The Prodigal Professor

The parable updated.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” This prayer concludes the 139th Psalm. I etched it in my zipper-lined King James Version, the Bible that fortified me through my years in junior and senior high school when the ladder on my Sunday school perfect attendance pin had grown so long and heavy that I tilted to one side every time I wore it on my lapel. While growing up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I repeated that prayer daily.

Before I matriculated at the University of Wisconsin in the early sixties, I had attended—as infrequently as my parents—a Greek Orthodox church in Milwaukee. The faith of our fathers, celebrated in our home most vigorously during the church’s holy feasts, failed to satisfy my raging appetite for religion. So I attended with extreme regularity a Bible-believing church located in an inner city neighborhood several blocks away from our two-story frame house. In the evenings I lounged next to my burgundy-colored short wave radio, the size of a fat midget’s coffin, and listened to the religious broadcasts emanating from the missionary headquarters of the Voice of the Andes in Quito, Equador. As a youth I rejoiced in the simple Bible-oriented broadcasts. Through them I found an edifying sense of witness in the testimonies of those who were serving the Lord in strange and far away lands, for they, more than any other group I knew, realized the dictates of the Great Commission: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

For my all-day Saturday diet of religious broadcasting, I listened to Chicago’s WMBI, the radio voice of the Moody Bible Institute. The searching religious programs they offered, the Bible studies they conducted, the hymn singing they shared, and the splendid warm testimonies of great servants of the Lord who were students or teachers or administrators at the Institute seized and hoisted my God-centered spirit. I nurtured that spirit with systematic Bible study and prayer in the privacy of my second floor room, under my olive wood crucifix, near my antique radio.

My Bible and crucifix accompanied me on my first trip to Madison. The radio remained lodged in my room in Milwaukee. The first thing to arrest my attention in Madison was a plaque nailed to Bascom Hall, the administration building. Culled from an 1894 report of the Board of Regents, the thought on the plaque proclaimed: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammal inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great State University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

The truth that I had known and loved and shared was found by mere acceptance of him who personified it and not by the rigorous process of sifting and winnowing. The thought of that plaque threatened my most cherished values; it reverberated in my mind as I struggled up and strolled down Bascom hill, casting glances at the law school, the school of education, the geology building, and other halls of learning. The words lingered with me as I sauntered up and down State Street, peeking into the windows of the platoon of student bars—long, dark, sprawling bars with booths and pictures of rock stars and ball players.

My first day away from home I recalled my pastor’s many attacks on the “beer culture” of the Wisconsin youth. I also recalled his parting words of advice: “I found philosophy,” he told me, “to be an excellent preparation for the ministry, and I am sure you would also.” So, I signed up for a major in philosophy and took two basic courses in that discipline during my first semester. I learned, all too soon, that the approach to philosophy used at that godless university differed from that encountered by my pastor in his undergraduate days at Wheaton College in Illinois, a theologically conservative institution that strived towards integrating the philosophic ideas of man with a Christian world view.

During those early days I felt certain that God would be with me throughout my career at Wisconsin. This much God assured me during my private prayers and Bible study sessions that I held daily and during those occasional “quiet moments” that I spent staring at the academic graffiti carved into those sturdy oak tables located at the base of a wide arch in the student union’s famed rathskeller, a dingy, drab place, always crowded with chattering students, irreparably infested with the odors of beer and coffee and smoke.

Session after session in the philosophy classes, selection after selection in the texts, my God came under attack. I had planned to defend him, but the assaults were so relentless and severe that I felt weak and timid and ill-prepared. Aristotle’s proofs for God’s existence disturbed, far more than they comforted, my thinking. The God of the ancient Greeks, my conception of him at any rate, lacked the personal quality of the God of the Christian Scriptures. I reasoned that the one true God, the Creator of the universe, the Saviour of mankind, was revealed to man. He was to be accepted, not proved. Still, Aristotle and his proofs became my ally simply because we shared a common foe in the ungodly philosophers.

Having accepted Aristotle as an ally, I began to wonder about the status of his soul. Since all those ancient Greeks—Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Thales, Homer—failed to hear Christ’s Gospel of salvation, where will their souls end: in heaven or in hell? How will they be judged? Can they be faulted for failing to follow a Saviour of whom they never heard? Were their souls considered worthy in God’s sight? Is there really salvation without Christ?

