Remembering my college education

In this reminiscence I wish to pay a debt of gratitude for some remarkable learning I was given in my college education, especially at Bard College in New York and Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne Indiana.

I was the oldest of five and among the first of my cousins to attend college. I really had no idea of what I was doing. In my senior year of high school in 1970 my draft number based on a lottery drawing of birthdates came up at #32. Yikes! The war in Vietnam was still hot and people my age were getting drafted. I was certain I wanted a college deferment, taking advantage of an unjust law that only later did I critically reflect upon. The adjacent state of New York had a lower drinking age at 18. That kind of narrowed my choices: college somewhere in New York State. Such is the thinking of an 18-year-old, old enough to get killed “in some crazy Asian war” as Kenny Rogers sang. I applied to Hofstra University and Bard College because they had theater programs. I enjoyed the drama club at high school and had a little success in it, and imagined with all the folly of an 18-year-old that I could make a go of it as an actor. That lasted about one week at Bard College.

Bard was on the cutting edge of the cultural changes occurring in the 1960s when I entered in the fall of 1970. Later I learned that my parents overheard some student conversation when they were dropping me off and my mother said to my father, “What kind of place are we leaving our son in?” As hip as I thought I was, I was not prepared for the student culture of “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.” We had a counter-cultural (in those days) soccer team rather than a football team, and three guys dressed up in mock Revolutionary War costume with flute and drum and a tattered flag for a marching band. We had an avowed Marxist-Leninist with a bullhorn organizing antiwar marches in nearby Poughkeepsie. I had a roommate who was a hashish dealer, who brought his girlfriend in for hanky-panky late at night across the common room, where I pretended to be sleeping. About a month into my first semester I was propositioned by a gay student. Like Dorothy to Toto, “I’m not in prim proper protestant suburban New Jersey anymore!” All the same, it was a rewarding year of intellectual discovery.

I began study of the German language with a native German speaker, William Fraenfelder, who decades before had fled Nazi Germany. He encouraged us to adopt Immanuel Kant’s als ob (= “as if”) practical morality, i.e. to live as if there is a God, judgment and reward for virtue. I studied hard and acquired a good reading knowledge of German that year. I also took a course on the Gospels with the Episcopalian priest who was also the chaplain of the college, Fredrick Q. Schaefer. This was my first introduction to the historical criticism of the Bible. I had an intense relationship with this man, Father Schaefer, who was sorely disappointed in me when I announced that I was transferring out at the end of my first year. He once told me that his faith is in “Western civilization.” Even then, I regarded this as curious, even an enlightened idolatry. I took a course also in that first semester on Nazi Germany with a historian, John C. Fout. In this class I read Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, an analysis of revolutionary violence posing as righteousness, which has had a lasting impact on me.

Having given up on theater, I was still interested in literature, perhaps as an aspiring novelist or as a critic. I really enjoyed my literature class. The professor asked me to recite a poem I’d written about the herd mentality I saw in my allegedly libertarian generation that was marching into a spiral of collective self-destruction (I’ve long ago lost it); the reading reduced some of my peers to weeping. But this professor, Benjamin La Farge, was in danger of failing tenure. I organized some students to testify in his favor. I remember claiming to the faculty committee that La Farge was like Adlai Stevenson, less charismatic but more substantive in losing to Eisenhower in the 1956 election. Evidently it helped; La Farge got tenure.

The other great event of my Bard year was a course I took with a Jewish professor Monty Noam Penkower. The class title was The Conservative Mind in America, in which we read Russell Kirk among others like the antebellum John C. Calhoun. For my term project, I read Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man. I was puzzled at how my professor could put him on a list of “conservative” minds in America. In my term paper I called Niebuhr prophetic in the same way as his friend across the street from Union at Jewish Theological Seminary, Abraham Joshua Heschel, was prophetic. But, having decided to study for the ministry, I transferred to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s Concordia Junior College in Bronxville, New York for my sophomore year.

This was a great year for me socially but a waste intellectually. The courses were on such a low level that I coasted through collecting As without any effort. The only real learning I recall was in a religion course, in which I read Luther’s Large Catechism for the first time. In particular I discovered his concept of personal faith ex corde, “from the heart.” A course on the Old Testament fell to the level of showing filmstrip cartoon illustrations, for example, of Amos as “God’s Angry Man.” Puerile. But after one year, I was off to Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana for the next two years.

I was a double major in philosophy and theology (or “concentration” as it was called there). The college was on the quarter system, which I really liked: three ten-week quarters (if I remember correctly) with a two-week January term and then the summer off. Consequently we got to explore a great deal, without the boredom that sets in during the typical thirteen week semester. We had required language courses in Greek and Hebrew that prepared us well for seminary level exegesis. I had Latin from high school and two college years of German behind me. The training was so good that I can still pretty much sight read the Greek New Testament, and with some brush up in Hebrew, I was able to write my theological commentary on the Book of Joshua for the Brazos series forty years after leaving the Senior College.

Prof. Curtis Peters taught us Continental philosophy, while Prof. Paul O’Connor introduced us to Analytical philosophy. Under Prof. Mihkel Soovik (émigré from Soviet Russia who colloquized into the Missouri Synod in 1950), we studied Kierkegaard. I remember the vertigo I experienced in reading Heidegger’s Being and Time in Soovik’s class. After a decade of assassinations, the Vietnam War and student protests, Cold War fears of a nuclear holocaust, the civil rights movement, the beginnings of the feminist movement, Watergate, race riots and the OPEC boycott, we certainly felt like we had been “thrown into existence,”  awoken thence into “being towards death.” Simultaneously, the civil war that was breaking out in the Missouri Synod afflicted us, not knowing how it would affect us going forward.

In theology, I resonated with Prof. James Childs, who was just finishing his doctoral dissertation under Carl Braaten at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. He introduced us to the leading ideas of the “Theology of Hope” coming out of Germany, though tilted towards Pannenberg rather than Moltmann. Childs’ own interest was in theological anthropology; his dissertation was on the doctrine of the Imago Dei. I was perplexed by his affinity to the theology of Paul Tillich and I remember asking him once in his office about the Christology of Paul Tillich. He conceded that it was “truncated.” Childs had a penchant for such rich vocabulary. “Truncated?” I asked, “Does that mean, like, cut off?” He nodded yes. But the take away I remember is how he relocated the transcendence of God from the traditional and static three-story universe of God up above in heaven, to the far horizon of time, the future. I thought this was an ingenious solution to a difficult problem in modern theology asking, “Where is God?” Answer: God is in the future that he has promised to us. Childs was so important to us that we asked him to preach at our wedding and at Seminex I advocated for his appointment when it became clear that the same dark forces were shutting down the Senior College.

There was still some of the low-level silliness in Fort Wayne that I had experienced in Bronxville. We had a course in geography where the professor belabored instruction in the various kinds of ditches dug in the American Midwest. We had a course in anatomy that was ridiculously picayune, requiring us to memorize as if we were preparing for medical school. But out of the same generation we had our classy old gentleman, Dr. Walter Wente, who gave us hope for the future in the midst of a church that was in the process of imploding.

At the Senior College, I was able to renew my love for the theater.  Productions were directed by Dr. Paul Harms, who also taught public speaking. I was given good parts in several plays. In The Heretic, a dramatization of Giordano Bruno’s trial by the Inquisition, I got to play the evil Cardinal Richelieu. We took this show on the road west to Concordia Seminary in Springfield, Illinois and as far south as Concordia College in Selma, Alabama - a memorable visit that included a catfish fry at the President’s house. Of course, Harms meant this performance to be a provocation in the Missouri Synod crisis, which it indeed was. In my senior year I had second lead in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, which by divine felicity, on a performance in south Indiana, involved the first romantic encounter with my future bride, Ellen. The Harms were very kind to me as I stayed in Fort Wayne to work after graduation, awaiting our marriage in August. I lived in the camping trailer behind their house.

Senior College housing was so arranged that about 30 of us lived in a house together. I was in Dorm H. We bonded together and had a great time going out for beer and pizza and playing a drinking game called Cardinal Puff. Together we locked arms going to the theater to watch the movie The Exorcist, which scared the bejesus out of me. My classmate, the future pastor Tom Hahn, had an incredible comic talent for mimicry. One evening he took us through the entire teaching faculty doing versions of exorcisms. We died laughing when he got to Jim Childs who rebuked the demon saying, “You are an … ontological impossibility!” I had lived in Bronxville with my Slovak Luther league friend, Phil Miksad from Yonkers, New York, in an (unheated!) carriage house behind the very nice dwelling of a neurosurgeon named Dr. Skok, of Slovak descent. We roomed together also in Fort Wayne and were in each other’s weddings in the summer of 1974. He has been a lifelong friend, along with his wife Carol.

