So the Institute of Lutheran Theology Has Accreditation -- What's Next?

From Whence We Have Come

On February 23, 2017, Comptroller Leon Miles and I received on behalf of the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) the Certificate of Accreditation from the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE).  We did the process quickly, having been granted formal applicant status in 2016, candidacy in 2017 and now initial accreditation in 2018.  ABHE has been wonderful to work with.  They have been good friends and helping neighbors for a young institution like ILT, coaching us to up our game in every facet of institutional life, and giving appropriate feedback along the way.

Accreditation by the ABHE means that ILT is recognized as an accredited institution by both the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA) and the United States Department of Education.  Furthermore, since CHEA recognizes all graduate programming ABHE accredits all the way through the Ph.D., CHEA will recognize all ILT graduate programming as well through the Ph.D.

It has been quite a journey for the fledgling institution that began life as a "House of Studies."  The Preamble of the "Proposal of the Lutheran Theological House of Studies Task Force" that I authored and delivered to the 2006 WordAlone Convention in Golden Valley, MN, sought to respond to the directive of the 2005 Convention to "appoint a task force to develop a plan and proposal to establish a 'Lutheran Theological House of Studies' using the gifts of theological teachers employing the scriptural hermeneutic of the Lutheran Reformation. "  I led the Task Force consisting initially of WordAlone President Jaynan Clark, WordAlone Board Chair John Beem, WordAlone Executive Director Mark Chavez, WordAlone staff member Rev. Randy Freund, and WordAlone Treasurer Irv Aal.

The Task Force Proposal actually specified much of what has become the Institute of Lutheran Theology.  It spoke of the need for the school to have "critical distance" from the seminaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) if it was going to be able to offer a prophetic voice within the ELCA context. It specified that the theological house of studies must have full curricular autonomy, and that it must be institutionally independent and academically accredited.   Having just acquired initial institutional accreditation, it is interesting to quote the Proposal on the question of accreditation.  So much of what ILT has done was clearly specified in the 2006 document.  Here is what I wrote then: 

"Probably the most important question as to the nature of any educational institution is whether or not it should be accredited.  Our task force has concluded that the challenges are so great in the present ELCA educational context that only an institution having strong academic qualifications can address them.  It is our sense that we are faced with a “confessional crisis” within North American Lutheranism, and that we owe it to our Savior, and to our Lutheran tradition, to offer an attractive vehicle by which to train future pastors and perpetuate the Lutheran confessional tradition.  Accreditation does three things:  1) It provides an external motivation to build academic excellence; 2) It provides increased opportunities for students; 3) It symbolizes to all that taking the Confessions seriously does not mitigate taking academics seriously.

Firstly, the very nature of external accreditation demands that our house of studies will have an adequate research library and fully qualified faculty.  While we might have good intentions in building excellence into a non-accredited house of studies, the natural discontinuities of temporal life make it difficult to achieve academic excellence in the long-term without institutionalizing external accreditation demands.  Accreditation implements externally our internal demand for excellence and keeps us honest long-term when hiring faculty and acquiring educational resources.

Secondly, being accredited allows greater student flexibility and opportunity.  Students can transfer in and out of accredited programs.  Each is treated fairly in accordance with objective standards developed and monitored by the accrediting agency (ATS).  In addition, accreditation grants greater flexibility for people studying at different schools and seminaries.  In accredited programs there can be certain assumptions about standard courses that are not found in non-accredited curricula.  Preparation for becoming a pastor is more “seamless” when there is a general program of preparation clearly defined, whose various parts can, to some degree, be gotten in different places.  Moreover, an accredited house of studies allows students to prepare not only to fill pastoral pulpits, but also be educated to be teachers in the church.  We wish to nurture an academic competency in teaching and relating Lutheran confessional theology within the marketplace of ideas.  It is our hope to offer advanced academic opportunities for highly motivated students.  We hope not only to train pastors for the future, but also to train teachers of those pastors.  While we could possibly train pastors short-term on a non-accredited basis, we cannot educate teachers of pastors.  

Thirdly, accreditation symbolizes the consonance within our Lutheran tradition of confession and academic competence.  Lutheran theology was born in the university. The “new theology” at Wittenberg was debated in academic halls and written about in scholarly tracts and books.  It is a university-bred theology that sought to be captive to the Word alone.  We live in a time in which the pastor often serves congregations with members more educated than she or he is.  In an environment in which the very plausibility of the Christian worldview is up for grabs, we need educated pastors who know the intellectual terrain of the various disciplines, and who are able and willing to give an account of that which lies within them.  Thus it is manifestly important that future pastors have good libraries, great professors, and an intellectually stimulating campus environment, precisely the characteristics of accredited programs."

While there are certain discontinuities between the vision cast above and what actually developed -- for instance, we never did pursue ATS accreditation because of their strictures years ago against delivering the majority of a curriculum through video-conferencing -- much remains as true now as twelve years ago, especially these three assertions:

• Accreditation provides an external motivation to build academic excellence.
• Accreditation offers increased opportunities for students.
• Accreditation symbolizes to all that taking the Confessions seriously does not mitigate taking academics seriously. 

The last point is particularly important.  I wrote then about an environment in which "the very plausibility of the Christian worldview is up for grabs," and the profound need for "educated pastors who know the intellectual terrain of the various disciplines."

Data from Pew shows how quickly the decline in Christianity is happening and how profound the challenges are.  Between 2007 and 2014 the Christian share of the [US] population fell from 78.4% to 70.6%.  This is a precipitous drop that cannot, in my opinion, be stemmed simply by excellent Law/Gospel sermons being preached to dwindling numbers of folks in the pews.  Pastors of the future are going to need wise heads as well as strong hearts, because they will need to deal with the reestablishment and the perpetuation of the Christian plausibility structure itself.  Such pastor theologians will clearly require "good libraries, great professors, and an intellectually stimulating campus environment," exactly the characteristics we have designed into ILT.

To Where We Shall Go

The Institute of Lutheran Theology has a graduate school and a certificate school.  Its graduate school faculty has seven members, its certificate school faculty has four, and there are well over a dozen adjunct faculty serving both schools.  Within the graduate school, students are designated as follows:

• Open Studies
• Masters of Arts in Religion
• Masters of Divinity  
• Masters of Sacred Theology
• Doctor of Ministry 

While all of these programs are excellent, none really get at the central task of the future: The reestablishment and perpetuation of the Christian plausibility structure itself.  How can this be done and who in Lutheran circles is attempting such a thing?  Is it not hubris to think that one can in any way be engaged in the establishment and perpetuation of Christian plausibility?  Is not the apologetic task a thing of the past, something we did once before these post-modern days?

I do not think so.  In fact, I believe that what is needed in Lutheran circles is a Ph.D. that produces deeply-educated men and women who know well the theological tradition, the intellectual and cultural horizon, and how to relate the tradition to the horizon in ways that make legitimate truth-claims.

The ILT Faculty Senate passed on January 19, 2018, a Ph.D. program that defines program learning outcomes, admission requirements, program concentrations, language requirements, qualifying exams, a course of study, comprehensive examinations, and a process for making a thesis proposal and writing and defending a dissertation.

ILT's proposed Ph.D. will offer concentrations in Old Testament, New Testament, Philosophical Theology, Historical Theology, Systematic Theology, and Christian Ethics.  The proposal calls for a minimum of 45 credits with 12 dedicated to the thesis proposal and writing, three to a methodology course, with the rest of the credits coming from 500 level courses, independent reading, writing and presenting an article at an academic conference, an article in a peer-reviewed journal, an article in an academic book, the translation of an academic book, or serving as a teaching assistant.

Students will normally take three qualifying exams, with one or more able to be waived if a student already has a STM from ILT.  The qualifying exams will be tailored for each concentration, e.g, Biblical theology, historical and systematic theology, or philosophical theology and ethics.  When the exams are satisfactorily concluded the student automatically becomes a candidate for the Ph.D.

The four comprehensive exams are all closed-book with a maximum of one week between them.  Students must present a proposal for their exams to their department head.  Only one of the four exams can be in the dissertation area.  When the student passes the exams, they begin in earnest the dissertation phase of their program. 

The video-conferencing technology ILT has used since its inception will work very well for bringing in external exam and thesis readers.  Instead of the student defending his thesis in a public hall where only local scholars are available, he or she will defend on-line where some of the greatest scholars in the world can be called together.  

There are challenges, of course.  More physical books will be needed in our library, and more digitized on-line books and serials must be made available to students.  But the requisite idea is present: We will develop from a school dedicated to achieving academic respectability to a school of real academic excellence, a school where the theological task is continually engaged, a school with the academic competence to think deeply and perhaps conclude, as I did in 2006, that the problem for theology today is our continuing penchant for Descartes' problem and the Kantian trajectory that ultimately issued from it.

