The Crucible of the Sixties as a Portal to Orthodoxy

The Crucible of the Sixties as a Portal to Orthodoxy Robert Benne Formative Years: 1937–1965 I was born in 1937, old enough to remember the surrenders of both the Germans and then the Japanese at the end of World War II, as well as the soccer playing of the German prisoners of war who were interned in our town, West Point, Nebraska. The young Americans coming back from the war wanted to marry and have children. The churches were burgeoning; some church historians call this period the Third Great Awakening. Martin Marty, who along with Ralph Bohlman and Fred Niedner grew up in West Point, noticed that the county was 105% churched. The Christian culture was clear and coherent. The church did not need to teach me a sexual ethic. The culture did, as it did concerning hard work, love of country, honesty, and respect for others. It was an idyllic time to grow up. Our public high school enabled a young guy to play sports, sing in various choral groups, play an instrument, do journalism, and act in plays. I love the old school building that housed us. About my twelfth year I worked as a gardener for the most distinguished woman in our town. I overheard her tell her phone mate that "Bobby Benne would make a good pastor." Wow. I interpreted her remarks as coming directly from God. I knew the call was authentic because becoming a pastor was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to be a jock and a coach, not an effeminate pastor. But I began secretly preparing to become a pastor. That meant going to Midland College, just thirty miles away in Fremont. I got to letter in four sports and became the valedictorian End Page 204 of our class. But, most importantly, I met my wife-to-be, Joanna Carson. Intellectually, the required senior course in Christian Ethics provided a great awakening. We read Reinhold Niebuhr's An Interpretation of Christian Ethics. I was enthralled. For the first time in my young life I discovered that the faith (Christian theological ethics) had relevance for economics, politics, and culture. That discovery touched me deeply. I won a Fulbright in my senior year. Joanna and I went off to the University at Erlangen, Germany, after we married at the end of the summer of 1959. There, amid a lot of travel and socializing with other American Lutherans, I was further stimulated by the lectures on Christian social ethics by Walter Kuenneth. Not only did he demonstrate a robust social effect by the Christian faith in his lectures, he had also lived it out by resisting the Nazis during World War II. Following Midland friend and mentor, Phil Hefner, to the University of Chicago Divinity School in 1960, I naturally chose the field of Ethics and Society for my Ph.D. work. Two very influential professors impressed me deeply. One, Al Pitcher, was heavily involved in the three great movements of the early 1960s, the civil rights movement brought north to Chicago by Martin Luther King, Jr., the anti-poverty campaign stimulated by Michael Harrington's book on The Other America, and the Alinsky-led community organization efforts by The Woodlawn Organization, which was an organization of poor blacks pushing back against the "urban removal" efforts of the University of Chicago. Pitcher lectured passionately about those three efforts. I was drawn into them as a student. My other professor, Gibson Winter, was a writer more than an activist. He wrote The Suburban Captivity of the Church, which lamented the escapist, monolithic church culture of the suburbs. He then wrote The New Creation as Metropolis, which argued that parishes should be organized by slices extending from the center city to the suburbs. Such organization would ensure the mixing of class and race. That was as unrealistic as it was idealistic. Two things were most important about these graduate school years (1960–65). One was the positive idealism that surrounded the movements. I call the period one of "liberal idealism." We thought End Page 205 we could overcome the great problems of American life by positive action. Camelot extended into social movements for...