The Senior College was a precious experience for me, both in the fellowship we enjoyed on campus and especially in the high level of education we received. I’ll relate my small part in the story of the Senior College’s tragic demise in the blog after next. But next I want to write about my education at the theological event that was Seminex.

,

Remembering Paul Lehmann

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!

Remembering Bill Lazareth

In this series of reminiscences, I wish to pay a debt of gratitude to those who have gone before me but took the time to form me on my life’s way.

I was never William Lazareth’s student, and I only got to know him after having finished my PhD studies and begun to work for the Division for Mission in North America, Department of Church and Society, in the old headquarters of the LCA in Manhattan. Bill had been the director of that department for the three years prior to my time. After he went to Geneva to work for the World Council of Churches, Paul Brndjar, Bishop of the Slovak Zion Synod of the LCA, was appointed director. It was Paul who hired me as a research assistant.

With his large personality and domineering command of the best scholarship of the 20th century Luther renaissance, however, Bill’s afterglow permeated my four years at Church and Society. Bill later joined the Management Committee, elected by the LCA in convention, to oversee our work. It was in that capacity that I got to know him, when he returned to Manhattan to pastor Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on the Upper West Side.

Bill was a force of nature, a Brooklyn kid with the street smarts to face down and/or talk down anyone in his way. One time Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had been invited to lecture at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church, also in Manhattan. I was in attendance with my friend and colleague Christian von Dehsen. Bill, fresh from his important ecumenical work in Geneva which produced the ecumenical convergence document, Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, was among the Lutheran clergy welcoming Ratzinger. In the middle of Ratzinger’s speech, however, a group of gay rights protesters staged a disruption. Like a military policeman, Bill immediately took up a bulldog posture between the protesters and Ratzinger, staring them down and asking them to leave in peace. In his day, in his way, ecumenism trumped identity politics.

He was noted for his powerful preaching at Holy Trinity, which did not shy from the bombast and scatology of his beloved Luther. Exaggeration to make a point was to be expected. Not that his preaching lacked logical precision or exegetical depth, but it was most definitely a robust performance unusual for sophisticated Manhattanites. After all, he grew up in Brooklyn. But as we were members of St. Peter’s and our pastor was John Damm, listening to his sermons was not chiefly how I connected with him.

Immersed in the literature of the Luther renaissance, as mentioned, and having taken deep dives into the modern critical edition of Luther’s Works, the Weimar Ausgabe, the erudite Lazareth argued effortlessly and eloquently from the 16th century sources for an updated Lutheran social ethic. The 2005 Christians in Society is Lazareth’s best book, the final fruit of many years of research, teaching, and critical reflection. Yet the material it contains was already the starting point for all of our work in Church and Society on social issues and controversies.  

In the early 1980s, these ranged from the threat of the nuclear arms race through the emerging status of women in church and society, to the smoldering crisis of apartheid in South Africa. Lazareth’s work was chiefly notable for correcting the modern dualistic misunderstanding of Luther’s two kingdoms doctrine, i.e. that religion is private and politics are public, and these two should be segregated as if existing in different realms, never to be mixed. Such dualism is the perfect recipe, however, for a denatured church and a godless secularism, each needing the other in sick symbiosis. Lazarus proposed to bring the church back into public life in a disciplined and coherent way, well-grounded theologically. His path was “forward to Luther”—well, anyway, to his Luther!

Like his contemporary in Europe, Ulrich Duchrow, Lazareth saw in Luther a more complex and interactive scheme than the static dualism in the minds of many moderns. There is an overarching battle for the creation between God and the devil, which God engages in both civil government and the church; these are God’s left and right hands, operating by law and by gospel, respectively. Unlike Duchrow, however, Lazareth was careful to specify that the regime of the state, working rough justice by the measurement of visible works, is backed by coercive punishment. As such it cannot analogize the kingdom of grace. This mode of operation is thus in sharp distinction from the regime of the gospel which works by faith backed only by the Holy Spirit. The two regimes, however, intersect in the locations/vocations of Christians in society. And the church as a public institution guides its people through serious study and analysis in its social statements. Equipped with this more complex and dynamic scheme, the contemporary church’s engagement with questions of justice in democratic society was to be both authorized and guided. Lazareth had hoped his book would become the textbook on social justice in Lutheran seminaries, but I doubt today that it is remembered, let alone taught.  

His work also pushed forward Lutheran theology to new development, particularly by his rejection of the so-called “third use of the law” as a measuring stick for sanctification. Not only does this put Spirit-led Christians back under the law, its focus is narrowly individualistic. For Lazareth, by contrast, the first two uses of the law sufficed: 1) to curb manifest sin politically, and 2) to reveal sinfulness before God spiritually. Rather, what Lutherans need is a second use of the gospel (the imperative of the indicative, e.g. you have been freed in Christ; therefore live as free people). Thus Lazareth’s proposal for the second use of the gospel would evoke and guide the gift of new life for Christians in society as “secular saints.” So Lazareth was a renewer of the doctrine of vocation in identifying the secular but not godless arenas of society where discipleship is to be carried out.

I had one episode with him, which in hindsight I find more amusing than offensive. There were calls to declare apartheid South Africa “a state of confession.” No one really knew what the Latin term status confessionis meant, except that during the Nazi era certain Protestant Christians had invoked it to justify resistance. The Lutheran World Assembly in Dar es Salaam, without much study or reflection, went ahead and declared that such a state exists, which obligates Christians as a matter of confession to oppose apartheid. Now the member churches were being asked to say the same. So I was tasked to produce a historical-theological study of confession. What I learned, however, tended to immobilize this contemporary appropriation, at least so far as it wanted to claim the Reformation as its inspiration.

The proper 16th century Latin term, in the first place, is casus (or tempus) confessionis, “the case (or time) of confession.” And what constitutes such a case is persecution of the church by political authorities specifically on account of the name of Jesus Christ and his saving purpose. That is what the article in the Formula of Concord teaches. Casus confessionis is thus a matter of the right hand kingdom, when and where the gospel expressly is under political attack. But contemporary opposition to apartheid was not particularly about repression of the church for its confession of Jesus Christ. In fact, many white Christian churches in South Africa openly or tacitly supported apartheid and some even tried theologically to justify it. One could imagine then that racism in the name of Christ might be identified as heresy. But that is not what Dar es Salaam asked for. Instead, status confessionis was invoked to require as a matter of salvation political opposition apartheid’s racial injustice and its violent imposition and legal rationalization by the white minority upon the black majority in South Africa – a textbook case begging for Lazareth’s left-hand kingdom analysis. The latter analysis, of course, would lay it on the conscience of Christians in society politically to oppose apartheid in the manner in which citizenship allowed, just as in any other secular matter of grave ethical concern.

So naturally, Lazareth was attracted to my analysis when he read the paper I had presented on my research for DMNA. Much to my surprise, one day I opened the little journal Christianity and Crisis to read an article by Bill on the topic of apartheid and confession to find generous excerpts from my text taken over verbatim without attribution and published under his name, not mine. So I wrote a letter to Bill, laying out into two columns his text and mine and asking for an explanation. I tried to be humorous about this, suggesting that given infinite time two monkeys at typewriters would produce identical text. He very quickly replied inviting me to lunch to discuss the matter. He certainly didn’t want a junior staffer to go public with an accusation of plagiarism! I was mollified by his rather lame explanation that as a member of the Management Committee, he felt justified in using whatever material the staff had prepared. It would have been more gracious, however, for a man of his power and prestige to acknowledge an underling’s work. I let it pass.

