SAINTS, SCHOLARS, AND SEMINARIANS
by Gerald Christianson
I have an assignment for you. If you accept, it will eliminate
the need for this address, and simplify your seminary career. I am told on
good authority that Wentz Library carries 1,200 volumes related to
spirituality. So here’s the assignment: read one a day, and at 365 days in
a year, this will take you four years with time off for internship.
Since I see no one heading for the exits, we’re obliged to pursue our enterprise in the tried-and-true pedagogical methods of classes, exams, and lectures such as this presentation. It is entitled “saints, scholars, and seminarians,” or to translate, “me, them, and you.” Since time does not allow me to discuss them or you, what follows could fall somewhere between Pami Anderson’s revelations and Augustine’s Confessions.
Fortunately, my theme is far more inclusive and simple. We are a community with a task, and yet more. We are a graced community with a special task, a community of saints dedicated to the vocation of scholars.
First, the saints. We all know that the cult of the saints was a major casualty of the Reformation. In the late Middle Ages, a saint was one whose holy life could generate enough merit to gain personal salvation, and have enough left over to help others. For Luther, however, every Christian is dependent for salvation on Christ’s merits alone. There can be no special class of over-achieving Christians, even among those who, like the young Luther, dedicated their lives to monastic retreat; and I might add especially not those who give their lives to seminary. (Thayer)
Consequently, Luther’s saint is not a dead Christian canonized by the church. Like scripture itself, he applies the term to all living believers. When asked, “How do I know I am a Christian?” Luther replied, in effect, “You know you are baptized; that is all you need to know.” He didn’t use the term, but if spirituality means anything, it must have something to do with the spirit, both human and divine, and for Luther the main partner in this relationship is always the Holy Spirit. “I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my lord or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called me through the gospel . . .” And without any transition whatever Luther goes on to assert that it is the same Spirit who “calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies the whole Christian church on earth.”
I stress the word sanctifies here. We all know theoretically that this gift is free. But let’s be careful. Even the most honest among us, and I include myself in particular, harbors a suspicion that God looks with special favor upon us who desire to serve him in what we unfortunately call “full time” ministry. And even the most sincere can foster an “add-on” spirituality. True, I am baptized, but must I not do something to become a real Christian, to be sanctified? On the contrary, one recalls that wonderful observation by our former colleague, Roger Gobbel: Lutheran spirituality is not baptism plus something else. It is the question, who am I this day as a baptized Christian saint?
We are, to broaden this thought, a gifted community, but our foundation should be expressed in the passive: we are a community that has been gifted. The true beginning of a Lutheran seminary is that as a community of saints we have nothing we can do. So the question becomes what should we do now that we have nothing we can do?
The answer I propose this morning is that we are charged with the task of learning the ways of a scholar. And somewhere in the creative tension between spirit and intellect, piety and curiosity, we will find our life as a sainted community.
If Luther is correct, this creative coupling of faith with intellect is not a burden but a joy. Erasmus with his fastidiousness about how to please a God who never allowed him complete confidence in unmerited redemption could not know this joy. It is the joy, for its own sake, of gazing at the stars, inspecting the evolution of a microbe, marveling at the beauty of the human body, enjoying the taste of wine, bathing in a Mahler symphony or a Matisse painting, or above all being wrapped in the warmth of human friendship. Joy. Here is the ground and rationale of seminary education, of this sainted community where we can learn the trade of a scholar.
But what is the trade of a scholar? First, I think it especially important that a scholar is one who can approach his or her task with the joyful assurance that curiosity, intellectual honesty, an open sharing of opinions, even radical ones, need not shake our faith. I cannot wave a wand to make all anxiety go away, nor would I want to, but we should know that others have plowed this field before us, and have come through the experience very well, thank you. We passed through the real crisis over modern historical study of the Bible at this seminary around 1926 with the appointment Raymond Stamm, a young academic with a Ph.D. and no parish experience, fresh from the University of Chicago. Charged by some as radical, if not heretical, the Seminary persevered. In my own seminary, Augustana in Rock Island, the change was just as abrupt. It started around 1930 with the appointment of Eric Wahlstrom, a parish pastor with no Ph.D.
