First Things RSS Feed - Robert Benne

Tim Walz, Progressive Lutheran

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 06:00:00 -0400

I share a hometown—West Point, Nebraska—with some prominent Lutherans: Martin Marty, the famed historian; Ralph Bohlmann, the former president of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod; and now Tim Walz, the first Lutheran to run for vice president of the United States. (Hubert Humphrey’s mother was a Lutheran, but he himself was a Methodist.)

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Only the Orthodox Will Survive

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 10:30:00 -0500

In the 1990s, a number of Christian public intellectuals began to take note of the secularization of church-related higher education in America. Many of these scholars reflected on the powerful trends that were slowly removing the “soul” from Christian schools—something that proceeds today with alarming momentum. The most important of these books was James Burtchaell’s 1998 book The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from their Christian Churches.

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Keeping the Main Things the Main Things

Fri, 06 Aug 2021 06:00:00 -0400

This quote is attributed to Martin Luther, though it is probably apocryphal. To paraphrase what it means: We would all agree that we are to “confess Christianity,” to proclaim and teach the gospel—the whole Trinitarian faith. But not all of the main things of the faith are under duress at all times. For instance, the world may think the Nicene Creed is simply a fantasy, but it is not specifically attacking the Nicene Creed. Right now the world is attacking other claims of the faith. If we ignore these attacks, we may be failing to prove our loyalty where the battle is raging.

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Another Narrative

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 06:00:00 -0400

In the early ’70s, one of my mentors at the University of Chicago told me there was a new theory of justice emerging in our country. “Bob,” he said, “It’s no longer equality of opportunity; it’s equality of results.” I did not accept his arguments in favor of this theory because I thought that equality of opportunity was the American way. After all, I thought, defining justice as equality of results meant fixing the results of the race for open positions according to group identity, regardless of individual talent and ambition. In A Theory of Justice , that ace liberal John Rawls had rejected equality of results in favor of “fair equality of opportunity.” Like Rawls, I believed it was “fair” for society to move disadvantaged and privileged people closer to the same starting line so that they could all compete fairly.

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The Augsburg Concession

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 -0400

In 1869, the faithful of what was to be the Lutheran Free Church named their seminary and college in Minneapolis after the Augsburg Confession, because they believed the Confession aligned with biblical truth. They were shaped by a Lutheran pietism that emphasized conversion, service to the church, fervent evangelism abroad, and an “awakened” life of strict piety that eschewed the “ways of the world.”

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Celebrity Theologian

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 06:00:00 -0500

Serious people on both left and right have wailed about the reality-show celebrity occupying the office of president of the United States. Trump's crudity, impulsiveness, narcissism, shallowness, tawdry sexual opinions, and general abrasiveness have repelled even his supporters. Parents worry about his effect on children. Many of us still find it hard to believe that such a fellow is there at all.

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ELCA Hits Bottom

Mon, 01 Oct 2018 00:00:00 -0400

Schism is a serious matter. Even though the leaders of the congregations that left the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) to establish the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) in 2010 considered the ELCA to be the schismatic party, having broken from the apostolic tradition, they trembled a bit about leaving. It is a sin wrongly to divide the Body of Christ, and I wondered whether I, as a vigorous participant in the severance, was guilty. Did we leave too early? Was there a chance for the restoration of orthodoxy in the ELCA? Why did so many fine Lutherans—including a number of my best friends—decide to stay in the ELCA? Were the issues over which we divided “second-order” rather than essential doctrines? Did I just engage in petulant actions after a painful defeat?

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Political Supersessionism

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Last spring I attended a conference at the newly established St. Olaf Institute for Freedom and Community, which is dedicated to “free inquiry and meaningful debate of important political and social issues.” The institute invited four professors to talk about religious conflict: a well-known Yale theologian about conflict among world religions; an Evangelical from Wheaton about tensions within Evangelicalism; a Palestinian Lutheran leader about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and me about discord and schism in the Lutheran churches. I had high expectations that the Palestinian Lutheran pastor, administrator, and theologian Mitri Raheb would “question easy answers and foster constructive dialogue” about that long-standing Middle East clash in which common ground between contending parties is very rare. As it turned out, his lecture was one of the most alarming that I have experienced in a long academic career.

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The De-Professionalization of the NFL

Fri, 30 Jan 2015 16:05:00 -0500

Not long ago I attended a college play that I really enjoyed. Between acts I noticed the stage-manager setting the stage for the next act. I went to the front and told him how much I enjoyed the earlier act. He did not respond. A day later I received an email of apology from him. In it he said that in doing stage management he wanted to model professional conduct for his students, and that meant putting his full attention to setting the stage, not chatting with the audience.

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How a Decadent Culture Makes Me Think Like Sorokin

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 09:36:00 -0500

The more I am hit by the decadence and vulgarity of American culture, the more I return to the thought of Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968). Now out of favor in spite of his enduring scholarship and his central role in the development of academic sociology, Sorokin was already beginning to fade when I entered graduate school in the late-1950s. His stout anti-communism, critique of loosening sexual mores, and cultural conservatism ran squarely against the academic trends of the time. And it didn’t help that his life story gave him far more credibility than his colleagues to discuss the great ideological debates of the Cold War.

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