Committed to Paradox

My friend and colleague Mary Elise Lowe dove into the ways that creation, justice, and communio/community are concepts and practices rooted in our institutions’ shared Lutheran identities. When considering the many issues that require our focus on campus, our undocumented students, our neurodiverse neighbors, disability services, gender diversity, food access, and queer justice … we see that one more thing becomes clear: This work is complicated. Committing to access and accessibility around these and other things necessarily means that institutional habits and patterns are disrupted. It can feel messy, uncertain, and challenging. That is, of course, the point.

There is one more distinctive root to Lutheran higher education that meshes with an honest assessment of this complex reality: paradox. Things that seem self-contradictory or run contradictory to expectation, multiple true things that would seem to be in opposition to each other. There are a lot of things about working at a Lutheran college or university that fit this description, including all of these issues around access and accessibility. I invite you to think about how this root of embracing and valuing paradox informs our work in two ways:

It helps us understand who we are … both our individual human nature, as well as the nature of institutions.

It helps us talk about what we do … our actions, transformations, and why change is challenging.

Embracing and living out of the value of paradox can also be one way of practicing humility for anyone who needs to remember to be open to learning, able to navigate transformation, and be okay with a bit of messiness along the way. Living in the muddled middle means the extremes of one position or another, one practice or another, have less value. Life is lived, and education and transformation happen somewhere in the middle.

Who We Are: Human Nature, Human Institutions

First, I want to point out that insights around how things are complicated and paradoxical help us understand who we are: human nature and by extension, human institutions. The Lutheran theological, intellectual, and educational tradition exists in a world where paradox is a fact … it is the nature of reality. Things that seem like they can’t both be true at the same time are. Things whose existence is not at all what conventional wisdom would suggest are real. These are the Both/Ands, the Muddled Middles.

Why we embrace this value has at least something to do with Martin Luther’s work, where we see a tendency to resist the binary, the “either/or”. When it comes to talking about human beings, he centered a claim that each person is both saint and sinner, and he embraced the paradox of freedom wherein a person is both lord of all and servant of all at the same time.

On the paradox of human nature, you already know that no one person is completely good or completely evil … we’re all more complicated than that. Consider how this applies to your work and your institution, and your habits and practices. Any one policy or practice is likely complicated, and not all good and probably not all terrible. For example, think of attendance policies in the classroom, billing deadlines in the business office, and marketing and branding strategies. Valuing paradox means that we can recognize complicated realities in things like these, and then discern together how to amplify what is good and figure out how to mitigate harm.

“Valuing paradox means that we can recognize complicated realities in things like these, and then discern together how to amplify what is good and figure out how to mitigate harm.”

On the paradox of human freedom, Luther argues that because Christians are freed by grace from having to do and say and be the perfect things in order to be saved and to “get right” with God, they are liberated to attend to the needs of their neighbors. For him, this is a theological discussion and he draws on the New Testament writings of Paul, suggesting “that when each person has forgotten himself and emptied himself of God’s gifts, he should conduct himself as if his neighbor’s weakness, sin, and foolishness were his very own.”¹ Because of that, he also notes that a Christian should “be guided in all his works by this thought and contemplate this one thing alone, that he may serve and benefit others in all that he does, considering nothing except the need and advantage of his neighbor.”²

These statements capture an essential reorientation of human attention toward the needs of the neighbor. Some like to shorthand this and say, “We are freed to serve.” Though he is clearly focused on what it means to be Christian, I think this re-orientation is helpful for institutions living out of those roots. In fact, I suspect that service and leadership are some sort of central pillars on your campus. Perhaps they’re in your mission statement or define a signature program. Remember, service and leadership are paradoxical insofar as they can be thought of in opposition to one another, and some will view them as contradictory. But on our campuses, something like servant leadership, holding that tension together, is good.

The fact that this paradox is woven into the Lutheran tradition helps us think about human beings as complicated, and human institutions as sometimes or even often contradictory. We can champion things that seem contradictory to some, like service and leadership, faith and learning. We may also recognize the most obvious paradox of being educational institutions that are Rooted AND Open … and Reaching and Gathering and Serving and so many other things.

When it comes to considering the needs and benefits of our students, it also gets complicated. Because it doesn’t mean just giving them what they want, treating them as consumers who need to be satisfied. It requires that we do the work of discerning what sort of education is good for them and for the world, what challenges will benefit them when they are in the world, when their worldview needs a little deconstructing, and when reconstruction needs to happen. And I know that each person working on a college campus will have more than one story of how students are complicated … they are walking paradoxes. They want to craft and sometimes brand their own bespoke lives and they want desperately to be in community. They have so many questions and crave certainty while resisting given answers. They have access to the world of information and connection in their pockets and are by many accounts the most socially isolated generation yet. They know the world itself is a mess and they have no shortage of blame for the ones in power. They feel they have no power while others perceive them as key drivers of culture.

