Faithed Secularity: The Promise of a "Lutheran" College in the 21st Century

The Rev. Dr. Duane H. Larson — March 23, 2010

The Rev. Dr. Duane H. Larson is president of Wartburg Theological Seminary.

The topic of a Lutheran vision for colleges and universities is strangely both familiar and unfamiliar. It is familiar because it crops up as a key conversation piece in Lutheran higher education circles at least generationally, if not even every 10 years. It is a theme that Carthage College itself has given explicit attention to over its years and continues to accent, if regular advertising in The Lutheran magazine be an indicator of such commitment (in addition of course to significant formal and scholarly conversations!). But the theme is also unfamiliar insofar as its Jack-in-the-box pop-up character shows that we haven't paid sustained attention to the question. Further, it is ever more unfamiliar as so-called secularity now transcended by so-called post-modernity has framed our minds all the less to think about a college's religious identity and the meaning of such for the college's teaching vocation.

So it is a delight and humbling honor to be invited as a part of this occasion to think with you about the "Role and Purpose of Lutheran Colleges and Universities in the 21st Century." It is especially humbling to be asked to speak "under the name" of William Lazareth, an indefatigable and artful public theologian and proponent of Lutheran higher education (among so many other things) if ever there were one! If anyone were to make this theme both familiar and sustained, it was he; the very same who sought breadth and coherence in both his theology and attire. Bill was an exemplary Lutheran pastor, ecclesiastical leader, confessional and ecumenical theologian and social ethicist, who could also quickly point out when a colleague mistakenly mixed a plaid tie with a striped shirt. And he did all this and more with his wonderful, — some would say idiosyncratic — east-coast air of a bishop's authority.

My own title under the theme for this lecture series plays on Dietrich Bonhoeffer's notion of a secularized faith (religionless Christianity). I have reversed the terms so to affirm that any college or university's role (I will use the terms interchangeably) is to prepare citizens for leadership by embracing the best of human knowledge and creativity so to advance the dignity of all people and to strive toward an ever more just and hospitable global sociality. But we must do so neither with a secularistic nor a religious fundamentalism. I do believe that an acknowledgment of ultimate dependence on someone or something greater than human being can conceive (1) is absolutely necessary for the human and creaturely project of transcendence. I also believe that such ultimate dependence must cohere with all progress of the arts and sciences. Thus I acknowledge my own bias toward a philosophical dialectic of religion and science at the outset. This, of course, will pre-frame some things I will suggest as a Lutheran Christian for the role of higher education in this century. And as a Lutheran theologian, I will rehearse some traditional theological themes that may not often be heard in a university setting, just so that I might suggest their implications for such settings, after stating "the problem" before in somewhat autobiographical terms.

A fulsome exploration of the theme would attend to foundational texts on the theme more generalized. This will not happen here. Of course, such a full rehearsal would start with Luther and Melanchthon. It would attend to John Henry Newman's The Idea of A University and to Jaroslav Pelikan's Reexamination of Newman. It would also consider the midrashes of Gil Meilander and others published in places like First Things. Such writing, I suggest, represents a general Newmanesque perspective on a Lutheran subject. A more moderate and — and perhaps more protestant style — is seen in the work of Tom Christenson (2), Darrell Jodock (3), and Ernest Simmons (4). One major thinker on such things who aligns materially with the "Newman" group while formally with the "protestants" is Robert Benne. One of the clearest statements of the meaning of the question comes from him. I will pose the problem with a quick summation of Benne's take, and then proceed with my own comments.

Lutherans in the United States have never had a univocal rationale for higher education, though we certainly have kept an extraordinary and exemplary commitment to it. The 26 colleges and universities of the ELCA still are remarkable in that they maintain a nominal relationship with the denomination, as compared, say, to innumerable other protestant-related schools that may have a tradition, but little else to signal themselves as faith-based. The colleges of the Missouri synod system exemplify a more doctrinal commitment in their constitutional documents and public relations than do we of the ELCA type. For some commentators this suggests that our ELCA schools are founded more out of a commitment to the continuance of an ethnic or cultural tradition. I get that. Raised on tacos on Saturday when I grew up in southern California, I was surprised by the strange tortillas (aka lefse) introduced to me at a Lutheran university of Norwegian background when I showed up there in 1971 to begin my undergraduate studies. So Benne writes.

