Nicholas Wolterstorff -- 1993 -- \'The Grace that Shaped My Life\'

The Grace That Shaped My Life NICHOLAS WOLTERSTORFF Nicholas Wolterstorff has a joint appointment in the divinity school and the philosophy and religion departments of Yale University. Prior to joining the Yale faculty, Wolterstorff taught for thirty years at Calvin College and also held an appointment at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has been selected to present the forthcoming Wilde Lectures at Oxford and Gifford Lectures in Scotland in defense of religious belief. His many important works include Works and Worlds of Art, Art in Action, Lament for a Son, Until Justice and Peace Embrace, Reason Within the Bounds of Religion and On Universals. The grace that shaped my life came not in the form of episodes culminating in a private experience of conversion but, first of all, in the form of being inducted into a public tradition of the Christian church. The reformation of the Christian church that occurred in the Swiss cities during the second quarter of the sixteenth century took two main forms. One eventuated in the movement known as Anabaptism. The other became embodied in the churches known throughout Continental Europe as Reformed, and in Scotland as Presbyterian. I was reared in the tradition of the Dutch. Reformed Church transplanted to the United States. My parents had themselves in their youth emigrated from the Netherlands. The place was a tiny farming village on the prairies of southwest Minnesota—Bigelow. Simplicity, Sobriety and Measure In his book on English dissenting movements, the poet and critic Donald Davie remarks that it was... John Calvin who first clothed Protestant worship with the sensuous grace, and necessarily the aesthetic ambiguity, of song. And who that has attended worship in a French Calvinist church can deny that—over and above whatever religious experience~he may or may not have had—he has had an aesthetic experience, and of a peculiarly intense kind? From the architecture, from church-furnishings, from the congregational music, from the Geneva gown of the pastor himself, everything breathes simplicity, sobriety, and measure.1 That’s it exactly: simplicity, sobriety and measure. We “dressed up” on the Lord’s Day, dressed up for the Lord’s Day, and entered church well in advance of the beginning of the service to collect ourselves in silence, silence so intense it could be touched. The interior was devoid of decoration, plaster painted white, ceiling pitched to follow the roof, peak high but not too high. The only “richness” was in the wooden furnishings. These were varnished, not painted; as a child I dwelt on the patterns in their unconcealed woodiness—perhaps because, coming from several generations of woodworkers, I was from infancy taught reverence for wood. We faced forward, looking at the Communion table front center, and behind that, the raised pulpit. Before I understood a word of what was said I was inducted by its architecture into the tradition. Then the consistory entered, men dressed in black or blue suits, faces bronzed and furrowed from working in the fields, shining from scrubbing; this was the Lord’s Day. Behind them came the minister. Before he ascended the pulpit one member of the consistory shook his hand; when he descended from the pulpit at the end of the service all the members of the consistory shook his hand, unless they disagreed. We sang hymns from here and there— nineteenth-century England, sixteenth-century Germany. But what remains in my ear are the psalms we sang. Every service included psalms, always sung, often to the Genevan tunes. Sometimes the services were in Dutch; then the older people sang the psalms from memory, always to the Genevan tunes. My image of the hymn tunes was that they jumped up and down. My image of the Genevan psalm tunes was that they marched up and down in stately, unhurried majesty—sometimes too unhurried for me as a child! The minister preached at length, often with passion, sometimes with tears, the content of the sermons—usually doctrine followed by application. He led us in what was known as “the long prayer,” during which the consistory stood, eyes closed, swaying back and forth. Four times a year we celebrated the Lord’s Supper. In a long preliminary exhortation we were urged to contemplate the depth of our sins and the “unspeakable” grace of God in forgiving our sins through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Then, in silence alive, the bread and wine were distributed. The minister communicated last. There was no fear of repetition. The view that only the fresh and innovative is meaningful had not invaded this transplant of the Dutch Reformed tradition in Bigelow, Minnesota. Through repetition, elements of the liturgy and of Scripture sank their roots so deep into consciousness that nothing thereafter, short of senility, could remove them. “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who