William V. Frame: The Dialogue of Faith and Reason: The Speeches and Papers of William V. Frame. Minneapolis: Lutheran University Press, 2006.
Note: William V. Frame was my academic adviser during my time at Kenyon College, 1969-1973. He taught comparative politics and introduced me to the study of Charles de Gaulle. He eventually chaired the Kenyon Political Science Department before going on to a career in corporate banking. These two paths served him well when he became president of Augsburg College, a Lutheran liberal arts college from 1997 to 2006. His book consists of a carefully arranged sequence of (mostly) speeches to audiences at the College, reflections on the character of Christian liberal education in contemporary America.
Frame situates his talks carefully within the College he governed as its chief executive officer. “Each was intended to draw into view a defining aspect of the college. It was this intention that led me back time and again to the foundings of the college, and then forward to contemplation of its modern mission”— and, it might be added, ‘above’ to its Christian character. With respect to the founding principles of the College’s regime, “during the nine years of my tenure, I became increasingly fascinated with the Reformation itself and the two giants who formed its traditions in Theology and Education—Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon. The Reformation, he learned, was “modern but alternative to the Enlightenment; Christian but calling us into the world in service; rejecting works righteousness but discovering in unwarranted grace the motive power of our good works; faith-based but intellectually demanding and respectful of human reason.” Such “has been Augsburg’s great gift to me”—most immediately, Augsburg College, more remotely but decisively, Augsburg, Prussia, where Melanchthon wrote the Augsburg Confession in 1530, a document later integrated into the Peace of Augsburg, “the first formal truce in the dispute between the [Roman Catholic] Church and the Protestants.”
He introduces his book with a speech given near the beginning of his presidency, at the College’s convocation ceremony in September 1997. On that occasion he pointed to the distinctive character of the place: “We have chosen—you and I—the one college in this part of the world”—he means Minneapolis, and he is almost unquestionably right—that “is dedicated to the provision of an education that is both practical and profound; that simultaneously supplies knowledge of the world and self-knowledge; that seeks liberation of the soul from cant of all kinds, both ancient and modern, and cultivates the capacity for obedience to the enduring principles revealed by both reason and faith; that silences our noisy prattle so that we may hear our calling, and returns us the new and literate voice of reflection so that our vocations—all of which will be pursued under the ascendant influence of urban, global and technological forces—are not only gifts to ourselves but serviceable to others and to God as well.” That distinctive character derives from the conjunction of two things: the founding of the College by “people self-consciously free of moral guidance by public opinion or governmental edict who wanted nevertheless to live rightly”; and the founding of the United States of America “by people anxious to give greater—not lesser—sway to the moral and ethical requirements of various faiths” precisely by establishing what Abraham Lincoln called “a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty than any of which the history of former times tells us.” That is, Augsburg College could be founded and perpetuated within the American regime because that regime afforded political liberty, along with the political means of defending it, to any set of people—in this case, a set of Lutherans from Norway—who consented to rule and to be ruled under the United States Constitution, which instantiated in civil form the laws of Nature and of nature’s God, understood to consist of the unalienable natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Without the institutions of the Roman Catholic Church, what would take its place? Luther said, “The fine liberal arts invented and brought to light by learned and outstanding people—even when those people were heathen are serviceable and useful to people in this life.” By “serviceable” Luther mean not ‘pre-professional’ and surely not something conducive to “self-expression or personal success,” but vocational in the Christian sense, attending the ‘calling’ of God in the midst of the world and following it throughout life. “The capacity for reverence is the bedrock of our honor of God and of our respect for human excellence.” “Only a college that puts faith into the crucible with reason and cultivates the capacity for reverence as the foundation stone of humility, can effectively provide the setting in which free men and women can fill the vacuum left by the withdrawal or ejection of officially authorized moral regimen—a vacuum too often filled in our time by the various progeny of nihilism and value-relativism—with a voluntary embrace of the good.”
