By Tom Christenson

This question has been responded to differently at different times. When most of our Lutheran colleges and universities were founded the answer would have been, “We need them to train Lutheran pastors and teachers to serve the communities of German or Scandinavian immigrants coming into the country.”

A little later the answer probably would have been, “We need Lutheran colleges and universities* to help the children and grandchildren of those immigrants blend into the American mainstream at the same time that we remind them of their ethnic and religious heritage.” That answer served for quite a long time.  [* Rather than repeating “colleges and universities” each time, I have used “universities.”  Please understand that I intend to refer to both.]

But both of those answers assume that a Lutheran university is basically a “for us/by us” operation, that it is an institution for Lutherans by Lutherans serving Lutheran purposes. I think that’s a model that still does apply to Lutheran seminaries. It may even still apply at a college or two.  But in an institution like this one, where Lutherans are a minority of the student body and the faculty and the staff, it doesn’t serve well any more.

So, let’s ask the question again, “Why do we need Lutheran Universities?” Here are some other possible responses:

Response One

We don’t really need them. There are plenty of good schools of different kinds. Some of them like community colleges and on-line universities are growing at a tremendous rate.

Response Two

We need them because we have them. Every institution has in it some tendency to self-preservation even without knowing why. So, it may be thought, we have as much right to exist as anyone in the marketplace.

This answer is often accompanied by the belief that a Lutheran college ought to become just another generic institution, offering generic courses toward generic majors toward generic degrees.

This view must be tempting because I hear it from so many quarters, but I am convinced that becoming generic educational-unit-generators would be the worst mistake we could make. If students and their parents begin to perceive us in this way, then they will eventually ask themselves “Where can I get these generic credits at the lowest possible price?” If we try to play the generic game we will lose at it. It will end up with us trying to compete with the Wal-Marts of this world. Our students will leave, transfer out or transfer in randomly, because we have no identity and no value to offer. What graduates we do produce will have no more loyalty than I do to the grocery where I shop for the best price on toilet paper.

Response Three

There aren’t really any Lutheran universities any more, there are just “historically Lutheran universities.” They used to be Lutheran in the sense of being for Lutherans and by Lutherans, but they pretty much have evolved out of existence. I don’t think this is true, but it is a view I have heard colleagues give, so I suppose it’s worth voicing here.

Response Four

We need them because some of us have a nostalgia for them. There are still loyal alums and supporters who remember the Lutheran connection. Thus it gets trotted out at homecoming and other times when alums are likely to be present, but not often otherwise.

Response Five

We need them because we (faculty and staff) work at them and we need jobs.

Response Six

We need them because they are somewhat like places we admire and emulate (elite liberal arts colleges, small, caring, family-oriented colleges with ivy, etc.) They are places we’re happy to work at while we’re waiting for that call from Harvard or Caltech or whatever’s on your dream list.

I hope you notice that none of these responses provide very good reasons. Some of them are false, others are based on bad assumptions. None of these reasons are good enough to inspire a reflective person to devote her/his life, best energies, or life-savings to them. They certainly aren’t reasons good enough to make anybody want to start a new Lutheran university or to invest oneself in making one thrive and grow.

But to say that these are not good or essential or inspiring reasons is not equivalent to saying that there are no good reasons. It’s just admitting that these reasons, though frequently at the top of the sack of popular thought about such things, are not good reasons.

So let’s (for the third time) ask the opening question: Why do we need Lutheran Universities? Here is how I would answer:

