[Because of the Covid pandemic, the usual retirement celebrations were delayed. I gave this swansong speech one year after retirement in my sole return appearance to the campus since.]
Faith and Learning October 25, 2022
Paul R Hinlicky
Autobiographical reflections are always in danger of being exercises in self-justification. I cannot claim in advance that I will succeed in skirting this danger, but I will try to give an honest reflection of personal thanksgiving, loyal criticism and abiding hope for the mission of Roanoke College. I am grateful to Jim Peterson for this Covid-belated opportunity to relate to colleagues considered reflections on my experience of faith and learning in 22 years at Roanoke College. I offer no prescriptions for the present or the future but only observations from my experience for what they are worth.
Faith and Learning
First, then, to the topic of my self-understanding in regard to faith and learning. As is well known, I am a Lutheran which in my case does not mean that I am partial to the bombast and recklessness of the historical Martin Luther although I am deeply influenced by his constructive theology. Indeed his constructive theology is a specific correlation of faith and learning which we who are educators forget, I fear, to our own peril. I recently composed a study of Luther’s commentary on the skeptical book of the Hebrew Bible known in English as Ecclesiastes. In it I find the following statement which captures my own view on faith and learning.
Luther criticizes pious know-nothingism, i.e. when interpreters of Ecclesiastes “suppose that the knowledge of nature, the study of astronomy or of all of philosophy, is being condemned here and to teach that such things are to be despised as vain and useless speculations. For the benefits of these arts are many and great, as is plain to see every day. In addition, there is not only utility, but also great pleasure in them in investigating the nature of things” (9, cf. 18). I certainly encountered such willful ignorance among religious students in my teaching experience here and I sought to embody the alternative model for them of a critical dialogue between faith and reason. I was greatly honored in this connection when my colleagues in the department acknowledged my wide-ranging intellectual curiosity in the lovely retirement resolution they composed on my behalf. I have never cottoned to a circle-the-wagons theology of Christ against culture. With Rowan Williams, I think that “Christ is at the heart of creation.” For me, “being in Christ” entails critical openness to the world which must always be received in faith as the world which God is creating. In other words, one cannot understand Christ without a concomitant understanding of the world into which he comes presently – and just these are mandates for ongoing learning and reflection which is the academic work of the discipline of theology.
My vocational debt as an educator in the field of the liberal arts are equally profound. Philip Melanchthon was known as the “teacher of Germany,” and it is increasingly recognized that the Renaissance humanism which he and Luther shared was not an ideology but a method of inquiry protesting against the cherry picking treatment of authoritative texts in medieval scholasticism. The motto, “back to the sources,” was not then a fundamentalist back to the Bible alone dogmatism but rather a hermeneutical demand for the holistic interpretation of texts in context in order, as our former colleague Monica Vilhauer put it following Hans George Gadamer, to stand-under, i.e. experience a text’s “claim to truth.” Luther was in this sense a “humanist” educator as I am also. For pertinent example, in his commentary on Ecclesiastes Luther insists we fasten upon “the purpose and aim of the author, which it is important to keep in mind and to follow in every kind of writing and even more important here” (7). For Luther the key text in this regard is 2:24: “There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God.” Luther comments that this claim to truth “is the principle conclusion, in fact the point, of the whole book… A remarkable passage, one which explains everything preceding and following it” (24).
This “claim to truth” regarding holy secularity for the life of faith in the world has been vocationally important for me. To be sure, holy secularity is not a blanket blessing of the way things are but rather designates the field of battle over which and for which an apocalyptic contest between good and evil is being waged with the fate of the creation at stake. Into this battle the Christian people of faith are called and enlisted: “Christians should be exhorted to live in the very midst of the crowd, to marry, to govern their household, etc. Moreover, when their efforts are hindered by the malice of men, they should bear it patiently and not cease their good works. Do not desert the battlefield but stick it out.” (106). Such spiritual warfare includes – pointedly – drinking one’s beer or changing the baby’s diaper to glorify God and to spite the devil! And if that is true, it certainly also includes college teaching of 18-year-old Americans! So much then for my self-understanding as an educator critically integrating faith and reason.