Unable to posit satisfactory answers to these questions, I left them only to confront other related questions. What is a soul anyway? Does it really exist? Isn’t the world made up of purely material elements? If one slices a man in search of a kidney or a prostate or a rib, one is likely to find any one of these. But can one slice a man and find a soul? Does a soul exist if it is not verifiable by sensory experience? Can one isolate the components of the soul? Can one define it? Can one define what is good? What is just?

“Can anyone define God?” one philosophy professor asked during a lecture. I raised my hand and said, “Yes, I could. I certainly could. The Bible has an excellent definition of God. ‘God is love.’ ”

“But how,” the professor fired back, “is God manifesting his love when an earthquake erupts and kills twenty thousand Christians? How is God manifesting his love when Christians on the battlefields of Europe and Asia slaughter themselves to the tune of eight million per war? How is God manifesting his love when he permits six million of his chosen people to be murdered by an insane dictator?” Needless to say, I failed to answer his questions, but I went on considering, if not confronting, the tough challenges that philosophy offered to my religious faith.

As I took other courses at the University of Wisconsin during my first year there, more questions arose. In a series of lectures, my skeptical professor of ancient history made a strong case that undermined the reality of the historical Jesus. All along, I had cherished my rich and deep relationship with Jesus Christ. Suddenly I found myself asking not what does it mean to have a personal relationship with Christ, but also whether that Christ ever existed as a historical figure who walked the dusty roads of Palestine and died on the cross at Calvary.

Anthropology presented me with all sorts of agonizing theories, among them the theory of ethical relativism. My cherished beliefs in the time-tested absolutes of the Ten Commandments came into question. Geology threatened my biblical beliefs in the creation of the world. Biology with its emphasis on the evolution of man from a lower species stripped God of his creative forces. A course in comparative religion showed me that the world had other religions claiming a monotheistic and powerful God, owning a refined and poetic scripture, preaching a gospel of love and salvation. Why should I believe the divine teachings of one prophet and reject those of another? Why should I consider Christianity better than other religions? After all, I reasoned with my professor of religion, I am a Christian simply because my parents were Christians. If I was born in Saudi Arabia or India, the chances were high that I would be a Moslem or a Hindu.

The barrage of questions was constant and unending that first year. None of the Christian fellowship groups that I visited appeared to be interested in grappling with such vast and threatening philosophic questions. So I retreated to my private world of Christian values only to find it in utter disarray. It wasn’t enough for me to label Aquinas’s attempts at christianizing Aristotle as brilliant. It wasn’t enough for me to call Hume’s attacks on religion as ridiculous. The writings of both, and the achievements of innumerable other thinkers, needed to be studied and understood in their complexities and in their context. This realization signaled the fact that for me education had at last begun. Either I had to “unlearn” much of what I had cherished in Christianity or simply to break from it.

What made the break more convenient were all the social pressures that I had felt. My first few days at Wisconsin, I walked into the classroom early, opened my lecture notebook to a blank page, dated it, and waited for the other ninety or two hundred or three hundred students to file in and hear the same lecture. To while away the time, I pulled from my shirt pocket a tiny New Testament and read from it until the professor strolled in to pontificate. As the year evolved, my Bible reading in the classroom lessened. Occasionally before class started I found myself visiting with students sitting to my left or my right. It wasn’t long before those students began to invite me to their apartments or fraternity houses for beer parties that frequently degenerated into sex orgies. I went to those parties even though the activities there violated my religious beliefs, the beliefs that were fragmented and confused by the onslaught of new and perplexing ideas and by new and exciting social mores.

During that first summer when I returned home to work as a playground coach for the city of Milwaukee, I found myself unable to return to the Bible-believing church of my high school years. Similarly, I could not pray or listen to the radio or read the Bible. I read a great deal that summer, mostly in Greek philosophy; I read all of Plato’s works and found them as absorbing as Aristotle’s were boring. On the few occasions when my parents attended the Greek Orthodox church, I accompanied them. Religion became a perfunctory feature of my life. Its passions gave way to my intoxication with ideas and drinks and women. New gods dawned upon me, enticed me, and remained with me throughout my college career and into my graduate school days at Indiana University.

Although I did well in my philosophical training (I wrote a Senior Honors Thesis on “Idealism in the Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards,” the most brilliant of the Puritan divines), I entered graduate school with a stronger interest in literature, an interest that was nurtured by my extracurricular reading and my desire to write fiction and poetry. There comes a time in a person’s life, I reasoned, when philosophy’s persisting questions (such as: What did Plato mean?) cease to be meaningful. I did not anticipate literature to offer me richer or profounder questions, but I had hoped literature’s perennial questions would be more engaging and varied. I knew full well the difficulties involved in deserting the rocky shores of Agnosticism on which philosophy had mercilessly deposited me, yet I secretly hoped that literature would help me recover the spirit, if not the substance, of my old religious values. I felt that men like Augustine and Dante, Milton and Bunyan, Tolstoy and Eliot might stimulate that recovery.

