My encounter with Paul Lehmann was brief but intense, non-official but impactful. I already recounted in my reminiscence of J. Louis Martyn how Lehmann humbled me when I presented a paper to the Paul Study Group at Union Theological Seminary early in my graduate studies. Born in the USA of immigrant parents with native fluency in German, Lehmann asked me whether I correctly understood a German word I had employed in the paper. I was defenseless, but afterwards I checked and rechecked that I had gotten the meaning right. It was a hazing ritual.
Lehmann was Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s American buddy who gave him a copy of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society to read when he arrived for a study year early in the 1930s, and then accompanied him in a motor tour to the American West during the summer recess. Years later, he took Bonhoeffer to the New York port, where he left safety in America to sail back to Nazi Germany. That association alone, of course, made me hunger to know him better. And he was happy to tell us stories about his friend Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
I was learning Karl Barth’s challenge to my modern Lutheran orientation, drunk as I was on the theologies of Paul Tillich and Rudolph Bultmann in reaction against the Missouri Synod’s turn to fundamentalism. Lutheran “promeiety,” Luther’s emphasis that justifying faith is always the personal appropriation indicated by the Latin pro me, had in the 19th and 20th centuries under the spell of Kantian philosophy reduced Lutheran theology to anthropology. I sensed that this was wrong--theology has to be about God--but I did not yet have the tools to see why.
Lehmann, cognizant of those modern Lutheran theologies, once remarked to me that he thought Immanuel Kant was the quintessential Lutheran philosopher. Even then, I sensed that this was mistaken. Kant, I knew, was far closer to Erasmus’s skepticism and moralism than to Luther’s doxological assertions of the saving Lord of the failed and the helpless. So my subsequent studies of Gottfried Leibniz and George Friedrich Hegel demonstrated--that is, if the category of “Lutheran philosopher” is to be admitted all. In any case, I remember reading Barth’s lectures on Schleiermacher at the time, as the scales fell from my eyes to see what was really going on all around me at Union: theology had in large part reverted again to anthropology, what Bonhoeffer had previously described after his year at Union as "Protestantism without Reformation." Lehmann, of course, had studied not only under Niebuhr but under Barth as well.
Refreshingly, Lehmann was talking about the activity of God in time and space to make and keep human life human. For him theology is about God, but specifically the living God of the gospel who is at work in the creation. I once mentioned critically (or perhaps pejoratively in tone) the German term, Heilsontologie = “ontology of salvation,” rejecting it as a false alternative to the theology of the word. Lehmann robustly countered, “What’s wrong with that!?” Once again, I sputtered, not knowing how to articulate my concern. At least in my theological journey, however, such challenge is exactly what is needed and sometimes wanted from a professor, “micro aggression” notwithstanding, an erudite mentor who had the smarts and the balls to challenge a student to think more deeply and articulate more clearly. In this rough-and-tumble way, I was learning from Lehmann about the hidden rule of the transfigured Lord Jesus Christ over our world – his ascended rule at the right hand of divine power which Christians were to discern so that they could join in God’s battle for humanization.
On my own I had read his book, Ethics in a Christian Context. I liked this book very much just because it helped further to liberate me from the chimera of Kant’s putatively universal ethic. The Christian community provides the habitat where one discerns not a categorical imperative to do what any rational agent ought to do regardless of the situation, but what a Christian ought to do in serving the God at work to make and keep human life human. He discussed the Ten Commandments in this book, not as a list of abstract absolutes but as a theological kind of sociology, identifying arenas of human life where behavior either humanizes or dehumanizes. Interestingly, this argument parallels Bonhoeffer’s in his posthumous Ethics, in which Bonhoeffer historicized and dynamized the static “orders of creation” of Lutheran tradition by speaking instead of the “mandates of creation,” deriving from the command of blessing in Genesis 1:26-28.
Christopher Morse made a suggestion to me about Lehmann’s book, The Transfiguration of Politics, which had come out several years before. Would I be interested in a non-credit discussion group with Lehmann, to be held in his apartment, about the book? I jumped at the chance, and we gathered a few more graduate students into the circle. But I have to explain a few things first. At this point in time, Lehmann was persona non grata at Union, even though he had been educated there in the 1930s and taught there later from 1963 to 1974. But a coalition of professors, Tom Driver, Beverly Harrison and Dorothee Sőlle, had become exceedingly antagonistic to Lehmann. There would be trouble if anyone knew that we were learning from him, and so our meetings would have to be secret. Driver, by the way, was my assigned academic advisor, whom I didn’t yet have the good sense or courage to be rid of. So our secrecy was pledged.
