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Western
Mission Cluster |
Consultation
III |
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Western
Mission Cluster |
Consultation
III |
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WMCluster: Home -- Current Activities -- Documents -- Consultations -- Consultation III |
[Transcript of Address
to Western Mission Cluster Consultation III
Spirit in the Desert Retreat Center,Carefree, AZ, 12/8/2001
revised version, 1/29/2002]
Patricia O’Connell Killen
Department of Religion
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0003
[This manuscript may not be cited or distributed without the permission of the author.]
INTRODUCTION
When Tim Lull called me with the invitation to be a speaker for this gathering of the Western Mission Cluster, my immediate response was, “But, Tim, I’m not Lutheran”; to which he responded, “We know that, but we still would like to hear what you have to say on the topic.” While his reassurance calmed my concerns about speaking to you, it did not eliminate them. I have been at PLU for eleven and a half years now, and while I have come to grasp something of the sensibilities and nuances of Lutheran theology, I do know understand it in the way that people steeped in the heritage do. So, I am addressing the topic, “life long learning for Christian vocation in the world” from my position as an American Church historian with a deep and abiding interest in how people do and do not access the richness of their particular theological heritage; and, out of my research and thinking about religion and the religious ecology of the Western United States. Finally, you must judge whether or not what I suggest speaks aptly to the ELCA heritage at the dawn of the twenty-first century.
Now it is 7:00pm and some of you have been up now for too many hours. This fact influences the format for this presentation. This will be interactive. I will start by asking you to write down the answers to two questions. Then I will provide input. At the end of each section of my talk, I will stop and invite you to speak with each other about the material. My format will, I hope, honor in a profoundly incarnated way the fact that our spirits are here and that we are in bodies that have pretty much “had it.” Secondly, I am convinced that much of the value of a gathering such as this resides in what happens around the tables. Tim Lull said, “we want you to provoke us, or go a little deeper in the issues; don’t just talk about the surface stuff but give us something we can chew on.” I took that charge seriously and that is what I am going to do.
Take a minute, now and write down the answers to two questions. First: What is the thing you most hope for your children, for the younger generation about whom you care, regarding their faith? Second: What is the thing about which you are most worried or anxious for your children or the next generation, regarding their faith? [Time to write.] We’ll come back to these questions as we work through the material, because in a very real sense, whether or not what I have to say matters, matters in terms of what it means about the generation that we are called in our own particular journeys to nurture. Look around the room. With few exceptions we are mostly dinosaurs. One of realities we have to face when we talk about doing theological education is that we are talking about carrying a heritage, a profoundly liberating heritage, into terrain that the human species has never before imagined. We don’t have a road map for that. Much of our capacity to do so, with a bit of grace, depends on how well we stay in touch with what our deepest desires are for those who come after us.
Let me start this evening with a quote, just one quote, from David Tracy. In his book, Analogical Imagination, Tracy writes:
The artist, the thinker, the hero, the saint–who are they, finally, but the finite self radicalized and intensified? The difference between the artist and the rest of us is one of intense degree, not one of kind. The difference is one where the journey of intensification--a journey which most of us fear, yet desire, shun, yet demand--is really undertaken. . . . The sign of the artist may well be a willingness to undergo the journey of intensification into particularity to the point where an originating sense for the fundamental questions and feelings that impel us all, and a rare response in thought and feeling to those questions is experienced--and often experienced as some kind of gift, comes “unawares” (125).
This quote pulls together the three themes that Bradley Hanson and I were asked to talk about: life-long learning, spiritual formation, and ministry in the world. As well, it is, I think, quite in line with Martin Luther, part of whose profound insight involved being in touch with reality. Much of his objection to the Roman Catholic Church was to ways, in his view, it kept people out of touch with reality. One of the central impulses of the Lutheran movement was an exploration of faith and the theological heritage that was university based. Lutheranism has been profoundly significant for education, always promoting literacy, so that faith would be engaged with the world. Finally, we are called as people who work in Lutheran theological education at the dawn of the twenty-first century to take that seriously again. Somewhere submerged in the various conversations among Pietists, Neo-Orthodox, and others that go on in a Lutheran community, there is emerging a sense of what does it mean to retrieve the profoundly humanistic and, if you will, incarnated, world-based insights in the Lutheran heritage.