... Lutheran colleges ... have an uphill battle to maintain their identity. Some schools that once had a clear rationale are, in fact, already losing it. A number of reasons for this are obvious. Some colleges fight for survival and are willing to adapt to market conditions even if it means giving up their religious center. Some [college leaders] ... do not believe that the Christian vision is any longer an adequate vision for organizing the life of a college. For many..., religion is a private, interior matter that should not be publicly relevant to the educational enterprise. Some colleges can no longer agree on the center and fall into a kind of chaotic pluralism (5).

Strong words. But they represent one significant perspective and help to clarify the issues for whatever argument it is that one would make on this subject. Of course, some Lutheran schools did realize a clear rationale for a public claim of their religious identity, and they did so on the liberal arts basis of traditioned Christian humanism. There are noted schools that ensured their Lutheran identity, Carthage among them, by way of certain faculty positions (like the Brauer chair), the visibility of their campus pastors, the public commitments of their administrators and Board members, and of course by their mission statement. By such means schools intend that a thoughtful and hospitable Lutheran Christianity would be clearly discerned in them. Still, the maintenance of a cultural ethos was a dominant raison d’être in many Lutheran schools, while usually of a para-curricular character. If the desire of the university leadership when I was an undergrad truly was to raise people like and unlike me in "the atmosphere of their culture" and were otherwise conceptually unclear about the point of their mission (6), there was new and already dry writing on the wall. The character of our commitment to Lutheran identity eventually would be clarified not so much under doctrinal terms. The new ink of the sixties and seventies also may already have compromised any collegiate commitments to Christian humanism (that was the "brand" of the day). But a conversation was beginning even then about a Lutheran college's commitment to free-inquiry and hospitality toward pluralism under the sign of the cross.

Hints toward a theology of the cross in higher education

The faculty of that same university that introduced me to Norwegian tortillas introduced me to an image that ever since has symbolized for me the unique Lutheran dialectic of reason and faith: the image of "the lamp and the cross." The latter does not "fulfill" the former, as would a Catholic perspective along the lines of Aquinas or Newman. Indeed, more like Augustine's understanding of faith's relation to reason, faith and reason enjoy both a tensive and complementary relationship. Together, on this side of mortality, faith and reason make for what wholeness human-being can receive, and they also act as mutual boundary conditions such that neither faith nor reason can dominate the other. That faculty agreed then in the '70s to the following.

[This] university identifies itself unreservedly as a Christian University. Moreover, it understands this identity from a distinctly Lutheran perspective. Only so does it maintain its integrity as a university without compromising its character as Christian. For a university that is Lutheran, faith cannot tyrannize reason nor can culture be subsumed under the faith. To do so only leads to legalism, which is the greatest enemy of the Gospel, and to a religious pretense, which is the greatest enemy of knowledge. (7)

The background to this statement was dramatic. The faculty, less than 40 percent Lutheran at the time, adopted a Lutheran understanding of faith's relation to reason at just a time when its president advocated that the university be less related to the church. This understanding of the cross as central to a Lutheran university's identity, right alongside the centrality of the Lamp, with neither cross nor lamp trumped or ignored by the other, is very different from the transcendental role of faith in western catholic philosophy and the wholly normative role of faith in American evangelicalism. For Lutherans, faith and reason finally do visibly "fuse," as it were, but eschatologically, and not in the form of human finitude. While there is much of the Christian humanist sensibility in this view, the Lutheran "cross" adds something new and different (at least new to 19th and 20th century Christian humanist terms).

