Conundrum

The year was 1986. I was about a year into my first senior pastorate, preaching to a church with a membership that was pushing 200. After a year in this ministry, I was experiencing frustration from two sources.

First, I was wondering why my college and seminary had not taught me more about what the real pastorate would be like. I felt that I had been poorly trained to face many of the actual situations that present themselves in ministry. Second, while I had grown up in one of the more balanced versions of fundamentalism, I had reason to question the model of leadership that I saw employed by many Fundamentalists. On the one hand, these leaders could be authoritarian to the point of brutality. On the other hand, they seemed preoccupied with trivial questions to which they gave answers that were either irrelevant or simply silly.

For instance, one of my earliest written pieces was a response to someone who was trying to impose the “no pants on women” theory on our church. I regarded Fundamentalist speculations about music as simply pathetic. In fact, the typical answers to the whole orbit of “cultural taboos” (as they were sometimes called) struck me as vacuous. The case that some Fundamentalists made for their version of separation was utterly unimpressive.

To be sure, there were still Fundamentalist figures whom I admired both for their leadership and for their thoughtfulness. The number of these, however, was declining. I had begun to look for other answers than I had been given and other models than I had received. In short, I was on the brink of a crisis.

I thought that I might find answers in more advanced training, and ended up in a broadly evangelical institution while continuing to pastor. Later I did a fair amount of my work under mainline ecumenical auspices. I found that I had been welcomed into a new world, and I am still grateful for what I received there. I was exposed to exciting new models and methodologies. Before long, however, I began to discover that these models and methods rested upon philosophical and theological assumptions that had too often been left unexamined. As I pushed to explore the ideas that drove the methodologies, I encountered as much closed-mindedness within evangelicalism as I had come across within Fundamentalism. Furthermore, I found that the new methodologies resulted, not in less, but in greater trivialization of the Christian faith.

All of this pushed me back into an investigation of first things. I found myself asking, What is the church? What is the church for? What is its mission, its structure, its polity, its leadership? What is worship? What is fellowship? How are we supposed to do these things? Indeed, what is Christianity?

It may seem surprising that a pastor writing for his doctorate would be asking such questions, but there I was. Although I had begun to move toward answers that would lead to a fairly radical reorganization of my understanding, I was very uncertain of my conclusions, and I felt that I could not ask a church to wait for me while I tried to find answers. I left my pastorate in order to seek answers in another doctoral program.

Ultimately, the answers came from a confluence of four elements. These elements influenced me in different ways, some more positively than others. None of them did I accept uncritically, but in each of them I found some key idea or ideas that helped to provide the mental categories that I needed before I could sort out the questions and find the answers.

The first element was a definitely Reformed approach to culture. I first became consciously aware of this theory when I read Machen’s essay on “Christianity and Culture.” In the Reformed theory, Christians recognize that all of culture must be brought under the Lordship of Christ. The approach is summarized in Abraham Kuyper’s words: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!”

The second element was a prolonged encounter with the works and perspectives of H. Richard Niebuhr, centering on the categories in his famous Christ and Culture. In this work, Niebuhr attempted to provide a typology of possible approaches to culture. Niebuhr’s categories were useful to me, but they became more useful when I realized the fundamental incoherence of Niebuhr’s typology. Eventually, a modified appropriation of Niebuhr became a powerful engine for critiquing various approaches to culture.

Third, at the same time I was reading Niebuhr, I was also reading broadly on cultural issues. When I say broadly, I mean to include sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, and especially Peter Berger. My reading also included critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Jacques Barzun, and the Marxian, Raymond Williams. It also included shapers of the postmodern theory of knowledge such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Michael Polanyi, and Thomas Kuhn.

The writings of these individuals were instructive, but stronger influences came from a disparate and sometimes quirky collection of my favorite authors. During this period I devoured the writings of Richard Mitchell, Russell Kirk, E. D. Hirsch, T. S. Eliot, Abraham Kaplan, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and especially Richard Weaver and C. S. Lewis. As I completed this reading, a definite theory of culture and its relationship to Christian faith was taking shape in my own mind.

The fourth and latest element that influenced me was a profound interaction with what I will call the “theologians of affection” (the proper name for this approach is fideism). Theology of the affections is very Augustinian, and therefore it is also Calvinistic. It shows up in Pascal, but receives its most sustained treatment in Jonathan Edwards. It is also the theory that undergirds the approach of C. S. Lewis to the presentation of Christianity.

