My appointment as editor of Lutheran Forum came as a big surprise. I was happy enough pastoring my rebounding congregation in the beautiful foothills of the Catskill Mountains. We found the winters beautiful too -- at least for the first several years! I was busy too with my side career in the Naval Reserve as a chaplain, and enjoying enough leisure to cast hand-tied dry flies for brown trout on the upper West Branch of the Delaware River. But my interest in the position was queried and, as Richard O. Johnson reports in his excellent account of these years, my frank declaration that I would set “a more urgent tone” addressing the “crisis in American Lutheranism” was well received and in short order I was appointed.
Johnson highlights the “crisis” mode of my “apocalyptic” editorship. No doubt, that is a fair description of much that I did and I can happily refer the reader to his two chapters concerning my work at the American Lutheran Publicity Bureau (1988-1993) for that side of the story. Suffice it to say, however, I have remained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America all these years since. I don’t retract any of the critical things I published about the ELCA during its first years and indeed I see in this denomination’s slow and painful tailspin confirmation of many of those dire diagnoses.
But as a churchman according to my evangelical catholic convictions, and despite being sorely tempted, I was resolved never again be part of a schism (such as was forced upon us by the J.A.O. Preus putsch in the Missouri-Synod). And I haven’t see that the alternatives are any better. The Missouri Synod has become increasingly reactionary – it is the party of Trump at prayer. The breakaway North American Lutheran Church is a small denomination in self-contradiction, trying to cozy up to the Missouri Synod but quite paralyzed, having grand-mothered in ordained women. Junior Missouri, the NALC seems forced to draw boundaries ever more tightly. And in reaction against the ELCA’s drawing boundaries ever more loosely, those many of my erstwhile comrades-in-arms from Lutheran Forum days who swam the Tiber, thinking to escape the ELCA protestantization of Lutheranism and find succor in the bosom of unchanging Mother Church, have rudely awoken to life under Francis, as liberal Protestant a Pope as has ever reigned.
I confess that I spilled considerable ink attacking what I polemically named “the wacky left.” I had read Herbert Marcuse already in seminary days and basically did not buy the argument of this champion of a “New Left” that, after the workers went for Hitler and Fascism, progressives should turn from class to sex and gender for the root analysis of oppression. I was coming from a certain sympathy with the tough-minded “old left.” I mean sympathy with the plight of poor and working-class people and particularly in the USA of African-Americans. But this sympathy inclined me to suspicion about the class-blindness of liberal feminism. I regarded radical feminism – we were all reading Mary Daly – to be hopelessly sectarian and utopian. In fact, I learned suspicion of affluent, elite liberal feminism from the early expressions of African-American “womanist” theology: at Union I had known Katie Cannon, Kelly Brown, Dolores Williams and perhaps Linda Thomas too (but my memory of her is foggy).
When I worked for the division of Mission in North America I had been tasked with producing a theological study on “Women and Men in the Body of Christ.” As I had been an advocate for the ordination of women from the beginning of my ministry, I gladly accepted the assignment. I did considerable reading in feminist literature which has stayed with me all these year. In particular, I drew upon drew upon Ann Douglas’s remarkable study of 19th century America, The Feminization of American Culture, which exposed how industrialization actually robbed women of their important economic roles in the premodern household and at least initially rendered women economically superfluous, producing a soft minded culture of sentimentalism. I loved and highlighted the statement I found in Douglas of the 19th century proto-feminist, Margaret Fuller, “Cheat me with no illusion! Tell me the truth!” Douglas simultaneously told a story about “the loss of theology” that became profoundly important for my study. I was particularly impressed with Jacqueline Jones’s book, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow about Black women at work and in the family from slavery to the present. I read the parallel Marxist analysis of Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class. Simone de Beauvoir’s, The Second Sex, however, struck me as overly influenced by her lover Sartre’s existentialism in railing against woman’s biological role as the root of oppression, in my view a profoundly misogynist stance. I found Barbara Ehrenreich’s dissection of Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment to be an honest lament, significantly voiced by a prominent liberal feminist. Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and The Minotaur, recommended to me by my colleague Kate Kidd (a valuable conversation partner through the whole project), provided a psychoanalytic perspective, arguing that second wave feminism unfortunately contributed to the neoliberal economy’s discrediting and disabling of long-standing, generation-spanning, primary relationships (a.k.a. family). And I rounded out this reading with the several studies of the inimitable Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism and Havens from the Heartless World. Along with consideration of much other literature, I produced the study.