As I said then, it is not that ontology recapitulates epistemology, but that epistemology recapitulates ontology.  Our present moment requires that we abandon the prejudice to locate the being of God through a profound introspection of human experience and cognition.  We must instead discern God where God might be found, in a Being whose be-ing is outside of human be-ing, in a Being whose be-ing is at issue primordially for it, in a Being whose be-ing called from eternity all being, in a Being whose be-ing is to be the eternal Savior of us all, a be-ing whose Spirit works faith and grace within those whom the Spirit pleases.

Tolerance, Commitment and the Lutheran Ethos

Forty years ago when I was farming in northwest Iowa, a farmer friend announced that the famous University of Chicago religion scholar Martin Marty was going to be speaking seventy miles away in Orange City, and he wondered if we might not want to go and hear him.  Although I had not heard of Martin Marty back then, I could not pass up the opportunity to go to Orange City.  As I recall, Marty was speaking on the general theme of tolerance and commitment, and telling us that mature faith possesses both.   My friend Doug challenged professor Marty after the lecture:  "Dr. Marty, I found your presentation very stimulating, but remain unconvinced.  My own observations suggest that the more committed people are religiously the less tolerant they are, and the more tolerant they are, the less committed they are."

I recall that Martin Marty looked at my friend rather sadly, as if Doug had showed up for card night without knowing how to play.  "That is not the way it works," he reiterated, "it is precisely in tolerance that one is most deeply committed."  He uttered many other wise things as well, but I don't recall how anything he said provided warrant for the widely-propagated view that religious tolerance and commitment are profoundly compatible.

Of course, being good Americans in the early twenty-first century, most of us naturally pay lip-service not only to the compatibility of tolerance and commitment, but also to their direct direct proportionality.  We Americans love our story.  After all, America was founded on religious freedom, a freedom from compulsion to a particular religion so that one had greater freedom to practice one's chosen religion. 

It was a great experiment, this founding of America.  Could a country endure that tolerated many different religions, that rejected the assumption of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia: cuius regio, eius religio ("whose realm, his religion")?  If Tillich is right and religion pertains to ultimate concern, then how is it possible for people with different -- sometimes radically different -- ultimate concerns to come together and agree to be governed?  Far better, it would seem, the traditional view where the ruler and the ruled share the same ultimate commitment.  But America not only survived, it thrived.  Apparently people with different ultimate concerns can live together without compromising those concerns!  So it is that we learn in America that it is precisely within the context of overarching tolerance that commitment is most deeply possible.

I remember thinking at the time, however, that Doug's question was a good one, and that the famed Dr. Marty had taken it rather too lightly.  (We often underestimate the strength of challenges to our assumptions.)  Perhaps Martin Marty was living so deeply in his religious tradition that he did not see the problem.  How exactly does one continue to assert the truth of one's own tradition, allow others to assert the truth of their own, and not run into fundamental conflict?  How does one do this if the truth about which one is concerned is ultimate? 

My days on the farm was a time in my life that I was very interested in the question of religious truth.  I puzzled a great deal over the question of how two or more religions might be true at the same time.  I was a pretty tolerant guy in those days, and it did not come naturally to me to think that my Lutheran truth-claims were mostly all true, and those of Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims almost all false.  Why would I be given the requisite epistemic priority to know the true, when those far more serious than I were not afforded the same? 

So assuming that contrary religious claims might be conjointly true, what would it be by virtue of which they could be conjointly true?  While I was thinking such thoughts in 1978, I admit I did not know anyone in my farming community except Doug who thought that supposed contrary statements about God's properties and relations could somehow be conjointly true.  Every Lutheran I knew thought that either God created the universe in six days or did not do so, that either Jesus was born of a virgin or was not so born, and that either Jesus the Christ was the only way to the Father or was not the only way. 

Later in my life I would ask undergraduate students this question: "If two people disagree on what is true, must one of them be wrong?"  In the middle 1980s when I started my college teaching career most students said "yes," but by 2010 when I was finishing my tenure of university teaching they were saying, "no."  Perhaps in the 1980s the few students saying "no" were thinking about philosophical or religious "truth."  (Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder in aesthetics, truth is in the mind of the conceiver in philosophy or theology.)  However, by 2010 students were assuming a much more expansive domain of putative truths, a domain that included the historical, scientific and even the mathematical.  Be that as it may, if my college students in the late 1980s could think that contrary religious claims might be conjointly true, perhaps it was possible in a northwest Iowa farming community a decade earlier. 

There are two ways, I believe, of conceiving the relationship between tolerance and commitment.  The first is one that the American founding fathers could embrace.  One must be tolerant of contrary claims in areas where one's epistemic limitations are the most pronounced.  Since one cannot know that 'x is true', one must be tolerant of those claiming, 'it is false that x is true'.  Such epistemic tolerance, however, is thoroughly compatible with the belief that 'x is true'.  One can be deeply committed to the truth of a claim without knowing that the belief is true.  Epistemic tolerance of x is clearly compatible with an existential commitment to ~x.  Accordingly, tolerance of another's claims of truth is the proper attitude to adopt when realizing one's epistemic limitations, but commitment to one's own beliefs is, however, proper, honorable and courageous.  After all, not to be committed to one's own beliefs is to live inauthentically, is to live in a way that does not own one's beliefs.  (I am thinking of Heidegger's Eigenlichtkeit or "ownmostness.")  

Doug and Dr. Marty would not, however, likely have affirmed this relatively traditional interpretation of the compatibility of tolerance and commitment.  Both were quite aware of the intellectual and cultural horizon of the 1970s, a horizon that increasingly understood religious assertions as statements of value and not of fact.  Accordingly, tolerance in things religious is assured because there is no way in principle for religious language to state what is the case apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language, and thus there is no facile way for its claims to come into conflict.  Religious language (and most theological language) reports, expresses or recommends one's own psychological or existential states; it does not describe a divine realm existing on its own apart from us.  Since such language pertains to human experience, every attempt to state that another's religious affirmations are false is an act of prejudice. Who can rightly say that my religious affirmations, grounded as they are in my experience, are false?  If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too must the truths of religion be only in the ears and eyes of its hearers and readers. 

Unfortunately, this view of things, though great for tolerance, presents deep problems for commitment.  If I know that my affirmation of x is a statement of value, and I know that your affirmation of ~x is a statement of value, then since values are neither true nor false, upon what grounds can one be rightly committed to to x rather than ~x?  Lamentably, the search for grounds for values succeeds only in uncovering other values.  (No matter how hard I have tried, I have never been able to derive an "ought" from an "is.")  Are not the deep values of the grounds simply another statement of commitment?  (I am committed to feeding the hungry because I value -- I am committed to -- feeding the hungry.) 

Simply put, if the warranted assertibility of religious utterances is ultimately subjective, then why be committed to the particularity of their assertion when times become difficult?  While one might die for truth, does one really die for value?  (I am not saying that one might not die for the truth of a value.)  Polycarp (69-155) was burned alive rather than renounce faith in Christ.  Clearly, the great man died because he was convinced of the truth of Christ, not the value Christ had for him.

Doug's question was sophisticated in the way of the medieval question of whether or not God could make a rock so heavy that He could not lift it.  Doug was asking this: If one is tolerant in one's religious assertions, then one is clandestinely understanding these assertions as not have truth-conditions.  But why be committed to the assertion of a particular body of statements or the doing of a set of actions if there are no truth-conditions grounding the assertion of the statements or the doing of the actions?  Alternately, if one is committed to a set of assertions or a class of actions, then one is presupposing their truth, but if this is so then why be deeply tolerant of unjustified views at odds with those that one has good reason to regard as true?  Just as the property of making a rock so heavy that God can't lift it cannot properly be applied to God, so to the property of being deeply tolerant of contrary religious claims while be profoundly committed to one's own cannot properly be applied to late twentieth-century Christian believers, those no longer believing as did the Founding Fathers that tolerance pertains to epistemic humility with regard to the domain of religious fact. 

Dominant strands of Lutheran theology over the past 200 years have tended to downplay the idea that there exists a realm of theological facts independent of human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Kantian assumptions within theology departments at German universities undercut notions of divine substantiality and causality.  As European Lutheran theology hit American shores (particularly after World War II), and comingled with American assumptions about the fact/value distinction, a Lutheran theological ethos emerged that was disdainful of Lutheran Orthodoxy, particularly it's penchant to regard confessional and doctrinal statements as affirmations of theological fact.  The result was heightened tensions among Lutherans, a tension pertaining to both semantics and ontology. 

While conservative traditions like the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods continued to assume that there was some objective fact of the matter about which confessional and doctrinal statements were speaking truly, the precursor church bodies which became the ELCA began leaning towards an understanding of such language that connected more to human experience.  While the former thus understood tolerance as grounded in epistemic limitation, the latter came to see it as an affirmation of the particularity of the believer's cultural existence itself.  Tensions ran high, and it did not help when spokesman of the former sometimes suggested that the tolerance of epistemic humility was due to a willful abandonment of the objectivity of revelation.   Nor were tensions abated when the latter seemed to think that confessional and doctrinal affirmations somehow denied the authenticity of the theologian or preacher's voice, and that such affirmations simply strangled the believer's authentic religious life and practice. 

