In this reminiscence, I want to pay a debt of gratitude for what I learned at this remarkable theological event which went by the name Seminex. For a brief passing moment in time, the Seminex education was captured in the battle hymn we sang: The Church’s One Foundation. The education was not only intellectual but profoundly existential. I’ll have more to say about the latter in the next blog. For the present I just want to recall significant teachers and the learning that occurred under their watch in my years in residence there: 1975-77.
I took homiletics from Richard R. Caemmerer. By this time, he was already one of our grand old men, impressive for being willing to join the seminary in exile. I learned from him and his colleague in Practical Theology, George Hoyer, something crucial, namely, not to preach only the gospel. That sounds surprising because our uncomprehending critics accused us of “gospel reductionism.” But they taught us that sermons that only repeat in countless variations a nice idea, say, that “God is love,” are not true to life, and become saccharine. Preaching is not primarily a communication of such airy information but the event which confronts us with a word not our own, the Word of God who is Jesus Christ, crucified and risen to be present “for you.” That is divine love in action meeting people where they really are (i.e., not where they fancy themselves to be). Thus the preached, i.e. enacted word of God judges us with the law in order to justify us with the gospel. Caemmerer in this mode preached a famous sermon early on at Seminex on the theme from Hebrews that a confessing church has “no continuing city” on its pilgrim way. It is still worth studying today as it remains an excellent diagnostic for churches today in dismay at institutional collapse.
As Hoyer characteristically emphasized, the most important part of the sermon is the diagnosis to which the gospel is to be addressed. And of course to do diagnostics well, the preacher has to be living with the people, feeling with them in their challenges and experiences, discerning the demons which haunt and the idolatries which enthrall by the measuring stick of divine law. I took Worship with Hoyer. For the first time in my life, I gained from him a theological understanding of liturgy and of pastoral leadership in liturgy. Sometimes we students joked about “chancel prancing” – a nervous worry that liturgical renewal would be alienating for our presumed parishioners, long indoctrinated in anti-Catholicism. But what I actually learned here was an alternative to the Herr Pastor as hired Christian lording over a passive audience. As the work of the whole people of God, the liturgy, by its melodious repetition, sung Scripture into heart and mind. And preaching, rather than being a lecture or rhetorical performance pontificating on whatever whim of the preacher, was rather integrated into the day of the church calendar on lectionary texts pertinent thereto. I was ready for the LBW when it appeared a few years later.
I learned American Church History from Dr. John W. Constable. This was an eye-opening exposure to the essentially Calvinist religious formation of the United States, along with all the anti-Calvinist dissent it generated, and how those earlier conflicts evolved into the fundamentalist-modernist controversies which wracked Protestantism from the time of Charles Darwin onward (and had now engulfed the Missouri Synod). At the time, it reinforced a growing conviction that (well, our kind of) Lutheranism could provide a healing bridge between these Protestant factions and forge a new relationship with the Church of Rome. In church history I also took coursework with Erwin L. Lueker, editor-in-chief of the Lutheran Cyclopedia. I think this was a course in comparative symbolics, but I don’t remember much about it. From Herbert T. Mayer I got a working knowledge of patristic theology. With Gill Thiele I took a meaty elective reading the doctor gratiae, Augustine, particularly his City of God, which made a profound impression on me – I had found Martin Luther’s real teacher in the 5th century “doctor of grace!”
My most significant learning from a church historian, however, came from an independent study with John Groh. I don’t remember how this came about, but we drew up a reading list on Reformation theology. He directed me to Luther’s great theological treatises from the second half of 1520s: This Is My Body and Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper. This reading sealed in me the conviction that the doctrine of justification by faith was applied Christology (Käsemann), not general ideas about trust or grace, or the mere idea of a loving God. Corresponding to this, the ministry of the church is service of the risen-to-be-present Lord, not the vicarage of an absent one. And in counterpoint to this learning from Luther, Groh had me read all four books of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. I remember expressing the wonderment at the end of my paper: how could a theologian be so biblical and yet so unevangelical (in the better sense of that adjective, i.e. pastoral, merciful). That is perhaps unfair to Calvin, but in the context of the Missouri Synod conflict, so it seemed to me: our opponents were not the true blue Lutherans they claimed to be but crypto Calvinists!
Groh, by the way, saw the writing on the wall and left Seminex for Arizona where he had a career in real estate. He has published some devotional books and a novel. What a loss of a good scholar for the church! Before he left, he also steered me to Martin Marty’s studies of American fundamentalism. I read a book he recommended from his University of Chicago circle about “Protestant Primitivism” in American history which for the first time enlightened me about Mormonism.
When I decided to attend Seminex, my study plan was to learn the Bible. At this time I was still thinking that I might want to do philosophy instead of systematic theology after seminary, and in either case I wanted a strong foundation in the Bible. And what of wealth we had in this department! I had my basic introductory course with Profs. Ralph Klein and Everett Kalin. I still remember the opening exercise in which we were required to compare the biblical citation in Mark 1:3 to its source in Isaiah 40:3. We discovered that Mark’s Greek refers to John the Baptizer as “the voice of one in the wilderness crying out: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord.’” But the Hebrew of Isaiah reads, “Prepare the way of the Lord in the wilderness …” referring to the forthcoming Exodus through the wilderness from Babylon back to Zion. The Greek translation, presumably from the Septuagint, misunderstood the Hebrew. Klein and Kalin were teaching us to take what is actually written more seriously than any preconceived ideas. A most valuable lesson! Face difficulties! Don’t artificially harmonize!