My wife Ellen remembers one incident in this connection that I do not. She thinks it was Lazareth’s recompense for his aforementioned trespass. At some event in the City after I was appointed the editor of Lutheran Forum, Bill claimed to her that he had nominated and advocated for my appointment to the editorship. When she asked why, he, now Bishop of the Metro New York Synod, grinned and replied, “Tammany Hall, baby.” In any case, the standing joke among us underlings about this commanding officer/Brooklyn bulldog/no holds barred street fighter was a riff on what GIs said about Gen. George Patton during the war: “He’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”

One of the most controversial projects of Church and Society was the social statement, Peace and Politics, which took up the approach of Lazareth’s left-hand kingdom analysis with some accents from the Christian realism of Reinhold Niebuhr. It argued that nuclear weapons could not be disinvented, but only managed for the sake of peace keeping, peace-building and peace-making. The political work for peace emerged as the path forward through the “nuclear morass,” as I entitled my background study. But this eminently sane path forward was denounced as antiquated 16th-century thinking incapable of confronting the imminent threat of catastrophic nuclear war. After considerable controversy, the social statement passed at the Toronto assembly of the Lutheran Church in America in 1983. Calls for unilateral nuclear disarmament were rejected decisively; passage also cast substantive doubt upon passionate calls for a “nuclear freeze.” Paul Brndjar remembers with great appreciation how, in this contentious atmosphere, Lazareth embraced him on the dais upon approval, publicly demonstrating his concurrence and support for all to see.

I am very grateful for the years I spent in Church and Society. It was an eye-opening but also disillusioning immersion into the unraveling democratic consensus of the postwar period in transition to what today we recognize in our polarized dysfunction as “post-modernity,” and in the church as “post-Christendom.” Both of these terms refer to the fact that the dominant culture in the West no longer recognizes the rock from which it was hewn, the quarry from which it was dug. The Western world has lost its story. Ignorant of what it owes to historical Western Christianity, it becomes indifferent if not hostile to the very idea of this heritage. For us Christians, this is an unprecedented situation which we face courageously or, like the proverbial ostrich, with our heads in the sand.

But this was not yet Bill Lazareth’s state of mind. He really thought that renewed knowledge of Luther’s social ethic according to his critical retrieval could win the day, at least in the Lutheran church. This conviction was evident in his participation in the thirty member Commission for a New Lutheran Church which engineered the emerging Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I had occasion to question him about some of the more controversial proposals coming forward from the Commission in terms of ethnic, gender and lay quotas which would in effect abolish the Ministerium, downgrading the role and status of ministers ordained to service of Word and Sacrament in the governance of the church. We would have bishops, miters and all, but they would have no role in governance and be subjected to periodic reelection. In other words, bishops in name only, albeit in ceremonial “historical succession.” I saw this abolition of the Ministerium as far-reaching in its implications and viewed it as something more attuned to the radical Reformation than the Magisterial one from which Lutherans historically descend. I saw an intimation of the future desired by many on the Commission when the name of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, only narrowly survived a vote.

But the Brooklyn bulldog confidently assured me that he could maneuver through the mess that was being created for the new Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Yet, for all his politicking, he was defeated in the first election for presiding Bishop by a narrow margin. His maneuvering had failed. I had heard one of the self-identified “progressive” members of the Commission aver that in the “new” Lutheran Church there would never again be theologians like Bill Lazareth, or his equivalent in the old ALC, George Forell, not to mention academics like Carl Braaten, Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert Jenson, George Lindbeck or Gerhard Forde having such sway. And after 35 years, we see that they got their way.

Therein lies a danger, I think, in Lazareth’s account of the left hand kingdom, in so far as it licensed a bare-knuckled kind of politics in the church qua institution. Bill’s opponents learned a lesson from Bill to fight this way. What I gathered from my years in the church bureaucracy was how easily it could manipulate a mass of theologically illiterate laypeople and company-owned and selected “rostered leaders” in that the bureaucracy possessed the unquestionable power both to stipulate and to frame the questions. But this manipulative behavior leads over time to what many church institutions are experiencing today: a loss of trust and growing sense of alienation. The ELCA is a church which no one loves but everyone uses. That is a very sad state of affairs.

But Bill was a happy warrior. He ended his career after being Bishop of the Metro New York Synod as a professor at Carthage College in Kenosha Wisconsin. His theological legacy abides for those who might be interested – very few, I think, in the denomination he helped to create.

He rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria.

Remembering my Father, the Rev. William P. Hinlicky

In this series of reminiscences, I wish to pay a debt of gratitude to those who have gone before me but took the time to form me on my life’s way.

There are many things a son could say about a beloved father. Not because he was perfect (far from it), but because he owned up to his imperfections in time to be appreciated for his fathering and at peace with all five of his boys, and their wives, before his death. I mention the wives as well, because perhaps the greatest testament to the parenting he and my mother did was that all five of these marriages have endured: as with my parents’ marriage, not always rosy, but real through thick and thin. Yet this post is not primarily about filial affection, but rather about how as a person and pastor he formed me, first as a Christian, then as a pastor and theologian.

Dad was a Navy veteran of World War II and so as a young man he saw some awful stuff. For the most part, he never talked to us about it. He told us about his older brother, John, navigating a B-19 in North Africa and later from England over France and Germany. But about himself the only thing I remember him relating was a liberty visit to the secured Normandy beach a week after the invasion, and witnessing an Arab in Morocco being shot in the back as he fled from the military base with a stolen sack of flour– his testimonies to the sad cruelty of war.  

Only after his death did we learn anything substantial. In his papers I discovered a typescript he made, apparently from handwritten entries, of a diary he kept of several convoy passages across the Atlantic to Africa and then to England, alternating boredom and U-boat terror. But an incredible story came from a cousin of my mother at my father’s funeral. He heard it as a teen from Dad’s own lips, when he was the vicar talking to the youth group in Streator Illinois, where he met my mother.  

Docked in Naples Italy, their ship came under air attack. A Navy radioman, Dad’s battle station position was greasing the ammo into the antiaircraft guns. There he witnessed strafing, which mortally wounded the gunner. A chaplain was summoned after the attack, a Roman Catholic priest, to administer last rites, but in the emergency he simply spoke to the dying man about Jesus. According to the cousin, Dad concluded the story by saying that at that moment he said to himself, “This is what I want to do in my life.”

Dad never told us the story. He used to say that there are two kinds of veterans. Those who have been to war and never want to talk about it, i.e., to talk about it is to relive it. And there are those who haven’t experienced the terror, but cannot keep their mouths shut. I have no doubt now, in the reflective hindsight of many years, that he bottled up the trauma in the fashion of his silent generation and consequently suffered some version of PTSD, since he had dark and depressive moments in his life.

Prior to volunteering for the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was a successful commercial artist working in the Chrysler building in Manhattan. When he was discharged, he returned to the potentially lucrative field. But his soul was restless. And when he told his own hard-working, but successful immigrant father that he wanted to be a pastor, he got the reply, “And what? Do you want to be poor for the rest of your life?” But Dad had learned from a neighbor how every evening during the war, in which his three sons were serving, my grandfather would go into his backyard to kneel at a rock, like artistic renderings of Jesus in Gethsemane, to pray for his boys. Reminded of this, my grandfather relented. This was a story Dad did tell us.

A member of the synod of Slovak Evangelical Lutheran Churches (SELC), affiliated with the Luther Church-Missouri Synod in the old Synodical Conference, Dad with many other vets headed to the “practical seminary” at Springfield Illinois. In his mid-20s already, he had some trouble adjusting to academic routine. He suffered from test panic, but caring professors coached him through it. He was a smart man with a heart for the underdog, the excluded and the hurting. How amazed I am, after all these years, still regularly to be contacted by people with testimonies to his compassionate pastoral care for them.

I was the precocious firstborn who wanted to be just like my father. He started a Lutheran day school on Long Island and I entered with the first kindergarten class. The church and school had a float in a parade, in which I was dressed in black gown and surplice as a future pastor. I guess you could say I was scripted from early on. But I admired my father. Around the age of six or seven I remember saying, “Dad, you’re going to be famous. Why, you have started the school and now you’re drawing a graphic catechism.” He continued his artistic interests like this as a hobby, often in service of the church’s ministry.

Once, when we were children, he was terribly stressed out by conflict in the congregation over the school. Next thing I knew, we all piled into the station wagon and drove to Florida to get away for a while. All I remember was the heat and the incessant fleas. We had stopped at a campsite on the way to Dad’s brother’s house in Maryland, but a tremendous thunderstorm struck and for fear of a tree falling and crushing us, he pulled up stakes to drive through the night to his brother. I remember being disappointed in Virginia that we were supposed to stop at Natural Bridge, but when we got there we couldn’t afford the tickets. My grandfather was right. In those days being a pastor meant being poor. Especially with five boys all under the age of eight!

