“You Shall Know the Truth, and the Truth Will Set You Free”: A Scientist’s Response

From the Publisher

James M. Unglaube

Unglaube reports on the second annual Vocation of a Lutheran College conference of August 1996, where Walter Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary addressed “What is Lutheran; What is the Lutheran Tradition” (biblical, catholic, evangelical, sacramental, world-affirming—the world “received, enjoyed, served as God’s Gift”). He previews presentations by Wendy McCredie of Texas Lutheran and Baird Tipson of Wittenberg on how the Lutheran tradition is embodied in its colleges, and Bob Vogel’s challenge in “Coherence—And Now what?” that the tradition comes to life in how faculty give expression to their beliefs and values in the classroom and with colleagues.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson opens with an invitation for reader submissions to balance the conference-paper format of the first two issues, then asks how college and universities can turn students positively toward learning. Drawing on Aristotle’s claim that study is loved for its own sake (which students greet with disbelieving laughter) and Neil Postman’s The End of Education, he argues that students lack narratives within which learning makes sense and proposes four Lutheran mega-narratives—stewardship of creation, the freedom of the Christian, the sacramental presence of the transcendent in the concrete and ordinary, and vocation—that could inspire learning at the 28 ELCA colleges and universities.

Lutheran Tradition: Five Continuing Themes

Walter R. Bouman

Bouman of Trinity Lutheran Seminary identifies five themes central to the Lutheran theological tradition (understood through Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of tradition as “an historically extended, socially embodied argument”): biblical (a non-oppressive authority for the Bible rooted in the gospel rather than in scholastic inerrancy, against the backdrop of Luther’s 1517 challenge to Tetzel and the post-Enlightenment marginalization of theology); catholic (continuity with the Book of Concord and the three ancient creeds, with Luther’s “Christology from below” recovering a Jewish rather than Hellenistic understanding of God, revived by Tillich, Pannenberg, Forde, and Jenson); evangelical (justification by faith as the answer to mortality’s radical question); sacramental (Word, Eucharist, and Baptism as Christ’s presence from the future of God’s consummated Reign); and world-affirming (creation as gift, vocation as God’s work in every calling, and stewardship of the ecological crisis).

“My Wife, We Have Not Come to the End of All Our Trials, but a Measureless Labor Yet”: The Lutheran Argument in Colleges

Steven Paulson

Paulson of Concordia College responds to Bouman by invoking Penelope’s unreasonable patience for Odysseus and asking whether Bouman’s five “principles” deliver the “continuities of conflict” that MacIntyre’s account of a living tradition demands. He argues that the proper Lutheran “continuity of conflict” is the praxis of proclamation—Christ crucified as “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles”—which is given outside the institution’s walls and which colleges and universities, as socially embodied arguments, “can’t like” because it places truth beyond their control. The Lutheran problem, he concludes, is not the Enlightenment or Post-Modernism but the “old Adam,” the Odysseus still unsure of his identity.

Disputatio Pro Quo? The Search for Lutheran Education

Jon-David Hague, Kimberly Hague

Kimberly and Jon-David Hague—both Luther College graduates completing graduate studies at Berkeley and Boston University respectively—respond to Bouman by offering Luther’s curriculum reform at Wittenberg University in the spring of 1518, only months after the 95 theses, as a model of the Lutheran voice in higher education. Inspired by humanistic principles, Luther introduced lectures on classical authors and the first instruction in Greek and Hebrew, giving students the tools to encounter scripture directly rather than receive dictated doctrine. The spirit of that reform—providing students with every possible tool while acknowledging that an instructor’s perspective is neither ultimate authority nor final word—remains useful for the search for Lutheran academia today.

Feeling at Home: Dimensions of Faculty Life

Jane Hokanson Hawks

Hawks of Midland Lutheran College responds to Bouman by reflecting on her path from a Lutheran childhood through the BSN at St. Olaf and thirteen years at four non-church-related institutions to her present home at Midland, where teaching at a Lutheran institution finally feels “right.” Bouman’s framing of the five themes as the Lutheran argument about what it means to be human helped her ad-hoc committee articulate the spiritual role in Midland’s new faculty mentoring program (recently funded by the Lilly Foundation), and grounds her work as a nurse educator confronting the daily humanness of grief, joy, ethical dilemmas, and care across cultural and religious difference.

On the Outside Looking Out: A Personal and Social Psychological Response

Chuck Huff

Huff of St. Olaf—a self-described “Metho-Bap-terian” from the South educated at Bob Jones University—offers a personal response to Bouman’s themes (welcoming the rejection of biblical inerrancy, the distinction between gospel and scripture in the homosexuality debate, the gospel-in-the-creeds reading that releases him from Hellenistic conundrums, and the recasting of justification by faith as meaning rather than insurance policy) and a social-psychological response in which a planned study of campus social networks at St. Olaf was discontinued when preliminary interviews revealed that everyone—storied Lutherans, secular faculty, feminists, fundamentalists—felt like outsiders. Continuing the tradition requires constructing a conversation that is thoughtful, fair, inclusive, charitable, focussed, and still true to the tradition.

