Hein Fry lecturers Bonnie Miller-McLemore and Pamela Cooper-White
spent a day helping the seminary community reflect on practical theology
in the life of the modern Christian

Hein-Fry Lectures participants enjoy a moment before the event. From left are Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, LTSP Professor Katie Day, who introduced Miller-McLemore, LTSP Dean Paul Rajashekar, and LTSP Professor Pamela Cooper-White, who gave the third lecture of the day. Miller-McLemore: By using "new language" and bringing "theological reflection" into thinking about various forms of suffering, believers will encounter "new ideas and emotional and spiritual questions." Cooper-White: Focused on what "an understanding of the human condition brings to faith." Miller McLemore and Cooper-White shared the microphone for a question and answer session at the end of the day.

PHILADELPHIA, PA (February 22, 2005) - Can key theological concepts help Christians decide how to live better lives today? How does living the Christian life reshape traditional theological categories? And if humans are created in the "image" of God, how might a better understanding of people's complexities lead us to a better understanding of God and God's purpose a beloved people?

Questions like those produced a challenging day of presentations and reflections for this year's fourteenth annual Hein-Fry Lecture Series at The Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.

The presenters were the Rev. Dr. Bonnie Miller-McLemore, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Pastoral Theology, Vanderbilt University Divinity School, and the Rev. Dr. Pamela Cooper White, LTSP's Professor of Pastoral Theology. The lecture series is coordinated by the Division for Ministry in cooperation with the eight seminaries of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America to foster original scholarship and to enrich theological dialogue throughout the church.

Miller-McLemore, a Disciples of Christ pastor who did field work in a Lutheran congregation in Chicago, gave two lectures and Cooper-White gave a third lecture in the afternoon. For both scholars, the issues of pastoral care in the midst of modern complexities are clearly priorities for reflection.

In her first lecture, Miller-McLemore, who once taught on the faculty at Chicago Theological Seminary, probed the notion of sin in contemporary life. Is it a relevant idea for today? She said talking about sin in direct relationship to concrete matters - such as death, children and women's lives, rather than academic abstractions or punitive church language, holds liberating potential.

Miller-McLemore began with a discussion of the various disciplines within the realm of theology and said that its cluster of disciplines has been seen as belonging "to academic experts and not for wider engagement. Too much has been done at too great a distance from practical life issues." She said a response to suffering is at the center of theology and an understanding of pastoral theology. By using new language and bringing theological reflection into reflection about various forms of suffering, believers will encounter "new ideas and emotional and spiritual questions," she said.

Miller-McLemore also noted a modern tendency in society "to avoid looking at sin as a way to understand human dynamics" with many considering the idea of sin as "just for religious specialists." The result is a "spiritual and pastoral problem" when it comes to the matters of dying and concerns for children where disciplines such as "medicine and technology are just not enough," she said. Miller-McLemore called for a "retrieval" of sin and new definitions.

Miller-McLemore said the experience of sin "intensifies" the experience of death, making death a "moral and spiritual practice. Because of sin we experience death differently. The element of sting is added," she said. In Christian language death becomes the enemy in part because "it is beyond our power to bring about the ending of life in any way that is satisfying." That makes illness and dying more difficult. Dealing with death involves the kind of public expression, she said "that is beyond medicine." She said that reclaiming the idea of sin and forgiveness can move humanity beyond nature, despair and guilt and toward the notion of salvation and divine completeness.

Acknowledging the reality of sin also "complexifies" our understanding of children and their development, parenting and family life, she said. Miller-McLemore referenced talk shows that attempt to "perfect mothering and children. She said retrieving sin today "might renew the value of religious practice in which confession, reconciliation, faith and hope become more essential for family practice."

Finally in her first lecture, Miller-McLemore noted that sin is shaped by power and privilege and took on the thorny issue of sin of the oppressed. "Can the subjugated contribute to their own entrapment" she asked. Oppressed women, for example may contribute by underdeveloping themselves, or "they can give too much, rather than too little." She suggested the word "frailty" might be a good, but awkward synonym for sin.

