Bargaining at the Cross

Good Friday when I was young was a day for bargaining. Not just between the pulpit and my ear, as I tried to do the mental math implicit in the inevitable substitutionary-atonement sentiments of the day, but even before that in respect to what sermon I’d have to hear. What set of mini-sermons, in fact.

The deal was, you could get out of going to your own church that night if you took in X percent of the three-hour service on the Seven Last Words from the Cross held at one of the neighborhood churches that afternoon. The attraction was not in hearing something new or exotic, since the dominies on the list were almost all Christian Reformed. (They let in one RCA pastor of sound theological repute.) Part of the lure was negative since the noon to 3:00 p.m. slot was too sacred anyway to permit shooting hoops in the neighbor’s driveway, much less trying out softball at the park. By contrast, you could get in some TV at night while your parents were at church, maximizing the utility of the reduced pleasurable hours that Good Friday afforded.

The tougher, more intriguing bargaining came with your parents—and then in comparing the deal you had wrangled with those struck by the other kids. My folks were of the moderate maximalist school: you had to take in four of the Words plus the hymns following each, which probably spelled a net elapsed time of an hour and a half. That was four 15-18 minute homilies, which made for much more sermon than you’d have at night, but four brief prayers instead of the long one, plus you could exit while the fourth hymn was being sung. Other parents seemed more liberal—three Words. But, if you took them at the start of the service, that entailed sitting through part of the organ prelude, plus the opening prayer (neither Long nor Short), plus an extra opening hymn. So your net time wasn’t that much less. No one I ever heard of had to stay for all seven Words, and only teenagers with cars would try getting away with going in to grab a bulletin and then taking off for the beach or a movie.

Once you had settled up, the debate turned to which Words to attend: the first, the last, or the middle block? Denny liked “I thirst” because it reminded him of “Jesus wept,” his favorite verse in the Bible, being the shortest. The mother and son exchange further down always struck me as a little creepy, and “It is finished” got to be very doleful, the minister in charge of that Word having to outdo all his predecessors at seriousness and woe. Personally, I liked the opener, on forgiveness, and its follow-up when Jesus assured the baddest guy on the hill that he, the thief, would be that day with Him in paradise. Did I like these because they came early and so promised quicker release into the free afternoon air? Or because all the bargaining, like the dicing at the foot of the cross, so missed--or made--the point as to make the Savior’s load heavier?

We had Bible teachers at our Christian school that could have helped with that question, but even then I was too uneasy to ask it. I probably didn’t even see it. I sensed it a bit, though, which helped give an authentic pang to the played-up ones the ministers were trying to conjure from the pulpit. Maybe we do make our own best sermons after all.

Which Francis?

It’s a challenge following Theresa Latini on this blog. Yesterday, again, she knocked one out of the park on a matter near and dear to me—or one that’s become nearer and dearer as I’ve become older and self-consciously unwiser. Namely, the virtue of listening, and of thinking of God as One who listens. So rather than spinning off from her insights as I did last time, I’ll hit on something entirely different. Professional, but maybe fun. A round of Historian Name Bingo.

It happened like this. The selection of Cardinal Jorje Mario Bergoglio as pope, and his selection of Francis I for his papal name, set some virtual tongues wagging on social media among people  who get geeked about such things. Like historians and theologians and especially historians of theology and of religion more generally. Which Francis is His New Holiness invoking? That of Assissi? Or Francis Xavier, perhaps. A Jesuit, like Bergoglio. A Jesuit whose sixteenth-century mission to Japan ran  afoul of rivalries with the order of friars bearing the Assissi man’s name, starting a series of machinations and diplomatic backstabbing that eventually fed into the suppression of Christianity in Japan altogether. So maybe Francis I, Jesuit, is making nice between the two orders and wondering what might have happened in the land of the rising sun instead. Brother Sun and Sister Moon and all that.

No, one of my colleagues retorted, the new pope is really invoking Francis Albert Sinatra, both because he made young people swoon in his day and because his Mafia connections give an idea of the offers that Francis I will make to the Curia tomorrow. Ok, Godfather III’s already been made. Not such a hot movie, or idea.

