Some books are books,
intended from inception for print. Other books arise out of vital
conversations. These books are attempts to record in print the power of a
speech event.
The new posthumous book
by Krister Stendahl is of the latter variety. It is a manuscript created from
the transcript of lectures given at Dana College, a small Lutheran school in
Nebraska. The manuscript was kept and edited by colleagues, and is now
published together with interfaith commentary.
Stendahl's reputation
as a theologian, bible scholar, and churchman is already well-established. I
would not be surprised if at some not too distant point in the future he would
be recognized as a saint in the Lutheran communions.
Stendahl's influence
extends in many directions, including the early shaping of the new perspective
on Paul, participation in 2nd wave feminism and the pastoral leadership of
women in the church (at Harvard some of the female students took to calling him
Sister Krister), and participation in the global ecumenical movement.
Above all, Stendahl was
a student of Scripture, in love with the Bible. [http://hds.harvard.edu/news/2014/01/21/john-stendahl-reads-why-i-love-bible-video]. Because many if not most readers come to Stendahl through his writings
on the New Testament (principal among them his writings on Paul Among Jews and
Gentiles and Other Essays).
So Stendahl's turn in
Roots of Violence towards "salvation as nirvana" and his more general
ecumenical and interfaith approach will come as a bit of surprise if discussions
of the New Testament are your primary introduction to Stendahl. However, if you
have met the ecumenical bishop and interfaith dialogue participant, the
ecclesial Stendahl, then this work will make all kinds of sense.
I'm honored in this
post to interview John Stendahl, Krister's son, about the work, and why so many
friends and family have devoted their energy to bringing the talk to
publication.
1. Can you tell me a
bit about the origins of this book, why this particular talk?
My father was
born in Sweden in 1921 and was shaped by a youth in which he saw the nations of
Europe descend into a nightmare of hatred and violence. During the decades of his residency and
eventual citizenship in the U.S. he had been deeply conscious of both the
deadly and ever-increasing weaponry in the hands of nations and individuals and
also the seductive hold of violent thinking on our culture and politics.
As I think about it, it seems a quality of my father's
biblical scholarship that he was constantly concerned about the ethical
implications of our use or abuse of scripture. Thus he became a champion of a
reforming consciousness about those who had often been victimized or
marginalized in the Church's reading: Jews, women, and, he was coming to
understand in the 70's, gay and lesbian people.
The problem of violence was therefore much on his mind and he had begun
to formulate his thinking about its relation to religion when, after Ronald
Reagan's election, he received various invitations to come and offer a lecture
series. This particular book is drawn
from what remains of the record of the version of this lecture series given in
1981 at Dana College in Nebraska.
2. The book really
captures the vitality of the spoken event. But of course most of us who are
reading the book were not present at the lectures. Can you tell us more about
the mood and environment of the talks that can shed greater light on how to
read the talks?
I'm glad that you feel that vitality. My father's
published work almost always had its genesis in spoken communication. He was
a fine writer but he found committing to print difficult. He told me, in words that describe my
experience as well, that, "When you have something to say and you
say it, it's said; but when you write it you look at it on the page and it
looks stupid." So it was, and in
this case is as well, that his thoughts were retrieved from transcripts of
recordings of an actual event. The Dana
lecture transcripts were quite flawed and it required a goodly amount of work, taken
up many years later and after his death, to reconstitute what he had said. Having helped with this manuscript, however,
I think we got it pretty close to a fully accurate reconstruction.
As to the setting of these particular lectures, I
don't know much about that but would guess that there were dynamics under the
surface. My father was coming as an
international churchman and a Harvard professor, an apparent "high
church" LCA theologian well known for his advocacy of progressive causes, and
he was speaking here at an ALC Midwestern college rooted in the more
conservative tradition of Danish pietism.
The head of the college, a professor of New Testament as well, had been openly
critical of positions my father had taken.
Thus it is interesting to read this volume with a sensitivity to the
task of bringing argument and insight into a setting where argumentative
confrontation might easily have sabotaged communication.
3. I was especially
surprised by the insights in the chapter on salvation as nirvana. It had never
really occurred to me that Christ would, as it were, "disappear" when
God is all in all. How do you receive this insight from the lectures?
This is indeed one of the most interesting things in
these lectures. My father's appreciation
of a more apophatic vision of salvation can be found already in his work on the
Epistle to the Romans, for example in his famous book Paul Among Jews and Gentiles.
He had noted the way in which, in Romans 11, Paul concluded his
discussion of the conundrum of salvation for Jews and Gentiles with an
exclamatory affirmation of God's mystery and then a doxology that is without
reference to Jesus. Now in these
lectures he builds upon and extends that appreciation, recognizing that a
theological via negativa is not only accessible to us in our tradition but
that it may offer a salutary counterweight and corrective to the cataphatic
imagery of Christ's, and our, victory.
I suspect that an influence in this was conversation
with my mother, who around this time was setting out on a study of images of
heaven in Christian tradition. As a
literary scholar and historian she would certainly have been much aware of the varieties
of imagining what salvation would mean for our individual yearnings and
allegiances, and I would guess that some of her learnings had now become his.
In devoting three of the four lectures to these three soteriologies—Victory,
Nirvana, and Shalom—my father is not seeking to banish any of them altogether
from the repertoire of our prayer and discourse. All three remained part of his own faith and
devotion. But he recognized an inherent
and deadly problem with the Christus
Victor mode of thinking and understood the importance, indeed the urgency,
of deploying an alternative to the hope of triumph. It seems to me that he was right (as well as
rather brilliant) in then lifting up the via
negativa that he calls "Nirvana" here, but I also think he
recognized that such an alternative would not compete well with traditional
imagery of personal and communal vindication. (Winning, after all, tends to have more appeal
than disappearing, even if it is into God that we disappear.) The provision of a third mode of imagining,
that of Shalom, is therefore vital as well, its call for healing and reconciliation
and wholeness as God's deep yearning within us.
4.
Where are we today in our conversations on the roots of violence? How do you
see this work contributing to contemporary conversations?
Unfortunately,
I don't hear all that many conversations on the roots of violence that seem
really helpful. Certainly there are those
folks who diagnose other traditions, or certain parts of their own, as
intrinsically violent. There are certainly
charges brought against Islam, and others against Judaism, and yet others
against old Christian notions of violent atonement, all accusations of the
cultivation of violence by others. There
is some truth and also a lot of caricature and generalization in all that. With
occasional exceptions, it doesn't seem all that salutary and frequently the
condemnations contribute more to the problem than to any solution.
One
thing I would like to see is a greater acknowledgment of the common (and understandable) humanity of the problem. The roots of violence are sunk in the soil of
experiences that are neither unique to one tradition nor entirely absent from
any exceptional other. We need to be recognizing
and owning the commonality of human
yearnings and wraths that can turn us to cruelty. Owning it entails that we do not demonize it
but also requires that we come with repentant sorrow and a compassionate
humility to the table of our conversations. At the same time, we need to see that we do have choices in the language we
deploy and the dreams that we remember and of which we speak with each other. There are options and alternatives available
to us, and our tradition is rich in its imagery and its songs. This book, providing not only my father's
lectures but also commentary from both Jewish and Muslim perspectives, seems to
me an invitation to, and a model of, such a constructive engagement with others
in the realm of religious imagination.
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