Renascentes Musae

Newman Redux

2011-01-03T09:49:00.002-06:00

In a response to an article by Roger Scruton, in which he employs Newman as a lens for examining the contemporary university, The Little Professor (Dr. Miriam Burstein) reminds her readers of how complicated the reception of Newman's ideas may be:

http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2010/09/the-ideal-of-a-university.html

Indeed, we can peg Newman as both a conservative and a radical. A lot of inside baseball? Perhaps. At the same time, Newman's problematical legacy provides much to consider for those who care about Lutheran higher education. In what ways is it beneficial for our institutions to embrace this paradox? How might we both conserve the past, challenge the present, and change the future? To what extent does an educational institution committed to confessional Lutheranism provide the perfect foundation from which to negotiate between these two extremes?

Happy New Year!

2011-01-03T09:07:00.003-06:00

Over the semester break, I have tried to catch up on some reading, and I came across an open letter that Gregory Petsko posted as a response to the cuts that SUNY Albany is making to its foreign language and classics programs:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/22/petsko

Now, I don't agree with every point Dr. Petsko makes. For example, I don't think a student has to come into contact with a Russian department to appreciate Dostoyevsky or that meeting a set of distribution requirements automatically gives students a rich liberal education. At the same time, anyone who has hung around the colleges affiliated with the old synodical conference knows that this is just not how people on those campuses talk to each other. But, I quibble. If you can move past those issues, I think it's important to note a couple of Dr. Petsko's points:

(1) I love his emphasis on the concept of universitas. The university is a place where the humanities contribute to the education of the "whole" person.
(2) I appreciate his articulating the serendipity of the educational process. The person who has been educated in a more "whole" or complete manner is well-prepared to meet the changes and chances that life brings. The best laid plans, etc.

The older I get, the more I think these are important issues to push when students walk through the office or classroom door.

A Monitory Lesson

2010-11-23T10:19:00.000-06:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education takes up the curious case of the now-defunct Founders College, what happens when what you have is a great idea and what you don't have is all your ducks in a row. Read more by clicking here.

Why Not Accept the Status Quo? An Open Letter to Ray, a Skeptical Lutheran Reader

2010-11-13T09:18:00.003-06:00

Ray, a reader of RenMus, has left some provocative comments on the last post, “Well, Of Course.” The present post attempts to address them, and, as you can see, I’ve organized these thoughts around answering the question, “Why not accept the status quo in contemporary confessional Lutheran higher education and, by implication, work with and within it?”

Coat of Arms, Wittenberg

The answer to this question is, in some sense, the entirety of this blog. But let me try to condense things as much as possible. First, the status quo in confessional Lutheran higher education hardly resembles anything distinctly or even noticeably Lutheran. I don’t think there’s any big secret here. In the vast majority of its programming, what the average synodical conference college does differently from, say, Cardinal Stritch (just to take an example with which Ray will be familiar) is so minuscule that students, especially those in satellite campus and evening programs, have to make an effort to discover any unique residuum of Lutheranism. This, by the way, puts the lie to the notion that opening the doors of Lutheran institutions to all comers is really “missional.” This is a pious self-blandishment and -deception at so many levels. First, it’s an extremely expensive way for the church to fulfill the Great Commission. Second, because the residuum of Lutheranism is so scant, it’s frequently the case that most non-Lutherans can enter and exit a great many Lutheran colleges without so much as a brush with the bracing claims of Scriptural, Lutheran theology. Third, as it’s sold it’s a terrible bait-and-switch scheme, even though the “switch” never really occurs (see “Second,...” just above). One might add that while the church certainly is and must be engaged in works of love toward the world (charitable and human-care undertakings), it is not clear to me that higher education, especially with a steep price-tag attached to it, is such an offering. The church’s charity is charity (“Come, buy without money!”), not “charity” on the back of student debt.

That’s the Lutheran theology element of the critique. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that there are not Lutheran theologians at the Lutheran colleges. I’m not saying that those theologians do not teach Lutheran theology. But that also does not mean that I am saying that all of the Lutherans are really Lutherans, either, nor that all the faculty are actually Lutherans, much less ones who can give what could be identified as a reasonably articulate account of Lutheranism. But therein lies the problem.

Ray wonders whether eschewing such professional-preparation courses as pharmacy or exercise science or what have you is a wise move on the part of those who advance a Wittenberg higher education. In other words, the question is “Why can’t RenMus and the professional and pre-professional courses of study just get along, i.e., exist side-by-side, in the same institution?” Answer: Because they can’t. Please note, that’s the “can’t” of impossibility, not the “can’t” of “uneasy, but liveable relationship.” There are many reasons for this. First, students are important to other students’ education. In fact, some educators identify “peer-group” as the single most important factor in a student’s college-years intellectual development. The peer group in a “multi-versity” is so broad and uneven that it has a corrosive effect on the entire student body. If one’s experience in higher education has been with high-quality liberal arts colleges, this factor will hardly have been apparent. However, it is a reality. A conversation can be only as good as its weakest link. If higher education is something like a sustained conversation between students and students and students and faculty, etc., the impact of the recalcitrant is utterly destructive. It would be like going to a Star Trek convention only to find that more than 50% of the people there wanted to talk about Desperate Housewives.

Second, when an institution of higher education, especially a Lutheran one, develops programming that is not characteristically Lutheran, that is, that lacks an account for why Lutheranism needs that program, the motive is always the profit motive (despite our pious self-blandishments; see above). This motive opens the floodgate to an Iliad of evils, not least of which is prizing and prioritizing the new programming over the “old standard.” Not only is it the case that the concerns of the Evangelical Lutheran Church are represented in an attenuated way or not at all in major curricular decisions (such as core requirements), but now the entire curriculum is shifted to meet the needs of what I like to call “grabby” professional and pre-professional programs. The argument might go something like this: “A legitimate business major doesn’t have room for a heavy distributive core. Now, since everyone at institution X earns the B.A., the B.A. requirements across the institution need to be curtailed to accommodate the professional programming.” Again, the church’s interest is derailed. Not only that, but as mentioned above, this places serious students of, say, theology or history or chemistry in a class with students who regard all of those courses as hoops to jump through (Desperate Housewives fans in a conversation with Trekkies about Star Trek). Again, the impact is corrosive on the student body. One might argue, even, that theology fares even worse in this scenario than the students (and therefore the students with it): as Robert Benne has well pointed out, the marginalization of theology on campuses has the effect of reducing it to what he calls a pietism, wherein religious feelings are expressed in the vaguest of terms (“God is great, God is good.”) and not brought into real converse with the intelllectual project or academic disciplines of the institution [see the post Worth Reading]. Thus to put a RenMus program in an existing institution is something like throwing the lambs to the wolves; there’s that bit about pearls, too.

Third, a Lutheran skeptic might wonder why a RenMus higher education could not or would not benefit, financially, from being attached to an institution with income-generating (?) programs [on this see Steve Gehrke’s monitory words in several comments on earlier posts]. In other words, why not use, say, a pharmacy program to underwrite a Wittenberg humanistic education? First, see the arguments above. Second, if generating income to support core programming is the goal, I can think of many ways to make money more effectively than by skimming the slim margin off tuition payments for a professional program that, in any case, provides a distraction from the institution’s purpose.

There are more universal concerns here, too, and unfortunately this post has grown way too long. But let me add a couple of points. First, the professional programming mentioned above is animated by an entirely different value system from that that underlies Wittenberg higher education. In Wittenberg higher education, that is, the higher education that the Evangelical Lutheran Church has at its heart, the goal is theologically learned and conversant laity and clergy. The education itself, while ordered to the goods of the church, state, and individual, takes what looks to us today like an indirect route to those goods: it mines the past for the present and the future. Carl Springer in his recent talk at CTSFW [click here, and then click on Listen/View Conferences and Events; then click on Lutheranism and the Classics; then click on Wise, Steadfast, and Magnanimous] points out that Lutherans, by habit and even by confession, “back” into their future. The future is unknown, except for the eschatological horizon when Jesus will return. The past is known. And we approach the present and future on the basis of what is known, using (again, a quaint notion) the best that has been thought and written in the past. In other words, the notion of utility that partially animates Wittenberg education should not be confused with utilitariansim, which is what animates professional programming. Second, it is always the case that the proliferation of programming takes the eye off the ball. Efforts at an administrative, curricular, financial, admissions, development, and PR level that can and should be aimed at advancing and fostering an ongoing encounter with Lutheran theology, developing awareness of the Wittenberg reformational approach to the life of the mind, foregrounding the Christian life of vocation (not vocationalism) become so scattered that what is said about the important core purpose of the institution becomes something like background noise—perhaps at most a kind of mood lighting or light God-“musack.”

Penultimately, given the reality on the street, even approaching an institution that presently exists in order to create something like a Wittenberg curriculum would require showing up money in hand. In other words, it is not the case that present institutions will simply divert funds from what they are already doing to develop a Wittenberg curriculum. Since that’s the case—that is, since it requires starting from scratch anyway—it’s best to keep it at a safe remove from what history has shown to be the inexorable progresss of a typical confessional Lutheran institution of higher education.

Will this mean teaching a handful of students in a trailer park in Northern Wisconsin? No, it must not; for it all to work properly, architecture, location, curriculum, faculty, governance, financing, admissions requirements, student body, etc., must all work together, that is, be expressive of the same animating idea or ideal. As I’ve tried to show above, just one element being out of whack can and most frequently does have a long-term and irreversible deleterious impact.

Finally, I express my thanks to Ray for putting his finger on and pressing the issue. Much of what has been said here has been alluded to or touched upon lightly in other posts; the fruit of Ray’s prompting, “Why Not Accept the Status Quo?” attempts to draw a line from RenMus’ critique of contemporary confessional Lutheran higher education to the envisioning of a better way.

Well, Of Course

2010-11-04T08:06:00.005-05:00

It is time to get rid of the humanities as unproductive, useless money drains. Gradgrind has been making the case for years. The numbers! The facts! And now we have this from the maven of humanism, Stanley Fish, in an Opinionator column of his in the New York Times several weeks ago [click here for the article]: “I have always had trouble believing in the high-minded case for a core curriculum—that it preserves and transmits the best that has been thought and said—but I believe fully in the core curriculum as a device of employment for me and my fellow humanists.”

Thomas Gradgrind

Well, there you have it. Milan Kundera has one of his characters, Paul, say that Europeans will never be able to fight another war because they don’t believe in anything anymore. That is, the French can’t and won’t fight for the French way of life because they don’t believe in it (at least against other nations; I’m not saying anything about torching their neighbors’ businesses and bashing the windshields out of tante Yvette’s car, an altogether understandable way to preserve one’s way of life). Nor can perhaps the most-listened-to (or heard) of the humanists in the U.S. today make a case for the humanities that is anything else than a French temper-tantrum at his friends losing their jobs.

But let me put it to you: why would you do anything else—if you didn’t believe in it?

This is what has been slowly choking the life out of the humanities. Once the Gradgrind argument became vogue—that is, once we bought the idea that facts, numbers, etc., should determine the good of the humanities—it was only a matter of time.

Ironically, the humanities have in some sense been a millennia-long protest against a view of the world that is “just the facts, ma’am.” Their very existence, their very own articulation of their raison d’être, is that they give access to some other non-quantifiable, qualitative dimension of human life: that of the soul, that mysterious thing we all know we have but whose existence we cannot prove by empirical measure.

Humanism, in fact, and Wittenberg humanism in particular, prizes this unproven thing, this thing whose existence has no demonstrable measure, as the center of human life, as the definitional element of humans. Luther defines the human being by his aristotelian potential in his Disputatio de homine: hominem posse justificari—man has the ability to be justified. Here he lays a theological finger on the distinctive element of human beings as overagainst all other creatures. Humans have the ability either (failingly) to justify their own existence before God, or to receive from God the justification for their existence. All other things have their account. It is humans alone who seek—and either make up or blessedly receive—an account. In other words, it is humans alone who are possessed of a soul, a soul caught in immeasurable existential Anfechtung or temptatio. And that’s why we need the humanities—to help us live in this strange place, between God and the animals, between good and evil, between infinite beauty and unspeakable horror amidst the truths and deceptions, the scant justices and barbarous injustices involved in human life.

That’s what we think. But if that account makes no sense to you, at least the humanities keep a few of Stanley Fish’s friends employed.

World-Class Liberal Arts for Lutherans

2010-10-19T07:48:00.000-05:00

The point RenMus has been attempting to make—with some success, we hope!—is that a new way in Lutheran higher education can and must be found. Worn out are those attempts to turn essentially parochial institutions into the multi-use, “everything-to-everyone,” institutions we see today. In fact, the success rate for Lutheran colleges that have become everything to everyone if only they might win a few for their coffers is dismally low. The Church’s interest in higher education really cannot be anything other than “a theologically conversant and literate laity and clergy.” All other “objectives” of higher education can be met by large state universities. So let’s leave those objectives to them and attend to our own interests.

Liz Reisberg makes a similar point in today’s Inside Higher Ed in an article titled, “If not a world class research university, then perhaps world class liberal arts?” The piece hinges on two arguments. First, world-class research university is coterminous with big bucks; liberal arts education is relatively much less costly. Second, given the tortuous route of a typcial worker’s “career” these days, liberal arts education is poised today as at no other time to be useful.

Mutatis mutandis, the same arguments Reisberg makes can be directly applied to Lutheran higher education. Chasing the latest professional program is always going to be much more costly than sticking with a solid liberal arts curriculum—and the payoff disappointing to the effort given. And since Lutheran higher education educates for one’s vocation, Lutheranly understood, and not one’s “vocation,” understood as “career,” it uses the human arts (artes humaniores) to that end on the premise that one learns to be a human better by reading Thucydides than by learning the precepts of marketing.

While the first point is one going to the proper management of limited resources, the latter is really a theological, not a merely aesthetic, issue. The Wittenberg Reformers were convinced that the higher education entailment of the Lutheran Reformation was a radical approach to the Western intellectual tradition through the sources themselves. To be sure, other approaches to higher education were wildly popular at their time; Melanchthon could complain with the best of us that students eschewed the liberal arts and chose instead what was “universally more saleable.” But for the Wittenberg Reformers, higher education was a matter of best preparing students to live under God’s call in a world and under orders created by God for men and their benefit. It was not, finally, business prowess or bureaucratic advancement that made for a life well-lived in the Wittenberg way; rather, a life well-lived in the Wittenberg way was one with a deeply cognizant sense of being located in a specific time and place, gifted with a certain wisdom handed down from antiquity and with an eschatological horizon that meant that this world was not all there was. That was the end to which the Wittenberg Reformers put the artes humaniores.

And that’s the end to which their modern heirs should continue to educate. Indeed, Thucydides is still the father of political philosophy, and the eschatological horizon hasn’t changed a bit. It’s only that we heirs of Wittenberg seem to have lost our way between our past and our future. But by approaching things like Wittenbergers, that is, by understanding what we ought to do now based upon where we have come from, based upon what we already know, we can find our way again.

Lutheranism & Classics a Huge Success

2010-10-14T07:57:00.003-05:00

The dust has finally settled, and I can offer a report on Lutheranism & the Classics. Attendance at the conference numbered over 150, and the response by those in attendance has been overwhelmingly positive. The conference drew together Lutherans and non-Lutherans alike (I ate breakfast one morning with a public school teacher from Colorado, a Methodist, who thought the conference sounded interesting and so decided to come!), clergy and non-clergy, and academics and non-academics. Speakers forcefully and persuasively made the case, both directly and indirectly, that the languages (classical Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) and the arts in which they find their home are the highest and most natural decoration of the Church and that the Church of the Augsburg Confession without them is like a stripped-out, whitewashed shell: a church building in Geneva, say, compared to the Stadtkirche Wittenberg.

That's all fine and good, and you probably wouldn't have expected anything else to transpire. But those in attendance, both by their numbers and by their appreciative reception of the orations at the conference, confirmed that Lutherans want to be Lutherans. They want their children to be educated as Lutherans, they want Lutheran preachers in their Lutheran pulpits, Lutheran teachers in their Lutheran schools, and they want it authentically--not in an attenuated form.

Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, which hosted the conference, has also generously published sound recordings of the plenary talks by Jon Bruss, Dale Meyer, Carl Springer, John Nordling, and Avery Springer and Jim Lowe. You can find these on the CTSFW Media page. Once you've navigated there, click on "Listen/View Conferences and Events," then hit "Lutheranism & the Classics 2010," which will bring up the five plenary talks.

