Recent studies suggest that memory is not like a computer databank just waiting to be tapped when the proper button is pressed. It is rather more an artful and sometimes deceptive composition triggered as much by current wishes, experiences, and other stimuli as by exact recollection of the past. So I expect that attempting an autobiographical statement, especially a theological one, could be a misleading exercise—perhaps a bit of a fabrication of what might have been, more an apologia pro vita mea, than an exact account of “what actually happened.” Like all autobiographies, this one should be read cum grano salis. I am indeed the most reliable source for what is to be said here, but I do confess to a certain bias!
I was raised in a country parsonage just north of Starbuck, Minnesota. My father served there for most of his pastorate and my grandfather before him. It was what the old-timers in Norwegian Lutheranism would call staunch “Old Synod” territory. For those uninitiated in such historical esoterics, the “Old Synod” was descended more directly from the Norwegian State Church, was generally the least pietistic of the Norwegian synods, and tended to be more wedded to the liturgical practices of “the old country” and most inclined toward orthodoxy in its spirit and ethos. No “gospel songs,” just solid chorales, if you please! This was the theological air I breathed as I grew up. Determinative also for my theology was the fact that the Old Synod was solidly “first form” in its understanding of election and predestination. That is, election takes place solely by divine decision and prerogative without any admixture of human willing or decision. The more pietistically inclined tended to be “second form,” i.e., God foreknows those who will come to faith by the workings of his grace and elects on that basis. Such attempts to “have your cake and eat it too” were to be avoided at all costs. I came by my later interest in and passion for Luther’s Bondage of the Will honestly.
Indhered, the country church where I was baptized and nurtured in the faith, with its lovely spire presiding over the surrounding countryside, was a cultural center as well as a place of worship. It actually had its own orchestra and choir, performed the Messiah every year, and so on. This is important for me not only because it indicates that culture was vital to the faith I learned, but also because in my later years I have come more and more to realize that my Christology and view of the atonement probably owe as much to the hearing of Handel’s Messiah—the actual performance—as any other single source. For weeks and months before the performances—in which eventually I also participated and sometimes soloed—the parsonage rang with practices and rehearsals. I am sure that it helped to shape that which people today would like to call my “spirituality.”
The catechetical instruction we received was, however, the most vital shaping factor in my theological beginnings. The material was the Catechism, the Explanation to the Catechism (not Pontoppidan’s—that was second form!), Bible history, and hymns. The method was memorization and recitation. We began in Sunday and released-time school memorizing the Catechism and reading Bible stories. When we got to the end we just started over. Later we progressed to hymns, Bible history, and the Explanation to the Catechism, a series of more dogmatic questions together with biblical passages to “prove” the answers. Again, when we came to the end we just started over until the whole was sufficiently in hand to permit confirmation. It was an important foundation on which to build. To this day when systematic questions arise, something of an answer with a series of biblical passages will often come to mind “out of the blue.” They come from my beginnings. Say what you want about the perils of “proof-texting”; it is certainly preferable to having no text in mind at all! In some respects at least, memory may be a bank after all!
Yet, I suppose I was never quite satisfied with the tradition. I was something of a skeptic even in Sunday School. I had a hard time believing that ax-heads could float. I was uneasy with the pious pronouncement that “there are just some things we have to take on faith!” Looking back, I think what bothered me—and what has stayed with me all my life—was not the dogmatic tradition itself, but rather that too often an insufficient case was being made for a good thing. Maybe it was that I was grasped by the gospel content but was not convinced by the scholastic method and trappings. The exhortation just to take some things on faith tended to reduce faith to the acceptance of propositions—sometimes questionable ones, at that. At any rate, a search for a better case has always stayed with me.
