A Response to Paul Santmire: The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth
Intersections No. 4 · Winter 1998
I found most of H. Paul Santmire’s article, “The Lutheran Liberal Arts College and Care for the Earth,” commendable and thought-provoking. The critique of the “back-to-nature” cult, the call for a holistic environmental ethos in the face of crass materialism and “sociopathic individualism,” the suggestion of creating a cosmic liturgical praxis—all provide considerable food for thought and, indeed, action.
Nevertheless, I take issue with Santmire on several counts relative to the section on classical Lutheran social ethics. Santmire admits that much of White’s argument “is historically justified, insofar as one can allow that religious faith can exercise in fact a significant historical causality.” He goes on at some length to defend the ecological tradition in Western theology—as if Lutheran theology were something wholly apart from Western theology! Santmire encourages contemplation of the riches in the vaults of Western theology, advising us not to “conclude that all historic Christianity has to offer is anthropocentrism and the domination of nature.” He encourages such contemplation of the riches of Lutheran vaults, too. But what are these riches? Only one, as far as I can see: “At its best, the Lutheran tradition has sent forth forgiven sinners to be good citizens and witnesses to the kingdom of God that has arrived in Jesus Christ.” That is all the Lutheran tradition has to offer? He has damned it with faint praise. Why the bum rap for Lutherans?
What is wrong here, in my opinion, is a simplistic delineation of the two kingdoms ethic. Granted, the two kingdoms doctrine has been used by German theologians of this century to justify acquiescence to the Nazi regime. Did the regime itself use the “two kingdoms” to justify its actions? There is precious little evidence for that. If the two kingdoms really was one of the sources of Nazi mischief, it could only be so insofar as one can allow that religious faith can exercise in fact a significant historical causality. As a matter of fact, both confessional and liberal German theologians of the nineteenth century used a distorted and misinterpreted two kingdoms doctrine to separate ethics from the gospel.
Luther never wrote a systematic treatise on the doctrine of the two kingdoms. (The term itself, by the way, became common as late as the 1930’s.) He used diverse terminology to come to grips with the ethical problems of the Christian of his day. One needs to examine the two kinds of dualities (antithetical and complementary) by which he explicates the doctrine. Luther does make a distinction between what he sometimes calls the “left hand” and the “right hand” of God. But these are elements of the “complementary duality,” i.e., what Ulrich Duchrow calls the two governances of God. True, the right distinction must be made between the two governances: they must not be confused. On the other hand, they must not be separated. The temporal (Kingdom of creation?) and spiritual (Kingdom of redemption?) governances are not spheres that can be separated, but dimensions to be distinguished. I will not go into the complexities here. I suggest a reading of Karl Hertz, ed., Two Kingdoms and One World: A Source Book in Christian Ethics; Ulrich Duchrow, Two Kingdoms—The Use and Misuse of a Lutheran Theological Concept; and Tom Strieter’s excellent Th.D. dissertation, “Contemporary Two Kingdoms and Governances Thinking to Today’s World.”
If, in fact, the two kingdoms doctrine was the reason for all those German Lutherans jumping on the Nazi bandwagon, how does Santmire explain all those German Roman Catholics, who had no such doctrine, jumping on the same bandwagon?
I do not know what Santmire means by “classical Lutheran teaching.” Sixteenth century (Luther)? Seventeenth century? What? If he puts the onus of intersection “only in the person of the individual believer…” on Luther, I think he is dead wrong. One should read, for example, Luther’s commentary of Psalm 82, or, “On Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed.”
Santmire argues that the two kingdoms is admirable for the theology of God’s grace, but it “leaves much to be desired as an affirmation and defense of the theology of God’s justice.” Again, I contend it is not the two kingdoms doctrine as such that is to be faulted, but its abuse and misappropriation. For a very insightful discussion of the evolution of Luther’s views on law and justice, I suggest F. Edward Cranz, An Essay on the Development of Luther’s Thought on Justice, Law, and Society, vol. XIX of the Harvard Theological Series, issued as an extra number of the Harvard Theological Review (1964).
It is ironic that Santmire brings up South Africa. The South African Council of Churches used the two kingdoms (correctly interpreted) in its fight against apartheid. I had discussed this very thing with Wolfram Kistner when he was head of the Theological Division of the Council. And Eberhard Bethge had lectured in South Africa on the two kingdoms, seeing it as a theological tool in the struggle.
It is a real stretch to link the two kingdoms doctrine with the alleged non-concern of church leaders for the “groaning of the earth and its masses in this era of global environmental crisis.” I doubt if church leaders know much, or care much, about the two kingdoms. The issue of whether or not to “hold hands with the Episcopalians,” it seems to me, has been driven by church politics rather than by theology. If theology were the issue, the agreement with the Presbyterians, the Reformed Church and the UCC would not so easily have glided through the ELCA Assembly in August.
Fundamental issues of social justice are being obscured in our time by many “circles” besides Lutherans. How do we know that “toxic waste dumps…” do not “appear” to be a matter of concern for “many” Lutherans today? Who are these “many Lutheran circles”? This is simply too general and too emotive to be taken seriously.
If we are to look for skeletons in our closet, let us search for real bones, not plastic ones. As far as I am concerned, the skeletons are not so much Luther as a departure from Luther. As Bill Lazareth has written, “There is nothing so sick about Lutheran ethics that a strong dose of Luther cannot cure it.”
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Editorial
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.
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Editorial
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.