The Institute of Lutheran Theology emerged, in part, because it became time for there to be an institution that was both deeply sympathetic to the starting points of the various Lutheran traditions, and that understood these starting points within the broader historical and philosophical context.  It is time now that Lutherans talk seriously to each other.  It is time we think together the dialectic of tolerance and commitment, time we ask together how an affirmation of both is possible.  In so asking, we shall undoubtedly learn a great deal more about ourselves.  Such learning is a very good thing, for it is time that we dialogue with each other in a spirit of tolerance and commitment, a spirit that shall take the truth claims of all partners seriously, while adjudicating conflicting truth claims within an ethos of epistemic humility. 

Lutheran Presuppositions

The old joke is that if you put three serious Lutherans in a room together, you will discover three distinct, and clearly defendable, theological traditions.  (Some say that you will find four or more traditions.)  The story illustrates a truth about Lutherans in North America: They have often not played well together!

While the disputes are many, I believe they have to do today primarily with hermeneutics, the locus of authority, and the ontology of the divine, justification and ecclesiology. I believe that the deepest issues confronting (and sometimes separating Lutherans) are oftentimes not how the issues present themselves at the congregational level.  Issues of women's ordination, the blessing of same sex relationships and marrying of same sex couples, human rights and social justice proclamations, closed communion, infant baptism, contemporary worship and use of early church liturgies, Biblical reliability concerning scientific and historical fact, etc., all do divide rank and file Lutherans and Lutheran congregations.   Some of the issues still remain quite venomous, notably differences on closed/open communion, women's ordination and LBGT issues.   Some issues of disagreement seem no longer rancorous.  (The truth of young earth creationism seems not to inculcate much disagreement these days in the lives of most Lutheran congregations.)

In this brief article, my concern is neither to do a careful historical reading of Lutheran traditions to uncover salient differences among them, nor to construct a typology which would list the necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of any of these terms: "Evangelical Catholic," "midwestern pietist" or "Lutheran pietism," "radical Lutheranism," "Lutheran repristination," "Lutheran renewal," "Lutheran fundamentalism," "Lutheran high church movement," etc.  All could be precisely defined, but any prescription of proper application will likely nonetheless be violated in practice. (Lutheran theologians have not always been charitable in the application of such terms to their Lutheran brothers and sisters.)

What I want to do is to go to the deeper level and explore the presuppositions that make it possible for Lutherans often simply to talk past one another.  Acceptance of presuppositions as fact or "just the way things are" produce theological "spins" making it difficult for Lutherans of one persuasion to ascribe rationality, good intentions or sometimes basic comity to those with whom they disagree.  The problem is that the discussion of the issues remains unsatisfying and superficial when the contour of deeper presuppositions is ignored. 

In what follows, I am sacrificing scholarly precision and sourcing for boldness.  (I figure that at some point in life, one must get bolder and I have endeavored to do so in recent years.)  Part of being bold, is leaving the safe harbor of proper theological speaking in order to make broader points. Perhaps what I am doing here is "proto-theological."

Below is my list of the profound presuppositions or "pictures" (Wittgenstein) that do divide Lutherans.  While each of these have theological ramifications, often the presupposition itself has little to do with theology.  At the end of this reflection, I want to tie these presuppositions together somewhat.  So what is my list of presupposition within early 21st century Lutheran theology?

• The Relationship of the Meaningful Content of Scripture and the Historical Conditions from which it Arose.  Lutherans of all persuasions declare that the Scriptures are the norm and source of faith, life (and theology).  They differ markedly, however, on what exactly constitutes the meaningful content of Scripture.  Is the meaning of Scripture found in the Biblical text itself, in the interaction of the Biblical text with the reader (informed by the Holy Spirit), or in the Biblical text as it is understood in the context of its formation, original audience, and transmission?  Simply put, to what degree does historical criticism (textual, source, form, redaction, etc.) and literary criticism help uncover the proper meaning of the text?  Differences of opinion about putative Biblical injunctions against homoerotic behavior, the role of women in leading worship, and the practice of closed communion pertain to the issue of how knowledge of the wider religio-historical context (both diachronic and synchronic), and knowledge of textual formation and intentionality affect the actual meaning of the text.  Lutherans in the pews saying "their Bible says this" have often been astounded to find their theologians saying that it really says something quite different if one has the requisite ability to penetrate back beyond the text into the horizon of its formation and original reception.  

• The Question of Proper Authority in Theological Adjudication and Communal Practice.  While all Lutherans speak of Scripture as properly norming faith, they disagree as to the authority of the norm.  Traditional Catholic theology understood Scripture to be of sufficient complexity that it was unlikely that non-learned readings could successfully interpret Scripture correctly.  A teaching magisterium was needed to guarantee proper interpretation of the text.  Rejecting this, Lutherans argued that the Scripture alone was the proper norm and the sole authority for faith and life.  But this works only if Scripture has external perspicuity, that it's meaning is sufficiently lucid that it can, in principle, work to adjudicate theological issues.  An objectivity of the text is presupposed as the sine qua non of effective norming.  However, if the very meaning of the text is at issue and its meaning oftentimes identified (discovered?, constructed?) on the basis  of theological (or other) criteria, then the danger is that the real authority in textual meaning is the interpreter.   But if the text's objectivity is determined by the subjectivity of the interpreter (and the interpretive community in which that interpreter stands), then the putative externality of the Word of God can become the mere documentation of the subject's hermeneutical virtuosity.  (None of this would have surprised the Catholic theological faculty at Tuebingen in the mid-nineteenth century.)  Adding the Holy Spirit to the mix does not seem to overcome this basic problem, for the activity of the Holy Spirit in making external clarity internal nonetheless presupposes the moment of external perspicuity.  

• The Ontology of the Divine.  Most Lutherans do not realize that their commitment to presuppositions of ontological and epistemological realism concerning the divine determine what they think is possible in theology.  Does God (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception and language?  Does human confrontation with divine determine the ontic contour of the divine?  Does God bring about causally that which would not have happened were He not to have willed it?  Simply put, is our language about God, His properties, and His causal relations with the universe and His children within it simply a language that clarifies human religious experience (feeling, willing, knowing, doing)?   If it does nevertheless refer to God, does it refer to the divine realm symbolically, such that the affirmation of divine qualities and causal powers point to the depth of being, a region in principle incapable of sustaining causal relations with ontic reality?   Clearly, if one believes that there is a God who exists on His own apart from human consciousness -- a God that has a primal intent upon creation -- then questions about "God changing His mind" will be understood in a far different way than if reference to God is conceived as a way of clarifying (or pointing to the limits of) human experience.  If one regards theo-physical causality as possible, then one will find it difficult to move from the methodology of scientific naturalism to a full-fledge metaphysic of scientific naturalism and the concomitant causal closure of the physical.  Moreover, if one believes God is not the kind of being who can in principle have causal power -- maybe God is like the set of all sets -- then one's views about the events of the early universe and macro neo-Darwinian evolution will likely be much different than one who does assert divine causality.   Clearly, the clear contour of Scripture's meaningful content will likely be different for the one holding the causal closure of the physical and the one rejecting it.  

• The Ontology of Justification.  Does justification constitute an actual transformation of human life, or is it merely a change in divine judgment about the conditions of that life?   (I don't want to engage the distinction between justification and sanctification, or weigh in here on whether "sanctification is merely getting used to justification.")  If there exists divine causality -- if the Holy Spirit is causally involved in human life -- then God's just-making and sanctifying does bring about some state of affairs that would not have happened otherwise.  (Some claim that religion at its depth is a path of transformation.)   Forensic justification can be understood causally as well, of course, for if God really exists, and really does divinely impute sinlessness to the sinner, than some state of salvific affairs is brought about that would not have happened otherwise.  However, if God does not exist apart from human awareness, perception, conception or language, and if God thereby has no causal powers, then justification seemingly must be construed finally subjectively; it pertains to the psychology of the "believer." 

• The Ontology of the Church.  What is the church?  Is it an association of individuals receiving the gifts of God, or is it somehow the Body of Christ effective in bestowing these gifts upon its members and the world?  One's views about the contour of ecclesial being will be determined in part by the one's views about divine reality itself.  If one believes there is a divine being with divine properties and divine causal powers, then one's view of the Church will likely be far different than if one believes there is no such being.  On the former, the Church can have a mystical, sacramental reality, but on the latter it must be finally understood on the basis of human community.  On the former, the authority of Law is grounded in the reality of God, on the latter it emerges out of the life of the community itself, and can be changed as communal life changes.  Obviously, one's views of LBGT issues will likely be quite different if one thinks there is an entity with divine properties and causal powers authorizing divine Law rather than the divine Law being an expression of, or somehow supervening upon, the life of the community.  