The poverty brought domestic tensions. One of the worst fights my father and mother ever got into happened when I begged my mother to go to the school for parent’s day to see my work. She slipped out of the house, but a younger brother woke up early from his nap and started crying, and my father had to take care of him when he was supposed to be working. It was a nightmare when she returned that I can still flash back to. I remember once when he complained to my mother in the presence of us boys that maybe the Catholics got it right, that pastors should not be married and have families. Ouch. That was terrible sounding in my little ears. The same commitment to ministry which made him a good pastor to so many hurting people caused hurt to his attention-deprived sons, until Dad finally woke up and re-prioritized.

I can’t say I learned from this. I too spent all my energy on my work to the neglect of my son until I finally woke up. Like Dad, I can say at this point, thank God, not too late. But maybe that is the better lesson. I learned from Dad how to live as a forgiven sinner, how to swallow false male pride, owning the humility to reprioritize.

By the time of my teen years, my false pride took a new form, as I preened as a budding intellectual. In school we had read the dramatic version of the Scopes trial, Inherit the Wind. I rather abruptly and self-assuredly announced to my Missouri Synod father that I didn’t take the Bible literally. What a brouhaha ensued! I had not the sophistication yet to say with Reinhold Niebuhr, “seriously, but not literally.” I found myself parroting words from the play back to my father. “Why, if the sun had really stood still at Joshua’s command, the earth would’ve been blown off its axis and slung into the nether regions of the universe!” How ironic that decades later I found in this fabulous story from the book of Joshua, taken seriously but not literally, a Christological intimation of the man who commands and the God who obeys.

I was a teen in the 1960s, amid all the changes in the emergent youth culture, which greatly troubled my conservative father. I wrote a one-act comedy for a high school contest and won the right to put on the performance of it, lampooning the hypocrisies of affluent middle-class culture. My veteran father read it, and wrote on the cover, “Written by an ungrateful, sloppy, long-haired socialist hippie.” But he came to watch every performance of it to the rollicking laughter of my peers. In spite of disagreement and perhaps keen personal disappointment (to which I was oblivious), he stuck with me.

What I internalized from his liturgical practice was a love for our modest but traditional worship. I can still sing the old liturgy or recite the old prayers. Continuing a Slovak tradition, before every reception of Holy Communion, the pastor would individually lay hands on the communicant announcing the absolution: “Be of good cheer, child of God, your sins are forgiven you for Jesus’ sake and his substitutionary death upon the cross.” At the conclusion of the communion, Dad would say, “Now may the precious body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ keep you to life everlasting. Amen.” I don’t know where he got the word, precious, from, but I have retained it and use it myself to this day.

And then there was his preaching in that serious law-gospel way that he had been taught. Often on Saturdays when he had finished writing a sermon, he would ask me or several of the brothers to listen to it in advance and give him feedback. In the congregation where he spent the last nineteen years of his active ministry, there had been a series of internal conflicts among members over various things. And what struck me and remains in my memory is how he repeatedly preached to the situation with the new commandment of Jesus “to love one another as I have loved you.” How often in later years have I come to some insight and realized that I’m just echoing what I once heard my father say!

When I decided to go to Seminex it was difficult and embarrassing for my father, who had been active in the Missouri-affiliated SELC off and on all his ministry. All the other pastors in the small Synod were relatives, friends and/or classmates. And now his son came to the Synod convention as a leading voice of the Seminex “rebels,” as we were called by one of the clergy there. “Love, love, love!” this pastor complained sarcastically, mocking us. “If they love us, why don’t they obey us?!” So I was unwelcomed from the fellowship. And my poor father had to live with these betrayals, one by his colleagues, but truth be told probably also one he felt from me, his son who was supposedly following him into the ministry.

After he retired early because of illness to his country property in upstate New York, he began to supply preach in ELCA congregations. I think the one beneficial impact I had on my father was to liberate him from the terrible scruples about “unionism” that had been drilled into him. Already at a teen coffeehouse ministry when I was 18 or 19, I got him to join hands with a Catholic priest for prayer. In retirement he was in demand as a preacher for small country churches that had no pastor, but also for a Slovak Zion Synod congregation in the city of Binghamton New York. When I was pastor at Immanuel, Delhi about 60 miles from where he lived, he would regularly supply for me when I was away, even though the congregation at the time was not affiliated with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. One of my older parishioners said, quite seriously, “So your father’s preaching again this coming Sunday when you’re away. That’s great, because he’s a better preacher than you anyway.” Dad did coach me on preaching. He taught me to find the key phrase in the sermon and to repeat it as a refrain regularly – a very effective rhetorical device which I still employ.

In all these later years, Dad was a talker. He loved to discuss, or rather, debate about any topic under the sun. We talked a lot of theology as I told him what I was working on. When I was the editor of Lutheran Forum, he read every issue cover to cover, so that when I visited we had to discuss it all. Later, he translated articles into Slovak for me and materials from Slovakia into English. There was always conversation about the nuances of translation. And politics, of course! There were endless evenings spent talking until I finally got up and said, “I've got to go to bed.” He kept talking to me all the way up the stairs as I climbed to the bedroom.

His great gift to me came when I was called to serve in Slovakia as a visiting professor of systematic theology. I had grown up in a Slovak immigrant ghetto, so I knew lots of “kitchen Slovak” and all sorts of little phrases that I’d heard my father and grandparents using. I knew some Slovak language hymns. But I had no idea how difficult it would be for a native English speaker to acquire fluency in this Slavic language. Dad helped me step-by-step along the way. Some years earlier, we had undertaken together a translation project from Slovak to English, which set the stage for this tutoring. By the end of my six years in Slovakia, Dad approved of my fluency.

“Opustila mi sila.” These were the last words of my grandfather to my father. “The power has gone out of me.” I had a similar farewell when my father was dying. All five of his boys, their families and some cousins had gathered for a service of Holy Communion in his hospital room. He wanted to be clean-shaven for it, so I gently shaved him before the others arrived. When I finished, I said I had something to tell him. I looked into his eyes and, for a time, lost my ability to speak. He said, “Paul, I know,” as if to release me from speaking. I replied, “No, I want to say this.” Summoning all my powers to contain my grief, I continued, “Whatever I have achieved in life or done for the kingdom of God, I have only stood on your shoulders. The boldest thing I ever did was to leave all behind to go to Slovakia. I couldn’t have done that without you.” He acknowledged my words and in the old Slovak way, which he had insisted upon from our childhood, I kissed his cheek and he kissed mine.

Dad rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria!

Remembering J. Louis Martyn

In this series of reminiscences, I wish to pay a debt of gratitude to those who have gone before, and took the time to form me on my life’s way.

I had great preparation for biblical exegesis at Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne. We were required to take several units each of Hebrew and Greek. The school had a system of “80%-ers,” step-by-step tests through the grammar and vocabulary. To proceed forward you had to retake the tests until you achieved an 80% score. Consequently, we knew more than a little when we began our seminary courses in exegesis.

We had fantastic exegesis courses at Concordia Seminary in Exile (Seminex). I remember a particular labor of love: an elective translating the biblical prophets Amos and Hosea from the Hebrew, especially the amazing Chapter 11 of Hosea. But the exegetical work that most profoundly influenced me for the future I took with the late Edgar Krentz on Philippians, especially his analysis of the Christ hymn in chapter 2. I learned from Krentz about the German New Testament theologian, Ernst Käsemann, which would connect me to J. Louis Martyn, though little did I know it at the time.

A brief aside: several years before his death, Krentz and I had reconnected on Facebook. I was able to send him a copy of my Brazos Theological Commentary on the proto-apocalyptic book of Joshua. His daughter told me she was able to show it to him just before he passed away. On the inside cover I thanked Krentz for his mentorship. The book was then given to the LSTC library.

All this background is introduction to the New Testament theologian who had the most enduring impact upon me at Union Theological Seminary. I can’t recall exactly how I got to know Martyn, because I was enrolled in systematic theology, not biblical studies. I believe it came about through an invitation from my excellent professor in systematic theology, Christopher Morse, to join what was called the informal “Paul Study Group.” This was a gathering of New York City theologians who were interested in new currents in Pauline studies, especially the impact being made by Käsemann and his thesis that “apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theology.” Lou Martyn was the leading light in this gathering as he had just recently shifted from his path breaking work in the Gospel of John (more on that below) to concentrate on Paul, especially the letter to the Galatians, for which eventually he produced his significant Anchor Bible Commentary.