There are reasons why these two seminaries, and most of Lutheranism, survived this crisis. Stamm and Wahlstrom had grasped Luther’s understanding of scripture as God’s word of grace. The church catholic did not need the Reformation to restore the authority of scripture. It needed the Reformation to hear the gospel in the scripture, to see the Bible, in Luther’s words, as the cradle in which God laid the baby Jesus. And it needed the Lutheran Confessions to offer a key, “justification by faith” to interpret this gospel in scripture. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this lesson in biblical hermeneutics and Reformation principles. It reminds us that we cherish faith even when we encourage a rigorous historical and biblical criticism. (Levin)
Because of this gospel, in the second place, a sainted scholar can acknowledge, even relish in, change and development in history and yet hold to a center, to an identity from which to offer a critique. At the heart of our creed is the assertion, “and became incarnate by the Virgin Mary.” This event invites, even demands, a continuing appreciation and appraisal of history--concrete, ordinary, mundane history, with all its warts, all its triumphs and tragedies--so that we remain faithful to our origins, but also that the power of the story retains its dynamic in the present.
I am a Christian scholar who professes that Jesus “became incarnate” and was “truly God and truly human,” but I realize that the creedal formulation dates from the 4th century in a way that is not stated explicitly in the New Testament. Nevertheless, on the principle that there need be no dichotomy between belief and careful scholarship, I must wrestle lest I construct some fictitious Jesus who is shaped in such a way as to give credence to a self-serving ideology or a highly selective set of moral regulations, which is the temptation of a so-called fundamental, non-critical interpretation.
The two characteristics of a sainted seminarian and scholar can be captured in two words, confidence and curiosity; or to take Luther’s famous advice to Melanchthon out of context: Go ahead, study boldly.
By now you may be wondering why you didn’t accept the invitation to read the corpus of books on spirituality--if only to escape to the library--but perhaps I can help by anticipating a third, and most important, question. Many assume that history began on the day of our birth, or at the most in 1776. So what is the use of all this?
As a medieval historian whose materials and ruminations are not on the tip of everyone’s tongue, I am especially sensitive to this question. Not long ago while we were engaged in a helpful dialogue with a number of visiting bishops who had emphasized the importance of our faculty’s service to relevant issues in the life of the church, my contribution was to ask that on occasion they allow us to be a little bit irrelevant.
I’m not sure that’s exactly what I wanted to say, but it was close. By the very nature of this retreat for reflection that we call a seminary, scholars of necessity must master a mass of material that may only rarely if ever come up in ordinary conversation. When I visit my family physician for help with my aching foot, she had better know every bone in this lowly appendage, but I don’t need her to name them all when she prescribes treatment. I once heard the great Franklin Clark Fry observe that it makes no more sense for ministers to declare that they are not theologians than for my physician to say, as I’m slipping under the anesthesia for a major operation, “but you know, professor, I’m not really a surgeon.”
We soon learn here that there are different kinds, or different levels, of relevance. In the fourth and fifth centuries, for instance, the question of Jesus as God and human was not an abstract question debated in committees or scholars’ offices; it was a question of what God and Christianity was all about. And I am convinced it remains such today, if only because it involves my identity, who I am as a baptized Christian trying to live out my life in the 21st century.
At the most fundamental level, history itself is not only relevant; it is essential to our life together in community. I define history as an act of friendship. It is, of course, not always friendly, nor about friendly people doing friendly deeds, but I want to communicate even these stories to others in the community around me, including the community of saints. I am asked to apply the golden rule, “do unto others,” to people in the past, and attempt to understand and speak for those who can no longer speak for themselves.
So we come back, even in our need for relevance, to “saints” and the “communion of saints.” Yet the greatest challenge remains: to demonstrate—more accurately, to give testimony about—how I personally stopped worrying and began to love my own specialization, the late middle ages, only to discover its astonishing relevance for both society and church, both evangelical and catholic.
It all began on April 6, 1415. Are you still with me? The Council of Constance had been summoned to solve what many consider the greatest constitutional crisis in the history of the church (the Reformation, with the possible exception of the Gnostic onslaught, was its greatest theological crisis). Known as the Great Schism, the problem arose with the competing elections of two and then three popes beginning in 1378. Constance had been called together by one of these popes who promptly fled the city, leaving the assembly without a head. Could the council, and the church, go on; and if so, by what authority?
