ReligionWise
ReligionWise
Identity, Vocation, and Contemporary Christianity - Guy Erwin
Today's conversation features Dr. Guy Erwin, the President of the United Lutheran Seminary. As a lifelong educator both with roots on a Native American reservation and as an openly gay man, Dr. Erwin shares his perspective on some of the social and cultural challenges faced by the church in the last generation. More generally, our discussion also considers the place of Christianity in public life and the relationship between the church and higher education.
Welcome to ReligionWise. I'm your host, Chip Gruen. if you're a regular listener to ReligionWise, you'll know that our goal is to host conversations about religion in public life. We do this mostly by featuring discussions that consider religion and religious diversity as they are relevant to public life in all kinds of ways. So this might be scholarship that focuses on important issues surrounding religion in our world, but it might also feature conversations that are more immediately relevant to understanding of law, policy, medicine or business. Our basic premise is that a more sophisticated, nuanced way of considering the place of religion in our world will help us to understand and interact with that world in a better way and also a more empathetic way, one that considers the needs and the perspectives of others. Of course, the dominant conversation about religion in our world is held by religious individuals talking about their own communities. We often feature those conversations in another program hosted by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding called WorldViews, that is held on campus at Muhlenberg College during both the fall and the spring semesters. If you're interested for more information on that, either if you're local you or you want to livestream, you can go to our website at religionandculture.com to get all of the details. Today on ReligionWise, we will host a similar kind of conversation that features this important part of the public discourse on religion by talking to Dr. Guy Erwin. Dr Erwin currently serves as the President of the United Lutheran Seminary. He has also held the office of bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and is a prominent church historian specializing in reformation studies. His biography is an interesting one, though he does a much better job of introducing himself, which he'll do during the episode. I want to make you aware of a few details about his life as we head into the conversation. So first, he grew up on a native reservation in Oklahoma and is a member of the Osage Nation. From there, after having lived some time in Germany, he went on to pursue his higher education in the United States, holding advanced degrees from both Harvard and Yale. He also holds the distinction of being the first openly gay male to serve as a bishop in the churches of the Lutheran World Federation, of which the ELCA is a part. I had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. Irwin while he was on campus to talk about how the history and legacy of the Reformation has affected Lutheran ideas about higher education. It's my pleasure to welcome Dr. Erwin to ReligionWise, to not only talk about this groundbreaking career, but also to consider larger questions on vocation and the place of contemporary Christianity in our public conversation more generally. Dr. Guy Erwin, thanks for coming on ReligionWise.
Guy Erwin:I'm glad to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Chip Gruen:All right, so one of the things I noticed in your writing and your teaching that I, that I was researching coming into our conversation is you really emphasize both the human and the humane. And I think it's maybe a good habit to start off with asking you a question about you as a human. Can you tell me a little bit about where you come from, how you got here, and what's the story of Guy Erwin?
Guy Erwin:Sure, sure. I I have had a very interesting life and trajectory, and a lot of it is not what one would expect. I was born in northeastern Oklahoma on the Osage Indian Reservation in a very small town, which was also the county seat and the capital of the reservation, and I have lived in a lot of different places since then, and seen and done a lot of things that I think most of the other people who were born there in that year would never have imagined. And it's not because of my own accomplishment alone, but because of decisions other people made for me and opportunities I've taken. I was raised by parents who though they would not articulate, I think, any sense of religious identity, and didn't practice any particular form of Christianity, were what I would call ethically informed Protestants, secular Protestants, in a way they did. We didn't actually ever belonged to a church when I was growing up, but I was brought up to have a high regard for the dignity of other people and a pretty deep curiosity about the way the world is, and they often without articulating it in words, set an example for me that basically was ask every question, find out whatever you can, don't miss any opportunity to learn something new and and I didn't realize, of course, until I was fully the person they had helped me become, that I'd actually learned it from them. And now I look back and I'm very grateful. For the upbringing I had and the willingness to say yes to things that I think some of my peers and friends and even relatives would have been afraid to do.