Happiness
I came to Roanoke College from a secure, tenured position at an central European University after earning there the second European doctorate, the habilitation – to be sure, mine was a humble theological faculty in need as it emerged from a 45 year period of repression. I had become fluent in the difficult Slavic language and was much appreciated, especially by the students with whom I have maintained relations to the present day, including a number who enjoyed study and later sabbatical replacement teaching opportunities here. But I was restless intellectually and for family reasons we needed to return to the United States. I had options at the time but I was happy to choose Roanoke College just because it had a more “secular” atmosphere than the alternatives. I longed for conversation with smart people outside of the smaller world of a theological faculty. Moreover, I was being offered, after a year’s probation, appointment to the endowed Jordan Trexler chair. The privileges of this chair would bring to fruition the kind of large scholarly projects I had been nurturing for decades. And this expectation was rewarded greatly in my first decade from 1999 to 2009. The reason for this dating will become apparent in my next section on Despair. But for the moment I wish to emphasize the vocational happiness I experienced in this first decade at Roanoke College.
The Dean and the President of the time of my appointment emphasized to me that my task was to make the department known nationally as a center for undergraduate theological education in the Lutheran tradition. I was encouraged to embrace the task of “public theology” and I memorably articulated that understanding in an address on Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address on the occasion of my appointment to the Jordan Trexler chair. In that address I argued for the kind of “critical pluralism” which I had learned from my teacher, Cornel West. But in the course of time the increasing polarization, if not Weimarization of political discourse in the United States, made interventions as a so-called public theologian increasingly unpalatable to me. I had published a lot of columns in the Roanoke Times as a public theologian, but the shrinkage to a 700 word limit on opinion pieces reduced essays to little more than a series of spicy assertions with no space for nuance or argument or evidence. After a few years of this I quit trying and turned to the internal dialogue of the Roanoke College community.
Like many Americans at the time, I was shocked by the 9/11 attack and in acknowledgment of my ignorance I generated an honors upper level course that I taught for a number of years with the title “Islam in the Eyes of the West.” I debated on campus with a cherished opponent and frequent participant in these faith and learning discussions, the physicist Frank Munley, about what the American response to 9/11 should be. This kind of deep and nuanced intellectual engagement over pressing public problems I found exhilarating. Frank allowed me to argue as the Christian that I am just as I allowed Frank to argue as the scientific naturalist that he is. Much of my happiness during these years at Roanoke College was in less formal exchanges with a variety of faculty colleagues who shall go unnamed, but whose perspectives on faith and learning, ranging from atheism to Protestant Pietism and serious Catholicism, Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, were enriching for me. These relationships also broadened my horizons as I played a role in the development of the new INQ curriculum which wanted to highlight intellectual inquiry and critical thinking skills and also to broaden the teaching of ethics out of the exclusive possession of the Religion and Philosophy Department. To me this development coincided with a desire to see our department offer more courses in what at the time was called “world religions.”
A significant change occurred during these years when the Dean of that time, John Day, asked me to move to the newly created chair, the Tise Professor of Lutheran Studies. To this point in my academic career, I had not thought of myself as a specialist in Luther, important though he was to me. Accepting the appointment, I had to retool. Above all, I had to relearn medieval Latin and I did so with the help of my wonderful student assistant, Roy Mackenzie, who excelled in Latin. We spent hours together in my office translating Latin texts. It was the kind of faculty-student relationship of mentoring that I enjoyed tremendously in these years. I was also regularly taking students in the May term to Europe on tours of that part of the world where we had lived during the 1990s to study the intersections of religion, politics and violence. We even organized a semester long stay at my former institution in 2009, which was the high point of my vocational happiness (though I didn’t like being away from home so long). In these years, I never had any trouble making my classes, even as I worried that the more narrow focus on Lutheran studies would have less general appeal to students. I was several times nominated for the Dean’s teaching award by students and several further times by the College for the Virginia teaching award. Although I never won, the nominations in themselves were sufficient acknowledgment of success in teaching and for me personally also recognition of the loving, I daresay pastoral interest I had in students. I add, however, as a point of pride that I had a reputation for being a demanding professor who never pandered or dumbed things down for the sake of popularity.
During the ill-fated presidency of Sabine O’Hara, my wife Ellen and I developed a friendship with her and Phil. We had in common that we were clergy couples and they knew well the German theological scene, which was an area of my expertise as a systematic theologian. Phil even joined me on a trip to Denmark for a conference on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. We often attended the midweek chapel service when it was available in the daytime for faculty. Having taught in a second language myself, however, I recognized a syndrome with Sabine. When speech in another language becomes fast and idiomatic and depends upon nonverbal signals, understanding fails. To avoid this, a second language speaker is tempted to dominate the conversation and to take silence, including embarrassed silence, as assent to what one is saying. I fear that this syndrome played a role in her failure as president for which I was greatly saddened.
Despair
My decade of happiness at Roanoke College ended after the year 2009 with the Great Recession and the extraordinary financial pressures it put on our institution. What a change in atmosphere occurred! Possibilities like team teaching, for example when Marwood Larson Harris and Bruce Parton and I collaborated on an INQ course, or the previously mentioned semester abroad in Bratislava, on down to more modest but helpful amenities like providing pizza for students, shrunk dramatically if not totally disappeared. An increasing load of administrative responsibilities were loaded on to teaching faculty, particularly with regard to the convoluted business of assessment, while the administrative staff seemed to grow exponentially as faculty salaries and hiring freezes failed to keep pace with announced goals. Any number of times I was drafted into teaching extra courses to the extent that I felt like I had become the utility infielder of the department. All of this was demoralizing in general.
After the defeat of a reformatory proposal to create a Faculty Senate which could exercise real power, I noticed that faculty meetings increasingly became extended infomercials as the faculty subtly but steadily yielded self-governance, deferring important decisions about the future of the college to the board and the administration. In any case, so it seemed to me. And the increased attention to student retention to pay for the dramatic expansion of facilities, along with the continued reliance on the economic model of attracting wealthy students from the Northeast in competition with every other institution looking for a piece of that shrinking pie, did little in my view to improve campus culture or faculty morale. I regularly protested to anyone who would listen that it is unjust to admit students who can be predicted to fail if we do not provide the remedial resources to make them competitive. The fear of stigmatization of course is genuine, and I asked for a faculty discussion of grading policy to get at the problems but to no avail. The injustice of burdening predictable dropouts with piles of student debt was in my view worse than the danger of stigmatization. Throughout the last decade I was talking also to graduates with $60,000 or $80,000 in college debt. I recall saying to a sympathetic President Maxey in a conversation about this at one point that I thought this student debt situation was “sinful.” Thus it was that despair attacked me, especially when two former beloved students, the previously mentioned Roy Mackenzie, and Joshua Bailey died, Roy a suicide and Josh, who had climbed his way out of incarceration to graduate, probably from an overdose.
From the beginning of my career I had been an advocate of the ordination of women to the ministry of the church, a vocation into which my daughter followed me. She and I at her initiative began a podcast now finishing its fourth season which has over 50,000 downloads. I have been pleased with the professional progress women in general have made in my lifetime. But for the reasons just mentioned, I have become deeply worried about alienation among young men and I wish that there could be an honest conversation about it which is not immediately stigmatized as antifeminist. I report without approval the sentiment which I have often heard from the alienated that Trump is the bully who bullies the bullies who have bullied us. At a certain point in the semester I got to asking students in a class whether they found their social relationships predatory. Almost all, both male and female, would raise their hands yes. And what are the social sources of the epidemic of depression among these young adults?
I coped with this time of despair by turning to my authorship with full energy and devotion. This second decade at Roanoke College saw the publication of 12 monographs, including one co-authored with colleague Brent Adkins, along with numerous other chapter contributions to books, peer-reviewed journal articles and review essays. With one exception, my books have received numerous and highly favorable critical reviews. The crowning achievement was to be senior editor of the three volume Oxford Encyclopedia of Martin Luther appearing in 2017. But I paid a price. As I drew near to retirement, I joked that I had spent the last 10 years living like a monk. Truth be told, I burned the candle at both ends culminating in the stroke I suffered in 2017 when I was at Loyola in Baltimore with our students attending a theological conference. This happened on the cusp of the grand academic observation of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation which I had planned for several years and was determined to steward in spite of my new disabilities. I was sincerely cheered by the outpouring of support for me after my stroke. But then Covid struck in my final year and a half of teaching – via Zoom, a miserable way to exit the scene for one who so much enjoyed the in-person classroom.
But the more pertinent reflection to make, building upon the above remarks about the institutional challenges during my decade of institutional despair, is that I became more aware of the privileges I enjoyed in holding an endowed chair and the envy, if not resentment that could inspire among overworked and underpaid faculty colleagues. I used my resources accordingly in these years to sponsor a series of well attended book discussions for a cross-section of faculty in acknowledgment of an ethical obligation to give back. I recall, however, how one colleague whom I greatly respect gently told me after a discussion of one of my new books that many of us would like to have the same opportunity for scholarly production that the reduced teaching load and conference travel stipend had provided me.
On reflection, I think that this complaint has some justice. I do believe that most of us aspire to college teaching for love of our subject matter and enthusiasm for communicating it to young people. But I fear that the model of the scholar-teacher is being priced out of the market. While I wouldn’t abolish all elements of merit any more than I would abolish grading or endowed chairs, I do think that faculty today are underpaid and overburdened with tasks and expectations extraneous to scholarship and teaching. Politically they hang on at the cost of surrendering more and more of their traditional power to direct the future of the institution. So I have major questions about the pressures the neoliberal political economy places on the private liberal arts college to instrumentalize learning, bringing many of its traditional values under siege. For me this includes above all Roanoke College’s mission statement about the critical dialogue between faith and reason which, as previously mentioned, I sought to embody in my work. The current commoditization of all things which Karl Marx predicted is occurring before our eyes, also in the academy.
It is perhaps well-known that by the end I had become estranged from my department after a botched job search which has made me highly skeptical as a result of the ability of the institution to honor the intention of donors in establishing endowed chairs. I will not air any dirty laundry here. And no doubt I am also at fault in ways of which I am conscious but probably also unconscious. Suffice it to say that my stroke and the disabilities that it left me with, and my entering phased retirement, reinforced my isolation from the department. Ironically, it simultaneously engineered a line of flight into renewed and expanded relationships to faculty colleagues outside of the department. In these final years I began to call the Olde Salem Brewing Company my “second office.” I still drink beer with colleagues there to the glory of God and to spite the devil.
Hope
Eighteen months of retirement have been very good for me, although having turned 70 in September I have the usual aches and pains and medical challenges of a man of my age. But we love our St. Gall Farm, growing our own food and feeding 8 to 10 other families with healthy and nutritious honey, eggs and beef, sustainably and humanely raised on marginal farmland, the soil of which is being regeneratively restored to health. Ecological theology, a manifestation of holy secularity, has become increasingly important to me for whom Christ is at the heart of creation. And indeed my concerns about the health of the private liberal arts college in the neoliberal industrialization of education in the United States mirrors my worries about the state of industrialized agriculture. So I tend my little garden as a public witness of hope in what appears to me to be increasingly an apocalyptic world situation.
Likewise vocationally as an educator retirement has been good. I teach as a PhD fellow for the Institute of Lutheran Theology’s graduate program – it’s been a long time since I have had graduate students as I did in Bratislava. I am the senior editor of a new series of books, Reconstructions in Lutheran Theology, which has under contract 30 authors and titles forthcoming in the next five years or so. I am in perpetual demand as a supply preacher, a book review essayist, a peer reviewer, and a chapter length contributor to books and encyclopedias. I am still writing recommendations for former students and for grant proposals by younger scholars. I have a couple of new monographs on the horizon. Thus I continue in retirement to embody and model the scholar-teacher.
The medieval monks kept the light of learning alive during the so-called dark ages, and this light was relit in the Reformation’s synthesis with Renaissance humanism to generate the doctrine of holy secularity, a.k.a. the priesthood of all believers and it has been handed down through the generations to the founding of Roanoke College. Hope in this respect for me consists in sustaining certain intellectual virtues, which students of mine have come to call the “Hinlicky Rule” (google it), although in fact I learned it from my doctor father, Christopher Morse, who learned it from Thomas Aquinas. It goes something like this: “You are not permitted to criticize an opponent until you can state the opponent’s position with such clarity and charity that the opponent would exclaim, “That’s it! I could not have said it better myself!” Then, and only then, may you criticize because then, and only then, are you dealing with the real thing and not a convenient fiction of your own imagination.” Imagine what obedience to that rule would do to the barbaric state of discourse in this country! I certainly have not always lived up to my own rule which is why I also agree with St. Augustine that in this life our righteousness consists for the most part in the forgiveness of sins.
But my hope does not lie in my own righteousness, real though inchoate. Rather, at the heart of creation Christ brings clarity and charity into a world of conflict giving us a way of reconciliation in a virtuous contest for truth. That is why in spite of all I live in hope, and have hope for Roanoke College. Roanoke College has been good to me and my hope is that it will be good increasingly for scholar-teachers devoted to the intellectual virtues of the search for truth in critical and charitable dialogue. So in this hope I bow as I fade from the stage, grateful for my 22 years in service of our common mission.