In Part One, Frame gets right into the heart of the fundamental question facing any educator in a Christian liberal arts college. Do “the elements of Faith” in his college’s foundations “allow adequate room for Reason” and, complementarily, do “the disciplines of reason demanded by this mission” tolerate faith? Although “I have not and never will succeed,” “I would like to draw every member of the faculty away from partisan commitment either to faith or to reason and toward acknowledgment that the presence of each enhances the reliability of the other.” As Luther and the American Founders both acknowledged, reason and faith differ but they intersect. Luther called them the Kingdom of the Left and the Kingdom of the Right, neither meaningful without the other; the American Founders called them the laws of nature’s God, that is, laws stated in God’s revealed Word but also discoverable by means of human reason—for example, the unalienable rights upheld in the Declaration of Independence. To clarify this, Frame remarks the ‘Socratic turn’. The ’empiricists’ and ‘realists’ of Socrates’ Athens held, with Thrasymachus, that justice is the will of the stronger. They took their bearings from ‘natural philosophy,’ which had discovered a cosmos consisting of matter in motion. In such a cosmos, insofar as beings in it can speak, power is indeed the ultimate reality and ‘justice’ is what the most powerful say it is. Yet one of those powers, the powers of speech, leads the mind that exercises it beyond the empirical, toward the realm of ideas. The existence of varying opinions among speakers brings their opinions into conflict, inasmuch as those opinions contradict one another. In that collision of opposites, that dialectic, the ‘weaker’ argument—the one not propounded by the physically stronger—may overthrow the ‘stronger’ argument.
At the same time, Platonic dialogues show Socrates and his interlocutors at times reaching an impasse. There is often a “point at which speech reaches its limit and can go no farther.” “It is at this point that the instructed student can look up and just for a moment glance at the formal notion of beauty or at the formal notion of justice.” This moment of noēsis or insight amounts to little more than a glance, and should therefore implant due modesty in the one who glimpses it. At the same time, that “glimpse leaves an ineradicable mark on the soul, and the possessor of that soul, down through the ages, will burn and reach for confirmation of the truth which it senses beneath the articulate level of knowing.” There may be times, as Luther would be the first to insist, that the Spirit of God amplifies and corrects what dialectical reasoning reckons, and this is where pagans differ from Christians. But the Spirit of God, too, speaks, conveys Logos, respects the principle of non-contradiction which is the core of rational thought. No one can believe a self-contradictory speech, once he perceives the self-contradiction, because such a speech has no meaning in the first place. The Apostle Paul “is responsible for the conclusion that you can’t get faith from reason,” that “faith is a gift, not an achievement.” But that doesn’t make faith logically incoherent, somehow absolving it from the need to meet the criterion of rational truth. In “describ[ing] the Gospel as ‘foolishness’ from the point of view of Reason,” Paul means to say that you can’t reason your way to “the Good News of the Cross,” not that reason is foolishness in the eyes of God. Reason rather needs to understand its limits, as it should when it proceeds dialectically not dogmatically.
From his early childhood on an Appalachian farm to adolescence in a small town, to college (where he “led the fraternity chorus, had my own dance band,” and drove a cool car, Frame stumbled into graduate school, where “I encountered for the first time a form of learning that illuminated life,” the life he’d been living thoughtlessly. “I read a Platonic dialogue line by line with a small group of friends—voluntarily, no credit.” He then discovered philosophy as the love of wisdom, an inquiry into “the business of living: Who around us is living the best life? What distinguishes the good life from its alternatives? What is the nature of the noble and the beautiful, and why should we embrace these instead of such attractive alternatives as the powerful, the advantageous, or the pleasant?” He found that “the whole starting point of that great classical inquiry was an act of faith—a conviction, confirmed time and again by the testimony of thoughtful, open-minded, decent people but without demonstrable ‘facts’ or ‘hard’ data—that the universe, nature, made sense.” It was “composed by means of principles which people could grasp, and that those principles were implicit in ideas and ‘values’ as well as material.” What Christianity adds to this is the teaching of Revelation, of the God-given, ‘by-grace’ glimpses of the Person who created nature granted to human beings by that Person, through that Revelation. What Martin Luther “taught me” was that “faith is a form of knowing; that each of us relies on a conviction about the moral structure of life that cannot be vindicated by the facts and data that modern academe in its flight from conclusive recommendation of moral principles, or particular ways of life, depends upon. That Christian faith, as I learned it from Martin Luther, freed me from living rightly at the behest of duty” by seeing that the grace of a loving God absolves us from fulfilling the counsels of perfection that are true but humanly unattainable.
But what about those who hide not behind moral relativism but behind a moral absolutism that insists on fulfillment in this world, indeed, and very ambitiously, by the whole world? “Each student comes into the college with a whole raft of opinions about the admirable and the objectionable. At the very least, we must ask them to answer a fundamental question: Where does this bunch of opinions come from?” For the most part, they come not from Plato’s Socrates, Aristotle, or Cicero—from the ‘ancients.’ They come from the ‘moderns’ (even when those moderns call themselves ‘post-moderns’). For Machiavelli and Bacon, logic is less a matter of speech, less what Frame calls a “bridge-builder” between the human mind and the nature of which it is a part, as a tool for controlling nature. “‘We are going to know the truth about nature,’ Bacon seems to say, ‘not be communicating with it but by “vexing” it. “We shall poke it with a stick and watch it react.'” The modern mind in principle alienates itself from nature, makes itself foreign from it. “Ultimately, alienation is a phenomenon inside the soul of an individual. As a college in the city, we have a challenge in that we are inviting our students into the midst of modern distraction. If we don’t run this college, so as to break the tyranny of that distraction and open up other realms of thought, we are remiss in our obligations as a college.” Accordingly, “we have declared the city the new field for our mission activity, replacing Madagascar and China and Japan.” The near should replace the far, with “joint and collaborative work” not “directed by a central bureaucracy.”
Within that uncivil, because modern, city, civility can be made to stand as a Christian virtue. “There are those who believe that our religion is a ‘private’ matter, and that it has nothing to do with politics or economics—except to teach us, perhaps, that the two elements of this world that are truly corrupting—position and wealth—are the hallmarks of politics and economics, respectively.” Indeed, “many of see the act of voting as the key political act, just as we see ‘belief’ as they key element in our religious lives,” as “private in the secretive sense,” nobody’s business but our own. “But we Lutherans are called into the world in service”; Lutherans “have been given a little sliver of the Cross,” a burden, an obligation. To discharge that obligation will require the Christian to disagree with, to contradict, many regnant opinions. “Whoever reaches for a universal ipso facto reaches beyond the political and instantly comes into tension with it,” as Socrates knew before he tried and illustrated thereafter. The language of civility” enables one to do that, without destroying the indispensable bonds of fellowship among citizens in a country that recognizes speech and religion as free by their very nature, stunted if suppressed. “The speech of the city,” civility, “aims at agreement and ‘equity,’ not Truth or God or Perfect Justice. The participant in civil conversation is the citizens, not the philosopher, or the Preacher, or the true Believer.” “Plato knows that the order supplied by the city is the vital condition of the philosophic enterprise.” That enterprise must therefore proceed civilly. So it is with Christianity. “Christian Theology doesn’t appeal to the citizen but to the human being; not to the law but to the Gospel; not to peace but to the Peace that passes all understanding.” In making that appeal, the philosopher and the Christian both necessarily inflect the way of life of the city. The American Founders understood that they could do so in ways that would do well in the city, and for it, but only if neither withdrew from the city nor addressed it uncivilly, with contempt. Civility forms the basis for something even better than itself, friendship, “the human relationship that was crucial to the successful operation of the dialectic for both Socrates himself and for Plato’s Socrates,” along with the fellowship of the religious congregation.
What then of the office-holder within a civil society—specifically, the vocation of a president governing a Lutheran liberal arts college? “There may be other jobs like this, but I’ve never had one of them.” He sought guidance, therefore, not among his contemporaries but among his predecessors. “I, for one, will look for the future of this college among the principles of its founding,” he announced, upon assuming office in October 1997. Those principles “suppose that the human condition is superficially relieved—not fundamentally changed—by the modern techno-mastery of nature or the replacement of national by global societies.” That, it might be noted, will depend upon how far modern techno-mastery of nature goes toward altering human nature, and whether Lutheranism can thrive in “global societies” (whatever they may be) without the protection of the nation-state, upon which it depended for protection from the global (that is to say) Catholic society with which it was surrounded in the sixteenth century.
For his part, within the circumstances of modern life, Frame worked to strengthen citizenship within Augsburg College itself by “transform[ing] employees into engaged citizens of that polity” and by “deriv[ing] leadership authority entirely from understanding of and commitment to the institutional self-definition” set down by its founders. This definition of the principles of the College’s regime then must be adapted to the immediate and like future circumstances of the College, crystallized in the form of what amounts to a social contract among the several “constituents” of the College, including not only employees but students and alumni, accomplished in a series of committee meetings. Initially, the president can serve as the arbiter among the several constituencies, but crucial to his task is to “a structure of institutional governance,” a “home for lasting leadership.” By these acts he intended to re-connect the people within the College to its original founding principles, after some forty years of responding to such practical necessities as financial solvency and the renovation of its buildings. “Academic leadership is possible only when the academy is founded as a polity, leadership in it is understood as a form of statesmanship, and institutional rehabilitation as an undertaking of citizenship,” citizenship aiming at the Madisonian end of seeking the permanent and aggregate interests of the community rather than the interests of the several groups within it. “The effort to make a polity out of a college is inspired by the Aristotelian (and teleological) proposition that, “Whereas the comes into existence for the sake of mere life, it continues for the sake of the good life.”
