A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar

The Vocation of a Lutheran College: Some Transitional Thoughts

James M. Unglaube

Unglaube offers final reflections on thirty years in Lutheran higher education as he leaves the ELCA Division for Higher Education and Schools to join Carthage College, his alma mater. He recalls colleague Richard Solberg’s influence, the closing of Upsala College in 1995, the Higher Education and Namibia program shared with Naomi Linnell, the growth of endowments from $70 million to $1 billion in 25 years, and the Vocation of a Lutheran College project he credits Paul Dovre with inspiring. He likens the twenty-eight ELCA colleges to flowers on a rose bush—same Lutheran tradition, each blossom different—requiring constant nurture if the partnership between church and college is to thrive.

From the Editor

Tom Christenson

Christenson thanks the departing Jim Unglaube, recommends Ronald A. Wells’s Keeping Faith: Embracing the Tensions in Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans) as both an interesting collection of essays and a model worth imitating at ELCA institutions, previews the issue’s pieces by Richard Hughes, Carl Skrade and Spencer Porter, Gregory Clark, and Karla Bohmbach, and introduces three new features of the journal: “What I Have Learned” (an essay by a senior or emeritus faculty member, inaugurated by Richard Ylvisaker), “Reviews” (initiated by Karla Bohmbach), and a “Bulletin Board” for cross-campus announcements.

Our Place in Church-Related Higher Education in the United States

Richard Hughes

Adapting his 1997 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference address, Hughes asks how the Lutheran heritage can sustain the life of the mind in church-related higher education. He compares Reformed, Mennonite, and Catholic traditions in turn—the Reformed integration of faith and learning around a Christian worldview, the Mennonite priority of discipleship over cognition, and the Catholic sacramental affirmation of the secular as bridge—before arguing that the Lutheran heritage’s particular gifts (justification by grace, theology of the cross, two kingdoms, paradoxical sensibility, vocation, and openness to ambiguity) uniquely support rigorous inquiry, genuine pluralistic conversation, and critical analysis. Drawing on Arthur Holmes, John Howard Yoder, Mark Schwehn, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Lutheran writers including Bob Benne and Tom Christenson, Hughes contends that Lutheran finitude grounds an unusually open and self-critical academic posture.

The Skeptical Theologian's Dictionary

Carl Skrade, Spencer Porter

Porter and Skrade offer selections from a mock-lexicon of theological terms: answer, church, faith, God, grace, hope, justification, love, prayer, sin, soul, and theology, among others. Each entry begins with a standard definition and then unsettles it—answer reminds the reader that in theology and poetry the questions matter more than their answers; church alternates between “the mystical Body of Christ” and ordinary human gatherings whose machinery often obscures the gospel; God is the One whose name we are told not to take in vain and yet whose name we keep using; prayer is communion with God yet often degenerates into a list of demands. The form’s irony exposes the gap between the language of theology and its lived realities—a sober, witty corrective for Lutheran classrooms and chapels alike.

The University in the City of God: Beyond Dialectics and Rhetoric

Gregory A. Clark

Clark, drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry, distinguishes the preliberal, liberal, and postliberal university and argues that the liberal university’s pretense of dialectical neutrality has masked a particular rhetoric of its own. Following John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, he holds that every philosophy and institution is finally a rhetoric and that the church’s task is not to win on the secular university’s terms but to proclaim and embody an alternative city. The Christian college, then, should give up the apologetic pose of meeting secular reason halfway and instead practice the rhetoric of the gospel: a proclamation of Jesus, an enactment of Christian friendship and peace, and a willingness to be vulnerable to the violence of the world as Jesus was vulnerable to his own. Clark commends this stance to colleges related to the church.

What I Have Learned: Maybe Plato Was Right

Richard Ylvisaker

Inaugurating the new “What I Have Learned” column, Ylvisaker reflects on a career of teaching philosophy at Luther College and offers four hard-won “preliminary examples” in which Plato turned out to be more right than fashionable criticism allowed: (1) communities are not necessarily better off by becoming more diverse—diversity needs a unity of purpose if it is to enrich rather than fragment; (2) politics, to be more than a struggle for power by competing interests, must rest on a moral basis that transcends those interests; (3) the much-derided body-soul dualism contains a measure of truth about the cognitive and moral limitations of embodied life; and, deepest of all, (4) reason itself depends on a community of discourse in which doctrinaire pronouncement gives way to disciplined inquiry. Athens and Jerusalem, he concludes, should meet at the college of the church.

A Response to Paul Santmire: The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth

Arthur A. Preisinger

Preisinger commends much of Paul Santmire’s earlier essay—the critique of the “back-to-nature” cult, the call for a holistic environmental ethos, the suggestion of a cosmic liturgical praxis—but takes issue with Santmire’s reading of classical Lutheran social ethics. He argues that the two kingdoms doctrine was not a systematic Lutheran treatise (the term itself became common only in the 1930s), that the doctrine’s misuse by some twentieth-century German theologians does not condemn its proper use, and that the South African Council of Churches actually deployed the doctrine (correctly interpreted) against apartheid. Drawing on Karl Hertz, Ulrich Duchrow, Tom Strieter, and F. Edward Cranz, Preisinger defends the doctrine as complementary duality—left hand and right hand of God, governances to be distinguished but never separated—and concludes with Bill Lazareth that the skeletons in the Lutheran closet are not Luther but departures from Luther.

