By Deirdre Good and Jane Redmont

Krister Stendahl, New Testament scholar, ecumenist, former Dean of Harvard Divinity School, Bishop in the Church of Sweden, advocate for women and lesbian and gay people, and pioneer in Jewish-Christian relations, died on Tuesday, April 15 in Boston. A memorial service for Bishop Stendahl will be held at Harvard’s Memorial Church on Friday, May 16 at 3:00 p.m.

At his core, Krister Stendahl was a priest. A reverent and exquisite presider, he celebrated a weekly Eucharist at Harvard Divinity School, early in the morning on a weekday, with a cluster of students and a handful of faculty and administrators whose affiliations ranged from Unitarian Universalist to Roman Catholic. He did this when he was Dean and again when he returned to the faculty after his time as Bishop of Stockholm, faithfully. He preached short, beautiful homilies, choosing his words well, always giving time to silence.

As Dean of HDS in the late 1960s and 1970s, Krister --most of us called him by his first name-- navigated a society, academy, and church in the throes of profound upheaval, the politics of Harvard, teaching, fund-raising, and leadership in the World Council of Churches. Yet it was his office we visited to talk about God. We were, of course, in awe of him --the Swedish accent, the fused spine, the slow, measured speech may have had something to do with that-- but drawn always by his kindness, his attention to each visitor, his discerning wisdom, and his palpable involvement with the Holy One of Blessing, who lives with us in the world and whose mysterious ways remain beyond those of our human minds and hearts. A man of solid ego and strong speech, he also knew the limits of the self. In his later years especially, he reflected on them with his customary blunt honesty and love of the Bible.

Krister's love of and skill with language translated into poetry as well as wit in the dialogue of daily life, in his practiced colloquialisms, in his sermons and lectures --and all this in English, his second language. He did not publish as many books as some of his learned colleagues, but when he did, his insights were memorable. Whether about the apostle Paul, the challenges of interreligious conversation, or the language of liturgy, they turned our thinking inside out and echoed down through the years. When Krister did not publish his words, we who were privileged to be with him at liturgies and lectures held the words and the sound of his voice inside us. There is a Stendahl oral tradition spanning at least half a century and only recently captured on video. One Good Friday in the 1980s or early 1990s, Krister preached the entire Seven Last Words of Jesus service at Harvard's Memorial Church. After the service, one of us asked him whether he might be willing to part with a copy of his text. "I had no notes," he said simply. So we carry his wisdom in our memories and into our own times in pulpit and classroom.

In his 1958 (Eng. 1966) book, The Bible and the Role of Women, written in the Swedish context of the debate on women's ordination, Krister Stendahl addresses the argument that because Jesus called only male apostles, only males may become priests. “By what right is this act made binding in ministry and interpreted that only males may serve in ministry?” he asks. In the cultural context in which apostles were identified with the 12 tribes of Israel, he notes, what other cultural alternative was there? He confessed in a talk to a gathering of new bishops at General Theological Seminary that he was tempted to ask Cardinal Joseph Bernardin how many Catholic priests were Jews. Wouldn't Jesus' Jewishness, he asked, rank more highly than his maleness in traits of the incarnation?

Of course there are New Testament passages that support women's subordination grounded in the order of creation. However, Galatians 3:26-28 breaks through this order of creation to describe a new creation in Christ overcoming separation between Jew and Greek, slave and free. The third pairing, “male and female,” alludes to the Greek translation of Genesis 1:27, “male and female created He them.” In Christ, says the Galatians passage, the basic division of male and female is overcome and the law of creation overturned. Krister points out that in the New Testament the question of any cultic role for women is never separate from the role of women in ordinary life, and that this role (subordinate, of course) is seen as founded in the order of creation.

It becomes extremely difficult then for us to assent to women's emancipation in civil life and to hold to subordination in the ecclesiastical area unless we make the church the last bastion of the “biblical” order-of-creation view. Yet that stance too contains a contradiction, because it is in Christ, not in the world, that there is to be neither male nor female. Stendahl writes, “If emancipation is right, then there is no valid ‘biblical’ reason not to ordain women. Ordination cannot be treated as a ‘special’ problem, since there is no indication that the New Testament sees it as such.”

Two months ago, barely mobile and already on the short road to death, Krister Stendahl presided at the memorial service of Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Strugnell, who had been his colleague at Harvard. In attendance was Archbishop Demetrios, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, who as Demetrios Trakatellis had been a graduate student in New Testament during Stendahl's tenure. Krister, scheduled to give the final benediction, spontaneously ceded the place to the Archbishop and placed him at the center of the celebration, a small but powerful gesture, typical of Krister, ecumenical and gracious to the end.

Alumni and alumnae of the Stendahl era at HDS remember Brita and Krister Stendahl's Christmas party with the punch bowl of glögg, the spiced wine of Swedish winters. But Brita was never just a hostess. Krister Stendahl was one of those men who like intelligent women, marry one, and love her to the end. In six decades of marriage Dr. Brita Stendahl, a scholar of Scandinavian philosophy, literature, and history, was steady companion, luminous presence, and sharp intellect. Brita and Krister gave workshops together on topics from religion and humor to women's wisdom, traveled to interreligious convocations, and sat listening to the wisdom of others, year after year. Krister, lover and husband, was discreet and dignified in his Northern European way, but his and Brita's presence and radiance as a couple were constant. To remember Krister is to remember this partnership.