Issues of finding "the precise balance between helplessness and responsibility cut at the heart of Christian life," she said. "We assume that children and the aged are frail, but isn't that true of all of us? We are often more afraid to admit our fear of frailty than our fear of dying." She called for being more willing to acknowledge frailty and dependence on others. In our state of frailty, Miller-McLemore said victims of oppression sometimes reciprocate and at times choose to blame others for wrongs rather than themselves. In some cases such individuals are "both victims and culprits."

She called for recognizing that sin is a "multivalent" term rather than a "monolithic" one. By seeing sin through "fresh portraits," she said humanity can move closer to an enlightened and liberated understanding of "the grace of God's power."

In her second lecture, Miller-McLemore took on the issue of sacrifice and its relevance to contemporary Christian life. Is there anything "salvageable" about sacrifice?

Her main thesis? She said "one cannot have an adequate theory of human personhood or an adequate grasp of the practice of care without some notion of sacrifice. However, those who hope to salvage it must begin by contesting the ways it has oppressed and harmed rather than saved and empowered."

She first raised suspicions about the term sacrifice. She noted that the term is used hundreds of times in eucharistic liturgies but that in certain contexts the term may be "off-putting." "The place of sacrifice in faith has produced huge divisions," she said. "We have disagreed about how Christ's death saves." And some eschew the validation of atonement and sacrifice as the central focus of the death of Christ on the cross, she indicated.

On the more practical and daily side, she said consideration of the term raises large questions "about our understanding of the good life, work and shared housework." She said that when mothers make sacrifice the focus, the ideal may "fail people's lives and misrepresent the intent of God for our lives. A question is what does God's sacrifice in Christ have to do with life." Modern women face a clash of commitments involving their professions, and roles as wives and mothers. Ideals for the working mother remain sketchy and "father knows best" remains an undying ideal. Poverty, abuse and chronic illness further complicate and introduce conflict between the notions of self-interest and self-sacrifice. She suggested that "just love" may be a suitable alternative ideal to self sacrifice in dealing with the "complicated daily dance" surrounding work, creativity, procreativity and rearing children. Love with justice in a marriage moves beyond "mere mutuality," she said, producing a rhythm of give and take. Miller-McLemore is the mother of three teenage sons. And personal experience has played a part in books she has written, including one edited with several others called Mutuality Matters: Family, Faith and Just Love.

Some modern understanding of self-sacrifice is the result of bad Christology, Miller-McLemore said. Jesus did not seek death as an end in itself, she said, but instead gave himself "to bring others into a relationship with God." "Love is never disinterested," she said. "It involves give and take and self-interest." She said the raising of children involves mutual pride and "freeing a parent from some responsibilities." She called for the kind of nurturing in families that brings others "more fully into being" and cautioned against a view of family life that overly "sentimentalizes" the ideal of sacrificing. Some feminist theology suggests that sacrificing that leads to suffering "has no redeeming value."

Salvaging a chastened, yet still seditious, sacrifice is worth pursuing, she said. In family life, care of dependents appropriately involves sacrifice in a "transitional" sense when that sacrifice is clearly short term and for the greater good. In the workplace, it makes sense to subordinate your own good for the good of others as long as individual aspirations are not left entirely in the back seat, she said. In the local and global context, sacrifice may be involved in bringing to life the ideal of loving the neighbor through altruistic social action. "Christianity has something to do with de-centering to something larger than self," she said. "Relinquishing control in what is the unjust distribution of goods in the global context is also a form of sacrifice that has relevance." In worship and in our theological lives, Miller-McLemore called for looking at Christ's death on the cross in broader terms, seeing his love-giving death not only as sacrifice, but also as a form of empowering others.

