Richard VonDohlen

A Fifth Teat on a Cow: The Irrelevance of the Lutheran Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms for Academic Life

Richard VonDohlen

No. 9 · Summer 2000

VonDohlen, responding to Richard Hughes, Carol LaHurd, David Ratke, Philip Nordquist, and Robert Benne, argues that the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms as commonly deployed in recent discussions of Lutheran higher education rests on a faulty sociology (taking Luther’s sixteenth-century structure for our highly differentiated society) and an epistemological monism (assuming a single neutral reason against the pluralism described by Alasdair MacIntyre and others), making it anti-intellectual, hostile to interdisciplinary dialogue and Christian social ethics, and ultimately as a defense of theology’s relevance about as useful as “a fifth teat on a cow.” Drawing on his experience on the Catawba Valley Hospice Ethics Committee, his Dutch Reformed and dispensationalist background, and the ELCA social statement “Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All,” he calls for an “intellectually ecumenical” dialogue between Lutherans and non-Lutherans willing to take each other’s paradigms seriously.