In this blog post, I would like to pay a debt of gratitude to those who took time to form me at Union Theological Seminary. In previous posts, I’ve already described my debts to J. Louis Martyn and Paul Lehmann, which I will not repeat here.
I had no idea what I was getting into. There were no precedents in my own family background to guide me, and with the loss of any institutional support after Seminex, all I knew was that I wanted to live in the Big Apple. I was naïve enough to think that Union remained the school of Niebuhr and Tillich and was unaware of the transition going on, as J. Louis Martyn put it, between Union A and Union B. Union A was the school of Niebuhr and Tillich. Union B was the school of Driver, Harrison and Sőlle. In between, at least during my time there, were the African American scholars Cornel West and James Cone. I was able to tiptoe my way through this divide and come out with a valuable education.
In my first semester at Union, in the fall of 1978, I took David Lotz’s course on the “historical theologians” of the 19th century, namely Ritschl, Harnack and Troeltsch. Coming out of my positive encounter with historical criticism at Seminex, and knowing that Lotz likewise came out of the Missouri Synod and was sympathetic to Seminex, I was eager to understand liberal theology at its best. Without doubt, this was a most demanding but also valuable introduction to my PhD studies. Lotz had written an important book on Ritschl which contained a penetrating comparison of Ritschl’s portrait of Luther to Luther himself – showing how Ritschl idealized and moralized the Reformer’s apocalyptic theology. Lotz also, ahead of and independently of the Finnish research, lifted up the importance of union with Christ to Luther’s signature doctrine of justification by faith. Reading Ritschl under Lotz, I learned suspicion of the Kantianization of German Lutheran theology.
Valuable, additionally, were deep dives into Harnack’s History of Dogma, which to this day reward reading on any particular topic or episode, even if, like Strauss before him, he strove to show step by painful step that “the history of dogma is the refutation of dogma.” Intellectually the most powerful thinker of the three, it was instructive to observe Troeltsch in his relentless historicism coming to a dead-end theologically. I left my paper for this class to the deadline and pulled an all-nighter writing it. When Lotz returned it to me, there was more red on the page than black! Certainly a paper produced overnight with no proofreading contained an avalanche of infelicities. In spite of that he gave me a good grade. It was an important wake-up call to work on my writing.
I also took my first course with Christopher Morse in the fall of 1978, who in the end supervised my doctoral dissertation. The course was on “Moltmann’s Theological Trilogy.” So we read the books Theology of Hope, The Crucified God, and The Church in the Power of the Spirit. Morse was friendly with Moltmann and had published his first book under the title The Logic of Promise in Moltmann’s Theology. This affinity provided me for the first time with a sympathetic understanding of modern Reformed theology. I especially resonated to Moltmann’s biblical argumentation and his critique of the transcendental idealism governing the theologies both of Barth and Bultmann. Morse’s insistence on logical precision and clarity in expression were an invaluable check on my penchant for theatrical expression. In fact, I did not like the rhetorical excesses I found in Moltmann’s Crucified God, despite the precedent for such rhetoric in Martin Luther. Luther retained in principle the classic Chalcedonian distinction, namely, that the suffering of the divine Son of God was according to his assumed humanity, even if on the basis of the communication of attributes in Christ he ventured some provocative statements about divine suffering as the voluntary passion of love. I found this distinction effaced if not obliterated in Moltmann’s Hegelian discourse amounting to a positive commendation of pathetic divine suffering, i.e. patripassionism. From Morse himself I imbibed his methodological “dogmatics of Christian disbelief,” as he frequently reminded, “to believe God is to disbelieve the idols.”
Also in that first semester, I took a course on Immanuel Kant with Wunderkind Cornel West, just a year or two older than me. We really hit it off. I began trying hard to appreciate Kant, knowing of his enormous influence on modern theology. West’s instruction was helpful in exposing the philosophy of Kant as the climax of the modernist search for a knowledge of knowledge, for a foundational “epistemology,” as had been launched by René Descartes. Coming as he did from Richard Rorty’s neo-pragmatism at Princeton, West revealed step-by-step his own anti-foundationalism. It took me some time to grasp this move to put philosophy’s feet back down on terra firma, but West won me over. In the second semester I did an independent study with him based upon Jürgen Habermas’s book Knowledge and Human Interests. What a tremendous education in modern thought I got from Cornel West! He served on my dissertation committee.