What is important here is to recognize that the questions of the ontology of the divine and the normativity and authority of the Biblical text finally come together.  If Holy Scriptures are reliable, normative and have proper authority, then they witness to a God with divine properties and causal powers.   The move to afford ontological status to the divine thus seemingly rests on one's view about the perspicuity and epistemological reliability of the Biblical texts.  Conversely, if one is convinced that the Enlightenment critique of the divine -- particularly in its Kantian form -- requires one to become an irrealist with respect to the divine and divine causal power, then one will likely be committed to a closed naturalistic metaphysic that makes it much more likely that one must interpret the meaningful content of the Biblical texts in light of the historico-politico-sociologico-economico interests and context in which they emerged.   

So underneath the difference among Lutheran is a very simply difference in presuppositions.  One presupposition is that God is real and language about God says what is true or false about the divine.  Another presupposition is that God's being is of an ideal or linguistic order, that it is forever related to human awareness, perception, conception and language.  Those holding the first view are more apt to hold a very high view of Scripture, believing that there is an objectivity to the meaningful content of Scripture -- even if this objectivity does utilize much of the machinery of the historical-critical method.  Scripture has authority because it reveals most reliable truths about the real God. Those holding to the ideality or linguisticality of God, are more apt to emphasize the historical conditions from which Scripture emerged.  Here the authority of Scripture tends to rest more in the traditions of its employment, and its place within the life of the Church generally.   Clearly, what is permissible hermeneutically is quite different on the first view than the second. 

Blog posts are supposed to be short, and I will endeavor not to violate that expectation.  What I am suggesting in this brief post is something quite simple, that is, that a high-view -- one might say a "non-natural" view -- of Scriptural authority and normativity links nicely with the notion that God is ultimately non-natural, having, as it were, sufficient non-natural causal power to affect the natural order.  Alternately, a natural view of Scripture -- a causal story of how Scripture arose out of community stories written down for community purposes -- connects with an irrealist view of God and the concomitant position that the myths and rituals of this God emerged in the evolution of human life, and that while this God may be the most noble and lofty idea of the human life, it nonetheless remains causally inert with respect to the central problem of human life: How can I be saved?   Clearly, it is reasonable to expect the practice of hermeneutics under the first picture to be far different than one finds it practiced under the second. 

The Dilemmas of a Secular Age

I am privileged to teach the first course of the Doctor of Ministry program at the Institute of Lutheran Theology entitled, "The Secular Age."  Our D. Min. wants students to be deeply aware of the intellectual and cultural horizon into which they must proclaim the gospel, an intellectual and cultural horizon that is by no means as simple and unambiguous as the secularists believe.  

The text used in this course is Charles Taylor's 2007 book,  A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).  In this massive tome, Taylor challenges denizens of the North Atlantic world seriously to consider this question: "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable" (25)? 

While Taylor devotes 871 pages attempting to answer this question, commentators over the last ten years have authored many more pages describing, analyzing, acclaiming and critiquing what Taylor wrote then, and what he has been writing in response to those who have written about what he wrote then.

I want today to discuss the dilemmas Taylor discusses in chapters 17 and 18 of A Secular Age as to their apologetic effectiveness.  Does he manage to point to an Anknuepfungspunkt ("point of contact") for those seeking to proclaim the gospel into the post-modern context?  Do these chapters succeed in uncovering a possible ground upon which an open hearing of the gospel is made more likely?  Is it possible that Taylor has articulated something the could remove an "obstacle to faith?"  In order to understand what Taylor is doing in these chapters, however, I will first have to say something about what had happened in the six hundred pages prior to Taylor's discussion of these dilemmas.

The Narrative

Taylor addresses the question as to why belief in God is now so difficult by providing a grand narrative.  The first 14 chapters -- four of the five main sections of the book -- tell the story of how it came to be that belief in God "seems" now implausible to a great many.  Taylor's story shows how "exclusive humanism" became an of option for a full human life.

Taylor's tale departs from what many expect, the story that as science waxes, religion wanes. He argues against "subtraction theories," views suggesting that the positive aspects of modernity emerge only after religious belief is jettisoned.  Taylor believes that the often intolerant, modern secularist world-view presupposes all of the following:

• The success of science in explaining that which religion fails to explain
• The psychological and moral maturity of modern man and women over the childishness of viewing the world religiously
• The ethical and moral inferiority of religion in its misanthropy and resistance to human self-actualization 

Taylor's tale starts with the story of disenchantment: the early modern rejection of the traditional porous cosmos in which good and evil reside in regions beyond the human heart, and its affirmation of a world of individual buffered selves affecting and being affected by the external world and other buffered agents outside the self and in that world.  Taylor refers to this process as the "great disembedding," a process that undercuts the previous embedding of human agents within society, a society which itself is embedded in a cosmos ultimately grounded in God (152).  In this disembedding, society is refigured, it is now seen as a collection of individuals, each with interests, one of which is happiness.   

In this world of buffered selves the notion of autonomous moral agency develops.  Taylor dedicates chunks of his text to the rise of reform movements beginning five hundred years ago.  It is part of disenchantment to reform the world and the self in conformity with the putative will of God.  

By the time of the Enlightenment, a "providential deism" is in the air, an affirmation of the divine in which God increasingly functions to support human happiness, particularly a this-worldly nurturing of family life.  However, as the implications of the buffered self and its autonomous moral agency become apparent, Enlightenment men and women begin to sense that their disembedded, disenchanted existence is one of isolated human agency within an impersonal natural order.  

Throughout this narrative, Taylor is less interested in describing historical theories and ideas than in discussing the background conditions making doctrinal theories and practical piety possible.  These conditions he labels "social imaginaries," the set of pre-ontic dealings buffered selves have with each other and the objects in their environment.  Such pre-ontic dealings constitute the pre-articulated phenomenological world we all inhabit.  This world was once one where it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, and now is one where it is inescapably easy not to believe.  Although Taylor does not use the term, he is engaged in genetic phenomenology, a description of the genesis of the meaning of things, in "laying bare" that world in which we now find ourselves in our judging, affirming and denying. 

As denizens of an impersonal natural order, we are not long content.  With Christian belief no longer a live option for the intelligentsia, new ways of seeking "fullness" arise in the nineteenth century.  Romanticism and its search for beauty plays prominently in various nineteenth century trajectories seeking fullness in non-explicitly Christian ways.  

Taylor seemingly employs the term 'fullness' salvifically.  Human beings have a drive to lives of fullness, a fullness thatTaylor often connects to agape love.  He suggests that fullness is an experience of the conveying of what matters most in life in a complete and perfect way (600-601).  Accordingly, such fullness could be grounded in a deep structure within us, e.g., reason, or it might perhaps be graced by the divine.  

The search for fullness, while once tethered for Christian to ends outside life, becomes in the 18th and 19th centuries increasingly connected to an "exclusive humanism," to a this-worldly ordering of society and culture for mutual benefit.  Such humanism espouses a benevolence motivated either by Enlightenment reason or the natural "fellow feeling" (Hume) men and women have for each other.  Exclusive humanism develops, providing an alternative to faith in God, miracles and mystery.  Positively, because of the development of dignity, freedom and discipline, exclusive humanism grants to buffered selves an expanded sense of self-worth.  Negatively, it displays to them their own limitations and inculcates within them a sense of alienation and emptiness.  

What follows is the "nova effect," an explosion of religious and spiritual options, a "galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane."  This intensifies into the current "age of authenticity," the growth of a widespread "expressive individualism" focusing on fashion, style and individual rights.  While traditional objects of religious devotion and belief have been marginalized in this age, new kinds of spiritualities and new places of the sacred have arisen to take their place.  Even Christian belief gets a new lease on life, for though Christendom is no longer, new Christian spirituality allows for a "believing without belonging" (528). In this age of authenticity religious searching continues as numbers of people still look for religious answers to the question of the meaning of life. 

I have said a few words about Taylor's narrative to contextualize and set up the last section of his text, the last five chapters which provide a structural analysis of our present age, an age where men and women are seeming haunted by a transcendence that they cannot quite affirm.  It is in this section that we finally turnTaylor's dilemmas, the primary focus of my remarks.  It also is in this section that we find Taylor taking up the apologetic task, not one that demonstrates the truth of the Christian faith, but rather one that attempts to point to and undercut the smug and confident secularist construal of things.  

The Analysis

We dwell today within the "immanent frame," that space that has resulted from our disenchantment from the cosmos and the emergence of the buffered self, a self which is individual, private and disciplined, a self that has set out to reform the world, a world vanquished from higher time, a world living the banality of homogenous "lower" time.  This immanent frame is a "natural order" rather than a "supernatural" one, a self-sufficient world we all inhabit pre-reflectively, a frame "common to all of us in the modern west" (543).  Moreover, this immanent frame can either be open to the transcendent or closed to it.  However, Taylor emphasizes that both of these possibilities step "beyond available reasons" into a state of "anticipatory confidence" or faith (550).  The immanent frame is given to us phenomenologically and pre-reflectively; it is the primordial world in which we dwell, a world prior to reason-giving, a realm prior to normative evaluation.  

