Disruption and Hope

Religious Traditions and the Future of Theological Education

Barbara G. Wheeler, Barbara G. Wheeler

• Verlag: Baylor University Press
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781481308199
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Religious Education

During times of rapid social and religious change, leadership rooted in tradition and committed to the future is the foundation upon which theological schools stand. Theological education owes itself to countless predecessors who paved the way for a thriving academic culture that holds together faith and learning. Daniel O. Aleshire is one of these forerunners who devoted his career to educating future generations through institutional reforms. In honor of Aleshire's decades of leadership over the Association of Theological Schools, the essays in this book propose methods for schools of various denominational backgrounds to restructure the form and content of their programs by resourcing their own distinctive Christian heritages. Four essayists, former seminary presidents, explore the ideas, doctrines, and ways of life in their schools' traditions to identify the essential characteristics that will carry their institutions into the future. Additionally, two academic leaders focus on the contributions and challenges for Christian schools presented by non-Christian traditions in a rapidly pluralizing landscape. Together, these six essays offer a pattern of authentic, innovative movement for theological institutions to take toward revitalization as they face new trials and possibilities with faithfulness and hope. This volume concludes with closing words by the honoree himself, offering ways to learn from and grow through Aleshire's legacy. Contributors: Barbara G. Wheeler, Richard J. Mouw, Martha J. Horne, Donald Senior, David L. Tiede, Judith A. Berling, Daniel O. Aleshire

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PROMISES TO SERVE

Re-forming Lutheran Theological Education

David L. Tiede

INTRODUCTION: A TIME FOR TURNING

“After John had been arrested, Jesus went into Galilee. There he proclaimed the gospel from God saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the gospel.’” (Mark 1:14–15, NJB)

The year 2017 marked the five hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, publically posted in Wittenberg, Germany, on All Saints’ Eve. Luther’s first thesis echoed the call in the gospels of “Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ” for “the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”1 In the sixteenth century, Luther was focused on the abuses of the church’s disciplines of penance. But Jesus’s first words in Mark’s account speak to more than penance, resounding with profound biblical understandings of “turning toward God” (metanoia, Greek, or shuv, Hebrew). This is the Messiah’s call to individuals and communities to the deep change of the mind and conversion of the heart that lead to lives of faith in the good news of God’s reign in Christ Jesus.

This volume explores “Disruption and Hope” in twenty-first-century North American theological education. The theme requires our varied Christian traditions to deal practically with the demographic realities we are all facing in one form or another of ecclesiastical, social, and economic transitions. But the disruptions we face also mark a new God-given time for “turning,” calling us to repent and believe in the good news of God’s reign. And our varied Christian traditions have deep, distinctive wisdoms of discerning where God is at work in the whirlwinds of change.

It is a privilege to contribute this essay as a Lutheran voice in the conversation. The Lutheran seminaries accredited by the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) include two Concordia seminaries of the Lutheran Church–Canada (LC–C: 59,000 members in 301 congregations) in Edmonton, Alberta, and St. Catharines, Ontario, and two Concordia seminaries in the USA of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS: 2,200,000 members in 6,200 congregations) in St. Louis, Missouri, and Fort Wayne, Indiana. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC: 115,000 members in 525 congregations) has ATS-accredited seminaries in Waterloo, Ontario, and Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And as of July 1, 2017, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA: 3,800,000 members in 10,000 congregations) has seven ATS-accredited seminaries in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and California.2

It is impossible to speak for all these Lutheran churches and their schools. Some seldom speak to each other. It is worth noting that all the seminaries have strong ecclesial identities, although financial support has diminished from all their church bodies. And they all are contending with enrollment challenges and anticipating clergy shortages amid decline in North American denominational memberships and worship attendance. The disruptions are real, but so are the legacies of faith. Merely grieving our losses and blaming others would be poor stewardship of the assets entrusted to us. We are not triumphal, but we believe God will prevail. To what repentance and hope are we Lutherans, among others, called in this time of turning?

This essay is an effort to prompt a sustained conversation among the Lutherans in the company of the ATS community of schools. Acknowledging the limitations of any one perspective in the maelstrom of change, I will first venture an interpretation of our distinctive Lutheran theological script of believing, belonging, and behaving, broadly shared among the many churches of the Lutheran World Federation, from Wittenberg onward (“I. Promises to Serve”). Then I will attempt a summary of some macrodisrupters that are converging commonly on North American education, including theological education (“II. Re-forming Theological Education”). I will conclude by focusing on the seven ELCA seminaries of my tradition and the profound regrouping of theological education we are now facing, pressing our 2017 “time for turning” to be more than institutional decompensation. To what faithful future is “our Lord and Master” calling us (“III. Called and Sent”)?

