In this reminiscence I wish to pay a debt of gratitude for some remarkable learning I was given in my college education, especially at Bard College in New York and Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne Indiana.
I was the oldest of five and among the first of my cousins to attend college. I really had no idea of what I was doing. In my senior year of high school in 1970 my draft number based on a lottery drawing of birthdates came up at #32. Yikes! The war in Vietnam was still hot and people my age were getting drafted. I was certain I wanted a college deferment, taking advantage of an unjust law that only later did I critically reflect upon. The adjacent state of New York had a lower drinking age at 18. That kind of narrowed my choices: college somewhere in New York State. Such is the thinking of an 18-year-old, old enough to get killed “in some crazy Asian war” as Kenny Rogers sang. I applied to Hofstra University and Bard College because they had theater programs. I enjoyed the drama club at high school and had a little success in it, and imagined with all the folly of an 18-year-old that I could make a go of it as an actor. That lasted about one week at Bard College.
Bard was on the cutting edge of the cultural changes occurring in the 1960s when I entered in the fall of 1970. Later I learned that my parents overheard some student conversation when they were dropping me off and my mother said to my father, “What kind of place are we leaving our son in?” As hip as I thought I was, I was not prepared for the student culture of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” We had a counter-cultural (in those days) soccer team rather than a football team, and three guys dressed up in mock Revolutionary War costume with flute and drum and a tattered flag for a marching band. We had an avowed Marxist-Leninist with a bullhorn organizing antiwar marches in nearby Poughkeepsie. I had a roommate who was a hashish dealer, who brought his girlfriend in for hanky-panky late at night across the common room, where I pretended to be sleeping. About a month into my first semester I was propositioned by a gay student. Like Dorothy to Toto, “I’m not in prim proper protestant suburban New Jersey anymore!” All the same, it was a rewarding year of intellectual discovery.
I began study of the German language with a native German speaker, William Fraenfelder, who decades before had fled Nazi Germany. He encouraged us to adopt Immanuel Kant’s als ob (= “as if”) practical morality, i.e. to live as if there is a God, judgment and reward for virtue. I studied hard and acquired a good reading knowledge of German that year. I also took a course on the Gospels with the Episcopalian priest who was also the chaplain of the college, Fredrick Q. Schaefer. This was my first introduction to the historical criticism of the Bible. I had an intense relationship with this man, Father Schaefer, who was sorely disappointed in me when I announced that I was transferring out at the end of my first year. He once told me that his faith is in “Western civilization.” Even then, I regarded this as curious, even an enlightened idolatry. I took a course also in that first semester on Nazi Germany with a historian, John C. Fout. In this class I read Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, an analysis of revolutionary violence posing as righteousness, which has had a lasting impact on me.
Having given up on theater, I was still interested in literature, perhaps as an aspiring novelist or as a critic. I really enjoyed my literature class. The professor asked me to recite a poem I’d written about the herd mentality I saw in my allegedly libertarian generation that was marching into a spiral of collective self-destruction (I’ve long ago lost it); the reading reduced some of my peers to weeping. But this professor, Benjamin La Farge, was in danger of failing tenure. I organized some students to testify in his favor. I remember claiming to the faculty committee that La Farge was like Adlai Stevenson, less charismatic but more substantive in losing to Eisenhower in the 1956 election. Evidently it helped; La Farge got tenure.
The other great event of my Bard year was a course I took with a Jewish professor Monty Noam Penkower. The class title was The Conservative Mind in America, in which we read Russell Kirk among others like the antebellum John C. Calhoun. For my term project, I read Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man. I was puzzled at how my professor could put him on a list of “conservative” minds in America. In my term paper I called Niebuhr prophetic in the same way as his friend across the street from Union at Jewish Theological Seminary, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was prophetic. But, having decided to study for the ministry, I transferred to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s Concordia Junior College in Bronxville, New York for my sophomore year.
This was a great year for me socially but a waste intellectually. The courses were on such a low level that I coasted through collecting As without any effort. The only real learning I recall was in a religion course, in which I read Luther’s Large Catechism for the first time. In particular I discovered his concept of personal faith ex corde, “from the heart.” A course on the Old Testament fell to the level of showing filmstrip cartoon illustrations, for example, of Amos as “God’s Angry Man.” Puerile. But after one year, I was off to Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana for the next two years.