Within the immanent frame both closed and open "spins" and "takes" are possible.  While a "take" in the immanent frame affirms either immanence or transcendence while remaining open to the disjunct it does not affirm, a "spin" does not recognize itself as an interpretation of the cross-pressuring within the immanent frame towards either immanence or transcendence, and accordingly denies plausibility to the disjunct it does not affirm.  Simply put, a "spin," unlike a "take," does not know itself to be simply a way of seeing things; it thinks it stands on the facts.

Taylor believes that in the immanent frame, genuine "Jamesian space" exists towards the possibility of transcendence.  (In the seemingness of immanence, there is a haunting of transcendence, a haunting that might give one reason ultimately to adopt a position of openness towards transcendence.)  While Taylor makes passing reference to religious fundamentalism as a spin in the immanent frame towards transcendence that cannot grasp how one could not discern transcendence, it is the academy and its intolerance to the very possibility of transcendence that is his real interest.  The "fundamentalism" of the academy mistakes its way of seeing things with fact.  Taylor wishes to contest the "spin of closure which is hegemonic in the Academy" (549).  In so doing, he searches for the motivation behind closed spins which inter alia identifies openness to the transcendent as wishful thinking. 

There exist "closed world structures," all of which function as "unchallenged axioms" by believers both secular and religious (590). The philosophical picture undergirding closed world structures is foundationalist epistemology, specifically the internalist epistemological project stretching back to Descartes.  Accordingly, we have representations of a basic nature that are sense impressions, copies of sense impressions, and (for the rationalists) innate ideas.  From these basic epistemological building blocks, we build up our world.  What is closer to the foundations is more certain; what farther away more conjectural.  Obviously, any putative transcendent is disenfranchised by this starting point in "the given" because there are no foundations from which the complex idea of the transcendent can be properly derived.

Taylor argues that the foundationalist story is not a discovery of how thing are, but rather a new interpretation constructed by the buffered self.  He writes that this new story is a "stance which requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority, of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the senses" (560).

Although Taylor does not explicitly say it, closed world structures are the way in which we dwell with, or reside in involvement with, entities (objects and persons) within our world.  Like a Heideggerian existentiale, closed world structures are distinctive ways in which our care and concern about the world in which we dwell present themselves.  (See James Smith, How (Not) to be Secular, Eerdmans, 97.)  The secularist spin on the immanent frame is a way in which humans comport themselves in the world, a way which occludes God.  What is this way?

The way of closed spin is a way of dwelling in a world of "there is this and no more" (my phrase).  The tug of the Augustinian "my heart is not at rest until it finds its rest in Thee, O Lord," is now phenomenologically given not as a tug to deeper truth, but as temptation and distraction away from the only truth there is (563), the truth of "there is this and no more."  The way of being-in-the-world without God is not a discovery given to us by science, but a way in which we now comport ourselves with entities in our world as we now do science.  We dwell in the world as ones who are alone, who without God and pre-established purpose must make up a story for ourselves, a story of courage to appreciate and affirm our aloneness.  Dwelling alone in the world, we understand that our norms and values are the only ones that actually exist.  In our being-in-the-world we pre-understand that our moral autonomy gives us the only dignity we can possess, a dignity that has now come to maturity.  We are no longer children; we see the world as it is.  We reside in our world in a "there is this and no more" way.  Any attempt to affirm differently is wishful thinking and a mark of immaturity and/or childishness.  Clearly, Taylor is pointing to a powerful image and a heady dwelling -- this way of seeing the immanent as if it were not possible to see more than the "there is this and no more."

Despite the hegemonic closed spin in the academy and vast sections of culture, "cross-pressuring" abounds, that is, conflict between "the draw of narratives of closed immanence on one side, and the sense of their inadequacy on the other," the memory of transcendence and its enlightened rejection, conflict arises between old destabilized beliefs and emerging new ones (595). Taylor believes that from the tension of cross-pressuring new spiritual possibilities can arise. 

The cross-pressuring between our drive towards fullness -- even exclusive humanists locked in the immanent frame cannot wholly abjure it! --  and our current naturalistic, materialistic, and reductionistic account of the world and how it operates, creates a tension that infects various "fields" of existence.  With respect to agency, we shrink from our own determination, and instead affirm ourselves as "active, building, creating, shaping agents."  With respect to ethics, we affirm "higher ethical/spiritual motives" that are irreducible to biological instincts.  Finally, in aesthetics we affirm meanings and purpose that "are not just differential responses to pleasure" (596). 

The Dilemmas

In Chapter 17 and 18 Taylor explicitly discusses the dilemmas produced by the cross pressures.  While these are dilemmas for Christianity, Taylor believes that they also are problematic for exclusive humanism. 

Taylor begins by pointing to the growing penchant to flatten out spiritual struggles by appealing to therapy.  If human beings desire existential wholeness, and religion and its struggles of the spirit do not produce such wholeness, then perhaps therapy can.  On the therapeutic model, "healing doesn't involve conversion" (619).  In fact, spiritual struggle and conversion is a fundamental culprit making achievement of wholeness difficult.  The therapeutic revolution assumes that spiritual insight and concern for the transcendent is itself a motive for existential disorder.  Our lives, haunted by the memory of transcendence and characterized by a lack of fullness, are now to be addressed by a therapy that regards such transcendence and fullness as a pathology.  (Much of what Taylor discusses in this section I first encountered reading Brave New World and Lord of the Flies.) 

Taylor believes, however, that there are significant problems with the therapeutic program.  It turns out that the guilt associated with the spiritual life is now transferred to the therapeutic life.  Did I get the right treatment?  To what degree was I effective in overcoming the spiritual?  Moreover, to call the disordered interactions of the spiritual life pathological, would suggest that much of our everyday non-spiritual disordered lives are pathological as well. 

But there are other problems that surface for religion:

• Religion in general (and Christianity in particular) asks us to transcend our humanity in moving to embrace the higher.  This, however, mutilates us by asking us to repress what is really human (623).  
• Religion in general (and Christianity in particular) often proclaims that the world could be other than it is.  Such a hope tends to "bowdlerize" reality, downplaying the difficult aspects of nature we all face.  

Religion's preoccupation with the ideal and transcendent denies what is deeply human in the here and now.  (It is as if the world is condemned by the divine Law.)  Moreover, preoccupation with divine promise and transformation (grace?) fails to take the here and now seriously.  (It is as if one asserts that after grace, the Law no longer applies.)  Either there is two much law or not enough.  This is a dilemma with Christian faith: "It seems hard to avoid one of these criticisms without impaling oneself on the other" (624).   

Taylor does, however, explore ways out of the dilemma.  What if we lower the bar as to what counts as transcendence, and embrace what Martha Nussbaum calls "internal transcendence," a transcendence that does not deny natural drives and passions? 

Now Taylor employs the strategy of what is good for the goose is good for the gander.  He believes that it will not work simply to make Christianity not deny human natural drives and desires, for the Enlightenment universalism ingredient in exclusive humanism also represses some of our basic human drives and passions.  In fact, exclusive humanism seems to be in no better position than Christianity when it comes to the project of leveling out the natural instincts, drives and passions of human beings in the name of good order.  (Does not the current PC movement sometimes effect a type of mutilation of the natural?)  The problem of mutilation infects both religion and exclusive humanism.  It is against both the mutilations of Christianity and exclusive humanism that the Nietzschean anti-humanist critique emerged. 

Taylor adroitly carries on a dialogue between the three partners: religious people committed to transcendence, exclusive humanists committed to the "modern moral order" of organizing society for mutual benefit, and neo-Nietzschean anti-humanists who reject both transcendence and the entire project of organizing society for mutual benefit.  On many issues, two of the partners agree over and against the third.  While the anti-humanists attack Christianity and exclusive humanism for their mutilation of the natural drives and passions of humanity, the anti-humanists and exclusive humanists stand together in attacking Christianity because of its commitment to transcendence.  Moreover, Christianity and anti-humanism seem somehow to agree about "the valorization of death and sometimes violence" over and against exclusive humanism (638). 

All of this brings us to a discussion of what Taylor calls the maximal demand: "How to define our highest spiritual and moral aspirations for human beings, while showing a path to the transformation involved which doesn't crush, mutilate, or deny what is essential to our humanity" (639-640).  Here it seems that we are faced with a dilemma: we must either adjust down our moral aspirations so that our ordinary human life might flourish, or we must abandon some of our human flourishing in order to achieve our highest ideals.  Taylor argues that the dilemma of either having to adjust down our moral aspirations or our human drives and passions applies to both exclusive humanism and Christianity.  But while the grace of the eschaton is available to Christians failing the maximal demand, it is not so for exclusive humanists.   (Taylor attempts throughout this section to evaluate Christian trajectories on their basis of how they meet the maximal demand.  Unfortunately, he does not sufficiently clarify the criteria upon which to affirm or deny particular Christian belief and practice as having met that demand.)

