How my mind has changed.

Hendel, Kurt K.

I joined the faculty of Concordia Seminary in July 1973. Hence, I was not subjected to the interviews, the accusations, or the personal and corporate attacks that my former teachers and then my colleagues had to face. My family and I moved into #3 Seminary Terrace very shortly after the New Orleans Convention, and it was immediately, tangibly evident that the life of the seminary community had changed radically since I graduated three years earlier. While I missed the faculty interrogations, I was present when the conflicts within the seminary and the church body reached their high point; when John Tietjen was suspended from office; when the students called a moratorium; when Martin Scharlemann, who asked for the initiation of a fact-finding process during my senior year at Concordia Seminary, became interim president; and when I, like my colleagues, had to decide whether I would honor the student moratorium and, shortly thereafter, whether I would submit to the Board of Control's dictum that the faculty resume teaching on the campus of Concordia or face dismissal. My presence here and now indicates the choices I made in consultation with my family.

I felt that I had very good reasons for making these decisions. My seminary studies, which I had completed only three years before being invited to return to Concordia to teach, had been a wonderfully enlightening, affirming, and freeing experience, intellectually, theologically, and spiritually. That was ultimately God's gift, of course, but God used the faithful men--and they were all men--who taught me at Concordia as God's means through whom the gift was given. My love for the biblical languages, for the critical study of Scripture, and for the gospel had been awakened at Concordia Senior College, but it was nurtured and truly blossomed at the seminary. My new attitude toward other Lutherans, even other Christians, was formed by the ecumenical perspectives of my teachers and of the leadership of the Missouri Synod. My growing conviction that women should be pastors was not simply a visceral response of someone who, after twelve years of doing so, was tired of going to classes only with males. Rather, it was due to new scriptural insights that I had gained; to a clearer understanding and experience of the freedom of the gospel; and to a growing awareness that women had always been important leaders in the church, albeit often behind the scenes, without the public support of the institutional church and without the grateful affirmation of the men who exercised leadership in the church. While we had a strong faculty advocate of the Vietnam War on campus, most of us had opposed that war from the beginning as we watched friends and former classmates going off to fight for a cause that we, and many of them, could not support. There were very few African-Americans enrolled at Concordia Seminary, but my seminary graduating class, impressed by the bold, yet peaceful, witness of Martin Luther King Jr., refused to attend a graduation banquet sponsored by Concordia Publishing House until this institution of the church promised to hire African-Americans, not only as dock workers and janitors, but also as white-collar employees and administrators. They did make that promise, and our graduating class participated in the banquet, eagerly anticipating the ministries to which we would be called.

Since my seminary career was such a formative time for me, primarily because of the faculty who taught me, it was quite evident to me whom I had to support in the conflict between the seminary and the church and between the majority and minority of the seminary faculty. I had to stand together with the majority of my teachers because I agreed with their stance and because I knew them to be faithful servants of the church. I was also deeply offended by the way they were treated by the community of faith they loved and served.

Hence I became part of the Seminex community. I was concerned about the unethical behavior of the church's leadership, and I knew that Christians, even Christians who disagreed with one another about important matters, should treat one another with respect and love. I realized that the use of the historical critical method did not destroy biblical authority. Rather, at least in my case, it enhanced my love for Scripture and its significance in my spiritual journey. I rejoiced that the ecumenical spirit had also manifested itself in North American Lutheranism and that even the Missouri Synod, long an opponent of anything that it considered to be syncretism and unionism, was eager to explore new relationships with fellow Christians, at least with fellow Lutherans. I trusted that the Holy Spirit was leading women to pursue pastoral ministry and that this same Spirit had moved the church to affirm the call to ministry that inspired these courageous and faithful sisters in Christ. The policies of the Nixon administration confirmed for me that my opposition to the Vietnam War was entirely justifiable. The martyrdom of Martin Luther King Jr. made it unmistakably clear that both the church and our United States society had to repent of its racism and affirm the struggle for equality of all races. These were all convictions inspired by a new understanding and appreciation of the freeing power of the gospel through which God restores not only the divine-human relationship but also opens up new possibilities for our dealings with one another and with the whole creation.

These were the reasons why 1 joined that band of exiles as we sang "The Church's One Foundation" and then followed the processional cross down the hill to De-Mun Avenue and eventually to St. Louis University and Eden Seminary. For these reasons, I was convinced that Concordia Seminary in Exile and eventually Christ Seminary--Seminex needed to exist as long as God willed, and it is because of these convictions that I was deeply grateful that many people agreed and expressed their agreement with generous gifts of support.

But I have changed my mind or, better, it has become clearer to me why I did what I did and why God called Seminex into being. It was about exegetical methodologies, ethics, ecumenism, racial and gender justice, war and peace. However, it was finally and ultimately about the gospel, and all of those other crucial concerns were reflections and inspirations of the gospel. After all, it is not a particular exegetical method that unlocks the Scriptures for us and points us to Christ so that we are nourished, enlightened, and enlivened by God's word. Rather, it is the radical good news that God is gracious and that God grants us all the gifts that we need, not because of who we are but in spice of who we have become, not because we merit God's grace or do just enough to tip the scale in our favor but because of what Christ has done for our sake. Hence, it is finally Christ, revealed in the gospel, who opens and explains the Scriptures for us and enables us to see God's saving activity in human history. It is Christ who inspires us to be agents of grace, peace and justice in our world. As the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod leadership accused the faculty of being gospel reductionists, they forgot that the gospel really is the key to understanding Scripture and the ultimate reason for the church's existence.

Thus it was the gospel that freed us to study Scripture with critical insight and to look for Christ rather than for proof texts for a particular theological perspective. It was the gospel that helped us recognize that faith is not rational assent to a specific, scholastic dogmatic tradition but fiducia, the ability to trust God's surprising, radical promises. It was the gospel that inspired us to be ecumeniacs; to recognize that we are one in Christ, whether we admit it or not and whether we manifest that unity or not. The gospel clarified that the Eucharist is truly God's means of grace that is not an ecclesiastical sign of dogmatic uniformity bur a gracious divine gift. It is a gift through which the Holy Spirit heals our brokenness, enables us to transcend our differences, inspires us to address what divides us, and gives us the wisdom to welcome the stranger and to celebrate our diversity even as we give grateful thanks that we are all one body of Christ. It was the gospel that enabled us to see particular scriptural texts with new eyes, to evaluate long-standing traditions in critical ways and to transcend traditional boundaries that discriminated against women and prevented them from serving God's people as pastors of the church. Even our concern for justice and for ethical behavior in the church was ultimately a fruit of the gospel because we recognized that unless our ethics are shaped and inspired by the gospel ethic of faith active in love, both our personal and our communal ethics will likely be legalistic, eudaimonistic, synergistic, or shaped by whatever is current political correctness. The gospel also clarified for us that while the quest for justice dare never be equated with justification, it is a natural consequence of the alien righteousness that is God's gracious gift to us for Christ's sake. It was the gospel that freed us to be theologians of the cross rather than theologians of glory, to let God be God, to call the thing what it really is and to recognize the paradoxical nature of God's saving work.

So, I have changed my mind. The Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod leaders were right about one thing. We were gospel reductionists in the best possible sense of that word, and I hope that we still are, for that is precisely what it means to be faithful to our Lord and faithful to our calling.

Kurt K. Hendel

Bernard, Fischer, Westberg Distinguished Ministry Professor of Reformation History Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago