This article will appear in the KIATS Theological Journal 2005 I.2 (2005 Fall). It is reprinted here by permission.
[1] In the last fifteen or twenty years, American church-related colleges and universities have been engaged in diligent reflection about their identity and mission. A Lutheran institution won’t answer questions of identity and mission in the same way as an Evangelical school, nor a Reformed, Methodist, or Catholic institution. Yet in the many conversations within and among church-related institutions in which I have participated, colleagues at most schools have struggled with a common problem: how to bridge the yawning gap between highly articulated theologies and ecclesiologies, on one side, and the daily work of faculty and staff, on the other. Brochure copy is not hard to generate, but where does the rubber really meet the road? How, in practical terms, does being a Christian college or university bear on what happens in the classroom, in the library, in advising sessions, or in recruiting new students and faculty?
[2] In the Lutheran context of my university one particular concept, central to Christianity and to the ancient tradition of Christian thought, illuminates both reflection on who we are and the practices that make us who we are. I experience this concept at work every time I sit down with a first-year student for the purpose of academic advising. This is one of the endearing moments of any teacher’s career, and it happens many times each year. I look at the student and ask her what she wants to do with her life. Almost invariably, either a flash of terror or a gleam of delight appears in her eye as she realizes that she is responsible for answering this question. She may be terribly anxious about it; she may be at odds with what her parents want her to do; she may be genuinely clueless (one of the many wandering in the wilderness of late adolescence); or she may be seized by the profound sense of importance and empowerment that asking such a formidable question of herself entails. If the latter is the case, it means that the student has assumed the responsibility of taking her life very seriously because she sees that she has both the calling and the opportunity to do so. A radical sense of freedom and a grave sense of duty dawn in the student and glint knowingly in her eyes. It is this moment of recognition that I prize more than any other as an educator.
[3] What is happening in this moment? In a word, it is what Christians call “vocation.” It is a sense of purpose, the realization that one’s life has a shape, a characteristic structure, that it isn’t accidental or ruled by chance or simply a matter of personal pleasure. Vocation, as the word suggests, is experienced as a calling, as a unifying intention taking shape in the choices one makes and in the sense we find embedded in and running through the events of our lives. Anticipating Augustine, to whom I shall turn shortly, vocation involves the discernment of a life-long answering to others-to the world of others among whom we live and to God, the one who is standing at the end of time, waiting for us to reach him through the course of events. Vocation is the trajectory and the telos of life here-both my own, individual life and the life of the community in which I live and work. Vocation happens as a growing awareness that I am part of something larger and that something larger has invested itself and its interests in the particularity of me. This is the heady recognition that rises up in my students and vicariously in me. Moreover, this sensation is not limited to students-I am happy to say that it is something that happens in key moments in campus life when faculty discern that they are part of something more than themselves and their individual careers.
[4] In my tradition, Lutheranism, vocation is a concept rooted in both Martin Luther’s experience and theological reflection and in the much older tradition that shaped his thought and spirituality, Augustinianism. I have found that teaching students to consider a spiritual understanding of vocation requires a careful reading of both Luther and Augustine to draw from these theologians what they have to offer us. Students often equate vocation with career and college education with a consumer-minded acquisition of the skills necessary for a particular job. My aim as a liberal educator in Christian higher education is to complicate these expectations with deeper reflection on what Luther and Augustine have to say. And my work as an educator draws from Luther and Augustine a special understanding of vocation that is worth sharing with Christendom and beyond.
[5] At an interdenominational conference comparing various models of Christian higher education a few years ago, I was struck by the differences as well as the features common to the Catholic, Lutheran, Mennonite, Evangelical, and Reformed participant institutions1. All of the schools faced a similar set of challenges and drew from the Christian tradition for guidance and inspiration. Yet on the question of identity, two different positions emerged. Catholics and
[6] Lutherans lined up together on the importance of freedom in hiring colleagues of widely varied confessional affiliation, and even colleagues with no faith at all. Alternatively, representatives of Evangelical and Reformed colleges used such exclusivist language as “Christian scholars,” “Christian scholarship,” and “Christian worldview” to convey what they considered the distinctive nature of being a Christian college. Students graduating from these schools were intended to bear explicit intellectual and behavioral traces of an education there. The work of faculty as teachers and scholars and of staff and administrators was to reflect and impart the unmistakable characteristics of each institution’s Christian mission and identity.
[7] I came away from the conference with an emboldened consciousness of my own tradition. The idea that there was a discrete body of knowledge called “Christian scholarship” produced by a group of “Christian scholars” who share a uniquely “Christian worldview” seemed fraught with problems to me. For instance, one need not be Christian to recognize the truth in a historical analysis, nor to produce a piece of scholarship that states a Christian truth; and the Bible hardly offers a single, unified worldview on which to base scholarly investigation. It seemed and still seems to me that it is much more convincing and intellectually satisfactory to understand oneself as a Christian who is a scholar than as a ‘Christian scholar.’ Not that one can be a Christian and pursue knowledge without regard to the ethical consequences of what one is doing as a scholar. Certainly there are, as Mark Schwehn and others have argued, different ethical values implicit in the epistemologies employed by scholars.2 For example, a practice of scholarship may seek to generate knowledge of the world for the sake of exploiting its technological potential in controlling nature or human behavior. In this paradigm, such knowledge and its applications are considered morally neutral by its producers and handlers. Alternative forms of learning will ground the creation of knowledge in a fellowship or community of learners such that learning is a collective affirmation of the people who are learning. This latter approach is grounded in a communitarian ethic, which may or may not be Christian, but is nonetheless to be contrasted to an instrumentalist mode of knowledge-making. In other words, the pursuit of knowledge is not morally neutral because its creation is inseparable from the way it configures human beings toward one another and the world in which they live.
[8] Certainly the latter of these paradigms will appeal to Christians, but it is by no means exclusively Christian. And knowledge produced by scholarship of the first paradigm will not be dismissed as intrinsically unchristian. Practicing generosity, forbearance, and humility in one’s scholarship and interpretation of cultural artifacts seems quite appropriate for the scholar who is a Christian, but it is obviously not true that only Christians may practice these values in scholarship, and it is certainly the case that many who otherwise claim to be Christians are scholars who regularly do not. Whether we practice an instrumentalist or a communitarian epistemology, scholarship depends on the proper observation of rules of reason, evidence, and shared discourse. As regards these rules, the proof is in the pudding: either a claim is logically and evidentially demonstrable or it is not. Special pleading from any set of assumptions-whether faith-based or grounded in any other ideology-is not compelling in matters of intellectual judgment. Christians who make assumptions about the creation of the earth in six days or acknowledge the power of demons to motivate human behavior will certainly produce a distinctive set of judgments about the age of the earth or the cause of neuroses, but these will not be widely credited in academic discourse. Nor, in my view, should they be.
[9] So I am glad to affirm in Lutheranism the recognition of the authority of secular learning. Lutheranism firmly acknowledges the appropriateness of secularity, what Luther called the “realm” or “government of the world” as distinguished from the “realm of God.” He proposed a theology of two realms, which asserted the relative independence of two domains. The secular world of human law and governance prevails in human affairs. The realm of God is the spiritual kingdom of Christian faith. The two realms exhibit their own sovereignty: secular authority may not command or coerce faith; spiritual government may not seek to exercise secular power. The church cannot use the state to dictate belief and the state may not use the church to enforce temporal order. Luther sought to work out a political vision in which for his day secular rule lay in the hands of the nobility while the purview of spiritual authority was strictly limited to matters of faith: “one must carefully distinguish between these two governments. Both must be permitted to remain; the one to produce righteousness, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds. Neither is sufficient in the world without the other.3” As this final remark indicates, the two governments are not fundamentally discrete in Luther’s mind. They need each other. The two exist in dialectical tension with one another because Christians are citizens of each world. We are not called to collapse the one into the other, but to practice in this world the fact of our citizenship in the other. If you are wronged in the kingdom of the world, you should turn the other cheek. If someone requires your help, you should assist them because you are a Christian, a member of the kingdom of God. And the Christian ruler, according to Luther, must strive toward satisfying “God’s kingdom inwardly and the kingdom of the world outwardly.4” Christians possess a dual citizenship, which demands that they respect the laws of each domain. This reflects the paradoxical nature of the Christian’s reality: we are, as Luther put it, simultaneously saint and sinner. We are both “a perfectly free lord of all” and “a perfectly dutiful servant to all.5” We are freed from condemnation by Christ’s redemption but subject to the needs and demands of our fellow creatures. We are liberated from the need to justify ourselves, but bound to serve one another in this life as a response to God’s righteousness bestowed on us through Christ.
[10] Luther was fond of paradoxes because nothing could express more faithfully the dialectical character of the Christian’s situation. In this paradox consisted human freedom. Each person in the secular world enjoys freedom of conscience: neither the state nor the church can dictate or enforce belief. Furthermore, we are each free to pursue our vocation precisely because the vocation exerts no redemptive or salvific efficacy. Vocation is not a way of earning grace, it is a response to the gift of grace. We are free to work because we do not need to work for our salvation. This was the message of Luther’s important treatise, The Freedom of a Christian (1520). There he subverted the secular/profane distinction enforced by the monastic tradition’s understanding of vocation. Monastic theology had regarded the act of taking religious vows as sacramental, as a means of dispensing grace and gaining the forgiveness of sin. Becoming cloistered meant possessing a vocation or call that was higher than secular or profane life outside of religious vows.
[11] For Luther himself this enterprise was a disastrous personal failure. “How I worked and tortured myself sick with fasting, waking, praying, etc., to attain [righteousness] when I wanted to be a pious monk!6” What does God want? What is expected of me? Luther learned to uncouple this question from another: How shall I attain righteousness in God’s sight? We are free to answer what God wants for each of us after we receive his grace. There are two aspects to call: proclamation and invitation. The first is the announcement of righteousness through divine mercy; the second the invitation to respond to righteousness realized in God’s act of forgiveness. The sense of vocation depends on each, but begins to take conscious shape in the second moment: God expects us to live in response to his gift of grace by pursuing the call to live as stewards of what he has invested in each of us. “We are all individually created for certain duties,” Luther claimed. Vocation is not limited to the cloistered. “A woman suckling an infant or a maid sweeping a threshing floor with a broom is just as pleasing to God as an idle nun or a lazy Carthusian.” “Let godly householders know that all their actions are pleasing to God, whether they care for the flocks or the fields, or even for stinking dunghills.” Luther never tired of castigating the presumption of monastics, “as though God could not be worshipped and invoked in common life.7”
[12] Fortunately, today we can dispense with Luther’s hostility toward Catholicism while holding on to the insight and contribution he made concerning the preeminence of vocation in everyday life and the secular world. Vocation is the voice of God in the lives of individuals and communities. Hearkening to that still, small voice is the all-important task that Christian higher education is particularly prepared to help students do. Consider, for example, the esteemed moment of advising undergraduates in light of what Luther has to say about the power of each person’s calling:
[13] For it is most certainly true that when anyone in his vocation is convinced in his heart that God desires and has commanded in His Word what he is doing, he will experience such force and effectiveness of that divine command as he will not find in the oration of any orator, either of Demosthenes or of Cicero.8
[14] When the student recognizes her calling to study art, this force is surely evident. We have each seen it many times. It is something to behold because it issues with a profound sense of purpose that is evident in a flurry of work and activity. Suddenly a new depth of thought and energy is apparent in the student’s work and these students no longer need the prodding and threats that those still wandering in the wilderness require.