My reading of Lutheranism here also goes along with another assumption: When a religious heritage is vital, when it works in the lives of individuals and communities, it grounds critique of self and society and funds the imagination for dealing with novel challenges. That is, I think, what happens when people are being formed in faith and living in the world. When it doesn’t work, that heritage becomes, at best, opaque, inaccessible and irrelevant to people; and at worst, a divinely shaped weapon ideal for ideological conflict, the “biggest cannon,” if you will, spelled with two “n’s” not one.
Whatever else “life-long learning for Christian vocation in the world” is about, it should be about providing people access to the wisdom and deep practices of their Lutheran heritage in ways that contribute to the care and feeding of grace-filled imagination and grace-permeated sensibilities for discernment. Both of those make possible the recognition of God’s spirit active in the universe and our capacity to cooperate with it in unleashing the liberating power of the gospel. So, to put the question slightly differently: how do we provide people access to the wisdom and deep practices of the Lutheran heritage that is at one and the same time critically engaged, soul sustaining, and faithfully imaginative? This is what we are asking when we talk about how to provide “life-long learning for Christian vocation in the world.”
This evening I will present briefly three kinds of ironies or challenges to the ways that the purpose of providing life-long learning for Christian vocation in the world comes together with the context of theological education at the beginning of the twenty-first century. All education is done with a purpose and done in a context. I’m focusing on ironies, tensions, or complexities in how our purpose and context come together because while they may be companions that bedevil us, they may also be graces that we don’t yet recognize, graces that spur us to more creative and faithful ways of operating. Each of the three ironies involves religion in the twenty-first century; each has implications about the Western United States; and, finally, and perhaps most importantly, each poses a certain kind of challenge to the Lutheran community as we articulate what that heritage is in our work of forming people in faith.
1) The irony of religious identity construction
How do we put together our religious identity and belonging? Let me set this question autobiographically. I read every week to my colleague, Dave Knutson, who took medical leave some years ago because of complications from diabetes, including blindness. Dave is a brilliant systematic theologian and an amazing human being. Sometimes our conversations about the material we read turns to our growing up, and how the ways we grew up are different from how the students we teach are growing up. Dave grew up in Midwest Lutheranism. I grew up in rural, ethnic Catholicism in Oregon. Both, however, were experiences of being steeped in a community where everybody in church has known you since you were born or you have known them since they were born except the people who married in and pastors who get written into the story. Some of you perhaps come out of those kinds of backgrounds. That can make it difficult to grasp how differently this situation is from that of most people in our churches today.
Until the 1960s, religious identity and denominational affiliation, for the vast majority of people in the United States, were tied up with family, locale, ethnicity, race, region of the country, education, or economic class. Until the mid-1960s the religious affiliation of most Americans could be predicted, if those factors were known. By 1965 that was no longer the case. For thirty-five years religious historians and sociologists have been trying to figure out what happened and what it means for those of us in denominations of the historic Christian faiths.
From the mid-1960s on, religious identity and denominational affiliation increasingly have been disconnected, uncoupled from webs of other relationships. Now we deal with a world where religious identity is the individual project of the individual person. Individuals choose from among a range of religious options those that best fit them. They find a religion that meets their needs by confirming their view of the world, providing community, being a place where the children can learn moral values, or enhancing well-being, or staving off fear and anxiety. Those are all things that religion has always done. When religion was embedded in a larger web of contexts, however, it did not look quite the same. What has happened during the past thirty-five years, I would argue, is that people have developed an individual religiousness that is quit intense, but also rigid, and therefore fragile. Today people in churches hold their beliefs fiercely, but with deep commitment that is quite inflexible.
I can illustrate this best with my students. For many of them, being faithful means to believe something and never ever change what you believe. I say to them, “Do you love your mother now the way you loved your mother when you were four?” They say, “No.” I say, “Why can’t your relationship with God develop?” They say, “Because if it changes it isn’t true.” There is something that has happened in the last thirty-five years as our society has shifted so that developmental notions of relationship with God have eroded. Increasingly people’s religious epistemology or way of knowing tends to be static. This has significant implications for forming people in faith.