I also began work with the rising star and founder of Black theology, James Cone. At this point in his career, Cone was in a state of transition. He had been influenced early on by a Canadian Lutheran theologian, William Hordern, and had written his dissertation on Karl Barth. When I read his very interesting book Malcolm and Martin I sensed that background expressing itself in the way that he related these two significant religious thinkers as law and gospel: distinct messages yet equally necessary in a kind of dialectic. His early books, like Black Theology and Black Power and God of the Oppressed, were written in this early, still intensely theological phase of his career. When I TA-ed for him, I detected a subtle shift away from Barth to Niebuhr, as he was looking for a more realistic and down to earth theology for the oppressed of the earth. I once heard him remark that the most important book for students to read was Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society. He was still enough of a Barthian, however, to remind that his provocative assertions that “Christ is black” or “God is black” were symbols not to be taken literally, subject then to Feuerbach’s critique of human projection. So, contrary to the way in which Feuerbach interpreted Luther, Cone meant these provocative predications as contemporary articulations of the biblical God taking sides with the downtrodden of the earth. Early on we got along well and eventually he served on my dissertation committee. But as I mentioned, he was moving away from theology to history, seeking resources in the traditions of the African-American churches. At times, consequently, I doubted that he was giving his students as good an education as he himself had received. In fact, it was just a different education.
In my second semester, I took Morse’s course reading the dogmatics of Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. Much as I tried, I could work up little enthusiasm for this tedious read. In the process I read Karl Barth’s lectures on Schleiermacher, which were far from tedious! Schleiermacher’s interpreters, and perhaps Schleiermacher himself, thought he was founding a modern Christian theology epistemologically in a way that sidestepped Kant’s proscription of cognitive claims about God based on revelation. The side-step moved on from the dubious claim to revelation as the Bible, miraculously produced, to the empirical fact of piety. Scientific theology henceforth attended to the human experience of the religious. As pious feeling became the subject matter of theology, theology argued indirectly from effect back to the presumed divine cause.
Pondering this, I found Barth’s statement of the problem for modern theology supposedly created by Kant’s critical philosophy far more insightful: the theologian is a sinful and finite creature, incapable of speaking truly of God, and yet is called to speak about God. That divine calling and its claim on conscience is what Schleiermacher fudges in relocating the discourse of theology from the church community to the modern university as its field of accountability. Instead of instead of responsibility to God for speech about God theology is now responsible for God to the academic world. Barth in correcting this nails the predicament of any theology which does not concede to Kant’s “tribunal of reason” proscription of cognitive discourse regarding God. Here theology rather ventures in faith to begin ever anew with the Deus dixit from its socially precarious platform in the real existing church. Yet, on reflection over many years, I wonder whether Barth’s starting point in the positive fact that the Christian church exists and calls theologians to speak of God is still an attempt to found a modern Christian theology epistemologically. In other words, Barth still swims, albeit downstream, in Kantian waters. I have spent most of my career since trying to overcome Kantianism by moving philosophically to pragmatism, akin to the path my friend Ron Thiemann was charting before his premature death.
I also took Tom Driver’s course on the theology of Paul Tillich, reading his Systematic Theology. I was very interested in Tillich and had already read a great deal of him, but hunkered down to work through the entirety of the three volume system. Tom was my assigned academic advisor. He was a cool dude and we were both nicotine addicts, chain-smoking as we chatted in his office. But I should have realized early on that ultimately we would not blend very well. Foolishly, I decided that I would try to influence this Bohemian gadfly for the good. I was the teaching assistant for a course he created on Christology and Ethics.
This was one of the most bizarre experiences I had at Union. A third of the way into the semester Tom was waylaid by a heart attack. At his hospital bed, he put me in charge of the class. The students had other ideas, and I ended up dividing the sessions among the various factions, who were not yet interested in intersectionality, but rather competed for time in the spotlight, trying to turn their respective grievances into some kind of religious discourse expressive of their ultimate concerns.
I came to the class on Christology and Sexuality to discover that the chairs and desks had been removed from the room. We were all asked to sit on the floor. After a “lecture” about how repressed we were, newsprint and colored markers were handed out with the instruction that we were to draw our sexual self-images. Repressed white male that I was, I drew a realistic representation of myself in the embrace of Ellen (which she has kept all these years as something like a love letter). When it was time to share our pictures, I discovered that every other one of the “liberated” students in the room had drawn abstract art with no visible relationship to their actual bodies. And I was supposed to be the repressed agent of the patriarchy! I vowed that I would never again be buffaloed by such ideological bullying.
In any event, my relationship with Driver did not end well. Supposedly he was advising my dissertation, and when I turned in a first draft of 500 disorganized pages, he called a defense immediately: “Obviously,” he said, “it’s a book.” In hindsight, I gathered that he said this without having read the draft. Needless to say the committee rebelled. Driver was relieved of duty and I was reassigned to Christopher Morse. I spent another year refining (and reducing to 200 pages) before Morse was ready to call a defense.