The faculty understanding I have just quoted was certainly not unique then, nor is it unfamiliar now. What interests me even more is that a new representation of Luther's theology of the cross was just emerging in theological circles around the world at the same time that this dialectical application of the cross and the lamp was happening in some Lutheran colleges. The arguments about and from Luther's theology of the cross were fresh and exciting. We discerned in this theology a new hermeneutic (again) that opened the meaning of the cross to vistas far beyond only atonement piety.

And a similar dynamic, though not so explicit, seemed to be happening with some Lutheran faculty with regard to the role of their colleges, too. Both were dedicated against totalizing explanations of reality and epistemic, religious, or ideological hegemony. Luther employed his particular theology of the cross, for example, against such totalizing or arrogant thought systems imposed by his Roman or hyper-Protestant antagonists. Four centuries later, the re-emergence of Luther's teologia crucis birthed Liberation Theology and subsequent theological movements bent toward equity and justice. For Luther and those close to him, the cross signed that God was on the side of those who could not choose sides. The cross was a sign of how God would check arrogance and presumption, especially the arrogant presumption that human beings in politics or theory could ever suppose what God was up to, or could ever define under whatever philosophical categories how God would, even must, act. The cross was God’s sign that, yes, God would and does align with weakness, just so that God thereby from weakness would remind self-willed saints and scholars that God is so free that no category or frame could suggest where to find or how to describe the divine. God will be God. Thus God will surprise us and show up where we would not expect.

It is probably fair to say that a self-consciously secular college will presume God not to show up anywhere, and a "faith dominant" college will presume God is almost everywhere but assuredly not in some places. A Lutheran college, cognizant of the meaning of God's cross, will not presume to know where God is in any place apart from where God has promised to be (in the preached word and the sacraments; and in all places of suffering). That college then also maintains a humble hospitality to the prospect that something divine could happen in the most unexpected places of daily campus-life, like laboratories, residence halls, and faculty meetings. I've discovered that God even shows up in a seminary president's office, and perhaps not as often in mine as in that of my Carthage College counterpart. The cross means that God will be God in God's own way. And God has chosen the way of human weakness and suffering most clearly to make God's own love, power and self known.

In sum: God's choice in the cross to align with what to us is so ungodly limits us in our presumptions about what is godly, and so makes us more human yet. That is a saving act of God toward us, out of what appears to be God's weakness. Thus so graciously given a boundary-condition from God, reason then is given free reign not to be God, but to serve the neighbor in love and rejoice in knowledge for its own sake, not out of any need for reason to prove its worth, or to pretend it has divine capacities.

The Function of the Doctrine of Justification for Higher Education Pedagogy

At this point we move from the distinctive Lutheran contribution of the theology of the cross to the Lutheran doctrine of justification. I must presume that you already have heard something about this primary talking point for what constitutes Lutheran identity. Please pardon repetition where you find it to be unhelpful. And where I display difference, I hope that would be received as a sign of the richness of the doctrine.

Most simply, justification by grace through faith refers to God's taking the initiative to redeem humankind and the world. And the doctrine of justification is the grammar which would guide our speech about God's activity. The grammar also is compact, though the material it covers is large. We are fallible mortals with an active history of sin. We are wonderfully capable of a certain self-transcendence. History proves it. In the wink of an eye on the cosmic time scale, we have trodden with gargantuan steps. We are benevolent and bold. We are stardust come to mind. Further, we know it and can now predict in grand cultural evolutionary leaps even a more expansive use of mind and hand. But we are not perfect. We maintain willful illusions about ourselves and our capabilities. We are so self-preoccupied that we name rewards as the necessary motivation for care of the neighbor. Out of such self-concern has proceeded a murderous history. We despoil creation and society while we really do know better. The good that we would do we do not, and the ill we would not do we do. The classic formula of original sin holds: we are non posse non peccare, not able not to sin. This is so true it affects all of our practical, scholarly and religious pursuits, individually and most assuredly collectively. We do not require scriptural citations to make the point, though they are many. We know this well from the liberal arts and sciences. This Augustinian theme is common to Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, Mary Shelly, and a blue James Cameron. This theme extends further into chaos theory, quantum mechanics and that most scientifically and intellectually normative law of all: Murphy's. If something can go wrong it will, because inevitably human being will make it so, while also making much good. There are no ivory towers of pure thought, and no golden streets or grassy plains of purely gracious deed. Good can and does rise out chaos. But evil also rises out of order.

