By Dr. James Kallas
St. Olaf College has appointed a Hindu as chairman of the Religion department. St. Olaf College, for over a century the flag-bearer for the very best of Lutheranism in the field of higher education, has lost its theological anchor. St. Olaf has capitulated to the current politically correct emphasis on diversity. Apparently, she has been seduced by the sweet sounding, but silly saying, that it makes no difference what you believe, as long as you sincerely believe it.
There is no compatibility, no room for cousin-kissing, between Christian convictions and contrary beliefs. An embrace of diversity was an impossible act for the earliest church. For the first three hundred years of its existence, the earliest followers of Jesus were battered and beaten, beheaded, thrown to lions, torn asunder. And what was the charge? Atheism! The church flatly refused to recognize the legitimacy of any other form of worship. The Roman gods were empty idols. The Pantheon was powerless. The key word for those who left father and family and fishing net behind to follow Jesus was not diversity, but exclusivity. Thus, they wrote of Jesus that “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12)
And when these “uneducated, common men” were commanded “not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus,” their fearless and faithful answer was, “We must obey God rather than men.” (Acts 4:13, 18, 5:29). And they paid the price. Stephen was stoned and James fell to the sword in Jerusalem. Peter and Paul were executed in Rome. Ignatius was dragged across Turkey and died in the arena. These were the earliest martyrs, whose unwavering allegiance to the exclusivity of Jesus led to their death. Their blood was the seed of the church. There was no vapid forfeiture of their own convictions of others. There was but one way. No one came to the Father but by Jesus.
Luther said the three ingredients of faith are notia, assensus, and fudicia. That initial step was notia, knowledge. Faith does not begin with emotion. Faith does not depend upon how we feel. Faith begins with education, awareness, knowledge, an emphasis not on how we feel, but on what Jesus did. Thus it was, that the university system, the jewel of western civilization, came into being. It was not a product of the state; it was the fruit of the church. Bologna, the oldest university in Italy, was founded by the church. Oxford and Cambridge were products of the church and the deans of the university were the dons of the cathedral. Harvard began when a Presbyterian pastor took a few boys into his home and began to train them to be evangelists for Jesus. On the seal of Dartmouth are the words of John the Baptist, “a voice crying in the wilderness;” and the word of Jesus was to be made known to the Indians of the area.
From the beginning, this majestic crown of the Christian world was a product of the church. Centers of education were outposts of evangelism. Dedicated believers in Jesus took the most far reaching, the most all-encompassing and the vastest thing they could grasp – the universe – and they founded the university. And theology was the queen of the sciences. Jesus was the center and goal of that educational adventure. Faith began with knowledge. Christianity permeated the curriculum. It was not a fringe, not a department. The Gospel was not taught as if it were just another topic in a box along with other topics – it was itself the box! Professors were not called to be deluded by the inane assertion that truth was like a race horse, all you had to do was put competitive ideas on the track and the best would automatically win. You had to fight for what you believed in. The very name they gave the faculty, the head, was “professor!” One who professed, believed, was permeated by the truth of Jesus and that allegiance which soaked his soul would shine out in all that he said. His job was not to pat other points of view in tolerant approval, but to maintain the primacy, the exclusivity, the metaphysical and life-changing truth found in Christ Jesus alone.
St. Olaf in its finest hour understood this and made that idea its matrix. I entered there in 1946. The year was important. That was the first full academic year after World War II. The veterans were enrolling and, rightfully, priority went to them. It was almost impossible for one like myself, fresh out of high school, not a veteran, to gain admission; either at St. Olaf, or anywhere else. Even though my high school grades were excellent, I was not admitted until a few weeks before the fall semester. June rolled by. July rolled by. So did most of August before the word came that enough veterans had decided not to attend after all, so that there were a few openings available to those of us fresh out of high school.