Back to Tillich. I find it very hard to pigeonhole him. He is not simply a liberal theologian. Like his philosophical hero, Schelling, he has a profound account of the ambiguity of the human experience of God, no doubt reflected in his own experience of life. We know today that after his trauma as a military chaplain in the trenches of the First World War, he virtually left the ministry of the church to make a living as a philosopher of religion. And we know from the autobiography of his wife Hannah that he imposed on her what we call today an “open marriage.” Years later, Reinhold Niebuhr became incensed at Tillich’s exuberant promiscuity at Union Theological Seminary. Wilhelm Pauck, in his biography of Tillich, reports as an eye witness that on his deathbed Tillich despaired that he was a sinner who would not enter the kingdom of God. Theology does not reduce to biography, but biography can illuminate theology.
As I was reading simultaneously in Karl Barth, the problem of Tillich’s method of correlation became more and more evident to me, namely, that the tail begins to wag the dog as context swallows up text. Although Tillich was far from being a Thomist in dynamizing “Being Itself” as the “power of being overcoming nonbeing,” he was deeply influenced in his “ontology” by the tradition of philosophical theology that emerged in the Enlightenment with Spinoza, passed through Schelling, and found existentialist expression in Nietzsche. He sought some “God beyond God” which effectively reduced the biblical God of the economy of salvation into a set of symbols alongside other symbols. When we got to discussion of the systematic theology where Tillich provocatively denies that God “exists” – meaning that God is not a finite being along other side finite beings to whom the category of existence applies – Driver asked us why we thought Tillich said that. I blurted out, tongue half in cheek, “I think he just likes to blow people’s minds.” Driver snorted with laughter. My disillusionment with the theology that once helped me through the Missouri Synod’s turn to fundamentalism had set in.
I had other profound learning experiences at Union. One was a class with Phyllis Trible on the problem of “biblical theology” in light of the penetrating critique of that notion by James Barr. It was an exploration of some of the attempts since the 19th century to write “biblical theology,” meaning a scientific exposition of the theology found in the Bible, i.e., prior to and apart from, as it were, ecclesiastical contamination. But this project seemed to have failed for several reasons. First, the concentration of historical criticism on the specific theology of any particular piece of biblical literature (or of any particular strand within a biblical book) yielded the Humpty Dumpty problem: no one knew how to put it all back together again. Second, the very project unwittingly presupposed the illicit dogmatic decision of normative Judaism and/or early Catholicism, namely canonization, which well after the fact included some literature and excluded others, turning those selected into sacred Scripture. But on what grounds? From the get-go, “the Bible” as a canon is ecclesiastically contaminated. The status of “biblical” in “biblical theology” was the illicit product of church/synagogue!
When, consequently, when challenged on this matter of canonical selection, scholars inevitably betrayed their own extra-biblical, often theological/ecclesiastical commitments, undermining any academic pretension to a putatively scientific “biblical theology.” Trible, who was famous for expositing certain “texts of terror” in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, particularly in the representations of women, nevertheless wanted to do biblical theology. The outcome of the seminar, as I recall, was that biblical theology would have to do exhaustive hermeneutical work, proceeding backwards through the history of interpretation to encounter the text now found in “the book of faith.” But who could manage that? The lesson I drew? “Biblical theology” can only be a sub-discipline of a critical dogmatics, as I have tried to show in my own theology.
I’m very grateful that I took a class with the theologian Geoffrey Wainwright on his book Doxology as he passed through Union, on what turned out to be a one year stay, from which he fled in horror at the end has Union B rubbed him the wrong way. This book of liturgical theology solidified in me my own growing commitment to an evangelical and catholic interpretation of the Christian faith. How delicious that I learned this, not from Arthur Carl Piepkorn, who died before I got to Seminex (although his legacy reached me through George Hoyer), but from – of all sources – a British Methodist! He went on to have an important career at Duke. I said he fled Union in horror. I witnessed the spectacle, after his excellent presentation to the theological colloquium, of Dorothea Sőlle’s scathing attack nailing the polite Brit to the wall for “all that is wrong with theology.” What an embarrassment -- although this kind of public shaming at the expense of actual argument has become only more common these days. I have treasured Wainwright’s comment on the paper I wrote for his class, “A Hinlicky contra mundum is a sight to behold!” I may ask that to be engraved upon my tombstone!