A college requires collegiality, that is, “the key element of social capital—trust.” By this Frame did not mean ‘Trust me’ but ‘I trust you.’ “Here, senior administrators are empowered to act outside the presence and blessing of the CEO”; “they are, after all, employees of the [College] vision not of the CEO, and so they are encouraged to establish their own reputations as leaders. This they cannot do except through the freedom to design the strategies for their particular jurisdictions through which the vision is realized.” As for the president, he “must take them as peers, reserving only two exclusive responsibilities—to relieve them of duty if they dissipate social capital and to maintain the official version of the mission and its reconciliation” with the overall goals of the College in its immediate circumstances. In this way, the way of limited but institutionally well-designed and responsible government, Augsburg College could become a civil association “that Tocqueville thought could restrain the growing epidemic of individualism,” by which he meant the ‘privatization’ of human life under conditions of social egalitarianism. Whereas Luther “intended vocation, especially for the lay professions, to reconnect the individual with society through work,” a Lutheran college in the modern world, now in many respects severed from the “ancient civil ideas at the dawning of the modern moment,” must itself work harder to teach its students but also its faculty and administrators, some of those ideas.
Here Frame sharply departs from the principles of the American founding. Given the “three critical axioms” supplied by Luther—”that we can do nothing of value by ourselves,” that is, without God’s assistance; “that our redemption by Grace does not erase the limitations of our humanity and so in this world, even Christians remain in need of law and the thrall of reason”; and “that the service we give the world through work in gratitude for our redemption is corrective and is therefore offered in both love and hope for the world”—is, he asserts, “challenged” by “the idea of natural right.” In his estimation, natural right “strained the relationship between citizen and society” by holding that “the individual is shaped by certain natal forces that are prior to and beyond the salutary reach of civil society.” This “leaves us alienated and individualized.” Lutheran vocation specifically and Christian vocation generally “survived the victory of the natural right position largely because that victory was never consolidated,” thanks to the soberer ‘moderns’ (Rousseau, with his critique of Enlightenment rationalism, and the prudent institutionalism of such thinkers as Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Madison) and also to “the political history of the United Kingdom,” guided as it has mostly been by blunt common sense. Since all of the thinkers he mentions considered political institutions as means of securing natural rights, Frame may mean that the Enlightenment conception of natural right tended toward French-Revolutionary-like dissolution of institutions, the ambition to re-make human societies even as modern science invites us to master nature, by poking it with a stick and watching it react. He may also mean that “nations and communities” “derive their legitimacy, their very identities, from history,” by which he means not the movements of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit but traditions, myths, legends. However this may be, Frame again inclines to overlook the political thing Luther never took for granted, and needed, the thing that stands between the civil association and “global societies”: the nation-state. Given his background in comparative politics, this may strike the reader as especially odd.
He himself supplies a corrective for such mis-thinking by considering the tragic story of King Oedipus. “His hubris was the condition of both his intellectual brilliance (he won the presidency by solving the Riddle of the Sphinx) and his radical lack of self-knowing.” From this monitory example he takes three lessons. First, self-knowledge “is not private even though it is exclusive to its owner”; one really does need to listen to the voices in the Chorus, even if determined not to obey them slavishly. Second, self-knowledge, especially in the soul of a king or president, “is constituted in part of learning, and about things that are profoundly public, it is acquired social, not in isolation.” Finally, in its quest for self-knowledge, by that quest, the soul (as it were) emerges as it engages in its vocation. For example, “the vocational president” will need “to be both serious and careful about his or her use of the rhetorical arts; he or she must do as did Churchill—labor incessantly over his impromptu speeches.” A college president is a sort of miner. His work consists of digging into the college over which he presides—not only by learning its founding principles but by studying how it has applied, misapplied, or even at times forgotten or knowingly rejected those principles, failed to live up to them even as it has believed itself to have been surpassing them. Only then can he refine his own vocation.
What is this talk of vocation, this “life of service”? In Part Three Frame addresses this question, which he regards as “the greatest contribution of the Reformation,” offering “the Faithful a life fully engaged in civil society and yet theologically legitimate,” even as “the individualizing and anti-political propensities of the Enlightenment were beginning their ascendancy.” “Now that the a-social human habits rationalized by the Enlightenment have proven unsatisfying, the idea of vocation is coming into its own,” he hopes.