Like all holy and learned people who are also public persons, Krister leaves behind spiritual and intellectual children. He was a mentor to hundreds of us, perhaps thousands. In his death we all feel related to him, but know the weight of his absence for his beloved children and their children's children, living their private grief amid an international outpouring of affection.

Advocate and colleague, Krister welcomed the challenge of women at Harvard, in Stockholm, and at the World Council of Churches in the laborious journey to equal public, ministerial, and theological presence. He came to know that the God who calls us beyond our limits and into life abundant cannot be limited by gender in our visions or in our prayers. The language of liturgy, intimate as the language of love --Krister once called it “a caressing language”-- changed even as Krister remained faithful to the traditions of Christian worship that formed him. He began, earlier than most, using gender-inclusive language not just to speak of humans but to address God: without fuss, without speeches, and with the blend of reverence, poetry, humor, and seriousness that characterized his stance before God.

The Church of Sweden, recognizing the historic episcopate, uses the word “priest” for its ordained ministers. In good Lutheran fashion, it also understands them as pastors. Krister Stendahl was both. The memorial website at his parish, the University Lutheran Church in Cambridge, shows only a fraction of the pastoral life of the man who led institutions but who, without fanfare, visited a friend's relative in prison and prayed for a former student hospitalized for depression.

Asked why Jews and women became such a focus for his scholarly work, Stendahl replied: “The Christian Bible includes sayings that have caused much pain, both to Jews and to women. Thus I have felt called to seek forms of interpretation which can counteract such undesirable side effects of the Holy Scriptures.”

Think about it. Why would a white privileged European man concern himself with Jews and women? To graduate students he explained that what called him to this search was a concern for justice or righteousness as the Gospel of Matthew describes it. Justice is an imperative of God's Kingdom. Jesus is about tikkun olam, the mended creation. For the dispossessed or oppressed, justice is grace. Only the privileged separate the two. Accordingly, Krister was often present among those ordaining first women and then gay men and lesbians to the ordained ministry in the Lutheran and Episcopal churches. When Gene Robinson was consecrated Bishop in 2003, there Krister Stendhal was next to Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold. In pictures of the event he can be seen smiling and nodding. At the end of the ceremony, as the procession left the arena at Dartmouth, the hymn we sang was “For All the Saints, Who From Their Labors Rest.” When all eyes were on our new Bishop Gene Robinson, there before him with the other bishops, clergy, and presenters, walking haltingly with a cane, went Krister. This is how we remember him.

Café contributors Deirdre Good and Jane Redmont were both students of Krister Stendahl’s at Harvard Divinity School, Redmont as an M.Div. student, Good as a Th.D. student in New Testament. Redmont has also served as a staff member at HDS, a field education supervisor for its students, and President of the HDS Alumni/ae Council.

By Deirdre Good

The publication of personal letters by Mother Teresa to Jesus, her spiritual director, a few clergy, and her bishop -letters that she specifically asked to be destroyed-raises ethical questions. The letters acknowledge God's absence in her spiritual life for some fifty years and contrast the already known public persona to the private reality but this is immaterial. What right does Mother Teresa's spiritual director have to release letters that Mother Teresa wrote either to or for him? Do we honor the requests of the dead or not? What right does the editor of the book, Joseph Kolodiejchuk, have to publish them?

These letters are all that remain of trunk loads of correspondence most of which she destroyed. Perhaps Mother Teresa knew she would be declared a saint. She already recognized the public nature of her witness and work. She wrote to Father Joseph Neuner, S.J., on March 6, 1962: "If I ever become a Saint-I will surely be one of 'darkness.' I will continually be absent from heaven-to light the light of those in darkness on earth." Could this kind of sentence mean that she could foresee what would happen to her letters and that she covertly approved of others seeing what she wrote?

Some letters have been public for years. But the recent publication of more must be seen in light of her canonization. Mother Teresa has already been beatified. Full disclosure of her spiritual darkness in a book with carefully controlled commentary and interpretation seems to be a way to contain and present this material before her canonization is complete. The editor of Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light addresses this matter only once in the book: "Providentially, Mother Teresa's spiritual directors preserved some of her correspondence. Thus, when testimonies and documents were gathered during the process for her beatification and canonization, the remarkable story of her intimate relationship with Jesus, hidden from even her closest collaborators, was discovered. In contrast to her 'ordinariness,' Mother Teresa's confidences reveal previously unknown depths of holiness and may very well lead her to be ranked among the great mystics of the Church." As a student pointed out in a class discussion, this paragraph doesn't answer the question. But it is the only explanation offered by the editor of the book.

