement and in opposition to the war in Vietnam. But when my senior pastor at Mount Zion Lutheran Church in Harlem asked me to join him for a Neuhaus soirée, I agreed to go. When Neuhaus got around to talking with me one-on-one, he asked me what I was interested in doing with my PhD work. I answered honestly --at this pubescent stage of my thought-- “I want to reconcile Luther and Marx by way of Tillich.” That proved to be a conversation stopper. Neuhaus bluntly retorted, “That’s not very promising,” and turned away to talk to others. The putdown stung. I enjoyed drinking his Scotch but wasn’t interested in returning to his salon for the next number of years.
My next encounter with Neuhaus occurred about five years later when, in my research work for the Division for Mission in North America of the old LCA, I published a study, “The Nuclear Morass.” In the midst of the turmoil of the SALT deployment of the early Reagan years and oppositional calls for a “nuclear freeze,” the study argued soberly that weapons of mass destruction cannot be disinvented, and the danger as such must be managed in the recognition that nuclear war would destroy humanity on the earth. In other words, my study described “mutually assured destruction” less as a strategy than as a new and irreversible fact. Neuhaus read it and applauded its Niebuhrian Christian realism. He invited me to dinner at his apartment for discussion of it and I agreed, thinking I would not mention my unpleasant first experience of him (which the increasingly famous man would probably not recall anyway).
But the dinner party was an embarrassing disaster for me. As a round after round of the Greek liquor ouzo was poured, preceded by several rounds of scotch before dinner, I finally realized how late it was. Knowing I needed to catch a train home, I suddenly stood up to leave. But the world spun around in circles as I fell to the floor in my own vomit. Nonplussed, Neuhaus and his other guests cleaned me up with the mess I made, helped me phone my wife, and put me on the couch for the night. When I woke up in the morning I made a fast exit. Neuhaus didn’t hold it against me. In fact he said, “You are not the first to whom this has happened.”
The story resumes in 1985 when I was appointed editor of Lutheran Forum. This was when Neuhaus, still a Lutheran, was editor of the punchy, sometimes snarky but always interesting, newsy and entertaining Forum Letter. So we became partners in crimes, real and imagined, against the newborn Evangelical Lutheran Church in America – in our view, ill born (for betraying Lutheranism to mainstream-American liberal Protestantism). During these years Neuhaus and I often consulted, and Ellen and I were sometimes guests at his New York apartment. I enjoyed participation in many of the theological conversations he organized, facilitating dialogue between Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Christians, and between theologians, political scientists and philosophers.
Even as he became increasingly conservative politically, we “evangelical catholic” partisans made bedfellows with the team of Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, editors of the journal dialog. We brought in another independent journal, Lutheran Quarterly, because it represented a stream of Lutheranism similarly unhappy with the “new” Lutheran church, namely, the “prairie populists,” as we called these Scandinavian-descended post-pietists urging “radical Lutheranism.” We jointly sponsored the two Call to Faithfulness conferences in Northfield in the early 1990s which attracted massive turnouts, well over a thousand for the first and over nine hundred for the second. But these ended in failure because the parties concerned with the direction of the ELCA themselves diverged over the catholicity of the Reformation and its implications for ecclesiology. It was in this disappointment that a disillusioned Neuhaus, who had long argued for “the Lutheran difference,” abandoned ship and swam the Tiber. He called me personally to inform me of his decision with the entailment that he would have to be leaving Forum Letter.
The truth is that I was also despondent and went shortly thereafter to New York to talk with Neuhaus about my own possible ecclesial transition. Neuhaus had branded his transition as a fulfillment of, not a contradiction to, his Lutheranism. The sticking point came when I told him that I could not in good conscience confess the modern Marian dogmas. His response to this confession left me uneasy and dissatisfied, namely, that if Mother Church has decided on something we should simply suspend disbelief and trust. I realized consequently in myself a core commitment to remain Lutheran. I will surrender neither intellect nor conscience to any except my Lord Jesus Christ. (Parenthetically, in an age when bullies try to silence us demanding that we check our putative “privilege,” I regard this Luther-at-Worms principle of bound conscience and intellect as indispensable.) In any case, greatly to Neuhaus’ disappointment, I could not follow him to Rome. And to this day I remain a member, too often in dissent, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
In spite of his disappointment, Neuhaus supported our family generously when I undertook a visiting professorship in Bratislava, Slovakia at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Comenius University. We remained in touch, corresponding through these years (as I tried to interpret the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue to a minority church in Slovakia that was exceedingly suspicious of Rome). So when we returned to the USA in 1999, he invited me to his grand theological powwows in New York City any number of times. These were dialogue events for me with many significant intellectuals: Peter Berger, John Milbank, Catholics Robbie George and George Weigel, Jews Michael Wyschogrod, Peter Ochs, Leon Klenicki, David Novak, Lutherans Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert Wilken, George Lindbeck, my Union professor David Lott, and Robert Jenson. I was signatory to a statement against legalized euthanasia, “Always to Care, Never to Kill,” fruit of these colloquiums.
