How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

Part II:  Lutheran Prairie Pietism: The Positive

 

Like all theologies, there are aspects that can be very helpful, and other aspects that can be negative and detrimental to one’s spiritual journey. In this post I will reflect on the positive of what I have labeled as my childhood faith: Lutheran Prairie Pietism.  First, let’s unpack what I mean by these three terms. And, since as a child I was in the state of what we have called precritical naivete (see last post), I write from the perspective of a child (with an adult voice now), learning and absorbing what they observe as they look up at the adults around them. 

 

We were definitely Lutheran, and proud of it. There might be equals, but no one understood God’s Grace better than we. Of course, as a child I had no idea what this meant, but as I progressed through grade school into junior high--when confirmation classes began—I came to understand that God is indeed a God of love. And that love is “unconditional,” based solely on God’s desire and choice to love and accept us “just as we are,” without any need for us to be good or sinless. While we did not dwell on sin and our unworthiness like many more fundamentalist denominations do, we still knew that we were all “sinful in thought, word and deed,” as our liturgy put it. I still remember Dad coming home from a day at his furniture store, aghast that a farmer who came to town stated to Dad that he had never sinned. Dad, good Lutheran that he was, was just plain astounded that anyone could believe that.

 

By prairie, I mean that we were rural folk. It didn’t matter whether you lived on a farm or in a small “farming community” of some 700 saints, as I did: everyone knew quite a bit about farming, and even we city folk helped with the harvest, such as hauling grain to the local elevator. When the Bible talks about sheep and goats, or wheat and barley, or weeds in the crops, or the need for rainfall, or the wolf who comes to devour, we were right at home. In a sense, you might also label us as populist, in that we saw ourselves as ordinary people who were often misunderstood by more affluent, “large-city folk.” We just kind of sensed that we were more at home in the Bible than those folks, and that made us feel pretty good about ourselves, even though, believe me, a good Norwegian Lutheran was supposed to think and act anything but proud. A little self-confidence was okay, but don’t let it get out of hand. I played tight end in football, and when you caught a touchdown pass, you slowly walked over to the ref and handed him the ball, making sure you did not make eye contact.  

 

Finally, we were pietists, which Merriam-Webster defines as “a 17th century religious movement originating in Germany in reaction to formalism and intellectualism and stressing Bible study and personal religious experience.” That movement eventually made it to Scandinavia and came with the Norwegian and German immigrants who made up the bulk of those who settled in North Dakota. Bible study was important at every stage of life, from Sunday School through Confirmation through Adult Education.  As prairie populists, we were very “low-church,” not getting caught up in fancy liturgical garb, like chasubles, or in many traditional liturgical rituals, like being anointed with ashes in the form of a cross on the forehead on Ash Wednesday, or elaborate chanting during the Holy Communion. We wanted everything simple, with the focus on having a personal relationship with God and Jesus. Not that we were into Billy Graham style “decision” theology or altar calls, but we were encouraged to develop a strong devotional and prayer life as we turned ourselves over in trust to our loving God. I saw Mom do this every morning, as she began her day with her Bible and the Christ in Our Home devotional booklet handed out free in church at the beginning of each month. 

 

In fact, this relational, pietistic perspective eventually evolved into the most important and positive aspect of the form of Christianity in which I was raised. Up until Confirmation, my church life was about worship and learning the stories of the Bible. That continued in Confirmation, but what really strengthened  my faith was when our new pastor, Elmo Anderson, took us confirmation students to Red Willow Bible Camp for a weekend retreat. Singing around a campfire and hearing older folks give a more personal description of God’s love in their lives--as compared to normal Sunday-morning worship--really inspired and excited me. 

 

This got a further boost when, in the summers after 7^th and 8^th grade, I spent three weeks at the same camp. Now it was college students sharing their faith journeys and leading the Bible studies. This continued as I worked as a counselor at Red Willow and other camps during my high school summers. I felt such a deep sense of community, bound together by love in the Bible camp community, and my own personal feelings of closeness to God and Jesus continued to grow. I didn’t have a need to question the elements of the faith I was being taught, and now experiencing, because life was good, and everything just seemed to fit together in a positive way.

 

That began to change in the summer of 1965, my first year as a counselor, when my dad died of cancer. It changed further less than two years later, when my mother also died of cancer. [See Chapters 1 and 2 of my book, When the Northern Lights Went Dark, Amazon].

At first my childhood faith bolstered me. Almost all of the other counselors at camp came to the funerals of my parents, and my home church of North Viking Lutheran surrounded me with love and care. I was encouraged to accept the deaths of my parents as just part of God’s Will, even though I, of course, couldn’t understand why God would want to do this to me. In fact, as I describe in chapters 3 and 4 of the book above, I entered a time of deep prayer and piety as I stayed extremely active in the church, which now included leadership in Luther League, the youth program of our church, at the local, synod land national levels. 

