I have not been able to find any materials from my time in seminary so my spelling of names is a little shaky. The historical details are as accurate as my memory will allow. Being seven years younger than Dr. Ogden, I assure you that that you have a right to fact check me! Classmates like Norman Stephenson, Terry Vaught, John Johns, Gene Leggett, F. D. Dawson, Dan Solomon, James Mayfield, Bill Cotton, Bruce Southard, Wesley Nelson, D’Armond Hunter, and Larry Robertson might add their own recollections to that of a new student from Wisconsin of that first year at Perkins, 1958.
Schubert Being Schubert
“I’ll try to be a little less hard on you,” Dr. Ogden told us. The six of us new students had been invited to his home. He was to be our faculty adviser. Classes had not yet begun and so we really did not know what to expect. Rumors were abroad that he was a tough grader and had the highest IQ of any member of the faculty. We were sitting in his living room going around the circle giving names, a little background about ourselves, and getting to know him in the process.
“One of the faculty got on my case,” Schubert went on. “He pointed out that I thought everyone was as smart I was and to back off expecting perfection from my students.”
We all laughed. As I look back on that story, I think it had to be John Deschner who laid that on him. John was the most willing to raise questions about his ideas and approach to theology
“I don’t know about that,” he told us, “but I’ll do my best to help you become competent theologians.”
The Times
That was early September, 1958. Joe McCarthy died a year before but anti-Communism was still heavy in the air. President Eisenhower had seen us through the Korean War’s cease fire and years of negotiations at Panmunjom only to be watching Communist North Vietnam’s fight with the French going against France. John Kennedy had not yet announced he would run for President. The United Nations was getting its feet under them. NATO was the new bulwark against Communism’s advance in Europe.
In the Church, the World Council of Churches was going strong following its startup at the end of WW II. In Bossey, Switzerland, the Ecumenical Institute was expanding, seeking to spin off satellites in the U. S.
Reinhold Neibuhr and Paul Tillich were the biggest names in theology, both having fled Nazism in Germany to teach in the United States. And a German New Testament scholar, Rudolph Bultmann, was leading the charge on demythologizing Christ, a follow up to the movement among Biblical scholars in the quest to find the historical Jesus. A young American theologian named Schubert Ogden was finishing his dissertation on Bultmann’s work.
IBM had put together a computer, IBM 1, a roomful of electronic gear that could calculate a thousand times faster than a roomful of mathematicians. And Yale University put it to the task of developing a concordance for the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.
The post war boom, which because of the GI Bill, put veterans into colleges and seminaries in record numbers. All of the mainline denominations were growing. The Methodists were approaching 11 million members in the United States and their mission work overseas was flourishing particularly in Africa and the Philippines. Communist China had driven the church underground. But in suburban America, churches sprouted up everywhere. It was the golden age of the Church in America.
In Dallas, Texas, a company called Texas Instruments was working on a tiny piece of technology that would revolutionize the world, the transistor. I-75 was completed through the city. Lovers Lane Methodist Church spun off hundreds of members to start Northhaven. Friends, who married around the time my wife and I did, attended Dr. Ogden’s Sunday School class on a regular basis.
And Perkins School of Theology had a vibrant young dean with the unlikely name of Merrimon Cunniggim. Perkins, situated on the SMU campus on the northside of Dallas in the suburb of Highland Park, was best known for its leading theologian, Albert Outler. He was internationally known and was a guest at the Roman Catholic Church’s first and second modern day ecumenical councils.
In class, Outler put us all at ease by telling us that following his seminary days, his ministry started in small rural Texas churches. “They weren’t accustomed to seminary trained preachers so I told them I was a simple Bible preacher and tried to prove it every Sunday.”
He was not the only professor of stature with a local church background. More on that below.
On the faculty was R. F. Curl. Dr. Curl taught church administration and was a member of the Judicial Council. Fred Gaeley taught New Testament and Church music. And I believe he had been a missionary as well. Dr. Irwin, who came back to complete a semester for the newest Old Testament scholar (Emanuel Gitlin), opened his lectures with a weather report relative the Biblical event or text that was the basis of his lecture for that day. Joe Mathews taught ecumenical affairs, though he left the year before I came.
What Dean Cunniggim did was bring in a remarkable group of young faculty members. For pastoral care, he brought in Bob Elliott, a practicing pastoral psychologist. For ethics, he hired Joe Allen, who as a graduate student had edited the computer-generated concordance (which I still use today, over sixty years later). For church history, Richie Hogg came. For social concerns, Douglas Jackson joined the faculty under Cunniggim. The dean found a Missouri district superintendent to come and teach courses on town and country ministry. He plucked a pastor from one of the largest churches in Texas to teach homiletics, Grady Hardin.
Notice the pattern here. Cunniggim took practicing professionals, several with local church experience, to teach at Perkins. It is no wonder both campus ministers serving the Wesley Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1957 urged me to think beyond the Midwest for my seminary training and suggested Perkins.
Cunniggim’s greatest achievement was finding young theologians who could stand with Albert Outler, Van Harvey, John Deschner, and Schubert Ogden.