Frame found these habits not mitigated but reinforced during his first job in liberal education at Kenyon College, which he doesn’t name but accurately describes as “a ‘highly selective’ liberal arts college in the countryside of the Midwest,” “purposely set well away from the city” by its founder, the marvelously-named Philander Chase, Ohio’s Episcopal Bishop, in 1824. Although Kenyon “introduced me to two of the critical axioms of the teaching vocation: great teachers begin and remain as serious student—of themselves as well as of the world—and learning improves life,” these “did not jell with the outgoing and service-oriented aspects of vocation.” At Kenyon, “most of us on the faculty preferred theoretical or classroom wisdom far above experiential learning.” “we diagnosed in those days; we did not propound therapies to advance civility or improve society,” whereas a city (he next worked at the Newberry Library in Chicago), “compels its aficionados to construct a coherent interactive public life.”
In his next career, at the Bank of Chicago, what Frame “wanted most was knowledge of how the commercial republic, so long the subject of my teaching and writing, actually worked.” To his surprise, he found corporate life “far more humane—more candid and encouraging,” than academia and also, “shockingly, full of better-educated people.” “The international division that I joined after banking boot camp had six or seven Ph.D.’s, not counting those in the country-risk and economic-analysis units. More musicians and artists were on my floor than at the entire college. Perhaps most surprising, there was more hunger for serious conversation than among my faculty colleagues.” And more trust. “Contrary to the academic arguments about the role of self-interest in financial transactions, I learned that the only deals that hold together and lead to new interchanges are mutually satisfactory ones. In the corporate world, a trusted colleagues’ word is better than a signature on a legal document.” Such as “the radically social character of [commercial]-corporate life,” where “no transaction was completed” unless “it could be publicly described as meeting the interest [each party to the transaction] held in common.” It was this experience in modern corporate life that prepared his mind for Lutheranism. Trust is a form of faith, and trust implies knowledge of the person trusted. Con artists will be ‘outed.’ His corporate experience “facilitated my fruitful contact with Luther” for Christianity as a faithful vocation, by “forc[ing] me to deny my original academic view that the private realm is the exclusive venue for personal growth.”
This helps to explain both the strength and the principal weakness in Frame’s analysis. Corporate life has spread itself throughout the world. Far more than socialism, which has repeatedly fallen back on nationalism when crises erupt, it has proved a vehicle for internationalism or ‘globalism.’ At the same time, corporate life is indeed very much like socialism, when seen within the corporate body itself. Its ‘foreign policy’ may be competitive/’capitalistic,’ but its ethos is socialist. It is therefore disappointing but understandable that Frame can write, “One of the needs of society in our time is help in transitioning from national and regional parameters to global ones.” Like many corporate capitalists, he envisions ‘one world’ ruled by—well, he doesn’t come out and say it, but—corporate capitalists. Nation-states will go away. Christian vocation will aim “at the needs, not the preferences, of the world,” eliciting “the whole range of our gifts.” It transpires that both Christians and corporate bankers know better what’s best for us than we do. In Christianity, Jesus understands knowledge in a particular way. His sheep hear his voice because “I know them, and they follow me.” Now, “the distinctive characteristic of a sheepfold is that each of the sheep who constitute it is known. They don’t know; they are known.” Divine knowledge of the sheep “forms the sheep into a Sheepfold,” into the ecclesia, the Church, God’s assembly or regime. This way of rule makes sense in a liberal arts college—its students still young, even if adults. And Christianity of course insists upon the consent of the governed; like the college admissions process, it’s a two-way street. It isn’t clear that corporate bosses will much concern themselves with that. Evidently willing to take this risk, perhaps hoping to mitigate it, Frame set Augsburg College firmly along the path of the ‘internationalists’ mantra, ‘Think globally, act locally,’ with Minneapolis as its locale. There he stood, and he would do not other—at least as long as his presidency would last. This was his vocation, and the vocation he set for his colleagues and students.
To understand the path of Christian vocation as it relates both to the liberal arts college and the world into which its graduates will venture, Frame points wisely and emphatically to Philip Melanchthon. Melanchthon will help in the task of “get[ting] hold of both the promise and problem of vocation.” As the newly-hired Professor of Greek at Wittenberg University in 1518, just after Luther posted his 95 Theses, Melanchthon taught many courses, including history, medicine political theory, rhetoric, “lov[ing] most of all to move among them at the gathering point, which he called Philosophy—the love of wisdom.” This included theology. His joy in learning and teaching, and his formidable capacity for both, finally earned him the title, Praeceptor of the Germans. His early book, Loci Communes, became “Lutherdom’s bestseller,” second only to Luther’s translation of the Bible into German.