Gosh, this sounds dire. I am reminded of George Bernard Shaw's definition of the pessimist as one who is afraid the optimist is correct. So how then can one live if humans will always screw up even when doing the best? The answer is like that given by Luther's theology of the cross. We can live, and abundantly so, because God's justification of the ungodly through Jesus Christ apart from any merit of our own frees us to do so. We are freed from our own needs to be God or godlets, as one teacher of mine used to say (the Fall story of Genesis tells of a "fall upward," the tempter's winning line being "you will be like God."). Because God has justified us in Christ crucified and risen, we are forgiven and set free from self-preoccupation. This is also to say that we now can acknowledge freely that we, with our words and deeds, are secured for God and the neighbor, even while in human time we are incomplete and imperfect.

An education that would have a self conscious "Lutheran" brand to it (though it need not always be named) begins, then, in the freedom given by justification finally and truly to communicate with one another. In a Lutheran frame, justification is the theological ground for any genuine education, even when that education is responsibly secular, because this ground enables us to speak freely and in depth. Before justification, we are but prisoners within ourselves stuck in the task of finding the right (and impossible) words to justify ourselves when we attempt to communicate with another. So often, it seems as if the point is not really to communicate but only to present our best self-constructed image to the other in the hope, as it were, that we are "friended" on Facebook as a response.

Certainly justification means that finally I and each of us are freed from the bondage of self-preoccupation. Because my future is secured in God, I need no longer be compelled to justify myself and put my own stars on my own crown. I am freed from the sins of my past and from my anxiety disorder around them that would cast all my relationships into dysfunction. I, in all my particularity and peculiarity, do not need to prove myself. About "me" I need not worry and can be playful. But about you, about the neighbor, I can be most serious, for I am in my particularity freed and called to serve you and show you your future in God's love. Think of how in undergraduate education so much counseling bears on freeing the young adult to claim her or his own voice and vocation, and this within the a very demanding and anxiety-inducing matrix. To help one move from perseveration about one's self to a mature claim of one's vocation of service to the world is a huge psychological transition, for which justification provides the most foundational spiritual support.

This is the point where we too often stop spelling out the implications of the doctrine of justification, though we’ve actually barely started. There is more to the doctrine than the psychological implications I have rehearsed, though they surely are important. But the doctrine also carries a metaphysical import that is equally critical. Justification concerns the right relationships of the things of this world, too; not just myself, not even just myself with other selves, but me with everything. So I argue that justification is also social. There is no justified me apart from a justified community meant for the justification of the world. Justification is also about the reality that God defines and creates as God’s reconciled, justice-filled world.

The trajectory of the biblical witness and the creedal foundation of the church is absolutely clear on this point of justification and reality. The world which God intends is profoundly both personal and social. Justification is God's way of putting us back into the divine life of the Trinity, which means that real life is meant to be social and communitarian. Justification intends and is fulfilled in community. And where members of a community, or a community of communities, would be concordantly related (justified), it necessarily follows that we practice justice. Justice is justification practically enacted between individuals and peoples if justification is a reality statement of social consequence at all.

Now what could these implications of justification and justice mean for the vocation of a Lutheran college in the 21st century? Well, some markers in the 21st century will not be new. A first implication to my mind concerns the vital and honorable commitment to academic freedom or the freedom of inquiry. We know this value is threatened perennially by forces of religious intolerance, anti-intellectualism, and in a certain way also by fundamentalistic humanists (8). A Lutheran perspective not only allows, but demands, academic freedom. Some even argue that the Lutheran tradition more than any other "provides a more secure foundation for academic freedom." (9) Justification means that the heart and the mind are to be set free for the proper things of human pursuit, and for the best of human being to be employed in such pursuit. Reason rules, so long as it does not pretend toward the things that inhere in God rather than humans.