It was an exceedingly stimulating series of meetings with Lehmann as we worked through his book. It provided me a sympathetic encounter with “political Barthianism” (which at length I critiqued sharply in my Before Auschwitz and again in my systematic theology for being insufficiently critical of Soviet communism), according to which one looks outside the walls of the church to discover God’s humanizing action in the world. At this time, the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua against the Somoza regime was going on. Lehmann had a very interesting application of the Protestant Reformation’s idea of an imputed righteousness, the so-called “alien” righteousness of Christ credited to the sinner, justifying the ungodly: he applied this to the Sandinistas! They may not even know that they are instruments of the risen and ascended Lord; moreover, there were certainly enough sins being committed by the Sandinistas to indicate that they were possessed by a righteousness not their own.
In fact today, the Ortega regime, descended from the Sandinistas, is persecuting the Roman Catholic Church. So the problem of discernment and the danger of enthusiasm emerge here as genuine difficulties (as Bonhoeffer warned about the enthusiasm of the German Christians in the first draft of the Bethel Confession, which he co-authored with Hermann Sasse. But theologically, I learned from Lehmann that while the risen Lord commits his mission to the church, he does not abandon his mission to the church. He is Lord over both church and world. Hidden from the eyes of the world (and all too often from the eyes of the church), he must reign in battle until all enemies opposing God and dehumanizing his creation are defeated.
A side note: I recall an exchange with a colleague at the LCA's Department of Church and Society. When I spoke Lehmannese about what God is doing in the world to make and to keep human life human, he chastised, "God does not do anything. God simply is" – transcendent being-itself, I suppose, timeless spaceless selfsameness as the essential identification of God, the Great Beyond. One may learn this from Tillich but not from Luther.
In this light you can imagine how baffling I found Lehmann’s remark to me (in spite of his friend Bonhoeffer’s retrieval of Luther’s Christology!), “Luther’s idea of ubiquity is the most ridiculous thing he ever said.” At the time, I took this to be an outspoken expression of his Reformed commitment to the so-called extracalvinisticum (the teaching that the divine Son of God is not contained in the finite body of the man Jesus). Yet I wondered: the ubiquity of Christ’s body would mean precisely that the Man-for-others, the embodied Jesus, is universally present in the world to do the battles for humanization which Lehmann was talking about. Such ubiquity was in fact the teaching of the second-generation Lutheran Johannes Brenz.
Over the years, I have come to think that ubiquity is a red herring which misleads both Lutherans and their critics. Luther only raised the possibility of ubiquity hypothetically, and in the end came to something closer to Martin Chemnitz’s ubivolipraesens, “Jesus being where he wills to be.” Chemnitz formulated this in opposition to Brenz who really did affirm the necessary and impersonal on account of metaphysical divine omnipresence ubiquity of Christ’s divinized body. The formulation, ubivolipraesens, to the contrary at once preserves the personal freedom of the risen Lord in a way that ubiquity seems not to do, then, just as it undergirds Christ’s specific promise to be present bodily for us in his meal. In the process, this meal-presence identifies the assembly gathered around gospel word and sacraments as the definite place of God’s humanizing work in the world.
To me, then, the worry is that the neo-Calvinist Lehmann’s evidently non-bodily, i.e. spiritual ubiquity of the ascended Lord at work in the world loses hold of the criterion for identification of what God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human. That criterion is spelled out in the Christ hymn of Philippians 2, instructing Christians to have the same mind in them that was in the Son of God who made himself human, humble and obedient, the specifically embodied servant of the Lord, even to death upon the cross. This human biography is not left behind in the exaltation, but is transfigured by it to be made present by the Holy Spirit in the proclamation of it in Word and Sacrament. That kenosis into the human body as Jesus, now vindicated and exalted, becomes in turn the forever measure in discerning what God is doing in the world to make and keep human life human. For us to be human, in turn, is to rise from the dead, vindicated and glorified in Christ. Such humanization is anticipated in the gospel proclamation of the justification of the ungodly and its creation on the earth of beloved community in Christ.
So my take away from this brief but intense encounter with Paul Lehmann is to affirm that the ascended Lord is active throughout the creation and beyond the walls of the church to make and keep human life human. The church is called to discern where and when God’s humanizing action occurs that it may join in with support and testimony. But discernment is measured by the embodiment which is Jesus Christ. “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.” (1 John 4:1-3).
I am grateful to Lehmann for pushing me beyond my parochial Lutheranism to affirm the more vigorous Ascension theology of the Reformed tradition.
He rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria!