Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary : 2001 Seminar

Location, Location—Vocation!

As soon as he settled in his seat for the long flight back to Minneapolis, he pulled out the job description again. Could he have just completed an interview for the position it described? Perhaps he'd missed something. . . .

". . . a seminary of the ELCA and a member of the GTU in Berkeley."

The student who picked him up at the airport had been eager to chat. "You're already teaching at Luther. Why would you want to come here?" The question came like an accusation. He was taken aback. He knew that PLTS and Luther were clustering partners in the ELCA. And though no one had been able to tell him what that meant, he'd thought it signaled some vague amiability . . . maybe he'd been mistaken. He explained that he was merely a sabbatical replacement, but then countered: "Why didn't you go to Luther?" The student said he'd wanted to study in an ecumenical setting and see a different part of the country, but he sounded wistful, as if he had studied and seen enough.

This was different all right. He'd never been to the Bay Area before and felt like he'd been transported to some bustling Mediterranean city. The solid brick and stone buildings of St. Anthony Park ceded here to stucco structures awash in pastels. Speeding along the freeways, he counted languages on the storefronts: Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese. He should have been asked for a passport at check-in. He would learn during the course of the next few days that not only were there seminarians having contextual education experiences in these settings; there were also students from these settings enrolled in a program leading to ordination in the ELCA.

As he reached the campus, he felt immediately at home. Despite the countries he'd traveled through on the freeway, here almost all of the students were white. There was even a little brick in evidence. A touch of the Midwest out here on the Pacific Rim.

The interview began in earnest the next morning: meetings with the GTU Dean and chair of "The Area." He assumed that meant Biblical studies, but the chair seemed to be looking primarily for someone in Coptic: "That's what ‘The Area' really needs." She politely dismissed his interest in textual criticism. Whatever "The Area" was, it already had enough of those.

It puzzled him, because an interest in texts and contexts created common ground with the GTU Dean, and they had talked easily and well. She'd had taught at Harvard, where he'd done graduate work, and they spoke the same academic language. Beneath the banter he knew she was testing his raw scholarly potential. He sensed that he had passed. Under her direction he could envision himself becoming a leader in the field.

"The successful candidate will be a Lutheran."

But he was not being hired by the GTU or by a university-related divinity school. A Lutheran seminary was hiring him, and he was intrigued to see how his "Lutheran-ness" would be calibrated. On this point, the faculty interview yielded mixed signals. Faculty seemed anxious to prove the soundness of both their scholarly credentials and their Lutheran identity: simul academici et Lutherani. This seemed to be a place whose Lutheran identity or scholarly competence had been rather regularly impugned over the years. Faculty and students had been perceived in other quarters of the church as somehow "not Lutheran enough," though just exactly what this meant was never articulated very clearly or very persuasively.

He'd been asked to describe "the Lutheran approach to the Bible." He knew he was supposed to cite chapter and verse of the Confessio Augustana, and he couldn't cough them up. The question had caught him by surprise, but in retrospect he realized that a distinctively Lutheran approach to scholarship mattered for a seminary in an ecumenical consortium. Each of the nine schools brought a particular charism to the whole, and PLTS saw its gift as witnessing to a tradition of theological reflection that was biblically based, confessionally sound, and pastorally engaged. After having studied texts as texts for the past six years in the studious objectivity of a university divinity school, he realized that here he would also be required to study texts as kerygma. He wanted to be a part of this intriguing and maddening confessional and ecumenical mix.

He wanted to ask the faculty about this in the interview, but reconsidered. Instead, he posed his next questions. "You're regarded as the seminary of the West. What exactly does that mean to you?" The pause that followed was about to get uncomfortable, when the president spoke up delineating "the many Wests within the West." He watched the reaction of the group: it was clear this excited them, and he wondered how they would wrestle with this. He realized they were wondering the same thing.

He had a final question: "In my brief time here, I've heard a lot of talk about ‘community.' How do you deal with it as a faculty?" There was a shorter pause. Then a senior member of the faculty spoke up. "We drive up here and teach our classes, then climb back into our cars and flee to our homes." People laughed self-consciously. That's exactly what happened. With faculty strung out across the Bay Area and another student residence several miles away, it was indeed a community in diaspora.

