Cross-Pressuring within the Congregation

Something extraordinary still happens our time, a time characterized by an intellectual and cultural horizon that seems inimical to its occurrence. All throughout North America, people still draw together into communities to worship a god who putatively creates and sustains the entire universe. This gathering together does not happen in the numbers it did in the 1950s and 1960s, but it still does occur. On any given Sunday morning millions of people are in worship.  

Charles Taylor, in his magisterial A Secular Age, adroitly interprets the cultural and intellectual horizon of our time with its attendant social imaginaries. His major question in the book is this: How is it that in the sixteenth century not believing in God was generally unthinkable, while believing today is very difficult, even for those professing such belief? What has happened? 

His answer to this is actually quite complicated, and I won't summarize it here, except to say that Taylor is no fan of subtraction theories, a view that conceives humans as being largely able to know the world in which they live and how to act within that world. Subtraction theory claims that human beings have largely not achieved their potential as responsible epistemic and moral agents because they have inter alia lost themselves in religion and have, accordingly, not developed the potential that they have had all along. According to subtraction theory, secularization is a good thing because as religion wanes, human beings are increasingly fulfilling the dream of the Enlightenment: Aude sapere ("dare to know").  It is a captivating view: we humans can finally turn away from the superstitions of the past and attain genuine positive knowledge of things.  

Taylor claims that in the North Atlantic countries (North America and Europe), secularization tends to bring with it either a closed "take" or "spin" on the universe and our place within it. A spin or take is closed when it accepts a naturalism that excludes traditional views of the transcendent; when it holds that there is nothing that "goes beyond" the immanence of this world. He distinguishes a closed "spin" from a closed "take", pointing out that while people adopting a closed take hold that rejection of traditional transcendence might be reasonable, but that it is not wholly irrational to hold otherwise, those in a closed spin assert that holding to traditional transcendence is completely irrational, and thus one's rejection of a closed view is either due to the mendacity or the irrationality of the one doing the rejecting. 

Much of the intelligentsia, argues Taylor, simply assumes a closed spin on things. Scientific theory gives us the best causal map of the universe and such theory makes no appeal to supernatural forces of gods. In the cities, the young often understand their human sojourn in this way: 

• Human beings are the products of a long evolutionary process beginning with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago.  
• The universe came into being in an explosion from a infinitely dense point that had no magnitude. 
• The subsequent history of the universe is due to natural events and processes developing as they did out of earlier conditions of the universe. There is no supernatural agency involved in the origin and development of the universe. 
• Explanations why there was an infinitely dense point at the beginning that subsequently exploded are mostly not something that science can rightfully provide, although theories of quantum cosmology recently sketched suggest the prior existence of a multi-verse of which the particular development of our universe is one possible actualized trajectory. There is yet not a theory of why there was at the beginning a multi-verse. 
• Why deterministic processes propel the universe forward into concrete actualization, there are throughout these processes the presence of "far from equilibrium" situations that allow for the introduction of novelty. Thus, the history of the universe, while basically deterministic, has some elements of chance within it. 
• Since human life is a natural product of the natural life of the universe, it must be understood naturalistically. 
• Understanding human life naturalistically means that complicated features of human life, e.g., intentionality, reason, etc., must be understood in natural ways: What are the natural processes that drive forward the development of our species? 
• Neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has wide acceptance as providing some explanation for why our species developed as it did: Genetic features are passed down from generation to generation, and the natural characteristics of the environment in which genetic mutation happens limits or excludes the development of some genetic variations while helping the development of other genetic variations.
• Accordingly, neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory makes no appeal to purpose or teleology, for the particular genetic variations that survive for later genetic variation are clearly caused by natural features of the environment. There is thus no pull (final causality) in neo-Darwinian genetic theory, only pushes (efficient causality). 
• Since human beings are natural products of natural processes, understanding them profoundly requires the casting of natural scientific theories, e.g., human characteristics like reason, love, empathy, etc., must be explained naturalistically.  
• To understand humans naturalistically, is to understand them in ways quite different from traditional great chain of being understandings. According to the great chain of being, human beings are created lower than the angels and higher than the beasts, and thus to understand what it is to be human is to look both above and below us: What are those features of human existence that clearly fall under the category of the imago dei, and what features are due to the fall into nature and flesh of those beings initially created in the imago dei?  
• Since human beings are fully natural beings developing as they have through natural processes since the beginning of the universe, the true key to understanding their existence is found by looking below ourselves and not above ourselves, e.g., what can the sexuality of orangutans teach us about our own sexuality? 
• Trying to look above ourselves for clues to our nature is the practice of idealism, and proceeding in this way is find putative answers in our own projections. While natural science can give us insight into our causal natures, traditional religion and philosophy obviates this causal nature by appeal to non-natural or supernatural processes and entities. In the words of Feuerbach, God did not create human beings, human beings created God. 
• Since we are natural beings, our sexuality should be understood along the lines of other natural beings, and our reason and communication should be understood in the way of other natural beings. Human beings do have a capacity to reason, communicate, and form sexual alliances, but these are not causa sui. Rather, it is a matter of degree, and not ultimate of kind, that separates our experience from that of the other higher primates. 
• The young living in vast urban areas who understand themselves naturalistically have, accordingly, very little motivation to either adopt religion or be open to it. Religious belief, they think rather confidently, does not track with our actual knowledge of the natural world in which we believe. It is thus a backward-looking movement motivated by wish and not knowledge. Religious people, they think, need a crutch to live in this naturalist world that is all around us. Thus, they think, religious people project views of the gods and pray their wishes to their gods. 
• The religious person is thus maladapted to the actual existing world. They don't have the courage to live in the actual world, and thus project upon the actual world a religious worldview that makes living easier. Religious people are thus more cowardly than those understanding themselves naturalistically, but also more dangerous, because in ignoring the causalities of the natural world and embracing superstition, those who could have been helped by the knowledge of natural processes are now not treated properly. Death that might have been avoided, now befalls the befuddled religious believer or those unlucky enough to take their advice and counsel. 
• Given that there is no God who cares or no ultimate metaphysics in which meaning and purpose are ingredient, human beings must simply create their own meaning in the limited days they have to live. 
• Since there are no objective structures corresponding to the good, the beautiful, and the true, human beings are free to develop in the ways that they might find pleasurable and useful. This does not mean that they act irrationally, but rather that they must assume the mantle of having to be their own law-givers. Reality does not come with moral structures. They must be sown and cultivated by human beings, and harvested only if the present situation is illuminated by them. 

I could continue with a description of what seems plausible to the urban young. It is important to see all of this under the category of a closed spin. To many of our urban youth, what I have sketched above is simply settled. Just as it is true that the earth revolves around the sun, so is it true that human beings are natural beings who must develop their science, societies and families ultimately without appeal to heavenly beings. To give up on what I have articulated is, for them, to descend into irrationality. There simply is no other option for them not to believe this. There is a new social imaginary at work, a communal way of seeing that can imagine a fulfilling life without gods, prayers, divine laws, or even transcendence itself. While earlier generations hoped for life out beyond our physical deaths, this new way of imagining existence is one where death is not a problem. In fact, death is part of the circle of life, and this circle of life can be understood naturalistically. 

people participating in congregational life in the North Atlantic countries today are sons and daughters of their age. While they may be attending Christian congregations, their intellectual and cultural ethos is likely one wherein naturalism makes sense. They have learned from their teachers about the difference between facts and values, and they believe that natural science somehow is concerned with the facts, while perhaps their religion deals with the values of those whom are at some level aware of these facts. People in Christian congregations today in the North Atlantic countries are thus decidedly cross-pressured. They participate in Christian life, even though their deepest understanding of the world provides little rational justification for that participation. 