One class that has had a lasting impact on me I took with Richard Norris on the Cappadocian Fathers. This very fine scholar was working hard at the time on Theodore of Mopsuestia, an Antiochene theologian who was enjoying some new appreciation for his Christological interest in the lived humanity of Jesus in a logos/anthropos Christological model as opposed to the dominant Alexandrian logos/sarx model. I found some resonance with this concern in Gregory Nazianzus, who emerged as my favorite of the three Cappadocians. But I became acutely aware from this class how the Council of Chalcedon did not solve the Christological problem, but merely erected outside boundaries for orthodoxy: neither the two sons of Nestorius nor the one nature of Eutyches.
I took away the insight that any solution to the opaque Chalcedonian requirement of “one person of two natures” could not take this unstable compromise as an abstract starting point. In the West, I have since discovered, we have been overly influenced by Pope Leo’s intervention at Chalcedon with his Christological Tome, treating the abstract natures as if they were living agents, i.e. persons each doing their own things in harmony somehow with the other. But this is virtually Nestorian. With further learning, I have maintained that one had to realize on the basis of the preceding three ecumenical councils that the Christological problem is a subset of the Trinitarian consensus achieved at the First Council in Constantinople in 381, something that the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 attempted to clarify after Chalcedon with its statement that “One of the Three suffered.” We are still looking for an appropriately divine pathos befitting the fully divine Son i.e., that is not the projection of an abjectly pathetic creaturely suffering but the passion of voluntary love, capable of vulnerability, expressing the “patience of God” for the dying and the sinful.
I might mention also what I learned as a teaching assistant. While I enjoyed this very much, and ever since have treasured immensely the classroom, the experience with students was something of a mixed bag of concerns and delights. Working for Cone, I got into a conflict with an Episcopalian who self-identified as a Fabian Socialist and took offense at the particularity which Cone insisted upon with respect to the suffering of African-Americans. I think my own working class background played a role in this conflict as I found this student’s paper snooty and told him so. In reviewing the student’s paper with my comments, Cone simply added, “I think you should take Hinlicky’s comments seriously.” (I had commented something equally snooty to the student: “Were you drinking a martini and smoking a cigar when you wrote this?”)
Another time teaching for Christopher Morse I had an outspoken gay student; mind you, this was at the time of the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic which was devastating gay men in New York City. Christopher Morse included reading Anselm of Canterbury’s Why God Became Human. Morse required this because he wanted students to wrestle with the question of the justice of God’s mercy. But my poor student, gripped with existential angst and terror at the epidemic, was grieved by the very thought of rendering satisfaction to God for our sins, even if the satisfaction of the debt was given to us freely from the treasury of infinite merit acquired by Christ for innocently suffering a death he did not deserve. And predictably, he latched upon the untheological critique that Anselm was simply reflecting feudal social relations. I persisted with this guy through the semester, but after the course he disappeared. Sad. I most enjoyed the assignment to teach the Lutheran Confessions course which Union provided for students needing that credit (but that was after I had graduated).
As mentioned, my doctoral dissertation passed through a fiasco before the matter was settled. Morse required that I focus and write clearly, even though I was already working full time for the LCA. Tremendous help came into my head at this point with the reading of Robert Jenson’s Triune Identity and Eberhard Jüngel’s God as the Mystery of the World. I attempted in the dissertation a “post-liberal” (as George Lindbeck would soon articulate) reading of the Gospel of Mark, invoking his theology of the cross to argue toward some doctrine of the “temporality of God.” This is the root of my mature critique of the metaphysical doctrine of divine simplicity in favor of a rule version of simplicity (which really amounts to lifting up the first three of the Ten Commandments as rules for discourse about God). The defense was successful, and I was congratulated by Lou Martin, Cornel West and Christopher Morse; James Cone actually said that he was “shocked” when he read it, although he never told me why, leaving me to speculate. I will avoid that temptation here. I myself was not satisfied with the dissertation. For me it was simply the culminating statement of what I’d passed through at Union Theological Seminary, setting an agenda for the future.
Finally, I would like to mention some mates whose camaraderie sustained me through the four years we lived on campus at Union. George Cummings went on to have an important career in Oakland, California as a professor of theology and founding pastor of the progressive African-American Imani Community Church. James Kay had a career at Princeton Theological Seminary and wrote a wonderful book on the theology of Rudolph Bultmann, Christus Praesens. Nancy Duff also had a career at Princeton Theological and has published in areas of Christian ethics; she has been a major interpreter of the legacy of Paul Lehmann. Christian von Dehsen had a career at Carthage College in Wisconsin teaching New Testament and serving as Dean of the faculty.
I am grateful to my teachers, most of whom are still alive. For all teachers, now including myself, it is rich consolation to hear such expressions of gratitude from their former students. Soli Deo Gloria!