Schubert Ogden 1928-2019

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.

The Distraction to End All Distractions

I wrote the essay below two nights ago as a follow-up on my task of commenting on recent Judicial Council decisions and to also follow up on why I had written several emails to the bishops.  

As you will see, I have several strong opinions.  For that reason, I am posting the whole essay in my personal blog and only the first two paragraphs and a few other sentences from this essay in the AIA blog.  

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I have not regretted going over a year without commentaries on Judicial Council Decisions.  Most of the issues before the Council were of how best to allow separation from the denomination by discontented pastors, bishops, churches, and conferences over gay rights.  Those decisions regarding separation have been carefully and thoughtfully described by Heather Hahn of the United Methodist News Service in her respective articles at the time of their publication by the Council.  I really had nothing to add regarding the meaning and legality of Paragraph 2553 and related paragraphs allowing withdrawal.

I have temporarily passed over the decisions on other subjects.  I hope to address those in the near future.

Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two issues arose in our church.  Those watching social concerns in the past began to focus on environmental matters, warning that air and water pollution were massive enough that work had to be done to reverse those trends or there could be terrible consequences.

Those watching for a chance to gain power in our denomination, as was happening at the time in all of the mainline churches, watched with gleeful dismay as a United Methodist pastor won a law suit against his conference for discrimination against him because he was gay.  Those culture warriors had lost the battle over abortion at the time with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court.  But now those who claimed they took the Bible literally, as long as you took their word for what was to be taken literally, had a concrete issue over which to fight in order to gain political advantage.  They wanted to reshape our denomination after generations of modernist (liberals and moderates) theology had dominated the leadership.

Sadly, we liberals took the bait and entered into conflict over gay rights and barely noticed the threat of global warming.

Prior to the gay pastor winning his lawsuit, no one particularly thought about sexual orientation.  The estimated ten percent of men and women, not defining themselves sexually as the rest of us did, tended to be isolated and in the closet.  Even our swear words were almost all theological or bodily function terms at the time.  And "gay" was a happy word.

But as our population grew, so did the number and variety of people's sexuality to where they finally discovered each other on a political scale that disturbed everyone who had not noticed this natural phenomenon before.

My introduction to the reality of homosexuality occurred in an anthropology course where I discovered articles about "berdache" among Native Americans.  Those braves who took a male homosexual partner brought into the women's areas of responsibility someone with masculine strength, a real plus for the tribe.  My professor gave me a hard time because I did not mention it in the monograph about the tribe I chose to study but included reference to the articles in the bibliography.  That was in 1958.  --  The professor never did lecture on it or even bring it up in class.  It was at most a niche issue that 90 percent of the population was not encountering it or its impact on their closeted alternately oriented neighbors.  I also think it was too complicated to deal with.  We as a culture had not been as wise as the Native American cultures and many other cultures were regarding it.

I think the conservatives used the era's sexual revolution at the time and for awhile hornswoggled liberals and moderates into looking upon the variations not as biological realities to be respected and integrated into our culture but instead to be seen as moral deviations.  That was a whole lot more scintillating than discussing the rise of CO2 and plastics in our atmosphere.

And now we are paying for letting the conservatives distract us.  We are now facing the greatest extinction Earth's long history with the demise of millions of species of flora and fauna and the prospect of the collapse of civilization hovering just over the horizon.  (See note at the end of this essay.)

That is why I wrote a series of emails to the bishops during the last couple months.  We have got to break the cycle of distraction brought by some power hungry politically oriented church leaders and focus on saving the planet.  Part of saving the planet, besides facing up to global warming, is establishing a stronger church so that we can work together  better and so that we can lean on each other through the tragedies of floods, fires, and storms that are upon us and yet to come.

That does not mean that what the Judicial Council does is irrelevant to the fate of the human race.  They are stuck with the limitations of their role in our legal system.  Our legal system as defined by the General Conference has not yet found a way to deal with climate issues that would allow the Council to have a direct impact.

Here too close to the end of my own life is my real regret that it took so long to speak up in support of the Dave Steffensons and Bishop Dycks of our denomination who have been warning us.  

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Note:  I know several, though not all, of the key "conservatives" who have led the fight for separation.  They are good guys, "play well with others," and I would trust them "in the trenches" with me.  If they ever seek my help, I will help them.  They think they are right and acting with integrity.  I used strong language about them above only because I truly believe that history will view them harshly.  

Rev. Vincent Sammartino

I woke up early this morning and found myself thinking about an old friend and wondering if I would learn if he was still alive.  I went to Bing to search and his obituary was the first item listed.  He died in Wisconsin Rapids in 2010, close to his surviving son and his family.  The obit gave me a chance to leave a message so I wrote the following:

Vince was an amazing minister.  He was asked to merge three small congregations in Racine, one of African American background, one of Italian background, and one of English.  He succeeded in pulling them together.  He was then assigned to a small congregation on the northwest side of Milwaukee.  The neighborhood was transitioning from European American to African American and Vince succeeded in helping the church grow.  It was working class families that constituted the increase in attendance as well as their Black neighbors.  Sundays were great celebrations of community love and the Gospel.  I asked him how he preached to such a diverse crowd.  "I always quote Jesus," he said.