I. PROMISES TO SERVE

Alasdair MacIntyre made the case for traditions of moral discourse in an age of relativism by describing a living tradition in ethics as a “historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition.” He also observed that “traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict,” and he recognized the institution as “the bearer of a tradition of practice or practices.”3 MacIntyre’s method illumines the social embodiments and confessional convictions of Christian traditions.

Every tradition of Christian theological education embodies convictions and practices to inform and form leadership for communities in their worship, witness, and service of God, the neighbor, and the world God loves. Justice churches and morality movements need distinctive kinds of education, as do Protestant missionary societies, Roman Catholic orders, and evangelistic communities of faith. The ATS is a singular context for traditions to learn from each other.

The several North American seminaries and schools that are heirs of the sixteenth-century Reformation have been disciplined in the study of the Christian Scriptures and attentive to their confessional identities. They have done excellent academic work, and they have developed distinctive approaches to the education of clergy, teachers, and community leaders for churches, institutions, and agencies who support and rely on them to do their work faithfully and well. Even as they serve increasingly ecumenical and interfaith groups, these theological seminaries are institutional embodiments of distinctive historic confessions or testimonies to God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the church, and the world.4

What do the Lutherans bring to the ATS schools and their communities of witness and service? And how will Lutheran strengths be disciplined to serve the twenty-first-century callings of their own constituencies and to benefit broader ecumenical, interfaith, and international publics?

Lutherans have struggled among themselves, coming from varied European histories of orthodoxies, state churches and pietisms, coerced unions, and emigrations. In the early era of North American immigrations, the reality was that Lutheran communities needed pastors, “like sheep without a shepherd.” Some were sent from the “mother churches” to ensure the Word of God would be “faithfully proclaimed” as Law and Gospel in the clarity of justification by grace through faith and the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper would be “rightly administered.” The immigrant groups brought Bibles, hymnals, and Luther’s catechism in their own languages. Many also carried memories of painful conflicts with Roman Catholics, Reformed Protestants, and Pentecostals, exacerbated by the policies of the state churches.5 As quickly as the Lutheran immigrants built houses of worship, their European-educated pastors founded training programs and seminaries in order that “the church might be planted” in the new land.6

By the time of the Civil War, the Lutherans were well established in eastern North America, but immigrations continued to flow into Lutheran communities until beyond World War II, especially throughout the western regions of the United States and Canada. The twenty-first-century landscape of North America continues to be unevenly spread with Lutheran “synods,” some very small, others gathered into larger denominations, and all aspiring to be Christ’s church.

The pastoral office has been held in high regard among Lutherans for serving God’s people with the ministry of the Gospel and for being a ministry to the Gospel.7 Just as Martin Luther continued to preach and administer the sacraments almost every week in the Wittenberg parish church, the faculties of North American Lutheran seminaries have been qualified for several generations by their pastoral and global mission experience as well as their academic credentials. The vocations of seminary professors and presidents continue to be honored as “teachers of the church,” often speaking and writing on difficult issues,8 providing leadership on ecumenical and interfaith consultations, and contributing educational resources for the churches.9 Until recently, the presidents and chief executives of the Lutheran colleges and social ministry organizations were almost all ordained pastors. Lutherans have valued the theological knowledge and faith of their seminaries and their graduates. Leadership into a world of many cultures and religions is difficult yet promising when drawn from the wells of Lutheran theological wisdom.

The clarion declarations of the immigrant churches still resound true: “As goes the seminary, so goes the church!” “The seminary is where the future of the church is embodied.” But what is the future into which God is calling the church, and how will the seminaries be turned to serve it?