Early on I had written a paper – for whom, I no longer remember! – focused on the righteousness of God in Paul. I had no idea what a contested minefield I was engaging, but I think it was here that the recommendation to read Käsemann was made and received. And Käsemann captured me! I remember how we several graduate students (including the future New Testament scholars Joel Marcus and Martinus de Boer, who also were invited to participate in the Paul Study Group) waited eagerly for the arrival of the English translation of Käsemann’s commentary on Romans. I was honored with an invitation to present my paper on the righteousness of God to this group of mostly senior scholars.

I tried in it to reconcile Käsemann’s thesis of God’s righteousness as “salvation-bearing,” i.e. as the divine fidelity which saves, to the classical Lutheran die Gerechtigkeit die vor Gott gilt ("the righteousness which counts before God"). Attending was the brilliant Reformed theologian Paul Lehmann, who decided that this upstart Lutheran graduate student needed a little humbling. I can’t remember what German language term I had employed in the paper, but he made the somewhat nerdy complaint that I had gotten the nuance of it wrong and then asked me to defend my usage, which left me tongue-tied. Such were the hazing rituals we had to endure in those days! I learned a lot from Lehmann later on, and will reminisce about him in a future post.

So that command performance was how I got to know Lou Martyn. From that point onward I would visit him in his office up in the tower at Union to discuss theology, and also – Union Seminary. At this moment in history, Union was transitioning in its self-understanding from a highly regarded academic program in the footsteps of Tillich and Niebuhr to a program defined by liberation theology commitments. Union was becoming “woke” ahead of its time! I learned from Fleming Rutledge some years later that Martyn described these two programs as Union A and Union B – a polite way of describing a dramatic decline in academic expectations based on merit to what we call today “identity politics.” As a student, I felt caught in the middle of this, especially as a straight white male, despite a strongly felt commitment to greater racial and economic justice. The conversations with Lou in his tower office were for me an island of sanity to which I frequently swam.

I took two doctoral seminars with him. The first introduced me to his groundbreaking research into the Gospel of John. Until this time, the study of John was dominated by Bultmann’s hypothesis of a Gnostic-Mandean “signs source,” which supposedly then suffered layer after layer of recensions by an “ecclesiastical editor” to make it more “orthodox.” This hypothesis led scholars on a wild goose chase for decades to uncover the “signs source.” For Bultmann, however, the theological payoff was that while the “orthodox” revisions made John acceptable to the early Catholic Church, in the process they smothered the original, radical witness to the “word alone” for “faith alone.”

As Bultmann famously put it in his reconstruction of the Gospel of John, the relentless message of the original is that Jesus reveals that he is the revealer – and that’s that! Take it or leave it! Don’t ask for any other reasons to believe than the sheerly improbable announcement of the obviously human Jesus that he is the revealer of God. Like it or lump it – and liking it means giving up all demands for, and reliance upon, the false security of good reasons, warrants or proof. John demands naked faith in a naked word, Kierkegaard’s leap into the dark night on the strength of a perceived voice calling, “Jump!”

Martyn’s critique of Bultmann’s historical critical reconstruction had as its background the still (at that time) dominant interpretation of Gnosticism as, in Harnack’s words, “extreme Hellenism.” Superimposing such Hellenistic “mysticism” on the Gospel of John, however, obscures the thoroughly Second Temple Judaic milieu of the Gospel of John: its narrative is organized by three trips to  the temple in Jerusalem on the occasions of three major Jewish festivals and culminates in Jesus’s death in Jerusalem at Passover, with his resurrection appearances where the temple had stood, to found the apostolic community and mission in its place. Of course, it may well be that early Gnosticism actually had its origins in disillusioned Judaic circles whose apocalyptic hopes for supernatural intervention in support of the rebellion against Rome had been crushed by defeat and sealed in the destruction of the temple.

Martyn showed that John’s narrative was organized as a “drama on two levels”: the ostensible historical report about Jesus’ sojourns to and from Jerusalem on one level, and the contemporary Johannine Jewish-Christian community’s painful debates with and eventual expulsion as heretics from the synagogue during the consolidation of early rabbinic Judaism following the Roman defeat of the rebellion. Theologically, the gospel of John is a “martyrology:” paradigmatically in Jesus’s testimony before Pilate, yet transparent to the suffering witness of the community of his disciples in the post-war situation. (I put this insight of Martyn’s to good use in my 2011 book, Divine Complexity.) For this rediscovery of Second Temple Judaism (and liberation from Bultmann’s existentialism, the spell of which had been cast upon me in reaction against the Missouri Synod’s turn to fundamentalism), I remain forever indebted to Lou Martyn.

The second seminar I took with Lou Martyn on the Gospel of Mark was even more important for me. I was impressed at the first meeting that the only homework Lou expected was that we read the Gospel of Mark in Greek weekly and keep track of our insights to share with the seminar. This made for tremendous scholarly discussion. Of course we all had to make presentations and submit a final paper, but this worked in me another liberation: away from the atomization of the text produced by source and form criticism and towards the new accents arising from redaction criticism. In time this led me to a literary critical approach on the way to renewed theological reading, as in my aforementioned Joshua commentary.

I was so taken by the seminar that I wrote a doctoral dissertation on it: “St. Mark’s theologia crucis.” I was not satisfied with it, however, and decided not to publish it, even though I recall with gratitude the congratulations from Lou, my thesis advisor Christopher Morse, and Cornel West in particular (James Cone didn’t like it much). Aside from the apocalyptic framing of the Gospel of Mark (which years later Joel Marcus would forcefully demonstrate in his great two-volume Anchor Bible Commentary), my chief takeaway was the solution I found to the mysterious ending in Mark 15:8, which breaks off abruptly with the women fleeing in fear at the angelic announcement of Jesus’ resurrection. This conclusion is possible, I argued, because Easter occurs in the middle of Mark’s gospel at the Transfiguration. So readers know from this point forward that the One about to be crucified is already the Risen One. But can they, will they, then, be faithful to death now in impending persecution, as those first followers of Jesus had proved not to be?

Lou was a classic historical critic devoted to knowing the particularity of a given biblical text without artificial attempts to harmonize with others. He insisted upon the difference, for example, between Galatians and Romans on the issue of the divine status of the law: in Galatians “mediated by angels” but in Romans the particular gift of God to the people of Israel. He left it to us theologians to worry about the discrepancy. But that did not mean he avoided theology. His historical-critical work on biblical texts was in service of theology in an approach akin to his friends, Ernest Käsemann, and at Yale, Leander Keck.

He was a man of faith. At the end of the John seminar he spoke movingly to the question of the evangelist’s inventiveness vis-à-vis the memories of the Jesus of history. What an impression Jesus must have had upon this community, he said, to evoke creative but faithful re-presentation into their present hour! But the real heart of his own passionate theological concern was the cruciform modification of the apocalyptic theology of Second Temple Judaism. This was articulated in a classic essay, “Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages.” Here I began to recognize my  own reading of Luther’s Heidelberg disputation and his “theology of the cross.” The connection is not a stretch, since both Luther and Martyn were dealing with the same text, namely 1 Corinthians 1. In his Galatians commentary, moreover, Martyn explicitly referenced the happy precedent to his own work of Luther’s treatment of Galatians. In the end, I didn’t fully agree theologically with his interpretation of “Christ made a curse for us” in Galatians, and actually staged a literary debate on this topic between Lou and N. T. Wright.

As to his character we have the fondest memories. I say we, because he invited Ellen and me to his apartment for wine and cheese with him and his wife, Dorothy. She was a counselor/therapist, a career that Ellen was interested in. What was memorable about that interaction was a lengthy discussion about the uselessness and deceptiveness of feelings of guilt. Guilt does not free one from the self-obsession which is the real offense to God and neighbor, but actually perpetuates it. The theological issue and the matter for pastoral counseling is what liberates from self-obsession for a new selfhood, oriented to God and the neighbor in need. This discussion corresponded with the observation he often made that the language of forgiveness is rare in Paul, suggesting that Paul found the concept too weak to express the powerful and liberating divine deed of righteousness in Christ.

In these connections and many others, Lou manifested makrothumia, the Greek word I dedicated to him in the acknowledgments of my dissertation, which I translate as “great-heartedness,” “magnanimity,” “generosity of spirit.” When he spoke like this to his students, not all of whom were nearly as seriously pious as he, he never failed to say, “Remember the poor.”