Melanchthon “blamed the political and moral collapse of Europe, but also the waywardness of the Church, on the decline of the ancient learning.” The Church had misunderstood antiquity, making of it a form of logic-chopping, of sophistry. By reading ancients in the original languages, Melanchthon could “leap over the dark valley of Scholasticism and get directly into conversation with the ancients, and with Aristotle in particular.” The greatest among the ancients, he discovered, did not direct their energies toward verbal deceit; on the contrary, they exemplified “the highest pre-Christian form of vocation.” They suffered two defects. The lived “these model lives of service in the narrow, cohesive, self-sufficient communities which had been stricken by empire, and then by chaos,” namely, the ancient poleis. And they overlooked original sin, “accomplish[ing] their work by means of a high regard for the human potential that was unacceptable to Luther’s and Melanchthon’s notion of fallen humanity,” a regard caused by their “conviction that reason and virtue were natural allies.” In refusing to believe that, Machiavelli was right. Unlike Machiavelli, however, Melanchthon never rejected Christianity on the supposition that it is too unworldly to engage in civil life. He “set out to extract and isolate” the “vaccine” of civility “through scholarship and then infuse it into Christian society through the medium of his students.” “Without civility, vocation would flounder on the selfish propensities of fallen humanity.” Although this by no means diminishes the indispensable character of divine grace, love of one’s neighbor needs the supplement civility provides, simply because the work of the Holy Spirit within us “is regularly frustrated by our egocentrism and our individualism.” This “idea of vocation was the principal contribution of the Reformation to the capacity and willingness of the Christian to love the neighbor as the self,” and the idea “had to be made at home in civil society.” “This is true whether or not the particular civil society in question was overwhelmingly Christian.” Without the “forms and images of virtues,” Melanchthon wrote, “which we follow in all decisions and in our judgments on all matters,” without the “humanity” which “shows the way to live properly and as a citizen,” men “are not very different from beasts.” With Aristotle, Melanchthon affirmed that man is a political animal. Political philosophy, he wrote, can teach “the precepts for civil life [that] are necessary” for peaceful life with one another in a political community. In Frame’s words, “neither Christ nor the Gospel provide these to us” (Machiavelli’s complaint), but that wasn’t His, or their, purpose. Christ “expounded something else, about the will of god and trust in God, which human reason could not understand.” Aristotle, and behind him Homer, pointed the way to something else, “the sociality that is the bedrock condition of civility.”
The central chapter of the book describes Melanchthonian civility as “the reconciliation of faith and learning.” Frame’s occasion for writing it was a speech describing the College’s projected Center for Faith and Learning, an institution whose mission it was “to establish a mutually advantageous relationship of faith and learning for application in every discipline in our curriculum and for infusion into our recruiting of students, solicitation of donors, and management of the extra and co-curricular life of the college,” a task which will require the “very development and cultivation of civility in the learning community itself and in the relationship of the college with its neighborhoods, its industry, and its global relations with Church and society.” Just as Melanchthon and Luther together created in the crucible from which the Reformation actually emerged a new political science”—one distinct from the new political science of Machiavelli and Bacon—and “a new theology which widened the availability of the Gospel as a blessing for human life on this side of the grave and for believers as well as strangers,” so too, one infers, the Center was intended to develop a still newer political science, and perhaps a new theology, designed crucially to inflect the emerging “global” society and the corporations likely to guide it. If this came to pass, would Lutheranism do a better job at influencing a world government than it did in influencing the Prussian, and eventually the German state? One can only pray that it would.
Under the Dark Ages and then Scholasticism, “the disciplined study of literature reduced the quality of Theology,” rather as (one infers) certain late-modern philosophers and ideologues have reduced the quality of theology in the past two centuries or so. The Luther-Melanchthon “reform of both church and education, took form in the heat of the moment—in their joint effort to save and restore the Church and to recover learning from the only civilization that had so far as they knew, properly cultivated Philosophy—the ancients, particularly the Greeks.” Especially (again) political philosophy: from the civic life of the ancients he took what he called the “first law” of any “governing assembly, whether in the state or in the church,” namely, “freedom for those who speak and patience for those who listen.” Melanchthon continued, “How our century is afflicted more than anything else by the fact that the mighty cannot hear free speech, and not even any thought of freedom.” This is where learning intersects with civic life, and with the civil life inside God’s assembly. “Learning is accomplished only in community, by way of what he called ‘disputation’—not in an isolated carrel in a library, but in the classroom and ultimately in the town square.” The “eloquent deliberation” Melanchthon esteemed in the ancients “adds coherence to community be deepening its knowledge of itself.”
