Rostered and Called VII

And here's another excerpt from "the entrance essay" that I was asked to write as a part of the candidacy process of becoming an ELCA minister of word and sacrament:

3. Missional Leadership

Based on your responses to the previous two questions, especially your theological constructs above, how has your understanding of yourself as a missional leader been shaped by your personal faith in the Triune God and your key theological building blocks?

            I am who I am because of my baptism. Nothing I’ve experienced in my life has been more important to me, my identity, and my vocation than that sacramental event in September 1962. Every morning and night, I make the sign of the cross in remembrance of it. I make this same sign of the cross each Sunday in the divine service and in the weekly chapel services I attend at Valpo.

            In a very basic way, my calling to the pastoral and educational ministry was not my choice; it was something thrust upon me by someone I greatly loved and admired. My grandfather’s piety and vocation rubbed off on me and I felt called to become like him. While at times that summons was a burden, mostly it was not. I do not recall ever thinking about pursuing another vocation, at least not for very long or to any significant depth.

            Luther’s explanations to the three articles of the Apostles’ Creed inform my personal faith. I believe that God has created me and has given to me my senses and reasoning and other attributes that are useful in an academic setting for the sake of extending God’s own mission in and through Valparaiso University. I believe that Jesus Christ is my redeemer and savior—and the savior of the whole world. I believe that God so loves the world that God has sent Christ into the world to love it and bring it to its fulfillment. I believe that I cannot believe in Christ without the Spirit first calling me to faith and sustaining me in that faith through proclamation of the word and the administration of the sacraments. Baptized into the name of God and nourished by Christ’s holy meal, I am called out from the world and sent back into it in my various callings: disciple, husband, father, teacher, pastor, citizen.

            Luther’s explanations of the Creed also serve as starting points for the university-level theology courses that I teach. In these courses, I seek to help my students gain deeper understanding of God the creator, the person and work of Christ, and the actions of the Holying Spirit. In many ways, my teaching serves as an exposition of God’s mission to and for my students. I am particularly interested in helping people to understand God more truly and to use the gifts that God has given me to help others to grow in their own faith and to discover how God might be calling them to service in the world (“equipping the saints for their work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ” [Eph. 4.12]). As a professor of Christian theology at Valpo, I seek to love the Lord with all my heart and mind and to love my students and colleagues as myself. I strive to teach my students in faithful obedience to Christ. In this way, I seek to fulfill the Scriptural exhortation that was spoken to me personally in the pastoral blessing at my confirmation: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

            One aspect of this teaching involves writing. I have recently written a book on fundamental theology, I am editing and translating several large volumes of writings by a principal modern Lutheran theologian, and I am beginning to develop a new book that will summarize key Christian teachings for undergraduates. As I indicated in my remarks above, I am always trying to show my students—those who are Christian as well as those who are other-religious and non-religious—what a “critical” faith in Jesus Christ might entail, an informed faith that does not shrink from the hard questions relating to Christ and the apostolic witness to him. For those who are other-religious (e.g. Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist) and non-religious (“the nones” and “the dones”), I seek to share reliable historical and theological information about Jesus, to explicate what it might mean to believe in Jesus, and to invite respectful dialogue. In this way, I seek to fulfill Christ’s admonition “to go and make disciples of all nations,” particularly through my teaching and personal witness.

            As I remarked in my Entrance Essay, the epigraph to the published edition of the Jefferson Lecture by the most famous scholar to have taught at Valparaiso University, Jaroslav Pelikan, is a quote from Goethe’s Faust: “Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen” (“What you have inherited from your fathers, acquire it in order to make it your own.”) Following Pelikan’s own example, I have tried to make this aphorism the motto of my work as a teacher and scholar of the church. Like him, I have undertaken this work primarily as an historian of ideas, although my final designs have never ceased to be theological. On the one hand, I have sought to understand and teach “the Christian tradition” as a person of faith, indeed as one who publicly identifies himself as a Lutheran Christian by conviction. Following the example of the author of the Augsburg Confession, I have striven to be irenic and ecumenical in my approach to Christianity and the other religions, to maintain in myself and to convey for others a basic respect and appreciation for the wider catholic “Great Tradition,” its texts, basic institutions, and influential characters. In view of the fact that most everybody is an expert on the present, I will continue to try “to file a minority report on behalf of the past.” On the other hand, I have also sought to convey the benefits of engaging the Christian tradition and other religious traditions critically through the same interpretive strategies that are brought to other human phenomena. In this respect, I do not hesitate to indicate where and why the Christian tradition, its texts, and institutions have been and are being criticized by scholars, including by me. I thus agree with Richard Hughes’ description of a Lutheran approach to “tradition” in which one must always be re-assessing and rethinking one's understandings. I believe this “critical” approach to “tradition” is essential in my work of teaching students to lead and serve in church and society. Once again, Luther’s theology of the cross, informed by more recent engagements with it, continues to shape and inform my calling as a professor of Christian theology.

            I became a teacher because I caught “the joy” of learning/teaching from my grandfather and from other significant pastor-scholars, some of which I have already mentioned. I want to be like they are (or were). Their passion for knowledge and truth is wed to their passion for God, which leads them to care for others and to entice these others to seek the same passions. I have learned that such passion is important for these pursuits, that one need not be afraid to share this passion, and that one ought not downplay the knowledge and experience one has received to date as a scholar/teacher of the church. I have also learned not to pretend that one is really ever “objective” and “neutral” in the Geisteswissenschaften (including theology), even if I also know that one should constantly strive to avoid bias and prejudice. Since students in my classes examine and reexamine the nature of religious experience, the meaning(s) of sacred texts, the (in)significance of ecclesial institutions and practices, and the future of a given faith, they analyze matters that come close to the “core” of one’s personal identity and worldview. Consequently, the space in which students address these matters must be one that is as non-threatening as possible, one that encourages civil discourse and respectful, humble postures. I have found that establishing such hospitable space is greatly improved by truly knowing my students, even liking them, and by trying to get them to know and like each other. Since I have always learned best when teachers cared for me as a learner, I have tried to follow their example. In these ways, I am humbly trying to fulfill Christ’s calling to me as one of his missional leaders at Valparaiso University.

            I hope my students recognize that I, too, am a student who is seeking understanding. I am grateful for the opportunities to learn from students and colleagues about how to become a better teacher/scholar for the sake of the church’s mission. While I try to stay current in my field of study (Christian systematic theology), I also find immense value in reflecting on pedagogy. This entails experimenting with different approaches to methodology and teaching strategy. (Most recently I have benefited from Stephen Brookfield’s Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, which impressed upon me the importance of “seeing oneself through the eyes of one’s students,” of keeping a pedagogical autobiography, of holding critical conversations with peers about what works and what does not.) I am constantly trying to learn new ways to teach and learn.