But the Management Committee rejected it, acknowledging its tremendous “erudition,” but saying, politely, that it wasn’t what liberal feminists were looking for. I shopped the manuscript for a publishing contract. Stanley Hauerwas was excited about it but his series partner, Alisdair McIntyre, was a touch uncomfortable, I think, with my reliance on Luther, wanted a more favorable view of the medieval period, and required more revision than I was capable of doing at the time. In this experience, in any event, my animus hardened against “the wacky left” especially at against the class blindness of liberal feminism and the anarcho-nihilism of radical feminism. I found such views being promoted in the new ELCA with reckless abandon regarding their implications for theology in the tradition of Luther, not to mention for Christianity as congregational life. The devastating problem in contemporary culture was not “the patriarchy” but the flight from fatherhood.
That is what I cared about. What Johnson overlooks, I think, is that I devoted considerable energy in editorials and in curating the articles solicited and selected for publication to defining theologically and describing practically the vocation of pastoral ministry in a decaying culture being raped by neoliberalism. As I related in my previous post, I was learning how to be a pastor at Immanuel Lutheran Church in Delhi, New York. Much of this learning entailed some unlearning of things I had been taught in seminary, particularly in so-called Practical Theology. I’m not referring to the great teaching I got from George Hoyer or Richard Caemmerer but to the kind of instruction that has since become required in Clinical Pastoral Education.
I began my editorship recruiting a great team of advisors: Rebecca Frey, Steve Bouman, Leonard Klein, Paul Brndjar and Christian von Dehsen. Unexcelled proof-reader, Rebecca was a devoted student of George Lindbeck and a sophisticated theological thinker, especially about the interfaces of theology, aesthetics, and liturgy. The men were all either working pastors or had had intensive previous pastoral experience. Steve Bouman produced an excellent regular column, “From the Parish,” and Leonard Klein continued to articulate the themes of liturgical and sacramental renewal in articles or editorials. Chris von Dehsen saw to it that biblical scholarship was brought to bear. And Paul Brndjar’s judgment on whether and how articles would engage contemporary congregational life was indispensable. We had lively editorial group meetings, hosted by Steve Bouman, planning and processing every issue that I edited. There was a real focus on pastor and parish. The presupposition of the whole was Christianity as congregational life. I was greatly interested personally in lifting up pastoral ministry as a sacrificial vocation the reward of which is quite literally “in heaven.”
I can think of several contemporaneous experiences that pushed me in this direction. I have mentioned in previous blogs how often I came in on the heels of clergy sexual misconduct and witnessed the devastation this appalling breach of trust brought upon congregational life. I stood in line at a “new” church hearing on ministry behind a fellow who went on and on about how he’s just a regular guy who walks into the hospital room dressed California casual, introducing himself with, “Hi, my name’s Joe and I like to visit patients. What’s your name?” What is the point of such aggressive disowning of pastoral identity? While I thought that adoption of the ecumenical proposal of a threefold ministry could be helpful for sorting out a diaconal ministry of the word for service from pastoral ministry to Word and Sacrament, in that it would channel differently those interested in social ministry but not called to pastoral ministry, I wonder whether adoption of it has actually worked well to accomplish this.
Above all, I had been around long enough to witness incompetent liturgies with the presiding minister kibitzing through any and all portions with which he or she felt uncomfortable, signaling disbelief in what is being said. Likewise I had heard a multitude of sermons offering nutrient-poor pottage, as if the preacher were at a loss about what actually to say from the assigned Scripture lessons and simply wanted to fill up 10 minutes with jokes or anecdotes. And I should mention, in passing, the woeful attempts at children’s sermons that, if not spent entirely on childish entertainment, went way beyond age-appropriate attention spans and frequently non-too-subtly pitched to the adults watching. I thought then, and I still do, that the most telling “compliment” to be received after service goes, “Pastor, I got more out of your children’s sermon than out of your regular sermon.” From the beginning of my editorship with my first issue themed on The Small Catechism and the Formation of Piety, I advocated dispensing with “children’s sermons” in favor of “children’s catechism” as a first step in re-forming piety for Christianity as congregational life.