Papers from the sectional sessions will, along with the plenary papers, be available in a Logia 2012 special issue. I'm sure Logia would be delighted to have new subscribers in anticipation of that issue!

To all who attended, to all who helped out, to all who spoke, many thanks.

Foxes in the Chicken Coop

2010-09-28T08:11:00.006-05:00

Critical observers of U.S. higher education—of which there are far too few—have certainly seen it coming for years, perhaps decades. I think it might have finally sunk in for me when, within the space of but a few years, the ubiquitous “caf” was renamed the “dining facility,” dorm rooms that looked like what you’d get for third-class passage on a ship were replaced by suites, and the cavernous rubber-and-sweat-smelling gym was turned into a “fitness center,” often as well appointed as the local for-profit fitness club. Ironically, none of this coincided with an equally obvious renewed emphasis on teaching and learning. Those on the busy side of the podium at the front of the room might even have been able to discern, over this roughly 10-year revolution that swept American higher ed, an inverse relationship between enhanced non-academic facilities and students’ engagement.

The problem was, those who should have been keeping tabs on it all were the ones who stood to gain the most from it: the fitness club for students is open, usually free, to faculty; the house-beautiful dorm rooms are as much a badge of pride for bricks-and-mortar administrators as they are for the students who take up residence there; and, well, everyone has to eat, and adults no less than students prefer padded chairs to benches, small tables to row seating, and a nice cut of beef in the stroganoff to yesterday’s shepherd’s pie. Meanwhile, students and their parents paid more and more; the federal government released more and more funds in support of “higher education” in the form of grants and loans; and the institutions kept doing what institutions do best: engage in a Veblen-esque conspicuous grasp for the biggest piece of the pie they could get.

Which makes it, frankly, refreshing that someone, finally, has someone’s ear: the president’s. In an interview with college and university newspaper staffs from around the country yesterday, Mr. Obama shows that he: (a) is onto the federal gravy train that has allowed higher education costs to soar out of proportion; (b) understands the higher-ed “arms race” (if I may be permitted: in 1985, 25 years ago, the comprehensive annual cost of one, very nicely appointed private institution [VNAPI] which I was fortunate enough to attend was just less than a brand-new VW Golf—$8,750; today, while the equivalent 2010 Golf runs roughly $16K, the comprehensive cost of the same VNAPI is $47K); (c) rightly views spa-like accommodations on campus as having little to no bearing on the quality of education; and (d) wonders out loud whether “research” may have gotten in the way of teaching and learning. You can read more about Mr. Obama’s interview in the Around Washington column in today’s Inside Higher Ed.

What does this all mean? First, this may be the first time I’ve seen these issues addressed publicly by anyone in Washington, although, as I've mentioned, critical observers have long noted these matters privately and in smaller venues. Mr. Obama’s comments may bring some long-overdue and well-deserved attention to some of the real problems in higher education. Second, this portends a new era of what we’ve been arguing for here on RenMus, a leaner, meaner curriculum, the creation of a shared culture not based upon whether students have private bathrooms with Kohler fixtures but on what they read. Third and finally, perhaps the reign of the foxes is over in the chicken coop.

That said, the foxes will be foxes as long as they can—even if it means destroying the chicken coop. The higher education juggernaut will continue. But there is room—and it is widening—for a new way, for a return to a tightly managed curriculum taught by teachers to students who want to be...educated. And Lutheran higher education, with its unique Wittenberg intellectual apparatus, is poised like few others to deliver.

Education & Schools of Education

2010-09-17T10:15:00.007-05:00

In The Chronicle of Higher Education this week, Richard Vedder wonders, "Should We Abolish Colleges of Education?" I encourage you to read the whole piece (it's very short). Among other recommendations Vedder has is this, that "State governments should consider defunding students in colleges of education, requiring future teachers to major in an academic subject, etc."

Advice easily transferrable to the colleges and universities of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America. The rationale for teacher education, that is, for paedagogical education, is insufficient. How does it help to underprepare future teachers in academic subjects (mathematics, geography, literature, etc.?) in order to overprepare them for the moment when they first open their mouth in front of a class of first graders? Anecdotally, each and every year I have grown as a teacher--by experience. This is largely due to the fact that I entered the profession without a preconception about what a "good teacher" looked like, about what he or she did. And I quickly found out that teaching is like politics: the politician identifies what he or she wants, and gets there by any means possible. That's what teaching is like. It's a constant, tacit renegotiation on the part of the teacher with the students. The goal is always the same, but it's never met in the same way. It certainly fits nothing like a text-book version. But the point is this: nothing prepares you for life on Capitol Hill like, well, life on Capitol Hill. In the same way, nothing prepares you for teaching like teaching.

But nothing un-prepares you for teaching like having nothing to teach. An interesting study recently showed that students taught by novices (TAs) did, generally, as well as those taught by veterans (profs)--in the class in question. But the subsequent progress of the same group of students was tracked. Those taught by the profs went on to do better in courses later in the sequence than those taught by TAs. What does this mean? It means that content matters, and that a teacher's mastery of the content up and down the curriculum matters. What is salient in Calc I? What do students really need to be able to do and know in intermediate Greek to make it in advanced Greek? What bases must be built in in "Survey of American History" for subsequent courses in the Great Depression and the Civil War, etc.?

At the grade school level: what does a kid really need to know, really need to be able to do, to perform well later on in Geometry and Trig? The answer of the survey I mentioned above is that it requires, on the part of the teachers, depth of knowledge in academic subjects.

This, indeed, was and remains the Wittenberg way. Certainly the Reformers, both educational and theological, cared about pedagogy. But it was, for them, a guild craft, something gained in the shop (the school classroom), not in the classroom (the university classroom). The latter was for content.

What might Melanchthon's or Winsheim's or Dietrich's or...Luther's recommendation be today for the Evangelical Lutheran Church's parochial school teacher preparation? Perhaps we could tweak Vedder just a bit and say, "Synods and synodical colleges and parishes should consider defunding students in colleges of education, requiring future teachers to major in an academic subject, etc."

Scripsi.

[Pictured above: Das Melanchthonhaus Wittenberg, where Melanchthon, in addition to his rigorous teaching schedule at the University and prolific publication activity, ran a school. Content mattered.]

Can the Lutherans Pull off an Ex Corde Renewal?

2010-09-13T08:40:00.004-05:00

Ex corde ecclesiae, John Paul II's Apostolic constitution requesting (or requiring, depending upon your read of the document) greater faithfulness to Catholic teaching in Catholic colleges and universities, has just reached its milestone 20th anniversary. In "Catholic Colleges 20 Years after Ex Corde" in the Chronicle of Higher Education, David House marks the anniversary with a retrospective look at what the papal message has, or hasn't, achieved in Roman Catholic higher education in the United States. Among the positive results, he notes that:

[Roman Catholic] colleges are beginning to recognize that emulating secular institutions might be worthwhile in some instances, but not at the expense of what makes them truly Catholic and, therefore, distinctive.... The importance of theology and philosophy, undergraduate core curricula, and how graduates of Catholic colleges should be distinguishable from those of secular institutions has emerged because of Ex corde. [italics added]

House points out that in the U.S. context in which the Land O'Lakes Statement of 1967 was expressive of the going paradigm in the heady years of and after Vatican II, Ex corde faced some stiff opposition--a corrosive opposition to the Catholic way, a critical rather than a fostering stance.

Heirs of the Wittenberg Reformation might learn a thing or two from Ex corde's success. First, a retrenchment is possible. The Wittenberg way need not be a relic, a something that, à Hegel, has led to another, quite different something. Second, a broad consensus (by which I don't intend to say the creation of a big-umbrella consensus that means nothing) among Lutheran colleges about what is at the heart of Lutheran higher education, and a consistent application of that across the range institutional functions can, in the long run, show some positive gains. But this requires fearless leaders at all levels. Third, the founding of some centers or even entire institutions that can show the way has a leavening affect. Today, "Catholic higher education" is not defined by Georgetown, but by Ave Maria or Belmont Abbey College or Franciscan University of Steubenville. Such colleges and universities stand as a constant reminder to their accommodationist peers that faithfulness to Church teaching and intellectual responsibility not only are not at odds, but may even--and, in fact, must--work in tandem in pursuit of a unique vibrance of faith and learning.

Herman Preus is noted to have said once that the colleges of the Evangelical Lutheran Church won't be steered wrong unless the congregations want it that way. In other words, the health or sickness of the colleges is a symptom, not a cause, of the health or sickness of the congregations. Melanchthon made the opposite case: if you want to ruin the Church, ruin the institutions of higher education. The truth is probably more complicated than either man might have imagined. But it is clear that the two are interrelated--and that the Church of the Augsburg Confession, whether because it is healthy or because it wants to be healthy, requires a distinctively Lutheran higher education of the highest quality. The question is whether we have the will to do it.

[Pictured above: Lutherstadt Wittenberg, market square.]

This Just in from...Canada

2010-09-13T08:06:00.003-05:00

More in the do ut des column: readers of RenMus, especially those directly involved in the delivery and management of higher education, may want to bookmark The Classroom Conservative, a blog by Craig Monk, faculty member and administrator at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. Oh, by the way, he's also apparently a reader of RenMus.

Lutheranism & the Classics Conference

2010-09-07T09:57:00.003-05:00

CTS to Host Classics Conference in October

Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne is set to host next month’s “Lutheranism & the Classics” conference on their campus Oct. 1-2.

The conference will strive to consider how the classical languages have influenced church, school, and home in the past, and how Greek and Latin are poised to enrich culture and civilization in both the present and the future.

The event is free of charge to Seminary students both at Fort Wayne and those in St. Louis, with the exception of the optional conference banquet Friday night. All wishing to attend the conference are asked to pre-register online at www.ctsfw.edu/classics.

Concordia Seminary President Dale Meyer will deliver one of the plenary papers at the conference entitled “Ridentem dicere verum: Horatian Satire in Preaching the Law.”

“My Greek and Latin teachers taught me to love the classics and to love that literature for its own sake,” Meyer shared. “Still, my younger years spent with the likes of Homer and Aristophanes, with Horace and Cicero and so many others have profoundly impacted my theological formation and service to the church. At this time of my life, I want to get back to a more active study of classics and welcome the conference as one way to do that.”

The conference will be presented in three separate tracks to specifically engage those in attendance. The tracks are broken up between an Academic track for Professional Lutheran classicists, a Classical Education track for educators, and a Concordia track for university faculty and students. Each of the tracks will be presented twice to give conference goers a broader depth of the material presented.

Throughout the conference, there will also be three worship opportunities, all of which will implement historical Latin in each of the services inside Kramer Chapel on the Fort Wayne campus.

According to the conference brochure produced by Rev. Dr. John Nordling, Associate Professor of Exegetical Theology at CTS, “The conference is intended for homeschoolers, pastors, ‘classical’ educators (principals, teachers, parents), professional classicists, those who don’t know the ancient languages yet (but are fascinated by them), high school Latin students and their teachers, and collegians.”

During the two days of the conference, Nordling will also present his paper entitled “Teaching Greek at the Seminary: What’s Involved and Why Greek Remains Essential for the Ministry.”

Registration information, additional conference material, and suggested hotels can be found online at the conference website.

by Andrew Wilson; reproduced from the serial of Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Around the Tower (Special edition, Sept. 2010, p. 4)

Wittenberg & the Sciences: An E-nterview

2010-09-03T07:15:00.006-05:00

Steve Gehrke, our featured guest on RenMus the last several days, offers some further food for thought on this topic that we've taken up of late, the sciences and the Wittenberg way.

JB: Following are some of the questions that, at first blush, seem to be basic and preliminary to any further consideration: Has so much scientific water flowed under the bridge since the 16th century that it is impossible today to make the sciences at home in a Lutheran curriculum?

SG: This seems to presume that either science and theology are by nature hostile toward each other as disciplines, or else that scientists and theologians are. Since the Lutheran view would be that science and theology both are creations of God, I don’t think the former can be true. If the latter is true, then I think the two sides must be reconciled to each other and learn to communicate. If that occurred in 16th-century Wittenberg, why not among the heirs of that tradition?

JB: Is there such a thing as a Lutheran approach to science? And if so, how does it differ from, how does it complement other views? How might it be regarded as better or deficient?

SG: This I think is a most intriguing question. I have read it argued that science itself is a product of the Christian world view, because Christianity described the world as being purposefully designed for humanity, and this led to the idea that there were rules that underlay the universe that could be discovered and understood. It is empirically proven that great scientists and engineers need not be Lutheran nor even Christian. However, I don’t know how I would argue that Lutheranism would make better scientists (to answer that, one would have to define “better”). I have long thought that Lutheranism is especially compatible with engineering, a somewhat different question for another post.

JB: What need does the Church have of the sciences, if any? Put the other way around, what would be missing for the Church without the sciences? And are all sciences equal? Which are necessary, which are not?

SG: If science is understood as the discovery of the laws of nature as created by God, I think the church clearly would be missing something not to be interested in studying God’s handiwork. Exactly what would BE that missing something I’m not exactly sure. Would it be heretical to suggest that the Mind of God would be reflected in the workings of his creation? As noted above, the idea that It would be, informed the development of science in the Western world. The relationship between the Reformation and rise of modern science has been explored by scholars but I’m not well enough informed to try to describe it myself here.

I think the Church IS missing something by its general lack of involvement or appreciation of the sciences and technology. I can argue that the high view of science by modern society is less that people are impressed by esoteric scientific discoveries than they are by iPhones and medicines made possible by those discoveries. Because the Church is frequently reactive to technological developments rather than proactive it therefore does not have the influence on people that it could have, and in any case tends to promote the view that it is archaic and irrelevant (see my 2000 Logia essay on this point).[editor's note: Our friends at Logia: A Journal of Lutheran Theology assure us they'll be happy to send you a paper or electronic copy of this issue for a modest price.]

The usual hierarchy in the sciences is math>physics>chemistry>biology. I don’t know if any other science would be considered fundamental. Subjects like astronomy are simply a branch of physics, and geology of chemistry. Even biology can be viewed as a specialized subset of chemistry. But there are no distinct boundaries between any of the disciplines. For example, there are chemical physicists and physical chemists.

JB: What sort of philosophical or theological Weltanschauung is necessary to work under in order to have a healthy scientific community on a Lutheran campus?

SG: I think it understands that science is the study of God’s creation, but that this study and its application (technology) are clouded by sin.

JB: Will 16th-century guide-posts be helpful or harmful in this discussion? If helpful, how can they be enlisted?

SG:

I’ve read a little bit of the work of theologians of this era (mostly as presented by RD Preus in The Theology of Post-Reformation LutheranismVol. II God and His Creation) and find it very helpful. Lutherans and Calvinists were already developing theological differences in the area of theology and science. Quenstedt in 1683 in debating Calvinists found it necessary to assert “We must distinguish between the book of Scripture and the book of nature,” by way of asserting that we must let Scripture speak for itself (Preus p. 186). Doesn’t this sound familiar? But because these theological discussions occurred prior to Darwin, it provides different perspective on the relationship between God and His creation without getting trapped in the well-worn ruts of the creation-evolution debates. Maybe with this fresh perspective we can learn something new in considering post-Darwinian questions.

JB: Can a science-less curriculum offer a responsible Wittenberg education?

SG: This is the only question you’ve raised that is easily answered: No.

JB: Do the big quarrels, such as that between evolution and intelligent design, materialism and non-materialist views, matter? Do they drown out the healthy discussions, or do they create a context in which a healthy discussion may occur? Are they the only “going paradigms” that may be adopted?

SG: Yes, I think they unquestionably DO drown and HAVE drowned out healthy discussions. Otherwise, from does what your opening paragraph derive? (“Perhaps no more vexatious question, no question passed over in more silence, no question more [unpersuasively] pontificated upon, is that of the relationship between science and theology. The two don’t make easy bed-fellows.”) Part of the challenge of putting science into the Wittenberg curriculum is in fact figuring out how to keep this from happening. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of these debates, but this is far from the totality of science-theology interaction. Simply consider all of the bioethical questions raised by advances in modern medicine such as end-of-life issues. Simply look for anything written by Glibert Meilaender on the subject to see why every family must understand these issues, and why confessional Lutheranism may suggest different answers to those moral quandaries than the consensus of modern society (generally strictly utilitarian).

[Graphic above: The shields of arms of the Faculty of Law (left) and the Faculty of Medicine (right) of the University of Wittenberg; Melanchthonhaus, Bretten, Germany. The shield of the Faculty of Medicine depicts its patron saints Cosmas and Damian.]