Is it possible the letters signify, not unlike the Virgin Mary, a construction of a feminine portrait of the Roman Catholic Church that can legitimate its own moral failures and justify its moral stances? Mother Teresa was unwavering in her commitment to the Church's teaching on abortion, and she never advocated for women priests. For all intents and purposes, she was loyal to the doctrine, discipline, and teaching of her church. But, as the Catholic Church itself has demonstrated in the many cases of sexual misconduct now surfacing, she did have a "darker" side. One motivation of this re-imaging -- we might even say re-branding -- of itself on the contours of her life is that it represents the Catholic Church's attempt to come to terms with its own past and engage in honest self-disclosure. But the veiled nature of the signification -- the fact that they chose a feminine image to shore up the status quo of a church that has failed to grapple with its own sexual misconduct and other moral failures suggests otherwise. Like the Virgin Mary, Teresa is evolving into a paradigmatic image of the challenges, hopes and fears of contemporary Roman Catholicism. In making these new revelations of her inner life, the church may have changed our perception of her, all the while failing to change itself.

We might also ask about the motivations of the book's publisher, Random House. On September 4, Publshers' Weekly noted "Random House reported an 8% decline in worldwide earnings for the first half of 2007, to 44 million euros ($60 million) while parent company Bertelsmann posted first-half losses primarily due to Napster legal difficulties." Random House CEO Peter Olson indicates that the fall publication list of the next four months (including Bill Clinton's new book Giving) will go some way towards meeting the full year's financial goals.

The extraordinary challenge Mother Teresa's spiritual life poses is in danger of being subsumed into our apparently insatiable desire for personal disclosure, of becoming a vehicle for rehabilitation of the Roman Catholic Church in a particular way, and of returning a publishing house to solvency. But despite the potential exploitation of Mother Teresa's spiritual life and my own deep reservations about overriding the explicit wishes of the departed, I participated in both - I bought the book. And I am grateful both to the author of the letters and to those who made it possible for me to read them. The miracle is that, murky ethical issues notwithstanding, we can witness in her letters an authentic sojourn in the heart of darkness as she carried out her mission to quench Christ's insatiable thirst for all human souls.

Professor Deirdre Good wrote this piece in conversation with Professor William Danaher at The General Theological Seminary in New York City where they both teach.

By Greg Jones

William Stringfellow was a gay, chain-smoking, Harvard-trained New York City lawyer, who lived and worked among the poor of East Harlem in the last half of the 20th century.

In the late 60s, he was a radical supporter of the anti-war movement, an extreme critic of the Nixon administration, and a hands-on advocate for the poor and hated. He defended Bishop Pike in 1966 against charges of heresy. He supported and defended the first women to be irregularly ordained. He befriended the Berrigans in their anti-war protests.

To many, one might suppose Stringfellow was the classic 'liberal Episcopalian.' Yet, in much the way that Stanley Hauerwas rejects 'theological liberalism,' Stringfellow was not a theological liberal. Indeed, he was a misfit among liberals who shared much of his social justice vision. Walter Wink has said that Stringfellow, "seems to have come, theologically, out of nowhere." But he didn't come from nowhere. He came from the land of the Bible. It is quite evident that William Stringfellow lived, advocated and worked as he did based on his deep commitment to living under the Word of God in the Bible.

As such, alongside his social justice activism, Stringfellow was also a surprisingly bold critic of Mainline Protestantism's "virtual abandonment of the Word of God in the Bible" for a mess of modernistic philosophical porridge. His observation of things inside the establishment-friendly Episcopal Church, and other mainline churches in America, was that folk were neither "intimate with nor reliant upon the Word of God in the Bible, whether in preaching, in services in the sanctuaries, or in education and nurture. Yet it is the Word of God in the Bible that all Christians are particularly called to hear, witness, trust, honor and love."

According to Stringfellow, the curious abandonment of the Bible by the Church began as a Modern Western phenomenon, with the intellectualization and academic specialization of biblical study. In their exceeding zeal to be regarded as intellectual equals by a secular intelligentsia, Mainline Protestant clergy and faculty put 'objective scholarship' ahead of 'faithful engagement' with the Word of God in the Bible. In good modern rationalist fashion, they began to look at the Bible as a container of intellectual or philosophical propositions to be analyzed and understood – as if the Bible were no different than the writings of Marx, Plato or Buddha.

Stringfellow tells a funny story to illustrate how far the elephant of biblical indifference had gone into the Episcopal Church:

[In the early 1960's I served] on a commission of the Episcopal Church charged with articulating the scope of the total ministry of the Church in modern society. The commission numbered about forty persons, a few laity and the rest professional theologians, ecclesiastical authorities and clergy. The group met, in the course of a year and a half, three times for sessions of more than a week. The first conference, as I recall it, floundered in churchy shoptalk that anyone outside the Church would find exasperatingly irrelevant, largely incoherent or simply dull.

Toward the end of that meeting some of those present proposed it might be an edifying discipline for the group, in its future sessions, to undertake some concentrated study of the Bible. It was suggested that constant recourse to the Word of God in the Bible is as characteristic and significant a practice in the Christian life as the regular participation in the celebration of the Eucharist, which was a daily observance of this commission. Perhaps, it was argued, Bible study would enlighten the deliberations of the commission and, in any event, would not impede them. The proposal was rejected on the grounds, as one Bishop present put it, that "most of us have been to seminary and know what the Bible says: the problem now is to apply it to today's world." The Bishop's view was seconded (with undue enthusiasm, I thought at the time) by the Dean of one of the Episcopal seminaries as well as by the clergy bureaucrats from national headquarters who had, they explained, a program to design and administer.