 

This kept me going for a while, but, by the time I entered college, cracks had begun to form in my view of the Lutheran Prairie Pietism in which I had been raised. Borg also describes how this began to happen in his life. If God really was “up there” in “heaven,” Borg writes, “I had taken the first step in removing God from the world. The solution I arrived at indicated that I had come to think of God as a supernatural being ‘out there.’ God became distant and remote, far away and removed from the world, except for special interventions.” [Borg, Meeting Jesus Again, 6] Borg terms this "supernatural theism" [The God We Never Knew, 11]

As I left home to begin college, I found myself in a spiritual quandary. Emotionally, my pietistic attempts to stay close to God were no longer working. It was difficult to feel close to the One who's Will was apparently that my parents should die.  Intellectually, like Borg, I increasingly saw God as detached and distant from the world, and thereby unavailable to me in my pain. Worse yet, I wondered if God was perhaps punishing me, although I could not figure out why. Was I missing something? Or was God not who I thought God was?

    

 

How My Theology Has Changed, Thank God

 Part I:  Don’t Throw God Out with the Bath Water

One of the strange things about humans is that we get so attached to our beliefs and theology (how we understand God and the world) that we often throw out God before we throw out, or revise, our theology. This is what I tried to do in my college years, but, thank God, rather than throwing out God I continued the intellectual and emotional struggle to deepen and enlarge my theology to better reflect the way the world is and what I actually do believe, rather than what I felt like I was “supposed” to believe.

 

The spiritual journey is a dangerous quest. It is a quest, which the dictionary defines as “a long or arduous search for something,” [Oxford] and the holy grail is always truth: truth about the world, about me, about God, about how God wants us to relate to one another and all creatures, big and small.

 

It is dangerous because to be true to this quest, we will have to be honest about and with ourselves. We begin the quest with all kinds of baggage, and some of it will need to be cast off and replaced, hopefully with something better and “more authentic, more true.” I know my theology, which has evolved through so many iterations already, will no doubt need to continue to evolve, which again, according to the dictionary, means “the gradual development of something, especially from a simple to a more complex form.” [Oxford]

 

As I describe the evolution of my spiritual journey, my traveling partner will be the late Dr. Marcus Borg (1942-2015). I choose him because, not only is he one of the most profound New Testament biblical scholars and theologians of the past half century, but because his Lutheran upbringing was so similar to mine, and his writings have helped me understand how I was raised and what I was taught--from the very beginning--to believe about God and the world.

 

Marcus grew up in rural North Dakota, just as I did, eight years before me. He attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, just as I did, and he returned there, with his doctorate, to teach right before I arrived, and right after I left. (I assume this was a coincidence.) 

 

I first encountered his work thirty years ago when I was a pastor in Fargo, ND, and I read (and then taught in the congregation) his 1994 book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, in which he describes the elements of the Christian theology in which he was raised, essentially the same theology in which I was raised 100 miles to the west of him.

 

My Home Church, North Viking Lutheran, Maddock, ND

I will describe that theology, which I label Lutheran Prairie Pietism--with its pros and cons--in the next two blog posts. But, before getting to that, it is helpful to consider Borg’s description of the three-step theological process that informed his own life. This is the move from precritical naivete  through critical thinking toward postcritical affirmation or conviction. (This sequence was first developed by French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur)

 

In the first stage of precritical naivete, we take it for granted that whatever significant authority figures tell us is true is indeed true. And we have no reason to think otherwise (Borg, Convictions, 53-54). Along with the cultural beliefs that a tooth fairy puts money under our pillow and Santa Claus brings gifts through a chimney, we were told the world was created in six days, a special star led the Wise Men from the East to Jesus, God is all-powerful and controls all that happens, sitting on a throne watching everything we do and think, and men are more important in church and society than women. 

 

The critical thinking stage begins when you start to develop a “suspicion” (this term is from Liberation Theology, which we will discuss later) that something you have been taught may not be “actually” true. A common example of this is the study of science. Christians and the church struggled with Copernicus’ assertion that the earth is not “actually” the center of the universe, as the Bible implied. I can still remember learning in high school about the age of the stars and universe, and wondering how this could be when the Bible had all of creation happening in a week. The common response that for God a day is a thousand years was not particularly helpful.

   

However, the real challenge comes when you move from intellectual curiosity to emotional pain. Like Marcus Borg, whose father died in Borg’s early twenties, my dad died when I was 15. This was followed by my mom’s death when I was 17. For a while my Lutheran pietism kept me going. But then a crack in my faith began to form. After all, if God did indeed control everything that happened in the universe, then why would God “choose” to take both my parents from me at such an early age? I was, in fact, facing in my late teens the issue all religious humans face sooner or later: what is the relationship of God to human suffering and pain?

   

This was the point when I was first tempted to throw the baby (God) out with the bath water (my childhood, precritical, naïve theology). The only way I could keep from doing that was to use critical thinking to build a new theological and spiritual understanding in the journey for a postcritical, authentic, integrated theology representing my deepest-held affirmations and convictions which was, at the same time, more in harmony with what we know about the world.

 

In the next post we will consider, first, the strengths of Lutheran Prairie Pietism when it came to the issue of loss, grief and God’s Will, and then, in the third post, the ways in which my childhood theology no longer worked for me, and which aspects of it I had to jettison. 

 

Following that I will share the insights I have gleaned from so many differing people and places as I began to develop my own postcritical theology, which includes majoring in college in both Philosophy and  World Religions, and then, later, the study of the Theology of Hope, the Crucified God, Process Theology, Liberation Theology, the Historical Jesus, Eastern Mysticism,  the Beloved Community articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr., and, finally, Revolutionary Love (Valarie Kaur), which includes a commitment to and  hope for the future of those whom I love and the world of strangers out there who are a part of me I don’t yet know. (Kaur)