Taylor indicates that there are other problems with which Christianity must deal.  Christianity has been deeply influenced by Platonism and its other-wordly emphasis.  So how can one square the hyper-reality of the transcendent light with the shadow (and unreality) of human drives and passions?  From the platonic perspective the "maximal demand" is really beside the point.  Moreover, how do Christian notions of sacrifice, suffering, punishment, atonement and violence survive the maximal demand to not mutilate our drives and passions?  How does an authentic Christian transcendence avoid that of Platonism, the latter of which, when conjoined to Christianity, seems to have provided profound meaning and purpose to countless through the centuries? 

The point of the dilemmas Taylor uncovers is to show that both Christianity and exclusive humanism are challenged by them.  This is particularly true of violence.  Christianity, anti-humanism and exclusive humanism all are confronted with the problem of violence, and all have difficulty coming to terms with it.  Exclusive humanism misses the deeper non-biological roots of violence while anti-humanism decouples morality from it.  But while only Christianity has the resources to think it profoundly -- and while only it believes it can be overcome -- the mere existence of the violence challenges notions of a beneficient God engaged in divine pedagogy of His children.   For Christianity, as well as exclusive and anti-humanism, there is "a fundamental ambivalence of human reality" (673). 

The question of profound meaning poses more problems.  From where comes our motivation for spiritual commitment or doing good?  Upon what "transcendence" is it based?  We deal with the experience of evil in two basic ways: Either ignore it and believe that there is nothing ultimately wrong, or address it by trying to heal and correct it.  Throughout this section, Taylor labors to show that Christianity is perhaps more open (and honest) with respect both to the recognition of evil and the attempt to ameliorate it.  He opines that exclusive humanism does not have adequate moral sources to undergird its commitment to human rights, and to treat properly the least advantaged in our society. The philanthropy of the exclusive humanist often becomes a misanthropy because those whom she helps often fail to appreciate both the gifts given and the highly developed moral nature of the giver. 

Whatever one might say about the specifics of these dilemmas, the strategy Taylor employs is important.  In doing apologetics in our postmodern, post-Christian context, one must identify the dilemmas facing both Christianity and exclusive humanism, point to the inadequacies of exclusive humanism in trying to address these dilemmas, and sketch the resources that Christianity has in addressing these dilemmas in a more profound way than exclusive humanism. 

The goal is first to get the person to see that their commitment to exclusive humanism is a take and not a spin.  This is crucial, because if the secular, the religious and the anti-humanist positions are all stories we tell ourselves, all ultimately alternate existentiales or ways of being in the world, all profoundly faith positions underdetermined by the data, then it is unreasonable to claim that one's closed take is a spin, that it is the way that things are apart from our awareness, perception, conception, interests and language.  If it is unreasonable to have a closed spin on the immanent frame, then a very significant obstacle to faith has been removed. 

Pascal once concluded that in the face of a possible infinite pay out of glory and bliss, it is unreasonable not to wager one's finite life.  Pascal knew that his wager never could bring one to faith, because that is in God's hands.  His wager was only meant to remove some obstacles to faith.  It was an Anknuepfungsspunkt whose establishment in no way undermines the gratuity of grace.

Perhaps Taylor is best read in this light.  If our closed spin is unreasonable, then perhaps we should pull back to a more defendable position, the field of takes rather than spins.  Notice that the area of either the open or closed take on the immanent is one probably more likely to hear the Word, a Word whose heard utterance rests only on the anti-foundations of the gratuity of grace.  The removal of an obstacle does not an affirmation make.  However, the honest affirmation of Christ does entail the removal of an obstacle to faith, the immanent spin on our present immanent frame.  

The Institute of Lutheran Theology -- A Brick House?

The Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) will celebrate its ten year birthday soon.  It was in December of 2007 that ILT acquired agency, that is, the property of being able to act and being able to be acted upon. The actual life of ILT began when it became a non-profit corporation.  Having gained this property, it soon acted to receive its 501 c3 status, acquiring this in March of 2008.

As an agent, ILT has been able to do many things: It early on offered courses to congregations, and began in the fall of 2009 to offer courses to those preparing to become pastors and church workers. By 2010 it had defined the core degrees it would offer: the Masters of Divinity, the Masters of Arts, and the Masters of Sacred Theology.  (It later added the Doctor in Ministry.)

Since its very inception ILT has raised funds for operations and charged tuition for its courses.   As an agent, ILT can and does own property and can and has taken on commitments and obligations.  As an agent, ILT is a financial actor with a financial history.  Like any person, some years of its life have been more challenging than others, some years better than others.  As an agent, ILT has exhibited behaviors, has had dispositions toward behaviors, and has acquired a reputation.  As an agent, ILT has been working to achieve institutional recognition from its institutional peers; it has toiled to become accredited.  Agency is the necessary condition of accreditation.

While all of this may seem obvious, so much confusion exists in the the present post-modern Lutheran context that many no longer grasp this clearly.  Institutions purporting to train pastors arise, declaring that they can accomplish such training while outsourcing to others either content delivery or degree conferral or both.  The reason for such outsourcing is obvious: To found and develop a new institution that will itself achieve accreditation is very difficult.  It takes a long time, is expensive, and often seems to be irrelevant to the actual task of educating students.  Why not simply open up a room within the Adobe Connect platform and have one pastor teach another?

There were once three little pigs.  One worked a brief time and built a house of straw, the second worked longer and produced a house of sticks, and the third worked a very long time, finally finishing his house of bricks.  When the wolf came, he could easily blow down the house of straw.  Moreover, with effort, he could flatten the house of sticks.  No matter how hard he tried, however, he was unable to blow down the house of bricks.  The house of bricks outlived the wolf whom, as you might remember, was boiled alive in the waters at the bottom of the brick house's chimney.

ILT has spent the last ten years preparing for accreditation.  It has created a finance and business office, an institutional advancement office, an office of academic affairs, an office of student affairs, and office of financial aid, an office of chaplain and educational ministry, an office of library and informational services, an office of assessment and measurement, an office of technology and technological support, and an office of public relations, publications, and donor development.  It has produced countless handbooks for students, faculty, staff, departmental offices, and its board of directors.  It has collected, collated and interpreted information from constituents, students, alumni, faculty, staff and its Board of Directors.  It has written detailed business and strategic plans, written and implemented assessment plans, built and implemented budgets, and received unqualified financial audits.  Each year that it exists the agent known as ILT has acted so as to grow stronger and wiser.   While accreditation is neither necessary nor sufficient for quality education in the classroom, it is essential if one is to create an institution that can survive the tempests of the coming years.

Since its birth, the Institute of Lutheran Theology has wanted to be a house of bricks.  Early on it realized that outsourcing its education to others or using the accreditation of others was like building a house of straw or sticks.  Difficulties arise, the wolf comes, and one's house is no longer.  Who knows if the institution to which one is outsourcing or the institution whose accreditation one is using will survive, or will have the desire to perpetuate the relationship initially established?   Early on it realized that it could not locate at another institution and with integrity call itself an autonomous and accredited school.  How could it control curriculum if the majority of the courses are delivered by the faculty of another institution who have their own agendas and institutional mission?

The Institute of Lutheran Theology has sought from the beginning to be independent, autonomous, and accredited.  It understood early on that this meant that it would have to take the long view, and slowly and surely develop an institution capable of existence into the next century and beyond.  Brick houses can last a very long time.  It has been the ardent desire of the Institute of Lutheran Theology to be around for a very long time.

Why is this?  Is it for the glory of ILT and its founders? 

No.  Early on it became obvious to us that the challenges to the perpetuation of the Lutheran confessional tradition were so great, that only an institution with financial stability, academic rigor, and institutional longevity could hope to address them.  However, what we do at ILT we do humbly; we stand under the Cross.   But make no mistake: In order to stand under the Cross at God's right-hand demands considerable left-hand institutional development.  ILT needs institutional girth in order to be a faithful, humble witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And it is for this that we exist.

Musings on Causality, Divinity and Resurrection

It took a very long time before I could see things clearly.  

Growing up, I contemplated both God and science.   They always seemed in tension.  It did not help, of course, that my eighth grade confirmation pastor made me recite Luther's explanation to the First Article in from of the church with the prefix added, "In defiance of the theory of evolution, I believe that God has created me and all creatures . . . "

Although I did not know it at the time, I was already struggling with some pretty deep issues in the logic of explanation.   If one could explain why something was the case by pointing to laws and antecedent physical events and processes, what exactly was there left for God to do?  If I explained x both by divine intentionality D and some set of physical events E coupled with physical laws L, then in what sense is D, or perhaps E and L superfluous?  If x would not have happened without D, then surely E and L cannot form a complete explanation of x.   But E and L do form a complete explanation of x, therefore by modus tollens, x would have happened without D, and thus D is causally irrelevant.

The general problem is one of causal overdetermination, and confronts us as well in the philosophy of mind.  If mental event M1 explains M2, and M1 is physically realized by a set of brain events P1, and P1 causes a set of brain events P2, and P2 is the physical realization of M2, then in what sense is M1 qua M1 -- that is, M1 in so far as it is M1 -- causally efficacious in producing M2?  Does not the mental become merely epiphenomenal on neurophysiology, a "wheel idly turning" (Wittgenstein) as it were?  Is this not clearly a situation in which mental explanation fails to articulate the deepest causal map of the universe, and thus is in principle reducible to brain explanation or, better yet, can be eliminated in favor of the latter?

Consider the healing of Mary from stage four liver cancer.  This event -- let's call it m -- is supposedly effected by God's intentionality and power D.  If God healed Mary, then clearly D causally produces m.  But Mary's healing is physically realized as some set of micro-physical actualizations S.   While there was once a time -- e.g., in pre-physicalist ages -- when one might have said that D causally produces S without means, that option is not available to most people today.   Our time assumes the principle of the causal closure of the physical,  for each and every physical event p, there is some set of physical events E that causally produces p, and for each and every physical event p, p cannot and does not produce events that are not physical.  But if D does not produce m without means, then there is some set of physical events that is the physical realization of D such that these events cause m.  

It has been axiomatic in theology since the late Enlightenment to conceive God-talk non-causally.   What I mean by this, is that the giving of an interpretation to theological language such as 'God creates the universe' does not involve one in the drawing of a causal relation across the disparate ontological domains of supernature and nature.  The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America slogan, "God's work, our hands," nicely captures the situation:  Divine agency is physically realizable!   God's working of Y is realizable through the means of some set of individuals P acting in particular ways -- let's say that the set of individuals P instantiates a complex set of relations Q.   Thus, when P instantiates Q -- or perhaps when P acts Q-ly -- then Y obtains.   But the question is obvious: How is Y qua Y a divine act when it is physically realizable as P acting Q-ly?   More simply put, how is divine agency possible in means, when causal explanations in terms of the means is sufficient?   Do we not have a case of causal overdetermination here when allowing the divine explanation to track alongside the physical?  

The solution to all of this is to offer a model of theological language in which prima facie causal terms are given a non-causal analysis.  This worked very well in ages dominated by idealist pre-suppositions.  Accordingly, 'God creates' is a way of talking about some reality deeper than the causal.  Perhaps there is a reality of "Being-itself" that is deeper than the realm of particular beings, a realm that is somehow more profound than the causal, an ontological depth of being presupposed by the ontic structure of being in which beings are causally related to other beings.  Maybe although causal talk here is in some sense misapplied, the language of the causal somehow illuminates the depth dimension of the human such that the language is nonetheless theologically vindicated.  Thus, while God does not really cause the bringing about of Mary's healing, the saying of 'God healed Mary' does illuminate or make sense out of one's existential situation and the seeming mystery of grace, the getting of that which one is ultimately not earned or deserved.   Saying that 'God healed Mary' seems to say more than there is some set of physical events that occurred -- though they cannot be fully specified -- that when instantiated brought about some set of physical events in Mary such that the term 'healed' could be applied to her.

One might, of course, complain that my concerns with 'God heals Mary' are somehow merely a problem for the philosopher.  While philosophers are concerned with semantics, the meaning of terms and the truth-values of the propositions comprised by them, semantics is not a problem for the believer reading the Bible.  Why allow the abstractions of fundamental theology (proto-theology), a theology that is most immediately relatable to First Article concerns, to transgress upon the hallowed domain of Christology and the proclamation of Christ's life giving death and resurrection?   Why not simply preach Christ and let semantics take care of itself?

Imagine listenting to preacher Pete proclaim that Christ is risen from the dead and that because of this the future has been conquered and that salvation is at hand.   One could, I suppose, simply listen to Pete and not think deeply about what his pronouncements mean and what the truth-conditions of the propositions he utters are.  (The truth-conditions of a proposition are those which must obtain in order for the proposition to be true.)  One might somehow be able to say, "OK, I don't know exactly what Pete's meaning when he talks of Christ's resurrection, but I will regard the resurrection to be true."  But this strategy does not work well when Molly asks what is meant by 'resurrection'.   At this point, one must either give some truth-condition for 'Christ is resurrected', or simply say that one does not know.  But if the latter, then Molly will say, "If you don't know what is meant by 'Christ is resurrected', then you don't know what it would mean for Christ not to be resurrected, and if you don't know that, then clearly to say "'Christ is resurrected' is true" is to say nothing at all."

To this, one simply has to change the subject.   While one might hope that one is meaning something even if one is not sure what one is meaning, there is no basis for the hope: Without knowing precisely what situation must obtain for 'Christ is resurrected' to be false, one knows not what 'Christ is resurrected' means.  Therefore, despite emotions to the contrary, to be told 'Christ is resurrected' is not to be told anything in particular -- and thus a fortiori not anything at all.  Sometimes for the sake of the Gospel one must say things as they are.  What is at stake is too important to do otherwise.

In the early days of Christianity, disciples knew that Christ's resurrection was tied to an empty tomb.  'Christ is resurrected' is false if the tomb is not empty.  The assertion had falsifiability conditions.   While the tomb being empty is not sufficient for Christ's resurrection, it is nonetheless necessary for it.  Christ's resurrection thus had a physical realization, and because that resurrection was tied to both the future and salvation, there was a physical dimension to both the future and salvation as well.   Just as Jesus Christ was physically raised from the dead, so too will all who sleep in the Lord be physically resurrected as well.   The coherence of soteriology depended up the physical realization of salvation.  While death was real, Christ's resurrected life could conquer it.

What I am saying is something quite sensible: Christ's physical resurrection and God's causal action producing it was itself understood in the tradition as causally-productive of human salvation.   Human salvation was an effect of divine agency, a causal action drawn across disparate ontological domains.  After all, there is no physical realization of 'Molly is dead' that in itself can causally produce 'Molly is alive'.  While 'God's work' can be realized perhaps in the work of human hands, 'Molly is being raised from the dead' has no known physical realization.

Simply put, while 'God creates the heavens and the earth' can be given a non-causal analysis it is not clear that a similar non-causal strategy can be given for 'God resurrects Jesus'.  The latter connects with the notion of salvation in a very intimate way -- as long as salvation is thought to be physically realized.  Of course, we are living in a time in which people are increasingly thinking that death is not an enemy.  If 'death' and 'life' are taken as descriptions of how we live rather than the fact that we live, then there may come a time when 'Mary's salvation' in no way depends upon the fact that she will live.  That time, which is increasingly our time, does truly recall the time of the Gnostics and their heresies.  

The first step in seeking treatment is realizing that one is sick.  If we do not realize the importance of semantics in theology, we shall not grasp the important theological work that must now be done.  It is irrational to hope for something of which it can be said that one does not know if one has it.

Studying Classical Lutheran Theology with Vigor and Rigor

I am driving back from the Association of Biblical Higher Education (ABHE) Annual Convention where the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT) was just granted candidate status towards full institutional accreditation.  ILT is dedicating all the resources necessary to acquire initial accreditation extremely quickly.

ILT is known, of course, for its innovative pedagogical model that uses video conferencing resources in an on-line format that allows almost all of our M.A., M.Div., STM and D.Min. curricula to be delivered directly into student's own home.  I was a tenured professor for many years at a state university, and often tell people that the only difference between teaching at the university or with ILT is that with ILT I don't have to find a parking place before class.  We do distance education very well.

Just because ILT is innovative pedagogically, however, does not guarantee its long-term success or viability.  Many other schools, even state universities, are beginning to use the technologies we have used since inception.  Lutheran seminaries are getting into the act as well.  So when all the Lutheran seminaries learn to deliver on-line like ILT has done, what is left to be distinctive about ILT?

The answer is easy: ILT is much more rigorous than most Lutheran seminaries now are; we prepare much more deeply in the discipline of theology itself.  The following compares the Institute of Lutheran Theology's Master of Divinity program with that of Luther Seminary's in St. Paul.  Luther Seminary once had a very fine curriculum, but changes over the last decades in the trajectory of theological education in North America have profoundly affected that curriculum.  The ILT curriculum comes from the 2017-18 ILT academic catalog.  The Luther Seminary information can be found in the Luther Seminary 2016-17 academic catalog found at www.luthersem.edu.  Below are the classes that students must take at each institution.