[15] Luther marked a pivotal moment in the emergence of modernity. His intertwined concepts of vocation and the freedom of conscience affirm everyday life, affirm all honorable work as God-pleasing, affirm work as the construction and maintenance of a God-pleasing world, and affirm the secular world as appropriately secular and as sovereign in matters of governance with respect to the spiritual kingdom. Yet Luther was by no means entirely modern. His views on human society and human nature will not enjoy broad appeal among members of modern democracies. One wishes Luther might have attended more carefully to Augustine’s recognition that humans bear in them the imago dei and that, as Augustine opened his Confessions, “to praise you is the desire of man….You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.9” Not just Christians in Europe, but human beings everywhere and at all times. All people bear the image of God and all people, Christian or not, are blessed by God with a vocation, a calling to contribute honorably to the world in which they live. Longing for order and justice and the need for love are in-built features of the human soul, and are the basis of the human self because these are the reflection of divine goodness in which the self takes shape.
[16] In addition to assuming human depravity, Luther’s model of social organization remains medieval. His picture of human society consisted of a static, caste-bound set of social arrangements that located people at the particular station to which they were each called by God. And there they remained in a more or less stationary and vertically structured hierarchy that would not allow of democracy or equality or liberty in the modern sense of those terms. The purpose of government was to preserve this organization and to protect people from the barbarian entropy always menacing from within. Luther did not entertain a modern understanding of the human capacity for democratic self-rule. As he sardonically put it regarding the restrictive task of secular government: “Frogs must have their storks.10” Thus, when the Peasant Rebellion threatened to topple the regnant social order, Luther encouraged the princes to retaliate without mercy. Whenever I teach Luther’s treatise on Christian liberty to students, they discern Luther’s frozen caste system and instinctively recoil from it. That is not only an understandable reaction but a very important one for members of a modern democracy.
[17] Life in a capitalist economy and in the egalitarian experience of present day democracies around the world militates against static social arrangements and an autocratic form of government. Capitalism puts self-interest to constructive (as well as destructive) use in modern society. Upward mobility and the capacity for a democracy to facilitate it are indispensable features of modern self-determination. Public and private higher education are designed to facilitate upward mobility (even though social hierarchies remain, the middle class is expansive and upward movement within it is widely, though by no means universally open to individual initiative). Consequently, I have found that Luther’s exposition of vocation succeeds much better in the classroom and in student advising when it is combined with the autobiographical treatment of vocation in Augustine’s Confessions. Since Luther was an Augustinian monk, the pairing of the two figures is not without historical justification. More importantly for our students, Augustine’s vastly influential book personalizes the idea of vocation as a life-long dialogue with God in a way that makes sense to young people today, serving to temper their often bald-faced narcissism with the demanding interpersonal ethics of Augustinian self-examination.
[18] Augustine invented autobiography. It did not exist as a literary genre before the Confessions and this book became the model for all subsequent autobiographies or narrations of the self as happening over time. The text is a sustained act of memory staged as an intimate dialogue with God, the creator and sustainer of the self that comes into being over time as a life-long dialogue with God. Time is the medium of the self for Augustine, and memory is the primary faculty for telling the story of the self. Augustine found he had to tell the story of himself if he really wished to enter fully into dialogue with God, and with his readers. “So what profit is there,” he asked, “when, to human readers, by this book I confess to you who I now am, not what I once was?11” A substantial aspect of the self is embedded in memory such that no confession was genuinely confessional that excluded the past. Moreover, memory is where the past is accessible since it no longer exists. And because the memory is a record of learning to know God, Augustine experienced memory as the place in human consciousness where God resides: “Surely my memory is where you dwell, because I remember you since first I learnt of you, and I find you there when I think about you.12” In fact, his famous rumination on time in book 11 of the Confessions brings him to the realization that time is the mind’s measurement of the impression of passing events on itself.13 Time, in other words, is not an objective reality imposed on objects, but originates in the mind.14 Time, Augustine believed, was a “distention” or stretching of the mind. Measured in memory, time is the medium of consciousness and therefore of the human self and its relationship with God.