Preaching to men and women today must take into account the cross-pressuring felt by those in the pews. While their participation in congregational life probably points to them not holding a closed spin, such a participation is entirely congruent with them assuming a closed take. While it seems like materialism or physicalism is true, there are some features of our experience that does not fit a closed spin on the universe. Perhaps it is because of these features that certain people become congregational members. Maybe they sense that the naturalism that they ought to believe is inadequate to their experience in its totality. 

Most of the time we leading Christian congregations underestimate, I think, the cross-pressuring that our members are likely experiencing. Yes, clearly many are waiting to hear the saving Word proclaimed in the sermon and celebrated in the sacrament. But in their desire to hear that Word, they remain deeply conflicted. As twenty-first century men and women, they cannot easily affirm the views of their sixteenth century ancestors. The naturalism everywhere regnant today was not known to Luther and his contemporaries. Luther had the advantage of having a metaphysical view of things that was consonant with his theological accents and innovations. 

But this is not the case today. Contemporary Lutherans who wish to retain Luther's theology must now do so in a culture whose dominant social imaginaries reject the metaphysical underpinnings Luther simply presupposed. So how does Lutheran theology play now in congregations whose members have little understanding of how God could truly be possible and relevant? It is to this question that we shall turn in the next post. 

The Contemporary Ethos in which Congregational Life Happens: The Problem of God

We have in the last two posts been reflecting about congregational life in North America.  In the post entitled Putting the Focus Back on Congregations, I spoke of the early days of the WordAlone Network, an effort in the first decade of the twenty-first century to return the Evangelical Lutheran Church to its theological roots. I claimed that WordAlone was trying at the time to point out that Lutherans have traditionally maintained both that the Church is the Body of Christ and means of grace, and simultaneously that it is a group of particular sinners gathered around the Word and Altar.  I contended that our then critique of high church presuppositions that undergirded the Concordat and Called to Common Mission was warranted because the ELCA bureaucracy had assumed a non-dialectical understanding of Church, claiming that the baptized themselves in churchwide assembly could be identified with the activity of the Holy Spirit Itself. What was needed then was simply to say that the church is a body of very human sinners begging for morsels from the divine, that it was, accordingly, a very human institution fraught with errors, mistakes, and earthly pretensions.  

I also indicated in that first post that the WordAlone critique of a non-dialectical understanding of high church could not become the one and only ecclesiology of the Institute of Lutheran Theology, because Lutheran traditions have not been historically monolithic in their understanding of church or in all the fine points of their theology. I argued that the Institute of Lutheran Theology needed to be a place where Fordean-inspired gnesio-Lutherans, Evangelical Catholics, pietists, confessionalists and neo-confessionalists could all study their traditions, and come to fuller appreciation of the theological accents the differing Lutheran theological traditions possessed. 

At the conclusion of that first article, I spoke of what features a genuine Lutheran Center for Congregational Revitalization might have.  Accordingly, it would work to enter into formal and informal relationships with congregations to help in keeping pastors in pulpits, to aid in the funding of theological education, to explore new models of congregational ministry, and to help keep an active and creative normative Lutheran theology at work in congregations. 

In the second installment, Focussing on Congregations: Why the Decline?, I spoke about the eclipse of congregational life in North America as the congregation moved in many communities from the center of social activity and function to the periphery of community social life. I argued that while it might be tempting to say that it is a good thing to clarify what the mission of congregations really ought to be by pointing to the merely accidental nature of social life within the congregation, it is nonetheless important to understand what has been lost as such accidental congregational social life diminishes. 

What is lost, I claimed, are the occasions to hear the Gospel of Jesus Christ preached, as it were, to ears that while mostly indifferent to the proclamation, are nonetheless still in the pews to hear the proclamation. In the parable, the son comes home to the father because he is hungry and out of funds. In the humiliation of this home-coming he experiences a love that wholly transcends the situation; he experiences a prodigal love that does not return likes for likes, but by grace alone bestows more upon the son than he deserves. Congregational life for Lutherans is not the proper end of Christian life, but it is the very human social context into, and through which, the Word might speak and be heard. While God's love is every where apparent, His prodigal love perhaps is most clearly witnessed in congregational life, where sons and daughters indifferent to the Father are nonetheless loved, and despite their waywardness, counted as precious by that Father. 

So let us examine the congregational horizon more deeply. What are the assumptions of many who continue to participate in congregational life in North America? What do they imagine their life to be in this third decade of the 21st century? They attend services and have caring conversations with other congregational members. They might be motivated to engage in projects of the congregation that help the disadvantaged. Possibly, they speak even prophetic utterances to a society that has forgotten the marginalized, that too closely identifies Christian life with the life of the successful American citizen. What are the root assumptions of people in the pews these day in Lutheran congregations in North America? What do they think of God and His benevolence? What do they think about their need for God or salvation? If they are to be somehow saved by hearing and doing the Word, in what does this salvation consist? 

It is important that we don't wear blinders here. I pointed out that NFS Grundtvig liked to say "human first, then Christian," and I paraphrased this in an earlier post, exclaiming that we are "sinners first, then Christian."  If we are going to get clarity into the actual intellectual and cultural horizon presupposed by congregational participants in North America in the third decade of the 21st century, we are going to have to be brutally honest.  What is the contour of that initial horizon in which Christian life grows and develops? 

There is no doubt that there are many within Lutheran congregations that have what might be called a pre-modern understanding of the world. Such people do not really find the existence of God a problem, nor are they much bothered intellectually by the Christian story: God created a universe that is good, that somehow features of this universe created good slipped into sin (the Fall) without God actively willing it, that all who have fallen into sin will ultimately perish eternally, and that God out of His infinite mercy will save some -- through the agency of His Son, Jesus the Christ -- who otherwise would eternally die, and that He thus turns their lives around as a witness to Himself rather than allowing them to remain in a ceaseless drive to their own sinful self-aggrandizements.  

However, for many people participating in Lutheran congregational life, this view of things simply does not ring true any longer. Why is this? For many today, thinking of God in this way is simply not any longer possible. The pre-modern understanding of the Christian story presupposes there is a creator God who either does not anticipate that creation will fall into sin, or, if He does anticipate it, He does not prevent it. The so-called irrational fall from creation into sin must either be understood as an unintended consequence of creation -- a state of affairs that makes God seem to be ignorant -- or a design feature of the universe itself -- a state of affairs that makes God seem less than good. The problem of the God of the tradition for many today is that He does not seemingly act as well as He ought. If we assume He knows what He is doing, we simply cannot help questioning why He does things as He does. 

Our questioning of the goodness of God is not confined to his creation of a universe that falls into sin and death, but it also extends to God's way of redeeming things. We Lutherans who claim that "I by my own reason or strength cannot believe in the Lord Jesus Christ or come to Him," must admit that the saving of contemporary man and woman is something that God does, not something that humans accomplish. But this saving seems to many today to be arbitrary and capricious. While somebody might say with confidence and sincerity that "God saved me despite myself," this cannot be generalized by most to statements about God's general saving of humankind, a wholly external saving in which humans might be along for the ride, but are never in the situation of doing any driving on their own. Making such general statements seems to contradict the very goodness of God in Himself. 

I submit that this view of things simply does not operate for most educated people today in the North Atlantic countries. Whether they are aware of it or not, they have swam too long in the cultural waters of the west to return to the pristine pre-modern view of the 16th and 17th century Lutheran theological tradition.  For most today, there is some sense that there is a God and some sense that in congregational life perhaps some kind of connection to this God is possible. But the God presupposed in the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon is not the God of the Christian tradition. What might be the marks of this other God? 