Even the theology of the cross calls, if obliquely, for reason's reign, sometimes also known by us as common sense. "A theologian of the cross calls a thing for what it is, and does not see in something a thing that is not," Luther famously remarked in his Heidelberg Disputation. Free speech is truth-speaking. Truth-speaking only happens where words are freely and/or courageously spoken. Truth-speaking also presumes the categories of the true, the good, and the beautiful (so Plato and Aristotle). Academic freedom seeks the true, the good and the beautiful. Already these central Lutheran themes of the theology of the cross and the doctrine of justification provide a solid foundation for the practice of academic freedom in the traditional university curriculum.

More yet strengthens this foundation. The Lutheran tradition is keen on the doctrine of creation. Sure, there is a stream of dour Lutheranism that seems to really enjoy the incessant confession of sin. But there is a huge positive side to the doctrine of creation. Everything (!) that God creates God calls good. That leaves nothing not good but for nothingness itself. Not only are the "things" of the world, material reality itself, good, but their given properties themselves, all that would identify them as they are. Reason is among such good faculties. Luther goes further. Most Lutherans at least used to know these lines. "I believe that God has created me and all that exists. He has given me and still preserves my body and soul [mind!] with all their powers. Day by day God provides me with home and family, food and clothing, all I need from day to day." The doctrine of creation adheres to the doctrine of providence. God gives me reason. And it is good. And it is better when I would practice it well, as it is meant to be employed.

The Lutheran stance demands reason's play, especially in the arena we are accustomed to calling secular. All that God gives to us, including reason — and love — are meant not to secure our salvation. That is already done by God. They are intended as means by which to serve God and neighbor in the midst of daily life. All this happens in the so-called "left hand" reign of God, where life is intended as secular according to God’s own design. Luther’s doctrine of vocation — a word that has received a new healthy respect in universities today, though perhaps not in the for-profit sector of higher education — unveils finally what we might call a "faithed secularity." Luther observed that God wants people to be the best with what they are given. If a barber, be the best at it. If a shoemaker, likewise. It was even better for Luther that a politician be a Turk and good at his craft than a Christian and mediocre. My, what Luther might say of religion and politicians today! Also, Lutheranism's birth in a university and the movement’s growth through universities over and against religious hegemony is the historical side of Lutheranism’s theological insistence that a healthy secularity (not secularism) safeguard society from religious extremism, which also too often funds anti-intellectualism. The cross demands the lamp, and the lamp demands the cross when the lamp’s oil overflows.

Freedom, academic or otherwise, of course, for Luther did not license anarchy. Freedom has a purpose.  has a purpose. As one's vocation (call) is to serve secular and religious society in the best way possible with one’s gifts, including reason, freedom always bends in service toward the neighbor and community. This relates to the doctrine of justification's insistence on social and not only personal transformation.

Freedom for neighbor and for community: doing justice

In his 1524 open letter "To the Councilmen of all Cities in Germany that They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools," Luther wrote: "Now the welfare of a city does not consist solely in accumulating vast treasures, building mighty walls and magnificent buildings, and producing a goodly supply of guns and armor. Indeed, where such things are plentiful, and reckless fools get control of them, it is so much the worse and the city suffers even greater loss. A city's best and greatest welfare, safety, and strength consist rather in its having many able, learned, wise, honorable, and well-educated citizens."

Link this with Luther's familiar maxim from his Treatise on Christian Freedom. "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is fully servant, subject to all." The freedom one is given by God's justifying work in Christ means indicatively, not prescriptively, that the Christian then will activate her freedom and faith through love. She will use all she is given, including reason, to make her love effectual for the good of the neighbor. In this maxim, justification intends justice. In this way, individual freedom/salvation moves the believer toward social transformation. A Lutheran university (if even but a few in it are Lutheran!) thus has within itself all the tools and theological premises so to love God and neighbor. If the minority be Lutheran and the majority other, friendliness toward the Lutheran premises and goals in a university setting is enough (satis est!) for the Lutheran "brand" to be effective (and, after all, Luther never intended a self-named movement in the first place.).

