How My Mind Has Not Changed, Yet Changed

How My Mind Has Not Changed, Yet Changed Ted Peters Would I sound stubborn if I said that my mind has not changed over six decades of study, pastoral ministry, and theological reflection? Would you think my head is made of hard wood? Impenetrable? Of course, new understandings have sanded my mind's patina. Social crises have drilled holes in my worldview. And I have had to do considerable reshaping. An evolving mind, I discovered, requires plasticity rather than rigidity. Yet, some core convictions have remained unchanged. The Gospel and the Cross My mind has not changed regarding the gospel. The gospel is the cynosure of the Christian faith. At least if you are a Lutheran. I saw this right at the beginning. And I still do. Oh yes, defining the gospel morphed a bit over time. Here's my current definition."The gospel is the story of Jesus told with its significance, articulated theologically as new creation, justification, and proclamation." With Martin Luther, I hold that the gospel lays the foundation upon which the church stands or falls. No change here. The Theology of the Cross has deepened for me. Already as a seminarian I had elected to follow the galvanic Luther instead of the more pedantic Lutheran Orthodoxy. Proclamation of the gospel, I surmised, required Luther's Theology of the Cross in its epistemological form: the truth about God is revealed under its opposite. In the cross we see death revealing the God of life. End Page 51 Later, when reading Jürgen Moltmann's book, The Crucified God (1974), I felt compelled to add an ethical dimension to the epistemological dimension: God suffers with the creation in travail. Moltmann emphasized that in Jesus' cross God in Godself experienced abandonment, suffering, and death. When looking at the cross, we can say "this is God!" The cross is not just the opposite of God. The cross is God experiencing what we experience. For you and me to live a godly life following Jesus, we too will feel the pain of creation groaning in travail. Was the dimension of divine suffering already in Luther himself? Yes. But it was Moltmann who dug it out and showed it to me. Racism in the Church I was ordained in 1970 to serve as pastor of an inner-city parish on the south side of Chicago. At that time, I was zealous for racial integration. I believed passionately that the church could not be the church of Galatians 3:28 unless worship included persons from a variety of races singing together in unison. I still believe this with equal zeal. In those salad days of ministry when racial "integration" was still a good word, I discovered that liberal anthropology worked better for moral transformation than did evangelical anthropology. Evangelical anthropology presupposes that we are sinners in need of repentance. I discovered that condemning white people for racial prejudice and demanding that they repent only precipitated resistance, recalcitrance, and rejection. What I found effective in matters of racial integration was capitalizing on the liberal view that down deep we are good people. Lifting a vision that good people affirm racial harmony was far more persuasive. It worked in my local situation just as it did largely on a national scale for Martin Luther King Jr. Now, a half century later, I still yearn for racial harmony despite the observation that North American Lutheranism is more lily white than it was when I first began formal ministry. Something blocked the path to achieving Galatians 3:28. What was that? Before 1987, Lutherans in their various synods simply reflected the prejudices and End Page 52 institutional habits of the surrounding culture. Then, when gestating the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA, born 1988), Lutheran leaders heroically eschewed racial prejudice and made the noble commitment to integrate. Hooray! At the time I celebrated with cartwheels, thanking God that our Lutheran communion was following the lead of the Holy Spirt. But my early hot excitement gradually turned to ice. Rather than integrate, our white leadership decided to substitute words for action, ideology for transformation. How did they do this? By twisting and distorting spiritual self-understanding. By incorporating...