Seminary with Dr. Ogden
After supper, we went back to the living room where Dr. Ogden fielded questions about life at seminary, drawing on his own years occasionally though never talking about his accomplishments. He was, in my experience, a private person, humble, and extremely attentive.
One of the students asked about Joe Mathews. Dr. Ogden described what it was like to have Joe on the faculty. “Never a dull moment. His creativity and willingness to explore concepts and ideas was amazing. But scholarly discipline was not one of his gifts. SMU has a policy that those without doctorates or at least a masters in their specialty may not teach more than three years. Joe’s third year was last year. We did everything we could to get him to finish his degree. Neil MacFarland even locked him in his room for days at a time to help him focus and finish his dissertation. Then Joe got a call to set up the Ecumenical Institute office up in Evanston and that ended his time with us. He is greatly missed.”
Before the evening ended, he said our first year theology course would be taught by three professors at the same time. It was experimental but he was excited about the possibilities. He said the curriculum would be traditional, with each of them having several lectures and then all three would as a panel conclude the section with a question-answer session with the class. We were in complete agreement, as students, that the idea was a good one. Our experience with it turned out to be even better because the three professors were in attendance with each other, taking notes, which gave them chance to respond when each took his turn and especially for interaction among them during the summary class, which no one wanted to end! The three that first semester were Van Harvey, John Deschner, and Schubert Ogden. (Albert Outler took Van Harvey’s role the second semester.)
There were many things that experience meant to me. Of the ones that remain in my consciousness, there are three to mention. The first is “prolegamina.” All three lectured for several days each to get across to us that our beliefs, and how we make sense out of them, come from many sources, some deep inside us and some from the milieu around us. Every person, whether they realize it or not, draws upon many sources as they put together what it is they believe and what influences might cause a change in their beliefs. That was a good basis for understanding John Wesley’s four bases pointed out by Albert Outler, the Wesley Quadrilateral. (I think it was those classes which helped Outler pull together his great work added to the Book of Discipline within the following decade.)
The second was Dr. Ogden’s strongest contribution to my thinking was this: “All good theology has to meet two criteria. Is it adequate? And is it understandable?”
While he pushed us hard on those when he critiqued our papers or when we made contributions in class, he pushed himself on those, being aware that his work in existential philosophy provided a jargon which was not widely shared and not understood well enough to use with any facility.
John Deschner loved Schubert’s two criteria and tweaked him about them.
The civil and always friendly challenge between the two culminated before I completed seminary. In my third year, Schubert announced that he was going to give a special lecture on the Trinity. The hall was packed with students and faculty.
Schubert said he was aware of the critique of his theology of the Trinity. He said he was trying to conflate what he found in Scripture with what existential philosophy offered and had thought he’d found that resolution which had become the point of his teaching on the Triune God. But he realized that philosophy fell short, especially his categories, of dealing with the very human ways Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were depicted in the Bible and experienced by the Church. And he had moved to a new insight about the Trinity, laying it out in more traditional terms.
John Deschner, who was seated a couple rows behind where I was, leaned over to a couple faculty colleagues and said, “It’s about time he joined the historical understanding of the Trinity.”
Theology is fluid because it comes out of several places in our background, it faces the difficulty of translation to ever-changing contemporary vocabulary, and it faces challenges from directions outside of our own original bases, problems our theology had never considered before (like homosexuality?). But it finds its stability in history, in human experience, as also seen in Scriptures.
The third was that theology will always be at that point between being what Albert Outer called “doxological ballet,” the best possible expression of the indescribable, and Schubert Ogden’s demythologized expression of faith, something that has to be based on reality and expressed in sufficient, clear, and understandable terms.
As someone trained by both, I expect neither would be pleased with the current theological struggle between the “traditionalists” and the rest of the church. I believe both theologians would have found problems with the “traditonalists’” stances related to using faith to justify anti-gay legislation, and the wider acceptance in the denomination that splitting it would be an act of faith. I think both would feel both would be apostasy, both would be wrong thinking for Christians.
Not having heard nor seen their writings since the 1972 introduction of anti-gay legislation to the Church, I will stand corrected by any such materials where they exist.
Dr. Ogden remained my faculty advisor through the four years I attended Perkins. I took his Bultmann course my last year. I noticed that he purchased an Opel, a small GM car manufactured in Germany, if I remember correctly. My car was on its last legs so we turned it in and bought a new Opel, a fact which I slipped into the final exam. It was shameful, I know, but he laughed. It least I think he did. That was the only item in the exam to which he had not applied red print of critique.
Conclusion
Word of Dr. Ogden’s passing triggered all kinds of memories that extended all through those precious years at Perkins and beyond. When each of my parents died, I thought my main way to grieve was to be angry. But over these latter years leading up to my 60th year as a member of the Wisconsin Conference, and especially now as I look back upon Dr. Ogden’s ministry to me, I find my grief comes out in the form of grateful remembrance. And by putting that down on paper, I hope I am extending his ministry to my reader as well.