[To me, the implication of the group's] decision not to engage in Bible study is that the Gospel, in its biblical embodiment, is of an essentially pedantic character – a static body of knowledge which, once systematically organized, taught and learned, has use ceremonially, sentimentally, nostalgically, and as a source from which deductions can be made to guide the religious practice and ethical conduct of contemporary Christians. If that is what the Bible is, then it is generically undistinguished from religious scripture of any sort and, for that matter, is of no more dignity than any secular ideology or philosophy. If that is what the Bible is, then it is a dead word and not the Living Word.

Such a view of the Bible authorizing, evidently, a merely academic use of the Bible, if pressed to its final logic, challenges the versatility and generosity of God's revelation of Himself in history and is a form of doubt deplored in James (Jas 1.5-8; 3.13-4.6) Yet, that very way of regarding the Bible is not only current among ecclesiastical authorities or seminary professionals, it has gained a wide acceptance in the last decade or so in programs of lay theological education in the several denominations and interdenominationally."

Stringfellow argued that Christians ought not primarily to think of the Bible as something to be dissected, figured out, and discussed as if it were a dead frog on a lab table – or an encyclopedia of ancient concepts. Rather, he argued that the Bible should be engaged with by living people in living ways – for in and of itself the Word of God is living and active.

Yes, to Stringfellow, the Bible is the Word of God, and as such is a thing not dead, but a Word militant, free and alive. Christians should be focused on living within the Word of God in the Bible in this world. Our primary vocation as Christians, therefore, regarding that Word of God, is to be open to it, to listen to it, and to live it – to live humanly and biblically as he would say. Yet this kind of open listening to the Word of God in the Bible – is the very thing we modern people are no longer very good at. Stringfellow says we can't listen to the Word of God in the Bible because we are not particularly good at listening to anything outside ourselves.

But this is the key for the faithful Church in Stringfellow's eyes. The single most significant thing a Christian must do is intend to be open to and to listen to the Word of God in the Bible. He says, "for that, a person must not merely desire to hear the Word of God but must also be free to hear the Word of God. This means becoming vulnerable to the Word and to the utterance of the Word in much the same way as one has to become vulnerable to another human being if one truly cares to know that other person and to hear his or her word."

Stringfellow explains that a person must come to the Bible quietly, eagerly, expectantly and ready to listen. "One must (as nearly as one can) confront the Bible naively," without preconceptions or baggage about it. The primary question of the seeker after God looking to encounter the Word of God in the Bible is – "what does this Word say?" "Not, what do I think? Not, do I agree? Not, is this relevant to my life and circumstances? But, straightforwardly, first of all, 'What is this word?'

At the same time, one must "approach the Bible realistically – rather than superstitiously – recognizing that access to the same Word of God that the Bible bespeaks" is given to us also in the event of Jesus Christ's incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection – the pivotal event of all human history – and in the incessant agitations of the Holy Spirit – and in the constitution of creation itself.

Stringfellow harshly criticizes Modernist literalism as a tendency which produces either an irrelevant Bible or a fundamentalist Christianity. Stringfellow would argue that the kind of Modern reductionism rampant among incredulous agnostics and credulous fundamentalists alike is false in that does not really engage with the living Word of God in the Bible. Moreover, this kind of biblical literalism is a denigration of the humanity of the reader or listener whose role in engaging the text is reduced to a passive one, and a flattening out of a text which is divinely multidimensional.

It is worth noting that Stringfellow admired Karl Barth, and Barth admired Stringfellow. Barth once said publicly of Stringfellow, "Listen to this man." For Stringfellow and Barth, despite their many differences, they both believed that theology ought to be no different than proclamation and witness to the Word of God. Stringfellow said,

"[This is what makes] Karl Barth such a threatening and unnerving figure among the professional theologians. ... For him to speak theologically is indistinguishable from confessing the Gospel."

By Rona R. Harding

Tomorrow we are celebrating Labor Day, a day when we remember all those who labor for us. This past week, we also have remembered Mother Teresa, on the 10th anniversary of her death, who labored for more than 66 years in the slums of Calcutta, showing great love and mercy to the poor. The revelation that this was not always easy work is shown in several dozen recently released letters that she wrote to her confessors and spiritual advisors in the 1950s and ’60s, expressing doubts and struggles with her faith. It has been shocking to some that she sometimes felt far from God as she labored showing Christ’s love to those around her. My 95-year-old father, for example, says she cannot be considered a saint if she ever doubted. But I have a different view.