I was a double major in philosophy and theology (or “concentration” as it was called there). The college was on the quarter system, which I really liked: three ten-week quarters (if I remember correctly) with a two-week January term and then the summer off. Consequently we got to explore a great deal, without the boredom that sets in during the typical thirteen week semester. We had required language courses in Greek and Hebrew that prepared us well for seminary level exegesis. I had Latin from high school and two college years of German behind me. The training was so good that I can still pretty much sight read the Greek New Testament, and with some brush up in Hebrew, I was able to write my theological commentary on the Book of Joshua for the Brazos series forty years after leaving the Senior College.
Prof. Curtis Peters taught us Continental philosophy, while Prof. Paul O’Connor introduced us to Analytical philosophy. Under Prof. Mihkel Soovik (émigré from Soviet Russia who colloquized into the Missouri Synod in 1950), we studied Kierkegaard. I remember the vertigo I experienced in reading Heidegger’s Being and Time in Soovik’s class. After a decade of assassinations, the Vietnam War and student protests, Cold War fears of a nuclear holocaust, the civil rights movement, the beginnings of the feminist movement, Watergate, race riots and the OPEC boycott, we certainly felt like we had been “thrown into existence,” awoken thence into “being towards death.” Simultaneously, the civil war that was breaking out in the Missouri Synod afflicted us, not knowing how it would affect us going forward.
In theology, I resonated with Prof. James Childs, who was just finishing his doctoral dissertation under Carl Braaten at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. He introduced us to the leading ideas of the “Theology of Hope” coming out of Germany, though tilted towards Pannenberg rather than Moltmann. Childs’ own interest was in theological anthropology; his dissertation was on the doctrine of the Imago Dei. I was perplexed by his affinity to the theology of Paul Tillich and I remember asking him once in his office about the Christology of Paul Tillich. He conceded that it was “truncated.” Childs had a penchant for such rich vocabulary. “Truncated?” I asked, “Does that mean, like, cut off?” He nodded yes. But the take away I remember is how he relocated the transcendence of God from the traditional and static three-story universe of God up above in heaven, to the far horizon of time, the future. I thought this was an ingenious solution to a difficult problem in modern theology asking, “Where is God?” Answer: God is in the future that he has promised to us. Childs was so important to us that we asked him to preach at our wedding and at Seminex I advocated for his appointment when it became clear that the same dark forces were shutting down the Senior College.
There was still some of the low-level silliness in Fort Wayne that I had experienced in Bronxville. We had a course in geography where the professor belabored instruction in the various kinds of ditches dug in the American Midwest. We had a course in anatomy that was ridiculously picayune, requiring us to memorize as if we were preparing for medical school. But out of the same generation we had our classy old gentleman, Dr. Walter Wente, who gave us hope for the future in the midst of a church that was in the process of imploding.
At the Senior College, I was able to renew my love for the theater. Productions were directed by Dr. Paul Harms, who also taught public speaking. I was given good parts in several plays. In The Heretic, a dramatization of Giordano Bruno’s trial by the Inquisition, I got to play the evil Cardinal Richelieu. We took this show on the road west to Concordia Seminary in Springfield, Illinois and as far south as Concordia College in Selma, Alabama - a memorable visit that included a catfish fry at the President’s house. Of course, Harms meant this performance to be a provocation in the Missouri Synod crisis, which it indeed was. In my senior year I had second lead in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, which by divine felicity, on a performance in south Indiana, involved the first romantic encounter with my future bride, Ellen. The Harms were very kind to me as I stayed in Fort Wayne to work after graduation, awaiting our marriage in August. I lived in the camping trailer behind their house.
Senior College housing was so arranged that about 30 of us lived in a house together. I was in Dorm H. We bonded together and had a great time going out for beer and pizza and playing a drinking game called Cardinal Puff. Together we locked arms going to the theater to watch the movie The Exorcist, which scared the bejesus out of me. My classmate, the future pastor Tom Hahn, had an incredible comic talent for mimicry. One evening he took us through the entire teaching faculty doing versions of exorcisms. We died laughing when he got to Jim Childs who rebuked the demon saying, “You are an … ontological impossibility!” I had lived in Bronxville with my Slovak Luther league friend, Phil Miksad from Yonkers, New York, in an (unheated!) carriage house behind the very nice dwelling of a neurosurgeon named Dr. Skok, of Slovak descent. We roomed together also in Fort Wayne and were in each other’s weddings in the summer of 1974. He has been a lifelong friend, along with his wife Carol.
The Senior College was a precious experience for me, both in the fellowship we enjoyed on campus and especially in the high level of education we received. I’ll relate my small part in the story of the Senior College’s tragic demise in the blog after next. But next I want to write about my education at the theological event that was Seminex.
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