Led by a stalwart group of theologians, canonists and cardinals, Constance adopted a famous decree, entitled Haec sancta, that declared that a council, assembled in the Holy Spirit and representing the church catholic, “derived its power immediately from Christ, and that all persons of every rank and position, including the pope himself, are bound to obey.” With this to guide them, the council’s delegates went on to elect a single pope and heal the schism.
A great political theorist of the early 20th century, John Neville Figgis, declared this pronouncement of a council’s superiority over a pope “the most revolutionary official document in the history of the world.” I once thought this an exaggeration, but now see its essential truth. Figgis, I have since discovered, was an Anglican clergyman who taught at Cambridge, and was deeply concerned that modern industrial societies achieve a diverse communal existence in which various religions and ideologies could live together in peace and harmony.
This is a vision worth contemplating. But there is more. Figgis also had something to say both about the origins of this revolutionary document in what we call “conciliar theory,” and about its later influence. Today, after years of intense research and lively debate, we have learned that in the first instance he was wrong, but in the second, on its later influence, he was surprisingly insightful.
Figgis thought that the theory of councils was simply the extension of parliaments that were just then being hammered out in the secular kingdoms of Europe. But fifty years ago this year, a young graduate student named Brian Tierney published his first book, entitled Foundations of the Conciliar Theory, an event that we celebrated at our Gettysburg Conference last October. Tierney demonstrated that the Constance decree on superiority and the entire conciliar movement was the culmination of ideas that were embedded in the canon law and doctrine of the church itself.
The exponents of this conciliar theory appealed to scripture, especially the Matthean text, “where two or three are gathered in my name,” but were also effected by the actual practice of corporations such as universities, guilds, town governments and commercial enterprises. These conciliarists, “advocates of what amounted to a constitutional revolution in the church,” held in common a belief that the pope, however divinely instituted his office, was not absolute or incapable of error but a constitutional ruler and susceptible to correction; that he possessed only a ministerial authority delegated to him by the whole community of the faithful (congregatio fidelium); that this community could exercise power through its representatives assembled in a general council, and in certain cases could even depose a pope. (Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870).
The most comprehensive and creative working-through of these principles is The Catholic Concordance by a young canonist-lawyer, Nicholas of Cusa, who composed it for the Council of Basel which had the unenviable task of applying the principles of conciliar superiority laid down by Constance when there was but one undoubted pope, who, it turned out, was no champion of reforming councils.
Yet, none of the conciliarists, least of all Cusanus, questioned the interior power of the church, the power of consoling burdened souls through confession and sacraments. The Catholic Concordance aspires to a church where all ranks and offices are open to regular reform and made up of mutually dependent and cooperating parts in which each has its function to serve the church’s well being. One sentence characterizes this remarkable work and the conciliar movement as a whole: “Rulership is from God through persons and councils, by elective consent.”
Cusanus later repudiated the Council of Basel and became famous as a philosopher-theologian, mathematician, mystic, and a cardinal in full support of the traditional hierarchy, by which time the papacy, once again in the ascendancy, condemned all appeals to a council over a pope?
Did the conciliar theory die with this declaration? Or does some residue linger in constitutional thought and in contemporary ecclesiology, both catholic and evangelical? Let me begin with the impact on western society.
Tierney’s thesis has met with a large measure of success here, largely because scholars take a keen interest in the roots of modern constitutional states and its spread throughout the western world during the past two decades, especially after the collapse of communism.
While losing out as a political alternative within the church, conciliar ideas on representation, consent, collegiality, and the right of resistance remained alive at the University of Paris beyond the 15th century. They came to play an important role in both the formulation and expression of Protestant resistance theory, particularly in the case of Scotland during the Catholic restoration under Mary Tudor. And so it entered the mainstream of modern political theory and continued into the 17th and 18th centuries. (Monahan)
It is gratifying, if surprising, to emphasize the relevance of Cusanus and conciliar theory, if only at a distance, by remembering that while Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, was an admirer of all things French, including the notion of individual rights and the human compact, James Madison and George Mason, major contributors to the Constitution, read the English and Scottish textbooks.
If the relation between church and society has always attracted a great deal of interest, the question of how late medieval thought on councils impacted the internal structure of the church is another matter.