[19] And here is what is essential to grasp for an Augustinian understanding of vocation. Looking back, “retrospection,” becomes a form of discernment that recognizes the course of one’s life as the site of God’s revelation. Augustine saw God at work in every decision that shaped his life.
[20] You were at work in persuading me to go to Rome and to do my teaching there rather than at Carthage. The consideration which persuaded me I will not omit to confess to you because in this also your profoundly mysterious providence and your mercy very present to us are proper matters for reflection and proclamation.15
[21] This was not clear to Augustine until much later, in retrospect. God’s providence, his ability to see ahead and direct all things in life with a view to the purpose he foresees, becomes visible to human beings only as they look back on their lives. In the present, mercy is often wrapped in mystery, hidden from us until we attain the proper perspective for discerning it. As an act of writing, creative expression, or communal reflection, revelation generally happens in retrospect, and telling one’s story is a powerful way of making the vision clear. But only if retrospection unfolds in dialogue with God. The masks hiding God fall away to reveal his countenance only when the story of one’s life is told as a pilgrimage, a long journey toward the living God.
[22] It is odd, of course, at least at first, to think of revelation as happening behind us instead of in the future. But all of the Abrahamic religions back into the future. Prophecy is not so much a telling of what’s going to happen as much as a calling of what the Qur’an names the “people of the book” to hearken to what God has said to and done with his people in the past. Looking backwards along the course of one’s path discloses how that path has actually been part of a larger narrative. We are able to discern how the course of events responded to a guiding idea that was often not clear at the time. Only after time has passed are we able to apprehend a pattern, motive, or aim. Memory’s grappling with the elusive, but driving force behind events seeks the form of stories and the many devices for registering time’s passage. Calendars, photo albums, monuments, anniversaries, and ritual celebrations are how we find meaning in our lives as a characteristic shape that emerges over time.
[23] But it takes time to recognize the shape embedded in time. When I was a boy in Sunday school, I was often frustrated by the teacher’s report that God performed miracles among the people of the Old Testament. Why, I wondered with frustration, did God only do the exciting stuff way back then? Why must revelation be over? Why must it be restricted to the distant past? Later, when I was older and had some time under my belt, I realized that revelation is not merely a discrete historical episode to which biblical narrative testifies. The Bible is a library of books collected over a long history that takes time seriously, indeed, regards time as the principal medium of divine revelation. God is present not simply in our reading of Scripture as a column of fire or a voice from heaven, but in an unfolding historical relationship with humanity that is roughly analogous on a microcosmic scale to each person’s genesis, youthful formation, growing awareness of a personal calling, engagement with the broader world, and denouement.
[24] The Bible shows how humans are creatures of time, how we exist within it and how our understanding of ourselves cannot operate without the instrument of temporality. And how our story is embedded in God’s story of the creation. Art students at church-related institutions can understand this because faculty are able to talk about God and divine purpose and the student’s reflection on each of these. And narration in various forms-literary, dramatic, pictorial, kinesthetic, musical-is something artists learn to practice in their chosen media. The study of the history of the arts has long made use of biography and autobiography as important tools. During the Italian Renaissance, Giorgio Vasari popularized-virtually invented-the artist’s biography. Chronologies of an artist’s work became a standard means of organizing an artist’s oeuvre during the nineteenth century. And in the modern era of museum practice, the retrospective exhibition is a principal means of discerning the total shape of an artist’s work to date. This sensibility so permeates artistic, art-critical, and art-historical practice today that almost any artist’s talk will consist of a large number of slides arranged chronologically from youth to the present. Artists, critics, and historians automatically regard an artist’s work as taking shape over time and as appropriately viewed within an encompassing chronological framework. Time is a medium of artistic self-expression no less than painting, sculpture, video, or any other medium.