One of the differences between religion before 1965 and in the year 2000 is that for those of us in the churches of the magisterial Reformation, individuals are less likely than they were before 1960 to remain with a congregation or in a denomination over the long haul, unless their needs are met. They are more likely to leave, if there is “nothing in it for me,” or if they “disagree” with what the church is teaching. That has become the American way in religion. The challenge this raises for us as theological educators, is this: How do we keep people with us long enough so that the gospel sensibilities or, in the language of Simone Weil, “loving sensing, faithful remembering, and hopeful imagination” can take root? When I teach a class on the future of denominations I often do a survey of religious affiliation. In a class with twenty-eight traditional aged students, three will be secular, four, including myself will be religious stables, (are what we were born), and the remainder will have belonged, before the age of twenty-four, to from two to as many as seven different denominational groups. Nor is this data idosyncratic. In the 1950s, one out of ten American adults changed denominations, by the 1980s the figure stood at one out of three. The question this raises for theological educations is: What are the implications of this denominational mobility for the task of forming people in faith, shaping them spiritually for mission in the world?
Historically faith formation took place in congregations composed of extended families in larger communities. Historically, in communities, individuals have been related around place, geographic place, (today church camps function this way for young adults), projects, people that mattered enough, that individuals cared enough about, that they felt claimed by them. If nothing else, one had to remain because one survived off the land. In such communities where individuals felt claimed, they learned to endure frustration and negotiate conflict. In short, these were containers where people learned to become adults and therefore to be able to develop adult capacities for the spiritual life. But we do not live in those kinds of communities any more. We live our lives primarily in limited-liability communities built around circumscribed interests. There are exceptions to the shift to limited-liability communities, many in isolated, ethnic communities in the West. But the vast majority of our people come to church out of a limited-liability, consumerist world.
Another factor complicating the task of theological education, once we recognize tentativeness of commitment and the priority of individual choice in religious identity construction, is that increasingly life is age-cohort segmented. People are with people their own age. My students and I talk about this. They are quite clear, even the ones from old Lutheran families, with good Lutheran pastor lineage, that they trust their own experience and the experience of their peers far more than they trust what their pastor, their denomination, or their lowly university professor tells them. As one student put it, “I trust it, if I feel it.” Theirs is an epistemology like that of the commercial, “Four out of five doctors recommend Excedrin, but what I know is that it works for me.”
The larger social shifts in the United States since the 1950s are pushing religious identity and affiliation more and more on to the individual. He or she has to construct it for themselves and choose it for themselves. This raises profound challenges for those called to form people in one of the historic Christian faiths. Lutheranism, like all the churches of the magisterial Reformation, is rooted in an understanding of psychological, social, and spiritual development that is profoundly inter-generational. It used to be that spiritual guides tended to look older than you looked, if you went looking for one. By and large, one did go the other direction. One went to someone who had a few years of gospel living under their belt and who you had some sense knew something that you didn’t know. There is less and less sense among people in their twenties and teens today that this is necessary.
Finally, to complicate the picture further, we are called to form people in a heritage that has been carried in publicly institutional forms, in an individualistic, age-cohort segmented world, in which institutions have become profoundly problematic. Distrust of institutions is high and has continued to grow since 1960. In a 1966 survey, 30% of Americans replied that they could trust the government in Washington only some of the time or almost never. In 1992 the number had risen to 75% (Bellah, “Code,” 16). In the religious sphere, distrust of institutions is equally strong. This is evident in the advertising of post-denominational and non-denominational groups. Calvary Chapel, Vineyard Christian Fellowship, and others evangelize using the claim that they are not denominations--hear self-interested bureaucracies whose leaders care only about themselves and not you--but fellowships--hear the ideal community where you will receive all the love your family did not provide you. Post-denominational churches are growing on the West coast, in part because their message is received congenially by many people. Spiritual teaching must connect with people’s longings to be received. The message of community over institution seems to speak.
Three things, then, complicate the construction of religious identity and belonging for those who come after us: 1) religious identity and belonging are an individual’s project; 2) life is age-cohort segmented; and, 3) institutions are problematic. Now, talk at your tables. Test out what I have said. What of it resonates with your ministerial experience? What of it does not resonate? What questions do these ideas raise for you about how we provide people formation in faith?
2) The irony of a spiritual hunger for a robust and profound theological vision, one commensurate with people’s level of professional education, existing in a larger culture where religious discourse is profoundly impoverished.