There is a general sense, I think, among most educated participants in congregational life that some deep facets of our experience are simply missed or ignored if we look at reality as a product of an evolutionary physicalism. Physicalism is the claim that ultimately the things that exist are those things that our fundamental theories of particle physics quantify over, or presuppose. The idea is that matter/energy is that which is, and this matter/energy has an extraordinary evolutionary history, a history that finally eventuates in the appearance of human beings on the earth, beings of such an extraordinary complexity that one most posit that it took billions of years for purely adventitious processes to produce them. Those who participate in congregational life, while maybe not self-consciously breaking with the assumptions of evolutionary physicalism, yet sense somehow that there must be more than it somehow.  This is not to say, that all would claim that there exist some deeper-level objective state of affairs by and through which the universe physically evolved. Perhaps they would say that such a view of things in not subjectively satisfying and claim that participating in congregational life somehow serves the heart if not the head.  

What I am suggesting is that active members of congregations today might say that while there is not sufficient evidence in the world to assert God's existence in an unqualified way, there is too much evidence to assert His nonexistence with confidence. Thus, while the contemporary congregational member is no longer sure of the Christian verities of the past, he or she is nonetheless a bit skeptical about contemporary claims of scientific or metaphysical materialists that the universe is as simple as they claim it to be. Having not enough evidence for the traditional Christian God, but too much evidence to be confident that the skies are empty, the contemporary participant in congregational life is exploring those non-cognitive features of experience that make life meaningful, an exploration that they sense can somehow be pursued without denying the central claims of science or the so-called scientific view of the world.  

There is much that can be said about whether the scientific view of things is an objective fact or merely an ideological commitment, and I will argue in a subsequent post that it is more like the latter than the former.  For now, however, I want to return to the question of God. Perhaps there is some "more-than-ness" to the universe to which participants in congregational life witness. How do we think this? Can this be thought about in the way of the God of the Christian tradition or does the problem of evil block that path?  At the end of the day, I agree with Charles Taylor in his epic, The Secular Age. Belief in the Christian God has diminished not primarily because of scientific challenges to religion, but more because of the human moral judgment of God. How can the God of the great Omnis -- omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, omnibenevolence, etc. -- act as the God of the tradition has reportedly acted?  While scientific evidence against God might count in the actual world, the problem of evil applied to God obtains in each and every possible world.  

We must be brutally honest today. In our teaching and preaching we encounter the default presuppositions of our contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon, the chief problematic one being the very goodness of God Himself. The question we ask is simply this: How is the goodness of God possible given the classical Christian story and our understanding of how God acts sub specie contritio? 

Any attempt to revitalize congregational life must wrestle with the presuppositions of that life, the first of which is the nature of God Himself.  As we try to understand congregational life today we must grasp the changed situation with respect to that life that has occurred in the last 500 years: Whereas people five-hundred years ago generally did not subject God's goodness to their moral judgment, they do so today, and it is not considered by most to be deeply sinful to do so. We shall return to this question in the next post, while introducing another assumption of our time: the general misunderstanding of scientific theory by most educated congregational participants.  

Focusing on Congregations: Why the Decline?

We all know that congregational life is dying. These are hard words for preachers or would-be preachers to hear, but they must be heard nonetheless. This is particularly true of Lutheran congregations in North America. It is factually accurate to assert that, for most Lutheran congregations, their days of maximum involvement and maximum relevance to their communities was sixty or more years ago. This is not to say that some Lutheran congregations have formed in the last few decades and have been quite successful. It is only to speak the obvious: In most communities in which there are Lutheran churches, there is less attendance in worship and fewer events happening at the church than was once the case. 

We can speculate as to the immediate causes of this. Clearly, school systems and sports programs do not respect the autonomy of congregational programming like they once did. We know that soccer fields on Sunday morning are filled with kids who believe they must be at the soccer field and whose grandparents recall that when they were young the expectations of being in church on a Sunday morning were as great as the coach's expectations now that the kids are on the field for practice or games. 

We can also easily point out that the local congregation once served as a place to meet neighbors and friends during an otherwise busy week. Farm life was difficult 100 years ago, and the idea that once could see friends or neighbors at church and coffee or lunch afterwards was a powerful draw for church attendance. Accordingly, the congregation once served a social function it no longer has. It is perhaps difficult for us to grasp clearly how important this social function was. At a time before the worldwide web and cellphones, there was little community outside physical community. Moreover, 100 years ago it was difficult sometimes for adults even to have physical community. Where would they go in small towns across America to meet others and talk with them about their dreams and fears? Families did not go to bars to meet others in 1924; they went to church. Their friends belonged to their congregation or another one in town, and there was sometimes visits of friends to other congregations. 

It is possible, I suppose, to say that the loss of the congregation as a center for social life is a good thing because it allows us to see clearly what it is that the congregation actually offers and has always legitimately offered. We could speak in the way of Aristotle and say that while the congregation as a center of social life is merely accidental to the being of the congregation, its function of proclaiming the Word is essential to it. The word 'accidental' simply means that the congregation can still be what it is apart from its social function; the word 'essential' claims that it is part of the very being of a congregation that it proclaim the Word of God to those who sit in its pews. 

Some thus welcome today the clarity that the loss of social function in congregations bequeaths. It is clear now, in a way that was not the case before, that the congregation exists to do something else, something quite unconnected to filling one's social calendar: The congregation exists as a place where the Word is preached to sinners, and where these sinners gather around the communion rail to eat and drink the Body and Blood of that Word incarnate, the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ. 

I think this way of looking at things does not, however, pay adequate attention to human motivation. The son did not come home to the father because he repented, but because he spent all his money and could no longer party or even eat properly. The Father welcomed the son knowing that the son's motivations were not pure. While the Danish theologian NFS Grundtvig never tired of reminding us that we are human first and then Christian, something quite controversial in its time, I can paraphrase Grundtvig with confidence and say that we are sinners first and then Christian. Accordingly, there are all kinds of motivations why we might want to go to church on a Sunday morning, and very few of them are pure. We go to church to be seen by others, to make business contacts, to do the right thing for our children, to show solidarity with our community, to show others that we are good people who care about the community, to show our spouses that we can do what they want us to do, to display to others our new car or clothes, or to manifest clearly that we are not on the side of soccer programs on Sunday morning. The list goes on and on, and has from the first days of congregational life gone on and on. Who truly can say with confidence that their only motivation for attending church is properly to worship their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and that they have no other motivation at all other than hearing the Word?  

Congregation life in North America tacitly accepted what was obvious: People participated in the life of the congregation for many reasons, only some of which had to do with what theologians call soteriology, those matters pertaining to salvation. They came to show their new hats, but perhaps heard what Jesus said about humility. They came to connect with potential insurance clients and heard that God's grace extends even to the unlovable.  In other words, the congregation was structured the way we are structured. We are sinful and unclean and cannot free ourselves because we ourselves always get in the way of what it would be to move past ourselves. We are self-centered even in our humility. Accordingly, we know that only God's external act of grasping us can protect us from our perpetual grasp of ourselves. Christ draws us to Himself through our activity of avoiding Him and embracing ourselves. Christ chooses us; we don't choose Him. When we say we have chosen Him, we can be sure that we have chosen someone or something that is not Him.  