At Indiana University in the late sixties demonstrations were as common as ice in a freezer. To act, beard and all, as a member of Dow Chemical’s greeting parade was a status symbol. It was the cool thing to do. In those days we demonstrated for many causes: to end the war in Viet Nam, to cut the tuition increase, to stop CIA recruiting on campus, to celebrate May Day, to demand that Israel withdraw from occupied Arab territories, to memorialize the death of four students gunned down at Kent State University.

Beyond marching in the demonstrations, I read voraciously for my Ph.D. degree. Although the great men of letters that I had read failed to wave their magic wand and help me recover my complete piety and return me to the Christianity of my youth, some of them—Dostoevski and Tolstoy in particular—brought me to a richer appreciation of the Orthodox Church in history. I began to rejoice in the Greek Orthodoxy of my heritage. I was born into that faith, baptized into it as a child, and I was not about to renounce my roots, though, to be sure, my baptism meant little to me. In some religious circles, however, I knew that baptism symbolized rebirth. So, when Oklahoma Baptist University called me for my first job interview, I claimed that I was a born-again Greek Orthodox. It was a claim of convenience and not conviction. Coupled with my Ph.D. work and publications, the claim clinched my first teaching position.

In Shawnee, Oklahoma, land of the Baptized Indians where the bumper stickers read, “honk if you love Jesus” and “America love it or give it back,” I taught Aquinas, Dante, and Goethe to fundamentalist Baptist preachers, missionary volunteers, immersed Indians, rodeo queens, born-again jocks, drug culture leftovers, and other minds strapped in America’s Bible Belt. Throughout my stay there, I ridiculed the religious fundamentalists, argued with them in and out of the classroom, and satirized them in print; I deflowered the university’s finest youth and searched for an identity among the drug culture crew. Some of my students nicknamed me “The Prodigal Professor.” Before the Baptists could dismiss me, I resigned and accepted a post-doctoral fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to do research at Amherst, Massachusetts.

At Amherst I lived in the residence of a French lady, a teacher of French who had planned to spend the summer in Paris. Her husband, a professor of philosophy, had recently died. His huge library remained in his study at the house, a spacious house decorated by many large oil paintings some of which I liked, others I would have preferred the paint to have remained in the tubes, and by several life-size sculptures that must have been done by a close friend. I stashed a couple of those sculptures in the closet in order to avoid daily contact with them.

After three days in Amherst I decided to spend my first weekend away from that small, tidy town. So on Friday I drove to Boston, saw the Red Sox clobber the Milwaukee Brewers and then spent the late afternoon at Harvard Square, strolling the streets, admiring the shops, browsing in the bookstores, eating in a Greek restaurant. In the evening I listened to those sidewalk musical groups, one, two, or three to a group, as they played different instruments and attracted small crowds as sure as piles of dates attract flies in Morocco. I spent all day Saturday in the Widener Library at Harvard scanning many literary and scholarly periodicals that I could not afford to subscribe to and that the library back at Oklahoma Baptist University refused to purchase. Saturday evening I sauntered into a bookshop, bought a volume of poetry then headed to a restaurant to read and eat. Written by the late Anne Sexton, the book was entitled, The Awful Rowing Toward God.

Exploding with passion and raw anguish, Sexton’s journey toward God reminded me of my own brutal journey begun during my senior year at the University of Wisconsin when I wrote a senior honors thesis on Jonathan Edwards, the glintiest of the Puritan intellects whose brilliant philosophic treatises, I felt, might lead me back to God. My journey then, much like Sexton’s, drifted to the quagmire of too many questions, too many cruelties, too keen an awareness of cynicism, too mindful of pressure from peers, too sensitive to doubt, too little humility, too much pride. The more questions I asked about God and existence, the busier I became in rearranging, as the old metaphor had it, the chairs on the Titanic of my life.