The United States always has been, and seems increasingly to be, a nation of religious or spiritual seekers. Jonathan Butler wrote about this in his Awash in a Sea of Faith. Wade Clark Roof has written about how Americans increasingly engage in “multi-layered belief and practice,” taking ideas, disciplines, modes of community from a variety of not necessarily congruent sources to cobble together a religious practice and belief system that satisfies them (Generation of Seekers). More recently, Robert Wuthnow has described the constellation of social, political, and cultural shifts in American society after 1950 that have transformed us, in his language, religiously and in other ways, from a nation of dwellers to a nation of seekers (After Heaven).
The West always has been a home for spiritual seekers, precisely because of its weak social institutions, high mobility, high educational levels of its population, and its penchant to celebrate the American value of individualism. The social ecology of the West has led people here to be attracted to portable modes of religion and morality that are easily taken from place to place. Hence, the disproportionate number of Pentecostal and post-denominational churches in the West relative to the churched population. Further, the West has been a region where visions of economic improvement and the grandeur of the geography have made it possible for people to negotiate spiritual impulses entirely outside of denominational structures. It also has been a place where people went to replicate what they had elsewhere, for example, the westerhausen, communities of Norwegian Lutherans who settled in the Midwest and did not evolve as did the people and their religion in Norway because they were “freeze-framed” in time.
Part of the spiritual hunger of people is for a theological and spiritual vision commensurate with the complexities of their lives and their levels of professional expertise. I make this claim based on the theological assumption that the desire for God is the desire to know reality and hence, that there is in us a fundamental impulse that moves away from self-deception and distorted understandings and toward a knowing of existence that is full and faithful.
The gap between impulse and its fulfillment, however, is a large one. The very social forces that have pushed the nation in the direction of being relentlessly a place of seeker religion have also diminished peoples’ capacity for access to or trust in the teachings, practices and communities that might help them discriminate between authentic and trustworthy spiritual teaching and spiritual versions of a pyramid scheme. (The latest thing in the Pacific Northwest is called gifting. It is a pyramid scheme and the state’s attorney general has taken them to court. What is difficult here is that there is genuine biblical, theological teaching about generosity that is woven into this but it is slightly off the mark in the way it is getting played out.)
As well, we live in a world where, increasingly, the functional epistemology involves two categories--brute fact and mere opinion--there is nothing in between. Precisely that in-between space is where we make sense of things, where we articulate meaning, where we explore depth, where theology and spirituality are, not in brute fact or mere opinion or a list of biblical absolutes that is to its core Docetistic, denying of the profoundly incarnated nature of Christ and of our knowing of God.
The Lutheran theological vision has something to offer spiritual seekers. Traditional Lutheran emphases in theological anthropology--simul justus et peccatur--grace, and vocation, among others, can be good news to seekers. These themes offer a way to accept our humanity and finitude as rich gift, to be at home in the universe in ways that allow us to practice hospitality to the stranger, and a sense of living out a purpose in life in line with God’s purposes that satisfies our needs to work and to love. How to communicate these possibilities, how to invite people to come and see, and to remain long enough to experience the liberating possibilities of the Lutheran theological vision? This is the central question that we face.
The question is vital because of what is at stake. What is at stake is the integrity of the Christian theological heritage in the twenty-first century. I am an historian and I know that more religious heritages are extinct than still exist on the globe. And though the theological, faithful side of me says, “Jesus promised the Spirit to the end of time,” the critical, historical side of me says, “We as human beings are sinful enough that we can so twist the tradition that the space for the Spirit is destroyed.” What is at stake is the integrity of the Christian theological heritage and, I would argue, humane life and the survivability of the planet. Let me expand this a bit. This is for me where all my energy goes in terms of theological education and why I am talking about theological education and not just spirituality. In terms of the Lutheran heritage and my sense of where we are in the twenty-first century our spirituality has to be intimately connected to our theological vision.
I invite you to consider something here that I borrow from the developmental psychologist, Robert Kegan, of Harvard University, from his In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. If we think about the array of roles and tasks that confront each one of us today as an adult, being a partner or a spouse, being a parent, citizen, employee, community member, being in a congregation, it becomes clear that to be successful at them, if you will, to negotiate successfully the curriculum of modern life, requires a wide range of knowledge and skills. But not only that, it requires a complexity of consciousness, never before demanded of the human species. Not only do we have to know a lot more and know a lot more a lot faster, but we have to develop more complex ways of thinking and knowing. That is profoundly where spiritual formation comes in.