In 1981, I worked for two months in Calcutta with Mother Teresa’s sisters and brothers of Charity in the Home of the Dying Destitutes. At that time, Mother Teresa was in Rome nursing Pope John Paul II, who had been shot as he mingled in the crowds at the Vatican, so I did not personally work with her, but I participated in her work. To walk into the Home of the Dying Destitutes was like walking into Auschwitz at the end of World War II. All one could see were living skeletons, hollow bodies and pain. For that reason, Mother Teresa had instructed her brothers and sisters and volunteers to turn their backs and look first to a wall that had a crucifix of Christ on it, with the words “I thirst” written beside it. These words reminded us that as we ministered to the dying, we would be ministering to Christ. Then all of us prayed this prayer she had written which was transcribed under the crucifix: Dear Lord, Great Healer, I kneel before you since every good and perfect gift must come from you. I pray, give skill to my hand, clear vision to my mind, kindness and sympathy to my heart. Give me singleness of purpose, strength to lift at least part of the burden of my suffering fellowmen, and a true realization of the privilege that is mine. Take from my heart all guile and worldliness that with simple faith of a child I may rely on you. Amen.

Then, and only then, we would go to work. The men would go to the male side of the home, while the women would work on the female side. We would bathe, change sheets, rub with ointment the parched itching skin of the starving, cook food and feed them. Usually the dying would revive a bit when they were brought in from the streets, from the comfort and care they were given, before they died. Some would get better and be transferred to one of Mother Teresa’s rehab hostels, where they would be taught a skill as they gained more strength. The sisters and brothers would send for an Imam, or Hindu priest, or priest – whatever the religion the dying was – so that each would have last rites in their own tradition. Comfort and love filled the place. It was quiet and dignified. But the work was hard and thankless. The brothers and sisters worked six days a week, ministering on the streets, running an orphanage, the various hospitals and the leper colonies. They had volunteers who would come in on Sundays so that they could go to church. We started the day with communion at 6:30 a.m. (for me at the Anglican Church across the street and for them in their chapel) and ended the day together at 4 p.m. with an hour of silent worship at Mother Teresa’s Mother House, in the chapel in front of the figure of St. Mary, mother of our Lord.

I personally found the work rewarding, but recognized that I would not have survived three days in Calcutta without a purpose, for the poverty was overwhelming, more than I had ever seen before or since. Lepers without faces, fingerless hands, children with leper spots, continue to haunt me to this day. Although the Missionaries of Charity are doing a great deal to stop the disease from spreading in the body, Calcutta remains a city with more than 100,000 people living on its streets, where disease, hunger, violence and cruelty are rampant. It is not unusual to see a parent starving a child to make her more pitiful in order to beg for money. Nor is it unusual to see a child whose parents have cut off his arms and legs, in order to make him into a beggar for them. Such is the depressing environment of Calcutta. I cannot begin to describe the magnitude of the problems there.

So no wonder Mother Teresa was depressed from time to time and felt dry and thirsty for God. She was constantly ministering not only to the poor, her more than 900 brothers and sisters and volunteers, but also administrating the numerous ministries that her witness founded all over the world. St. James in his Epistle says, “But someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” Or to say it another way, our faith must translate into works. There will or have been times in all our lives when we have not felt our faith, not felt the love of God, nor the love of our family members. But at such times we have lived out our faith as duty, believing in the will of God. This I believe Mother Teresa did in those dark times of her life, which all the saints have experienced, and yet remained faithful. St. James goes on to say, “faith without works is dead,” so by her works we can say her faith was alive, for she choose to believe, to love and to work, although she did not always feel it.

And finally, because Calcutta is such an overwhelming place, I believe that Mother Teresa in her love for all those she touched emptied herself completely from time to time. Her humility would not allow her to take credit for the honors she was given, for she was doing it all of God, for Christ Jesus. Her darkness in her letters, which she often called “thirst” to me shows that she entered into the passion of Christ, who thirsted for a better world. Her questioning at times her faith, as a recent Time Magazine article (“Mother Teresa's Crisis of Faith,” Aug. 23, 2007) suggested, echo Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, My God, why has thou forsaken me!” And yet, she continued to work and love, finding solace in her work. For remember, these letters are not daily scripts, but only represent occasional periods in her 66 years of work. They say to us that just as Jesus felt thirst and passion, and just as Mother Teresa did, so will we from time to time in our lives, if we have not done so already. The secret is to continue to love, to believe and serve and life will return.

The Rev. Rona Harding is rector of the Church of the Ascension, Lexington Park, Maryland, in the Diocese of Washington.

Verna Dozier, writer and educator, died one year ago this weekend. The Café offers this remembrance.

By Kathleen Henderson Staudt

Late last summer, I was at the beach with my family, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Checking my email one day in the last week of August, I saw a note from Virginia Seminary asking our prayers for Verna Dozier, former faculty member there and beloved local prophet in Washington DC. She was the author of The Dream of God and The Calling of the Laity, and known as a prophetic voice in the church, calling “the church, the people of God” to claim as our own the work of reconciliation in the world, the work to which our Christian faith calls us.

That last week in August, 2006, Verna was coming to the end of a long illness and nearing her death, and the email asked for our prayers for her peaceful passing. As I absorbed this news, a surprising prayer welled up in me: recalling the story of the prophet Elisha, inheriting the mantle of Elijah. I prayed, “Please, let a portion of Verna’s spirit rest on me, and let the message she carried be continued in me, and in Your church.”

