The 2010 LCMS Convention & Higher Education

Readers of Renascentes Musae will be interested in checking out Pr. Roger Gallup's discussion of higher-ed. memorials and resolutions to the upcoming 2010 LCMS Convention. If you're a delegate, before you end up "Giving Away the Crown Jewels," have a close read; don't miss the follow-up discussion, either!

The Best Way To Learn New Testament Greek? Start With Classical Greek!

For busy seminarians who are preparing for an even busier life in the ministry the prescription above will doubtless sound quite unreasonable. It requires plenty of time as it is to learn New Testament Greek, so why take even more precious time to learn classical Greek first? Reaching some degree of proficiency in New Testament Greek is regarded by many candidates for the pastoral ministry as a daunting intellectual challenge and anything that would make it even more difficult or time consuming is going to be viewed with extreme suspicion -- even by those who advocate the study of Greek as a continued requirement in Lutheran theological education. If the point of learning Greek is to be able to read the New Testament with some kind of minimal competency, why not adopt whatever means will get us to that end as quickly as possible?

The idea that the study of the ancient languages is little more than a means to an end is not a new one. Even the redoubtable C.F.W. Walther referred to the mandatory study of Latin and classical Greek in his own day as “the Court of the Gentiles,” that is to say, close but not all that close to the Holy of Holies. As J.P. Koehler, an appreciative, if not uncritical student of Walther’s, once observed, “many of his students misunderstood this to mean that the only purpose of such study was to prepare the student for the reading of the Bible in the original tongues and of the Latin church fathers” [The History of the Wisconsin Synod, ed. Leigh Jordahl (Sauk Rapids: 1981, 2^nd edition), pp. 138-9.]

Koehler goes on to observe that this same rather dismissive attitude was often applied also to Luther’s famous advice in An die Ratsherren: “As we love the Gospel, so let us cling to the study of the ancient languages.... These languages are the scabbard which sheathes the sharp blade of the Spirit; in them this precious jewel is encased.” The scabbard is not the sword, to be sure, but it would be a mistake to view the study of classical Greek or any other language as nothing more than a propaedeutic tool, a means to a greater end. After all, jewelboxes and scabbards are objects of beauty and value in their own right. Museums are full of them. And they are absolutely necessary. Not to press Luther’s analogy too far, but swords need scabbards. They can do a lot of unintentional damage to the swordbearer and others if they are not sheathed properly. Precious jewels are much more easily lost once they are removed from their containers.

Real language study involves far more than simply memorizing conjugations and declensions and vocables. Language is an essential part of human culture. The ability to understand and employ language is indispensable for the serious practice of theology, because theology is language, too. The effective “servant of the Word” must be able to read and interpret and expound words, sacred and otherwise, with deep linguistic, historical, and rhetorical understanding. In the preface to his study of Isaiah, Luther wrote: “Two things are necessary to explain the prophet. The first is a knowledge of grammar, and this may be regarded as having the greatest weight. The second is more necessary, namely, a knowledge of the historical background, not only as an understanding of the events themselves as expressed in letters and syllables but as at the same time embracing rhetoric and dialectic, so that the figures of speech and the circumstances may be carefully heeded” (LW 16,3).

For American students at the college level today who are learning how to read a complex literary text in another language, no responsible pedagogy suggests that they should only aim to learn just enough so that they can make it through that one text, no matter how important it may be. German majors, even those who want to concentrate on contemporary Germany, read Luther and Nietzsche, not just Günther Grass or Der Spiegel. Prospective high school English teachers study Chaucer and Shakespeare even though one unfamiliar with both authors would still be able to read Hemingway or The Onion. When learning a foreign language, as in other areas of study, it is a pedagogical mistake to aim at achieving only the bare minimum. As I once heard a veteran professor of German language and literature say: “If you know enough German to be able to read Goethe, you will also be able to order a sausage and beer when you get to Frankfurt. But if you only learn enough German to be able to order a sausage and beer in Frankfurt, you will never be able to read Goethe.”

Koine Greek evolved directly from the Attic dialect of Greek which rapidly spread over the ancient Mediterranean world after the conquests of Alexander the Great, so students who can already read Plato discover that it is even easier to read the New Testament. What a great position for such students to be in! To know where the language you are studying came from; to know way more than enough Greek instead of struggling to get by. And this amplitude and depth of linguistic understanding enriches the work not only of beginners in Greek but also of those who have persisted in its study. Long after their training days are over, serious students of the Bible should continue to improve their understanding of the language in which “the precious jewel is encased” -- for the rest of their lives. After all, nobody thinks that you’re finished learning the English language just because you passed a required freshman composition class or graduated from college. Native speakers continue to deepen their understanding of their own languages until they die.

There are introductory classical Greek textbooks today that focus on helping students to gain the ability to read ancient Greek, whether classical or New Testament, with some facility as quickly as possible. My personal favorite right now is Athenaze (two volumes; Oxford University Press) which I have used for several years. Its instruction in grammar and syntax is thorough, but the textbook’s chief virtue is that it gets students reading actual Greek texts (simplified at first, of course) drawn from a wide variety of classical authors (especially Herodotus) as well as passages from the New Testament (the Gospel of John at first). Along the way, Athenaze helps students to consider aspects of Greek philosophy, Mediterranean religions, art and architecture, social institutions (e.g. slavery), healing and medicine, trade and travel, the theater, in other words, much of what Luther calls “the historical background” and “the circumstances” of the ancient Mediterranean world into which the incarnate God entered and dwelt among humans.