Richard Johnson describes the foregoing as the turn of my editorship inward away from attention to social justice issues to church and ministry problems. Anyone in the ELCA in these years could count on the denomination urgently to demand attention to social issues (and little of my complaint in any event had to do with raising these issues as such). But what we could not count on in the ELCA was attention to the genuine crisis occurring in pastoral ministry. Least of all could we expect cognizance of the way the “new” Lutheran church was in fact driving the pastoral crisis with its pretentious self-understanding of “church-wide” as a significant political player, employing corporate management strategies at home on Higgins Road, viewing congregations more and more as branded local franchises. Today we see the outcome of this generation-long, religion-business “marketing” in hemorrhaging membership, depressing rates of pastoral burnout, paralleled by the failure to recruit a new generation of pastors for training at ever weaker seminaries. There is such a confusion of role and expectations surrounding pastoral ministry that it has become a thankless job that few in their right mind would undertake. I hate to say, “I told you so,” but, well, we told you so.
In any case, the pastoral vocation for Christianity as congregational life was a major focus of my editorship of Lutheran Forum. What did I learn from this experience?
Surprise at how controversial this focus was! My major take away personally is that the editorship catapulted me into a celebrity/notoriety that I did not enjoy and was quite willing to leave behind by the time I resigned. Illustrative of this, Johnson reports my dramatic protest at the first Call to Faithfulness Conference (initiated by Lutheran Forum and cosponsored with the journals dialog and Lutheran Quarterly) when I cast a copy of The Lutheran from the pulpit in the middle of my sermon before the congregation of 1000 or so who had come to Northfield Minnesota. I wish Johnson had pointed out what I was actually doing, and said I was doing in the sermon, namely casting down an article promoting “entertainment evangelism,” if I remember correctly, from the “Church of Joy” in Arizona. I further wish he had reported how I rebuked from the pulpit those cheering my action with a sharp reminder that we are all implicated in our ecclesiastical disaster.
In any case, I subsequently became notorious, if not already so, in the eyes of ELCA cheerleaders who actually felt the pain inflicted by my “ragged-edged axe” on the pages of Lutheran Forum. I accepted this role and this notoriety because I could see that my academic equals with the same credentials and, presumably, responsibility were paralyzed into silence by the precarious positions they held within ELCA institutions. One professor, a significant historian of the Reformation, chastised me for the editorial counsel that dissidents should “starve the beast,” transparently worried about his own salary. More typical was another seminary professor who wrote to me a long, handwritten, late-night letter stained with tears, thanking me for what I was doing in Lutheran Forum in calling out the madness and bemoaning his suffering at the hands of “new church” cheerleaders. Sort of like Nicodemus. When I challenged him to go public with his story, the conversation dried up. The last straw personally came when an anonymous editorial in Lutheran Commentator alleged that Paul Hinlicky had appointed himself the judge of everyone else’s orthodoxy. In fact, we were pleading in hope against hope for a generous and churchly orthodoxy against the protestantization of Lutheranism. Alas, Peter Berger has proved correct in seeing a “heretical imperative” at work in American culture to which the ELCA was fully accommodating.
Another take away in the end, accordingly, was the sorrowful conclusion that institutional reform of a denomination, be it the Missouri Synod or the ELCA, was a hopeless task. The inertia of institutions, especially in the state of decline, only causes them to step on the gas and continue to drive on all eight cylinders into the same brick wall. I had hoped for a pastors’ revolt but the decline in vocational consciousness had already, like an acid, eaten away this potential, and by the time of the formation of the ELCA, the Ministerium had been abolished. The ELCA bishops were bishops in name and regalia only, real power being ceded to the national bureaucracy which could easily manipulate the lay-dominated synod and church wide assemblies. So, by the end of my editorship, I had resigned myself to the unhappy fact that the Lord had placed me in a dying denomination, where I was to conduct a ministry to Word and Sacrament as I had sworn at my ordination.
Yet perception of the ecclesiastical crisis was real at the time and Lutheran Forum effectively addressed it. I was serving as Executive Director of the ALPB simultaneously with my editorship, and the subscription office had been relocated to my congregation in Delhi, New York. So I know as a first-person witness that paid subscription circulation peaked at over 4000 (today it is at 1300). Richard Johnson disputes this number because he is relying on a source on the ALPB Board who was never friendly to my leadership. It is water under the bridge now, and there is no way to adjudicate the question, so I mention it merely as counter testimony. In any event, when I left behind stewardship of Lutheran Forum, the entire ALPB enterprise was in a reinvigorated state, as Johnson also reports. So another take away was that I learned entrepreneurship, a practical skill that perhaps is increasingly important for the future of pastoral ministry. This entrepreneurship included the ALPB sponsoring the launch of the new theological journal Pro Ecclesia, of which I became an associate editor.