has made heaven and earth,” said the minister to open the service, unfailingly. The cycle for one of the two sermons each Sunday was fixed by the Heidelberg Catechism. This catechism, coming from Heidelberg in Reformation times, had been divided up into fifty-two Lord’s Days; the minister preached through the catechism in the course of the year, taking a Lord’s Day per Sunday. It was doctrine, indeed, but doctrine peculiarly suffused with emotion—perhaps because, as I now know, it had been formulated for a city filled with exiles. The first question and answer set the tone; decades later they continue to echo in the chambers of my heart: Q: What is your only comfort in life and death? A: That I am not my own but belong to my faithful savior Jesus Christ. A Sacramental Theology If the aesthetic of this liturgy was simplicity, sobriety and measure, what was its religious genius? The only word I have now to capture how it felt then is sacramental; it felt profoundly sacramental. One went to church to meet God; and in the meeting, God acted, especially spoke. The language of “presence” will not do. God was more than present; God spoke, and in the sacrament, “nourished and refreshed” us, here and now sealing his promise to unite us with Christ. Ulrich Zwingli had considerable influence on the liturgy of the Reformed churches; for example, it was he rather than Calvin who set the pattern of quadrennial rather than weekly Eucharist. In part that was because he insisted that the climax of the Eucharist was Communion, and he could not get his parishioners to communicate weekly, accustomed as they were to communicating just once a year; in part it was because he interpreted the Lord’s Supper as entirely our action, not God’s. But in word and tone the liturgy I experienced was a liturgy of God’s action; it was “Calvinistic.” During the liturgy as a whole, but especially in the sermon, and most of all during the Lord’s Supper, I was confronted by the speech and actions of an awesome, majestic God. Of course, liturgy was our action as well, not just God’s. We gave voice, always in song, never in speech, to praise and thanksgiving and penitence. The religious genius of the liturgy was interaction between us and God. And throughout there was a passionate concern that we appropriate what God had done and was doing. We were exhorted to prepare ourselves so as to discern and receive the actions of God; it didn’t happen automatically. It was as if the “secret” prayers of the Orthodox liturgy had been changed into exhortations and spoken aloud; the concern with right doing was the same. And we were exhorted, as we went forth, to live thankfully and gratefully. Max Weber argued, in his famous analysis of the origins of capitalism, that the energetic activism of the Calvinists was designed to secure the success that was taken as a sign of membership among the elect. I can understand how it would look that way to someone on the outside; and possibly there were some on the inside, English Puritans, for example, who did think and speak thus. But it has always seemed to me a ludicrous caricature of the tradition as I experienced it. The activism was rather the activism congruent to gratitude. Sin, salvation, gratitude: that was the scheme of the “Heidelberger.” Conspicuous material success was more readily taken as a sign of shady dealing than of divine favor. My induction into the tradition, through words and silences, ritual and architecture, implanted in me an interpretation of reality—a fundamental hermeneutic. Nobody offered “evidences” for the truth of the Christian gospel; nobody offered “proofs” for the inspiration of the Scriptures; nobody suggested that Christianity was the best explanation of one thing and another. Evidentialists were nowhere in sight! The gospel was report, not explanation. And nobody reflected on what we as “modern men” can and should believe in all this. The scheme of sin, salvation and gratitude was set before us, the details were explained; and we were exhorted to live this truth. The modern world was not ignored, but was interpreted in the light of this truth rather than this truth being interpreted in the light of that world. The picture is incomplete without mention of the liturgy of the family. Every family meal—and every meal was a family meal—was begun and concluded with prayer, mainly prayers of thanksgiving principally, though not only, for sustenance. We did not take means of sustenance for granted; my family was poor. Food, housing, clothes—all were interpreted as gifts from God—again the sacramentalism, and again, a sacramentalism of divine action rather than divine presence. Before the prayer following the meal there was a reading, usually from Scripture chosen on a lectio continua scheme, but sometimes from devotional literature, and often from a Bible-story book. Thus between church and home I was taught to read the Bible as doctrine, as Torah and as narrative; that