"committed and competent to teach required courses in the M.Div. curriculum . . ."

The interview required a lecture for students, faculty, and staff. Now this was a diverse audience, though not the multicultural diversity the catalogue touted. He was puzzled that he'd not been invited to preach in chapel that morning. He wanted to show that he could use text as kerygma.

But he attributed the oversight to a tight schedule, both for him and for the rest of the community. He gathered that daily chapel was not well attended, and he wondered how the school dealt with the whole issue of formation, particularly in an ecumenical consortium.

He turned to write something on the board and produced a cloud of chalk dust. Most of the institutions he had known were fighting to put in "smart" classrooms; this one was still struggling to keep its boards clean. He'd heard of the chronic financial problems at PLTS. The West was mission territory for Lutherans: there were more Roman Catholics in the Oakland Diocese than there were Lutherans in the whole state of California. Large parts of the West qualified as The Formerly Churched. If he could have stayed over the weekend, he would be able to experience first-hand the primary religious affiliation of Bay Area Californians: worship at the Church of the Latte-A-Day Saints! He could use a cup of Peet's coffee right now.

What he had at the moment was a lot of dust. He hadn't been there that long, but he detected a rhetoric of scarcity in what had been said. Everyone had simply internalized it. They'd been convinced they simply didn't deserve much better. He'd finally met the poor stepsister of Lutheran seminary education.

Faculty seemed stressed. He tried to imagine how the school supported the alphabet soup of all its programs—TEEM, MACM, MTS, MA, M.Div., Ph.D., and continuing education programs with 11.5 faculty, two of whom were in administration, two of whom were working part-time on grants, one with half-time pay and nearly full-time responsibilities, and one released to pursue a grant from the Templeton Foundation. If he came here, he'd better be able to set boundaries and say no. He wondered how much time he'd have to become a scholar in any field. A "promising young scholar" at this place could quickly have the promise drained out of him.

The lecture had, he thought, gone well. But as soon as it ended, faculty and staff abruptly got up and left, because this time was supposed to be for interaction with the students. The questions came rapid-fire, but they barely related to his lecture. What this crowd wanted to know could have been better answered in a sermon than a lecture.

"How would you teach an introductory Bible course that included non-Lutheran students?" (Mentally he referred this back to the faculty colleague who asked about a Lutheran understanding of the Bible.)

"How can you help me make Philippians come alive to the adult Bible study group that meets at my teaching parish? It's a community of Chinese Americans, and I need to contextualize my approach." (He'd not really had a course in grad school that dealt with this.)

"What do you think Paul meant in Romans 1:26, and how would you explain that in a classroom that included straights, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals?" (He'd read Bernadette Brooten's book, but she hadn't addressed contemporary applications.)

"Why is it that there's one more white male interviewing for this position?" He had an answer for this question: "I'd ask the search committee that question."

The room was spinning, but not fast enough for him to notice that he was younger than most of the students.

The final question came from the student representative to the search committee: what did he think of the seminary's new mission statement? She then proceeded to read the mission statement, which suggested that it was new to the rest of the students as well. The words sounded appropriately missional:

Deepening faith in Christ,
Expanding the heart,
Challenging the mind,
Energizing for mission.

He frowned slightly. The mission quadrilateral exposed the institution's deepest tensions: mission and maintenance, head and heart, academic scholarship and confessional Lutheranism, therapy and prophecy. Expositing these tensions so boldly exposed indicated a high degree of institutional self-awareness. Addressing them might be more difficult. There was a lot at stake, and he found himself wanting to be a stakeholder.

"Women and minority especially are encouraged to apply."

As the plane bumped across the Rockies, he found himself looking at his hands to make sure he was still there. The interview had been so full; he needed some physical point of reference. No, they could not possibly have passed as the hands of a woman or a person other than Caucasian. They were a man's hands and a young man's hands at that.

It could have been an air pocket, but with a jolt he suddenly realized that he didn't understand this position or this institution at all!