The same is the case within congregations. In the days of congregational social activity that often seemed far away from theological concerns, Christ showed up to claim His own while watching his own run from him in the many ways that fully social beings can. Robust congregations of yore were not filled with Christians of deeper commitments to Christ, but with more people that might hear the Word and be grasped by it. What congregations of 100 years ago had that we don't is people. Whatever the motivation might have been, there were more people in the pews to whom the Word was being preached then than there is now. That is the problem facing us, and no amount of getting clear on the "true motivations" of those now attending services will help us. Human beings run away from God; it is our wont. God through Christ turns some of our retreats around so that we might be put in a position of hearing the Word. The problem for us today is that since there are fewer people participating in congregational life, there are fewer opportunities for people to hear the Word.

So we are back where we began. As congregational life abates in North America, the chances for people to hear the life-giving Word preached in its purity and the life-giving Sacraments to be administered properly decreases. What is requisite, I believe, is to advance a program of actual congregational revitalization. Even though the death of Christendom is upon us and there no longer is the cultural momentum generally to begin or maintain Christian structures and institutions in our society, there still exist sinners who need a life-giving encounter with the Word. Congregational revitalization means that we want to build active congregations in multiple communities that maximize the possibility of encountering the Word.  

What is needed is to get clarity on what ILT qua ILT can do to help congregations be those places of possible Word encounter. We need clarity on what specific activities we might do to move congregational life forward. 

While I have no empirical studies to point to in support of this claim, I do believe that a change in our social imaginaries is making the very idea of congregational life less attractive to many.  Charles Taylor in his epic A Secular Age speaks of these imaginaries, ways that people within a community and society project as possible ways of living fully. Once upon a time in America people assumed that there was a God and that human salvation involved an embrace of transcendence, some state of being that goes beyond this life. Most often, they believed in an afterlife, and thought that their loved ones entered such an afterlife immediately upon death. But the social imaginaries of a benevolent God and future bliss beyond death no longer inform our institutional structures and, increasingly, our primary communities. I would argue that the primary impediment to congregational revitalization is not that other institutions (e.g., the schools or sports programs) are crowding out congregational life, but that participating in the life of a congregation simply makes less and less sense to people. 

It is difficult to play baseball without bats, gloves ands bases. I contend that, in the same fashion, it is difficult to participate in congregational life when the social imaginaries of a benevolent God and future bliss are absent. How does one play the game of congregational life when the very presuppositions of that game have been fundamentally shaken? This is the primary question of congregational revitalization, and it is one that I think ILT can address. In our next post we shall have more to say about the precise nature of this address, but for now I simply want to point in the general direction of that address: Our present social imaginaries are in considerable tension with some of the deepest drives of the human spirit. What is needed now is simply to subject these social imaginaries to an interrogation by that spirit. 

Putting the Focus Back Upon Congregations

The Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) has embarked on a new venture called the Center for Congregational Revitalization (C CR). In some ways, of course, there is nothing new at all about ILT being concerned about congregational revitalization. Back in 2001-1008, I was a member of the WordAlone Network (WAN) Board of Directors, and we were deeply concerned about congregational revitalization.  In fact, one could argue that ILT was formed directly to deal with problems within congregations, because we were in those days very interested in theology, especially the "working theology" of denominational structures like the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).  

Many reading this blog probably recall these days prior to the epic collapse of the ELCA as a relevant and important denominational body in North America. Many of us wrote extensively for WordAlone. The WordAlone Network was formed, one might argue, to save the ELCA from itself. What we did was try to lift up again some of the important features of traditional Lutheran piety and practice in North America. 

The ELCA in those days was becoming more and more convinced that the transcongregational denominational entity to which individual Lutheran congregations belonged was itself the church, e.g., the then ELCA Secretary Lowell Almen famously quipped that this entity is the Church and that the congregation is "an outpost of the church." I argued that what needed to be lifted up in that time was that the church for Lutherans had historically been interpreted both in a high and low sense. While high ecclesiology emphasized the role of the Church as the means of grace, and spoke strongly of the identity of the church with the Body of Christ -- the Church in its divine nature --, low ecclesiology emphasized the Church as a fellowship of sinners gathered around the communion rail and accordingly thematized the human nature of the institution. What was needed at a time when the divine nature of the Church was being proclaimed was a reminder of the human nature of that selfsame Church: We are all simply sinners begging at the communion rail for the Word in Body and Blood delivered to each of us.  

Clearly, the Concordat and Called to Common Mission that sought a common understanding between the Episcopal Church USA and the ELCA of the historic episcopate were documents that presupposed a very high ecclesiology. Just as the Law must be preached in a context of complacency and the Gospel in a context of despair, so must the church be reminded of its very human nature when it is tempted to think that the Holy Spirit itself speaks through the votes of the baptized at a churchwide gathering.

But we within WordAlone were often misunderstood. Instead of understanding the criticism of high ecclesiology dialectically, people believed that low ecclesiology was the position of WordAlone and its minions itself. People thought that the WordAlone critique of high ecclesiology meant that we were non-dialectically committed to a low ecclesiology, and that, accordingly, we could not confess that the Church was the Body of Christ and itself the means of grace.  

But I could confess this and did on many occasions.  Accordingly, some people were upset that from the beginning I not only allowed but encouraged people from traditions other than a Fordean-style radical Lutheranism -- the genesio position -- to teach and study at ILT.  I reasoned that if ILT were to be true to is Lutheran roots, it must allow other Lutheran traditions to be present as well, e.g., Evangelical Catholics, pietists, neo-confessionalists, Grundtvigians, etc.  In fact, I thought ILT could not be deeply Lutheran if it were to choose one strand of Lutheranism and proceed as if the other strands were simply misunderstandings or mistakes with respect to that one true tradition. After all, Lutheran congregations in North America are not monolithic in their theological ethos. Thus, to serve actual existing congregations, ILT had to be a bigger tent. If ILT were to be the seminary of a group of committed congregations, it needed to be able to understand the ethos of those congregations, acknowledge their theological ethos as Lutheran in its roots, and actually help those congregations to be faithful and effective in the proclamation of the Word.  

We have traveled a great distance at the Institute of Lutheran Theology in the last 17 years. We now have over 160 active students and strong DMin. and PhD programs. We have had accreditation from the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) since 2018 and are having our accreditation visit from the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) in March 2024. We continue to gain respect as a theological institution, and our faculty is acknowledged as first-rate. As a school we have never been stronger. 

But I think that we are missing something, something that was present at the beginning. While we teach undergraduates, STM, DMin and PHD students well and see increasing numbers from these groups every year, we notice there is one key group of students where we are not seeing stellar growth: ministry students! Yes, you heard me correctly. While ILT is growing in its academic programs -- particularly its academic graduate programs -- it is underperforming on that for which it was called into being: getting faithful and effective pastors into congregations. This we must do better!  

But there is actually a very good excuse for not doing this. Everywhere in the North Atlantic countries we see lower numbers of people studying to become pastors. The reasons why this is so are apparent: Pastors no longer enjoy the respect of American society in general and they are poorly recompensed. Why would anyone want to be a pastor when they could do something that our society could value and understand? While we can excuse our performance in growing ministry students by pointing to the fact that pastors are under-compensated and under-appreciated, making an excuse does not solve the problem. We simply must work to get more people into congregational pulpits. 

Congregations in North America are increasingly aware of the difficulties in finding pastors. There are, or will soon be, extreme pastoral shortages in most all of the Lutheran denominations in the United States and Canada. Rural congregations are immediately affected, for their very survival is often at stake. If a rural congregation cannot find somebody to fill the pulpit, it likely will not able to remain open.  Closing congregations has, however, devastating consequences not only for the religious life of those within those congregations, but also for the rural communities in which these congregations reside. Often, the last institutions to close in a rural community are the bar and the church.  