there might be tension among these never occurred to me. The Center The piety in which I was reared was a piety centered on the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament together. Centered not on experience, and not on the liturgy, but on the Bible; for those themselves were seen as shaped by the Bible. Christian experience was the experience of appropriating the Bible, th& experience of allowing the Bible to shape one’s imagination and emotion and perception and interpretation and action. And the liturgy was grounded and focused on the Bible: in the sermon the minister spoke the Word of God to us on the basis of the Bible; in the sacraments, celebrated on the authority of the Bible, the very God revealed in the Bible united us to Christ. So this was the Holy Book. Here one learned what God had done and said, in creation and for our salvation. In meditating on it and in hearing it expounded one heard God speak to one today. The practice of the tradition taught without telling me that the Bible had to be interpreted; one could not just read it and let the meaning sink in. I was aware that I was being inducted into one among other patterns of interpretation, the pattern encapsulated in the Heidelberg Catechism; sometimes polemics were mounted against the other interpretations. The center from which all lines of interpretation radiated outward was Jesus—Jesus Christ. Of course I knew he was human; but the humanity of Jesus Christ did not function much in my imagination or anyone’s interpretation. Jesus Christ was the incarnated second person of the Trinity. I must say in all candor (and with some embarrassment) that not until about five years ago, when I read some books on Jesus by Marcus Borg, E. P. Sanders, Ben Meyer, Tom Wright and Gerd Theissen, books that set Jesus within the context of first-century Palestinian Judaism, did Jesus’ polemic with the Pharisees finally make sense to me and did Jesus become a genuinely human figure. Describing precritical modes of biblical interpretation in The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, Hans Frei remarks that “biblical interpretation [was] an imperative need, but its direction was that of incorporating extra-biblical thought, experience, and reality into the one real world detailed and made accessible by the biblical story—not the reverse.” Then Frei quotes a passage from Erich Auerbach, in which Auerbach is contrasting Homer with Old Testament narrative: Far from seeking, like Homer, merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. . . . Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in this sequence; into it everything that is known about the world.., must be fitted as an ingredient of the divine plan. Frei then continues with the comment, “In the process of interpretation the story itself, constantly adapted to new situations and ways of thinking, underwent ceaseless revision; but in steadily revised form it still remained the adequate depiction of the common and inclusive world until the coming of modernity.”2 If Frei is right, the mentality in which I was reared was premodern; one of the ironies of history is that it now looks postmodern as well. The Full Pattern I remember my father sitting at the dining-room table during the long winter evenings in our house in the village on the Minnesota prairies, making pen and ink drawings. All his life long, I now believe, he wanted to be an artist; but he grew up in the Depression, child of displaced Dutch city dwellers consigned to farming in the New World, and it was never a possibility. There was in him accordingly a pervasive tone of disappointment. He was on intimate terms with wood; but wood was not yet art for him. I have since learned of Christians who see art as a device of “the enemy,” something to be avoided at all costs. I have learned of other Christians who are torn in pieces by art, unable to leave it alone, yet told by those around them that art is “from the other side.” My father-in-law was one of those troubled lovers of art. But not my father. I have also learned of Christians for whom the life of the mind is “enemy.” That too was not my experience. I take you now on our move from Bigelow to Edgerton, forty-five miles distant, in my early teens. My mother died when I was three. Of her I have only two memories: being held in her lap on a rocking chair when my arms were full of slivers, and seeing her lying still and pale in a coffin in our living room while I ate strawberries. After a few years of loneliness my father remarried and we moved to Edgerton, the village from which my stepmother, Jennie Hanenburg, came. The Hanenburgs were and are a remarkable family: feisty, passionate, bright, loyal. Thodgh our family lived in the village, most of the others were farmers. So after morning church they all came to our house—aunts and uncles, cousins, everybody, boisterous dozens of them. Sweets were eaten in abundance, coffee drunk; and the most