Another colleague suggests we might be getting two Francises for the price of one: Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain, buddy of the fascists, big fan of the Church. Francis I seems, as of this writing, to have had a not-uncheckered relationship with the military junta that ruled Argentina by ‘disappearing’ purported enemies of the state. You wonder: do papal candidates get vetted with one percent of the care that goes into background checks on American vice-presidential hopefuls?

Other Francises that have had political careers…. Francois I, king of France 1515-47. Calvin dedicated The Institutes to him in one edition, trying to play nice for the sake of gospel truth. Oops that. American side, we have one of the most and one of the least successful presidents bearing the name: Franklin Roosevelt and Franklin Pierce. At least Pierce could claim the greatest writer in the annals of campaign biographers: college buddy Nathaniel Hawthorne. In fact, Nathaniel died on the road with Franklin during the Civil War that both opposed. Hmmm.

Saint Francis the purported namesake of Francis I has some cities named after him. The one in California is not associated with a lifestyle of which His New Holiness approves. But then the fervently religious American folk who agree with the new pope on that issue diverge markedly from him on economics. Luckily for them that’s not a moral issue so it doesn’t come under the teachings of Jesus. Though it did seem to do so for Francis. The Assissi saint guy, I mean. Maybe we can resolve this all by invoking the real American St Franklin—cunning capitalist, yet no strait-laced puritan. Benjamin was his name.

Maybe. What’s your suggestion?

Higher Education Blues

Theresa Latini stole my thunder yesterday with her wise post, “How to Live Well and Faithfully in the Midst of Institutional Upheaval.” I’m glad she did, for her allusions to constricting markets, falling budgets, the downsizing of staff, the departure of some colleagues and the sweat of fear among those who remain give an apt picture of how things are in the “education industry” today. Her description was immediately pertinent at my own institution, for yesterday a long-awaited report was released in summary form by way of explaining how it is that Calvin College finds itself with $115 million of property debt and another $30 million overhang of, if you will, pre-payment penalties should we wish to get out from underneath some of the burden.

Theresa’s response to all of this is a model of sound pastoral care: abide, breathe, and communicate. My own reaction, as reports on bits and pieces of Calvin’s predicament have been released on campus over the past few months, usually ends up rattling between sorrow and anger bordering on rage. Yesterday’s release brought it all back; you can read it at http://www.calvin.edu/admin/president/finances/. Names are not included per campus policy, but exercise a bit of intelligent inference and you’ll get the picture. Particularly precious tidbits include the facts that—though not the reasons why—the debts in question were hidden, their interest payments not entered into the budget, the fund where they were lodged not audited, the committee in charge of investments not properly supervised by the college’s Trustees, etc. And etc., as the old comedian used to say. But since I’ve vented about this before in this space (see my post of last October 26: http://the12.squarespace.com/james-bratt/2012/10/26/if-sex-dont-getcha-the-money-will.html), I’ll try something else today.

When historians see a mess, they look for precedents, parallels, or analogies from the past. As it happens, I’ve been reading a remarkable collection of letters and reports pertaining to the early days of a sister institution: Envisioning Hope College, edited by Elton Bruins and Karen Schakel of Hope’s affiliated Van Raalte Institute. The bulk of the volume consists of letters from Hope’s—and Holland, Michigan’s—founder, the Rev. Albertus C. Van Raalte, to Philip Phelps, Jr., the east-coast Reformed Church man brought in to run a fledgling academy that grew into the college and its related Western Theological Seminary.

All these institutions have a solid record and sterling reputation today, making all the more glaring the financial struggles from which they emerged. We see the pious churchman Van Raalte—in other letters all absorbed in the conversion of sinners—bouncing from church to church in New York and New Jersey in a quest to raise $3000, battling stingy donors, negative press, and looming competition from other schools, mission societies, and every other good cause. Back home, he’s wrapped up in bank deals, land deals, medical practice, aspersions against his theology, a sickly wife, a slew of kids, and yearnings to escape to South Africa, where he can be a missionary and just tend to souls. Right--no complications there! Two sons having fought in the Civil War army, Van Raalte comes up with a scheme to start up a Dutch colony in conquered Virginia, the one he had originated in West Michigan apparently not having provided enough fun. He quickly learns that things going South has an unhappy metaphorical meaning.