Wittenberg and the Sciences: Some Thoughts from the Field

2010-08-30T07:12:00.008-05:00

By Stevin Gehrke

EO Wilson is a non-Christian biologist (an expert on ants) who also is known for his writing on the relationships between science and religion. In contrast to the so-called ‘new atheists’ like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens who find nothing of value in religion, Wilson believes that religion is an evolved behavior with natural selection advantages. He published a book in 1998 called Consilience to describe a need for the combination of knowledge from science, the humanities and the arts. Though he approaches the topic from a completely different set of foundational principles from Christians, I recently ran across some quotes from this book that resonated with me both as a regular reader of RenMus and as an engineering professor. The quotes below are taken from Wikipedia, which I’ve not had opportunity to verify (I’ve only read about the book, I’ve not read it myself), but I found it interesting that someone like Wilson echoes some of the concerns raised on this blog.

If the natural sciences can be successfully united with the social sciences and humanities, the liberal arts in higher education will be revitalized. Even the attempt to accomplish that much is a worthwhile goal. Profession-bent students should be helped to understand that, in the twenty-first century, the world will not be run by those possessing mere information alone. Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to become global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely.

The quote opens with an intriguing statement that the study of the natural sciences can revitalize the liberal arts education. (As an aside, I have had a sense that is true and may make some comments along this line in a future post, but these ideas are quite fuzzy in my mind. But perhaps the readers of this blog can weigh in on this point in particular.)

To draw on my own experience, this “synthesis” of knowledge is the key goal of engineering education. The capstone senior courses in engineering (usually with “Design” or “Synthesis” in the titles) focus on teaching students how to integrate the knowledge they have gained in their other courses to solve a complex problem without a specific or single solution. While students have always tended to compartmentalize knowledge, engineering educators broadly believe that teaching synthesis of knowledge is an ever-increasing challenge in our courses. Most faculty have heard from students, with varying degrees of seriousness, “Why do we need to take classes [apart from earning the credentials for a job] when all the information is on the internet and quickly found using Google?” Wilson in this 1998 quote has concisely stated that the problem is not the ability to access information, but knowing what to do with that information – essentially, wisdom. But how can wisdom be taught?

Again, in Consilience Wilson also opines:

Every college student should be able to answer the following question: What is the relation between science and the humanities, and how is it important for human welfare? Every public intellectual and political leader should be able to answer that as well. Already half the legislation coming before the United States Congress contains important scientific and technological components. Most of the issues that vex humanity daily - ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most consistently before us - cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities. Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic response to immediate need. Yet the vast majority of our political leaders are trained exclusively in the social sciences and humanities, and have little or no knowledge of the natural sciences. The same is true for the public intellectuals, the columnists, the media interrogators, and think-tank gurus. The best of their analyses are careful and responsible, and sometimes correct, but the substantive base of their wisdom is fragmented and lopsided.

Here in the opening sentence, Wilson lays out a challenging question that I think most professors (never mind their students!) have some difficulty answering. Yet I agree that a clear answer is important to develop. Farther along in this quote, Wilson lays out some of the rationale for including a general education in the sciences as something important and in fact necessary for anyone who claims to be “well-educated” in any discipline, and for anyone who holds a position of responsibility and respect in society. It has been a constant aggravation in my adult life, as one educated in the natural sciences and engineering, to read and hear frankly ignorant statements made by the sorts of people described in the quote above, and extending to some theologically trained leaders in the church whom I greatly admire and from whom I have learned much. Even Wilson’s disparaging reference to “religious dogmas” (which I am sure he meant to apply to all religious teachings) can be accepted from an orthodox Lutheran perspective, when one interprets that phrase to mean any heterodox views strongly held without understanding or reflection.

Now, an education in science and engineering education doesn’t automatically produce great and wise leaders either. Although I reject the opinion I sometimes hear from colleagues in the liberal arts that education in these fields is only a step above a vo-tech education in auto mechanics and the like, it is true that engineers and scientists often fail to understand or anticipate the implications of their work. I try to bring up examples in my courses of cases where clever engineering solutions were rejected by society because a technological solution was not in fact THE solution (for an orthodox Lutheran, surgical abortions safe for the mother could be put into that category).

To be accredited, all engineering programs are required to have a liberal arts component in their degree programs, but in my opinion, these are not well-integrated into the engineering curricula across the US. Perhaps a Wittenberg education can provide the foundation for making better engineers and scientists as well as humanists?

[Graphic: Tycho Brahe, 1546–1601, shown with his instruments]

Wittenberg and the Sciences

2010-08-25T12:00:00.007-05:00

Perhaps no more vexatious question, no question passed over in more silence, no question more [unpersuasively] pontificated upon, is that of the relationship between science and theology. The two don’t make easy bed-fellows. In fact, so the caricature goes, they’re more likely found sleeping in separate rooms, unwed. When the two do meet (Daniel Dennett, say, and Oral Roberts), it’s usually for an unsatisfying one-nighter in the alley behind the bar that both would rather forget, and it requires an ice-cold shower back in the safety of their own disciplinary apartment to wash off the filth. (Excuse the colorful image.) So it goes in the 20th and 21st centuries.

It has not always been this way. In Wittenberg, in fact, the sciences lived comfortably in what was at the time known as the Philosophical Faculty or the Arts Faculty, taken up by the master’s (M.A.) candidates and their teachers as the Quadrivium after they had successfully demonstrated mastery at the bachelor’s level (B.A.) of the other three arts. Indeed, there was no road to the higher faculties—to Law, Medicine, and Theology—but that that led through both the Trivium (B.A.) and the Quadrivium (M.A.). And in Wittenberg it is the case that by the mid 16th century, the humanistically-reformed curriculum that emerged was pointedly weighted toward the two elements that arose as central in the B.A. and M.A. curriculum: philology in the Trivium; science in the Quadrivium.

This historical fact and element of our intellectual heritage as Lutherans beckons us, it seems to me, to take the sciences seriously in the curriculum. But that raises hackles and comes with a set of questions that needs to be addressed before the sciences can find their home—not a place, but their home—in the curriculum of a Lutheran college radically dedicated to the Wittenberg way both intellectually and theologically.

Following are some of the questions that, at first blush, seem to be basic and preliminary to any further consideration:

Has so much scientific water flowed under the bridge since the 16th century that it is impossible today to make the sciences at home in a Lutheran curriculum?

Is there such a thing as a Lutheran approach to science? And if so, how does it differ from, how does it complement other views? How might it be regarded as better or deficient?

What need does the Church have of the sciences, if any? Put the other way around, what would be missing for the Church without the sciences? And are all sciences equal? Which are necessary, which are not?

What sort of philosophical or theological Weltanschauung is necessary to work under in order to have a healthy scientific community on a Lutheran campus?
Will 16th-century guide-posts be helpful or harmful in this discussion? If helpful, how can they be enlisted?
Can a science-less curriculum offer a responsible Wittenberg education?

Do the big quarrels, such as that between evolution and intelligent design, materialism and non-materialist views, matter? Do they drown out the healthy discussions, or do they create a context in which a healthy discussion may occur? Are they the only “going paradigms” that may be adopted?

In the coming weeks, I hope we can address this. I’ve enlisted the help of my friend, Stevin Gehrke, Professor in the School of Engineering at KU, pious Lutheran committed to classical, orthodox, confessional Lutheranism, and thoughtful interlocutor. Actually, this discussion finds its impetus in his proddings. Some things will get posted here on the blog. We can also use the Renascentes Musae Facebook page for less formal exchanges. If you have not yet joined us there, look us up, and welcome aboard.

But what’s your reaction, now, to this matter? Do you have any helpful things to say in addressing the questions above? Do you have other matters that you think can help the discussion along? Do you think that something like an intellectually and theologically rigorous and responsible science can be articulated from the Wittenberg perspective? Please weigh in!

[Image: Aritmetica; mosaic]

Rhetoric, Preaching, and...Homer

2010-08-20T12:22:00.004-05:00

Wait! Shouldn’t that say: “Rhetoric, Preaching, and ... Paul,” or “... St. Augustine,” or “... John Chrysostom,” all of whom are stand-outs in Christian preaching? This would be understandable. It was certainly the reflex of Tertullian, and the radical reformers, Müntzer, Karlstadt, and others: Christian things for Christians; leave their own learning to the pagans.

But Melanchthon’s 1523 Encomium eloquentiae or Praise of Eloquence operates with an openness to the rhetorical tradition even of the classical pagans, or perhaps especially of the classical pagans. There, Homer, on the recommendation of Horace, Quintilian, Cicero; on the example of Solon, the just law-giver at Athens (fl. 596 B.C.), and Peisistratus, the tyrant of Athens (561–525 B.C., with interruptions), who had the poems of Homer sung in their proper order and a text finalized—there, in Encomium eloquentiae, Melanchthon makes Homer the source and teacher par excellence of rhetoric, an art whose highest usefulness lies in understanding and proclaiming the Word of God. Homer remains the basic source for: the qualifications of a speaker, the arrangement of a speech, the capacity to argue and counter-argue, the ability to describe in persuasive detail; in short, all that is really needed for speaking, for rhetoric—indeed, for the proclamation of the Word.

But how does one “arrive”? How does one achieve the eloquence of Homer? First, one comes to grips with the humanist idea that the ancients are not museum pieces to be observed behind a glass case, but great works of art whose use in education is for them to be imitated. “No one doubts the perusal of good writers is very profitable. In truth, unless you add to this the habit of writing and speaking you will be able neither to understand with sufficient incisiveness their opinion, nor to conceive in your mind the fixed rule for judging and deliberating.” [Kusukawa & Salazar, 70]

Second, even in imitation one does not remain frigid and “scientific.” Indeed, deep and incisive reading is commended. The Encomium eloquentiae is exemplary in this regard (Melanchthon teases out of Homer what the untrained eye would miss; for example he notes that excellence of speech and excellence of mind are made tandem at Odyssey 9.367, σοὶ δ ἔνι μὴν μορφὴ ἔπεων, ἔνι δὲ φρένες ἔσθλαι, “You have both a form of words and an intelligence that are excellent.”) But even intensive and incisive reading does not lead to distance, but to proximity, so that “not only the mouth and the tongue, but also the heart, are shaped by the knowledge of good writers.” [Kusukawa & Salazar, 68]

As noted elsewhere in this blog, this is that business about the text interpreting the reader, not vice versa, the requisite attitude in the Wittenberg way for reading all great works, including and especially the Bible. Tuning the ear to the force of rhetoric in the Greats—Homer, Vergil, Herodotus, Thucydides—in turn allows the tuned ear to tune in to the rhetoric of Scripture, in short, to understand what Scripture, as rhetorical message, wants to say. Indeed, Melanchthon reasons, it was because of the West’s ignorance of classical antiquity from the end of the Carolingian Renaissance until what we now know as the Renaissance that the horrors and atrocities of scholastic theology came to be: “Unless these writings are studied, we shall have a posterity that is in no way more sane than past centuries, when the ignorance of writings had overthrown all human and divine matters. Indeed..., in time past, when God was sorely angered against the Church, writings were snatched away, and ignorance of holy things followed. For when God wanted to speak in our words, those who were inexperienced in the arts of speaking judged foolishly on the divine Word.... And since they had no writings from which to learn how to be wise, the charming men devised that foolish sophistry [note: scholasticism], and began to argue about fabricated compositions of words.... Does it not [now] seem that the [once] neglected writings have sufficiently avenged the affront?... Indeed, when the excellent Father [i.e., God the Father] had begun again to turn His attention to the wretched, and was going to give back to us the Gospel, because of His generosity He also restored [the classical] writings, by which the study of the Gospel would be assisted.” [Kusukawa & Salazar, 74–75]

So, yes! Let it be: Rhetoric, Preaching, and ... Homer! Otherwise you might end up with a theology worthy of the other Homer, and a preaching to match.

Grow and Thrive?

2010-08-17T13:38:00.003-05:00

This recent cluster of articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education seems designed to make any faculty member or administrator at a small tuition-dependent college choke on her Captain Crunch at breakfast:

"149 Non-Profit Colleges Fail..."

"Hundreds of Colleges Fail..."

We may be tempted to scramble and see if a favorite institution is on the list. As I looked it over, a couple of simple observations came to mind:

1. There are a number of what we might describe as "prestigious" institutions on the list. This economy has clearly touched institutions that previously may have been considered "untouchable" by fluctuations in the economy.

2. Sadly, there are a number of Lutheran institutions on the list (Dana is now closed). It would be fascinating to analyze the stories of both those colleges on the list and those that have escaped that fate (so far). What variables, decisions, and serendipity combined to shape the stories of these institutions?

Another recent Chronicle article suggests that many believe a growth model is what will help small institutions endure in this changing world. Others recognize the danger of debt that makes such growth possible:

"Negative Credit Ratings..."

But as Dr. Bruss and others have so adeptly demonstrated, a clear confession of faith, a focused sense of purpose, and a persistent commitment to academic substance should trump the commercialism and marketing (and concomitant debt load) that tempt us in the contemporary academic arms race.

We're left with the challenge of determining how the small Lutheran college can remain small, faithful, and yet viable in a world in which many of the assumptions we have made about higher education are now untenable or unsustainable. This is the task that defines our time.

Bankrolling Academia--Or Bankrupting It?

2010-08-17T08:12:00.007-05:00

A truth-telling op-ed piece on higher education financing appeared in The New York Times this week. In "Academic Bankruptcy," Mark C. Taylor, chair of the Religion Department at Columbia, tells a story of two academic institutions, his own and NYU, whose spending is prodigal even as sources for such spending seem to be drying up.

But the Columbia/NYU arms race is probably more a symptom of a systemic malaise in North American higher education than anything else.

In the face of this malaise, higher education the Wittenberg way is in a unique position to be able to do something radically counter-intuitive and, in fact, countercultural. A higher education the Wittenberg way doesn't require vast resources and can actually thrive with a leaner, meaner curriculum.

I was just doing a little number-crunching. A well-staffed, adequately-resourced Great-Books and radically-liberal-arts oriented curriculum can be put on the ground comfortably and cover annual costs necessary to run it (by which I mean underwriting instructional costs) at $10,000/year per student. If such an institution had a 15:1 student:faculty ratio, each faculty member would "bring in" $150,000 per year. Subtract $100,000 for a complete faculty package (salary + health insurance + retirement), and you're left with $50,000 for support functions per faculty member. In short, an institution with the physical plant paid off and a modest endowment adequate to maintain, manage, and run the physical plant, can deliver a bracing, intellectually-challenging, traditional, and rigorous education on the back of a bare-bones curriculum that focuses on what's necessary, not "what would be nice," at a quite modest cost.

This is the case that needs to be made to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America. While programs that have the appearance of enhancing our appeal proliferate, the core has evaporated. And yet the core is precisely whence Lutheran higher education takes its energy and that for which it exists. Are there Lutherans of goodwill out there willing to support such an endeavor? Can a wealthy Lutheran businessperson, for example, look beyond narrow business interests and projecting himself or herself upon Lutheran higher education and come to the conviction that Lutheran higher education doesn't need the bandaids of new programming, but surgery to restore core health? I think so. I think this makes, well, business sense--and sense for the Church.

Studium Excitare: A Worthy Project

2010-08-14T08:53:00.004-05:00

You'll definitely want to visit Studium Excitare, an online journal whose spiritual epicenter is Martin Luther College in New Ulm, Minn. Stud. Exc. publishes translations from the Lutheran Fathers' German and Latin works, including such 17th-century greats as David Hollaz and late-19th/early-20th century giants of North American Lutheranism K. Georg Stöckhardt, G. Adolf T. F. Hönecke. The translations are on the whole quite well done, with very little Deunglish and overly Latinate English, which makes the production of these pieces eminently usable. The journal is certainly doing its part to raise the profile of often long-forgotten figures who have important things to say to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in North America today.

To the editors of and contributors to Studium Excitare: Well done!

Melanchthon and the “Tradition” of Natural Law

2010-08-13T08:23:00.006-05:00

At the risk of greatly oversimplifying things, Christianity has treated pagan antiquity in one of two major ways. On the one hand, the pagan antiquities have a long and noble history of coming in for heavy weather in the realm of Christian thought (think: Tertullian). On the other hand, Augustine, for example, thought of the heritage of pagan antiquity as “Egyptian gold,” something to be appropriated by the Church for its purposes. More recently, C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man elaborates his understanding of the natural law (whose clearest distillation is found in the divine Decalogue, Ex. 20) and its representation within not only the cultural tradition of the West, but also of the manifold cultures of the world. Abolition of Man, in other words, represents something of an apologetic for the Christian use of pagan source material.