I can’t complete this hasty sketch of my beginnings without some mention of an event I don’t remember at all but which was probably quite important. My mother was killed in an auto/train accident when I was six months old. So I never really knew her. But I suspect somehow her absence left its mark even though I was lovingly cared for, first by an aunt and then by my stepmother. But I have always felt a certain independence, not of rebelliousness (which I thought childish), but rather perhaps a skepticism, a reluctance to rely on or trust others completely, whether they be teachers or even friends. If a solution was to be found, I had to find it for myself. If it happened to agree with “the book” or with the teacher, well and good. If not, too bad! Then the search would have to continue. But a position had to be tested. The “reason” had to be found and understood. I never looked particularly for something “new.” The “pull” of the ancient catechetical tradition was too strong for that. Contemporary clichés I found usually to be as vacuous as many of the ancient ones were unsupported. In the end, I was generally more interested in discovering the compelling rationale behind the ancient traditions than in multiplying contemporary confusions. The idea that the ancient traditions could or should be made “relevant” by a little modern camouflage has always seemed to me presumptuous if not slightly ridiculous. Later I have come to believe that the idea the gospel should or could be made “relevant” to old beings is one of contemporary theology’s greatest miscalculations. It is about as relevant as buttermilk in a bar or marriage in a brothel. “The love of God does not discover but creates its object.” So I learned later from Luther in the last of the theological theses in the Heidelberg disputation. It rang a bell. Either the tradition has something to say out of itself or it is empty. Cosmetics won’t help when darkness falls.
The “foolish” years of my life in grade and high school were spent pretty much in normal fashion trying to find out who I was. Not, however, by self-scrutiny but by grappling with the material put before me in school. I had no intention of becoming a pastor or a theologian. But then, I recall at this stage no particular intentions at all. I went to school and enjoyed it, particularly the mental competition involved. Poetry became one of my greater joys—inspired largely by my father, who could recite reams of it from memory. I also read many of the novels I found in my father’s library—classics: Dickens, Hugo, Hawthorne, and so on. Because the World War II draft was still in effect I began college (Luther College) immediately following high school graduation. I signed up for the army after the fall semester and was eventually assigned to the Army Medical Corps. That was significant for my future, at least to the extent that I made up my mind I didn’t want to be a medical doctor or have anything to do directly with hospitals!
Upon returning to college I decided to pursue a career in the sciences—eventually landing in organic chemistry. I was attracted to the physical sciences, I suppose, because they appeared to me to be rigorous, solid, and logical. The study came rather easily for me and I enjoyed the intellectual challenge. So I majored in chemistry and minored in mathematics and German. However, I always had in the back of my mind that I was more interested in teaching than in research. So I took some courses toward an education minor which, however, I soon abandoned in despair. I fell asleep in class too often. There is something of an irony in the fact that classes in education were the least educational of all, I thought. On the other hand, I admired the calm, judicious, thoughtful, and careful confidence of my professors in the sciences. They were, I suppose one would say today, my “role models” at the time. At the same time, I was less moved by the more strident opinions of other professors—especially some of those being presented in the required courses in religion. Those were the days of considerable strife and defensiveness in the church over against the threat of biblical criticism, liberalism, and other pernicious twentieth-century evils. The “pre-sem” students were primed in more special sessions to fight these battles. But safe in the havens of more “exact” sciences, I suppose I tolerated what the religion professors said but remained rather aloof to the fray. But it would be false to say I was a despiser. The ancient catechetical tradition was too strong for that. Nevertheless, I was still quite convinced that I didn’t want to be a pastor or a theologian.
So I went on to graduate school in organic chemistry at the University of Wisconsin. There, to make a long story short, I began more seriously to question what I wanted really to do or, to put it more theologically, what I was called to do. Matters came to a head one fine fall day when I was standing at the window in the chemistry lab looking down at students hurrying here and there. Suddenly the question came to me: “What am I doing here?” At the time, organic chemists around the country were engaged in something of a race to see who could be the first to synthesize cholesterol. Up to that time it had been available only by extraction—largely from beef liver, as I recall. So I spent hours in the lab working on some little link in the chain. When I assessed what I was up to I came to the painful realization that I didn’t ultimately care whether we succeeded in synthesizing cholesterol or not. Given the subsequent checkered effect of the steroid family on the human enterprise, it was perhaps a divine premonition! In any case, my lack of genuine passion for the outcome of what I was doing led me to conclude it was only honest to quit. The intellectual challenge of the scientific enterprise was stimulating, but I was not convinced it was my calling.