The next day, I was walking on the beach, my favorite prayer-place on these summer vacations. A passing hurricane had whipped up a strong sea-surge, covering the beach and creating dramatic waves, and an offshore wind now stirred the sea oats and dune grasses so that they bent deeply toward the churning ocean. The power of the wind that day reminded me of the power and prophetic energy I had experienced, reading Verna’s works, and being in her presence, and I prayed for her as I walked. Later I learned that she had passed from this life on that day, September 1, 2006. That spontaneous, prayerful connection with her, in those last days of her life, has led me to reflect more deeply on how Verna Dozier’s prophetic spirit and message have shaped my own understanding and experience of the call to Christian discipleship in this hurting and broken world.

I first encountered Verna Dozier’s writing in the mid 1990's, in an adult forum at the Church of Our Saviour, Hillandale in Silver Spring, Md. Bernice Harris Shook, an active participant in that forum, remembered having Verna Dozier as a teacher when she was a student in the DC public schools. This work in the church, including teaching at VTS as adjunct faculty, came only after Verna retired from her career as a school teacher. She would bristle when people referred to her post-retirement work of teaching in the church and ask "when did you begin your ministry?" Her work as an educator, she insisted, was just as much her ministry. That attracted me because at the time I was struggling to connect my growing inner life of prayer with my work and identity as a parent and a teacher, both in and beyond the church. I was convinced that my Christian faith was supposed to make a difference in the way I lived my life, and Verna’s work gave me language and a theological grounding for this conviction.

She herself grew up reading the Bible -- the Bible and Shakespeare were the only books in her household. A lover of literature, she understood the stories of Scripture as containing truths that are greater than factual truth, as telling the continuing story of humanity's relationship with God. That too spoke to my heart, as a poet and lover of literature. When she taught workshops, Verna would insist that every Christian should be able to re-tell the story of the Bible in 10 minutes, as a way of "making it our own." She read Scripture as the story of the “dream of God” -- God’s desire to be in relationship with us, and to see us in loving relationship with one another. From Adam and Eve, through the people of Israel, and the early disciples around Jesus, the story of Scripture records a God who is continually calling us to return.The church of our own time, she argued, still beset by the heritage of Constantine, has lost its understanding of “ministry” to a broken world as the work of all God’s people, focusing too much on the ministry of the clergy, the servants of the institution. The church, the people of God, she argued, is again being called to return to its original purpose – to love and serve the world that God loves. The prophetic energy of Verna’s message about the calling of the laity comes through clearly in her writing. I encountered that energy in person on the first of two occasions when I met her.

It was early Lent of 1996, and both of us had been invited to a party given by Martha Horne, then dean of Virginia seminary. I was wandering around when I spotted Verna Dozier sitting in a wing chair at the edge of the room, a frail figure, watching the proceedings quietly. I went to her and introduced myself, “gushing” like the fan I was about how much her writing had helped me to understand and claim my ministry as a lay person and a teacher in the church. She talked with me a bit about my story and my work, and then fixed me with her compelling, prophetic gaze, pointed her finger at me and wagged it sternly as she said to me, “Now: don’t you go and get ordained: Jesus was not ordained. Jesus was a teacher.”

I had sat down on the floor in order to hear Verna over the ambient noise, and so I was literally sitting at her feet as she said these words, and I have always remembered them as the message I received, sitting at the feet of the Teacher. They helped me tremendously in my efforts during those early years to name and claim a vocation as writer and teacher for which we didn’t have clear categories.

Verna’s was a well known voice in the Diocese of Washington. Her message is inspiring to lay people who hear and read it, but it is still not widely known, and my experience is that few people outside the Diocese of Washington have been aware of Verna’s prophetic message. Part of this is may be because her anti-institutional message is ultimately threatening to the structures of the church that could help to spread the message about the authority of the laity and our call to a mission of reconciliation within the “kingdoms of this world.” The closing paragraphs of The Dream of God still resonate today, for those of us who care about the mission of the church, the people of God, in this aching and broken world. Here’s what she writes:

The people of God are called to a possibility other than the kingdoms of the world. They must be ambassadors—again, St. Paul’s word—to every part of life. They witness to another way that governments can relate to one another, that money can be earned and spent, that doctors and care-givers and engineers and lawyers and teachers can serve their constituencies, that wordsmiths and musicians and artists and philosophers can give us new visions of the human condition. That is the ministry of the laity.

All of them need the support system of the institutional church. There must be those resting places where the story is treasured and passed on in liturgy and education. There must be those islands of refuge where the wounded find healing; the confused, light; the fearful, courage, the lonely, community; the alienated, acceptance; the strong, gratitude. Maintaining such institutions is the ministry of the clergy.

We have all failed the dream of God. The terribly patient God still waits.

Dr Kathleen Henderson Staudt works as a teacher, poet, spiritual director and retreat leader in the Washington DC area, and teaches courses in literature and theology at Virginia Theological Seminary and the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of At the Turn of a Civilisation: David Jones and Modern Poetics and Annunciations: Poems out of Scripture. Her blog is at poetproph.blogspot.com.