A Response to Paul Santmire

Don Braxton

Braxton appreciates the dialectical structure of Santmire’s mandates—“skeletons in our closets and riches in our own vaults”—and reads it as a faithful expression of the Lutheran tradition of Paul, Augustine, and Luther. He argues that Santmire is on target in warning against premature flight to non-Christian traditions for environmental wisdom (theoretical sensitivity does not translate into ecological behavior in practice), and that classical Lutheran social ethics has too often been quietistic. But Lutheran ethics at its best is dialectical, not dualistic—recognizing the interpenetration of church and world, Law and Gospel, eschatological Kingdom and present realities, as in Hegel, Ritschl, Bonhoeffer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Larry Rasmussen. Braxton commends environmental responsibility, social criticism of unsustainable practices, and a liturgical practice of resistance to instrumentalism as appropriate next steps for Lutheran liberal arts colleges, especially Capital University.

In Search of a Calling: The College's Role in Shaping Identity

Karla G. Bohmbach

Bohmbach reviews Thomas O. Buford’s In Search of a Calling: The College’s Role in Shaping Identity (Mercer University Press, 1995), which diagnoses a meaning-crisis among college students and traces two historical aspects of “calling”: the biblical, communitarian aspect rooted in the Hebrew Bible and the practical, individualistic aspect rooted in the Renaissance. She praises Buford’s reconstruction of imago dei as imagination rather than copy of God’s rationality, his broad disciplinary range (biblical studies, theology, educational psychology, business management), and his identification of the tension between freedom and limitation as the field of calling. She is sharply critical, however, of his final chapter’s wariness of canon-revisionists and multiculturalists, his caricature of “special-interest groups,” and his presumption of a homogeneous student body—a presumption that, she argues, never matched American college reality and matches it less today.

Of Fathers and Feminism: How One Lutheran Woman Came to a Vocation

Karla G. Bohmbach

No. 14 · Summer 2002

Bohmbach, a recently tenured Susquehanna University feminist biblical scholar one month shy of forty, traces her vocation back through a Vacation Bible School injury, an LCMS upbringing in which only men could preach or preside, her father’s contradictory message that she could do anything while modeling a church that limited women, St. Olaf’s revelation of a Lutheran female face, and a Duke graduate seminar on the History of Feminist Thought with Carol Meyers. Her published feminist work on biblical daughters and on the concubine of Judges 19 is read alongside Kathleen Norris’s account of word-bombardment in church, Michel Tournier on childhood as “ardent confusion,” and her own recent participation as both student and teacher in an Authorized Lay Worship Leaders Program.

Risky Speech–Gifted Friendships

Sonja Hagander

No. 44 · Fall 2016

Augsburg College Pastor Sonja Hagander reflects on pastoral care across faith traditions — from a campus chapel service after the 2008 murder of Muslim student Achmednur Ali, to her decade-long friendship with Jewish colleague Barbara Lehmann — and reads the Gospel of John as a roadmap for interfaith friendships marked by love, free speech, public space, and a willingness to risk being changed.

Building an Interfaith Bridge

Belle Michael

No. 40 · Fall 2014

Drawing on the holiday of Shavuot, the Book of Ruth, and Martin Buber’s I-Thou, Rabbi Belle Michael picks up Patel’s bridge metaphor and identifies three building blocks for it: experiences with people of different ethnic and religious groups, genuine and long-lasting relationships, and the holy curiosity to ask the questions we are otherwise afraid to ask.

Civic Engagement, "Baylor In Deeds," and Engaged Learning

Rebecca Flavin

No. 63 · Spring 2026

6 min audio

Flavin describes how Baylor’s strategic plan “Baylor in Deeds” and its Office of Engaged Learning are building civic engagement into the Arts & Sciences core curriculum, with early Global Engagement Survey data showing gains in civic efficacy and global civic responsibility.

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

No. 46 · Fall 2017

Wilhelm reflects on how NECU’s focused work on Lutheran identity in higher education — including the forthcoming document Rooted and Open: Our Common Institutional Calling — turns out to be a fitting commemoration of the five-hundredth anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation, even though it did not arise from anniversary planning.

Radical Hospitality on Haunted Grounds: Anti-Racism in Lutheran Higher Education

Krista E. Hughes

No. 52 · Fall 2020

Writing from Newberry College’s campus on land once home to the Cherokee and within a day’s drive of Mother Emanuel A.M.E., Hughes argues that NECU’s call to “practice radical hospitality” demands that predominately white institutions open themselves to the hauntings of racism — pursuing belonging rather than mere welcome, and risking kenotic transformation of institutional identity itself.

From the Publisher

Arne Selbyg

No. 24 · Fall 2006

Selbyg situates this issue in the ongoing ELCA conversation about education that began with the 2005 conference and is feeding into the second draft of the ELCA Social Statement on Education, previews the 2007 conference (“The Vocation of a Lutheran College — Engaging the World”) at Augustana College, Rock Island, and lifts up Luther’s insistence that the church and its members contribute to their wider communities rather than retreat into self-centered enclaves.