We at ILT remember our beginnings. We were called into being in order to get pastors into congregations, and thus advancing congregational life is within our very DNA. Accordingly, to be ILT is to care about congregations and their challenges and difficulties. It is with this in mind that we announce our new venture of congregational revitalization. The time is upon us. How does congregational revitalization work at ILT? 

• We enter into formal and informal arrangements directly with congregations, pledging that we shall help them in their search for pastors and that we shall do everything possible to help them keep pastors in pulpits. What we want to create is an ILT league of Lutheran congregations.  
• We create a funding mechanism to help support the educational costs associated with the training of pastors. We want to make it as easy as possible for those with a passion for congregational ministry to attain it. No serious student should be stopped merely because he or she has insufficient funding.  
• We work with congregations to develop new ways to deliver theological pastoral candidates into congregations. Clearly, for small rural congregations hoping to find somebody willing to serve them, the completion of a full M.Div degree may not be needed. We have since our inception worked to grant pastoral certificates to those lacking the time, opportunity or means to attain a full M.Div degree. 
• We work with successful pastors already in the field to create new educational programs and structures that can produce pastors on an ad hoc basis for the ad hoc and dynamic ministry situations that shall increasingly obtain. This means that we design M.Div, MM, and MCM degrees that prepares students deeply to face the kind of situations they will likely face.  
• We partner with donors who have a passion actually to change Lutheran congregational life in North America. While we know much of what must be done, we don't presently have the requisite resources to address those things necessary to ameliorate Lutheran congregational life. Committed donors can change what we do, but they need to see what can actually be done to improve the situation before they can donate deeply. 
• We put people in touch with each other to address the issue at hand. We act as a Lutheran clearing house for the normative task of delivering proper theology to congregations. We don't allow the ILT focus to stray from the congregational horizon. Lutheran theology is incarnation, not excarnational.  We can never be primarily concerned with the theological rectitude of abstract theological propositions, but rather with the incarnation of these principles in congregational life, i.e., in the lives of concrete men and women leading the Christian life within their communities.  

Much more needs to be envisioned and developed as we consider the creation of the ILT Center for Congregational Revitalization (CCR), but this will be the subject of many papers and articles that will be written and evaluated within CCR over the coming months and years. I want here simply to alert everybody that ILT is coming home to its congregations. We intend to focus on you and your needs. We want to be friends with you and we want to learn from you how we can do what we do better. Blessings!  

What does it mean to be the Christ School of Theology?

As many readers might know, the Institute of Lutheran Theology's seminary and graduate school is called the Christ School of Theology, and we are all about the accreditation of this institution. 

When checking our accreditation with the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) find us under The Institute of Lutheran Theology.  View our ABHE fact sheet here: https://app.weaveeducation.com/publicFiles/institutionprofilepdfs/Institute_of_Lutheran_Theology-ABHE_-_Association_for_Biblical_Higher_Education_Fact_Sheet.pdf.  We have been a full member of ABHE since initial accreditation in 2018.  We successfully achieved our first ten-year accreditation with ABHE at the 2023 February meeting of ABHE's Commission on Accreditation. 

When checking on us on the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) website, always look for Christ School of Theology. Christ School of Theology is the accreditable entity as for as ATS is concerned.  You can find us on the ATS website here: https://www.ats.edu/member-schools/christ-school-of-theology-of-the-institute-of-lutheran-theology.  While we have not been officially accredited by ATS's Commission on Accreditation yet, we are already Associate members of the ATS, and are engaged in many activities with them.  We are working hard to get our self-study complete this year, and anticipate an ATS visit in February of 2024.  

My thoughts in 2005-06 was that a new Lutheran House of Studies was needed that would serve all Lutherans -- especially ELCA Lutherans. This House of Studies, I argued, should be independent, autonomous and accredited, should assume the basic hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation on Scripture, and should be straightforwardly realist in its understanding of God and of theological language generally.  ILT, I thought, should be fully engaged with the question of truth, particularly the question of how to connect the truth of theology with the truths of the special sciences.   

ILT will begin its fifteenth year of offering classes in the fall of 2023 and, I must say, we are moving forward nicely. I always knew that ILT could produce pastors because we have from the beginning been blessed with great students and a renowned faculty. However, because we are not a LCMS, ELCA or Wisconsin Synod seminary, we don't have an already established market for students studying to be pastors. As our Wikepedia page says, we do prepare pastors for the Canadian Association of Lutheran Congregations, the Augsburg Lutheran Churches, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC) and the North American Lutheran Church (NALC).  We are happy to have such important work to do. 

However, other seminaries compete with us, particularly within the LCMC and the NALC.  While we believe we have the deepest program for students in these two church bodies, our program is quite traditional, with heavy doses of Biblical Theology, History of Theology, Systematic and Pastoral Theology.  It takes time to achieve an ILT education and not everybody wants to take the time, or perhaps has the time, to go through a program like ours. But I believe that our age demands more deeply prepared pastors than has perhaps been the case in the past.  Accordingly, we shall always serve these constituencies, and we shall always try to grow our ministry programs.  

To really effect change in the contour of Lutheran theology in North America, we would need to train perhaps 1,000 pastors over the next 10 years. 1,000 very well-educated pastor-theologians who would take very seriously the traditional truth claims of theology would likely alter the course of the church bodies we serve and the North American Lutheran traditions from which they were born.  ILT's Christ School of Theology will always take seriously the task of raising up the next generations of Lutheran pastors, and we hope to train 1,000 pastors -- though to do so in 10 years would demand that more markets become open to us. 

From the beginning, however, ILT has had another task, a task parallel to that of raising up the next generation of Lutheran pastors.  As I wrote already in 2007, we must raise up the next generations of Lutheran professors and teachers.  We must tend to our theological traditions theologically.  We need people involved in an effort that will issue in the making of a new class of theologians, theologians who know the the great Christian deeply as it has been understood by the Lutheran Confessions, people who have a profound grasp of the contemporary cultural and intellectual horizon and who can adroitly relate this tradition to the contemporary horizon.  

From the beginning we have created opportunities in ILT for advanced study, but now we are experiencing something at ILT we could maybe not have expected 17 years ago.  Although I knew that ILT must train future theologians, I did not realize in 2005-06, the degree to which God would bless our efforts at building a real theological institute.  

The last three years have shown very strong growth in our post-M.Div programming: the STM, the Doctor of Ministry, and especially the PhD.  People are seeking us out to study because they trust us to allow them to encounter the great texts of the tradition in creative and fruitful ways.  We don't tell the students that the great texts of the tradition must be avoided because they are not sufficiently sensitive to issues of class, sex, race, orientation, etc.  We are not deeply suspicious of the western canon as some are.  Paraphrasing Barth, we believe that we should take the presuppositions of that canon at least as seriously as our own.  Since we trust the tradition, we encourage our students to engage it deeply. 

What does ILT's Christ School want to be when it grows up?  While I cannot predict exactly what the Christ School will look like in fifty years, I do hope that I know what it will mean to be the Christ School then.  To be the Christ School of theology is to take very seriously the Holy Scriptures and the traditions of interpreting those Scriptures.  To take these Scriptures seriously means that this texts are not something of the past, but living and breathing documents of today, documents which engage us and open for us possibilities of our being. God's grace is, after all, something he dispenses each and every day, even as we living within the paradigms of the contemporary intellectual and cultural horizon.  Simply put, the documents confront us with the very question of salvation, the question that separates human beings from the beasts below them and the angels above, the question that will always remain orthogonal to the concerns of AI and the "machining of our culture."  