dazzling intellectual experience possible for a young teenager took place. Enormous discussions and arguments erupted, no predicting about what: about the sermon, about theology, about politics, about farming practices, about music, about why there weren’t as many fish in the lakes, about what building the dam in South Dakota would do to the Indians, about the local schools, about the mayor, about the village police officer, about the Dutch Festival, about Hubert Humphrey. Everyone took part who was capable of taking part—men, women, teenagers, grandparents. I can hear it now: one aunt saying at the top of her voice, “Chuck, how can you say a thing like that?” And Chuck laughing and saying, “Well, Clara, here’s how I see it.” Then when it was time to go, everyone embracing. I must mention especially my Aunt Trena, one of the most wonderful women I have known; she also died young. One Saturday afternoon I walked into her house and heard the Metropolitan Opera playing on her radio; to me as a young teenager it was caterwauling. So I asked her why she was listening to that. Her answer remains for me a marvel and a parable: “Nick, that’s my window onto the world.” She had never gone to school beyond the fifth grade; she was then trying to finish high school by correspondence. Reverence for wood and for art in my father; reverence for the land and the animals in my uncles, sometimes even for machinery; longing reverence for music in my aunt; reverence for the life of the intellect in everybody. In the tenth book of his Confessions Augustine imagines the things of the world speaking, saying to him: Do not attend to us, turn away, attend to God. I was taught instead to hear the things of the world saying: Reverence us; for God made us as a gift for you. Accept us in gratitude. It has taken me a long time to see the full pattern of the tradition. I think it was something like this: the tradition operated with a unique dialectic of affirmation, negation and redemptive activity. On the reality within which we find ourselves and which we ourselves are and have made, I was taught to pronounce a differentiated yes and no: a firm yes to God’s creation as such, but a differentiated yes and no to the way in which the potentials of creation have been realized in culture, society and self. And I was taught, in response to this discriminating judgment, to proceed to act redemptively, out of the conviction that we are called by God to promote what is good and oppose what is bad, and to do so as well as we can; as an old Puritan saying has it, “God loveth adverbs.” The affirmation of what is good in creation, society, culture and self was undergirded by a deep sacramental con- sciousness: the goodness surrounding us is God’s favor to us, God’s blessing, God’s grace. Culture is the result of the Spirit of God brooding over humanity’s endeavors. The tradition operated also with a holistic understanding of sin and its effects, of faith and of redemption. By no means was everything in society, culture and personal existence seen as evil; much, as I have just remarked, was apprehended as good. The holistic view of sin and its effects instead took the form of resisting all attempts to draw lines between some area of human existence where sin has an effect and some area where it does not. The intuitive impulse of the person reared in the Reformed tradition is to see sin and its effects as leaping over all such boundaries. To the medievals who suggested that sin affects our will but not our reason, the Reformed person says that it affects our reason as well. To the Romantics who assume that it affects our technology but not our art, the Reformed person says it affects art too. Corresponding to this holistic view of sin and its effect is then a holistic view as to the scope of genuine faith. Faith is not an addendum to our existence, a theological virtue, one among others. The faith to which we are called is the fundamental energizer of our lives. Authentic faith transforms us; it leads us to sell all and follow the Lord. The idea is not, once again, that everything in the life of the believer is different. The idea is rather that no dimension of life is closed off to the transforming power of the Spirit—since no dimension of life is closed off to the ravages of sin. But faith, in turn, is only one component in God’s program of redemption. The scope of divine redemption is not just the saving of lost souls but the renewal of life—and more even than that: the renewal of all creation. Redemption is for flourishing. Third, the tradition operated with the conviction that the Scriptures are a guide not just to salvation but to our walk in the world—to the fundamental character of our walk. They are a comprehensive guide. They provide us with “a world and life view.” This theme of the comprehensiveness of the biblical message for our walk in this world matches, of course, the holistic view of sin and of faith. The grace of Go