And so eventually I started anew at Luther Seminary. How that came about I cannot exactly recall—strange as that may seem. There was no overwhelming experience, no bolt from above. There were influences, I am sure, but it is difficult to sort them out. There was a preacher in Madison who was quite moving. I don’t even recall his name. There was the Lutheran Students Association, and the realization that I was more concerned about that which touches the spirit than just the body. But I suspect that through it all at bottom there was the cantus firmus of the ancient catechetical tradition asserting its silent but insistent witness. My older brother was at the seminary at the time, as were some of my old college roommates and friends. While visiting them as I did now and then, I chanced to pass the old patriarch Thaddeus Franke Gullixson, president of the seminary. I said hello in passing, and he responded in kind. Then slowly he stopped and turned and said to me in that magisterial voice of his with its slight quaver, “Were you looking for me?” If there has been anything like a call from God in my life, that was probably as close as you can get. I stammered something like, “Yes, I guess I am.” He invited me into his office and the issue of what I was to do was decided—especially when he discovered that I had already done my time in the armed services. He was leery of students who used the seminary as means to dodge the draft!
The seminary was a new challenge for me. I soon realized I didn’t know the vocabulary. To someone who came from the sciences, it was heavily philosophical. There was talk of Plato and Aristotle, Kant, Hegel and Kierkegaard, Tillich and Barth. I found it fascinating but realized I had a lot of catching up to do just to get in on the conversation. I read histories of philosophy, books on reason and revelation, and monographs on and by important theologians then in vogue, and so on. But even though I believe I got something of a handle on that vocabulary, it has never been my native tongue, and as time wore on it became apparent to me it was not where my interests lay. The suspicion that the vocabulary easily entices one on a Swiftian voyage to Laputa, the island that floats in the air, is at least in part a legacy from my scientific background. My native tongue, I think, has always been that of the ancient catechetical tradition.
But in the seminary, it soon became apparent that that ancient tradition was under attack. The attack, however, was not from without but from within. It was not, that is, the inroads of criticism and liberalism, etc., that were the ultimate source of trouble. Such inroads could temporarily, at least, be sidestepped, accommodated, or moderated. So we read Brunner (the most used in dogmatics classes as I recall), and Sittler, and Kantonen, and Nygren, and Tillich, etc., and they assured us that all was well in the “neo-orthodox” camp. Yet there was, for me at least, a certain unease. The surrender of biblical inerrancy to various versions of “truth as encounter” and other existentialist ploys seemed to lack the bite of the older views of biblical authority. Perhaps it was that something of the offense was gone. Yet there was no way back. Older views of biblical inerrancy were not an offense, they were just intellectually offensive. I was looking, I think, for something deeper and more compelling, a gospel authority that establishes itself by its own power and attractiveness, not a legal authority that simply demands submission.
Heilsgeschichte, then in vogue, dominated our theological classrooms. But it was at best a halfway house. It freed us from the older views of authority based on inerrancy but left us with rather serious questions about history. A Bible that is an authoritative mine for data to construct a historical scheme is, in the end, only slightly better than a Bible of texts used to “prove” dogmatic propositions. The inchoate desire of my younger days for a more solid foundation was not satisfied.
My real seminary experience began one day when I was impelled to set off on my own search. That certain independence and reluctance to rely just on the word of my professors once again asserted itself. While attending a class on Galatians one day, the question that was to occupy center stage for the rest of my theological career was posed, the question of the relation between “human responsibility” and divine election. The professor, bless his pious heart, stretched out his arms and said, “Men (there were only men in those days!), there are just some things we have to learn to hold in tension!” Something within me shouted NO! There are some things we no doubt might hold in tension, but not this thing, not the question of human salvation! I came to suspect that this was the real threat against the ancient tradition. I had to ask myself, “Was this the theology for which Luther was willing to see the church torn apart?” Was this the position over which he argued so desperately with Erasmus? I couldn’t believe it. This touched off my quest. And that question centering around divine election, the bondage of the human will, and being a theologian of the cross accounts for the sum and substance of my theology.
The search for an answer to the question about Luther ushered me into a strange and exciting new world. Modern Luther research was just beginning to be imported from Europe. I pored over Luther on Galatians, read and reread Luther’s Bondage of the Will; I gobbled up the essays and monographs I could find on Luther’s “reformation discovery” and his theology in general (Wingren, Nygren, Prenter, Watson, Boehmer, Pauck, Rupp, etc.), as well as on related exegetical questions about the righteousness of God, justification, law and gospel, and so on. In those days our education took place as much, if not more, in continuing conversations with fellow students in the dorm as in classes. I was blessed with an illustrious group of classmates: Robert Jenson, Carl Braaten, Clarence Lee, Harris Kaasa, Oliver Olson—to name just a few.
