Vatican joins historic talks to end 950-year rift with Orthodox church

Thanks to Bob Abrams for notifying me of this important story, which incidentally appeared in the New York Times on the day I was en route to the American Academy of Religion and various pre-meetings in San Diego--surprisingly, no one at the meeting mentioned this!!

Click here for the English text of the Ravenna document.

Jared Wicks on the Vatican Document

Yesterday I received two articles addressing the "CDF intervention" in June. The articles were written by my colleague on the U.S. Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue, Jared Wicks, SJ and were published last month. Wicks taught for many years at the Gregorian University in Rome and is currently at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. He began his academic career as a Luther scholar but is perhaps now best known as an ecumenist. He is one of two members of the U.S. Dialogue who also serve on the International Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue. The articles are helpful and clarifying in terms of the Roman Catholic position and the specifically the disputes within Roman Catholicism that the Vatican document intended to address. Both articles are available on-line so I am posting the links here:

• "Not-so-fully church" in Christian Century (Note: Jared's original title was: "Once More, the Vatican on the Church and the Churches")
• "Questions and Answers on the New Responses of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith" in Ecumenical Trends

Help me raise money for hunger!

This Sunday, September 23, I am walking in the CROP Hunger Walk with my alma mater, Wittenberg University. This August marks the 60th anniversay of CROP (Communities Responding to Overcome Poverty)--the community hunger appeal of Church World Service--and the beginning of the CROP Hunger Walk season, in which tens of thousands of people in communities across the U.S. walk to to raise money and show solidarity with those who are impoverished. The motto of the CROP Walker is: We walk because they walk!

Each year more than 2.5 million CROP Walkers, volunteers, and sponsors raise over $16 million per year to help stop hunger around the world -- and in their own communities

If you are not already walking for hunger or supporting another walker, would you please consider making a donation in support of my efforts? Your donation supports programs that work to solve the world-wide challenge of hunger. You can help me by making a donation online. Follow this link to my personal donation page where you can make a secure online credit card donation.

Luther and Lutheran Identity

Trinity Lutheran Seminary is now on the semester system! This has meant that some courses have been combined with others. One example of this is "Lutheran Identity in America" which I am teaching this semester. This new 14 week course is a combination of "Lutheran Identity" (known as "Lutheran Confessions" in many seminaries) and parts of "Being Lutheran in America" -- the parts that treated theological issues and debates over the Confessions in the U.S., especially in the 19th century, as well as contemporary challenges to American Lutheran identity. To put all this together in one semester has been challenging!

One of the perennial complaints about such a course is that we do not read enough Luther. We do read some Luther! We read his writings that appear in the Book of Concord: the Small and Large Catechism, and the oft-overlooked Smalcald Articles, which, according to William Russell, provides a "neglected key to the theology of Martin Luther." Those who took Systematic Theology with me last year read "On the Freedom of a Christian," and I think it is the goal of the new Church History II class for students to read all three of Luther's 1520 treatises. But to read more Luther at Trinity, one also needs to take an elective class such as "Readings in Luther" (which many students do).

Of course, in "Lutheran Identity in America," I remind the students that when they are ordained or commissioned, they will promise to teach and preach in accordance with the Lutheran Confessions, and not Luther's corpus. Helmut Lehman (one of the translators of Luther's Works: American Edition), in a piece he wrote several years ago entitled "Luther on the Study of Luther," reminds us of Luther's own estimation of his works and thus suggests a perspective to keep in mind when we study them:

In a variety of formulations and settings Luther speaks of wanting his books to perish lest they, like previous works, detract from studying the Holy Scriptures. Because all sorts of writings by church fathers, councils, and teachers have been collected and stored in libraries, “the divine Word is lost,” and the “Bible lies forgotten in the dust under the bench.” Already in 1528 Luther said he had sought to accomplish nothing else with his writing than to bring Holy Scripture and divine truth to light. He thought he had succeeded in this endeavor to such a degree that divine truth “praise God, shines forth so brightly and powerfully everywhere” that one could now get along without his writings and those of others who shared his views. John the Baptizer is Luther’s model. Through his writings Luther wants to “point toward the Scriptures, as John the Baptist did toward Christ, saying, ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’” [John 3:30]. Thus the purpose of the study of Luther’s writings is to point to the study of the Holy Scriptures and to Christ.

Bishop Sklba on the Vatican Document

The Most Rev. Richard J. Sklba, auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee of the Roman Catholic Church, was one of several distinguished guests who spoke in honor of Secretary Lowell Almen when he received the Servus Dei Medal at the recent ELCA Assembly. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel interviewed him on August 3, 2007, noting that just one month after the publication of the recent Vatican document asserting that the Catholic Church is the one true church, Sklba "is about to find himself in what some might assume would be an uncomfortable position - addressing more than 1,000 Lutherans. Bishop Sklba, who is the co-chair of the U.S. Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue, noted that the tenth round of the dialogue (The Church as Koinonia of Salvation, 2004) proposed that "Catholic judgment on the authenticity of Lutheran ministry need not be all or nothing." The report quoted a 1993 letter from then Cardinal Ratzinger: "I count among the most important results of the ecumenical dialogues the insight that the issue of the Eucharist cannot be narrowed to the problem of validity. Even a theology oriented to the concept of succession . . . need not in any way deny the salvation granting presence of the Lord in the Lutheran Lord's Supper."

George Tavard, 1922-2007

George Tavard, a giant in the ecumenical movement, died expectedly on Monday, August 13, 2007. He was named by Pope John XXIII to attend Vatican Council II as a "peritus conciliaris" and he served on the U.S. Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialogue from the beginning. Many of my colleagues from Trinity will remember George from his tenure at the Methodist Theological School in Ohio here in central Ohio, from where he retired in 1990. I was privileged to serve with him on the latest round of the dialogue ("The Hope of Eternal Life"). His gentle spirit and deep wisdom will be missed by all who knew him.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord. And let perpetual light shine upon him.

Racism, Classism, Sexism and Heterosexism

In one of my first posts, I wrote about racism and the need for white theologians to deal with it. This January, I will be leading an interim seminar that is a study of the issues of racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism in urban ministry with a focus on the city of Detroit. The class will meet for two days at Trinity where I will introduce the students theoretically to these problems and then we will spend approximately 10 days in Detroit where they will be instructed by pastors engaged in city ministry in Detroit -- "Acts in Common" -- and myself.

I have been doing some research in order to determine what the students should read for this course. The pastors of Acts in Common will help shape the reading list. I probably will show most (if not all) of the excellent PBS series, "Race: The Power of an Illusion" during the two days in Columbus.

Students who took the course previously read The Autobiography of Malclom X and White Women's Christ, Black Women's Jesus by Womanist theologian Jacquelyn Grant.

I just came across this interview in The Other Journal in which second generation Black theologian Dwight Hopkins offers an excellent (and at times personal) introduction to Black Theology [as an aside, his piece, "The Religion of Globalization" appeared in a previous issue of The Other Journal]. He also discusses his latest book (which has since been published by Fortress): Being Human: Race, Culture and Religion. I will probably use at least one chapter from his book in the reader I put together for this new course.

I also hope to include readings by White theologians who are addressing racism and White privilege, such as James Perkinson (who teaches at Ecumenical Theological Seminary in Detroit) who has written White Theology: Outing Supremacy in Modernity. On-line articles by Perkinson include "Theology and the City: Learning to Cry, Struggling to See" and "Like a Thief in the Night: Black Theology and White Church in the Third Millennium."

I welcome suggestions with regard to resources (books and other media) from those of you who have taught (or taken) courses on racism, classism, sexism, and heterosexism.