[25] Art students seem to understand this innately. They come to college with work extending back to their early years and they add work to an existing corpus as an ongoing evolution of an artistic autobiography. Augustine’s Confessions is, therefore, a vital resource for educating artists in art departments at Christian colleges and universities. His meditations on time and memory as the medium of dialogue with God can serve as a corrective to the involuted, self-indulgent narratives that students are often inclined to tell. The creation of art that emerges from reflective self-examination after the Augustinian model can be a powerful way of developing a sense of vocation in student artists.
[26] How can this practically happen in the classroom? When I taught in the Department of Art at Valparaiso University, we had a practice each semester of meeting with students for a public critique of their work. Students brought fifteen or twenty things they’d been working on for the last year and displayed them for the faculty to review. The student was asked to provide a verbal overview of the work and then to respond to questions and observations from faculty. For their part, the faculty perused the work of each student for patterns, themes, and issues that were emergent in the work. Lifting these up to the student’s attention, faculty members probed the student’s awareness of, intentionality toward, and resistance to themes and issues. Strengths and weaknesses became much clearer to the student, who learned to articulate them and to discern preferences and timidities in the work and his or her motives for making it. Only by standing back and seeing the work in the public setting, as it were, with the eyes of the community of learning, can some things become visible. The work done over the last year took its place in a trajectory of learning for which the student needed to claim responsibility. I am reminded of Augustine’s discussion of his hopes and motive for publishing his Confessions. He says to God, his interlocutor:
[27] I am making this confession not only before you with a secret exaltation and fear and with a secret grief touched by hope, but also in the ears of believing sons of men, sharers in my joy, conjoined with me in mortality, my fellow citizens and pilgrims. . . .You have commanded me to serve them if I wish to live with you and in dependence on you. 16
[28] Art is not a private expression, but a public exploration, a mode of fellowship that understands the self only by including others in self-exploration. The self belongs to others and one’s art-making unfolds in their presence and for their benefit no less than one’s own. Indeed, if we are to take Augustine seriously, one’s art might become a form of dialogue modeled on the Confessions: an interior dialogue with God that is simultaneously an exterior dialogue with those who find in the art the disclosure of something much more than private thoughts or feelings.
[29] But will this art be “Christian art”? Not as I understand the task. The point is not to produce “Christian art” or “Christian scholarship,” but to be Christians who are artists or art historians. The Christian moment consists in the communal relationship, which the art helps create and nurture not as an objective tag or exclusive feature of the artwork itself. Indeed, if we adopt the communitarian epistemology mentioned earlier, the creation of art or knowledge does not rest in the object itself, but in its ramifications among the community of learning that studies the work. Anything, therefore, is accessible to Christian learning, the act of studying together as Christians. It is not what we study or what we produce in our investigations, but the manner in which and the reasons for which we study and work that is the index of our faith. Christian identity rests not in the formulation or recitation of doctrinally correct statements, but in the social and prayerful practices of fellowship, of lived Christianity. I want to retain Luther’s contribution to a modern understanding of vocation by insisting on the freedom of the Christian as a citizen in two domains-that of the spiritual order of faith to which we belong as Christians and the secular order of the world in which we live, whether we are Christian or not. Citizens of the spiritual kingdom live and work as redeemed children of God, pursuing their vocations in the light of redemption and the ethic of love practiced by Jesus. We are not called to be Christian artists or Christian scholars. We are called to be Christians who make art or produce scholarship for the good of all. Some of this art or scholarship will bear explicit marks of its producer’s faith, but much will not. Christian meaning is not simply a matter of being abstractly encoded in works of art, but is experienced there in the prayer and fellowship of Christian people. Any scholarship or art that seeks the truth of the human situation and the truth of the natural order is acceptable to God. We are free to pursue whatever path in life God has called us to take up. Of this we may be certain because we have been liberated for a life that begins and ends in God.