Within the cacophony raised by Luther’s screeds against Aristotle and pagan philosophy (which he regarded—rightly—as having been misappropriated by scholastic theology) it is difficult to hear anything but a Tertullian-esque stance. But if you listen more closely, you can discover that the situation on the ground in Wittenberg was much more nuanced. Even as Luther was dropping some of his juicier anti-Aristotle comments, his colleague Philipp Melanchthon was working out a theory for the inclusion of the pagan humanities in the Wittenberg arts/philosophy faculty. His ability to do so was opened up by nothing less than Luther’s coming to clarity, in the early 1520s, on the Scriptural distinction between Law and Gospel. Now, with some qualification, the Law could be seen reflected and taught in antique pagan ethics, literature, and philosophy (so Melanchthon).

But how did this come to be? Melanchthon offers a tradition-theory for the presence of the natural law in the pagan works of the West:

[Homer] says, “Ill deeds do not attain to virtue, and even a slow man catches up with a fast one” [Od. 7.329]—that evil deeds do not lead to success or have a good outcome, and that the wicked man, however fast he may be and however versed in deceit, is nevertheless caught, and even by one who is lame. There is no doubt that this kind of saying was first uttered by the holy fathers [i.e., the patriarchs] and transmitted to posterity. Then they were passed on from one to the other, one could say from hand to hand, and finally extended to the men by whom they were included in these written monuments [the classical heritage], so that, put in an illustrious and perspicuous place, they could be kept in the memory of all posterity and beheld with admiration. [“Preface to Homer,” Kusukawa & Salazar, 43; brackets 1, 3, and 4 added]

Herein Melanchthon supplies at least a partial answer to the question on the minds of many a Wittenberg student who had developed Luther’s venemous attacks on Aristotelianizing scholasticism into a self-chosen educational program that rejected all learning but the theological.

Why does pagan learning matter? Because it evidences God’s providential guardianship of His Law, so that, here on earth and among men, the pagan authors can and in fact do offer no little guidance for a proper life. Indeed, because God has made all His established orders holy by, well, establishing them (that of the Church, of the household, of the state), savvy living within those orders is also a holy thing. And the pagan authors can excellently serve this end. Egyptian gold, indeed.

[Graphic: The Blinding of Paul, epitaph for Veit Winsheim, who delivered “Preface to Homer;” City Church, Wittenberg]

Kilcrease on Faith and Reason

2010-08-09T12:39:00.003-05:00

Readers of renascentes Musae will certainly be interested in Jack Kilcrease's disentangling of the sometimes conflicting, and nearly always mis-represented, data on the role of reason in the theological anthropology of the Wittenberg Reformation: whipping boy or useful friend? His post is aptly titled "Luther on Faith and Reason: A Primer."

Hierosylia--How Sad Can It Get?

2010-08-08T21:27:00.008-05:00

Melanchthon had his Declamatio de studio linguarum [CR 11.231–9; cp. Kusukawa & Salazar 29ff.] delivered by Veit Dietrich in 1533 (the same Veit Dietrich credited with the Reformation-era “Gospel collects” that will be known to Lutherans of Scandinavian extraction). I recommend the entire declamation, but draw attention to a final flourish that Philipp, or Veit, leaves with the hearer. Here, the image of plundering the holy places, or hierosylia, expresses the outrageousness of a Church without her languages.

Has artes quas recensui obruere ac delere tristius fuerit quam solem e mundo tollere. Neque vero sine cognitione peregirnarum linguarum retineri earum possessio potest. Qua ex re facile iudicare potest, linguarum noticiam non esse leve aut vulgare Dei donum. Quae autem impietas, quod scelus est, tale donum, cuius usus tam late patet, aspernari, et divinitus illatum in has nationes rursus explodere atque eiicere? Leges publice atrociter puniunt sacrilegia; at maius sacrilegium est, Ecclesiam spoliare linguarum cognitione, quam aurea aut argentea supellectile. Haec enim coelestia dona Evangelio lucem afferunt, et verius sunt Ecclesiae supellex, quam ulla ornamenta aurea. Neque enim dubium est, quin ad hanc utilitatem Deus Evangelio addiderit donum linguarum, ut vocant, ut ad sacras literas explicandas conducant. [CR 11.238]

It would be sadder to crush and destroy the arts that I have discussed [trans. note: the useful arts to Church and state] than to remove the sun from the world; however, neither can possession of them be retained without the knowledge of foreign languages [trans. note: in the usage of this declamation, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin]. From this fact, one can easily come to the conclusion that the knowledge of the languages is not a trivial or mean gift of God. But what godlessness, what a crime, for such a gift to be shunted aside whose usefulness is so obvious and to cast it back and drive it out when it has been brought by dint of God’s disposing amongst these nations. The laws harshly punish acts of sacrilege in public; and it is a greater act of sacrilege to despoil the Church of the knowledge of the languages than of her furnishings of gold or silver. For these heavenly gifts shed light upon the Gospel and are the Church’s furnishing in a more real way than any golden decoration. Nor indeed is there any doubt but that God has conferred the gift of the languages, as they call it [cp. Acts 2; 1 Cor. 14], upon the Gospel for this purpose: to advance the explication of the Holy Scriptures. [trans. Bruss]

Ilias Malorum: Video

2010-08-07T10:17:00.001-05:00

More on "Is It Time?"

2010-08-06T08:45:00.003-05:00

Naomi Schaefer Riley has a nice analysis piece in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education on "The Lure, the Risks, of Starting a University." There is much to be learned here. Let me outline a few of the items:

• free tuition works--and works very well

• newly founded institutions must find a way to

(1) locate properly

(2) conceive of an institution that can achieve what it wants with the size of student body that it can expect

(3) conceive of an institution attendance at which is made for intrinsic reasons justifiable and desirable to students.

Question: does a radically liberal-arts oriented institution envisioned on the Wittenberg model make sense in light of these criteria that Ms. Schaefer Riley has identified? I think so, but I'd love to hear from others.

Do ut des

2010-07-15T10:33:00.004-05:00

One of the sources of social grease in the ancient classical world was reciprocity. Aristotle even defined friendship in terms of reciprocity: far less than being constituted by the self-immolation we on the basis of millennia of Christian formation today think of as being true friendship, it was built upon the mutuality of loyalty, trustworthiness, and all the friendly virtues. This, at least in the study of Roman religion, is known as the do ut des principle: I give so that you will give.

Well, in that spirit, and having been given to, it's only fair, I think to draw attention through this e-medium to the many folks and sites who have graciously advertised "Lutheranism & the Classics" for us. Readers may even wish to visit these sites in the hopes of finding new friends, new ideas--in fact, that's the hope. Meanwhile, to all of them, Renascentes Musae and "Lutheranism & the Classics" offer their thanks!

rogueclassicism (scroll down to 9 July 2010)

LCMS (front page, under news)

Concordia Theological Seminary (under events: conferences)

The Illinois Classical Conference

If you know of other venues where we could get the word out about "Lutheranism & the Classics," please drop us a line. Academic or non-, cleric or lay, if you have a blog or a church or personal website and would like to post a word about "Lutheranism & the Classics," we will be pleased to send you an appropriate blurb.

Ecclesiae opus est toto illo doctrinarum orbe

2010-07-12T16:13:00.006-05:00

In Non posse stare on this blog Carl Springer gives a lively defence of Luther’s estimation that “real theology cannot stand without knowledge of literature.”

Luther’s quip was not an isolated judgment, a one-off, an exception that just proves another rule. It was, rather, a crystalized echo of the entire Wittenberg educational endeavor, that schema in which the Reformation was born and given its shape. Far from being viewed by the Wittenberg Reformers as window-dressing on a theological education, a finishing touch in the formation of theological dandies, the arts provided the intellectual framework in which to do any sort of serious theological work. Without them, conversely, the theological project was bound to fail.

Here I draw attention to one of the several pieces from Melanchthon’s hand fundamental to understanding this key element in the Wittenberg educational plan, his Oratio de philosophia (CR 11.278–284). Many of these orations have been handsomely translated, edited, and published in Philip Melanchthon. Orations on Philosophy and Education, Sachiko Kusukawa, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), a highly recommended volume for everyone interested in the Wittenberg educational project. What follows here is a handful of “greatest hits” from the 1536 Oratio de philosophia delivered at the conferring of the M.A. in that year.

I ask you...to be warned not only to flee the foolish judgements of those who do not believe that the Church needs liberal education at all...but also to execrate those people themselves like the most loathesome pests and fearful monsters. [Kusukawa, 127]

Altogether the most prevalent in an Iliad of evils is ignorant theology. [ibid., 127]

Since, therefore, ignorant theology has so many ills, it is easy to judge that the Church has need of many great arts. [ibid., 128]

“The many great arts” are necessary, so Melanchthon, because:

there is a certain cycle of arts [orbis quidam artium] by which they are all bound together and connected, so that in order to grasp individual ones many of the others have to be taken on. Therefore the Church has need of the entire cycle of sciences [quare ecclesiae opus est toto illo doctrinarum orbe]. [ibid., 129]

I entreat you, for the sake of the glory of God, which we must set before all other things, and for the sake of the welfare of the Church, which must be most dear to us, to resolve that the most excellent disciplines that philosophy contains are to be safeguarded, and to devote yourselves to them with greater effort, so that you may obtain for yourselves teaching that is genuine and useful for mankind. [ibid., 131]

Finally this:

So let us defend with great spirit the study of letters, and let us consider ourselves put in our position by divine providence, and because of that, let us do our duty with greater care, and let us expect the reward for our toils from God. I have spoken. [ibid., 132]

Et ego.

Just in Case You Forgot...

2010-07-09T08:37:00.004-05:00

But how could you?

Lutheranism & the Classics, 1 and 2 October, 2010, Concordia Theological Seminary, Ft. Wayne, Indiana. The Age of the Reformation was also the Age of the Renaissance, a period to which the birth of the modern discipline of classics may be traced. The classics provided a rich source for the thought, intellectual undergirding, and polemic of the era. Classics thus became part of the cultural DNA, as it were, of the Reformation and post-Reformation Church in the West. Of particular interest to this conference is the reception of the classics in the Wittenberg (Lutheran) Reformation. There, the darling of the Northern European Renaissance, Philipp Melanchthon, appropriated the classics in the service of the Gospel and drew them to the fore as an integral part of the reformational program in Saxony and much of Northern Europe. Papers at “Lutheranism & the Classics” explore this watershed period in the history of classics reception and its ongoing impact on the Evangelical Lutheran Church. For more information, visit www.ctsfw.edu/classics. Inquiries may be addressed to one of the three organizers: John Nordling (john.nordling@ctsfw.edu); Carl Springer (casprin@siue.edu); Jon Bruss (jonbruss@yahoo.com).

Campus for Sale

2010-07-01T08:55:00.005-05:00

Dana College in Blair, Nebraska, announced yesterday that it is closing shop. You can read the full report in The Chronicle of Higher Education's daily electronic update by clicking here. Dana is--or, better, was--a college associated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

For now, officials at Dana are blaming its demise on the North Central Association, an accreditation outfit that schools depend on for the green light for government and government-backed loans and grants for students. The accreditors apparently failed to okay the plans of an outfit that had set out to acquire Dana to develop a residential campus cum online offerings.

But here the accreditors have become just the whipping boy blamed at the last minute for what cannot but be a long line of failures that led to the critical moment at which it was sell or die for Dana.

First, like so many of the once-vibrant "sectarian" colleges, Dana came to offer what amounted to a hotch-potch of majors, with no central controlling narrative and a great deal of confusion between vocation and vocationalism. This is a story told time and again in the Lutheran higher educational institutions of the erstwhile Synodical Conference, as well. The survival of the institution, and not what it stands for or once stood for, becomes the brass ring, and this trips a downward spiral in which central mission fares in inverse proportion to the number and variety of courses of study. The idea, of course, is to become a player in the universe of regional competitors (in Dana's case, UNO, UNL, SDSU, etc.). The net effect, however, is to lose the raison d'être. The initial constituency, Danish Lutherans in Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota, no longer finds a reason to support the institution financially, morally, or by attendance. The Danish Lutherans haven't gone away; their college has left them.

Location, too, may have been a factor, but I rather doubt it. Blair, a town of nearly 8,000, is only 38 miles from Omaha, a nearly ideal setting: far enough removed not to be too expensive and for students to occupy the necessary "space apart" from distractions, but close enough to benefit from the many cultural offerings of a larger city.

Finally, however, it's not difficult to understand how the theological erosion that has occurred in the ELCA since its inception 1988 is a factor in the demise of Dana. The mainline churches in the States have become increasingly difficult to distinguish from the increasingly banal culture they inhabit and from which they take their spiritual and moral cues (in the pursuit of relevance?). Of course, like so many of the once Lutheran colleges in the States, Dana from its inception lacked the vim and vigor of a UAC commitment and, like so many Scandinavian Lutheran groups, any real appreciation for the precising of the Augustana that occurred in the Formula. As a result, because confessional subscription and the Confession itself was up for grabs, it could not but help fail to become merely window dressing, an understood, if unwritten, writ of divorce between the intellectual project and the spiritual project, leading to what Robert Benne has called a sort of "pietism," in which the Christian element of the institution is expressed through acts of piety, not through a vigorous integration of faith and learning.

Once a Lutheran college starts down this road, it has two choices, it seems to me. (1) Pursue the secularizing agenda with a vengeance and so try to catasterize oneself in the constellation of the Top-50 or Top-100 liberal arts colleges. Places like St. Olaf College have managed this quite well. (2) Continue on a path of mediocrity in all respects (in curriculum, admissions and graduation standards, and church relations), attempting to compete with regional "multi-versities" but without success and ultimately shuttering the campus. Dana's road is the one more travelled, and there's a lesson to be learned here.

And oh, by the way, apparently there's a campus for sale.

Is It Time to Move Forward?

2010-06-28T08:53:00.003-05:00

I just got back from the 10th annual meeting of the CCLE at St. Paul Lutheran High School in Concordia, Missouri (or rather, I got back last Wednesday, but had to turn my attention to the far more pressing matter of house painting before I could turn my attention to this post).

In any event, back in Concordia I had a chance to make two presentations, one rather brief, advertising the upcoming conference, Lutheranism and the Classics at Concordia Theol. Sem., Ft. Wayne, the other more extended, discussing the North American [Lutheran] higher education scene with these Lutheran folks interested in classical Lutheran education. By the end of the session, the group in attendance expressed overwhelming support for moving ahead with the formation of an institution of higher education here in North America on the Wittenberg model. The group included laity and clergy, academics and non-academics alike. Many expressed to me that there's a real a thirst and desire "out there" among Christians of the Augsburg Confession for such an education at the higher level, and another put the urgency of the case like this: "Strike while the iron's hot."

Are we, then, to move ahead? Initially this will require assembling an exploratory/investigative board. But before even doing that, I'd like to know what you think. What do readers of Ren. Mus. think about inchoative planning toward a Gnesio-Lutheran institution of higher education? Please register your thoughts!

From the Fish's Mouth

2010-06-14T10:17:00.004-05:00

Amongst a spate of recent articles extolling the virtues of a traditional humanistic education (more on which in coming days) comes this, from the [Stanley] Fish's mouth, really a review cum reflections on three recent books on traditional, aka classical, aka humanistic education. To whet the appetite I give you this:

Begin with “a well conceived, coherent, sequential curriculum,” and then “adjust other parts of the education system to support the goals of learning.” This will produce a “foundation of knowledge and skills that grows stronger each year.” Forget about the latest fad and quick-fix, and buckle down to the time-honored, traditional “study and practice of the liberal arts and sciences: history, literature, geography, the sciences, civics, mathematics, the arts and foreign languages.”

Need one say more?

For the rest of the article, click here.

Springer on Aesop

2010-06-11T15:38:00.003-05:00

Issues, Etc. has kindly granted us permission to link Carl Springer's recent interview on his work on Luther's edition, which never came to print, of Aesop's Fables. For more, click here.

Rescuing the Humanities from Themselves the Wittenberg Way

2010-06-02T10:21:00.003-05:00

James Mulholland’s recent Chronicle of Higher Education piece, “It’s Time to Stop Mourning the Humanities,” provides a compelling case for making a different case about the humanities within the larger university and contemporary culture. Chief among his recommendations is developing a non-esoteric vocabulary for and about the humane disciplines so that the humanities may, once again, be made conversant with the larger culture, to which we at Renascentes Musae say, “Yea and Amen.”

