This issue of INTERSECTIONS contains a greater variety of offerings than is usually the case. That variety has made it fun to put this issue together. The Von Dohlen / Ratke discussion should provoke some interesting responses. Von Dohlen challenges Lutherans use of Luther’s “two kingdoms” idea. Surely someone will be offended. As Diogenes the Cynic long ago said, “Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t piss anybody off?” Certainly someone will take issue with Ratke’s attempt to explain what Luther really meant. Several years ago I suggested that Lutheran theologians declare a moratorium on “two kingdoms” rhetoric until we could figure out what we wanted it to mean and what practices were (and were not) justified by it. Now I think that a genuine discussion with an important dose of humor will serve us better.
The talk by Rachel Hammond included here is, I think, a real gem. It demonstrates so many things: ways in which people are called, what it’s like to understand one’s education as a gift and a responsibility, what it’s like to suffer alienation and to find oneself in the process. I recommend copying this and sharing it with students. That’s what I intend to do. Anyone who is moved to contribute to the orphanage Rachel worked at may send a check to Rachel’s home congregation. They will forward all contributions to the Home for Perpetual Hope. Make checks payable to: First Baptist Church, 44 Lorain St., Oberlin, OH 44074.
The essay by Chuck Huff illustrates well the effect that liberal learning and teaching have on the way we conceive of and pursue our disciplines. I hope we get many more reflections like this one, written from a disciplinary viewpoint, yet engaging issues of a larger and deeper sort.
John Reumann’s essay tells the interesting life story of a scholar whose work is done not only to meet the highest standards of criticism within a discipline (biblical scholarship) but also to meet the needs of the church. Though Reumann’s essay was not selected with this in mind, it serves very well as an example of the issues argued in the Von Dohlen / Ratke discussion. Reumann begins by talking about the art of teaching as “a balancing act.” Reading that line made me pay attention in a new way to the drawing my eight year old daughter had completed after a recent trip to the circus. As a result she became the cover artist for this issue.
Tom Christenson
Capital University
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Editorial
From the Publisher
Arne Selbyg
Selbyg reports on the “Reclaiming Lutheran Students” research by the Lutheran Education Conference of North America (partly funded by the Aid Association for Lutherans), which found that alumni of Lutheran colleges report higher satisfaction with the overall quality of their education than alumni of flagship public universities, with more than eighty percent affirming that their college helped them develop moral principles and benefit from spiritual development, while also noting that parents of Lutheran high school students remain largely unaware of both the magnitude of financial aid offered and the quality of the education provided.
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Article
A Fifth Teat on a Cow: The Irrelevance of the Lutheran Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms for Academic Life
Richard VonDohlen
VonDohlen, responding to Richard Hughes, Carol LaHurd, David Ratke, Philip Nordquist, and Robert Benne, argues that the Lutheran doctrine of the two kingdoms as commonly deployed in recent discussions of Lutheran higher education rests on a faulty sociology (taking Luther’s sixteenth-century structure for our highly differentiated society) and an epistemological monism (assuming a single neutral reason against the pluralism described by Alasdair MacIntyre and others), making it anti-intellectual, hostile to interdisciplinary dialogue and Christian social ethics, and ultimately as a defense of theology’s relevance about as useful as “a fifth teat on a cow.” Drawing on his experience on the Catawba Valley Hospice Ethics Committee, his Dutch Reformed and dispensationalist background, and the ELCA social statement “Sufficient, Sustainable Livelihood for All,” he calls for an “intellectually ecumenical” dialogue between Lutherans and non-Lutherans willing to take each other’s paradigms seriously.
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Response
Tat for Teat: Ratke Responds
David Ratke
Ratke, agreeing with much of VonDohlen’s critique but contending that VonDohlen misreads both Luther and the two-realms doctrine, marshals Luther’s To the Christian Nobility, On the Freedom of a Christian, Temporal Authority, Whether Soldiers Too Can Be Saved, and the “Sermon on Keeping Children in School,” along with Walther von Loewenich, to argue that Luther was well aware of structurally differentiated society, made no claim to a monistic epistemology, and intended the two-realms doctrine to combat—not introduce—dualistic bifurcation between sacred and secular. Our identity is “not as either Christian or academic, but as Christian and scholar.”