1. We need universities that embody what Luther called “the freedom of the Christian.” Freed from the having to earn the love of God we are free to be fully and honestly human. We have no need to deny the body in service of some spiritual purity, we have no need to depart the natural to serve the supernatural. We can be, as Luther certainly was, both bodily and earthy and thoroughly creaturely. We are also freed from the rule of the world’s self-constructed hierarchies. We are freed to be women, not “not quite men,” to be students, not “not quite careered,” to be secretaries and custodians and steam engineers, not “not quite executives,” and even to be philosophers, not “not quite theologians.”Freedom is, I believe, the first premise of genuine education. Without that premise schooling just becomes a sucking up to some cultural agenda; being a success, or being cool or being in. To witness the absence of such freedom one only has to visit any high school in America, or perhaps any elite university?
2. We need universities that embody Luther’s own penchant for what I have called critical faithfulness. A Lutheran university should be a critical and self-critical place; a place that challenges the cultural, political, economic and religious assumptions and institutions of the age. Luther did that (and got in deep trouble for it), yet he was not critical in the way a cynic is critical (seeing through everything and committed to nothing), he was critical while being thoroughly engaged and thoroughly caring about the things he critiqued. He was a loving critic and a faithful critic and I think we should follow his model.As an implication of this we need to be universities that regularly stop and ask, “What are the idols of this age? What are the things that most people seem to assume? What are those assumptions built into our ways of seeing and knowing the world, that are built into our disciplines? What are the assumptions built into our culture’s models of success and into our understanding of what it means to be human?” The boldness and open-ness to pose questions of this sort ought to be characteristic of a Lutheran university.
3. We need universities that have deep historical and theological reasons for taking the education of the whole person seriously. There are so many forces in our contemporary world that want to reduce us to objects or to ciphers, or to our roles as producer and consumer. We badly need places that critique such reductionisms and that show what whole human regard is all about. There are many institutions that use the rhetoric of “holistic education,” but very few that actually take that seriously. Even our disciplines and professions may be reductionistic.We need universities that educate toward an enlarged and multi-dimensional humanity not toward a narrowed and flattened humanity. We need universities that connect scholarship to teaching and connect both to the personal growth of the student. Research universities can’t even connect the first two and can make no sense of connecting the latter.
4. We need universities that have deep theological reasons for taking earth-stewardship seriously. When I was a student this was not even on anyone’s awareness screen. I honestly think I was in my late twenties before I ever heard anyone talk about sustainable agriculture or an ecological footprint to say nothing of ideas like global warming or eco-justice. We were for a very long time ecologically blind, and then for a long time we’ve been in a state of ecological denial.But as people informed by the Genesis story of creation we should have been awake to this all along. The call to be the steward (not the possessor) of creation is there in the first two chapters of Genesis. Yet people who supposedly take that text seriously have been and continue to be complicit in the destruction of the creation. We need to ask why the most vocal so-called “creationists” are not also the leading voices for earth stewardship. The wasting and the destruction of God’s world, the world God declares over and over again to be good—this is not only bad science and stupidly short-sighted economics, it is blasphemy: wantonly abusing and wasting God’s lavish gift of creation. One of my favorite authors, Wendell Berry, has expressed it thus:
   

   Too often modern Christianity is still at bottom the religion of Miss Watson, intent on a dull and superstitious rigamarole by which we can avoid going to “the bad place” and instead go to “the good place.” One can hardly help sympathizing with Huck Finn when he says, “I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it.” . . . . modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into heaven, it has allowed itself to become the tool of much earthly villainy.

   We need people and institutions that take earth-stewardship seriously, learning to celebrate the gifts of creation and learning to be care-takers of it. We have many good reasons to be such places.

   Of course we must be learners in this regard at the same time that we are teachers. It certainly is not the case that my generation can teach this younger generation how to live sustainably. We must make a confession (of both ignorance and responsibility) and then become a community of learners. This is my favorite definition of a teacher anyway – “a teacher is a communicative learner.”