Biblical Theology

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Introduction to Greek
• Readings in NT Greek, Biblical Hebrew 
• Lutheran Evangelical Methods
• Lutheran Biblical Interpretation
• The Pentateuch
• Wisdom and the Histories
• The Gospels
• Paul and His Legacy
• Epistles and Formation of the NT
• OT or NT elective 

Luther Seminary

• Biblical Hebrew
• New Testament Greek
• Scripture & Witness I
• Scripture & Witness II
• Biblical Exegesis for Ministry 

Historical Theology

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• History of Christian Thought I: Origins to 1500
• History of Christian Thought II: The Reformation
• History of Christian Thought III: 1700 - 1900
• History of Christian Thought IV:  20th Century
• History of the Lutheran Church
• The Theology of Martin Luther
• The Lutheran Confessions 

Luther Seminary

• Reform and Expansion of Christianity
• Either History of Christianity since 1800 or Apostles to the Reformers
• Lutheran Confessional Writings or denominational option

Systematic Theology 

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Creation and the Triune God
• Christology 
• Christ, Spirit and the Two Kingdoms
• Three from the following:  
• Theology and Science
• World Religions and Theology
• Christian Sexual Ethics
• Philosophy of Religion
• Religious Interpretation of Films 

Philosophy

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Faith, Knowledge and Reason
• Critical Thinking for the Theologian (doctrinal track) 

Luther Seminary 

• None 

Pastoral Theology 

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Pastoral Theology I
• Pastoral Theology II
• Pastoral Theology III
• Parish Administration
• The Teaching Shepherd
• Theology and the Practice of Worship
• Homiletics I 
• Homiletics II
• Homiletics III
• Pastoral Theology elective
• Internship (no credit) 

Luther Seminary 

• Christian Public Leader I & II (half courses) 
• Congregational Care and Formation
• Foundations of Biblical Preaching 
• Public Worship
• Clinical Pastoral Education
• Internship (counts as two courses) 

Electives 

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Two courses (OT or NT elective and Pastoral Theology elective, as noted above) 

Luther Seminary 

• 12 courses 

Notice the difference in the emphasis between ILT and what Luther Seminary now offers.  We don't teach leadership as an end in itself, but believe that if our students humbly know Scripture and the theological tradition profoundly, they will be formed with servants' hearts so that they might preach, teach and lead boldly.  Evangelical leadership is a function of Evangelical servanthood; such servanthood is not a function of leadership.  

Given what I have just said, it might be useful as well to contrast the Institute of Lutheran Theology D. Min. program with that of Luther Seminary.  Here it is: 

Topic

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Reaching the Unreached

Luther Seminary

• Congregational Mission and Leadership

Residency Requirement

Institute of Lutheran Theology

• None

Luther Seminary 

• Total of 38-42 days over four years

Method of Course Delivery

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Live multi-feed video conferencing one evening per week for a total of 45 contact hours per semester

Luther Seminary 

• On-Campus one-week intensives, with work before and after

Required Courses

Institute of Lutheran Theology

• A Secular World
• Models of Engagement
• Proclamation in the 21st Century
• Catechesis
• Methodology and Approaches to Graduate Study 
• Two student-designed independent projects

Luther Seminary

• Integration of Theology and Ministry
• Pastoral Theology, Identity and Spiritual Life
• Missional Church
• Missional Leadership
• Congregational Practices 

Thesis/Project

Institute of Lutheran Theology 

• Work independently at own pace

Luther Seminary 

• Four visits to campus during fourth year for research and guidance

I have made a comparison with Luther Seminary simply because I take what has happened at Luther to exemplify general trends in theological education within North American Lutheran circles.  Please know that I have nothing against Luther Seminary; many of my good friends once received a very fine theological education there.   

Ten Years Ago and Ten Years from Now

It is January 2017 and I just received notification that the video of the Institute of Lutheran Theology's appearance on the "Leaders in the Future of Education" series on the public TV program Voices in America will be distributed to PBS stations across the country at the end of the month.  I was also notified that our first ILT commercials will be run on the Fox Business Network during prime time on January 19 & 20th.  (The commercials are an added benefit in being featured on Voices in America.)  ILT has come a long way.  

As we begin 2017, I am thinking back to 2007.   As many of you know, I am the President of a new educational initiative called the Institute of Lutheran Theology (ILT), a fully-operational seminary and graduate school offering a M.A. in Religion, a Masters of Divinity, a Masters of Sacred Theology, a Doctor of Ministry, and certificate programs in pastoral and youth ministry.  ILT is presently on the fast-track towards full institutional accreditation, which we hope to have as early as 2018.   Tonight, however, I am not thinking ahead to next year, but am thinking back to a time ten years before.  What was life at ILT like ten years ago?  Thinking about ten years ago, makes me wonder as well about ten years from now?  Where will ILT be in 2027?  

Before remembering January 2007, however, it might be beneficial to some to review what the Institute of Lutheran Theology is.  A good way to learn what we are about is to visit our webpage.  You will find there that ILT has a nicely elaborated Mission Statement and a number of Institutional Goals.  If you examine the page long enough you will find out about our many programs that still offer something of a theoretical approach to theology.  Graduates of our Masters of Divinity program learn Greek, some Hebrew, some logic, basic philosophy for theology, some ethics, a theology & science course, study the Biblical texts, take 4-5 courses in the history of theology, study Luther and the Confessions, take three courses in systematic theology, have 9 courses in practical theology plus a year-long internship.  We offer this program reasonably (about $30k for the full Masters of Divinity) and almost wholly through on-line video conferencing.  Each student sees and hears the other students, sees and hears the professor, and the professor sees and hears each student.  (Note: Internships are not virtual.  Students must do flesh-and-blood ministry in congregations.)   Though we are very young, we have already had about 40 graduates from our various programs, 16 in the last calendar year alone.  

Our faculty is very solid with several members with long academic records and research reputations.  We are blessed to have theologians from the following Lutheran traditions and bodies teaching with us: The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod, Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ, and North American Lutheran Church, the Association of Free Lutheran Churches, the Augsburg Lutheran Churches, and the American Association of Lutheran Churches.  ILT's students come from many church bodies, but predominately Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ (LCMC), the Canadian Association of Lutheran Congregations (CALC), and the North American Lutheran Church (NALC).  In our Doctor of Ministry and Master of Sacred Theology, we do, however, presently have students from the LCMS and the Evangelical Lutheran Synod (ELS) as well as the Reformed tradition.   

So where was ILT ten years ago today?  

We were nine months forward from our launch at the April 2006 WordAlone Convention in Golden Valley, Minnesota.  We were seeking partnerships when and where we could find them, about to visit Concordia University in Irvine, California and Concordia Seminary in St. Louis.  We were eight months away from our first course being delivered over the internet, eleven months away from being incorporated as a non-profit in the state of South Dakota, 13 months away from being granted our IRS 504 c (3) status, and still 32 months away from offering our first graduate course.  (We chose to offer courses to lay people within congregations in our first few years.)   The ILT staff in those days consisted of four people, each having full-time jobs doing something quite unrelated to ILT.  (It would be  42 months before I gave up a tenured full professorship to work to build the Institute of Lutheran Theology.)   Four part-time staff is a far cry from the ten dedicated full-time staff we have now.  In 2007 we raised approximately $30,000; while last fiscal year we raised almost one million dollars.  

People have asked me, "If you knew how hard this would be, would you have done it?"  I always answer, "I always knew it would be this hard, I just did not know we would be this successful."  After all, how does one begin a graduate school and seminary without institutional support and funding?  How does one bring it about ex nihilo?  The answer, of course, is that one does not do such a thing, and cannot do it.  However, by the grace and will of God, with perseverance and patience, things come into being that one could never engineer.  ILT exists by the grace of God and it will exist as long as God graces it.  

So where would we like to be in ten years?  What constitutes the success of ILT going forward?   

We will finish this academic year with a headcount of about 100 students.  It is reasonable to expect that as a fully-accredited institution, we can grow this headcount 7.2% a year to 200 students by 2027.  We think by 2027 that we will have had 8 cohorts of Doctor of Ministry students graduate, as well as a dozen or more Masters of Sacred Theology students, 30 Masters of Arts, perhaps 40-50 Masters of Divinity students, and maybe 125 certificate students.   We hope to grow our tuitional revenue by 200% and our donor revenue by 100%.  In addition, we want to be able to obtain grants to upgrade our programs, our library, and our entire facility.  It is possible that by 2027 we will have both a functioning Ph.D. program and a nascent BD curriculum.  Who knows what God might have in store if we are bold enough to dream?  

All will be for nought, however, if we don't remain true to our Mission.  At the beginning we were wary of locating at a denominational seminary because our experience was that the theological trajectory within the ELCA could not be controlled by traditional affirmations of adherence to Scripture and the Confessions.  We thought that being independent gave us the best opportunity to stay Biblically-grounded and Confessionally-based.   We still think this.  Our philosophical presuppositions and theological affirmations are meant to situate us on the same basic semantic and ontological field as was present within the Reformation itself.  We hold that there really is a God that is causally involved in our salvation, a God whose acts can be spoken about in true propositions.   

If you have not been thinking about us for some time, or have never really heard about us, do some research about us.  Our courses our top-notch.  We teach classical Christian theology from a Lutheran perspective.  We aim a bit higher intellectually than has been the wont within vast reaches of North American Lutheranism recently.  Check us out. You don't have to be Lutheran to benefit from great courses from faithful and competent professors, delivered right to your home computer.