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Reflection
Calling and Learning: On Losing and Then Finding Myself
Rachel Hammond
Hammond, a Capital University junior who spent two semesters studying in Guayaquil, Ecuador, recounts watching the sucre collapse from 10,500 to 29,000 per dollar between September and January, the overthrow of President Jamil Mahuad, the freezing of bank accounts over $4,000, the threatened eruption of the volcano at Baños, and her work at an orphanage that needed only $6.81 to feed a child for a month—and calls her fellow students, in light of Elie Wiesel’s warning that indifference is the enemy, to recognize their education as a gift and a responsibility to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.
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Article
Modeling Virtue: In Which a Social Psychologist Decides He Can Do Good Without Freely Choosing It
Chuck Huff
Huff, recalling his 1975 sophomore disillusionment with a sterile introductory psychology in South Georgia (and Danny Saunders’s question from The Chosen), defends a scientific psychology as model-making rather than meaning-finding, traces the collapse of Lawrence Kohlberg’s totalizing theory of moral development into chastened mini-theories, and presents William Damon and Anne Colby’s interview study of twenty-three “moral exemplars” whose lives were marked by self-good unity, constant self-examination in community, a felt inability to have done otherwise, religious grounding, and genuine happiness. Following Aristotle on virtue as learned habit and the Christian tradition of the “slave for Christ,” he concludes that goodness flows from the choice of constraints rather than from the lone free-will hero of fairy tales, complicating C. P. Snow’s two-cultures divide. Originally the 1998 Mellby Lecture at St. Olaf.
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Article
Serving Two Masters: Teaching and Writing Between Academy and Church
John Reumann
Reumann reflects on more than fifty years navigating between academy and church—the Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis (whose Doktorvater Morton Enslin was unceremoniously dumped at Toronto by “young Turks” Robert Funk and others, while Harry Orlinsky saved the day at the centennial), the 1978–1987 New American Bible Revised New Testament committee with its bishops, the U.S. Lutheran–Roman Catholic dialogue volume on “Righteousness,” and the 1999 Joint Declaration on Justification—and uses his Anchor Bible and Augsburg commentaries on Philippians, Colossians, and Romans to illustrate Krister Stendahl’s judgment that one can no longer master all the literature: epistolary research, rhetorical and discourse analysis, social-world readings, feminist scholarship on Euodia and Syntyche, the koinonia and friendship debates (Sampley, Fitzgerald, Witherington), and the house-church recovery of Filson. The academy is antepenultimate, the church penultimate, God ultimate—professors as “believers, testifiers, witnesses” serving pro bono, pro ecclesia, and pro Deo.
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Article
The Vocation of Intersections on its Twentieth Birthday
Jason A. Mahn, Robert D. Haak, Tom Christenson
No. 43 · Spring 2016
The three editors of Intersections — Bob Haak, Jason Mahn, and Tom Christenson (in spirit, following his death in 2013) — trace the twenty-year vocation of the journal itself: its 1996 birth at Capital University; its coming-of-age years of debate over institutional markers, two-kingdoms theology, and Lutheran identity; the ascendancy of “education for vocation” as the central marker of Lutheran higher education; and its ongoing identity in relation to a changing ELCA and to the broader cultural conversation about purpose, wholeness, and the vocation of higher education.
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Article
Point / Counterpoint: What It Means to be a "College of the Church"
Robert Benne, Tom Christenson
No. 28 · Fall 2008
Moderated by Wartburg College pastor Larry Trachte and introduced by Kathryn Kleinhans, this Wartburg campus conversation between Robert Benne (Roanoke College) and Thomas Christenson (Capital University) probes what it means to be a college of the church—Benne emphasizing ethos, vocation, and the Christian intellectual tradition over against secularization and generic education, and Christenson lifting up persistent vocational questions, the gift of difference, and induction into a community of discourse—and finds large common ground around hiring for mission, pedagogy that asks deep questions, and the courage to claim a living religious tradition while inviting everyone to the banquet.
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Article
Education as a Christian (Lutheran) Calling
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
Christenson opens with an imaginative reconstruction of early Christian communities as radically egalitarian, pacifist, communitarian gatherings within the Roman Empire and argues that such communities are natural homes for the educational vocation. Naming two temptations for contemporary Christian higher education—the parochial Bible school and “Generic U”—he uses his friend Sig Rauspern’s tree metaphor to insist that a university is Christian in its trunk and roots rather than in grafted-on branches. Drawing on Wendell Berry, Jacob Bronowski, Walter Wink, Douglas John Hall, and his own Gift and Task of Lutheran Higher Education, he names faithful criticism, engaged suspiciousness, simul justus et peccator, and a fallible, love-related Lutheran epistemology as the particular gifts Lutherans bring to the Christian educational calling.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 21 · Summer 2005
In his valedictory letter as outgoing editor, Christenson recounts the 1994 origins of Intersections, when he took the idea to Naomi Linnell and Jim Unglaube at DHES and persuaded the council of presidents to launch the journal on a shoestring with printing paid by DHES and everything else by Capital University. He summarizes the issue’s contents—papers from the 2004 Vocation of a Lutheran College Conference plus two commissioned pieces from former DHES directors Bob Sorensen and Leonard Schulze—and thanks the student copy editors and Capital’s presidents and provosts who sustained the publication.