To put this another way, when a circle enters a sphere, it knows the plane that it is in, it knows how to think and act and make meaning in that plane. What the circle does not know is that it is part of a sphere. It is neither aware of being in the sphere nor capable of operating as part of the sphere. It cannot construct the richer, thicker, gracious meaning that its “sphereness” makes possible. Neither can it act with the larger range of freedom and creativity that its sphereness invites (Kegan, 286). And yet, I want to suggest, sphereness, if you will, is what people are seeking. Finally, the hunger for a theological vision adequate to the curriculum of modern life is a hunger for wisdom. It is a hunger for that virtue which, to put it in encapsulated form, we might describe as the capacity to act or to refrain from acting toward oneself, toward others, and toward the world in ways that restore, support, and sustain harmonious relations among persons and all the elements of creation (Sternberg).
Whatever theological education is about, whatever spiritual formation for ministry in the world is about, it should support the development of those capacities. But make no mistake about it, theological education and spiritual formation that move people in this direction takes them out of their familiar mental homes (Kegan, 274-277). Literally, if you go there, you can’t go home again. What I am calling for here is theological education and formation for life-long learning that draws people into nothing less than perceiving and constructing experience and its meaning in more complex ways than they have up to now. If we are serious about this, what we ask of the people who participate is that they be disposed to being irrevocably changed and there are costs in that.
Table conversation around the second irony, challenge, promise. What of what I have said about a spiritual hunger for a theological vision commensurate with the rest of their lives rings true? What of it would you challenge? How does this notion provoke your thinking about doing theological education or spiritual formation?
3) The irony of assimilation, or, how do we articulate and think with the Lutheran theological heritage beyond the ethnic orbit.
I want to talk about this irony as a challenge, the challenge of a multi-lingual Lutheranism. What I mean is not just multi-lingual in terms of languages around the world. I want to talk about it as theological multi-lingualism. Another way to put this: how do we articulate the wisdom, grace, gift of the Lutheran theological heritage outside the ethnic orbit? Or, more broadly, what does it mean to be called to conserve and pass on an historic Christian faith in the modern world, a world defined by constant, rationally controlled change (Bellah, “Meaning and Modernization”). What is the place and function of a theological, liturgical, and ministerial heritage in a world where individuals construct their own religiousness? Robert Bellah noted recently that he was wrong in his famous Habits of the Heart, that it was not the Puritan John Winthrop who was the archetype for American religiousness, but rather Roger Williams, who at the time he died belonged to a church of his wife, himself, and one other person (Bellah, “Is There a Common American Culture?”). If this is true, then we are indeed fools for Christ as we hold up these ancient traditions and values.
For most of the history of Lutheranism in the United States, it has been carried in a web of ethnic relationships. Bradley Hanson alluded to this earlier when he said that Lutheran spirituality was carried primarily in worship with some catechesis and family devotions. Now Lutherans are hungry for more. One cause of their being hungry for more is that the container, the web that held things, is not as sturdy as it was, does not work in today’s world as it did fifty or one hundred years ago.
Lutheran theology, spirituality, and sensibility, are subtle in their expressions. This became clear when Richard Hughes came to PLU to speak about his book on models of church-related higher education. He could express in positive terms what the Catholic vision was through the tangible devotional practices or traditions of spirituality common in Roman Catholicism in this country. He could describe the Reformed vision through its activist covenantal vision of molding society that is part of the Reformed heritage (Richard Hughes). Hughes had difficulty, however, articulating Lutheran sensibility positively. He could only say that it was not Catholic and not Reformed. Part of the reason for his difficulty articulating Lutheran spirituality in positive terms is because he was dealing with a tradition that historically has used biblical and theological language to express its vision. It has not to any great extent used with enthusiasm historical and sacramental language, and even less so has it used humanistic language. They are all in the tradition, but it has been primarily the biblical, theological, that has been the dominant way, especially in seminaries, that the heritage has been articulated (and I would say that in Lutheranism the magisterium is located in seminaries).
My point, and what I think Lutheranism is being called to and the Western Mission Cluster is part of, is an articulation of the grace, the gift, the charism, the insight of Lutheranism in humanistic terms for the twenty-first century. If nothing else, all the institutions represented here, being committed to working together requires an ability to stretch beyond what might be the most comfortable theological language of every single particular institution. In many ways the Western Mission Cluster and the clustering notion is Lutherans being Lutheran.
In 1569 Luther’s catechism was a best seller. Now, once again Lutherans are getting together, trying something new, without knowing exactly where it is going. But that is, in fact, part of the genius of the heritage. The reason we are called to do this as theological educators in Lutheran communities is because most of the people in the U.S. under forty are not fallen away folks. They constitute a religious null set. They are people who have grown up in a culture where the do not learn about Scripture or theology. They come from a world where they have had little or no exposure to biblical, theological and spiritual teaching of any depth. If we are going to make the liberating power of Lutheran theology accessible, without “dumbing it down,” we must find ways to build bridges to invite people in. To make this point I will borrow from Soren Kierkegaard:
If real success is to attend the effort to bring a person to a definite position, one must first of all take pains to find where [they are] and being there. This is the secret of helping others . . . In order to help another effectively I must understand what [that person] understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to [them]. . . Instruction begins when you put yourself in [another’s] place so that you may understand what [they] understand and in the way [they] understand it. [The Journals of Kierkeggard, trans. A. Dru (NY: Harper, 1959), quoted in Kegan, 278].
There is an invitation here, if we take seriously both our purpose and our context. We are being called to move beyond simply precise and clear articulation of the biblical and theological content. We must make Lutheranism intelligible to people who are seeking, without betraying the integrity of the heritage. If we do not, there will be one or two generations where ethnicity will matter and keep people in our pews. After that, it will be gone. In my course on the future of denominations in the spring of 1999, there were eighteen traditional-aged students and six returning adults. The students got to see how their own and their parents’ religiousness was constructed. For all the returning adults some ethnic heritage mattered, one that they came out of and had either acted against, were still with, or had re-appropriated. However, it mattered not at all to the eighteen traditional-aged students what their parents or grandparents had been religiously.
If we look at the heart of the matter of Lutheranism, as I have come best to understand the heritage in years as a guest at PLU, there is in fact a Lutheran impulse, a deep impulse toward reality and toward grace permeating all of life. That is integral to the Lutheran understanding of vocation. Lutheranism at its best has always been concerned with broader issues in society, even if it was not as loud a presence as some other traditions. Lutheranism has been concerned with the quality of culture because culture mediates faith; hence, the quality of culture matters. Right now we are in a culture that religiously limps. Lutheranism is being invited to find fresh and new ways to be multi-lingual so that the message can be passed on.
CONCLUSION
Providing spiritual formation or faith formation for life-long learning involves inviting people into a community that supports them as they dispose themselves to letting the heritage read them through to the marrow of their bones. For, what does it mean to claim to be Lutheran, Catholic, or Christian, but to say, “I wager that if I steep myself in this community, if I allow myself to be read through to the marrow of my bones, if I let my sensibilities be shaped by this community and its heritage, I have a better chance of living truth. I have a better chance of getting close to whatever is at the heart of reality.” An imagery from carpentry helps here, the practice of “truing.” The Spirit is about “truing,” about making people’s perceptions congruent with reality, in faith. The Lutheran heritage too is about helping people notice where the Spirit works in the world. Finally, that is what we are called to, to notice and cooperate with God’s Spirit working in the world. This is the crux of the spiritual formation our people need.
There are many specific kinds of skills that people need. They need to be steeped in the knowledge of Scripture and theology and history. But finally, what people must learn, if we are going to make it in other than a twisted way as Christians in the twenty-first century, is how to notice the Spirit and cooperate with it, the Spirit of God in history.
So people are called to let a tradition read them through to the marrow of their bones. This is an idea that runs against most of the forces that shape individuals in our society today.