I had applied at St. Olaf due to the urging of my high school football coach, E. J. Nelson, himself an Ole. And when they were the first to respond positively, I decided to go there. It was my first contact with the church. It was only after I put down my $50 enrollment fee that I knew of its religious affiliation and its Religion class requirements. At first, that was alright. I went in neutral, not hostile, just uninformed. I was different. It was not just that I had black hair and everyone else was blonde. It was not simply that I was Greek, and everyone else was Norwegian. I was unchurched, a pagan! I was an inviting evangelistic target for every pre-seminary student on campus. Everybody was trying to convert me! I felt like a lonely pioneer on the Minnesota prairie, surrounded by Indians trying to scalp me; one more trophy to hang on their piety belt. I went into neutral, but I became hostile. I shunned chapel and almost failed to qualify for graduation because I refused to write a paper for Religion 101, outlining the essential ingredients of my Christian beliefs. Ditmanson got me off the hook. He offered me the opportunity to write about what I believed – not what the church said – and he even gave me a ‘B’ for the course.
The role of Ditmanson was indicative of that faculty. Superb people, filled not only with Christian charity, but supercharged with Christian commitment, able to integrate the essentials of Christianity with the basic elements of their discipline. I never went to chapel, but I became a Christian. A faculty who had tied together their faith with their subject matter showed me the significance and centrality of Jesus.
I had Pete Fossum in a freshman Physics class. One day we were looking at flecks of coal dust under a microscope. Each fleck was unique, a thing of beauty unlike any other; no two alike, each one exquisite in its symmetry and delicate fragility. And suddenly, Fossum said, “What a magnificent God of beauty and creativity is ours, who is able to make such a beautiful thing out of a fleck of coal dust which is today and tomorrow is cast into the fire.” Pete probably used that line many times earlier. Professors do that. If they find a good line, they hold unto it. But for a kid of 17, never before exposed to Christian confessions, having heard of supposed conflict between science and religion, I was stunned and moved by the fact that a learned scientist with a Ph.D. could see the hand of God in a hunk of coal. It was a step. One of the first. One of many.
Norman Nordstrant, who later left to become the Cultural Attache at the U. S. Embassy in Norway, taught a course in world literature. We read Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment. And as he unfolded it for us, a profound confession of sin and grace unfolded; a Christian anthropology was thrust upon me.
He told us how Raskolnikov went to Europe and was infected by Nitsche, the cultural giant of his day, the politically correct voice of that time. Nietsche said that God was dead. And if God were dead, then man was on his own. Dog-eat-dog philosophy, the weak to the wall, anything to further your own ascendency. So diseased, Raskolnikov returned to Russia and spilled out the entire bucket of a woman’s happiness to further his own by a single drop. He murdered her with an axe.
But the Russia to which he returned was mother Russia, pre-Bolshevik Russia, Christian Russia. He returned to the bosom of the church and as humanized anew. He was lifted up by the icons of the church and knew he had sinned, done wrong, and if it were ever to rise higher than the animal level to which he had descended, he needed to be cleansed, punished. Hence the title, “Crime and Punishment.” It was more than a literature class. It was an awareness of what it is to be human from the Christian point of view.
Every class was like that. We all chuckled with Glascoe’s heavy Scandanavian accent railing against “cigarette suckers,” but we all came to see that behind those perhaps too colorful denunciations of contemporary culture, there was a commitment to the body as a temple, which impressed us all – even those of us who smoked.
I didn’t go to chapel. But old Doc Mellby did. He had retired long before I had enrolled. He must have been over eighty years of age when I first saw him. But I did see him. At 9:30 a.m. in the morning, I saw him – temperature below freezing – trudging up the hill so that he could attend chapel. He made me wonder why I was so hostile to chapel. Perhaps there something to be learned there.