Melanchthon of course sees the danger in such well-turned rhetoric as clearly as the philosophers he studied did. “The liberation of thoughtfulness, armed by high literacy and powerful rhetoric, opens the possibility that the greatest rhetor, rather than the wisest, will wind the day. This danger explains Melanchthon’s very heavy emphasis on moderation.” In his understanding, moderation is a virtue cultivated not only by careful moral habituation of the young but by the intellectual character of dialectics within a Christian framework. That is, if nature, “the essence of creation,” is “a work of mind,” the mind of God, and “therefore accessible to reason,” the capacity to make logical distinctions, then the practice of deliberation in an assembly and the dialectic employed therein must moderate, limit, the power of rhetorical flourishes. In the assembly you get to answer back, not just sit back. To take the most malign ‘German’ example, what Hitler told you was unanswerable, on pain of death. By contrast, “dialectics, and the collateral rhetorical skills on which it depended were, for Melanchthon, instruments designed to keep the ‘fallen’ human mind attentive to nature rather than itself, to keep the disputation focused on the truth rather than on a particular expression of it or on the reputation of the expresser, and to make of the truths so discovered additions to the coherent substance of the community, rather than the exclusive secrets of an elite”—this last phrase a jab at the ‘Straussian’ political scientists who were his colleagues at Kenyon. (He does, however, laud Strauss for his recovery of political philosophy, the philosophizing of Socrates as depicted in the Platonic dialogues and as practiced by Aristotle.)
In this, Luther remained Melanchthon’s beau ideal of a statesman. The Great Reformer, he wrote, “adorned and defended civic life as it has never been adorned and defended by anyone else’s writings.” Luther “both knew the state and accurately perceived the frame of mind and wishes of all those with whom he lived,” understanding the Christian Church itself as a polity, having “read most avidly ancient and recent ecclesiastical writings and all works of history, relating their examples to the present business with outstanding dexterity.” Contrary to Machiavelli’s complaint about Churchmen, Luther, “said Melanchthon in the funeral oration, did not allow his piety to blind him to human reality.” The result, as Frame puts it, was that “the University, in which Theology and Philosophy meet and mingle, is the training ground of the response to the call, which the reformers named as vocational life.” Machiavelli and the ancients agreed on one thing, that civil life could not be made “dependent on an active, regularly intervening God, and not to forces that were perfected in heaven or some place other than right here.” What Machiavelli rejected, and what the ancients didn’t know, what Luther did know, is that “two kingdoms are better than one.”
Why? “What Luther and Melanchthon saw in the contemporary landscape of early sixteenth century Europe was a Church that had ascended from literally nothing to so mighty a position that it had absorbed political as well as religious authority” under the rulership of priests. Their majesty, mystery, and authority simultaneously denatured politics and corrupted religion by reserving political rule to an elite against which there could be no earthly appeal, no ‘back-talk’ or public deliberation, and by polluting the sacred, removing from it the innocence of doves and leaving it only with the prudence of serpents. In opposition to this, Luther and Melanchthon wanted to know what those who receive and keep faith in the Christian God “will do when we get the faith.” They urge that we “feel such gratitude for the unwarranted act of grace which has freed us from the embarrassment of our human limitations that we give up our lives to the service of our neighbor,” to “move forward in faith and into congregation, parish, party and polity.” In this way, both the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Man “hold sway, simultaneously, among us.” To argue, as Machiavelli does, that this shared rule fatally bifurcates the human soul, makes it incapable of surviving in this world, the Kingdom of Man, overlooks or despises the fundamental trust upon which all human regimes depend.
As Providence (or Fortuna?) have it, the state of Minnesota during Frame’s presidency at Augsburg “possessed one the nation’s highest levels of ‘social capital'” or trust. Minnesotans could and did ‘bond’ with one another as a society of “similar or similarly situated people,” presumably a middle-class population with no shortage of ethnic Norwegians. To thrive in an increasingly ‘globalized’ world, in which “the ethnic and socio-economic diversity” of the Minnesota population was set to “expand dramatically,” Minnesotans would also need to enhance their capacity for “bridging,” for “reach[ing] across the boundaries of age, gender and socio-economic status and cultural and religious identity, then to find a joint and public purpose that pulls us together for social action.” To aid in this, the College could admit “emigrés from central Africa,” who are “among the most highly educated representatives of their societies” and ones “quickly absorbed into their new world despite their cultural and religious diversity.” What is more, the College should aim at “reconcil[ing] diversity (understood to include age, experience, cognitive capabilities, gender, sexual orientation”—what might Luther and Melanchthon say to that?—along with “religion, culture, and ethnicity).” Perhaps most immediately, “we need to run this business as a college!” That is, since “the corporate and academic worlds in the United States presently stand in desperate need of each other but remain isolated by a profound mutual distrust,” Augsburg should lead the way in their reconciliation.