Two Poems: The Advent Carol / The Madonna of Dohany Street

Brian Forry Wallace

Two poems by Brian Forry Wallace of Capital University: “The Advent Carol,” a litany of the babies who were not adored—the Jewish baby shot with a Luger, the Black child hanged from a tree, the female messiah tossed into a river, the Tutsi infant cut by machetes, the Japanese newborn incinerated by atom bombs, the Chinese baby crushed by Japanese bombs, the aborted Mary’s child—ending with the baby “whom we do not understand, cannot feed, whom we kill”; and “The Madonna of Dohany Street,” on a Holocaust photograph in a Budapest museum of a dead mother and her dead Christ-child daughter in the former ghetto, in which annunciation, nativity, adoration, and crucifixion are seen together in a single instant.

Embodying the Tradition: The Case of Wittenberg University

Baird Tipson

Tipson, President of Wittenberg University, locates Wittenberg in the “American” strain of Ohio Lutheranism founded in 1845 under Ezra Keller (a Pennsylvania College and Gettysburg Seminary graduate and disciple of Samuel Simon Schmucker), with English-language preaching, financial support from the pan-Protestant New England Society, Presbyterians on the Board, and an Episcopalian teaching Latin. He names two ongoing challenges—remaining authentically Lutheran while welcoming a pluralistic student body (just under a quarter are Lutheran in a primary service area that is 5% Lutheran), and making the tradition clear and compelling to non-Lutheran or lukewarm Lutheran students—and presents the five things every Wittenberg graduate should be able to do (respond to the human condition; recognize, define, and solve problems; develop a sense of vocation; assume servant-leadership; take moral responsibility) as authentic expressions of the Gospel and of the university’s ELCA relationship.

Writing Toward the Night Complete: Teaching and Working at the Public, Secular Institution

Bruce Allen Heggen

No. 16 · Winter 2003

Heggen, Lutheran Campus Ministry pastor and adjunct English professor at the University of Delaware, builds on a freshman’s essay closing line—“All in all our night was complete”—to argue that even in the secular public university one can “teach hope” as a critical principle by drawing on Douglas John Hall’s Heideggerian distinction between calculative and meditative thought, the Frankfurt School’s instrumental versus substantialist reason, Luther’s theology of the cross, Parker Palmer’s “obedience to truth,” bell hooks, Lionel Basney, Shelley Shaver, and Donald Sheehan’s Frost Place “principle of compassion.” The classroom and Lutheran campus ministry together can become “communities of memory and hope” that, like the artist student’s Fourth of July, hold together danger, people getting together, explosions, and lots of fun.

Wake Up Running! A Call to Ethical Leaders in Quest of Democratic Space

Walter Earl Fluker

No. 62 · Fall 2025

Abridged from his VLHE keynote, Fluker draws on Habakkuk and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower to call a new generation of ethical leaders to “wake up running” toward democratic futures, packing their runaway bags with love-filled-justice, grace-filled-empathy, and hope-filled-resiliency for the soul-filled work the moment requires.

Rich and Poor in an Era of Globalized Religion and Economies: Challenges to Lutheran Colleges

Pamela K. Brubaker

No. 25 · Spring 2007

Brubaker opens with two World Council of Churches communion stories—a generous Aymara potato meal in Bolivia and a gated invitation-only lunch at a prosperous immigrant German Lutheran church in Brazil—to frame the question of which stance Lutheran colleges will adopt toward diversity. Drawing on Richard Hughes and Ernest Simmons on Lutheran “ecumenical confessionalism,” Linell Cady, Ulrich Beck, Held and McGrew, the World Bank’s 2006 Equity and Development report, Mark Juergensmeyer’s Global Religions, Harvey Cox on the Market as God, the WCC’s “economy of life” / AGAPE document, and Larry Rasmussen on universal human rights, she argues that part of the academic work of Lutheran colleges is to educate for critical citizenship by questioning neo-liberal assumptions and equipping students to claim social, economic, cultural, civil, and political rights for the whole human family.

Conciliatory and Queer: The Radical Love of Lutheran Higher Education

Kiki Kosnick, Sharon Varallo

No. 50 · Fall 2019

Kosnick and Varallo reflect in conversation on how Augustana’s Five Faith Commitments and its conciliatory ecumenical roots in the Augsburg Confession have given them — a non-binary queer first-generation faculty member and a twenty-one-year veteran — the “street cred” to act on radical love, build bridges to imprisoned and non-binary communities, and discover that Augustana is welcoming not despite the fact that it is Lutheran, but because of it.

Gift and Calling: A Lutheran Perspective on Higher Education

Darrell Jodock

No. 34 · Fall 2011

Jodock argues that a Lutheran perspective on higher education rests on three underlying ideas—that we are gifted (a giftedness that calls forth wonder, awe, gratitude, a sense of humor, and vocation as response to neighbor); that the Lutheran tradition affirms a particular kind of God who is down-to-earth and at work in the world for justice and human wholeness; and that a Lutheran “third path” can be both rooted in the tradition and inclusive of others. He draws out ten implications for higher education, from wonder as the heart of religion through liberal learning oriented toward the freedom of its members.

From Alien to Citizen

Arne Selbyg

No. 29 · Spring 2009

Selbyg reflects on three experiences of being educated for citizenship—growing up in Norway under the legacy of Lutheran pastors and public school teachers who resisted the Nazi occupation, arriving in America as a resident alien, and becoming a naturalized American citizen—and proposes the jazz ensemble as a better metaphor for American society than the melting pot, one in which different citizens learn skills, study other instruments, and dialog with one another in service to the common music.