Lou rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria!

Remembering Robert W. Bertram

Bertram deserves to be known better. He gave his life to being a church theologian, yet that life was disrupted by the trauma of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s fundamentalist turn and the resulting schism. The Crossings Community has codified his literary legacy and you can access it here.

I benefited enormously from his friendship and mentoring, even though our first encounters were not happy.

After taking a gap year upon completing my undergraduate work at Concordia Senior College, I entered Concordia Seminary in Exile (“Seminex”) in St. Louis in the fall of 1975. Ellen and I had married in the summer of 1974. I came home from class in September 1975 to the news that we were pregnant with our first child. The plan had been to complete the required academic courses for the M.Div. degree in two years. We stuck to the plan. I was working 20 hours a week, and we were actively involved in the Slovak heritage church, St. Lucas, in south St Louis. My memory is that I studied or was in class 16 hours a day, including summer classes. All this is background for a request I made of Bertram in my first semester, after attending the first several classes of his required introductory course in theology.

I thought his lectures were insightful but not time-efficient for me. I asked him to grant me an independent study for the course. I proposed that I would work through the Latin and German of the Augsburg Confession, with reference to the Apology, and write a paper about it. This was motivated in part by my dislike of his own theological inspiration, Werner Elert, and in part because my head was full of Paul Tillich, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann. I wanted to make my own independent evaluation of the Lutheran Confession.

Reluctantly, Bertram granted my request, but when my paper was due at the end of the semester, and I was behind on finishing it, I was avoiding him. He caught me in the hallway. I tried to fake it, saying, “I have been looking for you.” He saw through me and said, “No you haven’t. I’m easy to find. Where’s your paper?” When I turned it in, I didn’t get the A which I thought I deserved.

I had argued that AC Article XXVIII on the “spiritual” power of bishops “to judge doctrine and condemn doctrine which is contrary to the gospel” in distinction from the coercive power of the magistrate to punish criminals was the key to the whole confession. In the context of the Missouri Synod trauma, however, that did not sell well, as the faculty majority of Concordia Seminary had been condemned for teaching false doctrine, not by a bishop, of course, but by a politicized church convention. In any case, I didn’t echo the themes from Elert about the contradictory words of God in the law and in the gospel. So Bertram and I were off to a rocky start.

But to my amazement and in testament to his generosity of spirit, Bertram nevertheless enlisted me to be a teaching assistant in the Lutheran Confessions for my second year at Seminex. In the peer cohort of assistants, we discussed the weekly readings in advance of meeting with the students, and I think my understanding of the material was helped very much by that dialogue. It was in this time that I read many of Bertram’s brilliant essays, above all the excerpt from his doctoral dissertation on Luther’s second Galatians commentary, the section entitled, “How our sins were Christ’s.” I was convinced; this was something special.

I learned the Christological key to the signature Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith from Bertram’s explanation of Luther’s “joyful exchange:” not the usual quid pro quo, tit for tat exchange according to merit under the law, but an astonishing exchange that gives precisely what is not deserved:  Christ takes all our negatives to give in exchange all his positives: sin and death in exchange for righteousness and life. As I studied Luther I realize that this joyful exchange was the dramatic, narrative plotline that runs through all of his thinking. To be sure, justification is by faith, indeed faith alone holds true just –only--because it is faith in such a singularly self-donating Christ. For grasping this, which has remain central to my own thought, I am forever in the debt of Robert Bertram.

There were tensions within the Seminex faculty. For some, exile meant freedom for liberal Protestantism, joining the (then) mainstream in America and leaving behind the insular world of the German immigrant refugees from the Prussian Union in the 19th century. It meant freedom to criticize the Bible and open up new socio-ethical possibilities. But for Bertram, it meant freedom to confess Christ alone even when the church wants assurances other than Christ alone. It was through this confession of Christ that Bertram engaged social questions, as in his essay on the cultural captivity of American churches confronted by the witness of Martin Luther King Jr. and his later approach to apartheid in South Africa.

I remember the pull of the first motive. In exploring other seminary possibilities prior to Seminex I often said that I did not want to waste my time fighting over something so patently false and theologically trivial as Missouri’s doctrine of scriptural inerrancy, which made the historicity of Jonah and his whale a litmus test of orthodoxy. But Bertram convinced me of the second motivation, and thusly mitigated the allure of transitory cultural acceptance by way of joining up with liberal Protestantism.

When I left St. Louis for my vicarage in Long Island, Bertram knew of my plans to apply for a PhD program in theology or philosophy. But in the institutionless state of exile, I got little guidance, other than his reflex recommendation of the University of Chicago, where Bertram had earned his PhD under Tillich and Pelikan. I thought about Chicago, but thought instead of Carl Braaten. So I applied to the THD program at LSTC and was accepted. But for entirely petty reasons of regional chauvinism, this inveterate Easterner wanted to live in New York City. It was to be a PhD either in philosophy or in theology. I wanted to do philosophy at the New School for Social Research where Hannah Arendt was still active -- as a freshman at Bard College I had read her Origins Of Totalitarianism (but I’d also read Reinhold Niebuhr there). When the New School shut down its graduate program and Union Theological Seminary accepted me with a scholarship, the school of Niebuhr won out. Interestingly this led to my next connection with Robert Bertram.

The so-called “International House,” which provided room to traveling ecclesiastics, was immediately next-door to the Van Dusen student apartment building where we lived. As Bertram traveled regularly to Europe for Lutheran World Federation gigs, Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue meetings, and sundry other engagements, he would overnight at the International House and we would host him for dinner. Over Scotch on the rocks we talked about all things theological till the wee hours many times. The relationship grew warmer personally as well as intellectually. He invited me to come to St. Louis for a summer teaching opportunity. In addition, I was invited to give a lecture about a Lutheran interpretation of the liberation theology which was all the rage at Union. He assured me that he would be looking for a teaching position for me, and I believe that he actually intervened on my behalf in several cases, although nothing ever came of it. That was the fate of many of us Seminexers. We had no church home. The loss, as also the decay, of an institution is a grievous matter.

In so far as liberation theology is actually a theology, and not just religious window-dressing on New Left ideology, it has to be reflection on Christ the liberator who, as Luther famously put it, snatched us poor lost sinners from the jaws of hell triumphantly to bring us to the Father’s embrace in the power of the Spirit. But that account of divine action in Christ in human time and space ill comports with the basic idealism of liberation theology which, unlike cold, hard-headed, unsentimental, old-fashioned materialist Marxism, imagines that liberating ideas about God can enable or empower human liberation.

In these Union years on account of my working class roots I was wrestling with the almost enchanting attraction that old-fashioned Marxism can have. Being of Slovak descent and knowing the oppressive reality of “real existing socialism” behind the Iron Curtain, however, I was not able to be drawn fully into the chic mystique, for example, when Union classmates returned from study trips to Cuba or East Germany singing the praises of the “workers’ paradise.” Niebuhr’s Christian realism help me here.  

I don’t think Bertram was overly happy about this growing reluctance in me concerning liberation theology. I was simultaneously engaging Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thought and urging Bertram to consider him as an alternative to his beloved Elert. But Bertram worried about Bonhoeffer’s more Barthian take on law and gospel (although later he warmed up to Bonhoeffer). He once tried to explain Elert as a kind of German “liberation theologian;” but for me, that was exactly what was wrong with Elert’s theology! It was such presumptive insight into the workings of the hidden God which led him to condemn the Barmen Declaration and embrace Adolf Hitler as the pious prince sent by Providence to rescue the Germans.

The title of Bertram’s dissertation was “The Human Subject as Object of Theology.” So neither was Bertram happy with my increasing interest in Karl Barth, for whom the sole object of theology is God. Theology is knowledge of God or it is nothing. I know that Bertram’s colleague, Edward Schroeder (with whom I had an on and off relationship for years), finally concluded that under the influence of Bonhoeffer and Barth, Hinlicky “was weak on law and gospel.” In a way, I plead guilty. Barth and later Jenson convinced me that there is no ethical difference between law and gospel; the ethical content of both is the double love commandment. The difference between law and gospel is that when love is demanded of me, I am exposed as a failure but when love is lavished upon me, even in my failure to love, I am beloved – that is the gospel. And so beloved, I get as a “little Christ” to lavish love upon the neighbor in need.