He also sang to them.  Being of Italian extraction, he was ready to break into operatic-style song, even from the pulpit in the midst of a sermon.  I never found it to be an ego trip but rather a gleeful rendition of a hymn or song appropriate to the theme of the sermon.   He wasn't afraid to put himself out there.

That Brooklyn assertiveness underlay his evangelical nature.  He knew how to draw people to the Church.  He was unique enough that many of us wondered if he was really a Southern Baptist.  He was quite open about where he stood theologically.  "I'm Arminian," he told me.  "I never bought into that Calvinist stuff.  God's grace is free but we still have to take responsibility for working beyond our salvation.  We have to remember we are on the road to perfection, like John Wesley preached."

There is one vignette I want to share about Vince to illustrate his sense of humor and made him easy to be around.  "When I was young,  I joined the navy to see the world.  And ended up all the years of my enlistment assigned to the Brooklyn Navy Yard!"

Now let me add some more critical information about him for which there was no room in the funeral home's response section.

Late one night, Vince called me.  "I don't know what to do.  The DS told me I had to be out of the parsonage by Friday.  It's terrible what they are doing to us."

I was serving Faith UMC in Milwaukee at the time.  While I was commuting from Whitewater where my family lived and my wife was working full time, I stayed overnight at the parsonage two nights and four full days (putting in 60 daytime work hours on site).  I asked if he could come down and we could talk over his situation.  He did just that.

He was facing charges of spouse abuse and he could not get anyone to stand with him against the conference.  A couple years earlier, he had observed my success before the Judicial Council (see JCD 492) and, though I was little more than an acquaintance, he called.

The upshot of that conversation was that I would be his advocate, that he could move in to the parsonage until other arrangements might be made, and over the following year or so, would see him through a church trial and finally back into a church.

I saw first hand how good friends could ignore me because the bishop was clear that Vince was in the wrong despite the facts of the case, even through a church trial.  Fortunately, the jurisdiction's committee on appeals ruled in his favor, though it took the bishop six months to finally appoint him.

The experience was demoralizing for me.  My mistakes in trying to help him were bad enough but all of my closest clergy friends, at more than one point each, disregarded my views and threw Vince to the wolves.  

Through it all, Vince was our chaplain.  The team we pulled together was as good as it could have been.  But the set-backs seemed to never end.  Even so, Vince would remind us that God was in charge and that everything would finally be all right.  

Once he was established in a church in the northern part of the state, he served there for many years until his retirement.  But he never forgot me.  Every holiday, he sent me a small check as a sign of his appreciation for helping him.

"Red Flag" Ministry

 What if we divided up our districts as United Methodists and established parish lines out to the next UM church in all directions. We would not use those lines as restrictive to define our pastoral "kingdoms" but as defining for whom we were responsible on at least one point: who might be a potential shooter.  

I do not think that John Wesley had that in mind when he admonished his preachers to visit from house to house. But I would not be surprised if he was concerned that mentally ill or otherwise vulnerable people were going unnoticed and therefore unserved by the community resources, of which the church is one.

In all of the hundreds of cases, especially since the assault weapons ban was allowed to expire, no shooter or his family has been reported to have a pastor or church involved in their lives.

The Jehovah's Witnesses who actually do visit house to house do not go beyond trying to encourage people to join their association. I know. I've mentioned to them when they visit me that they are doing a unique thing and could be bearers of lists of resources counties and communities offer. They turn glassy-eyed when I ask them about that.

So, my fellow UM pastors. What do you think? Can we carry on a "red flag" ministry that just might save a ton of lives?

The Supreme Court's anti-abortion ruling

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"Mommy killers! Mommy killers!"

I'm not surprised that protesters are not yelling that at the Supreme Court after today's ruling gutting Roe v. Wade.

Anti-abortion people have been crying "Baby killers!" for years. But this new ruling has the effect of forcing women who cannot afford to go to another state to end a pregnancy to do desperate things. In the early years of my ministry, when abortions were illegal, the death rate from efforts to get abortions were high, especially among minority women. Why the pro-life folks felt that was okay is a mystery to me, even when white women also died.

In the old days, it was Roman Catholic belief that abortion was bad because if you had to choose who should live, baby or mommy, baby was chosen because its pure soul trumped the bad things the woman may have done and must have done during her life.

That is not usually heard in any arguments nowadays. The focus is on the simpler issue: these are babies, even if they have not been born yet. The well-being of the mother is not even considered, AT ALL, by the politics of anti-abortion.

Jewish faith requires abortion if the mother's life could be otherwise harmed. In fact, the Bible. acknowledges life exists when the fetus first breathes.