Indeed, where the humanities stand today in North America is linked in no small part to the adoption in the late 19th century of the German university model of higher education. Within that model, all disciplines are, well, disciplines, each with their own “scientific” language, and this language has grown ever more esoteric over the years and is now encumbered, especially in the literary disciplines, by the linguistic overlays of over a century of critical fads, ranging from the New Criticism to today’s post-modernism. Humanists use this critical vocabulary, every bit as esoteric as the language of quantum physics, to justify their disciplines within a university system organized around the German principle of Wissenschaften, “sciences.”

In other words, humanists’ practice of talking about what are essentially everyday literary phenomena, for example, in an impenetrable jargon meant only for specialists demonstrates, at least to humanists, that the humanities have arrived: quantum physics with its complicated conceptual framework and equally arcane vocabulary has nothing on the humanities. It is, in fact, difficult to see just what function within the university the humanities any longer have apart from being that field upon which scholars demonstrate their intellectual agility. The artifacts of humanities—the texts and monuments and deeds of the past—frequently serve as the material for just that.

The Wittenberg approach differs from the contemporary model in some basic ways. First, the Wittenberg model doesn’t adopt an instrumental view of the artifacts of the humanities. The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, to mention but a few works, are, rather, viewed not as things through which we create an esoteric message, but as things that create their own message. The reader in this model is the one addressed.

And that brings us to another point. The humanities looked at in the Wittenberg way—and you can see this in the Wittenberg approach to Scripture—have an intrinsic value. As bearers of a message, they demand to be heard. And since they demand to be heard, the first interpretive act is that of the text on the reader, not vice versa. In other words, the Aeneid first asks of me how it is that I, like Aeneas, do or do not fulfill my obligation to ancestors and posterity, gods and nation. This line can be repeated and deepened across the range of works that constitute the artifacts of humanistic inquiry.

But it’s just here that the humanities come in for rough weather, because the German-model university in its contemporary incarnation is, or is thought to be, valueless (actually, it’s rather the case that the university is permeated by values—frequently, however, they just don’t happen to be those expressed in the Great Tradition). Which suggests that Mulholland’s idea of finding a new justification for the humanities within the university may be a losing battle. If we let the humanities speak simply and as they are, they bear a message we’re not willing to hear, unless we can first hedge and criticize.

But not in a university or college conceived of in the Wittenberg way. There, where a regard for text and message lies at the heart of the intellectual enterprise, the humanities are not just top-dressing, they are the guts of the educational endeavor, its marrow, each reading of a text a little workshop in letting the text interpret the reader, and not vice versa; each interpretation by the reader of a text an act of charity that allows the text, as speaker, to make its claim upon the reader, as audience, as is only proper in a civilized society.

This in turn emerges from and is part and parcel of the high Lutheran regard for Scripture, which “is not of private interpretation” because it’s a public address by the Most High God to a fallen and dead humanity that He wishes, through His Word, to heal and raise and vivify.

And herein lies the relevance to Lutheran higher education of the humanities, a “cultural” and “university-wide” relevance hardly imaginable in the broader culture and broader university culture of today, but no less significant for that fact—in fact, all the more necessary.

Orthodox Lutherans in Academia

2010-06-01T11:49:00.004-05:00

A Registry of Lutheran Faculty to help Lutheran students attending college at secular or non-synodical conference schools is underway at orthluthia. This is a website that will help you or your friends and relatives or parishioners get in touch with confessionally-minded faculty at colleges and universities across the States and Canada and may even help advise you on where to attend college.

If you are a faculty member at a school not owned and run by the LCMS, WELS, ELS, or CLC but are a consciously confessional Lutheran, see as part of your vocation as a Christian on campus aiding students to remain steadfast in their faith and confession, and wish to be contacted by such students, please write to jonbruss@yahoo.com with your full name, institution, department, email address, parish affiliation, and synodical affiliation.

Here's what orthluthia says about itself:

Most college students raised in Missouri Synod, Wisconsin Synod, and Evangelical Lutheran Synod households do not, for whatever reason, attend synodical colleges. This website is for them and their families, because their continued connection with the Evangelical Lutheran Church is of utmost importance. In the presence of the Means of Grace—the Word and the Word in the Sacraments—faith in Christ is created, fed, and nourished. Apart from the Means of Grace, this faith withers and dies. It’s quite that simple.
Ironically, in the face of the increasingly confusing and pluralistic spiritual marketplace of academia, the Lutheran chapel network across North America is, with some certain bright exceptions, being cut, curtailed, or undercut. Simultaneously, many Lutheran chapels have traded in their birthright to vigorous and unapologetic Lutheranism in doctrine and practice for a pottage of a vague and light pan-Christianity that fails to embrace the Lutheran distinctives.
Orth[odox] Luth[erans] i[n] a[cademia], orthluthia, is designed to put students from orthodox Lutheran homes into contact with orthodox Lutheran faculty. Those listed here have volunteered their names and contact information because they want to help students maintain their confession in the face of indifference on the one hand and animosity on the other. If you are student or family member or pastor of a student, please use this site! It’s meant to be used, not looked at.

The 2010 LCMS Convention & Higher Education

2010-05-21T10:19:00.002-05:00

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!

2010-05-16T20:47:00.003-05:00

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

2010-05-13T09:10:00.005-05:00

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

2010-05-06T07:12:00.006-05:00

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.

No Humanism, No Reformation / No Reformation, No [Wittenberg] Humanism

2010-04-19T15:31:00.003-05:00

It's a frequent contention that the Reformation had been an impossibility, historically speaking, without the advent of Humanism, and students of the era quickly recognize this fact as they read through the primary sources. The same impulse that animated Humanism, ad fontes, also animated the reformational desire to return to the source of the Church's life, Scripture itself, without the scholastic accretions, the "human traditions," of the Middle Ages. It's like buying a Gucci purse: you can either go to the guy on the corner and get a knock-off, or you can expend a little extra effort and get the real mccoy. So no Reformation without Humanism.

Same goes for the Wittenberg form of Humanism: it, too, is inconceivable apart from the Reformation. The peculiar brand of Humanism that developed in Wittenberg was reformational Humanism, a Humanism deeply informed by the theological thought of Luther and Melanchthon, as we've had occasion to point out here at Renascentes Musae.

In celebration of the phenomenon of Wittenberg Humanism, Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, is hosting a conference entitled "Lutheranism and the Classics." You can read more about it by clicking here. So mark your calendars for 1 and 2 October, 2010, and please join us as we examine, prod, explore, uncover, probe, and revel in the intellectual tradition of earliest Lutheranism.

The Chorale and Classical Lyric Poetry

2010-04-07T16:08:00.009-05:00

[Please excuse the length of this post, but please read on!]

Part of our argument at Renascentes Musae is that the fullness of the Lutheran tradition just is not available apart from something we might call Lutheran culture—Lutheran higher culture. Now, to be sure, none of us would be willing to admit that the Gospel is culture-dependent, that what the Gospel is and delivers, the forgiveness of sins through faith alone in Christ alone, requires a certain cultural background. But, together with Scripture (e.g., 1 Tim. 2.2; Phil. 4.8) and the old “standard” Prayer of the Church, we recognize that in human culture certain things can be done or not done to foster or hinder the Gospel. Our confessions recognize, too, the role of human culture in fostering a Christocentric, sacramental piety when they note that ceremonies, the “Latin parts” of the liturgy, and “German hymns” are “needed to this end alone, that the unlearned may be taught” (AC 24.1–9, esp. 1–4).

The passage in AC referred to above was both informed by contemporary practice and informed subsequent practice, particularly in the blooming of the Lutheran chorale. During the 16th and 17th centuries, literally thousands of chorales were written by Lutheran theologians, pastors, and poets in German, Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian, and the like. When the preaching of the Gospel flourished so did the singing of the Church, since the Church responds to kerygma by her confession, and her confession is, in a prophetically and apostolically normative way, her song (see, e.g. Exod. 15.1–18, along with Miriam’s song as a coda, v. 21; and Eph. 5.19).

But the Church’s song isn’t just ‘any old song,’ just folk lyric or popular lyric. Addressed by the Most High God in His Word, the Church responds in clothing her song, her offering to God, by singing at the very peaks of human culture. When Paul in Eph. 5.19 encourages the singing of “hymns,” he has in mind that pinnacle of Greek lyric, the hymn.

Greek lyric. A pagan form—now baptized by the Gospel. Tertullian need not have asked, “What does Jerusalem have to do with Athens?” because the Apostle had already answered it. Tertullian’s synecdochal “Athens” was Augustine’s Egyptian gold, not intended for making idolatrous calves (Exod. 32), but for the worship of the God of Israel. In the case of the gold from Egypt, it was the substance that was neutral and the form it took (an idol) that was evil; in the case of “Athens,” the heritage of the Greco-Roman world, it was the form (the “hymn”) that Paul viewed as neutral, even if its substance, riddled with the worship of pagan deities, was not.

The Lutheran Reformers understood this well. On the churchly side of culture, all that had gone before was good so long as it did not militate against the Gospel (AC 15); on the secular side of culture, what was best was also good, so long as it could be conscripted into the militia Evangelii, the “service of the Gospel.” And what was best lay in the classical culture of Greco-Roman antiquity (as we’ve had occasion to point out, by today’s standards a quaint notion, but quite serious to the Reformers). To that end, Philipp Melanchthon devoted himself tirelessly to a living appropriation of classical culture so that he himself was regarded among the best composers of, e.g., Greek and Latin epigrams, and so that he inspired an entire Lutheran educational system devoted to the study and living appropriation of Greco-Roman antiquity. His students and their own students went on to compose epigrams, propemptica, elegies, plays and sacred poetry (also known as hymns, aka “chorales”) in Greek, Latin, and German. (Here I refer the reader to Manfred P. Fleischer’s, “Melanchthon as Praeceptor of Late-Humanist Poetry,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 20.4 (1989), 559–80.)

“Okay. So what?” the reader may ask. Indeed. But the proof is, as they say, in the pudding. The lyrical production of the Reformers and their heirs down through the Age of Orthodoxy is nothing if not stunning—and deeply indebted, both self-consciously and unself-consciously—to Greco-Roman antiquity. This was driven home to me over Holy Week and through a conversation I had about it with Mark Preus, who himself has a blog devoted to the “revival of the Lutheran hymn.”

Gerhardt, Melanchthon & Pindar. On Easter Sunday at our church, St. John’s Ev.-Luth. in Topeka, we sang “Awake, My Heart with Gladness” (“Auf, auf, mein Herz”) by Paul Gerhardt (1607–1676), a Lutheran pastor who was the beneficiary of a fine Melanchthonian education. The Gerhardt chorale is, at the end of the day, a Christianized Pindaric victory ode, and Gerhardt himself points to this in the hymn. (Did Gerhardt know Pindar? Could he have? Yes. Among Melanchthon’s many accomplishments, he also produced a text, translation, and praefatio to Pindar’s victory odes; see CR 19.187ff. along with CR 9.673–4.) At the end of the fifth line of the second stanza of Gerhardt’s German chorale, we hear Christ’s cry at the devil, “Viktoria!” (in Latin, no less, which evokes the classical world, a point obscured in the English translation). The very term alludes to Pindar’s epinician (victory) odes, perhaps his most famous production. Gerhardt’s debt to Pindar is also betrayed in the final verse, where the believer looks forward to being brought to “this portal / that leads to bliss untold” and upon which “this rhyme immortal / Is found in script of gold.” Gold as a topos in this context is clearly not from Scripture. But it is Pindaric—in fact, the topos of gold in Pindar is practically emblematic of Pindar’s poetic oeuvre, so much so that Olympian 7 for Diagoras of Rhodes was even inscribed in gold on the temple walls (cp. “this portal”) at Lindos. In “Awake, My Heart,” Gerhardt thus figures Christ as an Olympic or Pythian victor—not over other human competitors, but over sin, death, and the devil. And in a final Pindaric turn, Gerhardt further lends the victor glory of Christ, by way of a “crown” (gekrönt), to all who have suffered with Christ here, just as the Pindaric victor brings his own glory to his homeland.

Heermann & Sappho. Another classical borrowing resides in the beloved chorale “O Dearest Jesus, What Law Hast Thou Broken” (“Herzliebster Jesu”) by a poet of the generation before Gerhardt’s, Johann Heermann (1585–1647). The ‘invention’ of the sapphic stanza, three lines of 11 beats followed by a fourth line of five beats, is credited to the poetess Sappho of Lesbos. In the ancient world it was profoundly associated with erotic lyric (see, for example, Catullus c. 51, which ‘translates’ Sappho fr. 31). Sapphic lyric poetry also has a strong element of wistfulness about it, a feature found also in the Roman lyric that uses the sapphic stanza. These elements come out forcefully in Heermann’s “Herzliebster Jesu.” The poem itself is composed in sapphic stanzas. Furthermore, the very first word of the hymn, “herzliebster” (“my heart’s dearest”) is an erotic evocation, unexpected in the liturgical performance setting of the poem but very much in line with Heermann’s metrical choice. And the love theme persists throughout the poem, touched throughout by the wistfulness the permeates sapphic lyric. Again, Heermann’s encounter with sapphic verse, which motivates this famous chorale, was mediated through his Melanchthonian education.

These are but two examples of a phenomenon that has gone little explored but is key to understanding the richness of Lutheran higher culture. To put it in terms that hit a little closer to home: the lyric treasury of the Lutheran chorale, the very guts of the Lutheran Gottesdienst, is virtually inconceivable apart from the Christian Humanism that is woven into the Wittenberg Reformation. Which is to say that Lutheran higher culture, to be a living thing and not a relic, (forgive the compounding of images) requires rich fertilization in the soils of Christian Humanism.

Happy Birthday, George Herbert!

2010-04-03T16:10:00.003-05:00

Although the topic may drift a bit from the official purpose of this blog, I would like to commemorate today (3 April) because it is the birthday of the British priest and poet George Herbert (b. 1593). He was intimately acquainted with the cross and suffering, as well as the relief and hope the resurrection provides. Here is a poem for Holy Saturday:

"The Dawning" by George Herbert

Awake sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns;

Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth;

Unfold thy forehead gather'd into frowns:

Thy Saviour comes, and with him mirth:

Awake, awake:

And with a thankfull heart his comforts take.

But thou dost still lament, and pine, and crie;

And feel his death, but not his victorie.

Arise sad heart; if thou doe not withstand,

Christs resurrection thine may be:

Do not by hanging down break from the hand,

Which as it riseth, raiseth thee:

Arise, arise;

And with his buriall-linen drie thine eyes:

Christ left his grave-clothes, that we might, when grief

Draws tears, or bloud, not want a handkerchief.

We eagerly await the joy tomorrow brings: A blessed Easter to all!

Teach Us to Pray...

2010-03-30T21:41:00.002-05:00

Over at incarnatus est, Pastor Alms has posted a marvelous excerpt from Augustine on baptism:

http://incarnatusest.blogspot.com/2010/03/lords-prayer-is-our-daily-baptism.html

This is a the heart of the quote:

But, since we are destined to live

in this world where no one lives without sin, on that account

the remission of sin depends, not solely on the washing in

holy baptism, but also on the Lord's daily prayer which you

will receive after eight days. In that prayer you will find,

as it were, your daily baptism, so that you may give thanks

to God who has given His Church this gift which we

acknowledge in the Creed.

Augustine's emphasis on finding our baptism in our daily praying of the Lord's prayer reminds us of the precious gifts our students receive when we encourage them to pray and live faithfully in God's word and the church's traditions. In these efforts, Lutheran schools pursue a noble purpose.

Joseph Conrad and the Purpose of Art

2010-03-30T16:21:00.002-05:00

Today, I taught Joseph Conrad's Preface to his The Nigger of the "Narcissus" to my students. While I wish Conrad would give more credence to the pursuit of Truth, I find myself drawn to the conclusion of Conrad's analysis of art and its purpose:

And so it is with the workman of art. Art is long and life is short, and success

is very far off. And thus, doubtful of strength to travel so far, we talk a little

about the aim--the aim of art, which, like life itself, is inspiring, difficult--

obscured by mists. It is not in the clear logic of a triumphant conclusion; it is

not in the unveiling of one of those heartless secrets which are called the Laws

of Nature. It is not less great, but only more difficult.

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the

earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for

a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shad-

ows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile--such is the aim,

difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But some-

times, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And

when it is accomplished--behold!--all the truth of life is there: a moment of

vision, a sigh, a smile--and the return to an eternal rest.

A discussion of the benefits of both engaging art and pursuing an education rooted in the gifts of the Lutheran tradition and the rigors of the liberal arts should include their shared ability to encourage students to stop as they pursue ends such as a career, and see the world differently than they have previously. To paraphrase Conrad, when our education makes us see differently, perhaps we can begin to glimpse the Truth for which we have forgotten to ask.