The quest on which I embarked was greatly stimulated and encouraged when Lennart Pinomaa, the Finnish Luther scholar, came to us to lecture for a semester. He stayed in the dormitory with us and a number of us helped him put his lectures into an English accessible to students. Needless to say, we learned a lot about the Luther renaissance. Here, I began to sense, was the real foundation for the ancient catechetical tradition for which I had been searching. I found the answers to my questions not in nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to transcend or remodel the tradition but rather in a probing of its own depths. In so doing I found a gospel I believed I could preach to the twentieth century. Many seem to react to the Luther renaissance as though it were a species of historical antiquarianism. I have always found Luther to be the one theologian who has something new to say—and better, one who inspires the preaching of the new.
In any case, inspired, encouraged, and enticed by these discoveries, I thought to solidify and deepen them in a program of graduate studies. After a delightful year of “filling in” as an instructor in religion at St. Olaf, which I enjoyed immensely and which reinforced my interest in teaching, I set off for Harvard Divinity School (1956). I went to Harvard, frankly, because I was looking for a place that would allow me to continue my quest with a minimum of professorial interference! I knew pretty much what I wanted to do and also that if I were to do it in this country I would have to do it mostly on my own. I was interested still in understanding the foundation of the Reformation tradition in Luther as well as gaining some inkling of what had subsequently happened to it. This led me to take up more seriously the question of Heilsgeschichte. Eventually this led to a study of J. C. K. von Hofmann, the “father” of it all on Lutheran soil. There I also discovered the very interesting and significant beginnings of a controversy over the atonement among Lutherans. Much of what Gustaf Aulén said in 1929 was already anticipated by von Hoffmann and debated by his contemporaries. The intimate connection between historical revelation, Christology, atonement, law, and gospel became more apparent. The outcome of this interest was a doctoral dissertation and eventually a published book on The Law-Gospel Debate.
Of course I did work in other areas and on other theologians all the while, with professors who were interesting, stimulating, and broadening, even if eventually not so determinative for my theological interests: Paul Tillich, Paul Lehmann, John Dillenberger, Richard Reinhold Niebuhr, Georges Florovsky, and Milton Virgil Anastos (yes, I studied Eastern Orthodoxy!). Also, as time allowed, I listened to various famous professors “over in the yard.”
Through it all, however, I continued my own more or less independent quest. I didn’t really have what would be called a “doctor father.” I began with John Dillenberger, but he left within the year. I then had Paul Lehmann, who introduced me to serious study of Barth, for which I am grateful, but he also left before I went to work on my dissertation. I ended with Richard Reinhold Niebuhr, H. Richard’s son, who had little interest in what I was up to. The greatest help for my quest came when I was granted an LWF scholarship to study at Tübingen, Germany for a year following completion of my course work. This was one of the most enjoyable and stimulating years of my life. Here, of course, I found students and professors who “spoke the language” and knew what I was concerned about. My favorite professor was Hans Rückert, then editor of the Weimar Ausgabe of Luther’s works, who lectured brilliantly on the history of dogma but published little. There were others, of course, who were helpful as well—Hermann Diem and Ulrich Mann particularly. Ernst Käsemann came the second term I was there and I listened eagerly.
The most important fruit of my year in Germany was my introduction to what writings were then available of Hans-Joachim Iwand, whom I count as my favorite interpreter of Luther, still largely unknown and unpublished in this country. I was attracted at the outset by his early essays on law and gospel and especially by his introductions to (in the München Ausgabe, Vol. 7, 1954) and essays on Luther’s Bondage of the Will (in Um den rechten Glauben, a group of essays published by Chr. Kaiser Verlag in 1959). Iwand is the only interpreter I know who was able to swallow Luther’s view of the bondage of the human will whole, together with all the theological presuppositions and consequences entailed in that view. He is the only one I have found who accepts the Lutheran decretum horribile that the deus absconditus has not bound himself to his word but kept himself free over all things. Virtually all of theology ever since, even to the present day, has busied itself trying by theological manipulation to banish that God from sight. It is, you might say, the favorite armchair sport of theologians. That means there is always somewhere, even among the staunchest Lutheran theologians, a reservation compelled to assert some bit of human responsibility. And that is the beginning of the end for all serious theology. This, I came to see, is where theology loses its bite. It loses its doctrine of God—the belief that God is in charge even in terrifying hiddenness. It loses its Christology—the awareness that the awesome and hidden God shows his hand concretely only in the preached word of the cross and the sacraments. Which is to say, it loses its faith in the Spirit and its ecclesiology as well. Where the word loses its bite as living address, it flattens out into a religion and enters the market where one has to look to philosophical or apologetic arguments to establish one’s case.
