Report from Minnesota
A rump gathering that involved several Pietisten board members was held on Shirt Lake, Crow Wing County, Minnesota, this summer. In fact, it fell on August 8, 2015, the very day of the Pietisten Picnic and Annual Meeting on Vashon Island, Puget Sound, Washington. The rump gathering was part of the 2015 Summer “Conference on Despair,” whose solemn sessions raged on in Minnesota through the week of August 4 through 10.
A sentence or two of explanation is in order concerning the Conference on Despair: it was Bruce Carlson (1940-2006) who founded the Conference in the early 1980s, inviting several friends to join him twice a year at a meeting (named in irony) to celebrate their already long friendship, one with deep roots at North Park College and in on-going life in the Twin Cities, Seattle, and Rock Island, Illinois.
Shirt Lake, the scene of the Summer 2015 Conference, lies about twenty miles east-northeast of Brainerd. At the lake’s northeastern end, perched on a hill just above its clear, cold, spring-fed waters, sits Phil Johnson’s cabin, simple and inviting. With the newly-finished bedroom in the cabin’s crypt and the three bedrooms upstairs on the main floor, the place easily accommodated the attendees, and not even the six inches of rain that fell over two days during the Conference quenched the flaming fires of friendship that seem to burn hotter and dearer with the advancing ages of the conferees. The creaking and groaning of Pietistic joints and psyches mingled with the wail of lonely loons to remind these pilgrims of their mortality (two Conferees have already shuffled off their mortal coils), but the hope and love that St. Paul enjoins in I Corinthians 13 are great compensation and solace for the remaining four and their wives.
The third of that Pauline triad of virtues, faith, was, of course the subject of much of the conversation during the sessions. Discussion was animated by the article in the last Pietisten from Arvid Adell, in which the author mused as to whether one can keep the essence of the faith we had been imbued with in our home churches, Bible camps, and North Park when she or he has serious questions about Biblical literalism, eternal punishment, salvation only through Christianity, and other matters touched upon in the recent piece.
Based on those issues, the Conference considered the relationship between religious terms and the truths which lie behind them. Is the language of Christian faith flexible and negotiable, or must it remain relatively fixed, since the unique events and truths to which it points are not proclaimed save in its terms? What about categories of human thought other than theology, particularly psychology and philosophy? Are they capable of illuminating faith in categories and with concepts that are not particularly biblical? Do general reason and human experience help to understand and clarify faith when they are not controlled by the Gospel? What is the balance between reason and emotion in reaching religious truth?
Quotations from Holy Writ, K. Barth, P. Tillich, P.P. Waldenström, K. Olsson, D. Frisk, E. Hawkinson, Z. Hawkinson, H. Gustafson, and a host of others were hurled back and forth as the Conference cranked up, and by the time of departure from Shirt Lake, many in the wide range of individual positions had been modified, if not abandoned. But the common agreement was that it was the Sunday morning service in Johnson’s living room that meant the most to the Conferees, especially since United Church Pastor Mampel preached and presided at Holy Communion. That, plus the conviction that Crow Wing County needs a better pizza joint, was the most important conclusion of the Conference.
With some time to reflect, I am determined to report that if our collective and individual faith is not entirely synchronous with that of the Swedish originators of the first Pietisten (and maybe not with each other’s as well), some of the most important qualities of earlier Scando-Pietism seem to have persisted among us. Like our mid-nineteenth century forerunners on both sides of the Atlantic, we feel obliged to, if not bound by, our heritage. The Pietists were reluctant to part with the Lutheranism of the Church of Sweden, recognizing in the idea of justification by faith alone (sola fide) a recovery by Luther of the core of the Gospel. Luther, for his part, believed that he had preserved the real essence of catholic Christianity, not willing to concede that he had broken with the historic faith, no matter what church authorities said.
There was a good deal of discussion of our own Lutheran Pietist heritage by the people at Shirt Lake, especially at the Saturday sessions while the Pietisten picnic was being celebrated on Vashon Island. While many of us are concerned to rethink parts of the theological content of our tradition, we all recognize the importance of qualities from it that persist in our own lives.