Sound Familiar?

2010-03-18T08:29:00.008-05:00

Johann Christoph Kunze arrived in the colonies in 1770. He had taught at Kloster Berge (left) near Magdeburg (which would, not 40 or 50 years later become a hot-bed of Lutheran confessionalism). Prior to that he had received a full-fledged classical gymnasial education at Halle and theological education at Leipzig.

Three years after his arrival, he founded a Seminarium--a Gymnasium, really--where students who had done passing work in the lower grades could continue their education. Solberg calls it a "thoroughgoing Latin school." The curriculum included: Greek, Latin, English, German, geography, history, philosophy, math, etc. Kunze's admirable goal was to provide learned teachers and preachers for the fledgling Church of the Augsburg Confession in the colonies.

What a waste. So Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg. But hear him out:

We have here in America large English institutions of that sort, academies, colleges, and universities. In these institutions every year large crowds of young gentlemen are created bachelors, masters, licentiates, doctors of law and doctors of medicine, and they are let loose on the world. Then the poor suckers wander to and fro. They have used up their small resources and have no way of making a living. They cannot dig, to beg they are ashamed, and so they sometimes become public charges. [in: Carl Frederick Hausmann, Kunze's Seminarium (Philadelphia: American Germanica Press, 1917), 28].

And there's no short-cut so short but that it's worth taking. Again, the esteemed Mühlenberg, who argues what a pity it would be:

to torment such candidates [that is, for the pastoral office] with foreign languages over a period of many years; it would be sufficient if they possess native intelligence, a compendious knowledge and experience of the marrow and sap of theology...an understanding of the mother tongue [German, of course] and English, and possibly also the declensions and conjugations of the Latin language...and, preeminently, a heart that loves the Savior of the world and His sheep and lambs. [in: T. Tappert and J. Dobberstein, trans., The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1945), 2.586–7]

Ah, the heart that loves Jesus and His sheep. It reminds of the road to hell paved with good intentions--or of the apocryphal story of Ole out working in his fields. Ever heard it?

Ole loved Jesus, yes he did. One day as he was out working in the barnyard the clouds formed odd shapes above him. As he looked, he saw these letters: G P C. Ole pondered and prayed and prayed and pondered for a long time and then, there it was, his answer. G P C meant Go Preach Christ. So Ole set off down the road to his Lutheran pastor and told him of his intentions. O, Ole loved Jesus, yes he did. And he could speak Norse and English pretty well, too. And he knew the catechism inside and out, you bet he did. But old Pastor Svendsen, he had been to the seminary and knew a little bit more about theology than Ole did, and so he set Ole straight. G P C didn't mean Go Preach Christ, it meant Go Plow Corn.

No less in Mühlenberg's case than in Ole's did a well-intentioned pietism get in the way of good theology and the kind of education that doing good, responsible theology requires (see the post on Robert Benne's critique of the pietistic turn in Christian higher education).

Let us only point out that it's a good thing no one gave God Mühlenberg's advice when He decided to call Moses to lead His people out of Egypt (see Acts 7.22).

Reason and the Limits of Her Whoredom

2010-03-11T08:53:00.010-06:00

The troubling thing about great one-liners is that they take on a life of their own. Joe the Plumber quickly became an imaginary friend of John McCain's who had taken up in a shoebox under the latter's bed (so Saturday Night Live). "Reason, that whore," [WA 51.126.7] one of Luther's most famous quips, has also taken on a life of its own, haunting, as an imaginary friend, the recesses of the Lutheran mind, an invective turned as invective against "fideistic" Lutheranism. Sola fide, however, does not mean checking the hat of Reason in the narthex and it never did. To the contrary, it means, quite reasonably and on the basis of the clear words of Scripture, that salvation is appropriated to the individual through faith, not works. Reason becomes a whore only when, following her natural inclinations, she prostitutes herself out to the Law and reasons on the basis of the Law and the putative goodness of her master, the Old Adam, that she can and must do something to settle accounts before God's judgment. There she plays, and is, the harlot, dispossessing the soul of her spouse, Christ.

But as we have had occasion to point out elsewhere, Lutheran confessional theology reserves, with Scripture, a wide playing field for reason--for reason where she is Mistress, not madame. The following elegiac epigram was composed by Philipp Melanchthon on Book 7 of Plato's Republic which, as the epigram is entitled, is a "commendation of Dialectic."

Sermonis certas tradit Dialectica leges,

Quaque via poßis prendere vera, docet.

Ac velut in coenum incautus si forte viator

Labitur, atque udo polluit ora firmo:

Surgit, & immundis sordes detergit ocellis,

Abluit & turpi squalida membra luto:

Sic hebetes oculos acuit Dialectica mentis,

Lynceus ut videas lumina vera puer.

[Philippus Melanchthon, Epigrammatum libri sex, ed. Petrus Vincentius (Wittenberg: haeredes Johannis Cratonis, 1579), Liber Quartus, N2 43 recto et verso.]

Discourse’s sure regulations within Dialectic discovered

Teach you the road on which you pow’r upon truth may lay claim.

Just as the footman, unheeding, perchance may stumble in puddles,

Visage and face with the damp earth and its filth befoul:

He then arises and scrubs from his eyes, unclean, their foulness,

Washing that unsightly sludge, cleansing his aspect of filth:

So, just so, Dialectic can sharpen the mind’s blunt vision

That, like Lynceus, you, too, with acuity, see!

Sometimes things aren't what they seem, and sometimes nice girls dress in provocative clothing (is it pressing too far to mention Dostoyevsky's Sofia Semyonovna Marmeladova?). The God who communicates to humans through His Word, who inscripturates Himself in human language, does that because He has given the capacity to reason. Just let reason be--and remain--modest, Mistress of her realm, not madame in a street where she has no business.

Beyond Rhetoric

2010-03-07T13:07:00.003-06:00

The cry of alarm can be heard once again. In its recent "Special Report: The Liberal Arts," the Chronicle of Higher Education provides a series of articles that provide the latest snapshot of what has become a long and rather exhausting post mortem of the liberal arts in American higher education.

In one of the articles in this series, "For the Liberal Arts, Rhetoric Is Not Enough," the president of Ursinus College presents his institution's efforts to emphasis the liberal arts on campus. The article can be found here (subscription required):

http://chronicle.com/article/For-the-Liberal-Arts-Rhetoric/64356/

While providing an informercial for his college, President Strassburger has much reason to celebrate. In short, his college has worked to "craft a set of programs that made all the virtues that we claim for liberal education clear and transparent." They have found three primary ways of accomplishing this:

1. Their faculty has "developed a two-semester program required of all first-year students, what became known as the "Common Intellectual Experience."

2. All first year students live together in six residence halls as a way to foster intelligent discourse among the cohort.

3. Their faculty created an "Independent Learning Experience" that required every student to do "significant undergraduate research, study abroad in certain programs, student-teach, or have an academically legitimate internship."

President Strassburger's assessment data suggests that if students feel "their concerns about how to live a meaningful life are taken seriously, they will respond."

Spot on, as the British say. But what are the lessons for Lutheran higher education?

First, these efforts suggest the importance of faculty taking their vocations seriously. On a micro-level, what if faculty, as they design courses, intentionally allow the texts, values, and outcomes of a liberal education to shape the development of their syllabi and daily course content? What if they mentor students and advise them to pursue a liberal education? What if they, in their personal reading and research, grow themselves as students of the liberal arts? On a macro-level, what if faculty committees (Development, Curriculum, Assessment, and Uffda, how the list goes on!) pursue a liberal arts agenda in their committee work and use those values as the standard against which they measure their work?

Second, a Lutheran institution, grounded in Holy Scripture and the church's symobls, guided by the Church's tradition, has an embarrassment of riches to share with students. If we want to help students in a serious endeavor to consider "how to live a meaningful life," then we certainly have no reason not to orient them to the gifts Christ has given his people.

Even if a majority of faculty do not agree on these values or concerns, a concerted effort by those who love the liberal arts can make a tremendous difference in the lives of individual students and can carve out a corner in any institution in which those values survive, and by God's grace, thrive.

Elitism...again

2010-03-01T07:45:00.003-06:00

An article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, "Saving the Life of the Mind," by Goldie Blumenstyk, once again raises the specter of the ugly e-word, elitism, an epithet that goes with "liberal education" like "swift-footed" goes with Achilles. Blumenstyk's article reports on how it is that certain institutions are trying to undercut the elitist epithet for "liberal education." The irony is, in the process, they are making liberal education even more elitist than before.

The argument goes something like this: liberal education has become the preserve of the few rich in the United States, and is represented at elite Top-50 or Top-100 liberal arts colleges. Meanwhile, other institutions that once had a strong liberal arts presence have, under perceive market pressures, etc., developed increasingly career-oriented curricula, where "liberal education" is represented by a weakening core of courses. The solution, according to this article, is to combine liberal education with career education. The trick is to redefine what liberal education is, and then say that what you have is liberal education. Consider this, for example:

liberal arts means not only a course of study featuring a rich mix of disciplines in the arts and sciences, but also an education that emphasizes skills such as complex problem solving and requirements that students learn to apply classroom curricula to real-world experiences

On the positive end of things, this is a frank realization of the vitality and centrality of liberal education to the higher education enterprise. As the article notes, students at career-oriented institutions like Hamline in St. Paul and LaGuardia Community College are getting some exposure to some elements of liberal education. And yet, it is difficult to understand in just what way this is not essentially a re-tread of the old approach that eroded liberal education in the first place.

This approach is problematic in other ways, too. Is a rhetorical composition class subsumed under a business program the same kind of rhetorical composition offered and exercised in a liberal education? The question is rhetorical. The answer is no. Such a course may have elements of its liberal self, but it is certainly not the same thing.

In the last analysis, in spite of such approaches, or perhaps even because of them, liberal education remains as elite as it ever was, the preserve of those 50 or 100 top liberal arts colleges in the country. This has been the approach of the Lutheran colleges in the confessional ambit, as well, as we have had ample opportunity to point out. But it certainly need not have been that way; nor must it persist.

Non posse stare sinceram theologiam

2010-02-20T11:35:00.004-06:00

Dear readers,

In my first posting to this blog, I would like to explicate a bold statement of Luther’s, both in terms of what it must have meant at his time and what it could possibly mean today: Ego persuasus sum, sine literarum peritia prorsus stare non posse sinceram theologiam [“I am convinced that without literary training, pure theology is not able to stand upright;” WA Br. 3.50].

Luther most likely has in mind here the study of what we today would call “the Classics.” (In sixteenth century Germany, “German literature” did not yet exist as a disciplinary subject any more than “English literature” did; there was nothing but Greek and Latin and possibly Hebrew) So “literary” here should be understood to refer to ancient texts like Aesop’s fables, Cicero’s philosophical and rhetorical writings, Terence’s comedies, Virgil’s Aeneid, and, of course, the Bible, among others. And by “training,” Luther meant the development of a set of intellectual skills that built upon the work begun in the trivium at a young age and that continued throughout the course of one’s education and life.

Ah, the trivium. These foundational elements of a traditional liberal education (careful, attentive reading; clear, sensible thinking; eloquent, persuasive speaking and writing) were seen as having practical applicability in the 16^th century (just as they had had for Ambrose and Augustine and Chrysostom in the 4^th) for a wide spectrum of jobs and professions that required verbal acuity. (For more on the three cornerstones of a liberal education, namely, grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the reader may wish to check out a web site that I have developed on the subject. Click here.)

Luther was not a reactionary. He was interested in educational reform and attacked the cathedral and monastic schools of his own day with his customary scatological vigor. (He referred to textbooks used in monastic schools as “asses’ dung.”) And he was no elitist, either. He wanted education to extend much more broadly to all elements of society, to include most notably girls. But in other ways his reformation of education was conservative, reflecting his reformation principles in general. He did not throw out ecclesiastical elements unless he felt they were entirely out of sync with the Gospel. He reformed them. Like fellow humanists, his instinct was not to go a little ways backward but to return all the way to the historical roots, ad fontes [“to the fountainheads”].The curriculum of the Lutheran gymnasium would not have struck Isidore of Seville or Martianus Capella or Varro as all that unfamiliar.

One could describe Luther’s approach to intellectual formation as “backing into the future.” Ordinarily, humans can guess at what the future might hold, but the only thing they have a fairly good shot at understanding is the historical past. So instead of facing the blank future and turning our back on the richly detailed past, as we are used to doing today (especially in America), the “premodern” pedagogical idea was to move into the future backwards, as it were, keeping one’s eyes fixed on what could actually be seen, known, and studied, namely, the past. Over the centuries, Lutherans have learned to worship as Lutherans by singing the ancient melodies of the church in the words of David, and Ambrose, and Luther, and Catherine Winkworth. Even so, when it comes to learning how to read and think and speak, the Lutheran mind has traditionally been trained by studying the language, thought, and art of Isaiah and Plato, Paul and Cicero, Virgil and Bach, and others who have historically shaped the Lutheran tradition. This isn’t an entirely reactionary ideal, because it is only by understanding fully one’s historical identity that it will be possible to bring the past alive for the future. As Goethe put it so memorably: "Was du ererbt hast von deinen Vätern, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen” [“What you have inherited from your fathers, make an effort to possess it for yourself.”]

The significance of Martin Luther’s enthusiastic and weighty support of the liberal arts often goes relatively unnoticed. His scholarly colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, aptly dubbed praeceptor Germaniae, certainly did much more of the actual work in helping to shape the curriculum of Lutheran schools and universities along humanistic lines than Luther did. All the same, imagine what would have happened if Luther’s support for the classical curriculum had been only luke warm! He made it clear often and unmistakably that he valued the ancient languages highly. He praised the works of Virgil and Cicero and Aesop in hyperbolic terms. And he let everyone know that he cherished the art of music next to theology itself. Without his personal and public advocacy for the liberal arts, it may well be that the anti-intellectual ideology of contemporaries like Carlstadt and the Anabaptists would have won out in the 1520s.

There are, of course, a number of other ingredients besides “literary training” which Luther considered crucial for theological formation, including the generous gifts of the Holy Spirit, prayer, meditation, and, most famously, the experience of wrestling with Satan’s attacks (tentatio or Anfechtung). None of these other constituent elements, however, lend themselves as readily to the conventional classroom instruction that makes up so much of the Lutheran theologian’s formal education as literary study, an important component of the bonae artes (cf. WA TR 3.312).

So, of all the arts one could study, why should literary studies be considered so essential for sincera theologia? The Lutheran reformers were deeply concerned to distinguish their approach to theology from that of contemporary Roman Catholics or “enthusiasts” who relied far less heavily on the written word of God. Grammar, rhetoric, logic, history, and the study of languages and literature were so important to Lutherans because of their distinctive emphasis on sola Scriptura. Historically Lutheran clergy and laity haven’t interpreted dreams or heeded an inner voice or listened to the siren songs of charismatic leaders in order to discern the will of God. No, they have read, interpreted, taught, preached, and sung the written message of the Scriptures. Without the ability to read God’s word accurately and sensitively what other source for inspiration and guidance from above could a Lutheran theologian have? Without the verbal skills to expound, declare, and apply the Word of God to contemporary situations and audiences, how could a Lutheran theologian effectively function?

But, someone might object, that was then and this is now. The world has changed radically since Luther’s day and never more so than in our own lifetime. Screens have replaced books. Numbers trump words. There is a real and growing reaction in American higher education against the traditional liberal arts. Students are gravitating in ever increasing numbers to majors like Nursing and Pharmacy, demanding ever more applied courses (e.g., “Spanish for Engineering”), and they are growing increasingly impatient with coursework that does not have an obvious connection with vocational preparation. It is somewhat gratifying to discover that such indifference to literary studies or even to the life of the mind is not at all new. At Luther’s time there was a common saying: Gelehrte sind verkehrte [“the learned are crazy”] and Luther himself was keenly aware of this opposition. In his 1524 address To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany, Luther bluntly described as “brutes and stupid beasts” those educational minimalists of his own day who questioned why it was necessary to teach “Latin Greek, and Hebrew and the other liberal arts” instead of just using “German for teaching the Bible and God’s word, which is enough for our salvation” [LW 45, 341 ff.]