On the way home Sunday morning I stopped in Northampton, Massachusetts, and worshiped in the Congregational Church that Edwards led for twenty-three years in eighteenth-century America. Much to my surprise and disappointment, the mystique of Edwards and the formal service failed to move me. And I was certain that all the philosophy books back at the house—works by Russell, Plato, Hume, Wittgenstein, Dewey, Moore, Leibnitz, Kant, Bergson, Santayana, Whitehead, and others—would also fail. If anything, I reasoned pessimistically, these books would deflect, if not destroy, my journey back to God. So I refused to touch them, though two titles arrested my attention whenever I entered that study. They were Williams James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and The Will to Believe. I had read both works during my undergraduate days, but I failed to recall their substance. I deduced the realization, however, that to a religiously inclined spirit, The Will to Believe, at least its title, appears warm and affable.

I was at a stage in my life when belief was, once again, being elevated into an act of will, though, to be sure, the act now was harder to perform. During my schooling and teaching career, my religious beliefs grew out of an intense preoccupation with all sorts of issues from the scientific, philosophic, and literary domains. The sum total of those beliefs was that nothing was to be believed, that certainty did not exist, that all was in flux, that cynicism must prevail in an anguished age. In such context too many questions remained unanswered in my mind; I felt a profound feeling of emptiness; my life appeared purposeless; my behavior with my students reprehensible, to say the least. Like a rat chews an old newspaper, guilt chewed my conscience that traced its vibrations back to the days when I hunched next to my short wave radio and listened to the Voice of the Andes, the voice of someone crying in the wilderness.

At amherst I spent many hours with my Bible once again. Each evening I read several chapters from the good book, then I took long strolls in the quiet streets of that historic town, meandering now into the graveyards, now into the softball fields. As I walked I often cried to God: “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Slowly the wisdom of an old Catholic philosopher, filed in the back of my mind, came to the forefront and I began to realize that I needed to “believe in order to understand and not understand in order to believe.” All along my faith had been a struggle, an “awful rowing,” unfulfilling but demanding. Suddenly I began to see my faith or belief as a struggle with a purpose; it was a struggle to reach a canal, to enter and navigate the turbulent waters of the great beyond. To make that journey meaningful I returned, not to philosophy or science or literature, not to the pressure of peers or that of my family traditions, but to the Christ of my youth, to the Saviour who once gave my life a sense of mission.

On a sweltering Sunday in August, in a Baptist church at Amherst, I responded to the “invitation” of a preacher, and with Augustine’s soliloquoy—“My heart is restless until it rests in thee, Oh Lord”—heavy on my mind, I confessed my sins to God and invited Christ into my heart. The words of Christ that I had heard and read so often as a young man growing up in Milwaukee lit up my mind with joy and comfort. “Let not your heart be troubled,” I repeated, “believe in God believe also in me” (John 14:1). As the congregation sang “Just As I Am” I knew that my rebirth was at last real. My youthful passion for religion, my years in philosophy at Wisconsin, my work in literature at Indiana, my teaching days at Oklahoma, my study of the Bible at Amherst, my will to believe in Jesus—all conspired to act as the midwife of my rebirth. This is what the psychological, indeed secular, explanation would claim. As an explanation it is not inadequate but incomplete. Above all—and this is what makes the explanation complete—it was the grace of God the Father and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ his Son that have brought me into the world as a new child of God, a born-again Christian at thirty-three, the very age, ironically enough, when Christ exhorted from the cross, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”

Ode: Entropy & Easter

that all things wear out, break down,

erode, crack, shatter,

sag, splinter, break;

due to neglect

the rooftree gives way–

and there is no way

to avoid neglect

something is always left undone

something always overlooked

if we knew when

the thief would come,

cancer grow,

the bombs fall,

we could take reasonable precautions

but we work against night and decay

with little light,

and in ignorance of the next moment

the seed must die to grow

and yet our life–

scripture says it–

is as brief and tenuous

as the wild flower trembling

in every breeze, scorched

by the sun, clipped

by the frost

all things run down to dust at last,

they crumble and scatter, are lost

the wind chimes clatter

against Rose’s sung alleluia,

the guitar’s throbbing chords,

asIreach with ink

for an affirmation, seeking

a light seeded and rooted

beyond-beneath-above

the light that is only sun

how easy to say

“he is risen, it is Easter at last

and darkness has lost”—

yes but harder to say lightly

against the weight

of a body riddled with cancer,

of a child tortured and murdered

of the twist in the spine

that makes walking a cacophony

Easter can be true only

if the Cross was truly

the death of God

and Man in one body-

sung alleluias flower

only from that dark root

of final disaster

when all seeming hope is lost–

then can the dead rise–

and praise be alive at last

EUGENE WARREN

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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