How to Create and Sustain a Consciously Lutheran Identity

Adam Smith and his idea of specialization have come to roost with a vengeance in the nests of the Leucorean [Wittenberger] university and college. The result? History is the job of the historians; philosophy that of the philosophers; worse, theology, that of the theologians. Lutheran colleges and universities have “specialized” theology out of the life of the faculty, if not de iure, then certainly de facto. What to do?

Precious faculty development dollars need to go to things that colleges and universities need to do largely for purposes of accreditation. What follows is a modest proposal to divert a modest amount of those funds toward understanding Lutheranism within the university. How?

Give an annual, and significant ($100/month/participant), grant to a small and therefore competitive faculty reading group that will read, examine, peruse, discuss, ponder, argue over, and write about a classic Lutheran text, finally producing a cache of essays short or long that bring the text into conversation with their disciplines. This cache of essays should be intellectually responsible (as the object of serious wrangling within the reading group), communicative, and thus also inspiring to others to think about how their own discipline and its bases and preconceptions and fundamentals speak to Lutheran theology, or rather vice versa.

For example, a theater professor might discover that, far from what we Americans think of the provenance of theater in the modern West—that it’s the stuff of dissolute, drug- and sex-addicted oddballs like Poe—it was actually vigorously used during the Reformation and post-Reformation eras by Lutherans (Luther, Melanchthon, Strigelius, von Rist, to mention but a few) frequently for Lutheran purposes. Aha! What a discovery! And this is rooted deeply in Lutheran realism which is a sort of “Egyptian-gold worldliness” (as opposed, e.g., to the non-realism and other-worldliness that permeates Calvinist theology; we Lutherans can sing, “Our God is dead,” it being otherwise difficult to say exactly what happened at the Place of the Skull; but it’s anathema in Geneva. And this difference can be traced to respective stances on realia, or the data of theology and of, well, thought.). Lutheran realism, in turn, lies at the heart of Wittenberg’s pursuit of, e.g., what we know as the hard sciences (on which see the relevant essays by Philipp in Kusukawa and Salazar).

Where to start, then? Oswald Bayer, for example, or Hermann Sasse, or Luther’s Address to the German Nobility, should be, and in fact are, eminently intelligible to anyone qualified to serve on a college or university faculty. But find your own list of goodies—and yet make sure they’re goodies. That’s why you need a learned Lutheran running the show: C.S. Lewis, as fun as he is to read, just isn’t going to cut the mustard here. (This point has been driven home to me in the last month as a clergy reading group I’m in has taken up Mere Christianity, which is woefully inadequate from the perspective of and as a vehicle for Lutheran thinking. Sorry, Clive.).

So why not? Why not give it a shot? Why not “de-specialize” theology? And now I’m talking to you, whoever you are: why not become the Lutheran Socrates? Of the real Socrates Cicero claimed he was the first to bring philosophy from the sky and put it in the streets and marketplace and make it dwell among men. Why not take Lutheran theology from the theology department and make it the province of the whole faculty?

Actually, that’s too soft a peddle. The case really needs to be stated like this: how can we afford not to make Lutheran theology the province of the whole campus? What makes a college Lutheran isn’t just its chapel (the University of Minnesota and Univ. of Wyoming have very fine Lutheran chapels, but they’re not for that reason Lutheran universities). The faculty alone doesn’t do it (there are lots of Lutherans teaching at lots of different places, but they don’t make their colleges Lutheran). Nor does the student body (again, the U of M, etc., etc.). Let all of those things be present; but if the intellectual framework is missing, it means nothing. And the only way you can get the framework is to work at it, and read, and think, and argue, and wonder, and write.

So share a good book; learn to think Lutheranly with your fellow Lutherans; and most, learn to think about yourself, your work, your discipline like a Lutheran.

Who knows what might come of it?

Lutheran Higher Education in an Undifferentiated Landscape

The time has never been more ripe, so Seth Godin, a higher education market researcher, for fundamentally re-shaping institutions of higher education, or for creating new ones that buck current models. In his 3 May "The Coming Meltdown in Higher Education (as Seen by a Marketer)" in The Chronicle of Higher Education Godin makes the devastating criticism--long spoken by many, but now believable, I suppose, because it's coming from a marketing type--that "most undergraduate college and university programs are organized to give an average education to average students." He doesn't think this is a good thing; and he goes on to detail escalating costs that have spiraled way out of control in the higher education arms race toward...sameness.

Fact is, precisely what Godin identifies as the factor underlying the great "undifferentiability" in U.S. higher education is a plague upon sectarian or religious education, as well. De Tocqueville saw the great strength of our nation in its almost infinite number of smaller associations and religious establishments, each with their own unique character- and society-forming impact upon their adherents. In sectarian higher education, and, in large part, in sectarian parochial education, this strength has been reduced to nearly nothing at all, as institutions of higher and lower education bend to the will of the great non-differentiating factors of public rankings, perceptions of the marketplace, and accreditation.

Let us think of a better way. Instead of bringing an undifferentiated education from Lutherans to Lutherans, let us think of ways to bring a most differentiated education from Lutherans to Lutherans, one that is actually distinct not because a campus happens to have a Lutheran chapel, but because the Wittenberg way permeates the entire intellectual program. This will, of course, upset the apple cart. Neither curriculum nor student body nor, alas, faculty and administration can or will be the "same old same old." But before we are swept as one more undifferentiated thing into a meaningless higher education landscape, let us, let us for the sake of our young people and our children and grandchildren, for the sake of preserving a Lutheran identity and with it a culture imbued by Lutheran theology that can understand Lutheran theology and bring Lutheran theology to bear on the wider world--let us for the sake of all that try something new that's really old, something better, something that revels in the distinctiveness of Lutheranism.