What I learned from Iwand is that the compulsion to hang on to some bit of human choice and responsibility over against the God of election is precisely our problem. The compulsion, the claim to freedom vis-à-vis God, is the bondage. This realization set off a chain of reasoning that has stamped my theology ever since. Iwand helped me to see that the bondage is not theoretical but actual. In its deepest sense it is not, that is, a conclusion or a deduction from the doctrine of divine necessity but an actual reaction, an act of will. As fallen beings we are compelled and driven. Our claims to freedom vis-à-vis God are precisely our rebellion against God. This is our original sin—a sin by which we are bound—we are not forced to it, we will it. That being the case, no theoretical or theological reformulation will help. The sinner cannot be cured by a more subtle theology. We can’t sit in our studies and save people. So the conclusion became inevitable: the only remedy for the sinner is death. Thus follows the matter of becoming theologians of the cross. The old Adam or Eve must die and the new come forth who—for the time being—lives by faith alone. Somewhat in that fashion through the years, my theology took shape. As I put it in my little book on justification, it is a matter of death and life. And such death and life cannot be simply a metaphor for transformation or a change of heart. There must be a real savior, a real death, indeed, one in which we are involved and implicated, i.e., put to death, and, consequently, a real resurrection from the dead. My preoccupation with the doctrine of the atonement flows quite logically, for me, from the matter of death and life. Reshaping the doctrine in terms of death and life is one of the most prominent instances where I have sought a more adequate foundation for the tradition. The bondage of the human will works itself out finally by killing Jesus, the one who said, “You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you.” And so it is. And that is our death and new life.
The basic death/life structure became determinative for all of my subsequent theologizing. It establishes the foundation for which I was searching. The word of God is not just a mine for dogma, nor a source book for the history of salvation. It is indeed both of those things. One need not deny that. But were we left only with that we would be abandoned to our own decisions. Over and above all is the realization that the word coming to us from the scriptures is a word that kills and makes alive. It is eschatological in intent and shape. It ends the old and inaugurates the new. It does this by the very fact of its unconditionality, the fact that it leaves the old Adam and Eve with “nothing to do.” That is the death. The new life that follows is the sheer gift of freedom and what it inspires within us. Complaints about my being “weak on sanctification” and so forth have, of course, always swarmed around my head like angry flies. I brush them off confidently and say that if what is supposed to be Christian about our lives and deeds does not flow spontaneously from the freedom of the gospel, it has no claim to being called sanctification. It may be philanthropy or charity or other socially laudable activity, or even just plain legalism, all of it admirable and useful in this age, but it is not sanctification. As Jesus could say of the “hypocrites” who made ostentatious display of their almsgiving, “They have their reward.” Public approbation is their reward. True sanctification has to do with the “reward” of the Father “who sees in secret.” It is born out of the end and the new beginning. Theology has the task of fostering the doing of that end and new beginning in the living present. It must drive to such a proclamation, or all is lost. This is what I tried to say in Theology Is for Proclamation.
The fundamental death/life structure is, of course, intimately connected and indeed structurally identical with the thoroughgoing “dialectic” of Lutheran theology in general: God hidden and revealed; simul peccator et iustus; old/new; law/gospel; killing letter/life-giving Spirit; left- and right-hand rule of God, etc. The dialectic is compelling not only because of its inherent ability to expound the faith I learned from the beginning but also because it reflects and illumines the basic eschatological structure of the New Testament. Virtually all of my writing, teaching, and lecturing circles around these themes.