Karen Larsen was so frail that I was afraid she would sneeze and shatter. I had a history class from here; the top floor of the library. One blustery day, in early March or so, I noticed that a sparrow had made a nest on the window sill and was protecting her egg, and the next week, her baby, from the winter’s winds. I decided I might have a chance at a better grade if I let Karen see that I was soft-hearted and sentimental. And so, after class, I asked her to come back and see this baby bird. She did. And she liked it. And it was only then that I realized that she was far more insightful and made of sterner stuff than I had originally recognized. She thanked me for sharing the bird and the put me into my place by telling me I would be better off in her class if I listened to her as intently as I watched out the window. I did listen to her more Carefully after that. One of the lines I remember is that, “History is His story. It is the hand of God shaping the affairs of humankind. Beware the Greek cyclical view, that there is nothing new under the sun. History has a goal and God is its shaper and end.” She, like Fossum. Like Nordstrand, had integrated her discipline with her devotion. Education was evangelism.
This aggressive insistence on the exclusivity of Jesus, the affirmation that it is only His truth which is worthy of embrace, and that all other professions of allegiance are but words on the wind, can and has led to horrific abuse. The Inquisition is but one of the most sordid examples of the depths to which the denial of diversity can lead. And it is no doubt the cummulative impact of these past execesses of the church which have led to today’s attempt to say something positive – to be more accepting of – other religions that we have in the past.
But the posture of our time which mistakenly suggests that there is validity in other religions is not the right remedy or cure-all for past abuses. There is no validity in other religions. Not for the Christian. To be something is to be against all other things.
It would have been impossible for Pete Fossum, or Doc Paulson, or Karen Larsen to say with appreciation or approval, “One of my most memorable students became a Buddhist while here.” (Page 6 of the Spring 2007 issue of St. Olaf magazine.) That is surrender, a consequence of the crises of confidence. It is a collapse of conviction. It is an abandonment of the exclusivity of Jesus, which is the bedrock of Christianity.
The atrocious excesses of the Inquisition were an outrage, an unforgivable sin of the medieval church. But equally outrageous is that contemporary spineless attempt to wallpaper over serious differences and speak of the “Hebrew-Christian tradition” as if there were no fundamental and far reaching differences between Christianity and Judaism. (See page 42 of that same St. Olaf issue.)
There is another way, an alternative avenue, in between the rabid persecution of past anti-Semitism and the present tepid tone of compromise which compliments and confirms as legitimate those opposing opinions which undermine our own.
The Bible itself shows us the way to go. There can be absolutely no denying the fact that both Paul and the Jews of his day saw the fundamental incompatibility of church and synagogue. When Paul abandoned his persecution of the Christians and instead became one with the church, he was from that moment on, despised and condemned by his former brethren, who vehemently sought his death, as we see in Acts 22 through 26.
And yet, despite the monumental gulf between Christianity and Judaism, which both sides clearly saw, Paul continued to pray for his fellow Jews: “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for them is that they may be saved” (Romans 10:1). He told of his love for them and of efforts to convert them (Romans 11:13-15). He did not indulge in hypocritical pretense, claiming community of thought or commonality of goals. They were wrong, and he said so, but he continued to love them and sought to convert them. That is the Biblical way, the only way, to approach other religions.
There are differences between Judaism and Christianity, and there are differences between Christianity and Hinduism, and between Christianity and every other religion. And those differences are monumental. We are not to attack and torture, renew the atrocities of the Inquisition. But neither are we to ignore in an ostrich-like fashion, the foolish and unfounded fiction that we are all climbing the same mountain only from different sides. We are going in opposite directions. We have nothing in common, beyond a few ethical axioms, with Judaism, or Hinduism, or Buddhism. Our task as a church active in the amphitheater of life, where we battle for allegiance of young men and women, is not to provide a platform for the presentation of views other than those of the church. Our task is to return to the unshakable allegiance of the earliest church which insisted upon the exclusivity of Jesus. And our prayer is that St. Olaf will repent of, and recover from, its jelly-legged abandonment of its treasured tradition.