[30] Set within the global context of Christianity today, my argument should address the very different situations of Christianity around the world. As an old majority culture in the United States, Christianity faces a different situation than it does, for instance, in Africa and Asia, where Christians are commonly a new religious minority. African and Asian Christians often must feel a need to be far more distinctively Christian than many American Christians do. I do not wish to dispute this difference for it is surely a valid one. It is a difference grounded in the fact that Augustine and Luther each spoke from within the bulwark of Christendom defined as a national entity, indeed, as a civilization identified with the lineaments of the Roman Empire, in one case, and the emerging political structure of European nation-states, in the other. But this is not the only difference to discern. Lutheranism and Calvinism take differing views on the matter of distinctiveness. For Luther, being Christian does not mean turning the state or even society itself into a Christian entity, for that would violate the integrity of the state as a realm sanctioned by God. But the transformative vision endorsed by Calvin seeks to take the best from any realm and make it part of the explicitly Christian enterprise of a society.
[31] It may be that both models of culture are useful. In its nascent stage, the church as a minority culture may benefit most from an insistence on distinctiveness and transformation. But when it achieves majority status, Christianity may benefit more from the liberal approach represented by Lutheranism. There are certainly dangers in either case, however. One thinks of the capitulation of the Lutheran Church in Nazi Germany, on the one hand, and the rabid sectarianism and debilitating in-fighting of some Calvinist churches, on the other. In the first instance, Christians forfeit the moral calling to public righteousness and abandon the need to resist the power of an unjust state; in the latter instance, Christians lose sight of the unity of Christ and the larger goal of living the witness of his love. If they vanish into the larger world of tyranny in the first case, Christians risk isolating themselves within an insular tyranny in the latter. Neither extreme is acceptable, and both are undeniably present in the Church today.
[32] In the end, I remain an advocate of the Lutheran model, though one who is wary of its potential weaknesses. As Christianity continues to develop in the non-Western world, even to the point of eclipsing its Western predecessors, I hope it will find a crucial place for intellectual and artistic creativity, freedom, and productivity that Latin and European Christianity have long endorsed. Failing to do so would mean failing to realize the full range of calling that has blessed the Church with some of its richest cultural forms of communal life.
End Notes
1 The conference, “Models for Christian Higher Education,” was held at the University of Notre Dame, June 12-13, 1998, was organized by Richard Hughes, of Pepperdine University, and followed from his work on Christian higher education-see Models for Christian Higher Education: Strategies for Survival and Success in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Richard T. Hughes and William B. Adrian (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1997).
2 Mark R. Schwehn, Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Parker Palmer, To Know As We Are Known (New York: Harper and Row, 1983).
3 Martin Luther, “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 45, edited by Walther I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962), 92.
4 Ibid., 96. A lucid discussion of the consequence of several of Luther’s key ideas (including the two realms) for higher education today is Richard W. Solberg, “What Can the Lutheran Tradition Contribute to Christian Higher Education,” in Models for Christian Higher Education, 71-81.
5 Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, trans. W. A. Lambert, revised by Harold J. Grimm, in Luther&=javascript:goNote(39s Works, vol. 31, edited by Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), 344.
6 Martin Luther, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John, tr. Martin H. Bertram, in Luther’s Works, vol. 24, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1961), 240.
7 Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis, in Luther’s Works, vol. 6, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1970), 349, 348, 347, 349.
8 Luther, Lectures of Genesis, in Luther’s Works, vol. 4, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1964), 103-4.
9 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. by Henry Chadwick (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3 (book 1, section 1, paragraph 1).
10 Luther, “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 45, 114.
11 Augustine, Confessions, 180 (book 10, section 3, paragraph 4).
12 Ibid., 201 (book 10, section 25, paragraph 36).
13 Ibid., 242 (book 11, section 27, paragraph 36).
14 Ibid., 240 (book 11, section 26, paragraph 33).
15 Ibid., 80 (book 5, section 8, paragraph 14).
16 Ibid., 181-82 (book 10, section 4, paragraph 6).