05-4 Theology of the..

LOGIA FORUM 63
ME GAVTE LA NATA
A renowned semanticist, Umberto Eco is also known for his fiction,
the most familiar work being The Name of the Rose. Insights are
available to readers who may note postmodern passages in society’s
thinking or windows exposing one’s own thought. Foucalt’s Pendulum,
translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1989), page 50.
Incredulity doesn’t kill curiosity; it encourages it. Though distrustful
of logical chains of ideas, I loved the polyphony of ideas.
As long as you don’t believe in them, the collision of ideas—
both false— can create a pleasing interval, a kind of diabolus in
musica. I had no respect for some ideas people were willing to
stake their lives on, but two or three ideas that I did not respect
might still make a nice melody. Or have a good beat, and if it
was jazz, all the better.
“You live on the surface,” Lia told me years later. “You sometimes
seem profound, but it’s only because you piece a lot of surfaces
together to create an impression of depth, solidity. That
solidity would collapse if you tried to stand it up.”
“Are you saying I’m superficial”
“No.” She answered. “What others call profundity is only a
tessaract, a four-dimensional cube. You walk in one side and
come out another, and you’re in their universe which can’t coexist
with yours.”
UTILITARIAN SCHOOLS,
UTILITARIAN CHURCHES
In this excerpt, David Hicks laments the cosmetic approach to educational
reform. This approach simply emphasizes teaching primarily
for the sake of doing rather than for the sake of becoming. While
we might concur with Hicks’s diagnosis and shudder to see the attitudes
he exposes running rampant among many administrative
officers and synodical board members, we can also note the Calvinistic,
Neoplatonic idealism in his prognosis.
Still, we must point out how these trends have so infected our
congregations which think of church work and liturgy as primarily
“doing” things rather than learning to ask the important questions—and
delighting in what is received in Christ. So long as stewardship,
missions, and evangelism staff persons inundate us with
“how-to” literature for doing projects, and as long as college departments
and seminary professors prefer a shallow utilitarian track, the
Lord’s people will be subjected to a serious lack of understanding,
faithful intuition, and depth of character. David Hicks, Norms and
Nobility: A Treatise on Education, pages 156–157.
Both state and marketplace accelerate the trend toward utilitarian
learning that in turn encourages a cosmetic approach to reform.
The typical criticism leveled at the school by business and government
is: you have not taught the young to do anything. Contrary
to Aristotle, who wanted education to teach the young how
to use their leisure for reaching the full stature of their humanity
and how to realize their greatest happiness in the life of virtue,
business and government view education as a preparation for
work and indoctrination into the practical life via the enticements
of the life of pleasure. The modern educator accommodates
by adding vocational courses to the curriculum or by
requiring more classes in composition: it is a simple matter of
determining what skills are presently in demand.
But ironically, the young can do nothing because as the effort
intensifies to prepare them for the practical life, they are not
learning the rudiments of thinking in terms of the essential
dialectic that we have discussed. The young are not learning to
ask important questions, for the normative questions opening up
a life of virtue are methodically barred from the classroom. Nor
are they getting a chance to discover the wonderful connection
between life and learning because their utilitarian instructors
ignore their major human concerns.
THE LAST WORD ON CHURCH
AND MINISTRY
The ongoing debate in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod
about the relationship between church and ministry has officially
been terminated. At least that is the impression one receives after
reading the report on the LCMS President’s visit to the Fort
Wayne seminary [Reporter 22 (June 1996): 1]. C. F. W. Walther’s
book Kirche und Amt is declared to be the official position,
because it achieves a moderate position between the excesses of
Loehe and Grabau on one side and Hoefling on the other.
The argument of “moderation” is rhetorically useful, but logically
unconvincing. There is no doubt that Walther had keen
insight into the problems of North America, where there was no
Christian prince to finance and counsel the church. A Lutheran
church owned and ruled solely by a corporation of clergy is
clearly contrary to Luther and the Confessions. This problem has
suggested various confessionally responsible answers, one of
which includes LCMS polity.
The problem with canonizing Kirche und Amt is that Walther
contradicts Luther in a number of key places, forcing the theologian
to choose between the two. That is an unhappy choice,
which leads “Lutherans” to avoid this topic, lest they be accused
of pointing at the father’s nakedness, like Ham pointed at Noah.
“Waltherians,” on the other hand, seem to be blissfully unaware
of the contradictions, of which three follow.
First, Walther states that ordination is only an apostolic ordinance,
not divinely instituted (C. F. W. Walther, Church and Ministry
[St. Louis: CPH, 1987], 247–248; Ministry VIB). Luther, on the
other hand, states that ordination was instituted on the authority
of the divine Scriptures (AE 40: 11). Luther’s criticism of ordination
was not directed at its divinity, but at the bishop’s claim of sole
right to ordain (see Tr 61–72), as well as at the many errors that had
crept into the Roman rite of ordination.
Second, Walther argues that whatever spiritual rights are possessed
by the whole church are also possessed by each individual
(Walther, 268–270; Ministry, VII, 1). Luther, on the other hand,