With respect to ‘diversity,’ academe’s much-valorized goal, forever receding, for about half a century now, “I regularly rejected the pluralist approach,” “whereby the community is literally constructed of the differences it includes.” As he learned from Plato, “the unity of a diverse community is created by its ‘one-ness’ rather than its diversity.” That is, “the diverse elements which originally constitute a society issue in a new kind of person, largely by means of a process of interaction with a founding vision or constitutional act,” as in the founding of the United States. (On the basis of natural right, it should be added, contra Frame’s earlier remarks at least as they might be interpreted.) This vision seeks to “narrow the existing gap at Augsburg” between the liberal arts and professional knowledge or ‘expertise,’ between “experiential and theoretic wisdom,” between knowledge gained through action and knowledge gained by observation, and between reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem—all without denying the distinctions between the elements of those pairings. To bring discrete dimensions of human life closer together is neither to succumb to pluralism or moral relativism, the way of incoherence and ultimately of civil war, nor to mush them together in a Hegelian or Marxist synthesis, the way of modern tyranny or ‘totalitarianism.’
Neither Hegel nor Marx but Jeremiah serves as a better guide. “As part of his call to the Jews in exile to sop dreaming idly of a return to Jerusalem and start constructing a decent life for themselves among their captors, he forecasts a new Covenant.” Christians see that new Covenant in Jesus’ call “to close the gap that all laws suffer to one degree or another—the gap between behavioral and heartfelt compliance.” In so doing, He “liberated us from our sin” by means of His graceful offer of forgiveness. Our acceptance of that offer does not “extinguish our sin” (“if that were done, we would become gods ourselves, and leave behind our defining humanity”), does what Abraham Lincoln would later imitate in his 1838 Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield: maintain that law-abidingness finds indispensable support in the spirit of lawfulness against the “towering genius”/tyrant (Lincoln is likely thinking of Napoleon, then dead only 23 years). Just as Lincoln called that spirit, that “reverence for the laws,” the “political religion” of the American nation, so did Jesus demand that reverence for God’s laws, founded in reverence for God, animate the new polity, the new assembly or ‘church,’ the new regime consisting of reverent Jews and Gentiles alike. Does Lincoln “not illustrate by the clarity of his effort, the direction to which we are called by the Reformation?” A direction taken “in the name of a profound freedom accomplished not alone by the order sanctified by Washington and the Patriots of `76, but by that more complete freedom provided by the Gospel.”
Both the Declaration of Independence according to the Spirit of `76 and the Gospels place equality into the forefront of human deliberation, of human politics. Tocqueville saw this clearly, recognizing the importance of both the Christian equality of human souls before God and the natural equality of human souls as members of the same species, not to be separated by racial or class distinctions that treated any person as subhuman. But neither for Jesus nor for the American Founders, Lincoln, or Tocqueville did equality mean similarity. Indeed, “to the degree that equality amounts to similarity it is not satisfying,” failing as it does to give play to human excellence. Augsburg College, “for example, doesn’t want to be or feel equal” in that sense; it intends “to be outstanding, and to be recognized as such in the world.” How else could it participate in any degree to guiding the world? “All of us have been given but one Christ. But each of us has been given that Christ!” Such equality “does not bring God to our side, but more precisely it brings Him to each of us,” freeing us “to do and be our best,” opening “for our individualism a way to do God’s work” in the Kingdom of Man, which after all belongs to Him as much as the Kingdom of Heaven. And to do that work “in an outstanding way.”
It is hard to resist the conclusion that William V. Frame did his work at Augsburg College in an outstanding way. His concessions to some elements of the regnant niaiseries of ‘diversity’ might well have been intended as politic accommodations carried to an impolitic extent. His eagerness to partner with international business corporations hoping to bring about some sort of ‘globalism’ or world government was likely ill-judged. But it is hard to doubt that his own governance of the College was anything but a blessing to it, an elevation and enrichment of it.
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