Old Testament I learned from Carl Graesser, an archaeologist associated with the F. W. Albright Institute of Archeological Research. We read John Bright and the commentaries of Brevard Childs, with Gerhard von Rad in the background (on my own I did read the latter’s two-volume Theology of the Old Testament). I also learned from Alfred von Rohr Sauer, who looked like Moses himself with his long locks and flowing white beard. I accompanied von Rohr Sauer on the mission trip Seminex students took in order to interpret our exile to Missouri Synod congregations. I vividly recall visiting the Slovak (SELC) Synod congregation in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where I knew Pastor Paul Visoky from Luther League. Visoky pointed at the Moses-like von Rohr Sauer and asking the congregation, “Does this look like a heretic!?”
I learned sensitivity from Ralph Klein to the problem of Christian anti-Judaism embedded in the history of Christian biblical scholarship, and also lessons on the literature and theology of the Babylonian exile that were quite relevant to our existential situation at Seminex. The most impressive learning I experienced in Old Testament, however, was an elective in the Hebrew exegesis of the prophets Amos and Hosea which I took with Arlis Ehlen. I focused on the dramatic passage of Hosea 11:9: “I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” I argued that the Hebrew noun choice translated here by the NRSV as no mortal was actually the word for “male.” In the context of Hosea’s symbolic marriage to Gomer, the faithless spouse, as a symbol for wayward Israel, the connotation of the word choice was that the Holy One of Israel is finally not like an enraged male in a jealous fit at a cheating wife. I made the case but I don’t think Ehlen was convinced. Ehlen, by the way, had been the target and first victim of the Preus purge, after years of hounding by Herman Otten’s yellow journalism for questioning the historicity of Adam and Eve and other such “heresies.”
In a previous post on J. Louis Martyn, I reminisced fondly on what I learned from Prof. Edgar Krentz, who had studied with the German Ernst Käsemann and made me aware of his work. Of course we had the prodigious scholar, our so-called “Red” Fred Danker, thus nicknamed not only for his red hair but also for his politics. I profited from his interpretation of the location of the gospel of Luke in the cultural world of Hellenism (including Hellenistic Judaism), as we all have profited from his prodigious labor on the comprehensive BAGD Greek lexicon.
Years later, I had a very disappointing encounter with Dr. Robert Smith, long after he had migrated to Pacific Lutheran Seminary where he taught New Testament. He was a guest lecturer for the ELCA’s annual missionary conference when I was in the USA for the summer. I knew that he was a popularizer-type from Seminex days, but when he – announcing “I have a problem with authority” – went off on a tirade about Ignatius of Antioch as the cruel instigator of oppressive episcopacy (popularizing the profoundly skewed thesis of Walter Bauer on orthodoxy and heresy in the early church), I actually rose to embarrass him in front of the assembly. I protested that Ignatius was arrested for being a “bishop” (= an overseer, i.e. a pastor) of an early Christian community who was being marched to Rome in chains to die in the Coliseum for confession of the name of Jesus Christ when he wrote his letters. Substantively, the letters were critiquing the first early Christological deviation that was denying the true, i.e., bodily humanity of Jesus Christ, turning him into a spirit. What then would be the point of Ignatius being shackled bodily in chains for naming Jesus (not Caesar!) as Lord? If only we had such “bishops,” I concluded, today! My intervention left him speechless, but also left me wondering about some of the fallout from Seminex, witnessing such ill-informed posturing from a supposed scholar, not to mention the California-vibe outburst of anticlericalism – strange for a teacher preparing pastors for ministry.
In my so-called “hospital course,” we were instructed to avoid religious language and simply be present to listen on the model of Rogerian psychology. It took me some time in actual pastoral ministry to unlearn this awful indoctrination. Listening, yes, but listening in order to pray well with the sick and the dying, the lost and the lonely. Somehow I clashed with Prof. Paul Goetting -- my own fault, because I was impatient with practical ministry courses that took up a lot of time when I wanted to finish my academic work in two years to get on with life. Years later I knew Goetting in New York when he and I worked for the LCA. Memorable, however, was an episode when I shared what I was learning from the reading of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization in a small group discussion that he was monitoring. The book is the charter document of the so-called “New Left,” a fresh start for Marxism with the help of Freud after the working class went for Hitler instead of the revolution, turning now to sexuality and race instead of class conflict. These were the ideas in the air at the time and so I channeled Marcuse to the palpable discomfort of my still rather conservative classmates. After class, Goetting took me aside to warn me about the dangers of “blowing minds,” as we used to say in those days.
I have discussed what I learned from Robert Bertram in a separate blog and I will discuss my relationship to Edward Schroeder in the next one. I finished my academic work at Seminex in two years and then accomplished my one year of internship at Redeemer Lutheran Church in Seaford, New York. That too was a learning experience, as the supervising pastor had fled town the week before we arrived with the kindergarten teacher, when their affair was discovered. (This was the beginning of a depressing pattern. About ten years down the road I counted up some seventeen different congregations I had served as vice pastor or supply pastor and found that in ten of those cases I came in on the heels of clergy sexual misconduct. And I testified about this at the hearings for the “new” Lutheran Church going on at the time). I conducted something like thirty funerals during that vicarage year. The local undertaker was a member of the congregation and took pity on our poverty, so he sent for me every time a grieving family was looking for someone to officiate final farewells. This was existential learning. After repeating Paul Tillich’s “love is stronger than death” to uncomprehending or, rather, disbelieving families a number of times, I went back to the drawing boards in search of a stronger theology in face of death. I was awarded the M.Div. degree in abstentia in 1978, when I entered the PhD program in systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
All things considered, I am grateful for what I learned intellectually at Seminex. What I learned existentially, however, is another matter -- for next time.