About two months ago someone sent me this article I had written in late 2005 and that was subsequently published on the WordAlone website in January of 2006. The article talks about the need of a Lutheran House of Studies. What is interesting about the article is the degree of continuity we have been able to achieve from the initial diagnosis of the problems to the establishment of the Institute of Lutheran Theology. I submit it to readers of this blog who perhaps have never seen it. Frankly, I had forgotten I had written it.
_______________________
A wise person once said that wisdom is the gift of
understanding the obvious. I have talked with many Lutherans who are concerned
about the future of theological education in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America. Congregations sense that newly ordained pastors often think quite
differently than those joining the clergy rosters 40 years ago. But granting
this is so, why is it so? What understanding of this problem is available to
us?
I recall three recent conversations that exemplify the
problem.
In the first, a woman was talking to me about the sexuality
issue confronting the ELCA, "How can my pastor be for allowing someone
engaged in homosexual behavior to be a pastor? Doesn't it say in the Bible that
we aren't supposed to do that, and hasn't Christianity always taught
that?" I remember trying to explain to her how it had come about that
Bible and tradition were no longer thought to clearly decide the issue. She was
not impressed with my reply.
In another conversation a man said to me, "Why is
everyone coming out of the seminary these days so politically correct? It seems
like they care more about fixing society than they do about preaching the
faith." When I told him about the justice perspective of the prophetic
Biblical faith, he responded, "I am not against talking some politics in
church, I just want to make sure we also talk about church in church, because
we don't talk about that anywhere else."
Finally, I recall the words of an older gentleman who
remarked, "When I was young, the pastor definitely had authority in our
congregation. It was not just his word against ours. But when pastors get all
agitated about stuff they don't know about—our last pastor was convinced that
large, multi-national agribusiness was the work of the devil—then it makes us
think they maybe don't know as much about what we are paying them to know
about." I didn't know what to say to that because I remembered my own
synod's passing a resolution directed against Cargill even though members of
the economics faculty at our state university claimed those voting hadn't a
clue as to what they were voting about.
The three conversations clearly display the problem. As a
church what is our authority? If it is no longer Scripture and tradition, then
what is it? As a church what is the focus of our message? If it is not the
crucified Christ, then what is it? As a church what is our competence? If it is
not the proclamation of the revealed Word into the concrete situation, then
what is it?
It is obvious that things have changed in Lutheran
theological education in America. Precisely what have changed, I think, are the
teachable assumptions about authority, message and competence. Underlying these
is an even more fundamental presupposition that confessional theological
statements cannot be true—at least not in the way we had previously believed.
WordAlone, along with many other Lutheran reform movements,
perceives that the classical loci of the Lutheran tradition have been
de-emphasized within ELCA seminaries over the past 40 years. The following are
my speculations as to why it is that we find ourselves in the current
situation. Hopefully, there will be some gift of wisdom in my attempt to
understand what, to many, is obvious.
One cause of the problem is economic. We must recognize that
ELCA funding for its seminaries is much lower than the funding of the previous
Lutheran bodies towards their seminaries. This change in economic policy has
had tremendous repercussions. In order to survive and prosper, the seminaries
have had to become more autonomous in their self-understanding than previously
had been so, and they have thus had to offer curricula that can appeal to a
broad range of students seeking theological education. As the de facto mission
of the seminaries changed from the "in house" task of preparing
Lutheran students for Lutheran ministry to the more general task of providing
academic theological education to a broader constituency, the explicitly
confessional nature of theological education was accordingly de-emphasized. (I
am not claiming that anyone set out intending to do this.) The result has been
that the ethos of Lutheran identity and confession no longer prevails in the
student body of the seminaries. Many students today neither know the Lutheran
tradition nor wish to adopt and advocate for it. This state of affairs is
simply an unarguable fact about our current context and the economic realities
that underlie it.
Secondly, the decline in teaching classical Lutheran
theology is attributable in part to a change in the theological direction of
ELCA leadership and significant numbers of the ELCA rank-and-file.
