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| Dr. Martin E. Marty is the author of more than 50 books, including A Cry of Absence, considered to be a spiritual classic. Recipient of the National Humanities Medal, he is an ordained minister who taught at the University of Chicago for 35 years. |
A College of the Church at the Millennial Turn
By Martin Marty
What is "a college of the church" today? You ask, because so many speakers at your 50th reunion made much of St. Olaf being one for 125 years. You say that some things you saw or heard on campus confirmed that this is the case for today, but you also keep hearing that it is hard to be such a college nowadays. What do I think?
You went to St. Olaf and I did not. Two of my sons went there and one of yours did. But now your grandchild is enrolling, and you wonder what she will find. What counts as evidence of a commitment? Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn once said, "an oral agreement isn't worth the paper it is printed on." St. Olaf has a written agreement, a "mission statement," saying that this college of the church is "committed to the liberal arts, rooted in the Christian gospel, and incorporating a global perspective." What might this mean for your granddaughter?
When we regents go presidential candidate-hunting, we use support of that mission statement to prepare our first criterion. We always catechize new regents about its meaning. You could shake and wake a regent at 3 a.m. and he or she could recite the mission statement. When some of us dealt with faculty during a presidential search, we learned that serious non-Lutheran faculty members were at ease with this identification with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and appreciated the commitment it implies. They experience nothing sectarian.
Which leads me to make an ecumenical smart crack. Decades ago a national magazine interviewer asked a salty Lutheran editor, "Do Lutherans Believe Theirs Is the Only True Religion?" He answered, "Yes, but they just don't believe they are the only ones who have it." Aware of that, your Catholic daughter-in-law should feel at ease with her daughter being at St. Olaf. I've never heard of one of the many Catholic students feeling alienated by an occasional "A Mighty Fortress" on campus. You say your church drop-out son is not too happy, because he is afraid his daughter will get an overdose of religion at the college. Meanwhile, your "born again" minister thinks St. Olaf must be pagan, since it doesn't force students to daily chapel. You sound cornered among diverse expectations. You can see why college leaders have to be reflective about the meaning of being "a college of the church today."
Your family situation makes clear to how many constituencies the college tries to relate. An overeager public relations expert might say, "No one will ever be offended at St. Olaf," implying that it is wishy-washy about belief, other-belief, and non-belief alike. I would hope instead that someone listening to dorm conversations, faculty gatherings, chapel talks, or anything else would hear some spiritual feather-ruffling, probing, testing, conflicting, and faith-affirming language that helps students grapple with the surrounding world and their world within. That is what college is for. A "college of the church" is not "a church," though many of its people may give expressions to aspects of church life.
My quoted crack about the Lutheran faith and other faiths has to do with Christianity. You asked also whether your grandchild's high school classmate — you describe her as "being Asian, but not Christian" — will be welcome at St. Olaf. I would hope so. Having "a global perspective" means not only travel abroad but a daily on-campus encounter among a diverse student body.
At the Honors Day lunch last spring a top student spoke. Ten years ago he had been one of the Vietnamese "boat people" who knew no English; today he is medical-school bound. He is very respectful of the faith of the majority at St. Olaf, but he also spoke reverently of his Vietnamese tradition and the influence of "Lord Buddha." He belongs, as does also the secular-minded searcher.
"There you go, Marty," I can hear that pastor of yours saying. "You're giving the ball game away by speaking well of non-Christian seekers." I can picture him reading some popular books which accurately describe how many "colleges of the church" did let the game go, or chose to let it go, or gave it a push. No doubt some people at St. Olaf, uneasy with the tradition, the faith, and the church, chafe a bit to be reminded that they are at a "college of the church." In a "more-secular-than-thou" spirit, some here might try, as some do elsewhere, to sound avant-garde by wishing the college to be faith-less, distant from church. What about them?
I think they are in the rear guard, victims of cultural lag. We are educating today in a world wherein the old ideologies like Communism have tumbled. Some of our own cherished systems include elements that have crumbled. "The market has won," but our collegiate generation has to fashion, or affirm, personal and social philosophies to interpret an emerging world. A "college of the church" is poised to help them. It does not "start from scratch" or have the field to itself.
The faculty is crucial. St. Olaf does not have any creedal tests for faculty, but is forthright about the expectation that they should at least be friendly to the mission of a "college of the church." Which mission implies first, being the best college it can be. I read recently that St. Augustine respected the believing community so much that he wanted the people to settle for nothing but the best. So he gave them the best. And at St. Olaf? In the classroom, in the rehearsal hall, in the chapel, on the track, teachers are to help students receive and try to produce "the best."