In salvaging a new understanding of sacrifice, she said, it is essential to heed limits and parameters.

Those parameters include listening carefully to those who are "harmed by sacrifice and self-sacrifice." She called for distinguishing between "life-giving" and "life-denying" sacrifice and using the term with greater attention and care. Is sacrifice truly chosen or invited? Or is it motivated by fear? Living out one's faith involves being willing to look at flaws in one's religious tradition and examining how that tradition deals with the behaviors of the powerful against the powerless.

"How are we to live according to the will of Christ? Are we helping or hindering?" she concluded.

In her afternoon presentation, Cooper-White explained that "pastoral theology begins with human beings" and involves a "mutual dialogue between theology and the human situation of suffering." As such it can be a guiding and liberating discipline. She turned the Hein-Fry questions around. Instead of asking what wisdom faith brings to the human condition, she decided to focus on what "an understanding of the human condition brings to faith, and in particular to theology."

She began by noting that as part of the recent curriculum revision at LTSP the area formerly called "Practical" renamed itself the "Integrative Theology Area." Noting the change had some controversy, Cooper-White said the adaptation recognized that "those of us who traffic most at the intersection of theology and the daily practices of ministry do not merely apply or put into practice theologies that are handed to us by more 'systematic' theologians, or even handed down historically from doctrines in our traditions, but that our work, in fact, is constructive and systematic theology. It is continually informed and shaped in mutual dialogue with the realities of daily life, and the human situation.

"It may be argued, then, that all theology, but especially pastoral theology, which is concerned with care for suffering, must begin with human beings, and in particular with the pain and brokenness of the human condition, and indeed all of creation," Cooper-White said.

"We often begin these discussions by examining the nature of God," Cooper-White continued. But she said all descriptions of God "are human fabrications", and most attempts at describing God involve our unconscious psyches. "Reflecting on life may be the best starting point" to catch a glimpse of God, she said, rather than thinking about God in the abstract. She called for looking in the mirror of human experience and creation as a way of sensing the "glory of God in a single leaf."

Cooper-White, an Episcopal priest who is a pastoral psychotherapist, described the complexities of human consciousness ranging from the findings of Freud to more modern experts.

She identified a list of characteristics of humanity created in the "image of God."

She said creation was created as good, therefore humanity began as good. She said she likes the Quaker notion that God is "within each person." People are also vulnerable, she said, and susceptible to straying from the good path. They are embodied, enfleshed realities. They are both alike and unique, she continued, "simultaneously like all others, like some others and like no others." She said people are relational and share a common humanity. They also yearn to connect with the Creator. Most challenging to enlightenment concepts of humanity, human creatures are also multiple rather than unitary in their personalities. They are mutable and fluid in process and constantly in a state of flux and transition. Finally, each person is loved by the Creator, and therefore all humans are also loving creatures.

She went into the characteristics in great detail, noting that postmodern psychology and understanding steadily reveals that humans are far more complex than was once thought, more complicated than many people understand.

She said that all this complexity and wonder suggests a God "with many images." God in relating to the world becomes a "dynamic, Trinitarian mystery of love" who developed a creation from nothing and an infinity and reality sometimes beyond our knowledge and without substance. Looking at the complexity of God-made humanity "emancipates us from a monolithic understanding of both God and human beings," she said.

"A multiple, relational theology, it seems to me, is hospitable to an embodied conception of mind and self that gives room enough for the human person to encompass a wide capacity for relationality, both with other people, and with and among the inner selves that inhabit the time and spatial dimensions of one's own lived life."

She said the "rigid hierarchy" of consciousness and unconsciousness collapses "as we recognize that our creativity, art and human nature itself contain spheres of both rationality and irrationality, knowability and unknowability, of abstract thought, emotion, and animal sense, both within ourselves and in our relations with one another. These are not fixed positions, but are in continual flux as we move in and out of different internal and external states of pressure, desire, conflict and union."