Exposure to these theologians (especially Edwards) and to Lewis reinforced the importance of the affections. It also highlighted the crucial distinction between affections and passions or appetites, a distinction that was recognized almost universally in the premodern world. Lewis provided the mechanism for articulating this distinction in more specific ways (see especially his Experiment in Criticism).

A quarter of a century has passed since I began the transition that brought me to my present perspective. But now I find myself faced with a conundrum. This conundrum revolves around both sources of frustration that I experienced in the mid-1980s.

First, I have been thrust into a position of leadership. It is not a very big or important position, but I do bear responsibility for the ministry of a seminary. I would like to lead that seminary according to the perspectives that I have gleaned over twenty-five years’ worth of struggle. Having rejected authoritarian and abusive models of Fundamentalist leadership, however, I cannot simply enforce my perspectives upon the institution. New Testament leaders must not use tools of coercion. They are limited to tools of persuasion.

I have been surprised to discover a widespread assumption that to be a Fundamentalist leader is ipso facto to be authoritarian and abusive. This means that I am often assumed to be, and occasionally accused of being, the very things that I most despise. For some people, there seems to be no possible evidence that would contradict this assumption.

Let me be perfectly clear about my own leadership. There are times when I lead badly and times when I lead sinfully. But when these behaviors are pointed out to me, I take them to be sins of which I must repent. Far from endorsing such modes of leadership, I wish to do all that I rightly can to undermine them, both in myself and in my peers. At the least, I want to communicate a different model of leadership to a future generation of churchmen.

Christian leadership is persuasion, but occasions for persuasion are far less common than one might assume. Most of a president’s life is taken up with administrative bustle. Even if he is also a teacher, he does not get to focus simply on the areas that most interest him. Overworked employees are understandably resistant to the suggestion that they might do extra reading or otherwise prepare for extra conversations. Constituencies are alert for any idea that seems unusual. Gatekeepers of churches and other institutions are watchful for any remark that might be construed as a criticism. I have about concluded that institutional presidency is the worst position from which to attempt to propagate ideas. Presidents have less freedom to say what they think, and they are granted less opportunity to say it, than almost anyone else.

There is another side to my conundrum. By the mid-1980s, the weakness of fundamentalist argumentation had convinced me that certain “cultural taboos” were trivial. In some cases they really were. My subsequent study and thinking, however, has led me to believe that all cultural activities are far more freighted with meaning than Fundamentalists (or most other evangelicals) have realized. We cannot insist with Kuyper that Christ claims every area as His own, but then treat certain areas as if they are unimportant.

In other words, many of the things that I once considered trivial, I now see as greatly significant. But when I try to explain my conclusions, many people seem to assume that I am just repeating the same, old Fundamentalist presentation that I rejected twenty-five years ago. In a way, I can understand. Some of my present positions do bear similarities to practices that some Fundamentalists have advocated. In most cases, however, my reasons diverge, and in all cases the process of reaching my conclusions has been entirely different.

The conundrum is this: how do you speak to people who are already convinced that they know what you think, and who have already rejected your conclusions because they do not accept arguments that you never intended to use anyway? Furthermore, how do you explain conclusions to people who lack even the categories to frame the questions?

The only place for sustained interaction over these questions is in the classroom. If they are to be discussed there, then something else will not be. Here is the greatest irony and the most pressing conundrum of all. In the effort to prioritize the kind of thinking and conversation that will lead students to grapple seriously with first things, I must choose not to offer some of the hands-on, practical training that I myself missed in my earliest years of ministry.

These conundrums are always humbling and sometimes humiliating. Here as everywhere the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. If there is one lesson to carry away, it is this: no seminary can teach a pastor everything he needs to know. The best that we can do is to equip him with a set of tools and habits that he can employ in his lifelong pursuit of learning and effectiveness.

An Hymne

Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650)

Drop, drop, slow tears,
And bathe those beauteous feet,
Which brought from heav’n
The news and Prince of Peace.

Cease not, wet eyes,
His mercies to entreat;
To crie for vengeance:
Sinne doth never cease.

In your deep floods
Drown all my faults and fears;
Nor let His eye see
Sinne, but through my tears.

This essay is by Dr. Kevin T. Bauder, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). Not every professor, student, or alumnus of Central Seminary necessarily agrees with every opinion that it expresses.