Some might argue that Lutheran higher education is somewhat immune from the current educational trend here identified. Seminaries and schools of theology still do value the liberal arts and literary studies, don’t they? Possibly. But while it is not uncommon for Lutheran seminaries to recommend an undergraduate major in the Classics for undergraduates who are planning to study theology, how often is fundamental preparation and demonstrable aptitude in the liberal arts actually required? And no wonder, when so many second-career candidates, with an undergraduate degree in engineering or business, are admitted to seminaries with the sole proviso that they take a crash course in New Testament Greek, if that. And how seriously are the liberal arts really taken as part of the training of parochial school teachers, “directors of Christian education,” “staff ministers,” and others whose jobs will require them to deal on a daily basis with the Word of God?

These curricular suggestions sound awfully Euro-centric today. Christianity has spread to continents of which Luther wasn’t even aware. What about “literary training” in Chinese or Spanish, some might ask. Why not indeed? Suggesting the study of one set of curricula doesn’t necessarily have to be an attack on the other. Why not encourage real glossalalia? The study of Latin could be just the beginning. At the same time, realistically speaking, vita brevis est, ars longa. It is unlikely that any student could ever master more than just a couple of languages (to say nothing of bodies of literature) in a lifetime. And it is important to appreciate the serious particularity inherent in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. Curricular proposals can be very broad. Learning objectives can be as sweepingly ambitious as we want to make them. But life itself is quite particular. It was to a particular region of the world, at a particular point in history, and in the midst of a particular cultural milieu that God sent his only Son to be born. Everyone has to start somewhere. Why would Lutheran theologians not start by immersing themselves in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world in which Jesus lived and where the first apostles began their evangelical work?

This all will seem excessively “ivory tower” to some. What about all the practicing theologians today who spend little of their time in the study and must work in the bustling modern world? They manage schedules and budgets, handle difficult personalities, plan for the expansion of physical plants, etc. Maybe these untheological duties might be better delegated to others who are better trained in these areas and who are not theologians. But even so, the liberal arts don’t have to be regarded as entirely useless in this regard. Luther saw precisely this kind of education as a great “ornament, profit, glory, and benefit, both for the understanding of Holy Scriptures and the conduct of temporal government” For him, it wasn’t only about the studying per se, but also what could be done with the results of that study. A liberal education, it has been said, “desires to educate for wisdom and virtue, not power and vanity; finds tiresome the present age’s preoccupation with utility, speed, novelty, convenience, efficiency, and specialization; and refuses to justify education as a means to wealth, power, fame, or self-assertion” [see Richard M. Gamble, The Great Tradition: Classic Readings on What It Means to Be an Educated Human Being (Wilmington, 2007), xviii]. If Lutheran theology is a theology of the cross, it is hard to imagine any education more practically suited for the development of sensitive, persuasive, and wise exponents of it than the kind Luther prescribes.

Posted by Carl P.E. Springer

The Unbearable Burden of Tuition and a Radical Proposal

2010-02-16T10:17:00.004-06:00

As writers of comments on this blog have pointed out, and as one of the bloggers, Erik Ankerberg, has pointed out, the tuition drive in higher education has an ultimately corrosive impact on liberal education when it comes to what is offered, delivered, and gained. It's an understandable, and clever, business plan that students, parents, college administrations, and, therefore, also faculty, have: $$ in must = $$ out. Who can argue with it? The result is, as we've had occasion to point out, a constant wearing away at the core of liberal education, also in the Lutheran higher learning. What is to be done?

A radical proposal: create, or reform, a Lutheran college not just in its curriculum, but in its very governance, and back that reform up with a financial reform that would eliminate tuition. I love to return to Newman, and here a point he makes about tying liberal education to external goals bears repeating: the education that has specific vocational outcomes in mind (vocational as in "vocationalism") will never be liberal as in liberating, but always servile, as in enslaving. You can chew on that one for a while. But his logic is irrefutable, and evidenced in scads throughout Lutheran higher education today.

But in terms of tuition: the curriculum has been taken captive by pressures derived from the tuition drive. If that can be removed, the curriculum can be freed and can provide a truly liberal education, in the Newmanian sense.

This is, of course, predicated upon articulating a theologically faithful and intellectually responsible rationale for liberal education, instantiating it in curricular form, and then approaching influential laity, congregations, and pastors who can support the endeavor morally and financially--and financially to a point wherein tuition is taken out of the equation. Simply what this means is that the core endeavor of a college--its instruction--must be fully underwritten by drafts on endowed funds, or in other words, that every faculty position be an endowed chair.

Radical? Yes. Achievable? d.v. Utterly necessary? certissime!

More Indications from the Confessions: Lutheran Catholicity and Liberal Education

2010-02-16T08:39:00.006-06:00

In the ears of many contemporary Lutherans, the creedal phrase, "one, holy, Christian [or catholic] and apostolic church," has a ring that is very much here-and-now, organized around and from the viewpoint of the speaker who says "I believe." That is, when I speak the phrase I mean that right now I am part of a group of people (a church) that has a unity (one) in its confession of Christ (Christian) by whom it is made holy. On this account, the view of the Church's catholicity is decidedly synchronic: if I can make the leap out of the walls of my own congregation's building, the definition embraces the Chinese, African, German, Brazilian Christians, et al., who inhabit the world on this Sunday in the 21st century.

But the confessional language of AC 7 comes at what the church is, viewed from its catholicity, in another way. It begins with a diachronic articulation, or gloss, on what "one" and "catholic" mean. German: "Es wird auch gelehret, daß alle Zeit musse ein heilige christliche Kirche sein und bleiben [It is also taught that at all times a holy, Christian church must be and remain.]" Latin: "Item docent, quod una sancta ecclesia perpetuo mansura sit. [They also teach that one, holy church shall remain in perpetuity.]"

It's these phrases, alle Zeit and perpetuo, that are of interest, because they figure catholicity not as an eternity of extension, but as a continuity of extension. Alle Zeit means "at every point in time;" perpetuo means "without interruption," and in church Latin is frequently paired with aeterne, as in the phrase perpetuo et aeterne ~ "continuously and eternally." This emphasis in AC 7 even seems to correct some earlier "egotistical" articulations of catholicity, as in Luther's 1528 Bekenntnis, where he defines the catholicity of the church against the papacy by its extension beyond the papacy (WA 26.506), and even the Schwabach Articles that, pace the eds. of BSLK, do not emphasize Luther's synchronicity, but come at catholicity diachronically, but not as continuity, but eternity. AC 7 thus conceives of the catholicity of the church as consisting in a basic diachronic continuity, recognizable at every point, even the here-and-now, as AC 7 goes on to demonstrate, on the basis of its kerygma (bei welchen das Evangelium rein gepredigt; in qua evangelium pure docetur ~ "amongst whom/in which the Gospel is purely preached/taught") and right administration of the sacraments (die heiligen Sakrament lauts des Evangelii gereicht werden; et recte administrantur sacramenta ~ "the holy Sacraments are administered in accord with the Gospel/rightly").

So what's the point? The point is that the Church of the Augsburg Confession, wherever it finds itself in space and time, whether in the U.S. today or in Norway 250 years ago, recognizes itself as part of a diachronic continuity so that it makes its confession together with the church of all ages and places. It is the height of egotism to claim contemporary novelty as an embrace of the confession of this church. It is thus the height of arrogance and egotism to do theology in a vacuum that does not recognize the uninterrupted continuity of the church. As Paul puts it, "We have not what we have also received." [1 Cor. 4.7] The Church of the Augsburg Confession thus operates with an intellectual and spiritual humility, though not uncritical, in the face of the dominical promise of the catholic continuity of the church.

The Reformers also modeled this attitude toward the intellectual and spiritual tradition of the church in their approach to higher education. Ad fontes, the famous Renaissance cry embraced also in Wittenberg, was not a haughty boast to the effect that we have finally got it right. In fact, this was precisely the criticism the Wittenberg Reformers leveled against late Medieval scholasticism. Rather, it was a humble recognition that other people at other times and places woven into the great fabric that we call humanity had thought important thoughts, stated important statements, created beautiful, just, true, and noble creations worth studying and emulating. In a very real sense, then, the education envisioned in the Reformation slogan of renascentes Musae is an embodiment, in another realm, of the attitude of the Church of the Augsburg Confession toward itself that recognized itself as something located in a specific space and time within a larger theological and spiritual framework: it was decidedly biblical, Augustinian, and Western, and this had come down to Wittenberg in 1530 as an uninterrupted continuity. It was, in a very real sense, a creature of its historical genetic material. So, too, the intellectual framework: it was part and parcel of the great web of the West, beginning with the Greeks and continuing with the Romans, embraced by Augustine, obfuscated, but not snuffed out completely, in the Middle Ages (so the thinking went), and reprised in the Northern Renaissance through a living appropriation.

The ancients had called it an ἐγκύκλιος παιδεῖα (enkúklios paideîa) a "universal education," not by way of asserting a sort of superiority over the past, but by way of laying hold of "the best ever written and thought," by now, of course, regarded as a naïve and quaint notion. But in its quaint naïveté, it recognizes a truth about itself that revels in the fact that in the here-and-now it has a share in the diachronic continuity of something much larger than itself, a formed and informing intellectual tradition that is, by the certain logic of history, inescapable.

Philipp Melanchthon, Confessor

2010-02-16T07:53:00.003-06:00

Today, 16 February, the birthday in 1497 of Philipp Schwarzerd, is also observed in the Lutheran Church as the Commemoration of Philipp Melanchthon, Confessor. We at renascentes Musae are quick to add that his epithets include the following: humanist, educational reformer, Graecist extraordinaire, and praeceptor Germaniae. Read the devotion for the Commemoration of Melanchthon from Memorial Moments.

Vocation, Vocationalism, and Liberal Education Lutheranly Conceived

2010-02-15T14:04:00.010-06:00

One facet of American modernity that stands in sharp contrast to Lutheran theology is the reduction of vocation (vocatio, Beruf) to vocationalism. While it is not clear that all use of modern terminology built on the "vocat-" stem bears intentional animus toward the more fulsome, Lutheran theological sense of the term, it is the case that what moderns mean by one's "vocation" differs dramatically from what Lutherans mean by one's vocation. Untangling the mess, that is, extricating vocation from vocationalism, is thus a key element in building the theological and intellectual substructure of confessional Lutheran liberal education.

Again, the confessional documents come quickly to our aid in this endeavor. The human being, who is constituted by being addressed by God in His Word--both in His Law and in His Gospel--, is subject, first and foremost and universally, to God's directive, "You shall have no other gods before Me," meaning: "We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things." All else, all other human action, must, at least paradigmatically, flow from obedience to the First Commandment. Thus, for example, Commandment Four means that "we should fear and love God so that we do not despise or anger our parents and other authorities, but honor them, serve and obey them, love and cherish them." The human being addressed by God in His Word is also socially located, and that social location does not remove God's address to him. Rather, because he stands under God's universal address in the First Commandment, within his social location, his "station in life," his action within that realm flows from his first being addressed by the God who is to be feared, loved, and trusted above all things. In other words, no matter in what situation the Christian finds himself, he remains as he has always been: addressed by God, "called" by God. His vocation is therefore first and foremost to act in the way that a creature addressed by God is to act, by keeping the Ten Commandments. Note that there is no prescription for a certain career-path, no age-limit top or bottom, no boundary set but that set down by the fact of one's calling, one's being addressed by God.

Second, it is specifically under the Gospel that the God who presents Himself in the First Commandment demonstrates Himself to be worthy of the fear, love, and trust He demands. Put differently, Christ in His cross reveals the merciful heart of His Father. 1 Corinthians 2.16: "'Who has known the mind of God to take counsel with Him?' We have His mind--Christ." This self-disclosure of God the Father's heart in the cross of Christ evokes, calls forth, the confession that "God has made me and all creatures; He has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, etc." The cross of Christ--that element of Pauline kerygma that the saint gleefully exclaims he had determined to know nothing other than among his hearers--becomes the flash-point, the locus of revelation, through which and in which the gracious will of God the Father is made known and through which and in which the Christian is able to confess, "God has made me and all creatures, etc." The Christian ethical entailment of this is simply a repeat of the chorus in the Ten Commandments. "We should fear and love God so that we don't..., but do...." ~ "For all this it is my duty to thank and praise, serve and obey Him." Again, no specified career path, no age limit. The Christian's vocation is determined by his being addressed by God, first in the Law and then in the Gospel.

The creedal explanation, however, "thank and praise, serve and obey," not only recalls the obligation laid upon me as a creature addressed by God and expressed in the Ten Commandments, but also reflects back to those gifts of God given to me under the First Article of the Creed. My thanks and praise, my service and obedience, to God, are carried out through the profitable use, the exercise, and the development of His gifts attached to me as addressed and confessing subject. This is how Luther puts it in the Explanation of the First Article in the Large Catechism, §19, 23:

Now, all that we have, and whatever else is in heaven and upon the earth, is daily given, preserved, and kept for us by God. Therefore, it is clearly suggested and concluded that it is our duty to love, praise, and thank Him for these things without ceasing [1 Thess. 5.17–18]. In short, we should serve Him with all these things, as He demands and has taught in the Ten Commandments.... In this way the heart would be warmed and kindled to be thankful, and to use all such good things to honor and praise God. [ed. Paul T. McCain, et al., Concordia: The Lutheran Confessions, 2nd ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2006), pp. 400–401; bold print added]

Lutheran higher education thus falls (a) under the First Article of the Creed; and (b) within the realm of Christian vocation, not [Christian] vocationalism, and is that intellectual and social space wherein the gift of the reason is, in a special and focused way, profitably used, exercised, and developed. As such, confessional Lutheran higher education seeks to use tools uniquely adapted to the development of the mind to ends that honor and praise God, above all to aid the recipients of such an education to use their reason faithfully to confess the God of the Creed. In precisely this service, the Wittenberg Reformers enlisted the "human arts," the arts that are at the center of being a human being endowed with reason, the "liberal arts," and the best of the human arts that had come down through the Western tradition. This was undertaken without regard for one's station in life--undertaken without a sense of vocationalism, but in the pursuit of vocation, lutheranly understood. Even more specifically, it was undertaken in pursuit of the godly and profitable use, exercise, and development of that uniquely human quality and good, the reason.

Faith & Reason: Something Worth Thinking about...

2010-02-15T13:29:00.003-06:00

Jim Peters, a good friend, fine Christian thinker, author of The Logic of the Heart, Professor of Philosophy at The University of the South and chair of the Department of Philosophy, has the following to say about the natty matter of faith and reason. Listen to it on Issues, Etc. Click here for the audio.

Productivity

2010-02-10T18:04:00.003-06:00

I've become a fan of Dean Dad's musings on higher education in his blog at insidehighered.com. Here is link to a recent posting about two ways to consider "productivity" in higher education:

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions_of_a_community_college_dean/charging_for_quality

A quote from the posting:

"From the standpoint of an individual instructor, the controllable variable (at least to some degree) is the quality of instruction. That's also what you care the most about, what you pride yourself on, and at a really basic level, why you're there.

From the standpoint of trying to make payroll, though, the opposite is true. A thrilled student doesn't pay any more than does a barely-contented student. (There's presumably a minimal level at which attrition becomes an issue, but I'm assuming at least basic competence.) Students pay by the credit, the course, or the year; they don't pay by the breakthrough. The 'extras' that a great class can generate don't show up in the budget. Worse, some students actually prefer classes that don't ask very much of them. (If you doubt the truth of this, spend a day at in-person registration, just listening.) The mutual non-aggression pact between an instructor who doesn't ask very much and students who'd rather not be bothered is one of the open secrets of American higher ed, and it fits short-term institutional needs disturbingly well. There's a reason that Rocks for Jocks and Physics for Poets still exist."

While Dean Dad is certainly speaking about the interplay of these forces in a secular environment, the pressures he describes impact contemporary manifestations of Lutheran higher education. Of course, our ethos should inspire us to provide students with a rigorous synthesis of the best that our Lutheran faith and the Western tradition has to offer. But that's the supply side. I think one of the great challenges Lutheran higher education faces today is working with various constituencies, the demand side: students, obviously. Their families, of course. But, we also know we must never tire of taking every available opportunity to educate the synodical officials, the pastors, the lay leadership, in short the good people of various Lutheran stripes that this kind of instruction enriches young people's lives and prepares them to live faithfully here, in time, and hereafter, in eternity. So, I'll ask our sage readers: How can we best work to influence and educate our fellow Lutherans about the benefits of this kind of education?