One of these qualities is the insistence that religion must first of all be personal. Hilding Pleijel, the mid-twentieth century church historian at Lund University in Sweden, wrote about the shape of Swedish religion before the awakenings. It was, he said in a 1951 book, Hustavlans värld: Kyrkligt folkliv i äldre tiders Sverige (“The World of Luther’s Catechism: Churchly Folk Life in an Earlier Sweden”), a world in which religion was thought to be primarily and essentially a social force, one which assigned a place to each person in the family, the church and the civil society. Lutheranism was the principal factor upon which the leaders of church and state relied to keep order in the land. The function of religion was to engender acceptance of one’s role or place. It was not to enable and even encourage the individual to define and understand her-or himself over against the prevailing social order and its values.
For the Pietists, on the contrary, real religion was first of all personal. Often it called upon a person to “come apart and be separate.” The Shirt Lake conferees clearly believe that that should be the present role of faith; in a society with the values and ambitions that this one has–cultural, political, economic–any thoughtful person must often resist the fatuous excitement that many of our public people and agencies–politicians, CNN, ESPN or Joel Osteen–steadily purvey.
Faith is the factor that persists in calling us to that role. We Despair Conferees talked often about our common agreement that the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. So whether we are considering our country’s Middle East policy or the stuff the movies and TV put out, we often find ourselves thinking like pilgrims and strangers. And the “fellowship of kindred minds,” one of the blessed ties that bind us to one another, is based upon the belief that each one of us must take seriously and respect what the other person brings to the conversation, as the effort to cope with contemporary life continues.
At their best that is what our ancestors in Pietism did; at our best that is how we work too. The “Pietisten Premises” include “To take people as they present themselves to us” and “To engage with friends in an open conversation and to expand our friendships.” They speak of “a tradition of spontaneous voices in the congregational and democratic traditions.” The Premises indicate we “look for the Gospel” (my italics) and that we “enjoy the liberty to say and print anything we want and let it be subject to criticism by anyone who is interested.”
Interestingly, the lead piece in the last edition of Pietisten was a report on a conversation between Professor Roger Olson (co-author of Reclaiming Pietism) and Pastor Mark E. Swanson, in which Olson noted that while there are many similarities between current evangelical faith and historic Pietism, one difference is that while contemporary evangelicals seem to stress doctrinal truth over personal experience, Pietism’s emphasis is on “transforming personal experience of God” as “the permanent essence of Christianity.” This stress on the personal rather than the doctrinal certainly marks the ruminations of the members of the Conference on Despair. We recall that the leaders of the Swedish State Church regarded Waldenström as a heretic who deviated from what the Swedes called ren lära (pure doctrine).
That preservation of the importance of the individual, even in the midst of mutuality, is fortified by the sense, persistent among the Despair Conferees for many decades, that we are all on a quest and that collective faith must credit each person’s journey, never expecting that all of us will take the same path toward a goal that lies beyond the Here and Now. Bruce Carlson loved to quote the novelist Walker Percy: “When you’re not on the search, you’re in despair.” When we met in a rump session on a Minnesota lake while a picnic took place on a Washington State island two thousand miles and two time zones away from us, we realized again the joy and gratitude that each person feels when he or she discovers that other souls are still on their travels, guided by ideas and values to which we are all obliged but by which we are not trapped.
While we found ourselves debating the exact nature of our faith (or, maybe, respective “faiths”), there was also the recognition of a risk in taking seriously the emphasis on the individual encounter with God that characterized early Pietism, in employing the metaphor of journey, and in crediting each person’s journey as unique but valid. That risk lies in what Karl Olsson’s By One Spirit made clear a half century ago: when everyone’s individual trip through life and faith is valid, who gets to decide on which commonalities everyone must be bound by? We recall that in reviewing the fierce debates and the hostilities that characterized Covenant history in the years before and after World War I, battles which Olsson’s book accounted carefully, the Lutheran Conrad Bergendoff asked (in what for him at least was irony): just what was the “One Spirit” which guided those often contentious folk?
One could, of course, have reminded Bergendoff that his own tradition had been plagued with such fights too. What the Shirt Lake rump session concluded about the tension between individual spirituality and collective faith was that it is our common history that ties us together, not necessarily agreement on doctrine or even the nature of faith itself. We think that the emphasis upon the right, indeed, the responsibility, of each person to explore his or her own path and form convictions based upon that journey comes from our heritage in Pietism and that the risk of dissent and debate, even “heresy,” is worth running, especially when there are so many years, friends, and memories that bind us together.
And that is the reason the meeting on Shirt Lake resolved to send this, admittedly belated, report to the Annual Meeting and Picnic on Vashon Island.