The Christ School of Theology is growing rapidly, particularly at the D.Min and PhD levels.  How big might we be next year?  If the trends I am seeing continue, we will have between 30-35 PhD students studying in the fall of 2023,  20-25 D.Min students, and 10-15 STM students.  This means that 60-75 of our students next fall will likely be doing advanced work in theology.  

We celebrate this! It is a God thing! The students are coming from almost all of the Lutheran traditions and beyond these traditions as well.  Our ATS headcount of 96 in the fall of 2022 could see another 15% increase next fall.  We are building the Christ School of Theology not by watering down who we are, but by embracing it the more deeply.  We are not a divinity school, but a flesh-and-blood Lutheran seminary dedicated to taking seriously Lutheran truth claims.  In a time in which seminaries are shrinking, ours is growing.  

I have been discussing here our seminary and graduate school and have not addressed our undergraduate school, Christ College. Nor have I talked about ILT's library and all of the publishing planned to flow from it.  These demand separate posts.  Here I have simply wanted to remind all what it means to be the Christ School of Theology.  We live the commitment to our heritage while at the same time being wholly vulnerable to our intellectual and cultural horizon.  This way of living is, we think, what the theology of the Cross is all about.  

ILT Commencement Address June 2022

It was an honor to offer the first commencement address for the Institute of Lutheran Theology's graduates from Christ School of Theology and Christ College on Thursday, June 16, 2022.  There were 14 students who walked last week.  Congratulations all!  

__________________________

Grace and peace to you in the Name of the Risen Lord! 

 

You made it!  Some of you made it just this last semester, and some semesters long ago.  Regardless of when you completed your programs, we are proud of you!  

 

We just completed the ILT Board Meeting this morning. We talked about operations, policies, budgets and the future.  And we talked about you!  You are so very important to us, and I want you to remember this throughout what I shall say today. 

 

This summer some of my PhD students are reading two very important books from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995): Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being.  Levinas in these texts does something bold and new. He claims, in fact, that most of the western intellectual tradition has simply missed what is completely obvious: There is much more to things than just our thinking about them, our categorizing, explaining and knowing of them. 

 

There is the Other, he argues, that which is truly not-I, but is irreducibly more than merely not being I. Levinas claims, in fact, that the Other is infinite; we can never think deeply enough or sense precisely enough to be able to grasp the Other as other than my grasping of it. We have an inexorable Desire for this Other, says Levinas. We want to escape our world and flee into it.   

 

This Other, declares Levinas, resists the Totality of the Same. It halts every effort to comprehend it. It confronts my life of freedom with demand.  I encounter the Other though the human Face. The Face and eyes of the Other place a demand upon me that limits the freedom of the world I have built and in which I dwell. According to Levinas, the Face of the Other is a trace of God. Accordingly, religion pertains to the irreducible, unbridgeable gap between my activity and my projects and the Face of the One whose meeting cannot be comprehended in and through my activity and my projects. 

 

The Other meets me as demand, but every fiber of my being wants to deny the pull of the Other and to make the Other into the Same, that is, into more of me. Accordingly, I who am drawn to the world of the Other, want a world without an Other, for I can dwell comfortably in such a world. I am quite at home in the sameness of my world until the Other’s nomadic sojourn, until this Stranger arrives. The Other announces itself to me in and through my discomfort. Now I, who am no longer at home, must have a face-to-face encounter with one who is not of my world. 

 

Levinas has a particular take on the philosophical notion of transcendence.  His teachers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger thought mightily on this topic. Husserl believed that the I transcends itself when it knows what is not it. Because consciousness is directed toward an object, conscious life is ecstatic.  To be conscious, to be self-conscious, is to be conscious of that which is not the self.  In Husserlian talk, every noetic act has noematic content, and all noematic content presuppose a noetic act.  

 

His student Heidegger too was concerned with transcendence.  Human being is that “being-there” which is being-always-already-in-a-world.  To be is to have a world in which to be.  Human existence for Heidegger is thus ecstatic.  To be is to be always already outside oneself. There is no bare identity to the self.  The self is the self in being other than a mere self. It is what it is in the world which it is not.  

 

Levinas thought that both Husserl and Heidegger were not bold enough in conceiving transcendence.  He argued that both philosophers ultimately tried to understand the Other on the basis of the same, and thus never really go to the Other at all. Instead Levinas opts for a real encounter with the Other, an Other that can be no part of the Same.  We live, dream, plan and execute in the Totality of the Same.  Our lives, dreams, plans and deeds are the deposits of our own freedom.  We are comfortable. Then comes the Other from a place outside the Same, an Other that pushes us beyond ourselves, beyond the boundaries of the Same. We transcend toward the Other.  

 

In the Face of the Other, in the vulnerability of his or her eyes, I am lifted beyond my own projects. I am no longer the one I seemingly inescapably am, no longer the one trapped in the freedom and comfort of my self-narrative. The Other grants me an ecstasis beyond being all I can be, beyond being who I authentically am, beyond being the one who in its being lives the possibility of no more being. The Other seizes me and all my dreams of self and Same are shattered.

 

So what does the relation between the Same and Other have to do with you who graduate from ILT?  Why have I started my commencement speaking by speaking in such a way? 

 

You have all been to graduations, and you know the drill. Graduation day is the day to talk about the graduates, their lives as students, their overcoming of adversity, their accomplishments, skills, dreams, and opportunities.  Graduation Day celebrates the student after years of emphasizing the professors.  Graduation day is pregnant with future possibilities.  

 

But the President of the Institute of Lutheran Theology cannot talk about you in this way. Why?

 

Because you are neither your possibilities nor your actualities. You are, in fact, not you. You are beings who in your being are ecstatically connected with something not of your world. Accordingly, you are beings who shall preach and teach without a career. You are beings who shall pray and serve in denial of searching for or finding yourselves.  You are beings who are not who you are, but are only in pushing beyond to what you are not.  

 

Let me make this clear. ILT has not prepared you to live fully, but rather to come and die. ILT has not offered you opportunities to get ahead in life, but has pushed you to the edge of life.  ILT has not given you courage to be yourself, but has robbed you of the illusion of self.  Why say such things on this day of days?  

 

When Christ calls a person, He calls that person to come and die. This death is the death of the self, the end of the Totality of the Same, the abnegation of the creaturely life of enjoyment within the Father’s creation. This Call from the Stranger, from the One who perpetually sojourns, is a call to live outside the self and upon the boundary, it is a call back from the monotony of being into the rupture of meta-physics, a call to that which is beyond physics and all its being. 

 

Let me make this even more clear. ILT is not about its students, its faculty, its curriculum, its staff, its Board, its alumni or its donors. ILT is not about ILT. ILT is not at all about the Totality of the Same, but rather about the ecstasy of the Other. ILT is about that which ruptures all of its own projects.  ILT is in the call toward what is not. ILT is about the Christ.  

 

Graduates of ILT, you have been called to extraordinary lives, because you are called to a life that ends your life. You have a serious task at hand, a task much more serious than your life. Your task is witness to that Other who displays His traces in the eyes and faces of those you encounter. The master lives in his own house, but the servant lives in another’s. You servants who face Faces of divine traces, have ultimately one and only one otherworldly task. You must listen!  

 

You, whose lives are not your own, you, who have no careers, you, who live the discomfort and displacement of all that makes you you, you must listen to a Word that cannot be your word, a Word that destroys your illusions to lead, a Word that  annihilates the deepest pleasures of Creation itself, a Word that seizes you,  strangles you, and suffocates the last vestiges of your own freedom, a Word otherly distant but proximately fascinating. 