Other theologians have also been important to me. It is hard now to recall them all accurately and put them in any sort of rank or chronological order. The Finnish theologian Lauri Haikola was vital for the development of my understanding of law and gospel. Gerhard Ebeling’s interpretation of Luther and early preoccupation with hermeneutical questions fired a constant concern about questions of interpretation and preaching. I have always believed Karl Barth to be one of the best conversation partners for Lutheran theology because he raises the right questions. Those Lutherans who were willing to listen to Barth, even if critically, I have generally found to be the most interesting. I always enjoyed teaching Barth, especially the thunderous negations of his Romans. Wingren has been important, perhaps as a counterbalance to Barth. His little book Theology in Conflict was decisive in my early struggles with Barth over law and gospel. Conversation and discussion for almost twenty years with Roman Catholic colleagues in the Lutheran/Catholic Dialogue in the U.S. have been most rewarding and have sharpened my perceptions in the ecumenical arena. Team teaching the Lutheran Confessions with Jim Nestingen has repeatedly focused and augmented my understanding of the Lutheran witness.
A few words about my career subsequent to the return from Germany are perhaps in order to close out this exercise. I was asked to teach the History of Christian Thought at Luther Seminary, so I shuttled back and forth between St. Paul and Harvard for a couple of years. Interpreting the history of thought in the light of what I had learned gave me the confidence that it would “fly” for prospective pastors and teachers. Teaching the next two years at Luther College following an upheaval in the religion department gave further opportunity to put my theology to the test. At stake in the upheaval were precisely the questions I had had about the ancient catechetical tradition all along, and it was challenging to have to deal with it now as a teacher. During a year’s leave I had requested to finish work on my dissertation, two decisive things happened. I married my lovely and helpful wife Marianna, a Yale Ph.D. who was teaching French language and literature at Wellesley, and I was called once again to return to teach in the Church History department at Luther Seminary. So in 1964 we returned to Luther Seminary where we have remained ever since, with the exception of sabbaticals and two interesting and delightful years as Lutheran Tutor and Chaplain to Lutheran Students (of which there were hardly any!) at Oxford University. In 1971, I shifted from teaching in the Church History department to Systematic Theology. This did not represent any major transition in my thinking or teaching. My degree at Harvard was in a division they just called “Theology,” as I recall, which encompassed both the History of Christian Thought and Systematics, as evidenced by professors such as Tillich and Lehmann. It did mean, however, that I have always taught systematics from a historical base—as it ought to be taught!
It is difficult precisely to sum up what my thirty plus years teaching at Luther Seminary have meant for my theological understanding. I suppose I have said it already in what I have set down above; I am not conscious of any radical changes of mind theologically, but rather of a constant deepening and sharpening, and I would like to think, even radicalization of the views I either held or was seeking from the beginning. This I credit to ever insistent and penetrating questioning from my students and colleagues. Looking back, I think the absolute necessity of preaching a word that does the killing and making alive in the living present has been a growing conviction and the question of how one is to do that a constant preoccupation. There is no solution to the “problem” of the hidden, almighty, electing God in theology. The solution is given only if this God comes to us here and now to do the deed. That is what the preaching and the sacraments are all about. And theology must drive us to that deed. That is the breaking in of the eschatological future.
My biggest fear in the present is that the eschatological two-age structure of theology is once again simply being lost. Lost in our disregard for the new age and a life that conquers death. Lost in our constant preoccupation with the old self and its “development” and “esteem,” our causa sui projects, as Ernest Becker put it. Lost in an ecclesiology that threatens to substitute itself for the kingdom. Lost in a turning to the historical Jesus (as in the “Jesus Seminar,” etc.) rather than to the risen Christ. Lost, that is, in a theology that flattens Christianity out into a “religion” rather than the end of religion and the beginning of the new.
But now I think I have said enough, if not too much. In looking back over what I have written, I can see that I have been lured into doing what the very idea of an autobiography tempts one to do: speak too much of the self and its quest. The recently deceased John Chancellor, sagacious news analyst and commentator, is said to have remarked once that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans! When St. Augustine wrote his “theological autobiography,” he came to realize that he finally was not the actor but rather the one acted upon. I expect that this is our only hope in the end, and that God will not have too big a laugh at our expense.