So, what might be one of the beginning points of the bridge beyond some kind of religious enclave that hides from the world, and a bridge into the world with the good news? The work of my colleague in Chicago, John Shea, suggestions one approach. In a book called The Spirit Master, about apprenticing oneself to Jesus, Shea suggests that formation in faith begins when someone is fascinated by the range of freedom and imagination that they see in another human being. Fascinated, they inquire, and glimpse that what they want is not what that person has, but contact with what gives that other person their range of freedom and imagination. (Jesus to the apostles at beginning of John’s Gospel, “Come and see.”) The desire for that “what” is the opening of a serious discussion about the desire for God and the life of discipleship.
Fascination, with its attendant honoring of desire as holy, may be a glue that substitutes for the ethnic web or the stable communities of the past. This notion of fascination is congruent with the Lutheran theological heritage.
Spiritual preparation for life-long learning, faith formation, and ministry in the world--it is about discipleship as Bradley Hanson suggested earlier this afternoon. It is about adult Christians learning how to act in ways that are faithful to the gospel–with integrity--and in ways that are understandable and prudential–with intelligibility. To do so we must open ourselves to a life-long process of conversion and growth in faith. In the twenty-first century, if the gospel is to be preached in its full power, then preachers at all levels have to dispose themselves not only to God’s grace working through them, but to having their understanding, perceptions, and judgments transformed. In a very real sense the three ironies or challenges that I briefly presented tonight, are, in fact, the asceticism of our lives as theological educators. It is in walking into these and grappling with them as we go about our task that we may, in the words of Elizabeth Seton, “encounter our grace.”
In conclusion I will recapitulate with four points about theological education for life-long learning aimed at formation for ministry in the world:
1. Whatever programs we develop, they must provide something of what community is, by which I mean a context within which people stay long enough to learn to endure frustration and negotiate conflict.
2. We must provide venues for people to experience being claimed by a heritage. Lutheran camps do this, as do other common projects. If people have an experience of being claimed by the heritage, of being read through to the marrow of their bones, they get fascinated, they hang around.
3. Whatever theological education or spiritual formation we do, it has to contain an artful combination of challenge and support. Too much of what passes for theological education in the church is worthless. This is because there is a temptation in our work to think that if we make it challenging, people will not take part. But people will. We have to provide certain kinds of theological education that fall into the category of recreation. People like it and it can provide one of the first bridges into study. But we must have more. We must have programs that provide people sustained opportunities for serious, critical thinking, and with that, the linking of the theological heritage to their lives. Bradley Hanson talked extensively about the need to link the theological study to lives. (The two articles on the web page share some of my thinking on this topic.)
4. Some of our theological education must involve sustained encounter with the heritage that includes a three-step process that creates a climate for insight, where people rub up against the heritage in ways that change them. We can do this by including these three dimensions in our process: a) Teach people to engage in the nonjudgmental narration of experience, whether it is their individual experience or the experience of a group. b) Provide a creative, surprising correlation between the particularities of individuals’ lives and our scriptural, theological heritage. c) Third, somewhere in the process people must name and claim something new, some way that the heritage seeps into them.
Opportunities that contain these elements are the occasion for the kind of reflection that help shape grace-permeated capacities for discernment. Finally, whatever we do, we want to think about and have as our purpose, developing capacities for wisdom. Because we do not know what the future holds. We are in a wildly different place than we have been in before. If there is anything we are going to carry forward, it is something about capacities for discerning what is of the Spirit and what is not.
[Table conversation. Go back to the two questions you began with tonight, your hope and what you were anxious about. Share with each other any way in which the material that I have presented and that you have been talking about speaks at all to your hope and your anxiety, and does it suggest any steps. Followed by general discussion.]
A final quote, from Teilhard de Chardin, “By reason of creation, and even more incarnation, nothing is profane to those who know how to see.”
**********************
SOURCES
Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (NY: Harper and Row, 1970).
Robert Bellah, “Flaws in the Protestant Code: Some Religious Sources of America’s Troubles,” unpublished manuscript.
Robert Bellah, “Is There a Common American Culture?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66/3 (Fall 1998): 613-625.
Jonathan Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Richard T. Hughes, Models of Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Survival and Success in the Twenty-First Century (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1997).
Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation. (San Francisco: Harper/SanFrancisco, 1993).
Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.
Jack Shea, The Spirit Master. Chicago: Thomas More Press, 1987.
Robert Sternberg, ed. Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins, and Development. (Cambridge University Press, 1990.
David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. (New York: Crossroad, 1981).
Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven: American Spirituality Since 1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).