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Book Review
Review of Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson reviews Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Educating for Shalom: Essays on Christian Higher Education (Eerdmans, 2004), edited by C.W. Joldersma and G.G. Stronks. After recounting his own early prejudice against Wolterstorff’s Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and his subsequent conversion through Art in Action, he focuses on two threads: Wolterstorff’s expansive reading of shalom—not merely peace but justice, community, communal responsibility, and delight—as the overall goal of Christian collegiate education, and the influence of Abraham Kuyper’s claim of “privileged cognitive access” for Christian inquirers, which Wolterstorff demonstrates rather than declares.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Tom Christenson
No. 20 · Fall 2004
Christenson introduces an issue featuring “young and old, angry and encouraging, prophetic and hopeful” voices unified by the assumption that Christians engaged in thinking and educating will ask hard questions: how to raise concerns about militarism and the new American “imperialism,” what a Lutheran law school will say about training a new generation of attorneys, and what Lutheran colleges communicate to undergrads about vocation. Such faithful criticism, he argues, is part of who Lutheran institutions are.
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Article
Ethical Leadership for a Changing World: A Shared Calling from Cradle to Career
Cory Newman, Janelle Rozek Hooper
No. 62 · Fall 2025
5 min audio
Hooper and Newman recount how an ELCA Barna survey on early childhood education sparked the realization at VLHE 2025 that ELCA colleges and the 1,200 Lutheran schools and early learning centers share identical challenges — and an untapped potential to form ethical leaders across the full educational continuum from cradle to career.
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Editorial
From the Editor
Jason A. Mahn
No. 42 · Fall 2015
Mahn introduces the “Vocation and the Common Good” issue by asking what is left of “the commons” in an age of privatized goods and education-as-commodity, and frames church-related colleges — with their stubborn vocabulary of “liberal arts,” “collegiate,” and “calling” — as among the least fully-privatized resources left in American life.
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Article
Why Martin Luther and the Reformation Matter 500 Years Later
Kathryn A. Kleinhans
No. 46 · Fall 2017
Adapted from a 2017 address to Wartburg College’s entering class, Kleinhans surveys Luther’s lasting impact in vocation, education, social service, and the necessary work of repentance — closing with the Lutheran World Federation’s Windhoek assembly and the Reformation World Exhibition’s call to live reform forward into the next 500 years.
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Response
Disputatio Pro Quo? The Search for Lutheran Education
Jon-David Hague, Kimberly Hague
No. 2 · Winter 1997
Kimberly and Jon-David Hague—both Luther College graduates completing graduate studies at Berkeley and Boston University respectively—respond to Bouman by offering Luther’s curriculum reform at Wittenberg University in the spring of 1518, only months after the 95 theses, as a model of the Lutheran voice in higher education. Inspired by humanistic principles, Luther introduced lectures on classical authors and the first instruction in Greek and Hebrew, giving students the tools to encounter scripture directly rather than receive dictated doctrine. The spirit of that reform—providing students with every possible tool while acknowledging that an instructor’s perspective is neither ultimate authority nor final word—remains useful for the search for Lutheran academia today.
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Article
Low-Hanging Fruit, Moonshots, and Coffee: Dreaming Big Within and Beyond Our Limitations
Jeremy Myers
No. 59 · Spring 2024
Myers shares the process used by Augsburg’s Christensen Center for Vocation to help teams move from a shared experience to next steps — an Ignatian-rooted Awareness Examen followed by naming low-hanging fruit, moonshots, and the coffee conversations that build the coalition to make it all happen.
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Institutional Focus
Vocation for Life: A Report on a New Initiative for Alumni
No. 36 · Fall 2012
A report on “Vocation for Life,” a collaborative initiative of ELCA-related colleges and universities to make vocational exploration available to alumni across the country regardless of which school they attended. The first pilot retreat—“Explore Your Life’s Calling,” in Rochester, Minnesota in November 2011, facilitated by Tom Morgan of Augsburg, Chris Johnson of Gustavus, and Tom Scholtterback of Concordia using the Circles of Trust approach—is described.