Greek Just for Reading the NT? A Wittenberg Answer

2010-02-10T16:33:00.002-06:00

An unequivocal "No!" from Melanchthon:

It was not apart from an extraordinary divine plan that it came about that the teaching of the Gospel was first and most powerfully committed to writing in the language of this people [the Greeks] and thus entrusted to posterity, even if it was to be spread throughout the whole world. For since this language [Greek] already encompassed the teaching of character, of discipline and culture, that is, of the divine law, since it was already the mistress of the best arts and of those arts most necessary to cultured life, a ταμεῖον [tameîon/storage room] of deeds wrought and of the history of the world, God [because He chose to commit the Gospel to men in Greek] willed also that treasure [outlined above] to be bestowed upon the human race through the service of this very language, in order to demonstrate that it was this gift of His kindness that, amongst His other kind gifts, ought especially to be sought out and embraced.

Non absque singulari consilio divino factum est, quod evangelii doctrina, etsi per totum orbem spargi debuit, tamen huius gentis lingua primum ac potissimum descripta atque ita ad posteros transmissa est. Cum enim haec lingua iam ante doctrinam morum, disciplinae et humanitatis, hoc est legis divinae, contineret, cum optimarum artium vitaeque humanae summe necessariarum magistra esset, cum rerum gestarum et historiae mundi ταμεῖον, voluit Deus et hunch thesaurum per eiusdem linguae ministerium humano genere impertiri, ut ostenderet inter cetera beneficia sua hoc beneficium vel praecipue expetendum atque amplectendum esse.

[Philippus Melanchthon, Oratio de studiis linguae Graecae a Vito Winshemio dicta, pp. 23–38 in Karl Hartfelder, Philippus Melanchthon. Declamationes, 2. Heft (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1894), pp. 29–30.]

Classics (Now) and Humanism (Then)

2010-02-08T21:34:00.003-06:00

The student of the Wittenberg Reformation quickly realizes that today's academic field of classics is but a shadow of its former self. Put more elegantly than I could, Joshua Hayes, a Renascentes Musae reader, has this observation to make:

The spirit of humanism no longer lives in Classics. The two are not mutually exclusive by an means, but they are distinct. Classics is more of a modern, "scientific" endeavor--an observation of things classical. Latin (and Greek), therefore, is more of a tool of the trade. It is akin to the scientist's microscope. It gives him insight to another world, but it is not a goal in itself. Thus most classicists are perfectly content to be able merely to read Latin, but they read (usually by translating into a quasi English-Latin hybrid) just to get the info. Style and beauty of expression are seldom noticed or appreciated. I do not say never, but seldom and only secondarily.
The spirit of humanism, on the other hand, is not primarily observation, but participation in things classical. This, I believe, is the distinguishing factor. Humanists don't just observe, they want to participate in Latin (and Greek). They don't just want to translate Latin to cull information; they want to read Latin, appreciate its beauty, speak it, live it. That sort of activity is the goal of humanism: improving the self, participating in studia humanitatis.

Sic. Which means that Greek and Latin aren't even at home in their own living room any longer. The Wittenberg approach to classical antiquity is not dissection, but living appropriation.

Introductions

2010-02-07T13:30:00.003-06:00

Over the weekend, as you'll note in the right-hand sidebar, we have added 2 new bloggers to Renascentes Musae, both experts on Lutheran higher education: Erik Ankerberg and Carl P.E. Springer.

Ankerberg is Associate Professor of English at Wisconsin Lutheran College. He holds the Ph.D. in English from Marquette University. Springer, Professor of Classics at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, holds the Ph.D. in classics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Between the three of us, we have decades of experience in higher education, both as students and as faculty, a great many of those years spent in Lutheran higher education: Northwestern College (Springer), Concordia Ann Arbor, Concordia River Forest, and Wisconsin Lutheran College (Ankerberg), and St. Olaf College, Bethany Lutheran Theological Seminary, and Bethany Lutheran College (Bruss). In addition, we share an abiding zeal for the Lutheran intellectual tradition, literae humaniores, "the languages," and confessional Lutheran theology. Over time, I have no doubt you will learn more about each of them from the links off this blog to their personal profiles.

As you can see from what's above and what has been posted elsewhere on this blog, Renascentes Musae is something of an "ecumenical" endeavor: it is a blog for (and now of) Christians of the Unaltered Augsburg Confession regardless of their synodical affiliation. We support every embrace of the Wittenberg ideal no matter where it may be found. Indeed, two of us are Missourians, another a Wisconsinite. Two of us were raised in Missouri (not the same 2 as are in Missouri today), one by a long-standing Missouri Synod family, the other in a family that came to Missouri from the ALC; the third of us was raised a Protéstant, if my recall serves me correctly. All three of us have been educated in synodical institutions of higher education: one of us in the ELS and erstwhile ALC, one in the LCMS, the third in WELS. Two of us are laity; one is ordained. Two of us have the Ph.D. from secular land-grant institutions, one from a Jesuit institution. Perhaps these facts bear witness to the strength and persuasiveness of the Lutheran intellectual and theological tradition: it has the power, as a shared inheritance, to make possible this conversation across synodical lines and institutional affiliations.

In any case, I have every confidence that the addition of these two writers will in every way enhance the content of what is written and increase the blog's appeal to established readers--and to readers as yet unidentified--as Renascentes Musae continues to offer historically, theologically, and intellectually well-grounded ideas for reprising the Wittenberg ideal in Lutheran higher education in North America in the 3rd millennium. Gott hilf uns allen!

The Gospel's Not for Sharing, Blogs Are

2010-02-05T15:36:00.003-06:00

The Gospel's for proclaiming. But enough silliness.

The point of this post? To invite you, the reader, if you think what Renascentes musae, the blog, is doing is worthwhile, to send a link to this blog (http://renascentesmusae.blogspot.com/) to your favorite armchair theologians, concerned Lutheran laity, and other potentially interested parties. No treasure stored up for you in heaven, I'm sorry to say, but I hope it will be worth your while anyway.

AC 18 and Lutheran Higher Learning

2010-02-05T14:21:00.004-06:00

Two posts ago I promised to return to AC 18 and what it might have to say regarding Lutheran higher learning. In the last post, I briefly laid out some fundamental differences between the way in which various local reform movements and Humanism interacted. I return now to my promise, building on the preceding post. AC 18:

On the free will they teach that the human will has some freedom toward effecting civil righteousness and choosing matters that are subject to reason. But it does not have the power, without the Holy Spirit, to effect God's righteousness, that is [seu] spiritual righteousness, since "the natural man does not perceive the things that belong to the Spirit of God." [1 Cor. 2.4] This, rather, comes about in hearts when the Holy Spirit is received through the Word. Augustine says as much in so many words (Hypognosticon, Book 3): "We confess that all men have a free choice (albeit that possesses the judgment of reason), not that it is thereby suited to begin or, certainly, complete in respect of those things that have to do with God, but only in respect of those works of the present life, both good and evil...."

The Wittenberg settlement between Christian teaching and Humanism (last post) honors this Scriptural assignation of powers to the free will. Humanism is one of those good works spoken of and belongs to left-hand realm of God, where the free will does have a choice. (Get ready for the next sentence; sorry it's a Teutonic doozy.) And just as choices in congregational life such as whether to build a new nave or not belong to the left-hand realm but impact for better or for worse the right-hand realm, where God rules through His Word and Sacrament, so too does the choice under the purview of human judgment and within the realm of the free will, the choice of Humanistic vs. scholastic learning, or, in short, the choice of the kind of learning that the Church wishes to support and pursue, have an impact for better or for worse on the right-hand realm, where the human task is rightly to understand, speak, confess, and proclaim God's Word. In Lutheran theology, that choice remains right where it belongs: in the realm of the left. That is, it does not, as with Zwingli and Erasmus, drive the theological agenda. However, it is not a value-less choice, but one undertaken only in the face of what can and does properly support the understanding and teaching of the Gospel--not just for clergy-to-be, but for all Christians.

Faced with precisely that choice, and informed by their theological agenda, the Wittenberg Reformers adopted Humanism, literae humaniores, the classics, along with the languages, as that vehicle that surpassed every other in aiding a solid understanding of (a) the realm of the left; and (b) the realm of the right. But it was a choice, consciously undertaken. It didn't fall on their laps, and in fact they went to great lengths over the course of Luther's and Melanchthon's lifetimes not only to reform the university in accord with it, but to defend it from the pretenders of obscurantism (Müntzer and those of his ilk) and the scholasticism which remained a powerful influence in late Medieval life.

Of Humanism[s] and Reformation[s]

2010-02-05T11:58:00.005-06:00

Alister McGrath's Christianity's Dangerous Idea is worth looking at for a number of reasons. Without quibbling about some details where he has certainly gotten Luther wrong, I point out that a major benefit of this volume is to demonstrate with some degree of clarity that the social, theological, economic, and intellectual factors that served as drivers for reform movements throughout Northern Europe in the early and middle 16th century resulted in fundamentally different Reformations. True it is that Reformation and Humanism go hand-in-hand. But how the two interacted in each reform movement (Zürich, Wittenberg, Geneva/Genff, Erasmian neo-Catholicism, etc.) was fundamentally different.

McGrath doesn't quite put it this way, but what emerges from his broad-stroke depiction of the various reformational movements is that Wittenberg was unique in placing the theological reform of the Church ahead of the humanistic reform of manners. To be sure, Wittenberg co-opted Humanism, just as Luther was, at least early on, co-opted by the Humanists (Erasmus cheered from the sidelines until his disastrous defense of a free will overagainst God in his Diatribe, and Luther's subsequent, wholesale, and irrefutable articulation of biblical teaching on the freedom of the will, or lack thereof, in his 1526 De servo arbitrio).

The De servo/libero arbitrio incident itself demonstrates the difference between humanistic reform that also concerned itself with theology, on the one hand, and theological reform that used the tools of Humanism, on the other. For Erasmus, the center of the issue in the debate over the will was human manners: how, he reasoned, if humans have no free will, can we Northern Europeans emerge from the pigsty that is our life? For Erasmus, Scripture is subsumed under humanistic tenets.

For Luther, on the other hand, the question in front of him had nothing to do with human manners, which before God (coram deo) were, even at their best, filthy rags, even if before men (coram hominibus) some degree of righteousness could be ascribed to them. But here's the key: in the argument put forth by Luther in De servo arbitrio, he uses the tools of Humanism (rejection and refutation of scholastic argumentation, for example; close examination of the primary text, Scripture, even, albeit citing largely the Vulgate, with reference to the thought underlying the Latin expression based upon original Hebrew and Greek; use of typical humanistic tropes, such as the author's professed lack of eloquence [on which see the many Wittenberg declamationes, Ciceronian and learned in the highest degree, but accompanied by the disavowal of any real skill on the declaimer's part]), but Scripture is the driver of the argument.

This distinction between Wittenberg thinking and the thinking of other reformational movements is fundamental. The driver of Huldrych Zwingli's Zürich Reformation was humanistic: humanism shaped his critique of contemporary life, the way he read Scripture, and the ends to which he engaged in churchly reform, which was, in the end, a reform of manners in whose pursuit theology was enlisted.

Here again the genius of the Lutheran Reformation shines through: even with the darling of the Renaissance and Christian Humanism, Philippus Melanchthon, quite literally on campus at Wittenberg, Humanism was kept safely where it belongs: in the left-hand realm of God. To be sure, Humanism did aid in the pursuit of the theological aims and goals of the Wittenberg Reformation, but it did not define them. Much as the two realms of God, the left and right, resist any sort of finalizing separation of one from the other on this side of the eschaton (in my role as Hausvater in our home, I participate simultaneously in both realms, just as I am, paradoxically, also saint and sinner at one and the same time), so also was there an interpenetration in Wittenberg of Humanism and Christian theology. But there was never any doubt which was Queen.

Of Economics & Higher Education

2010-02-02T06:44:00.005-06:00

What is happening in higher education today—the collapse of the job market for Ph.D.s, salary freezes and cuts, firings, and whole-sale re-evaluation of institutional costs—is not something that prognosticators could not have foreseen many years ago. In the flush years of the go-go 90s and into the new millennium, colleges and universities expanded offerings, majors, faculties, facilities, programs curricular, non-curricular, and extra-curricular, and administrations as if, well, there were no tomorrow. Today we live in “no tomorrow.” This hasn’t impacted only the little leaguers, but even the big leaguers—even the Ivy League. This from David J. Skorton at Cornell, as quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The current economic downturn should also be a sound opportunity to make bold changes to sharpen our focus and enhance our quality and impact—changes that would be much more difficult to make in more prosperous times... We are unlikely to control the cost of higher education, or improve overall quality, if we simply add new programs on top of what we already offer.”

There’s nothing like a good economic shock to bring us to our senses, and perhaps instead of lamenting what we’re losing, we can focus on what we ought to keep: a lean, mean, and clean liberal arts curriculum that prepares not for a job, but for a life or, as we Lutherans might put it, for one’s vocation. A liberal arts curriculum, which is not only the best education for the propagation of confessional Lutheranism, is also the cheapest, directest way to accomplish it.

Because it is not a fad, it is not constantly shifting (and thereby costing money). Because it is concerned with a way of thinking based upon time-tested “greats,” it doesn’t require a massive library—just a few good books. Because it is not professional preparation, it doesn’t compete for faculty with industry and commerce—it just needs a few good, faithful, thoughtful faculty concerned above all not with the number of notches in their scholarly belts, but with students, what they learn, and how they develop.

Lean, mean, and clean not only makes curricular sense, it makes economic sense. Rightly endowed, in fact, lean, mean, and clean, absent non-essential frills that are frankly a distraction from liberal learning, is self-perpetuating. Like a good liberal arts education that can’t be taken away from anyone, a lean, mean, and clean liberal arts institution is the antidote to deleterious economic impacts on Lutheran higher education.

AC 16 and Lutheran Higher Learning

2010-02-01T14:46:00.004-06:00

The Lutheran Confessions do not have a great deal to say directly about higher education; rightly so, since it's something squarely in the category of adiaphora or Mitteldinge, to use the Confessions' language; and higher learning is nothing on which one can stake his salvation. But this doesn't mean that it's impossible to extrapolate some sort of guidance from the Confessions about higher education and to locate it within the horizons of the Confessions.

Key here, then, are two articles in the Augsburg Confession, 16 "On Civic Matters," and 18 "On the Free Will." [I shall return to the latter in another post.] In the first, Melanchthon discusses the Christian's freedom in respect of converse in society:

Concerning civic matters, they [the teachers of the Augsburg Confession/"our churches"] teach that legitimate civic orders [legitimae ordinationes civiles] are good works of God [bona opera Dei], [and] that it is permissible for Christians to function in magistracies, to carry out judgments, to judge matters on the basis of imperial and other applicable laws, to determine punishments on the basis of right, to go to war on the basis of right, to serve in the military, to make legal contracts, to hold property, to swear before magistrates when they require it, to take a wife, to be married.... They also condemn those who do not locate evangelical perfection in the fear of God and faith, but in the desertion of civic offices.

This pronouncement of the confessors at Augsburg stands in stark contrast with that of Müntzer, Karlstadt, and other radical reformers, and is not only a positive confession but also an intentional self-distancing from the extreme measures of Müntzer, Karlstadt, et al., who radicalized the Wittenberg Reformation by overthrowing social structures. This radicalization resulted both in the Peasants' War and, closer to home, in the late 1520s in Wittenberg, in an obscurantism advocated by the university students that rejected not only scholasticism (as did the Wittenberg Reformers) but also the liberal arts. Put another way, the university as a social structure [Uni-Wittenberg belonged to the Elector!] was threatened by the radicalization of the Reformation. AC rejects this radicalization, instead insisting that such social structures are, in fact, "good works of God [bona opera Dei]."

Where Do We Go from Here?

2010-01-22T14:58:00.003-06:00

A reader of the last post, "Why (1) Will Never Work and Why (2) Might," wisely asks, "So now what? Where do we go from here?"

To get from here to there (or hence thither) the following steps are required: (1) assemble a team of like-minded scholars/teachers and like-minded and interested but non-academic Lutheran laymen of great influence; (2) design a curriculum, figure out initial staffing and physical plant needs, as well as costs to perpetuate the program; (3) raise money (at least enough to support at least 50% of the salaries and benefits the necessary initial faculty + anticipated library needs); (4) take hat in hand and approach the existing institutions with an offer to fund, staff, and run the program; (5) ensure accreditation through the AALE or TRACS for the program.

There's a lovely story about a couple, shabbily dressed, who approached the then president of Harvard University with an offer to make a donation. The president, sizing them up on the basis of their shabby appearance, turned down their offer as presumably too piddling. So instead of donating to Harvard, the Stanfords founded a brand-new institution. Apocryphal though the story may be, it's well known in educational circles today, and nary a president turns down even the smallest offer of support.