The definition of papal primacy at the First Vatican Council seemed to leave Catholic historians with little choice but to treat the conciliar movement as a misguided or even revolutionary moment in the life of the church. But then John XXIII called Vatican II in 1959, and led some to turn to Tierney’s proposal, written four years earlier, that the conciliar theory was neither recent nor revolutionary. (Oakley)
The story of this ambiguity in the Roman Catholic Church was told in no uncertain terms by Francis Oakley at our conference last October. The title of his paper, “The Politics of Oblivion,” said it all. It traced the neglect, misunderstanding and even suppression of the conciliar option right down to Vatican I which one might illustrate with the fate of Hans Kung who in large measure was disciplined for having endorsed this option.
On the Protestant side, neglect was based on the assumption that, since it was followed by the Reformation, the later Middle Ages must have been a time of degradation and decline. What could such a period have contributed to Protestant ecclesiology?
Luther’s attitude, however, reveals more continuity than discontinuity. He first appealed from a misinformed pope to the next general council in November, 1518, following a similar appeal by the University of Paris in March. Article 28 of the Bull that excommunicated him in June, l520, singled out his conciliar theory for condemnation. Despite this, Luther made a second appeal to a council in November. (Jedin) Later, it is true, Luther refused to attend the Council of Trent because it was not free, but he never repudiated conciliarism.
Although his work is now almost entirely forgotten, John Thomas McNeill, a great church historian and Presbyterian, long ago argued that “Protestantism at the outset was not merely national or sectional, but catholic in spirit and aim,” and that the disruption of church unity brought about by the Reformation was nevertheless attended by a revival of conciliarism which became the normal Protestant principle of church government. Among other denominations, American Lutheranism has remained distinctly synodical. Before the formation of the LCA, the Lutheran body into which I was ordained proudly bore the name of Augustana Synod. [126-27]
On the other hand, McNeill was quick to point out important differences between Protestant and Catholic conciliarism. These differences remain an issue, if not the issue, in ecumenical dialogue today. (183) [93-94] On the one hand, Protestants drove the practice and theory of councils deep into local congregations as well as national structures. The absence of this local conciliarism as a substructure may have accounted at least in part for the defeat of the conciliar movement in the late Middle Ages. Catholics just never had a chance to get into the habit. [128]
The congregational-conciliar impulse, however, remained near the heart of Luther who maintained that the criteria he laid down for councils, including the Council of Trent, applied to all councils, great and small, including the mini-councils going on all the time in its parishes and schools. (43)
Furthermore, and more fundamental, the institutional structure of the church is primary for Catholics because sacramental life flows from, and is validated by, the authority of the church made concrete in the plenitude of the papacy, while for
Luther the gospel has priority over all ecclesiastical authority, including councils. Luther’s conciliar theory was based on the primacy of the community of saints where the Holy Spirit gathers believers around the hearing of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. (Tecklenburg-Johns)
One final point. If the structural principle of association in Protestantism is conciliarism, the principle of its spirituality is the priesthood of the people. (191) [cf. 129]. This priesthood is exercised socially. It is not “every person is one’s own priest,” but a mutual ministry where every Christian is the neighbor’s priest. (192) [36] Its focus is not individual indulgence, but the opportunity for service to the neighborhood. (193) [38]
So here we are--a community of saints in search for something to do now that we have nothing we have to do. Emboldened by the joy of unmerited love and free grace, and curious about the tradition from which we derive our identity, we are summoned to pass on this tradition as relevant to ever new circumstances because this tradition speaks to what is ultimate. Medieval scholars imagined that a universitas took the form of a human body, probably female, because they never tired of celebrating theology as the queen of the sciences. Well, then, fellow saints, scholars, and seminarians, it’s time to meet the queen.
John T. McNeill, “Luther and the Constitutional Principle of Protestantism,” The Canadian Journal of Religious Thought, 6 (1929): 181-93.
Idem, Unitive Protestantism: The Ecumenical Spirit and its Persistent Expression (rev. ed., Richmond, 1964).
Jaroslav Pelikan, “Luther’s Attitude toward Church Councils,” in The Papal Council and the Gospel: Protestant Theologians Evaluate the Coming Vatican Council, ed. Kristen Skydsgaard (Minneapolis, 1961), pp. 37-60.