But the post-Civil War North was a place for big thinking and bold schemes. Philip Phelps concocts a plan to expand the barely adequate Hope College into Hope Haven University. Does not the newly instituted theological branch constitute a graduate school? Is there not demand for a Female department? Does not a new donation of land offer possibilities for a cash-cow orchard that will simultaneously form the basis of a Scientific School? Phelps was present at the creation of a higher education boom in America, with land-grant colleges and tycoon-atonement projects popping up across the land, from Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University) to Vanderbilt, Stanford, and Carnegie Tech. Phelps had a noble vision of totally integrated Christian education, from grammar school through grad school, sustaining an integral Christian culture. The same vision was dawning upon Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands at much the same time.

Sometimes vision is cankered by bad financing, sometimes crippled by meager financing, sometimes thrives on modest financing achieved through sweat and sorrow. These things are not preordained by human reckoning. We simply have to strive on doing our best, acting always with honesty and integrity. In the tough times remembering Theresa’s council: to abide, to breathe, and to communicate. To which I will only add: to remember, and to try to remember aright.

Ask the Right Question

Last night I received a teaching award at my college--most surprisingly and not a little discomfiting, as the remarks below indicate. But an occasion to celebrate a worthy common project in our Reformed endeavor, nonetheless. Here, then, my acceptance speech.

When President LeRoy called me up with news of this prize, I immediately replied no, no, you can’t mean it. I was afraid that the awards committee was going to visit my next class, observe for five minutes, then quickly meet to revoke its decision. I started a mental list of four or five people just in my department who are better teachers than I. So, first denial, then anxiety, then bargaining—why was I responding to such good news by recapitulating the five stages of grief? I decided to drop that line and go for gratitude instead. Here then my simple, heartfelt thanks for this wonderful tribute. I accept it, as my predecessors in this prize all have, as a tribute to all Calvin College faculty­­ for the unrelenting commitment it takes to sustain good teaching day by day over the long run. Most of all, I accept it as a tribute to our common project of Christian liberal arts education.

Some of my best moments in that project came in teaching the students on our honors floor last year. Every Monday night from September to May we met to discuss a great book, in this case Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. I chose this title not because De Tocqueville, much less America, got everything right, but because of the penetrating questions this French aristocrat asked of a strange new democracy 180 years ago. I wanted us to be provoked by his observations to better understand this country and other countries today, and also to demonstrate how various disciplines can converge to enrich our comprehension of a subject.

Our conversations in that class were spritely, wide-ranging and very revealing—especially to me as a teacher. Because more often than not, as I was driving home, it would hit me: so that was the question in the room! That was the issue in the text! Not the one I had thought of or prepped for. Why hadn’t I seen it ahead of time and set it up foursquare from the start? Because I couldn’t discover it on my own, nor could the students. We had to find it together, off our pre-set plans.

Much of good teaching consists in simply asking the right question, but the right question is not so simple to find. It’s not evident at the start. We happen upon it by working our way through a puzzling maze of experiment and deliberation, in the lab, in the field, in the text. We think the answer is this and so the question must be that, but we learn when we discover that the question is really something else. This quite simply is what liberal arts education is at heart, and only by its means does this kind of learning occur. Don’t worry—the skills it teaches are readily transferrable and highly valuable, whether for crafting a legal brief, designing medical tests, or reading a balance sheet with integrity.

We may come to faith by the same process. At least so it happened for this good Grand Rapids boy. I was reared within the full matrix of Christian Reformed education (catechism, Sunday School, Christian day schools, and 110 sermons a year). Early on I learned that faith was the most important thing—the only gateway to salvation, the only hope in life, the only ground of lasting value. So I set out intently to get this faith. I worked hard at it. In fact, faith became the hardest work I’d ever done—hard, and quite unavailing. The quest left me hovering in mid-air, battering my head against a sky of brass. My professors here at Calvin did me the enormous service of listening to my doubts and giving me methods for interrogating those doubts. But in my case it was not until I became a father that the issue was ultimately joined, for then I finally had to face up to the existentialism I had encountered in philosophy and German literature classes here: is love forever? Could I love unreservedly in the face of death; commit utterly to these tiny new persons in full knowledge that separation and loss stand at the end of the road?