The final take away I would like to mention, which follows from the foregoing, is that there was a real hunger for adult-level theological discussion. While Lutheran Forum had the definite editorial perspective of evangelical catholicism under my editorship, I was careful to print alternative points of view, provided that they satisfied criteria of intellectual honesty, scholarly credibility and some kind of confessional commitment. At one point I indulged the tongue-in-cheek brag that we published more of the “Radical Lutheran/Word Alone” material than the “prairie populists” (of the future LCMC) did! Of course, this policy excluded a lot of the “Christianity-lite” (as Leonard Klein put it) literature coming out of official ELCA platforms. As a PhD in systematic theology, I was acutely aware that the kind of writing published in academic journals would not fly for our projected audience in Lutheran Forum of pastors and educated laypeople. Given the steep decline in the standards of seminary education, however, and the ensuing infantilizing of the laity by the theology-lite products of such seminary education, even our carefully selected and edited articles were sometimes perceived as too academic. The truth is, we were trying to fill a real void with, in this respect I suppose, varying levels of success.
What I learned, then, from those five years was that I had to retire from the celebrity/notoriety and return to my first love, scholarly theology. In these years I had twice competed (and according to inside sources clearly won) searches for tenure-track positions in systematic theology at two different ELCA seminaries. In the first case, I ruined my chance at the last minute with an egregious, even arrogant response to a question at the faculty interview from someone in Practical Theology about how I would connect with the social sciences. To this I replied all too flippantly, “That’s assuming that the social sciences are science.” The comment triggered a civil war on that faculty which eventually led to my chief advocate’s resignation and departure for more favorable pastures. The second time around it was my notoriety that triggered adamant opposition from the leading voice of liberal Protestant theology on the faculty. I note that even the “radical Lutherans” took my side in this case, but it was a bridge too far to cross for the president to appoint me.
When I told the ALPB in 1992 that I was looking to resign and that they should prepare for a transition, I had no idea what would come next. We were settling down at Immanuel in Delhi. We had purchased five acres, put up a house and moved out of the parsonage. I told the congregation that I just had to quit smoking and would predictably be a real grump so everyone should leave me alone as much as possible for the summer in 1992. Putting myself on the spot that way helped and I have not touched a cigarette ever since – 32 years as of this writing!
I made friends with a young Slovak theologian, Ondrej Prostrednik, who had excellent English and visited us in Delhi while on a USA church tour. The possibility of my coming to his theological faculty in Bratislava came up. With the fall of communism, the young generation was flooding into the churches. The short-staffed faculty was overwhelmed after all the years of communist suppression. I turned from this conversation to my friend Paul Brndjar: would he, with the Slovak Zion Synod of which I had been a member in New York City days, sponsor me? After some discussions about fundraising, the answer came back in the affirmative. So in my final year at Immanuel, I began again to study the Slovak language and daughter Sarah finished high school a year ahead of time. By August 1993, we were packed up and ready to fly off to the greatest adventure of our lives.
My final issue as editor of Lutheran Forum was titled The Lutheran Bonhoeffer. In those days, this was still a controversial proposal. Most scholarship had fallen into a simplistic juxtaposition between two poles: quietist, politically passive Lutheran churches pining after the lost patronage of the Imperial Reich, coupled with authoritarian tendencies inherited from Luther, to accept, if not favor the Nazis; on the other side, the politically activist Reformed churches leading the opposition to Hitler. Two Kingdoms vs. Lordship of Christ. Bonhoeffer was interpreted as a theologian of secularity who broke free from Lutheran passivity rationalized by the Two Kingdoms doctrine to participate courageously in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Thankfully, today, we have the scholarship of Michael DeJonge to set the record straight. I personally had been studying Bonhoeffer, starting with Letters and Papers from Prison, already from college days. I knew that the prevailing opinion about Bonhoeffer was wrong and in this final issue I solicited articles that would indicate Bonhoeffer’s serious appropriation of the Lutheran legacy in theology and ethics. In my parting editorial, after thanking the readers for their support over the years and announcing our impending move to Slovakia, I left with the parting thought that Bonhoeffer points the way forward to the renewal of Lutheran theology in the church: “Christ-existing-as-community.” When one surveys the scene in seriously Lutheran theology today, that counsel seems to have been well received.
Soli Deo Gloria!