Second, the college has to have character, has to be "descript" in opposition to being "non-descript," which would mean being "neither here nor there." Colleges that are cookie-cut, merely standard, and clones of each other, lack clarity of mission and profile. Other colleges can have non-religious or other-religious understandings of what they are about, but our descriptness includes church-relationship, and we want to wrestle with that. I know Jews who are happier at Catholic universities than they would be at faceless look-alike colleges. In the former they can define their environment, select valuable elements from it, gain perspective, and go their own way at points where certain Catholic features alienate them. St. Olaf is "descript" in many ways, including being a "college of ... "
Go deep. That would be my third mark of a college of the church. No, not everything elsewhere else is shallow. You won't catch me talking down the education your engineer-daughter got at a state university. She knew what she wanted, found it, and excelled. And, you reminded me, she had good "soul care," thanks to a campus ministry. We are not talking "better than" language — though I am sometimes tempted to do so — but are making "different than," or "other than" judgments.
Fourth, most people at a college of the church believe that the deepest questions of life — those that deal with finitude and contingency and transience, the bigger words for dying and accidents happening and things passing, and seeking the eternal — helps the community pursue the spiritual and religious dimensions without academic fetters. That means that they do not have to exclude an open encounter with texts and inquiries that talk about God and the transcendent, about theism and a-theism. You could say, in a risky phrase, that such colleges are allowed to "privilege" readings that help students pursue the depths.
I thought of that notion recently when someone asked a poet why she chose to teach at a certain evangelical college though she did not share the details of its faith. She said, "Because there we don't have to stop when things go deep." The secular private college tends not to privilege texts that give faith a fair shake, and tax-supported public universities cannot give faith and faiths a shake at all.
Does not privileging certain discourses — I'm using campus jargon now — prejudice and warp the pursuit of learning and the full life? A Canadian friend told me of a discussion between a university student and a campus guest. The student said, "You talk that way because you are with Imperial Oil." The guest speaker replied, "You talk that way because you are not with Imperial Oil." At St. Olaf someone can speak as he does "because he is a Hindu" and another, part of a larger number, "because he or she follows Christ." Marxist, market-oriented, agnostic, progressivist, positivist and other philosophies bring their biases and prejudices to hundreds of campuses. It's in place, we think, to do some cheek-by-jowl examining of classic religious outlooks alongside them, too.
Does that mean that at St. Olaf you have to be some sort of insider to catch on? Does one have to be Norwegian, as most of your own classmates were, to belong responsibly here? Not likely. I did not even visit the Norwegian Holy Land until I was sixty-nine. And unless the Vikings overran the Swiss, there's not a drop of Viking blood in me (though, thanks to a St. Olaf alumna, there is in two grandchildren now). We honor the cultural heritage. It is part of our "descriptness." But the St. Olaf mission statement says nothing about it and students of Italian, Asian, African-American, Hispanic, or other descents make their own contributions to the shape of the place.
The statement does say "Lutheran." Did I make too little of this? A Lutheran spin is natural at our kind of college of the church. President Mark Edwards expertly spells this out. His writings define this heritage alongside of characteristic Catholic or Calvinist ways of being colleges of the church. Lutherans do not have to see the world remade in a Lutheran image before they can deal with it. They delight in paradox, which is why they can be at home with so openly exploring both the sacred and the secular on campus. They might even agree with Luther that sometimes God finds authenticity in the angry shout of the atheist and despises the pious prattle of the spiritually self-contented. Expect lively conversations with your granddaughter as she deals with contradiction, freedom, and risk at St. Olaf.
In respect to being, and being named, a college of character that produces character, St. Olaf takes the moral and familial aspects seriously. The saying on my study wall by Lutheran theologian Pogo reminds us that "we have faults that we have hardly used yet." Meanwhile, the faculty, administration, staff, and campus leaders care about seeing character develop in and beyond the classroom.
In the Lutheran version of Christian faith, there is also much accent on "vocation." Again, Catholics and Calvinists and Hindus can talk about vocation and may use slightly different terms. But "vocation" is part of what Jews would call the Lutheran shtick among leaders at St. Olaf. Faculty and counselors care about seeing students here find their vocation, their calling, that package of philosophy and action that is irreplaceably and irreducibly theirs. If undergraduates begin to find their vocation, they can follow that discovery with pursuit of their profession — about which this college cares — and eventually with their career, about which their grandparents and parents and they all care. And they had better. But profession and career are secondary.
I am glad that you did start that trust fund for the grandchildren back when your children could not save for them. Now I hope you have reason to put your fund of grandparental trust to work, as I do, with a new generation. I hope you will enjoy the ways your granddaughter will profit from a mission statement whose words she may never memorize — unless she becomes a faculty member or a regent some day.
Don't wait for reunions before you visit again. There's that new Buntrock Commons to help lure you, to serve as a hearth in the cold country, where community grows and more of what it is to be a "college of the church" gets realized. And there are plenty of faculty and students who'll sit there with you and debate, as I have. And, oh yes, we can listen to the "college of the church's" grand music, and revel in its pursuits of arts and sciences.