Chip Gruen:So you remarked that you've been able to do lots of things. You've had lots of opportunities. I'll also say you your your career, your life, has been marked by a lot of firsts. You're the first openly gay male to serve as an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Bishop, the first Native American to serve as a bishop in the ELCA. Beyond those, the personal characteristics that enabled you to be a groundbreaker, I have to think that your worldview is also informed by something of a revolutionary temperament. Maybe that's too strong. You can tell me if that, if that makes sense or not, are you a rebel? You know, and if you are, how does this bled into your career as a teacher, a preacher and a leader of the church?
Guy Erwin:That question is a really good one, because I suppose in some ways, I am a rebel. I never would have put it that way. It would never have occurred to me to think of myself that way. In fact, in my conscious self reflection, I would say I am not a rebel. In fact, a traditionalist and a conservationist, in a sense of being having a high regard for the past and the experience of those who've gone before us. Where I have been rebellious is that I refuse to accept what everyone else says has to be as an ultimate reality, and the fact that, I wish I could say that I was the person who knocked down the wall, who opened the kick to open the door, I didn't. I waited till the door was open a crack, and then I put my foot in it, and then I put my whole self in it so it couldn't be closed again. And that's how I was a first. That's how I changed things. You know, I think other gay people and other members of minority racial groups whose identity is not obvious from their faces would agree with me that our lives growing up are kind of always testing the room we're in to see how safe we are. And I never, I don't think for the most part, I presented to other people as gay in an obvious way. It wasn't an attempt on my part to conceal who I was. It's part of being in my generation that the models of masculinity I had were fairly what we would think of now as fairly old fashioned, and I have never really questioned that part of my identity. But I was always aware that if everyone in the room knew everything about me that I know about myself, I might not be as safe as I am, and that has kept me cautious, but it's also given me the opportunity to go in some spots where people who are maybe more rebellious by nature would have would have stumbled or would have played their hand too strongly. If you grow up always having to code switch and always having to read the room around you, it's hard to give it up. And I'm grateful that younger people don't really have to do that anymore, and can kind of just blow into a space being 100% who they are. I actually don't feel like I don't do that but, but I understand that my way of doing it is not one that's going to it hasn't gotten me in too much trouble, and I'm I hope that my doing that has helped make the space safer for other people. I know that in my career in the church, for example, that there are a lot of people who know me in some way as a figure of authority or respect who know that first and then find out, oh, he's gay, so a husband or he's native, he's Osage and the native stuff doesn't matter too much. There's not a deep prejudice, I think, in our society against natives in general, just more indifference. But being gay, that's that's a big deal in Christian circles and and if people have already come to like me or have some respect for me, or at least see me fully for who I am as a as a church leader, before they find out I'm gay, it's very hard to completely roll that back and say, "oh, well, that means he doesn't know anything, can't say anything," and that has helped in some ways too. I don't think one could get from the A to B in my life in the same way today that I did it in my time, and I had lots of peers who were more outspoken, braver, more assertive, more more rebellious than I was, and at times I felt guilty about that, but I knew it was not in my nature to do that. So we all get, we get where we need to be in the trajectory of our lives, but we take different paths.
Chip Gruen:So the other part of your identity that I want to hesitate on for a little bit is growing up as a part of the Osage Nation, of being Native, and you describe that as being as having of those traditions, at least the ones that you grew up in, as having faded with the generations, or that they were an overlay of, quote, middle class, white American values. And you know, something I've always wondered, and, you know, tried to be empathetic to for you know, indigenous people is, on the one hand, knowing the tragedy of the past, that that's part of your story, but on the other hand, I mean, particularly in your situation, being a leader of a cultural institution that is not got clean hands, you know. You know broadly. You know for Colonial exploits or for the political and and social world of the past. You know. You know. So I wonder how you, how you come to terms to that? How do you think about that being, you know, the face, really, of an institution that has...