We United Methodists passed a resolution that urged medical care in any circumstance where abortion was needed though we did not identify when that might be.

Maybe this will become a matter of religious freedom. And the issue of the right to privacy may no longer be the linchpin.

My friends who are against abortion may choose not to have them. What would happen if I somehow got legislatures and Congress to prohibit gambling because it is against my firmly help religious belief? Gambling along with alcohol are destructive of families that leave them impoverished.

You've probably stopped reading by now. Maybe I need to shout something so offensive that I get your attention back but which describes what will happen. No, I will only ask this:

What about the mothers?

Michael Cohen's View Of Things

 I just finished reading DISLOYAL, Donald Trump's personal lawyer's book on his work for Trump.  He describes working for Trump as an addiction that blocks rationality.  The Trump world was exciting, challenging, and very heady stuff.  Just a few days before the FBI arrested Cohen, he had sat at the dinner table with now President Trump and one of the richest men in the world, a meeting he had brokered for them both.  And he described the way Trump then distanced himself from Cohen and actually worked through Attorney General William Barr to have him put back in prison after he had been released to home custody during the pandemic as many other prisoners had been released.  All his years of loyalty to Trump were being repaid with retaliation to prevent the writing of this book.

Cohen does a couple other things that surprised me.  First, without diminishing their culpability, he humanized Don Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and Malania.  There was little he could do besides describe the actual behaviors of Trump himself to humanize him.

The other thing that surprised me was how much he downplayed the Russian connection in his book.  While he spoke at length about the probability of the existence of the "pee-pee tape" and showed no regard for the Steele Dossier, he said practically nothing about the Russian help everyone else who has written about the 2016 election included in great detail.  He may have been saving what he really knew for sharing with Congress after his book was published.  Or he may have really had little to do beyond what he admitted, that he had worked on the Moscow Trump Tower deal all during the campaign at the time when Trump was denying any business with the Russians.

His main thrust as to what got Trump elected was that the Main Stream Media amplified everything about Trump they could find and kept reporting all the negative things the GOP was doing to make Clinton's emails seem like the crime of the century.  To Cohen, what little the Russians did was nothing compared to the media's fascination with all things Trump.  Trump was exciting and free of any moral or ethical restraints, a state of being that was admired and yearned for by half the American population.  Trump was a star, one who ruled "reality" television, including the world of wrestling.  Fox Network, Limbaugh, and other "conservative" media only enhanced what the rest of the news gathering agencies were doing, in Cohen's mind.

As a side note, let me add that Jonathan Karl's BETRAYAL, Michael Wolff's LANDSLIDE, and the Woodward/Acosta book PERIL also said amazingly little about the Russian influence.  They may have been asked by the Department of Justice to hold up on what they learned about Russia.  I can't imagine such writers not encountering a lot more about foreign interference in the Trump years.  I am awaiting a book by someone who reports on the influence Putin had on Trump to do things like sending federal troops into the BLM protests to break them up, to clear the square in front of St. John's Church for Trump's PR stunt ("dominate the streets"), and other moments when Trump tried to do things that even his most loyal staff found a way to torpedo or drag out until he forgot about it.

Cohen has laid bare what it is like to become a cult member at the same time he was aware of how badly he was acting on Trump's behalf.  His book is most engaging.

Too Many Big Lies

 Our era has too many big lies believed by too many people.  And they are getting people killed.  

The most immediate deadly big lie is that the white race is superior to any other race.  This has led to putting chemical dumps next to small ethnic communities, to providing poor public services like sewage and schools, presuming ethnics are dangerous, and feeling free to harass and even kill ethnics without due process.  

The next is that public health measures like wearing masks in public and getting vaccinated against the COVID virus are some kind of false pretense for a leftist government take-over.  What is really is crazy is that such attitudes leave the "true believers" vulnerable to infection and possible death.  They are harming themselves by their belief in this big lie.  What is worse is that the virus can evolve in their infections into something that could infect even the vaccinated, thus prolonging the pandemic for everyone.

And then there is the big lie that Trump was cheated out of being re-elected.  Over sixty law suits were dismissed by all kinds of judges, many appointed by Trump himself that there were irregularities in the 2020 election.  Every election official all over the country said this was the most secure election in history.  The only violations were a small handful of Trump voters who tried to vote in dead relatives' name.  The big lie that Trump was really the winner in 2020 led to the death of five people, three being Capitol Police, on January 6, with the possibility that that was a practice run for an even bigger and more deadly attack on our government.

All three lies are part of the belief system of many who are mostly in one political party, thanks to Trump.  That does not free any who are not of that political party from believing one or more of the big lies.  They all tempt every one of us.  

What is really bad is that the "true believers" think it is okay to harass, threaten, and even damage us.  They do not believe in pacifism and agreeing to disagree.  It's their way or we suffer the consequences, consequences they get to choose.  

That's not the way to govern.  It is not the American way!