 

What advice can I give graduates of ILT?  

 

Live in the ecstasy of this Word. Dwell not in the meadows of the Same, but rather in the desert of the Other. Listen to this Word from that place beyond being that calls you to a deep service of your neighbor, a call not built upon the reasonability of such service, but rather gifted by the absurdity of the call itself.  Live, hearing the Word that propels you to the ultimate boundary of this world, live the Word that demands, but loves in and through those demands.  

What advice can I give to graduates of ILT?  “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom.12:2), a renewing that can never be of this world, but can be only in being otherwise than being, can be only through the free grace of Jesus the Christ.  What I am saying should now be clear. Hear the Word that loves, graces, frees, transforms, and renews; hear this Word not as words about the Word but as the Word itself, as the Word that assumed flesh and dwelt among us.  Hear the Word whose doing in you drives you away from yourself and towards the Spirit, the Holy Spirit who will ultimately equip you for ministry.

 

Graduates, we have learned from you and have been changed by you.  Your faces among us have made us more than we are. Your time here was precious for us. We know that you are not ours, but His. We now wait, listening for the Word that words in and through your words. We wait as you preach, teach, and witness to that Other, an Other that sounds forth from where we ought to be, but can never find ourselves.  We wait as the Word that words in your words reclaims the Same for service of the Other, an Other who is wholly holy.  

 

We are created as nomads who profoundly prefer to wander in the labyrinths of the Other than settle in villages of the Same. But we have exchanged our birthright for a mass of pottage (Gen 25:29-34) and have become squatters upon the Same, thus erasing and defacing the Other. But then the Word spoken by your lips, graduates, speaks Truth. You are not your own, but His, so you need no longer worry about being you. 

So what ultimate good could come from the goodness of life when compared to wandering in the wilderness of the Holy? 

 

ATS Fall Headcount and FTE for Lutheran Institutions and an Update on Progress at Institute of Lutheran Theology

It is time for my yearly update on the growth of the Institute of Lutheran Theology with respect to Lutheran Seminaries in North America. 

ILT had a combined headcount of 101 in the F 2021 and a FTE of 81.26. The graduate school alone, Christ School of Theology, had a headcount of 79 with an FTE of 68.72.  This places ILT in ninth place in size among the 21 Lutheran seminaries. Below are the numbers for the fall of 2021, with the first number reporting headcount and the second in parenthesis giving the student FTE. ATS schools numbers are easiest to find, and I must confess to almost guessing on some of the other institutions.   

Of real interest is that the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary is now ATS accredited and claiming to have a FTE and headcount of 174. This would make it the sixth largest Lutheran institution in North America. 

ILT's Christ School of Theology is beginning the process of ATS accreditation, having had its first ATS visit in February. I am very optimistic the partnership we will have with ATS going forward. 

Concordia Seminary (LCMS) 603 (377)

Luther Seminary (ELCA): 476 (330)

Concordia Theological Seminary (LCMS): 307 (217)

Warburg Seminary (ELCA): 231 (198)

United Lutheran Seminary (ELCA): 342 (184)

Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary (WELS): 174 (174) 

Martin Luther University (ELCIC): 134 (110)

Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago (ELCA): 129 (103) 

INSTITUTE OF LUTHERAN THEOLOGY: 101 (81.26), 79 (68.72) grad school alone

Trinity School of Ministry (where the NALS is housed): 152 (65)

Lutheran Theological Southern (ELCA): 57 (46.3)

Trinity Seminary (ELCA): 43 (35)

Bethany Theological Seminary (Brethren): 55?

Pacific Lutheran (ELCA): 49 (40)

Lutheran Brethren Seminary: 40?

Free Lutheran Bible College: 25?

ALTS (AALC): 25??

Bethany Lutheran Theological Sem (ELS): 16?

Concordia Lutheran Ontario (LCC): 19 (14)

LTS Saskatoon (ELCIC): 17 (11)

Concordia Lutheran Edmonton (LCC): 7 (7). 

Documents Pertaining to the Founding of the Institute of Lutheran Theology: A Lutheran House of Studies

There was once an organization called the Fellowship of Confessional Lutherans (FOCL), and they had a publication which I recall was called FOCL News. I penned this article on the new "Lutheran House of Studies" for that publication in order to get the word out. I believe it was written and published sometime in the summer of or fall of 2006.  You can see that I was interested from the beginning in establishing a theological ethos at ILT, and wanted to address this question: Given the different interpretations of subsequent traditions of foundational documents, what can ILT do to vouchsafe some normative approach to interpreting those documents? Theological realism, semantic realism, and the possibility of theophysical causation are advanced as possible "grammars" by which foundational documents could be read. 

__________

A Lutheran House of Studies

Dennis Bielfeldt, Ph. D. 

WordAlone earnestly desires to establish a new confessional Lutheran theological house of studies.  But some ask, “Why?  Why does Lutheranism need another place trying to train pastors confessionally?  What is so wrong with what we have?  While things aren’t perfect, perhaps, they aren’t that bad either.  Why does WordAlone think it can establish an institution more confessional than what has already been planted in ELCA, LCMS or WELS soil?  Why does it believe that the effort and expense will bear good fruit?”

These are important questions, of course, and it seems that the so-called “Director of the WordAlone Lutheran theological house of studies” (my official title these days) should have ready answers to them.  When the WordAlone Convention in May adopted a plan for implementation of the house of studies, it voted on a report in which I spoke of several challenges facing seminary education within the ELCA.  At that time, I saw six major issues:  

• an economic challenge
• a sociological challenge
• a leadership challenge
• a theological challenge
• an authority challenge
• a rights challenge

I still believe that these identify the major difficulties facing theological education within the ELCA, and I recommend that FOCL readers examine the Report and form their own opinions as to its accuracy. This report, I believe, gives the rationale for why another Lutheran institution is necessary for the training of future pastors and teachers.    

If this list is accurate, however, and is successfully answers questions of why we need a confessional House of Studies now within the ELCA context, it does not address the further question of the general theological contour of that house of studies.  Given that the house of studies is “confessional,” what does “being confessional” mean for its curriculum and teaching?   Even more profoundly, what does “being confessional” mean within Lutheranism generally in our time?  

The easy answer to the question of what “being confessional” means is this: For an educational institution to be confessional is for it to privilege the historic confessions of its tradition such that they become foundational (and normative) for the piety, teaching and research of the institution.  

Unfortunately, this definition is inadequate.  Because our postmodern times allow (and often encourage) multiple readings of texts, two or more institutions grounded on the same confessional texts might have quite different theological trajectories.  All the ELCA seminaries can make a claim to privilege Scripture and the Lutheran confessional writings, yet it is obvious that some have departed more significantly from traditional Lutheran theological affirmations than have others.  Many celebrate this departure from the tradition as a departure entailed by the radicality of God’s love for us in Christ.  (This is clearly true with regard to the sexuality/homsexuality debate raging within the ELCA.)  

So how can this situation be fixed?  Indeed, how might one fix the interpretations of the Confessions so that they might not drift?  What kind of interpretation of Scripture can block interpretations attempting to say that Scripture itself says nothing about the sinfulness of homosexuality?  What kind of interpretation of the Confessions and the confessional tradition can block interpretations saying that the Reformers “earnestly desired” to retain Bishops in historical succession with Rome, and thus that Lutherans are mandated by their own confessions to seek visible, ecclesial unity with Rome? 