Guy Erwin:I mean, I do think about it from the standpoint of the institutions, but I would go a little bit deeper and say that, in fact, even part of my life search for meaning in faith, has been coming to terms with the fact that there are no clean hands. Humans just aren't like that. My ancestors are both the enslavers and the enslaved, the dispossessed and the dispossessors, and especially in my case, since I'm mostly white, my Indian ancestors are only a fraction of my total number of ancestors. I have to think about that every day. Which side am I on? The thing is, there really aren't any sides in America we are all kind of in this situation of being both guilty and living and living with the benefit of the exploitation that was done, both of enslaved people and of dispossessed ones, but also realizing that they are us. You remember the you might remember the old cartoon that we've met the enemy, and they are us, and in some ways that is is us. Now, in my case of being Osage, there were some special issues involved in that. I belong to a tribe that is has about 20,000 members now, of whom there are less than a dozen who are 100% Osage in their ancestry. So every ancestor they know of is Osage. Everyone else is mixed to some degree. Some people are more native than others because their, their ancestors intermarried with people from other tribes. So they're quite a lot of mixed Indian families, but almost everybody has some white ancestors too. And some of the most active members of my tribe are people who are no more Osage than I am in we don't like to talk about the blood quantum thing, because that's really is a racist way of assuming, of figuring out who's who. But you are, you are as Osage as you feel in some ways. It's not even a matter of knowledge, I think because some of us know more than others, I know some things, and I've I realized in my maturity that I learned things as a child from having grown up there around it, that my relatives, who grew up in other parts of the United States, who are as Osage as I, didn't know, and this has been a very interesting source of conversation for us in later years, how much of it is kind of osmosis, because I was not told, I was not given lessons. Nowadays, I'm really happy to report if you're a child growing up where I was born, you learn the Osage language in Head Start, and you get instruction in the public schools, because the tribe pays for it. When I was a kid, I felt like the tribe was, in some ways, trying to disappear culturally. There wasn't any support for that. If you wanted to learn Osage, you had to be in a family that spoke it. And nobody in my circle of relatives did. So I mean, it's kind of one of my old age projects is to learn some of the language, to catch up a little bit on what I missed. But of course, at the time, I couldn't have had it. I think we were. We were living in a racist paradigm that had bought the the old idea that the less Indian you were, the better you'd be, the better American you'd be, the more chances you'd have at material prosperity and upward mobility and and that's that's really, that's a really basic problem for natives in America today, is the pull to be not native, because it isn't an advantage. There's almost no place where it's really an advantage.
Chip Gruen:So zooming out just a little bit, you know, seeing some of your sermons and some of your written work, it seems to me, one of the central cores of your understanding the Christian message is that it hinges on the defiance of expectations. So you say in one place, you know that the gospel doesn't fit into the usual categories of experience. You even describe Jesus as someone who, quote, "delights in breaking the rules other humans had made to hang on to control." I don't want to be overtly political, but here we are in 2024 so it's sort of hard to avoid it, but it seems to me like the role of the church is a little bit up for grabs right now, with a great deal of available options, whether that be retreat from public life, full throated political activism, you know, thinking about, on the one hand, defiance of expectations and what's expected and the categories that we're set to fill and the other hand, you know, the current political situation where, historically, you know, go back to Constantine, Christians have been super active, you know, in in political life. I mean, how do you square your read of the gospel with what the Christian calling is for political vocation?
Guy Erwin:That's another really complicated one. I on the on the one level, I think that it is important for Christians to develop a sense of what it means to live in the Gospel. There are two things I mean by that. One of them is the, I think the more superficial, but perhaps at the moment more important one of us constituting, situating one's life and one's work in a way that works toward the common good and that serves one's neighbor. So Christianity is not the only faith that does this, but in its best moments, helps people get past themselves, to think about the good of others and to act in ways that promote that. If we, if we voted the way we believed there would be, there still could be a wide variety of ways in which we would vote. But I think that at least for Lutherans, Luther gives us a pretty good roadmap in the Small Catechism. For in his his explanation of the 10 commandments about how we are to live together with others, and the living together part is important. People talk about Protestant individualism and finding your own, you know your own salvation, and it being between the individual and God. But in fact, it doesn't ever stop there, because we aren't alone. We always live in community and society. And for Luther, at least, that's right there. It's never, it's not even step two. It's the other side of the coin. And so I think in some ways it would, it's very easy to use Jesus, the example and teaching of Jesus, in a way to set up a political program by which one could say, yes, then you ought to vote in this way on that issue and that way on that issue. I also though, at the same time, think the church's job is to say, wait, there's more to it than that, because neither, no human construct, no platform, not even Luther's explanation of the Catechism or the 10 Commandments in the Catechism, is a is an infallible roadmap to better. We're always partial. We're always we always have those dirty hands, and we cannot extricate ourselves from where history and life has put us so that, in some ways, I think we need to say, the church needs to say, at the same time, paradoxically, this is really important, that we do the right thing and say, in the end, it might not matter. We might not be able to decide what the right thing is. And you know, that's not something everyone, anyone's ever going to run a campaign on, because it's too complicated. But the reality is that the the life of a Christian is a life that is not just in the here and now, but one that connects us to the whole story of God's work in creation and with humanity, we're part of something bigger than ourselves and something that reaches out beyond the span of time in which we live, and the Church has always said that, and usually not been listened to when it does. I derive a lot of inspiration from St Augustine, who's not people's favorite saint anymore because of I don't know, human sexuality issues, but I think the more you read Augustine, the more complicated and subtle he becomes, and the caricatures are easy, but his sense that the world was ending in every material way, and yet the church was going to survive, that God was in charge, I find it inspiring. It's maybe not the best and clearest call to political action. I get that, and I do think we need to be responsible citizens. The more agency we have, the more responsibility we have. And Americans have a great deal of agency in their political choices. Though, right now, I will say, and I maybe I shouldn't say this out loud, the idea that a well organized minority could trample on the rights of everyone shakes my faith in the kind of democracy we've set up here, and it might be a little corrosive of my faith and democracy in general, because I do have, at the end of the day, a fairly low view of human nature in the collective I think we're very easily swayed by fear and and I'm afraid that modernity has not made us less, it's not made us less gullible in some ways.
Chip Gruen:So I want to chase that a little bit more by referencing a turn of phrase that you've used, I mean the commonplace of the one church, right? That you use the church in the singular, which, of course, is a very old kind of vocabulary that goes way back. But you, as a church historian, have the great vantage point of seeing the diversity in the tradition that's always existed. And I guess I want to ask about, sort of the contemporary diversity and maybe the black eye that Christianity as a whole gets in the public view, right the public discourse. I'm sure that there, you know, maybe even listeners right now who are surprised that someone like you is in a position of authority, right with your identifying characteristics, is in a position of authority within a mainstream Christian denomination, because they know what Christians are, right? Christians are those people who want to tell me what to do, or Christians are those people who are really socially conservative or theologically intolerant of difference, or what have you. Can we talk about that? Can we just talk about the ways in which, you know, the, to put it crudely, the brand of Christianity has gotten really damaged in the past generation.
Guy Erwin:In some ways, I think I was, I was kind of formed for this moment, because growing up my my parents as I said were highly ethical, thoughtful, kind people who were pretty much untouched by by specific religious commitments. And we knew we were. My family was sort of culturally Protestant, but, but we weren't any more narrowly shaped than that. If somebody would ask what we were, we would say we were Methodists, because that usually just ended the conversation. But we never belonged to a congregation, and it was, as I say, two generations earlier, since anyone had what it means, though, is that we were acutely aware of the Christianity around us. It was more than one thing, but I lived, I grew up in a religion saturated environment, and it was a Christian one. We had, I knew I didn't meet somebody Jewish until I was in grade school in another part of the country, and I didn't, I don't think I met a practicing Muslim until I was in college. And so it was a Christian world, but in my family, at least, if something was described among us as Christian, it had invisible quotation marks around it, and it meant those people like that. And what we meant in the in the eastern in the Oklahoma setting, was fundamentalists or Pentecostals, people whose way of being Christian was really foreign to us, so much so that we really couldn't see ourselves in that story. It's in some ways remarkable that I wanted to be a Christian in spite of that. I don't know exactly why. Maybe that's where my rebelliousness comes in is that I've always thought there was something more to be learned or something more to be said, and I might even have been slightly envious of people who had that kind of strong, powerful association that built a kind of a community identity. I don't remember consciously thinking that. I do remember the first branch of Christianity, aspect of Christianity I was impressed with was the Roman Catholic Church, because of its antiquity, which is also sort of more apparent than real in lots of ways, because it cultivates the idea of tradition without always knowing that some traditions are not that old and but the whole, the whole edifice, points in the direction of tradition. And that appealed to me in some ways. The point I'm trying to make is that I've always known there were Christians I didn't want to be one of. And I think my becoming a Christian was a process of eliminating them, of kind of taking, going through the filters in such a way I had a I could find a livable faith, one that I wasn't embarrassed by, and that's and that landed me in the in the Protestant mainline, but especially Lutheranism, had some things that offered that some of those other churches didn't so, so I do see that process, for me as being really closely tied to my discovery of Luther and Lutheranism.
Chip Gruen:I can see why you have an affinity towards Augustine, because he tries everything first too right, everything else.
Guy Erwin:Well, I wish I could say I had as an exciting path to it as he did but I did not.
Chip Gruen:So I want to zoom out a little bit further on your role as a scholar and an educator. You talk a little bit about the advantages you've had about being an outsider to the tradition, and even just now, you talked about becoming a Christian, because you know your family's religious life was not, you know, well defined if that's if that's fair to say. And so you talk about being adopted into this Lutheran Christian identity, as opposed to being a quote, unquote "cradle Lutheran." Can you talk about your distance from the tradition, and what you mean when you say that's an advantage over some of your colleagues and peers for navigating it?
Guy Erwin:Yeah, advantage makes it sound like there's a kind of one can win in this, which is not really the case. I do think it gives me a valuable perspective that my that my fellow Lutherans need, and other Christians can benefit from, and that is that I don't, for example, actually believe there's such a thing as a cradle Lutheran. There are people who have been part of Lutheran communities their whole lives because they were born into Lutheran families. And in fact, I think our the Lutheran churches in America, kind of rejoice in the great number of people who have been, have always been there, and whose parents and grandparents were there and since they came from Europe. But we all know that is not how one becomes Christian, that it is, it is not just a matter of an action and a decision. I don't believe in decision theology, but if you don't know what it means, you haven't really made it your own. And so I'll admit sometimes I take a puckish delight in in teasing lifelong Lutherans about how much they assume that being who they are in the family in which they're embedded, in the congregation to which they belong, is their understanding of what Lutheranism is and how thin that is, because it doesn't really stand on anything except this collective experience and sentiment. And that's why when then we introduce new peoples, new populations, new cultures, into the faith, and try to have people who are not white, European Americans in our churches, often we crash because we can't understand them, and they can't understand us because we've associated our faith with our religious culture. And it's helped me a great deal in being Lutheran that I I was shaped not just by American Lutherans, but also by German ones and East German ones who lived under communism and were disadvantaged for their faith. And I have been very much influenced by Lutherans from other parts of the world. So I don't see I think American Lutherans tend to confuse Americanness with Lutheranness too, and and I try not to do that. So there's this old I wish I knew exactly where it came from, but there's an old Finnish Lutheran proverb that a Christian is only ever one day old. What you were yesterday doesn't matter. What you are tomorrow, you can't possibly know. You wake up every day into the reality that you inhabit, and you decide, am I with God? Is God with me in Jesus or not? And live accordingly. That I find that enormously consoling, although I think some people might find that scary, because it seems a little intangible, but I really think it's important to remember that it isn't the tradition, it isn't the pomp, it isn't the songs we know by heart. It's it's the decision each day, who's to, whom do we belong?
Chip Gruen:So that seems a little bit in opposition to something else, and I don't know you can straighten me out that you describe your initial interest in Christianity as one that views it as a quote, unquote, "human phenomenon." And I'll admit, when I read that, I was like, Oh, I like this, right? I like this idea. I always start my classes teaching my students that at least what we can see in the religious studies classroom is understanding the human phenomenon of religion. So what do you mean when you discuss Christianity as a human phenomenon? And maybe to go back to the previous answer, how does that square with this idea of that presentism, as opposed to, you know, banking on the tradition of the past?
Guy Erwin:That's a really good question, and I think that's the difference. I mean, I don't know how well I'll be able to explain it, but that is at heart, the difference between being someone who's very interested in Christianity and someone who is a believer. I talk about I was captured entranced by the by the physical phenomena of Christianity as a child, visiting churches and cathedrals, seeing the ways in which human effort had gone in such to such remarkable degree into depicting and strengthening ideas the abstract. And I think, I actually think I probably would still have been a historian of Christianity, even if I had never come to faith. I would have done it in exactly that way, and I and I have a deep curiosity about those things. I always want to know more. I'm still learning, but I'm also learning about other faiths. I led a tour of students and a few adults and clergy to Spain and Morocco after 9/11 so my response to the attack in 2001 was to teach a class the next semester on Holy War and the three Abrahamic faiths, because we all have this legacy. It isn't just a Muslim thing. You know, the God of hosts we pray to in the Sanctus at the Holy Communion the verses from the Old Testament. That's the God of armies. We're invoking the armies of God at the Eucharistic table and and so I wanted to show that this isn't really too subterranean, even in Christianity and certainly in Judaism. And then the students were so interested in it that I decided to lead a tour. That's a long story. The point of the of the anecdote is that I had a very earnest Lutheran pastor with me on the tour. And as we would visit places that were holy to Muslims, I would explain how, as much best I can, I'm no expert and don't pretend to be how Muslim worship was carried out, what the prayer meant, what the symbolism of the mosques meant, all the kind of decoration, what the call to prayer signified to the different times of day, all that sort of thing. And she, in her earnestness, somehow came to believe I was a secret Muslim, or wanted to be one, just because I was able to work up a sympathetic enthusiasm for the practices of someone else's faith, and that sympathetic enthusiasm is what makes me a scholar of religion. It doesn't make me a Muslim. My fascination with everything Jewish doesn't make me Jewish, but I hope it allows me to talk about those things with my students and others I need to talk with in that way, without prejudice, with trying to remove the barrier between us. I don't have to decide, I don't have to insist that a Christian way of doing things is right. In fact, it gets in the way of understanding what other people do. So as a scholar, I try to practice that kind of self removal, but I know that when I was studying Luther and working as especially as a college student, that I was really also looking for something else. I wanted to be a part of it myself. I wanted to, I wanted to be inside and not just looking at it from the outside. And I don't know, I can't really describe how it happened. I read a lot of Augustine. I read a lot of Luther, and there was something about the way Luther described God's presence, God's self manifestation, in Jesus, and the way that changes the equation of the relationship between God and humankind that I found so compelling that I could never it, it wouldn't leave me alone. And that's maybe also an Augustinian trait that, and I mean, it's been exaggerated how much of an Augustinian Luther was, but the but that idea that God is there, God has come, God has grabbed on and will not let go was also held on to me until I was ready, very slowly and with tiny steps to actually make the public declaration of my own faith. And it took me, it took me quite a while.
Chip Gruen:So you talk about, and I'm really happy to have this conversation, because you've expressed, I mean, not a rigid binary, but a binary that I don't think I would have expressed before, between what you describe on the one hand is, oh, help me, it was enthusiastic sympathy?
Guy Erwin:Yes, yes.
Chip Gruen:Yeah, on the one hand, but that not being the same thing or being different from being within a faith community, right? And I describe this sometimes as and I think you have in your writing as well as empathy, right, and the cultivation of empathy and that part of your work is helping to cultivate that in yourself and others. And the reason I'm kind of excited about this just editorialize for a second, is because I am always trying to reinforce to my students, and you know, when I do public talks, that empathy is actually an intellectual exercise that needs to be practiced, right? That it's not, it's not kumbaya, it's not just egalitarianism, but it's like, it's hard work, right?
Guy Erwin:The keyword being exercise, yes, it requires effort and requires practice.
Chip Gruen:And yet, right while on the one hand, you put that on the side of historical study, you describe it one place as you know, cultivation of empathy for people we can only know partially and whose life experience was profoundly different from our own. It also seems to have a role in your other vocational calling that is an engagement with difference, right, all kinds of difference. So can you talk a little bit more about that, that enthusiastic sympathy, or that empathy, and how it is not just about, you know, history and the historical other, but it's also about, you know, contemporary communities.
Guy Erwin:Yeah, I want to take it quickly to the very highest possible level and say that, I think, in a very real way, for me, Jesus is the ultimate expression of God's empathy for for the creation, humankind in particular. We're human, so we put ourselves in the center. And I think that's that's natural enough. So having said that the fact that God is wants to demonstrate this empathy for us, this love, you know, we start we we call it love, we call it grace. We call it mercy, all these things that God wants to be connected to us as we are, not at some point when we reach our highest form of development, I see that as enabling us, enabling me to manage my anxiety with all the kinds of difference that either delight me or cause me to be afraid. I mean, I'm not. I'm no better than anyone else at being confronted by radical difference. I have to adjust myself to it, but I'd like to think that I have practiced enough not to be surprised by what is human, not immediately to draw a line and refuse to look any further. I think, to be also being a historian, to be a historian who deals with the 20th century. And I'm, I was really, I kind of, to be honest with you, avoided that the 16th century bad enough, but the 20th century was, was I couldn't face. And I think anyone to be a good historian has to be able to look the evil in the eye, and you don't have to be the ultimate judge, but you have to be able to look at it long enough to appreciate what was done and be able to talk about it in a way other people can or write about it in a way that other people can understand. And that takes, that takes real effort, and it isn't always empathy. I don't think we can completely be empathetic with people we can never fully know, but it's an attempt, at least to get beyond our own disgust and understand that there are people so profoundly different that there's almost nothing we have in common.
Chip Gruen:So your occasion for visiting Muhlenberg, and this is today, I'm super grateful for your time, because you're very busy, and I'm sure you're going to collapse tonight after it's all over, but your occasion for coming is to talk about higher education, to talk about vocation, you know, as a part of the Lutheran heritage. And I want to talk to you just a little bit about higher education in general and your own calling as a vocation in it. And I want to call your attention to something you wrote in The Expert's Historian. You wrote the foreword to that book because it was written by a mentor of yours, Leonard Smith. I get that correct? Yes, and you describe his life and work as displaying a quote "blend of broad and dispassionate knowledge with intense and passionate conviction". You go on to describe him as having lived a scholar's life within a teacher's vocation, and that he was perfectly at home, both in the library and the classroom. Now I'm not bringing this up because I want to dive deep into Leonard Smith's life and work. But it seems to me like that this is at least aspirationally autobiographical for yourself. So can you talk about the balancing of these different callings within your vocation as teacher, preacher, leader in the communities you served?
Guy Erwin:It's, I think it's fascinating that you found that and lift it up. Because, in a way, I think you're correct about this autobiographical aspect, without my having ever noticed that until you pointed it out. Because the one thing you need to know about Leonard Smith, and I think one of the reasons I could write that with such feeling, is that, this is a man who taught in a very ordinary undergraduate institution, it was one of quality but, but ordinary liberal arts school. He has a very long career, taught many kinds of history because he was in a small department, and during this entire career, kept an intense fascination with one narrow aspect of German 19th century historiography that he collected and wrote about and honed and all of that until he was in his late 80s, and then finally published it. He was long retired. He'd retired before I ever got to that school, and we just became friends, and and I hope I fear that I have thought and thought and thought and not said enough. That if I'm, it's not that the world needs me, but that it would be a waste to have spent as much time thinking about these things as I have without doing a better job of telling telling the story back. And so it's one of the reasons I accept invitations like the one to come to Muhlenberg today is that it helps me frame my own calling to talk about faith and learning in ways that might help other people, might strengthen other people's ability to do that. But people don't need to be rescued by me. But if we have something to contribute that will help people, keep people from falling into traps that are too narrow, too small, too sectarian, and have a wider view, then we ought to do it. I've been struggling with how to do that. You don't gain respect in the historical guild by writing a brief history of everything from my own personal perspective. You do it by showing you know inescapable expertise in some narrow way. And I'm past that now in my own life at thinking so I'm I almost hate the focus on on me that the current wave of memoirists seems to be evoking, but there may be some kind of memoir like thing I need to say before my life comes to an end. I'm not that old, but, but you need to think about things like that and and so as I frame as you ask questions and I answer them as I will speak tonight at Muhlenberg, I'm always trying to figure out, what does this mean, and what does it mean that I need to talk about it in some way while I'm here, because I do have, I do think I have had some extraordinary experiences of crossing boundaries, being insider outsider in many different ways. And we live in a world that is so sharply polarized, in which people listen to one another so badly or so little that that we desperately need that to to improve. And liberal arts colleges like Muhlenberg have an opportunity to give people the space to talk safely about complicated and difficult things and grow. And we really need that in our society right now, I'm sorry, the degree to which polarization has taken over even colleges, because that ought to be a kind of a sacred ground where we can, where we can regard each other as human beings first and encounter ideas as not the last word on things.
Chip Gruen:So speaking of the last word on things, I want to give you the last word. I like to exercise a little bit of humility here by recognizing that I might be totally missing the boat on our conversation about what's really important, about what the the message as we think about about vocation, about higher education, about the life of the church, what am I missing that you think is super important for our listeners to kind of take away from this conversation?
Guy Erwin:I um, I'll take a stab at it. I'm not confident this is the last word, but I'm increasingly convinced that what motivates most people is some form of fear, and especially in this polarized situation we find ourselves in this country, so many people are afraid of losing something valuable to them, and I won't characterize the the ends of the poles, but to say that we need to be calmer and more self differentiated when it comes to the engagement with ultimate questions, because none of us has an ultimate answer, and if you can talk about faith with someone who has a different faith from you, you're a long ways along that path, but it's still hard for us to do. And I, and I am concerned and a little alarmed by the degree to which, especially in intellectual circles in the United States and often in universities, talking about faith is just off the table. It's taboo. It reminds me of when I was when I lived in East Germany for a while as a graduate student during dissertation research and studying at the university in Leipzig, I lived with my host family, my professor's family, and they had a high school age daughter who came home in tears at least once a week because her teacher had humiliated her in front of the class by pointing out that she was a Christian and therefore unable, by definition, to think scientifically. For them, it was a categorical binary. If you were a person of faith, you couldn't be a person of knowledge in the way that knowledge was valued, in that, in that philosophical system. And and one day, she came home and her father had a leather box that had in it three large gold medals, and they had that had been given to him by Eric Honaker, the chair of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of East Germany, for his achievements in Luther scholarship, because that was the year that East Germany wanted to welcome all the tourists from the west to celebrate Luther's 500th birthday, and they needed the hard currency. So the hypocrisy of a system that would humiliate a schoolgirl but reward a professor for talking about the same things, that's really made me realize that we need we need to make a have a better integration of faith and learning. The fact that that religion has been banished from the intellectual public square is as much religion's fault as any I don't blame the enlightenment or rationalism for this. I blame the fact that when it was invited to engage, Christian thinkers often pulled back and said, No, we just going to insist on what we know to be true, and you'll have to come along. And I think we really lost something there. The Enlightenment was not won by the free thinkers. It was lost by the people of faith, and it still remains one of the most interesting periods of our history. We can still learn from that era, and I hope he will.
Chip Gruen:All right. Well, I think that is a good place to leave off. Guy Erwin, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a great pleasure.
Guy Erwin:Thanks for talking with me.
Chip Gruen:This has been ReligionWise, a podcast produced by the Institute for Religious and Cultural Understanding of Muhlenberg College. ReligionWise is produced and directed by Christine Flicker. For more information about additional programming, or to make an inquiry about a speaking engagement, please visit our website at religionandculture.com There you'll find our contact information, links to other programming, and have the opportunity to support the work of the Institute. Please subscribe to ReligionWise wherever you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you next time.