The adjective “Lutheran” is both an asset and a liability. Martin Luther didn’t like the idea of a church carrying his name. In the global world of Christian denominations, Lutherans regularly identify their church bodies as “Evangelical,” which raises other questions. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for example, must defend the integrity of its name against those who think it is an oxymoron because they don’t regard Lutherans as evangelistic. But “Evangelical” is the crucial claim to define the identity of all the Lutheran churches, not by their denominational boundaries, but by their center in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Lutherans’ most vital watchword, therefore, is an evangelical declaration: “What serves Christ” (often quoted in German, Was Christum treibet). “What serves Christ” is as much a generative question as a declaration. This watchword reaches deeply into the scriptural assurance that the living Christ is at work in and through forgiven sinners and their imperfect institutions. This is not mere human optimism. This is the faith the missionary Bishop Lesslie Newbigin identified from the Apostle Paul (e.g., 2 Cor. 3:4, NRSV) as “proper confidence,” because it is grounded in trust in “the fidelity of God.”10 This is also the theological conviction that gives Lutheran scriptural interpretation its heart for serving God’s promises, in hermeneutical contrast to the ideals of scholasticism,11 in tension with the Enlightenment’s critical detachment, and in dismissal of all arrogance citing the Bible for national or ethnic superiority.

“What serves Christ” puts the church to work and calls upon Lutheran theological education to help communities of faith serve God’s promises in Christ faithfully and effectively. Two of God’s promises have framed a distinctive evangelical script to guide five centuries of Lutheran believing, belonging, and behaving for Christians and their communities. Justification by grace through faith and Christian freedom to serve the neighbor have been called the pillars of the Reformation, testifying both to God’s love for undeserving mortals and to God’s care for the world. Along with Christians of many other traditions, Lutherans are called to serve Christ by trusting in God’s gracious promises in Christ Jesus to give ultimate worth to unworthy humans and to empower them to make the world trustworthy.

Justification by grace through faith, according to Martin Luther, is the teaching by which the church stands or falls. “God proves his love for us,” declared Paul, “in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” God does the “justifying,” the “declaring or making righteous” of the ungodly, reconciling us through Christ even when at enmity with God (Rom. 3:21–26; 5:6–11). God’s justification is the promise that defines the evangelical center for Lutheran identity and practice. This conviction requires disciplined theological leadership, frames Lutheran ecumenical and interfaith engagements, and empowers the missiology of this confessional tradition.

There is nothing neutral or relativistic or generic in this core conviction. This is not a testimony that “God’s in His heaven. All’s right with the world.” Israel’s law, prophets, and writings bear witness along with the Christian gospels, letters, and writings to the compassion of God in the midst of the broken human condition and the travail of the creation itself. And God’s love in Christ Jesus will prevail. As Paul, Augustine, Luther, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer (among others) saw, all humans, families, communities, and societies are ultimately unable to save themselves. In Christ, God acted from outside of us (extra nos) to rescue us personally and socially from being turned in on our self-righteousness (curvatus in se).12

Grounded in the “theology of the cross,”13 God’s compassion is disclosed in the human horrors of Jesus’s crucifixion and the carnage of war. “Justification by grace through faith” cuts sharply into all opportunistic forms of self-justification. Trusting God’s love even for the alienated and ungodly rejects the culture’s doctrinaire optimism in human progress and self-fulfillment.14 This faith corrects and heals the triumphal arrogance of nationalistic religion. God’s commands and promises both reveal our compromised mortal plight and welcome us to life in Christ.15

To serve its evangelical confession, Lutheran theological education must turn and return, again and anew, to “What serves Christ” in the faith of people, communities, and institutions. Alert to the issues and problems confronting communities of faith and informed by ecumenical Biblical, theological, ethical, historical, and ministerial scholarship, the vocation of Lutheran theological education means repentance and faith in the God who justifies the ungodly in Christ Jesus.

This is also the Lutheran calling in interchurch and interfaith relationships. “Justification by grace through faith” has provided the biblical/confessional standard for ecumenism, adjudicating dogmatic divisions among the Christian churches of European origin and yearning for full communion throughout the Body of Christ. The authenticity of interfaith engagements is strengthened when the voice of each faith speaks from the soul of its beliefs and practices. Seeking to understand one another’s faith is crucial, especially among Muslims, Jews, and Christians. Jesus of Nazareth holds fascination for all faiths, and no one can surpass his welcome of everyone. Thus serving God’s radical promise of justification in Christ Jesus empowers our gracious engagement with our neighbor’s faith.

The sixteenth-century Reformation sought to “Christianize Christendom”16 in a culture where almost everyone was baptized and there was little social or theological understanding of either Jews or Muslims as people of faith. That awareness ...