In the absence of a present normative consensus as to what the texts of the Confessions mean, it becomes important to make clear from the beginning that it is not the text itself that grounds a tradition, but rather a particular interpretation of the text.  A particular reading of the text, established in part by its situational context, functions normatively and determines, at least partially, the character of any educational institution regarding that text as foundational. 

My motivation in offering the WordAlone “fundamentals” is to try to determine if there is sufficient theological clarity in the WordAlone movement to establish normatively a range of interpretations of the Lutheran confessional documents.   Given that Lutherans holding to Scriptures and Confessions believe many different things about what Scriptures and Confessions mean and presuppose, is there sufficient clarity within WordAlone to be able to determine for these documents a range of appropriate meanings?  What “take” on Scripture and Confessions has seemed to be operating in the WordAlone movement since its inception, a “take” that might be worked up into a list of central theological affirmations or assumptions? 

My own attempt at articulating these affirmations of WordAlone appear on the WordAlone website, but I include them also below.  I believe that these assertions function as the differentia which give WordAlone its identity as a species within Lutheranism.      

• Theological statements have truth-conditions
• God is real, that is, God exists out and beyond human awareness, perception, conception and language
• God is causally related to the universe
• All temporal structures, institutions and conceptual frameworks are historically-conditioned      Nothing finite is infinite
• The true church is not visible, but remains hidden
• The Holy Spirit works monergistically, not synergistically, upon sinners effecting saving faith

While all seven statements are important, the first four are especially significant in our theological context and thus I have developed them quite extensively in a longer article that I hope to have published soon. I have space here only to touch upon the first four. 

The first assertion makes the semantic claim that what makes a theological statement true is some extra-subjective reality that is relatable to the subject.  This statement clearly denies that theological language could merely refer to the self, or to the attitudes, values and orientations of a community.  In addition, it claims that theological statements must be more than simple rules by which a community organizes its religious life together.   Theological statements function as rules, I believe, only if the community believes them true, only if it thinks these statements state what is, in fact, the case.   

The second and third assertions are ontological.  They claim that there is some reality to God that is not merely reducible to human experience.  Over and against the dominant theological tradition of the last 200 years, the third claim is that God is causally connected to the universe, that there are at least some physical events that would not have obtained had God not causally-influenced them to do so.  These two assertions are important because they bring God out of the “causal isolation” presupposed in the development of much Lutheran theology since the time of Kant in 1781.  For Kant, God could not be a substance causally-related to the universe, but was instead an “ideal of pure reason.”    

Finally, assertion four has epistemological consequences.  All objects of knowledge, and all acts or knowing, are denizens of time and are thereby limited by other events within time.  Thus, there can be no knowledge of any such objects that are not affected by history.  Every act of knowing is historically-conditioned.  We have no immediate knowledge of things as they are in themselves, no “bird’s eye view” from which to gaze out on things and know them absolutely.  This is so for all acts of knowing, even when it is the divine that is known.  This affirmation clearly admits that God is hidden, but does not thereby make a diminished ontological claim about God simply because we cannot know God as He is apart from Christ.   

So how is it that the proposed house of studies might successfully establish a normative standpoint on the Confessions such that they become the foundational documents which they must be if they are to govern the subsequent educational trajectory of the institution?  How does the WordAlone House of Studies guarantee that it will not become just another expression of a liberal Protestant ethos in North America?

The simple answer is this:  If the WordAlone Network can agree on some rather key theological issues, it can establish its house of studies upon on the ground of this consensus.  Without some normative theological underpinning, a WordAlone house of studies will drift and shift according to the prevailing theological winds of the day.  Let us examine how establishing a normative theological center might affect the house of studies.    

Lutherans within and outside the WordAlone Network will likely agree that God confronts us in Law and Gospel, and that the address of the Gospel has salvific significance for its auditors.  Lutherans within and outside WordAlone will emphasize the performative nature of first-order statements - - statements referring to the primary objects of theology - - bespeaking God’s grace in and despite human sinfulness.   But clearly a majority of folks within the ELCA see no tension between this emphasis and the practice of a mandated historic episcopate.  Thus, there is a disconnect between a lively Law/Gospel application of Scripture and “issues of church organization” like the acceptance of the historic episcopate.  The problem is a very deep one, and it goes to the very heart of some rather profound theological issues.  

I believe that a presupposition of much ELCA thinking is that second-order theological language - - statements dealing with the relationship of theological objects and the first-order sentences bespeaking them - - does not literally have truth-conditions (that is, that its statements are not literally true or false).  While all can agree on the abundance of God’s grace in the linguistic encounter in sermon and text, many will assume that further statements about God are unwarranted and even misleading.  For instance, why would one ever want to say that ‘God exists apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language’ or that ‘God is causally-related to the universe’?  Why would one need to say these things, if the reality of God’s grace is communicated through first-order language?   For many liberal Protestants, the problems begin when one begins to speak about God.  If this is true, why would one want to affirm statements about God?  

The response to this is two-fold: 1) We need second-order language about God to state what it is we actually believe, and to ground what it is we shall teach about God; and 2) What it is we actually believe about God does influence the hearer’s appropriation of the words of Law and Gospel.  

In regard to the second response, we must point out that the logic of being forgiven entails that there is one to forgive.  In like manner, the logic of living under divine wrath requires that there is a God who is righteously angry. While one might have an experience of being forgiven without there being God, or might have an experience of being under divine wrath without God, one simply cannot be forgiven by God or truly live under divine wrath unless there is a God.  Moreover, the contour of the experience of wrath and forgiveness is related to whether or not there is One whose wrath is kindled, and who nonetheless graciously and mercifully forgives.  What human beings believe about God dialectically links to howGod confronts us in Law and Gospel.  For instance, if John doesn’t believe God has a personal agency, then the experience of grace John has hearing the Gospel will surely be different than what he would have had were he to have held that God was a personal God.         

As another example of this, take the words of Scripture ‘fear not!’  In a particular situation, these words spoken can be words of Gospel and grace.  They certainly were so for people like Luther who understood the gift of God’s grace and forgiveness over and against a backdrop of divine wrath.  Luther and the reformers actually thought that God existed outside of them, and that this God could (and did) adopt particular attitudes about them.  Luther thought that God in his hiddenness was so awe-full, that he counseled others to keep their eyes riveted on the Christ.  The Words of Gospel promise are so sweet because the human condition before the inscrutable will of the hidden God is so dire.  

For Luther, the necessary condition for being a hidden God with inscrutable will that terrifies man and woman outside of Christ is that God is a real being having causal relations within the universe.  God is no mere idea of reason, no abstract thought about the unity or mystery of all things.  God is a living reality that is a threat to sinners - - and all of us are sinners.  It seems, that even though God is hidden, some reflection upon, or encounter with, God’s being is necessary if one is going to understand the situation as Luther did.  It should come as no shock that the confessional documents read in quite a different way to those who believe that God has independent existence outside the self.  At that point, all thinking about the gift of language stops and we are thrust back into the primal experience of awaiting a word of Gospel from God- - not because it is a word, but because it comes from God.  

Much more could be said about these things, but the point is clear.  If WordAlone can arrive at some consensus of theological opinion, then there is a foundation upon which to ground a Scripturally-engaged, and confessionally-grounded Lutheran theological house of studies.  If WordAlone is unable to define clearly what it is to be both Scripturally-engaged and confessionally-grounded, then its house of studies shall likely not prosper, and the critics who claim it ill-advised and wasteful to have attempted its establishment will themselves perhaps be vindicated.  As with most human endeavors, it is extremely important to start correctly.