Neuhaus was a magnanimous host, at the peak of his powers in the early 2000s: editing the influential journal First Things, invited to dine at the White House with the president of the United States or His Holiness at Rome (which occasions he never failed, ever so casually, to mention). He increasingly pressed me (along with any and all in earshot) to join him on the far side of the Tiber River. In one of the last of these colloquiums I attended, I was sitting next to George Lindbeck, and as Neuhaus went on and on about the primacy of Peter as the key to the unity of the church and the restoration of Christendom, I whispered to George, “This is unbearable.” And he whispered back, but almost loud enough for everyone to hear, “And it gets worse and worse.” George had rightly projected the Christian future in the West as “sociologically sectarian, but catholic in its self-understanding.” That was his point, and mine also, in staying Lutheran in the changing churches.
Upon the publication of Pope Benedict’s encyclical Deus caritas est, I had written an essay approving of it under the motif, “Benedict is my Pope too.” By this I meant what the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue in America had actually suggested: a reformed papacy with a non-coercive pastoral mission for promoting the worldwide unity of Christians. But Neuhaus, who lifted up my essay, took it as indicating that I was finally ready to take the plunge into to his increasingly papist view of the papacy. (How ironic that those who transitioned to Rome wanting a strong Pope to save them from Protestant faddism now have been graced with the reign of Francis!) When Neuhaus was disappointed again by my stubborn refusal to see the light as he saw it, I was no longer invited to New York for the powwows. In spite of several submissions, I was never able to get anything published in First Things. I was disappointed, even hurt, after my book publications took off from 2009, that they never got much coverage in First Things; what they did get was perfunctory.
I followed Neuhaus through the reports of his battles with cancer and sent him on occasion missives of encouragement, but it felt as if he had given up on me. Thankfully, Robert Benne, still directing the institute at Roanoke College which was eventually named after him as the Benne Center, invited Neuhaus to Roanoke to give a lecture. Neuhaus had always affectionately addressed me in the German fashion as “Paulus.” When he arrived he so greeted me with a generous smile, the first time in a number of years, and, as it proved to be, the last time. After his recent close encounters with death and, I think, aware of his impending demise which would take place rather abruptly two months hence, there were no undertones of acrimony nor disappointment anymore. We enjoyed an raucous and altogether endearing evening together reminiscing with him in the Bennes’ home after his lecture.
My career in theology spiraled around Neuhaus because I do believe in the “Lutheran Difference,” which may be variously described as “evangelical catholicism,” or as a “reform movement within the Western Catholic Church.” My alignment with evangelical Catholicism followed from my reading of Luther’s treatise, Confession concerning Christ’s Supper during my Seminex days (the “seminary in exile” emerged after the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s fundamentalist and authoritarian takeover). But Neuhaus traced his evangelical Catholicism to his teacher, the Missouri Synod theologian Arthur Carl Piepkorn. The seeds of our divergence are already here in nuce. As Neuhaus became a zealous Roman Catholic and his theo-political vision became one of restoring Christendom, I had rediscovered the patristic “theology of the martyrs.” We both realized finally that we had been led in different directions.
It is no accident consequently that I have entitled several of my important books with the culturally specific and descriptive note, “after Christendom.” I’ve described this as an unprecedented situation in the history of the Gospel on its way through the nations. For me, it is nevertheless our culture in which the Gospel must be preached and thought theologically. We do not get to choose our place in history, but are asked, just there, to know and serve the God of the Gospel. For some this will signal capitulation to the spirit of the times, but I mean it as knowing the spirit of Christ amid the spirits of the postmodern world.
My friend and erstwhile comrade in arms rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria.