THE SOBER ONE AT THE PARTY [T, 1-31-23]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter: THE SOBER ONE AT THE PARTY  [T, 1-31-23]

 

I started seminary at Perkins School of Theology at SMU in great part because of Schubert Ogden. He was very young at the time, barely over 30, and Perkins had hired him as a professor of theology even before his PhD dissertation was finished.

Joseph Quillian, the dean, and the 33^rd Methodist minister in the Quillian family, was building a theological juggernaut at Perkins. He was luring established and much-lauded scholars like Albert Outler, and successful and experienced preachers like Grady Hardin, and mixing them with young groundbreakers like Ogden and Van Harvey.

Dean Quillian wanted Perkins students taught by the best, and that was Schubert Ogden in theology. His dissertation, Christ Without Myth, was a reaction to Rudolf Bultmann’s existentialist, demythologizing theology, with was the cutting edge of theology in the 1950s. Ogden neither embraced nor rejected Bultmann, but went beyond him.

As former students reflected upon Professor Ogden at the time of his death, the most-oft heard phrase was, “He taught me to think.” That is a wonderful epitaph. The most important thing a teacher at any level can do it teach a student to think.

I say the following not with pride but with gratitude: I already knew how to think when I went to seminary. I’d had good teachers in my family and in school, from elementary on through university. I was an experienced theological thinker from age fourteen, when I was sure that God had worked a miracle to save my sister’s life. But most of all, I’d had narrative.

Early in my career, I heard some professor say that a sermon could be either a string of beads or a handful of confetti. He obviously thought string of beads was right. So I worked at that.

I could do beads preaching, because I loved stories. They started with “Once upon a time…” and ended with “…happily ever after.” You could count on that. But I came to understand that bead-string preaching was not helpful to some of my listeners. Neither their brains nor their lives were set up to do a string of beads. So, I tried to tell the story of God in such a way that both beads people and confetti people could see themselves in it.

It was because Joe Quillian was hiring people like Ogden that my bishop, Richard Raines, said that if he were going to seminary now [1960], he would go to Perkins. That was theology’s leading edge. So that’s where I went…and enjoyed it, until Helen and I were fired from the community center where we worked for admitting black children. Being unable to stay in seminary without a job, we returned to Indiana. Bishop Raines gave me an appointment at Cedar Lake, IN, just south of Gary, and I finished seminary at Garrett, in Evanston, IL.

It was probably a mistake to go to Dallas. It would have been far simpler to “stay home” and go to Garrett from the start. But we made good friends, and I was taught by good thinkers, like Schubert Ogden. I’ve always told young preachers that before you can preach well, you have to think well.

These days, I’m not sure that it’s a good idea to teach people to think. If you can think well in today’s society, you’re always like the only sober person at a drunken party. I’ve been that one sober person, and it’s quite boring.

John Robert McFarland