That was the question, and it unfolded its own answer: yes. And that answer itself opened up on the person of Jesus Christ who made precisely that same commitment to us. And in making it, broke through the wall of death into the mystery known as life everlasting. It’s not the theology that’s important right here—notice the process. Only when the question of faith changed to precisely the right question for me did Christ become Christ to me, and for me.

Faith and learning typically do not yield to direct assault. They come by indirection. We don’t even so often pose the right question as have it dawn upon us, a different proposition altogether. We stumble over it on the path to somewhere else. As we go forward together in recalibrating this college in the face of the harsh winds of change in higher education, may we remain open—no, resolutely committed—to this unmeasurable, seemingly inefficient process of searching and learning, for it is the true and proven way to wisdom, most worthy and irreplaceable.       

History Wars Part II

A couple months ago, in commenting on Lincoln the movie and some arguments it had triggered, I promised to return to a similar controversy over Thomas Jefferson some day. Pine no longer, gentle reader, the moment has arrived.

The matter involves big biographies by two journalists—the 500-page (not counting 215 more of notes) Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, and Henry Wiencek’s (once Time-Life) Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, half the size but triple the TNT. The arguments over these books might be more interesting than the volumes themselves as the coalitions  confronting each other across the battle front keep shifting: pro- vs. anti-Jeffersonians, naturally, but running athwart and not along that line, defenders of journalistic good reads vs. the guardians of academia, and devotees of complex portraits vs. champions of the driving thesis (not to mention ideology). Remembering too that “complex portrait” might itself amount to an ideology.

Meacham lauds Jefferson for being a consummate politician—an extraordinarily bright and broadly read politician, to be sure, a philosopher and scientist and architect and all that, but withal, a canny judge of people and the moment of opportunity, a guy that could get ‘er done. And get ‘er done he did. Jefferson was, Meacham avers, far and away the most successful politician of his generation, of the whole half century from Washington to Jackson, perhaps of all American presidents save for two or three others. To be sure, he had this blind spot about slavery. Tragic. A blight on his legacy. But what a genius—in the corridors of power and in the empyrean of learning and in knowing what of the one could be imported to the other.

To which Wiencek replies with a simple indictment. The young Jefferson opposed slavery; the post-Revolutionary planter endorsed it, profited from it, turned aside all objections to it, worked against measures that might undo it, limit it, ameliorate it, or put it on the road to eradication. All for the love of money. The Monster of Monticello, insists the author, was not a mild, conscience-stricken master caught in the toils of history and circumstance, as Jefferson’s apologists argue; nor was he first of all driven by racism, as other critics have charged. No, he consciously calculated how much money each live birth in the slave quarters netted him, and so turned them into a breeding pen, displacing his guilt into a rage against any notion that freed blacks and whites could ever live together in a free and harmonious society.

Wiencek’s book has elicited a cannonade, Meacham’s a meh. Too much extraneous detail that obscures whatever analysis his narrative might be venturing, it is said of the latter. A resolute hewing to the moderate middle ground. A book quite more ambitious in size than in argument. Wiencek is savaged for the opposite sins. Tendentious, manipulative of evidence and ignorant of that evidence’s context and meaning. An author in hate of his subject, a provocateur who exaggerates his originality and hides his reliance on established scholarship. Wiencek’s critics are not, as he appears to be, shocked! shocked!! to discover that Jefferson was an affluent (yet bankrupt) planter who championed democracy while living like an aristocrat off slave labor, nor do they dismiss the contradictions in the man as Wiencek accuses them of doing in his worst passages. Meacham’s critics, on the other hand, merely wonder what weight his book will finally pull in the rows of Founders Chic on bookstore shelves.

This baffled episode in an unending argument might simply testify to this: that Jefferson and every one of his contemporaries at the birth of America as an independent nation was not the god that Americans want ad fontes. That slavery was not incidental but fundamental to such freedom as early Americans could attain for themselves and their posterity. And that the bill thus overdue is still ours to pay.