I think Bertram remained irritated about these deviations of mine. When I started reading the Finnish Luther research – I invited Simo Peura, Sammeli Juntunen and Antti Raunio to Bratislava in the 1990s and enjoyed excellent conversations with them-- I wrote about this encounter to Schroeder. He passed my letter over to Bertram who hand wrote in the margin, commenting on my enthusiasm regarding faith as union with Christ, “what does Hinlicky think we have been saying all these years?” My reaction when Schroeder sent that letter back to me: “Well, you could have fooled me!”

I don’t think Bertram ever succeeded in fully disentangling the joyful exchange as union with Christ from the dominant forensic model in Formula of Concord Lutheranism --of a heavenly law court assigning alien righteousness to the hapless sinner by divine fiat-- as that emerged following the Osiander controversy. Both models involve "imputation," but in the joyful exchange Christ gives (“imputes”) himself, crucified and risen, to the sinner while in the law court it is an extrinsic benefit acquired by Christ that is credited to the sinner. Sadly, that marginal comment in the late 1990s was the last word I received from Bertram, who died shortly after I returned to the United States to teach at Roanoke College.

Bertram sacrificed his potential as an academic theologian to the demands of his historical hour which was the Missouri Synod catastrophe. Just so, his neglected literary legacy makes for much enlightenment, perhaps precisely because he worked it out through trauma. Neglected are his substantial contributions to the Lutheran-Roman Catholic dialogue, which are of enduring value. I remember him fondly from those great evenings together in New York City.

He rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria!

Remembering Richard John Neuhaus

Richard John Neuhaus was a larger than life character, as all who knew him will attest. My career in theology spiraled around his for many years. I say “spiraled,” because I could never quite get into full alignment with his trajectory, but neither could I simply escape it. He rightly diagnosed our “naked public square,” a cultural vacuum from which the demons of Inquisition and Witch Trials had been exorcised but were now in pressing danger of seven demons worse coming to occupy it. I did finally reject his version of catholicism as sophisticated nostalgia for Christendom, but it was a sad breach. Although he influenced me, I cannot say that I influenced him. Yet our hot and cold relationship finished personally with a grace-note, as I shall recount.

In the 1970s Neuhaus regularly hosted a gathering of New York City Lutheran clergy at his apartment in Gramercy Park. As a graduate student at Union, I was suspicious of his recent turn to then incipient neo-conservativism, after admiring his 1960s activism in the civil rights movement and in opposition to the war in Vietnam. But when my senior pastor at Mount Zion Lutheran Church in Harlem asked me to join him for a Neuhaus soirée, I agreed to go. When Neuhaus got around to talking with me one-on-one, he asked me what I was interested in doing with my PhD work. I answered honestly --at this pubescent stage of my thought-- “I want to reconcile Luther and Marx by way of Tillich.” That proved to be a conversation stopper. Neuhaus bluntly retorted, “That’s not very promising,” and turned away to talk to others. The putdown stung. I enjoyed drinking his Scotch but wasn’t interested in returning to his salon for the next number of years.

My next encounter with Neuhaus occurred about five years later when, in my research work for the Division for Mission in North America of the old LCA, I published a study, “The Nuclear Morass.” In the midst of the turmoil of the SALT deployment of the early Reagan years and oppositional calls for a “nuclear freeze,” the study argued soberly that weapons of mass destruction cannot be disinvented, and the danger as such must be managed in the recognition that nuclear war would destroy humanity on the earth. In other words, my study described “mutually assured destruction” less as a strategy than as a new and irreversible fact. Neuhaus read it and applauded its Niebuhrian Christian realism. He invited me to dinner at his apartment for discussion of it and I agreed, thinking I would not mention my unpleasant first experience of him (which the increasingly famous man would probably not recall anyway).

But the dinner party was an embarrassing disaster for me. As a round after round of the Greek liquor ouzo was poured, preceded by several rounds of scotch before dinner, I finally realized how late it was. Knowing I needed to catch a train home, I suddenly stood up to leave. But the world spun around in circles as I fell to the floor in my own vomit. Nonplussed, Neuhaus and his other guests cleaned me up with the mess I made, helped me phone my wife, and put me on the couch for the night. When I woke up in the morning I made a fast exit. Neuhaus didn’t hold it against me. In fact he said, “You are not the first to whom this has happened.”

The story resumes in 1985 when I was appointed editor of Lutheran Forum. This was when Neuhaus, still a Lutheran, was editor of the punchy, sometimes snarky but always interesting, newsy and entertaining Forum Letter. So we became partners in crimes, real and imagined, against the newborn Evangelical Lutheran Church in America – in our view, ill born (for betraying Lutheranism to mainstream-American liberal Protestantism). During these years Neuhaus and I often consulted, and Ellen and I were sometimes guests at his New York apartment. I enjoyed participation in many of the theological conversations he organized, facilitating dialogue between Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Christians, and between theologians, political scientists and philosophers.

Even as he became increasingly conservative politically, we “evangelical catholic” partisans made bedfellows with the team of Carl Braaten and Robert Jenson, editors of the journal dialog. We brought in another independent journal, Lutheran Quarterly, because it represented a stream of Lutheranism similarly unhappy with the “new” Lutheran church, namely, the “prairie populists,” as we called these Scandinavian-descended post-pietists urging “radical Lutheranism.” We jointly sponsored the two Call to Faithfulness conferences in Northfield in the early 1990s which attracted massive turnouts, well over a thousand for the first and over nine hundred for the second. But these ended in failure because the parties concerned with the direction of the ELCA themselves diverged over the catholicity of the Reformation and its implications for ecclesiology. It was in this disappointment that a disillusioned Neuhaus, who had long argued for “the Lutheran difference,” abandoned ship and swam the Tiber. He called me personally to inform me of his decision with the entailment that he would have to be leaving Forum Letter.

The truth is that I was also despondent and went shortly thereafter to New York to talk with Neuhaus about my own possible ecclesial transition. Neuhaus had branded his transition as a fulfillment of, not a contradiction to, his Lutheranism. The sticking point came when I told him that I could not in good conscience confess the modern Marian dogmas. His response to this confession left me uneasy and dissatisfied, namely, that if Mother Church has decided on something we should simply suspend disbelief and trust. I realized consequently in myself a core commitment to remain Lutheran. I will surrender neither intellect nor conscience to any except my Lord Jesus Christ. (Parenthetically, in an age when bullies try to silence us demanding that we check our putative “privilege,” I regard this Luther-at-Worms principle of bound conscience and intellect as indispensable.) In any case, greatly to Neuhaus’ disappointment, I could not follow him to Rome. And to this day I remain a member, too often in dissent, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

In spite of his disappointment, Neuhaus supported our family generously when I undertook a visiting professorship in Bratislava, Slovakia at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Comenius University. We remained in touch, corresponding through these years (as I tried to interpret the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue to a minority church in Slovakia that was exceedingly suspicious of Rome). So when we returned to the USA in 1999, he invited me to his grand theological powwows in New York City any number of times. These were dialogue events for me with many significant intellectuals: Peter Berger, John Milbank, Catholics Robbie George and George Weigel, Jews Michael Wyschogrod, Peter Ochs, Leon Klenicki,  David Novak, Lutherans Jaroslav Pelikan, Robert Wilken, George Lindbeck, my Union professor David Lott, and Robert Jenson.  I was signatory to a statement against legalized euthanasia, “Always to Care, Never to Kill,” fruit of these colloquiums.

Neuhaus was a magnanimous host, at the peak of his powers in the early 2000s: editing the influential journal First Things, invited to dine at the White House with the president of the United States or His Holiness at Rome (which occasions he never failed, ever so casually, to mention). He increasingly pressed me (along with any and all in earshot) to join him on the far side of the Tiber River. In one of the last of these colloquiums I attended, I was sitting next to George Lindbeck, and as Neuhaus went on and on about the primacy of Peter as the key to the unity of the church and the restoration of Christendom, I whispered to George, “This is unbearable.” And he whispered back, but almost loud enough for everyone to hear, “And it gets worse and worse.” George had rightly projected the Christian future in the West as “sociologically sectarian, but catholic in its self-understanding.” That was his point, and mine also, in staying Lutheran in the changing churches.