Students are complicated, and our campus communities are complicated. Think about it: our institutions are Lutheran without a critical mass of Lutheran students, or faculty, or staff. A generation past would have bemoaned that paradox. Even beyond religious identity, most of the students in my classroom, and probably most of the people working on each NECU campus, are not the people for whom the modern university was established. Especially Lutheran colleges and universities. Unless you are a straight white cisgendered neurotypical able-bodied Lutheran man, your presence in this work today is a paradox.

I conclude this discussion about the paradox and complications of who we are as people and as institutions with the words from one of our student speakers at commencement this spring:

“Attending an Evangelical Lutheran College as a Muslim, I was apprehensive. Would my faith waver? Spoiler: it didn’t. Thanks to courses like RE 102 and the college’s support for my spiritual journey, my commitment to Islam only grew stronger. … Enrolling in RE 102, Bible in a Diverse World, I encountered peers who embraced their faiths with passion and sincerity while remaining genuinely open to understanding others. This experience illuminated the profound role faith plays in shaping our lives and principles. It inspired me to explore the mosaic of religious beliefs, a journey that, rather unexpectedly, deepened my own commitment to Islam.”³

What We Do: Human Action, Struggle, Change, Transformation

If who we are is complicated, let’s shift to focus on what we are called to do in our work as colleges and universities committed to access and accessibility, and see how this Lutheran root of valuing paradox and tension informs that. Because we didn’t get to this point where a Muslim student leader claims the value of a Lutheran college education easily, quickly, or without dissent. The vision of what it means to be a college or university of the ELCA changed over time, and as a result of discernment, needs, action, pressures, and intentions.

By being grounded in a resistance to binaries and false choices, opening our institutional doors wider, and reaching for each other, Rahima’s and so many other students’ stories are possible. In the end, the series of choices that moved from rootedness to openness and accessibility has empowered more flourishing. This commitment to complicated work, holding things in tension, sheds light on more dimensions of the human experience and makes deeper connections possible. If someone were to insist that Lutheran higher education is still only for that mythically normed young white Lutheran man, look at what would be lost. Look at who would not be here. Think of the conversations that wouldn’t be had.

“They can and should lead to hard conversations, to information that can complicate things and even change your mind, to relationships that contradict what you might have been taught were possible, and to the particular kind of discomfort and challenge that is essential for growth and transformation”

These paradoxical communities are not simple, not always fun, and often challenge us deeply. They can and should lead to hard conversations, to information that can complicate things and even change your mind, to relationships that contradict what you might have been taught were possible, and to the particular kind of discomfort and challenge that is essential for growth and transformation.

Here too we have grounding notes from the Lutheran theological and intellectual tradition: Martin Luther focused a lot of his attention on the cross when talking about how to “do theology.” In the Christian gospels, Mark especially, Jesus’ followers routinely have no idea what he is talking about throughout his public ministry, and they are uncomfortable to the point of desertion. They aren’t there at the end of his life, at the cross. The women are there … but the men? Gone. A surprising fact in a complicated narrative. Luther pointed out that the Christian belief in a God of power and grace who would be most fully present in death and desertion also defies logic and conventional wisdom. That Jesus’ own devoted friends and followers would be absent? This is not what one would expect. That new life comes from brutal death? This is not what one would expect.

For Luther, the moment of Jesus’s tortured and painful death at the hands of the state on the cross is both not how one would expect “the son of God” to live and die, and it is exactly there that God is most fully experienced: in a shocking place of suffering and injustice. It is also that God is there in the suffering precisely for the purpose of overcoming it. He argues that understanding this is a prerequisite for being a theologian because it accepts that the default human situation is pain, not comfort. It assumes struggle and claims God’s presence in the midst. With a deep hope that all of this mess is headed somewhere else. This is Luther’s description of what it means to be a “theologian of the cross.”

Theologians of glory, on the other hand, are the ones who assume they know everything already and are able to get it right—even perfect. On the contrary, with this cross experience, Luther puts it bluntly: “God destroys the wisdom of the wise.”⁴ Knowing that we don’t really know, seeing that we have not truly seen, listening to voices that we have not heard: these today are expressions of this Lutheran root.

“When we commit to access and accessibility, we live out of a complicated and ever-reforming Lutheran tradition that is rooted in understanding the truth of paradox and struggle, the value of accompaniment and discernment, and the hope of new life.”

It is important that we lean into the hope and ultimately the freedom that this foundation affords us all. When we commit to access and accessibility, we live out of a complicated and ever-reforming Lutheran tradition that is rooted in understanding the truth of paradox and struggle, the value of accompaniment and discernment, and the hope of new life. The work is complicated, and it’s ultimately worth doing, so that we can witness more stories from transformed lives and renewed communities.

Endnotes

1. Martin Luther, “Two Kinds of Righteousness (1519),” in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut Lehmann (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–1986), 31:302.

2. Martin Luther, “Freedom of a Christian,” 365.

3. Rahima Waheed, “Wartburg is our village.” Online: https://www.wartburg.edu/rahima-wartburg-is-our-village/

4. Luther, “Heidelberg Disputation,” 53.