Endtimes

From the Publisher

Mark Wilhelm

Wilhelm bids farewell to Robert D. Haak, who is leaving the editorship of Intersections and the Augustana College Center for Vocational Reflection for a chief-academic-officer post at Hiram College in Ohio, and welcomes Jason A. Mahn as the incoming editor. He celebrates Haak’s tireless work to integrate the Lutheran concept of vocation into the practices and rhetoric of Augustana and ELCA higher education through six years of Intersections, and frames the journal as a vital tool for sustaining the conversation about education in a Lutheran key—even at colleges and universities where most students, faculty, and staff are not Lutheran themselves.

From the Outgoing and Incoming Editors

Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak

Outgoing editor Robert D. Haak reflects on a six-year run inheriting Intersections from founder Tom Christenson, the “powerful voices” that have driven the conversation (Dovre, Jodock, Christenson, Simmons, Morgan, Olsen, Wilhelm) and the newer ones now entering (Mahn, Bussie); incoming editor Jason A. Mahn, picked up from the airport in Bob’s pickup truck five years ago, names central issues that “Lutherans on Faith and Learning” engages and previews essays by Dovre, Jodock, McDonald, Hill, Turnbull, and Jodock again.

A Lutheran Learning Paradigm

Paul J. Dovre

Drawing on Hughes and Adrian’s Models of Christian Higher Education and on Ernest Simmons, Darrell Jodock, Tom Christenson, Robert Benne, and Richard Hughes, Dovre sketches a Lutheran learning paradigm shaped by four deep narratives—the biblical, the confessional, the theological, and the vocational—and traces their implications for curriculum (the study of scripture, theology, and vocation), for the religion faculty’s college-wide responsibility, and for pedagogy (moral deliberation, dialectic, paradox, the engagement of faith and the secular disciplines).

Gift and Calling: A Lutheran Perspective on Higher Education

Darrell Jodock

Jodock argues that a Lutheran perspective on higher education rests on three underlying ideas—that we are gifted (a giftedness that calls forth wonder, awe, gratitude, a sense of humor, and vocation as response to neighbor); that the Lutheran tradition affirms a particular kind of God who is down-to-earth and at work in the world for justice and human wholeness; and that a Lutheran “third path” can be both rooted in the tradition and inclusive of others. He draws out ten implications for higher education, from wonder as the heart of religion through liberal learning oriented toward the freedom of its members.

Lutheran Colleges, the Lutheran Tradition, and the Future of Service-Learning

Joseph McDonald

McDonald, who has used service-learning since the early 1990s and now directs the Values Based Learning Program at Newberry College, traces the service-learning movement from its 1960s socio-political pioneers (Nadinne Cruz, Ira Harkavy) through its institutionalization as classroom pedagogy and citizenship education (Stanton, Giles, and Cruz; Edward Zlotkowski; Jane Addams’s Hull House and John Dewey). He argues that three strengths of the Lutheran tradition—robust reflection as a community of discourse, Christian vocation as service infused in all roles, and the capacity to negotiate tension and paradox—uniquely equip Lutheran colleges to hold the pedagogical and socio-political dimensions of service-learning together, recovering the energy of the pioneers without sacrificing classroom rigor.

Dreaming God's Dream: A Sermon on Isaiah 56:1-2, 6-8

Stephan K. Turnbull

Preached at the 2008 “Savvy with Substance” Convocation of the ELCA at Central Lutheran Church, Minneapolis, this sermon by parish pastor Stephan K. Turnbull (First Lutheran Church, White Bear Lake) sets the small dreams of pastors and academics—balanced budgets, peaceful congregations, coherent midterm papers—over against the prophet’s dream in Isaiah 56 of a God who gathers all nations to a house of prayer for all peoples. Turnbull calls educators, preachers, and church leaders to articulate God’s dream of getting the world back through the dying of Jesus the Messiah and the resurrection’s first fruits of new creation.

Fumbling Toward Integrity: A Sermon on Mark 8:34-38, Pastor Kaj Munk, and Father Maximilian Kolbe

Darrell Jodock

Preached at the 2007 ELCA Convocation of Teaching Theologians at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Jodock holds up two World War II martyrs—Polish Franciscan Father Maximilian Kolbe, who took the place of a condemned father in Auschwitz’s starvation bunker, and Danish pastor-playwright Kaj Munk, who was shot by the Nazis after helping save 97 percent of Denmark’s Jews—as mirrors for our own priorities. Drawing on the rescuer characteristics identified by Samuel and Pearl Oliner (agency, moral independence, universalistic caring, a history of care-giving) and on Jesus’s words in Mark 8:34-38, Jodock asks how we who routinely opt out at the first sign of opposition might fumble toward integrity in our own time.

Ivory Tower or Holy Mountain? Faith and Academic Freedom

Nicholas Wolterstorff

No. 11 · Spring 2001

Wolterstorff defines infringement of academic freedom as impairing a faculty member’s standing on account of the ideological content of her position, argues that academic freedom (like free speech) is “duly qualified” rather than absolute, and offers eight considerations bearing on religiously based institutions: Weber’s differentiation of Wissenschaft, religious pluralism within a liberal polity, the vitality of American civil society, a decentralized educational system, the “holistic” character of much American religion, the post-Kuhnian collapse of classical foundationalism and of the “generically human” academy, the fact that ideas matter, and the personhood violated by infringement (the desecration of an image of God). He concludes that the private sector offers wider academic freedom than the public, that religious qualifications are not inherently inappropriate (any more than St. John’s Great Books commitment), but that religiously based colleges too often apply them unjustly—arbitrarily, secretly, without recourse—and that the AAUP’s best service is model codes of procedure.

About Rooted and Open: The Common Calling of the Network of ELCA Colleges and Universities

No. 49 · Spring 2019

An institutional framing piece introducing Rooted and Open — NECU’s statement on Lutheran identity in higher education — with a roster of the faculty working group and writing team and an orientation to the essays in this special issue.

Writing Toward the Night Complete: Teaching and Working at the Public, Secular Institution

Bruce Allen Heggen

No. 16 · Winter 2003

Heggen, Lutheran Campus Ministry pastor and adjunct English professor at the University of Delaware, builds on a freshman’s essay closing line—“All in all our night was complete”—to argue that even in the secular public university one can “teach hope” as a critical principle by drawing on Douglas John Hall’s Heideggerian distinction between calculative and meditative thought, the Frankfurt School’s instrumental versus substantialist reason, Luther’s theology of the cross, Parker Palmer’s “obedience to truth,” bell hooks, Lionel Basney, Shelley Shaver, and Donald Sheehan’s Frost Place “principle of compassion.” The classroom and Lutheran campus ministry together can become “communities of memory and hope” that, like the artist student’s Fourth of July, hold together danger, people getting together, explosions, and lots of fun.

The Etiology of Eschatology

Kevin Griffith

No. 15 · Winter 2002

A wry meditation on end-times and beginnings in which the last trumpet is only a prelude to the longest dawn, newly handmade animals grow fat waiting for caretakers to name them, dark-robed cryptologists fret over the end of everything, and once everyone has solved the great conundrum the big man simply hits rewind.

Scarred Epistemologies: What a Theology of the Cross Has to Say about the Gay Marriage Ban

Jacqueline Bussie

No. 22 · Spring 2006

Responding to Robert Benne’s claim (citing Gilbert Meilander and Wolfhart Pannenberg) that one cannot defend gay marriage on biblical or confessional grounds, Bussie reads three theses of Luther’s Heidelberg Disputation alongside Moltmann’s Crucified God and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to argue that the theologia crucis—with its insistence on calling the thing what it is, its acknowledgment of scarred epistemologies and simul justus et peccator, and its refusal to domesticate God—exposes the Ohio Defense of Marriage Act as scapegoating, selective literalism, and an unjust law that the Christian conscience must reject.

The Idea of a Christian University

Richard Hughes

No. 11 · Spring 2001

Hughes’s lecture at the inauguration of Andrew K. Benton as the seventh president of Pepperdine argues that a Pepperdine-wide “strategy of community-wide conversation,” carried by the new Pepperdine University Center for Faith and Learning, can sustain the school as a Christian university by leaning into the paradox of Christian particularity rather than around it. Drawing on the incarnation, the Matthew 5 and Luke 14 teachings of Jesus, the Quaker and Cane Ridge (Joseph Thomas) abolition traditions, Galatians 2 and Romans 8, and Luther’s simul Justus et peccator as the gospel that frees the scholar to be wrong, to doubt, and to confess “Lord I believe; help thou mine unbelief,” he mines the Churches of Christ heritage—Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, and John Rogers of Carlisle, Kentucky—as a unity-and-freedom tradition that grounds both diversity and academic freedom.