5. We need universities that have agendas for taking peace, justice, compassion and forgiveness seriously. We can do that in courses and programs such as peace studies, studies about political and economic justice, etc. But we can also do this in the very basic ways in which we treat each other: ways we make each other feel welcome or unwelcome, ways we reach out to those who have been hurt in one way or another, ways we provide support for those who are struggling, ways we give opportunities to begin again. The early church was noted by both its supporters and its critics as a radically inclusive community, a place where all kinds of distinctions of utmost importance in the empire counted for nothing: were you rich or poor, slave or free, citizen or alien, male or female, Jew or Greek?This combination of things, (reaching out to the outsider, dwelling in peace, seeking justice, practicing compassion, forgiveness) create a bundle that my friend Nick Wolterstorff has called by the Hebrew word, shalom. It is his and my belief that universities like this ought to be a bit different because they are embodiments of a different view of what it means to be human, to be humans in the world and to be humans with humans. To be in a world without humans, to be in a world where no one treats you as a human, that is a horror story of the worst imaginable sort. Yet we know that it is not just imagination because it’s a story that has been played out in the gulags and concentration camps and killing fields and sweat shops that we’ve witnessed again and again in the last century.
6. We need universities that have a calling to serve by means of education the deep needs of the world. One of Luther’s key ideas was his understanding of vocation. He believed that every human is called to do God’s work. But unlike most of his contemporaries he did not understand God’s work to be the doing of something peculiarly religious. Luther says:
   

   Every person has a calling. While tending to it God is served. A king is doing God’s work when he is at pains to look after the welfare of his people. So does a mother when she tends to the needs of her children . . . and a student when he applies himself to his studies. …  When a maid milks the cows or the farmer hoes the field they serve God more truly than all the monks and nuns … If this could be impressed on common people every servant and every householder would dance for joy and praise God. … If everyone would regard their service to their neighbor as service to God the whole world would be filled with Gottesdienst [literally “god-service” this is also the German word for the worship liturgy]. The king, the stable master, the kitchen servant, the child in school, these are really God’s workers.

   I want to quote a few lines from a poem, To Be of Use, by contemporary poet Marge Pierce, because they illustrate this vocation idea so concretely.

   The people I love the best
   jump into work head first
   without dallying in the shallows . . .

   I love people who harness themselves, as ox to heavy cart,
   who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
   who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
   who do what has to be done again and again. . . .
   . . . the thing worth doing done well
   has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
   Greek amphoras for wine and oil,
   Hopi vases that held corn are put in museums,
   but you can see they were made to be used.
   The pitcher cries out for water to carry
   and a person for work that is real.

   I want to spend a little more time with the concept of vocation because in some ways it brings together the other themes so well. How does Luther’s understanding of vocation apply to the university?

   • Luther’s concept of vocation makes us look at the dignity of all work differently. It makes us not so ready to buy into the ways our culture rewards and ranks work. It should make us suspicious of the cultural idea of prestige. It should make us want to honor work by how well it serves real needs rather than by how close to the corner office it gets. What alums do we honor? What retirements do we celebrate? What workers do we thank? Perhaps we should ordain people for every work, not just pastors?
   • Luther’s understanding of vocation makes us see learning as ultimately focused on service. Our culture is most likely to see learning as a training to be a commodity–“we need workers for the world economy” our leaders say.  If we see the world as a world of jobs, our view is limited in a certain way. All you have to do is read the want ads for a few weeks to get a feeling for what that world looks like. We have a vocation wherever the gifts we possess intersect with the needs of the world.  To view the world as an intersecting world of needs and gifts expands our vision and expands our view of the possibilities. Someone saying, “It’s not my job,” expresses a very different relationship to the world than someone saying, “It needed to be done.”Another common view of the justification of learning is seeing it as a ticket to elite society and high culture. With such an education I can enjoy the best concerts and converse about the best books with the best people in the nicest places. It’s a tempting view, but not one that Luther would buy into.A third, and less common view, sees learning as an end in itself, something done just for the joy of it. Luther recognizes the appeal of this, having felt such joy himself, but he sees it too as something of a temptation embodied in the monastic ideal that the highest human calling is a life of pure contemplation. So he reminds us that learning also ought to serve the needs of the world, the real needs of the neighbor.

     In contrast to all these views, Luther’s concept of vocation makes us look at all education as potentially focused on service.

   • Luther’s concept of vocation should make us critical of the professions, our institutions, and the ways we have of preparing people for them. Examples:
     

     Law school trains attorneys & other legal professionals.
     Education majors train people for certification in education.
     Pre-med and nursing programs train people for health professions.

     But in each case we need to stop and ask, “How do these professions serve the deep needs of the world?” “Do they serve well the needs of those who come to them in deepest need?” “Are these professions and the institutions that embody them really serving the needs of the professionals who work in them and not primarily those who come to them in need?”

     The idea of vocation as an idea shaping education should lead us to see education in a different way; a way more expansive, more focused both on the need of students and the needs of the world, and a way more critical. In the last issue of The Washington Monthly there is a ranking of colleges and universities that counts both open-ness to economically disadvantaged students and the service records of graduates among the ranking criteria. Needless to say the rankings turn out quite different than the U.S. News & World Report ranking does (where one can increase one’s ranking by refusing to admit a larger percentage of one’s applicants). Interestingly eight of the twenty-eight ELCA colleges are listed in Washington Monthly’s top 100. By the U.S. News rankings only two are in “the elite 100.”

I think there are three major dangers for universities like ours in the contemporary world. They are dangers because they are temptations:

1. There is the temptation of religious insularity, moving back toward what I called the “for us / by us” model of religious education and religious identity.
2. There is the temptation of becoming generic institutions delivering generic courses toward generic degrees in a perfectly transferable marketplace.
3. There is the temptation of becoming elite colleges hosting elite students funded by elite parents and supported by elite alums and federal research grants. This latter one may not be a danger for all of us because it is so far beyond our realization. But I think the danger lies not just in achieving such things but also in being tempted by them.

Many of the things I’ve talked about above as characterizing Lutheran universities are in our root stock because they are biblical (like the idea of shalom and earth-stewardship and whole-personhood), some are there because they are Christian (like the understanding of radical inclusiveness and compassion), but some of them are there because they are peculiarly Lutheran (like critical faithfulness and the idea of vocation as service of the deep needs of the world). It is not important that any of them are exclusively ours. It is important, I believe, that we take them seriously, not that no one else does.

So, who needs a Lutheran University?

I think that the answer (or at least a good part of it) is now becoming plain. If we are what we claim to be –

1. The world needs such places, for they are places that perennially articulate those deep needs and find ways, through education, to produce humans who can address them.
2. Our students need them, students who are open to seeing life as a calling to service, but also students who thought they were here just to get a degree but find themselves called to something more (“I came here to get a degree but I ended up getting an education”). For such students the university years are years of growth as persons, years of transformation of vision, years of calling, and all of these honed against the stone of a particular discipline.
3. The professions and our disciplines need them because both need places where they can be pursued critically and self-critically, honestly and humanly.
4. The church needs them for I believe it is in such places that we begin to realize what it means in the contemporary world to “love our neighbor as ourself.” Like the very religious young man in the “good Samaritan” narrative in the gospel of Luke who comes to Jesus asking about the path to eternal life, the church (and in fact religious people everywhere) are tempted to focus on the love of God and miss the needs of the neighbor, miss the gifts we have to share in serving such needs, and miss the dimensions of neighborliness altogether. The ‘good Samaritan” story that Jesus tells is, I believe, played out for us over and over again in the lives of our students and the people they go on to serve. The love of God is not realized through an exclusive occupation with God, but through a refracting of God’s love into the world. Christians and other religious folk need to see this. Our Lutheran colleges and universities are places they could see this if they looked.
5. You and I need them? I shouldn’t speak for you I suppose, but I am excited by the prospect of a university distinguished by these themes: Christian freedom, critical faithfulness, education toward whole personhood, earth-stewardship, and vocation. A place that took such ideas seriously would be a great place to learn, an exciting place to teach and a challenging place to serve.

In conclusion let me say that I think that these are good reasons for the Lutheran universities we have. They are also good reasons for universities to take their Lutheran-ness seriously and for all of us to rejoice when they do.