The genius of a "Lutheran" idea of the university fuses the commands to love God, neighbor, and creation and serves such love with its wealthy bank of reason so wonderfully and divergently employed. A Lutheran university is inspired to do just so by the freedom given to minds and bodies whose futures (i.e., our futures!) are secured in Christ. Luther's "sin boldly" has as much to do with what happens in laboratories, classrooms, business models and one's theoretical musings as with the selfless care of a neighbor in the face of a tyrant's threat. The advancement of a whole social world is implied in all. Luther, of course, has a fitting summarizing word. "We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not to himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love." (10) A Lutheran university's activities, then, so premised and in all respects, directly or indirectly, bends toward justice.

Diversity and Pluralism

Because justification necessarily yields social consequences, justification also necessarily means that a Lutheran school welcomes and engages pluralism, or diversity. I know that in many educational settings today the word "diversity" has come to denote the practice of different teaching modalities and welcoming access to people of widely divergent learning capacities. While this includes multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural audiences along with other "multis", I want to be clear that by my use of "diversity" here I mean the acknowledgment of and respect for deep pluralism that any notions of justification, hospitality, and a positive doctrine of creation must posit. And so I mean by the acceptance of diversity, too, that it affirms the pursuit of equity and inclusivity in a pluralistic world. The mere act of tolerating diversity is not enough. In our own American climate of e pluribus unum we have always held as a value that homogeneity is not the same as unity. Unity is of difference and even informed by difference. It is a dialectic well exemplified in the distinctly American conversation between radically pluralistic William James and his friendly philosopher colleague, the radically communitarian Josiah Royce. We have healthy philosophical precepts enough on the American scene throughout its history. But for the xenophobic talking heads in every era, the argument for American exceptionalism always has been that freedom in diversity strengthens society. Diversity is essential in any fully thought-out notion of community.

But there is value-added, too, in a Lutheran Christian idea of diversity. This idea argues a metaphysical or ontological basis for diversity. This idea hold that those who are made in God's image are made in the image of Trinitarian community, wherein the different members live and love in full reciprocity, simultaneously enhancing each other’s difference and deepening community. Luther himself shows an early, though undeveloped, appreciation of such implications by acknowledging his debt to Hilary of Poitiers' exposition of the dogma.

There are too many interesting implications to spell out fully from this foundational insight presently. But it surely suggests that a university that recognizes a Lutheran impulse in itself will welcome and practice diversity as both a tool of reason and object of respect, because it is given by and even in God's own self. This means a further respect for secularity too. Mark R. Schwehn's insight is on target. If Lutheranism was at root engaged with both church and university, then Lutheranism's vocation always has been to engage the whole world, with all that that means. Schwehn stresses, "Lutheran universities cannot be true to the roots of their heritage unless they are themselves constituted by people of all faiths and backgrounds." (11) I take Schwehn's words at face value so to include "secular" dispositions and practices.

Still, this orientation does not require a commitment to a metaphysically radical pluralism, else language itself would be impossible. Post-modernism does have its limits (and is likely waning). Every university is implicitly dedicated to the assumption and pursuit of intellectual coherence. The "buzz" of pluralism in the culture at large and expressed in the internally diverse interests of college life itself could compromise such coherence. Sometimes the powers of intellectual ideals, compelling theories, professional allegiances, market demands, or even church affiliations could appear to claim final authority. But a university finally succeeds in its vocation only on the premise of the unity of truth. Indeed, a pluralistic world can be celebrated and otherness honored only on the premise of a transcending truth that holds all together.