We live in a time in which the "truth-conditions"
for theological language are routinely considered to be problematic. In an age
of cultural relativism that often breeds ethical relativism, there is a
profound awareness of the multiplicity of religious options and a sincere
desire on the part of many not to be ethnocentric with respect to their own
fundamental beliefs and world views. This awareness has tended to conflict with
the prima facie particularity of Christian confession. While in previous times
one could say "confessional proposition x is true because the state of
affairs denoted by x obtains external to human awareness, perception,
conception and language," this option seems to many today to be
provincial, parochial, naïve and misguided. How can one's own confessions be
true in this way without saying at the same time that everyone else's are
wrong?
The result of this has been a general movement away from
understanding confessional assertions realistically, and instead understanding
them as mere expressions of one's own cultural values. Thus, a
"theological irrealism" has taken up residency within the ELCA. Of course,
to claim that such an irrealism is the only alternative to the robust realism
of earlier generations is itself to commit the fallacy of false dichotomy. The
denial of one simply does not entail the truth of the other, even though it may
often seem that way to people in the pews. (The problem bequeathed by the
Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant was to try to give theological language
truth-conditions without having to understand them realistically. The next 150
years of theological development tried to grant objectivity to theological
propositions without making them about metaphysical objects. The problem today
is that there has been a general loss of confidence in this entire project.
Objectivity itself has become subjectivized, and normativity is customarily
regarded as an expression of the self embedded in its immediate cultural
context.)
Thirdly, with the loss of particular truth-conditions to
theological language, there has resurfaced in our time the problem of
authority.
While Lutherans once believed that Scripture itself could
adjudicate conflicting claims, contemporary Biblical scholarship assumes that
the sensus of Scripture is not easily located. Given the conflicting claims in
Biblical scholarship about the real meaning of particular texts, a retreat to
the letter and authority of the confessional documents has also seemed
wrongheaded. Moreover, the real meanings of these documents are themselves open
for scholarly debate. Given this present vacuum of authority, it is small
wonder that voices have emerged urging a ratcheting up of the authority of the
Church. When Scripture and Confession can no longer function to grant authority
to the particularity of Lutheran theological affirmations, then something else
is requisite, and that hoped for "something else" is identified by
many as "the Church."
The paradox of the present ELCA participation in the
ecumenical movement is this: Lutheranism began in the particularity of its
theological affirmations over and against Catholic, Reformed and Anabaptist
theology. Now, the ELCA is putatively, or supposedly, to "get over"
these particularist affirmations in order to find unity with others within the
Church catholic. Those holding to the particularity of these former
affirmations are understood by many as undermining the unity of the Church. In
a time when form prevails over substance, unity smells sweeter than truth.
There is a final point worth mentioning. There has been a
widespread attenuation, or lessening, of emphasis on the scandal of the Cross
in favor of a preoccupation with social justice issues.
The reason for this is not difficult to ascertain. Citizens
of America generally embrace the traditional American values of individual
rights and dignities. Advocating for social justice and individual dignity,
while part of the Biblical prophetic tradition, is thus clearly consonant with
the prevailing ethos of American culture. To speak for peace and justice is to
state the deepest and noblest values of our civilization. But proclaiming the foolishness
of the Cross is irreducibly counter-cultural. Advocating an ultimate
eschatological, or end times, empowerment before God that does not entail
immediate temporal empowerment is a position that has been, and will continue
to be, criticized by enlightened, cultured despisers of religion. But
Lutheranism must always find its center in the second article of the creeds,
the scandal of the Cross.
The WordAlone Network's House of Studies project wishes to
establish a structure for theological education that assumes the following:
- The authority of Scripture and Confessions
- The centrality of the scandal of the Cross
- The truth and particularity of traditional Lutheran affirmations
- The notion that the Church is primarily the hidden gathering of the faithful and not a visible means of divine grace
- The value of theological competence and student mastery of Scripture and other primary texts of the Lutheran theological tradition
______________
The Institute of Lutheran Theology, consisting in its graduate school called the Christ School of Theology and its various lay programming, is the fruition of what in 2006 was called a "House of Studies." It exists to perpetuate the teaching of good Lutheran theology to those of any tradition called to preach and teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. While we are now are getting clarity on the hardware, the software has never been in doubt.
No comments:
Post a Comment