By Roger Ferlo

I spend a lot of time in my seminary chapel reading memorial plaques.

The fact that I do this says less about the quality of seminary worship than the quality of my attention span. But then, the plaques in this old seminary chapel are really splendid things. The building dates from the 1880s, and its architecture reflects the quaintly Gothic tastes of an otherwise staunchly evangelical set of founders. To be fair, the plaques are not the first thing you see when you walk in. They were intended to be relatively inconspicuous. The most striking feature of the place—besides the fact that the wood stain on the pulpit doesn’t match the wood stain on the choir stalls, and the wood stain on the pews seems to be of a third shade altogether, and the door to the sacristy looks like it was purchased at Home Depot—is the painted inscription that arches somewhat menacingly over the massive east window: Go Ye Into All the World and Preach the Gospel. That fiercely evangelical injunction tends to focus the attention. So much for Gothic choir stalls—no aesthetic lingering here. The mission fields await you. You feel a little ashamed to be caught thinking about Home Depot.

But still, once you’ve settled into the daily round of prayer and praise and scripture reading, morning, noon and evening, day in and day out, when your mind begins to drift a little, and you even have begun to take that inscription for granted, you notice the plaques. They are mostly memorials to nineteenth-century seminary professors. Although many of their students would go far afield as missionaries, these men (and they were all men in those days) led touchingly stable, unsung and sedentary lives. Not all of them, to be sure. There is after all Philips Brooks (a seminary entry in the Episcopal calendar of saints) to whom that shambling Richardsonian pile known as Trinity Church Copley Square in Boston is itself a massive memorial. The sheer size of that building matches the notorious girth of the man himself. Here on campus, there is an appropriately largish plaque in his honor to be seen in a shadowy corner of the narthex, just to your right as you walk in the side door opposite the seminary’s old administration building (but not so old as to predate Philips Brooks). “Philips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, Harvard 1855, Virginia Theological Seminary 1859.” It is telling that Harvard takes precedence here. The plaque was erected by grateful Harvard graduates and undergraduates in 1906, bearing the inscription “He bound Harvard to Alexandria.” One wonders what the resident faculty thought about this odd gift from that Yankee citadel.

It’s the resident faculty who haunt my days as I sit in chapel, contemplating my own work as professor and priest in a school and a church that would now seem as foreign to them as that great art nouveaux church in Boston must have seemed at the time. Their plaques are less pretentious. Near where I tend to sit, there is an eloquent memorial to W.Cosby Bell, “professor of theology in this seminary”:

A Man Who Loved the
Mountain Streams, the
Hearts of Men, the
Christ of God.
A Thinker who Sensed the
Wonder of Life and
Interpreted its Fulness to a
Bewildered Age.

You seldom hear the word apologetics any more (or you mistake it for apology, which Episcopalians find themselves spending all too much time doing). But Cosby Bell must have been an eloquent apologist for the hope that was in him. Our bewildered church could use a Cosby Bell in these contentious days.

I speculate a lot about the Kinloch Nelsons, (were they father and son? the official school history makes no mention). Their plaques hang side by side to the left of Professor Bell’s. Kinloch Nelson the elder graduated in 1868, having fought in the Confederate army. Just three years before, Union troops had evacuated the administration building next door, which they had used as a military hospital. These were bitter days. There was no chapel yet; built three years later, it must have provided these embattled alumni their first taste of recovery from the devastation of the war. Bell studied here for only a term. Did he carry with him, like the men and women returning from Iraq, traumatic memories of carnage? Did those memories cut short his time here, or haunt his priesthood? He returned to the seminary in 1876, and taught until the day he died in 1894, “Christ’s faithful soldier and servant to his life’s end.”

The other Nelson, Thomas Kinloch, was born in 1879, perhaps here on campus:

Strong and simple in his faith in God,
Generous in his sympathy for men,
He brought to his chosen task of teaching
A wise and understanding heart.

By the time he died in 1940, a different kind of war was looming, and the manly white Protestant world to which these monuments attest was beginning to shake from its moorings.

It’s still shaking. It’s important not to get too sentimental about all these inscriptions. De mortuis nil nisi bonum, as Cosby Bell himself might have said—about the dead say nothing but good. But there’s a back story to every one of these plaques, some of the stories well known, and included in our official history, some of them subject to more critical speculation. For one thing, there is much too much talk of men in all these monuments. And of course, this being Virginia, the most haunting back story remains the fact of slavery. Unnamed enslaved people haunt our family histories here, as no doubt they do elsewhere, even in Boston. What we used to call integration we now call diversity. For all their charm and eloquence, there is not much diversity in these chapel memorials. Until John Walker graduated from here in the early 1950s, our black students were kept safely away on a remote campus, remembered now only in faded photographs and the name of our library building. There is no plaque in Bishop Walker’s honor, although his portrait hangs outside the seminary refectory. We don’t seem to want to make plaques any more—life is too complicated, perhaps, memories too problematic, tenures too short. After all, in these conflicted days, who is it who would decide whose plaque goes where?