Upon the publication of Pope Benedict’s encyclical Deus caritas est, I had written an essay approving of it under the motif, “Benedict is my Pope too.” By this I meant what the Lutheran-Catholic dialogue in America had actually suggested: a reformed papacy with a non-coercive pastoral mission for promoting the worldwide unity of Christians. But Neuhaus, who lifted up my essay, took it as indicating that I was finally ready to take the plunge into to his increasingly papist view of the papacy. (How ironic that those who transitioned to Rome wanting a strong Pope to save them from Protestant faddism now have been graced with the reign of Francis!) When Neuhaus was disappointed again by my stubborn refusal to see the light as he saw it, I was no longer invited to New York for the powwows. In spite of several submissions, I was never able to get anything published in First Things. I was disappointed, even hurt, after my book publications took off from 2009, that they never got much coverage in First Things; what they did get was perfunctory.

I followed Neuhaus through the reports of his battles with cancer and sent him on occasion missives of encouragement, but it felt as if he had given up on me. Thankfully, Robert Benne, still directing the institute at Roanoke College which was eventually named after him as the Benne Center, invited Neuhaus to Roanoke to give a lecture. Neuhaus had always affectionately addressed me in the German fashion as “Paulus.” When he arrived he so greeted me with a generous smile, the first time in a number of years, and, as it proved to be, the last time. After his recent close encounters with death and, I think, aware of his impending demise which would take place rather abruptly two months hence, there were no undertones of acrimony nor disappointment anymore. We enjoyed an raucous and altogether endearing evening together reminiscing with him in the Bennes’ home after his lecture.

My career in theology spiraled around Neuhaus because I do believe in the “Lutheran Difference,” which may be variously described as “evangelical catholicism,” or as a “reform movement within the Western Catholic Church.” My alignment with evangelical Catholicism followed from my reading of Luther’s treatise, Confession concerning Christ’s Supper during my Seminex days (the “seminary in exile” emerged after the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod’s fundamentalist and authoritarian takeover). But Neuhaus traced his evangelical Catholicism to his teacher, the Missouri Synod theologian Arthur Carl Piepkorn. The seeds of our divergence are already here in nuce. As Neuhaus became a zealous Roman Catholic and his theo-political vision became one of restoring Christendom, I had rediscovered the patristic “theology of the martyrs.” We both realized finally that we had been led in different directions.

It is no accident consequently that I have entitled several of my important books with the culturally specific and descriptive note, “after Christendom.” I’ve described this as an unprecedented situation in the history of the Gospel on its way through the nations. For me, it is nevertheless our culture in which the Gospel must be preached and thought theologically. We do not get to choose our place in history, but are asked, just there, to know and serve the God of the Gospel. For some this will signal capitulation to the spirit of the times, but I mean it as knowing the spirit of Christ amid the spirits of the postmodern world.

My friend and erstwhile comrade in arms rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria.

Remembering Carl Braaten

When Carl Braaten died several weeks ago, Doug Sweeney, the executive director of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology, contacted me to write a tribute for the Center’s website. You can read it here. In this post on my own website I’d like to add a few more thoughts, personal and professional, about my friend and colleague through many years. As to friendship, Carl and Lavonne honored us with a memorable visit with us in Slovakia in the 1990s. Believe me, he was a fun partier!

Carl not only promoted my professional vocation as a theologian, he saved my physical life. When I was struck down suddenly by a stroke at the conclusion of the Pro Ecclesia conference in Baltimore in 2017, he was first to recognize the danger which I was in and summoned an ambulance. His second wife, Beryl, held my stricken body in her arms, comforting me until the ambulance arrived.

I first heard about Carl from my college professor, James Childs, at Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne. Childs was finishing his dissertation on the imago Dei under Braaten’s supervision as Childs was also introducing us to the exciting new theology emanating out of Germany in the figures of Wolfhart Pannenberg and Jürgen Moltmann. Braaten had emerged by then as a major interpreter in the USA of the so-called “theology of hope.”

In the turmoil of the Missouri Synod’s impending schism, I journeyed in 1974 as a college senior to check out the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. I don’t remember much about that visit except the experience of Braaten’s classroom: his dashing entrance, handsome and athletic appearance, the rhetorical flourishes as he lectured passionately for an hour without notes. Many students will recall how he would characteristically contrast the great world religions and philosophies as teaching how to ascend to the divine while Christianity proclaimed the divine descent to sinful and perishing humanity. By the time I entered seminary (at Seminex, not LSTC), Braaten was widely acclaimed as the most influential Lutheran theologian in America. I learned later, however, that disillusionment was already setting in.

In the processes for the merger of the AELC (the Missouri refugees), the ALC and the LCA, Braaten was instrumental in convening a theological discussion of the future contours of “the new Lutheran Church.” It was already clear from these discussions, however, that a new gospel of inclusivity was being generated for the ever-so-new Lutheran Church. In the spirit of the 1960s still percolating into the 1970s, many of us greeted this new gospel with great enthusiasm. We would come out of our immigrant ghettos to become a truly American denomination, reflecting authentically the ethnic and religious diversity of our contemporary social habitats.

But when a system of quotas was proposed and eventually adopted, unease began to set in. Was this not asking the law to do what only the gospel could accomplish? I posed this question sharply at the second of two Call to Faithfulness conferences in Northfield Minnesota in the early 1990s which I, as editor of Lutheran Forum, organized in collaboration with Jenson and Braaten’s journal, dialog, and Oliver Olson’s Lutheran Quarterly. Did not this reliance on legalism, moreover, exhibit a false consciousness in denial about our own denominational finitude, our actual history and our constituencies, which would spell real trouble in the future as these quotas were imposed upon real, howsoever flawed, existing church? Did this enthusiastic legalism not deflect attention away from the real scandal of Christian disunity and reinforce American denominationalism in a new guise? (“For the Church, Against the Quotas," Lutheran Forum (November 1992: 26/4) 64-68).

In fact after 35 years of the ELCA, and despite unrelenting top-down effort, the needle has hardly moved in terms of diversity while the denomination has hemorrhaged members, declining from an original 5.3 million to about 2 million today. In these ensuing years what began as the fairly benign gospel of inclusiveness has morphed into the strategic racism of identity politics, which has not a little to do with the ELCA’s backdoor loss of its traditional constituency.

That ecclesiastical background is not off-topic. Perception of it is what brought Braaten and I together years ago at the Call to Faithfulness conferences. Braaten at this time became disgusted with the “new” church consequences at LSTC which in the environs of the University of Chicago had prided itself on being the think-tank academic seminary. The decline in scholarly standards, the wacky-left ideologies increasingly masquerading as cutting edge theology, declining enrollment and unsustainable finances, combined to trigger Braaten’s early resignation/retirement. He devoted the rest of his career to the ecumenical theology project of the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology.

His contributions to the tradition of theology stemming from Luther remain significant. He connected Christological dogma with a dynamic new missiology. He had done his doctoral work on Martin Kāhler’s rebuttal of the 19th century quest for the so-called historical Jesus, which basically he endorsed with the Pannenbergian twist that affirmations about the Jesus of history as an eschatological prophet making a claim to authority remain integral to Christology. This marked a significant departure from the neo-docetism of Rudolph Bultmann which prevailed especially in Lutheran circles at the time. I suspect Braaten would have been pleased with the recent evolution of so-called “Spirit Christology.” The emphasize on the integral role of the Holy Spirit in the humanity of Jesus refocuses understanding of the deity of Jesus away from abstract ideas of God-in-general somehow also being (an equally generic) human to the specific relationship of the Jew Jesus as Son to his heavenly Father, the God of Israel. The Spirit’s agency in Christology, moreover, provides the missing link in understanding the rise of early Christian Trinitarianism.

Given Braaten’s embrace of the eschatological proclamation of the imminent kingdom of God in the ministry of Jesus, is not surprising that in his missiology he expanded the notion of salvation from the rescue of lost souls to the holistic redemption of the creation. Politically, Braaten was in fact a lifelong socialist, but this didn’t prevent him from friendship and even alliances with political conservatives. What he cared about was the Christian authenticity of the churches, let the political chips fall as they may.

In his final years he lamented that “his name was mud” in ELCA circles because of his outspoken opposition to church blessing of same-sex unions. How quaint that seems today, however, when sexual revisionism has long since moved on to the rejection of biological heterosexuality as normative, inching towards the churchly embrace of polyamorism.

But Carl was a happy warrior and in that I have tried to emulate this mentor and my friend. He rests in peace to rise in glory.

Coming soon: Theological Ramblings

As the Spirit moves, occasional theological interventions on developments in theology, church and society, politics and culture, books worth discussing, and whatever else. Coming in Fall 2023.