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Article
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.
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Article
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.
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Article
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.
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Article
A God of Peace and Love? Reflections From a Biblical Scholar
Karla G. Bohmbach
Bohmbach responds to Gregory Clark’s call to proclaim Jesus on Lutheran campuses with biblical-scholar reservations. Israel’s sacred texts also include the herem ban, the conquest narratives, and a God who fights for Israel; the Christian canon includes the apocalyptic violence of Revelation. To proclaim Jesus is therefore to proclaim a particular and contested figure within a tradition that has its own internal violence—not a generic God of peace and love. Bohmbach asks what it would mean for staff, administrators, and teachers on a college campus to take seriously the Jesus who made himself vulnerable to the violence of his world, even to the point of suffering for it, and whether Lutheran colleges are prepared for such a vocation.
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Article
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.
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Article
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.
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Book Review
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.
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Book Review
Vocation on Campus: Reading Mark Tranvik's Martin Luther and the Called Life at Pacific Lutheran University
Alex Lund, Michael Halvorson
No. 47 · Spring 2018
Halvorson and Lund — faculty member and student — review Mark Tranvik’s Martin Luther and the Called Life alongside PLU’s Wild Hope Center for Vocation, weighing the book’s warning against “vocation lite” against the challenge of speaking of God’s call to students in the Pacific Northwest’s “None Zone,” where most students have little exposure to Lutheranism.
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Article
No Child Left Behind Meets Philip Melanchthon: A Reflective Conversation
Kathy Book
No. 26 · Fall 2007
Inspired by Tim Lull’s My Conversations with Martin Luther, Book imagines an interview with Philip Melanchthon in the cobblestone courtyard of the University of Wittenberg, in which the Praeceptor Germaniae reflects on his pedagogy (Socratic questioning, brevity and example, declamations, repetition, and interdisciplinary connections), his graded curriculum from primer to university, and his collaboration with Luther on the responsibility of community, parents, and government for the education of all children — and finds his vision strikingly resonant with the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2006.
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Article
The Diversity Dilemma: Dealing With Difference
Kathy Fritz
No. 8 · Winter 2000
Fritz reports from Newberry College—83% Caucasian, 16% African-American, 22% Lutheran, the smallest college in NCAA football—on a 1998–1999 year of crisis in which the Board of Trustees Executive Committee asked the president to resign over financial issues, the president fired three vice presidents, four trustees including the chair and treasurer resigned, and the controversial “veterinary technology” major became a flashpoint between the president’s recruitment-driven vision and the faculty’s commitment to “preparation for LIFE.” Turning to ethnic diversity, she frames three sociological approaches—“feed them all” to reduce conflict, the “3 A’s” (academics, athletics, arts) to create common identity, and Aguirre and Turner’s case for “weak ethnic identification” against the post-Yugoslavia failures of strong pluralism—and grounds the search for institutional unity in St. Paul’s body-of-Christ imagery from 1 Corinthians 12 and Ernest Simmons’s claim that diversity yields “creative adaptations that assist mutual survival.”
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Book Review
Paul Dovre, ed.: The Future of Religious Colleges
Baird Tipson
No. 15 · Winter 2002
Tipson, president of Wittenberg University, reviews Paul Dovre’s edited proceedings of the October 2000 Harvard Conference on the Future of Religious Colleges (Eerdmans, 2002), summarizing essays by Douglas Sloan on the failure of the “two-realm theory of truth,” George Marsden on faith-shaped scholarship, DeAne Lagerquist, Father David O’Connell, Mark Noll, Robert Benne, Mark Roche on Notre Dame, Joel Carpenter on neo-Calvinist Kuyperianism, and Mark Schwehn on a Lutheran “college-related church” and the centrality of vocation. Against Benne’s suggestion that only two or three robustly Lutheran colleges can be sustained, Tipson defends a less robust but still authentically Lutheran model embodied at places like Wittenberg, Gettysburg, and Roanoke, arguing for the enlightenment commitment to subjecting all truth claims to rigorous criticism and for hiring Marsden-style faith-shaped scholars rather than counting Lutheran heads.
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Reflection
Otherwise
David Wee
No. 6 · Winter 1999
Wee’s September 3, 1997 St. Olaf Opening Convocation address takes its title from Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise” and asks why we gather: to celebrate the gifts of life, place, companionship, and the work we love, and to become “otherwise”—wise about the others in our midst. He honors his own St. Olaf teachers (Ditmanson, Shaw, Stiehlow, Jordahl, Paulson, Meyer, Hove, Clausen, Larson, Jorstad) and the gruff Latvian stamp scholar Gus Eglas and Sherlock Holmes expert Randy Cox, draws Huck Finn’s “All right, then, I’ll go to hell” and Flannery O’Connor’s grandmother into a single argument, and closes on Tim Lull’s expectation that a Lutheran college campus should display contentment, courage, and cheerfulness as a family member faces day-six post-bone-marrow-transplant—“the first day of the rest of your life.”
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Article
Affirming, Entrusting, and Acting: A Baptismal Grounding of Affirmative Action in Lutheran Higher Education
Peter Carlson Schattauer
No. 60 · Fall 2024
Schattauer draws on the Lutheran baptism liturgy — where the gathered assembly publicly affirms what it is for and is entrusted with responsibilities for justice and peace — to argue that NECU institutions create truly inclusive communities by affirming commitments, naming responsibilities, and acting in ways that embody both.