No Easy Answers

It’s only natural to seek easy answers, but in the challenges of living together as nations, religions, congregations, local communities, and families we recognize that what we face embodies all the complexities of life. As professors, pastors, and parents we need to resist the temptation to seek the “quick fix” or the “glib response.” And just think of the challenges our children face—how to spend one’s life, with whom, and for what purpose. Our congregations, I hope, are places where life can be faced in all its complexity, safely, and with the expectation that our questions and anxieties will be taken seriously.

Ralph W. Klein discusses the challenge of interpreting difficult biblical texts. The book of Job provides no easy answers for the problem of suffering, but invites us into the struggle to achieve meaning, comfort, and hope in our suffering. It is the gospel that gives the Scriptures their authority, and authority in the Bible often has to do with power for forgiveness and mission. The Bible is the Word of God, but it is also words written by finite humans, with their own limits, presuppositions, and even biases. For the last several centuries many Christians have read the Bible “critically,” but at the same time they read it devotionally and with the expectation that they will find here clear expressions of the gospel. Current challenges to biblical exegesis include the subjectivity of the interpreter (gender, race, class), the social location of the biblical writers and the diversity of their perspectives (examples from Chronicles, Hosea, and Daniel, and the problem of the Bible’s patriarchy), and passages that seem out of touch with our world today (divorce, sexuality, rape). To give easy answers to hard passages is an insult to those whom we would serve.

Munib Younan reports on the status and activities of Christians in Palestine. Small in number (42,000 Christians in Palestine and 120,000 in Israel) and decreasing, Christians play a role in peace-making and reconciliation well beyond their size. Israel’s occupation of Palestine since 1967 and acts of violence on both sides have seriously crippled hopes for the future. Christians played a significant role in the recent “cartoon crisis” and have pressured the Palestinian Authority not to make Islam the official religion of Palestine and that Sharia not become the main source of legislation. Schools sponsored by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land teach peace, co-existence, and democratic principles. Reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis must be built on three principles: genuine reconciliation can only grow in a culture of truthfulness; reconciliation is built on justice, and the fruit of justice is peace; for true reconciliation to occur all sides must be willing to forgive. Bishop Younan gave this address in January, 2007, at LSTC. The subsequent clash between Hamas and Fatah and the deterioration of the situation in the Gaza strip make the situation even more perilous now.

Robert O. Smith investigates Luther’s attitude toward the Turks of his time and Islam. In Luther’s day European Christians thought of Muslims as military foes. But already in 1518 Luther held that Catholic hostility to the Turks was often in resistance to the judgment of God which the Turks exercised. Luther was convinced that the fight against the Turks must begin with repentance. Luther also held to the just war theory and believed therefore that the state had the right to protect against the Turks if they destroyed the worship of God, the peace of the country, law, and justice. The Turks fit into his eschatological scenario: “When the Turk begins to fail a little the Last Day will surely come.” Luther became increasingly convinced that Pope and Turk were two sides of the same coin. The joint threat from Turk and pope was addressed in one of Luther’s hymns: “Lord, Keep us Steadfast in thy Word/And curb the Turks’ and papists’ sword.” Luther was concerned to educate fellow Christians lest they be seduced by the beauty of Muslim religious practices and convert to Islam. Luther characterized both Islam and Roman Catholicism as religions of works-righteousness. The doctrinal nature of Luther’s critical approach to Islam is consistent with his approach to internal Christian adversaries.

Bruce B. Rittenhouse seeks “the truth” about the thirty-three killings at Virginia Tech in April 2007. We must struggle to perceive a meaning which is not just a mirror of our insecurities, but reflects the reality of human beings’ relationships to God and to one another. It is a denial of the reality that human beings are equally created and sustained by God to suggest that immigrants or Korean-Americans or persons who suffer depression are distinctively prone to evil acts. While the killer is responsible for his acts, the rest of us are responsible for forming the context of his acts, a context which contains risk factors for violence. We are each guilty of contributing to our culture’s sins towards the socially marginalized through ignorance, fear, and inaction. We are sinners who can live only if we are forgiven.

Pamela Cooper-White provides an extensive review of a recent book by Leonard Hummel on suffering. The book investigates seven Lutherans whose lives had been significantly touched by suffering. Hummel is interested in the particularities of Lutherans’ beliefs as they are lived in real life, but he discovered that Lutherans’ beliefs and practices around consolation for suffering are less tied to concepts of doctrinal purity and congruence with a received textual tradition than one might expect. The consolation of God is clothed not in theology per se, but in Word and Sacrament, the promise of God repeated by human lips, and by the practices of the faithful community. Hummel offers a method for a tradition-centered pastoral research that engages the details of believers’ lives with both the comforts and the critical edges of religious tradition.

There are “no easy answers,” but life is more than a series of mazes and meaningless busy-ness. Jesus spoke of “the one thing needful,” and the fact that we are justified for Christ’s sake through faith is at once a focus and an invitation to live without fear and to dare to seek the peace of our communities. If seminary is a place where all your answers are questioned, it is ideally also the place where the center is sought and the gospel reigns supreme. Easy answers are no answers at all; no answers are an evasion of evangelical responsibility.

Ralph W. Klein
Editor

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