The Rev. Dr. Roger A. Ferlo is Director of the Center for Lifetime Theological Education at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where he also directs the Evening School of Theology. His books include Opening the Bible (Cowley 1997), Sensing God (Cowley 2001) and Heaven (Seabury 2007).

By Deryl Davis

Do we need to be re-educated about Christianity? That was religion scholar and Jesus Seminar participant Marcus Borg’s contention in his address before the recent Church for the 21st Century conference at Washington National Cathedral. In his address, entitled “A Tale of Two Christianities Today,” Borg argued that the common understanding of Christianity of a generation or two ago has become “hugely unpersuasive” in our time and that adult theological re-education in local congregations is now one of our most pressing needs.

Drawing from his recent popular book The Heart of Christianity, Borg set forth two “paradigms” for understanding Christianity, the common “belief-centered paradigm,” which he said was passing away, and a “transformation-centered paradigm,” which he argued has emerged as a major movement in mainline Christian denominations. In essence, the belief-centered paradigm is based on assent to a set of specific beliefs, while the transformation-centered paradigm, which Borg holds to be the more authentic, “is primarily about a path, a way [of being], for the individual and the world.”

Borg contended that the belief-centered paradigm, heretofore dominant in the modern era, is largely a product of the “collision” of Christianity and the scientific rationalism of the Enlightenment, rather than a product of early Christianity and the pivotal church councils of the first centuries. The transformation-centered paradigm is also only about 300 years old, Borg asserted, a product of a narrow circle of Enlightenment-era elites that has grown into “a major grassroots movement” in recent years.

Borg drew a number of important distinctions which he saw between the two paradigms. He asserted that the belief-centered paradigm focused on the afterlife and personal salvation, and was therefore “centered in one’s own well-being,” while the transformation-centered paradigm focused on spiritual transformation in the present life and was “at its best centered in God.” While the belief-centered paradigm turned religious faith into a “system of requirements and rewards,” the transformation-centered paradigm acknowledged that only a personal relationship with God and the sacred can change an individual. Not least among these differences, Borg argued, was that the first paradigm affirmed Christianity as the only way to God, while the second affirmed religious pluralism “out of a deep conviction that the God who created the universe has been known in all enduring religions.”

Examining the role of the Bible in both paradigms, Borg drew distinctions on matters of scriptural origin, authority, and interpretation. While the belief-centered paradigm views scripture as inerrant, infallible, and directly from God’s hand, the transformation-centered paradigm assumes a “historical-metaphorical approach” that understands scripture as a human product and a social construction representative of a particular people or peoples, place, and time. “What we have in the Bible,” Borg said, “is how our spiritual ancestors saw things, not how God sees them.” Borg argued that, rather than a reduction of scriptural meaning, the historical-metaphorical approach looked beyond the literal meaning of words for what they tell us about the generations of readers transformed by them. The approach is not dependent upon factuality, as is the literalist, Borg said; therefore, it is open to nuance and imaginative construction.

While strongly asserting his preference for the transformation-centered paradigm, Borg acknowledged that the spirit of God can and does work through the older, belief-centered model. The problem, he asserted, is that in recent years, adherents of the latter, literal scripture approach “have become aggressive and judgmental in the use of this paradigm” using it “to beat up on others.” Thus, the belief-centered paradigm has become “an obstacle and a stumbling block” for many Christians. By way of contrast, Borg offered the transformation-centered paradigm as a “neo-traditional view” of Christianity, recovering and retrieving what was most central to the faith before the collision with modernity occasioned by the Enlightenment.

Borg concluded his prepared remarks by noting commonalities between the two paradigms and pointing out the history of the words “faith” and “belief.” Both paradigms hold Jesus and the Bible as primary sources of revelation, both the Word of God, making Christianity distinct from all other religions, Borg said. Christians see Jesus as the “decisive” Word of God, Borg asserted, and understand Christianity as a transformative journey undertaken by means of a relationship with God in Jesus.

Borg contended that, before 1600, the word “believe” as used in Christian parlance did not refer to consent to a set of truths but rather to a commitment or loyalty to a path, as illustrated by Jesus. “The word ‘believe’ never had a set of statements as its direct object,” Borg asserted. “Faith is not about [that],” Borg argued, “but about a deepening trust in God in Jesus.”

Borg’s provocative remarks elicited a number of audience questions on the supposed decline of mainline denominations (it’s reflective of a former cultural expectation of churchgoing, Borg said); on literal interpretation of the ancient Christian creeds, especially statements about the resurrection (whether the tomb was empty or not doesn’t really matter, Borg said; what matters is that Jesus continues to be known as a figure in the present); and on the criteria for discerning the meaning of scripture (there are no objective criteria, Borg asserted; discernment is best done in the context of the Christian community and in relation to “progressive revelation” – understanding that specific meaning may change and grow over time). Borg concluded this segment of his address with a reference to Martin Luther, to the effect that “what is authoritative about the Bible is what is consistent with Christ. We know him through the gospels, we know the spirit of Christ as discerned through scripture.”

Deryl Davis is producer of the Sunday Forum at Washington National Cathedral and an associate faculty member in religion and drama at Wesley Theological Seminary.

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