A Lutheran university, again accented by its distinctive doctrine of vocation, will be even more progressive than it's simply secular peer, insofar as it understands that all vocations — when rightly performed — serve God's interests in honoring the diversity of God's creation. If all God's creatures have a place in the choir, then all kinds of minds can gather at the smart board. All good vocations do so without having necessarily to stamp a sectarian or ideological copyright on such activity. Lutheran higher education is distinctive and inspiring, thus, because it begins with humility at the cross where human freedom is given. It continues with freed zeal to hold high the lamp of reason. It will be broadly ecumenical and broadly inter-religious. And it regularly extends personal and intellectual hospitality as a refrain of gratitude. In sum, God's one world is served in the honoring of diversity. And diversity re-invests in and compounds the community of God's world. In this way diversity is integral to the Lutheran idea of the university.

Is The Idea of Faithed Secularity for A University Viable?

So, is there "added value" with a "Lutheran" predicate for the university in the 21st century? If by "added value" one means a way to survive and even grow successfully in an economy of "niched" markets, rather than trying to have the biggest market share ("Walmart University"), then the answer is a fairly easy yes. But I have tried to argue for something more fundamental than that. I have tried to argue that tried and true values like academic freedom, diversity, hospitality — long hallmarks of the idea of the university, which now, unfortunately, are too often presumed than well-argued — may have a stronger foundation yet when practiced from a Lutheran disposition. And yet this disposition need not be an imposition on presumed values. When discussed at some length, it could even deepen those values. The new control test, I think, will be with those for-profit colleges and universities that govern from top-down, impose a template on all courses of study, and measure their success only by wide-access rather than by the consequences of a well-articulated and deeply "owned" mission and vision, such as a Lutheran one. Will that Lutheran one "win" in the end? I do not know. But it should make a university's mission, vision and arguments more powerful and more visionary, thus more "leaderlike," than that institution run only on the bases of pragmatism.

The Lutheran college, like most other liberal arts college communities, will use all practical and theoretical resources at its disposal to encourage the free, self-confident and humble maturation of the student into a solid and respectful citizen, servant, and leader in a pluralistic world. The value-added predicate of "Lutheran" denotes a security and divine imprimatur for our cause that, as it were, adds vision to our vision. At the least, our own knowing that we do our work on the basis of certain religious convictions provides more passion for our doing so with excellence. That is no small matter. But our impetus is more than subjective. For us to envision and teach toward a "faithed secularity," — for God's will to be done on earth as in heaven! — and so also for God's will to be done among Lutheran colleges and universities in the 21st century means that we will daily rise to our vocations and daily remember whose we are no matter what our individual religious brands advertise. And so also we will deliberately and gently remind others whose they are through our daily honoring of the thoughts and things of this world that bend toward community, diversity, justice, beauty, and truth; that truth finally to which we will more relate than control or even know. Finally, the Lutheran university will honor its own tradition as the ground for engaging all other traditions; it will be confident, without being triumphal, that the individual justified life will find concord in a growing just society, for which a Lutheran university's breadth, depth, and hospitality is critically and crucially necessary.

Delivered at Carthage College, Kenosha, Wisconsin, March 23, 2010

1 — And so I tip my hand both to the ontological argument viz Barth and to Friedrich Schleiermacher.

2 — The Gift and Promise of Lutheran Higher Education (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004).

3 — "The Lutheran Tradition and Education," Evangelical Lutheran Church in America — http://archive.elca.org/SocialStatements/education/involved/jodock1.html

4 — Lutheran Higher Education (Augsburg Fortress, 1998).

5 — Benne, "Integration and Fragmentation: Can the Center Hold?" in Richard Cimino (ed.), Lutherans Today, American Lutheran Identity in the 21st Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 212.

6 — Benne, 207.

7 — Philip A. Nordquist, Educating for Service, Pacific Lutheran University, 1890-1990 (Tacoma: Pacific Lutheran University Press, 1990)183.

8 — A Richard Dawkins can demonstrate as much intolerance and is as much a reductionist (fundamentalist), though usually with more sophistication, as a Pat Robertson or James Dobson.

9 — Mark R. Schwehn, "Lutheranism and the Future of the University," The Cresset (December 2009, LXXIII:2), 11.

10 — Quoted in Jodock, op.cit.

11 — Schwehn, 6.