Post: Readers Respond

Congratulations on eight years of publication! John Satterberg, Edina, Minnesota.

We look forward to each issue of Pietisten! It is the only periodical that I read from cover to cover as soon as it arrives! Congratulations on eight years! Herb Freedholm, Palatine, Illinois.

Once again I have been inspired, refreshed, challenged, and just plain pleased as I have read the Summer 1994 edition of Pietisten. Many thanks to all of you who are involved in putting it together.

How I wish I could have heard Zenos give the Founders’ Day address, but now that I have it in print, I’ll be able to read it again and again.

I’m a sentimental guy, I guess, but more and more I am grateful that I had the privilege of studying under and getting to know David Nyvall, Nils Lund, Eric Hawkinson, Samuel Wallgren, and C.J. Wilson — all of them steeped in the best of the Covenant tradition and very alive to the world about them. That’s a good combination and we should not forget it. Aaron Markuson, Vashon, Washington.

I still really enjoy receiving Pietisten, so I am enclosing my yearly $10. I particularly liked Don Franklin’s series on Bach. It’s also nice to keep a little handle on one’s heritage because down here in New Orleans, no one has ever hear of North Park, the Covenant, or Swedes. Keep it coming. Marilyn Magnuson, New Orleans, Louisiana.

Your strictures against “religion-as-business” is really a voice in the wilderness. Moreover, it goes against a millennium of tradition. Those Burgundian monks at the Abbey of Cluny, as cloistered as they were, were about money. Granted: the financial transactions were effectively blended into an overall religious framework that predominated and obscured the greater reality. Then, too, the Church’s collective social work seemed to mitigate its wealth in the eyes of the faithful. Ole Henry the Eighth knew precisely what he was doing in confiscating Church property.

Protestantism’s triumph is linked to the rise of capitalism. Some have even seen a causal association. But Protestantism was not a coherent framework, like Catholicism, in its relationship to money; nor did it possess the theological context of Catholicism, permitting a social welfare network (schools, soup kitchens, orphanages, etc.). Where these existed, in a Protestant context, they were individual efforts. Pastors buying homes is an example of an individualized form of business that is supported by a long line of tradition.

You, I think, want your cake and want to eat it, too. You seem to be a new breed of theologians (if I might judge from Pietisten’s context) who are demanding a degree of piety that has only marginally existed in Christianity. The authors of some of your articles sound like converts to Christianity. Neither Augustine nor Pascal would be theologically disturbed by the contents of Pietisten. Please see this as a compliment and a critique.

Protestantism’s great promise of a spiritual re-awakening did not materialize. It may have been too much to ask to believe that man could leave the “things of this world” alone and to concern himself with his spiritual well-being, and this on an individualized basis. Protestantism today seems to me fairly gutted of its great essentials.

Catholicism, by contrast, has been beached, like some huge leviathan. This enormous structure continues to breathe and, occasionally, to budge here and there to no real effect. For me, the French Revolution completed what the Reformation began: the disengagement of the individual from the traditional theological concerns of heaven and hell. Is it not fascinating to see how these two words have virtually ceased to exist in our vocabulary? Even God is fast disappearing as a conscious, daily concern in the West. But Catholicism’s structure, coherent or not, will save it from disappearance. I am not so hopeful for Protestantism, as an institution. Robert Thompson, New York, New York.

Dear Penrod,

I am compelled to write by your sharing of a spiritual crisis. It is refreshing to find a soul willing to confront the basic questions of life head on. I am struck by your honesty.

Having experienced the “emptiness and pain” of which you speak and having run the gamut from shaking fists and cursing God to benign neglect of God, I finally distilled my conclusions on faith based on my experience. My conclusions were three:

Throughout my life the people who I respected and loved the most all had faith.
When I could break through all the intellectual inhibitions to childlike faith, life felt good again.
When I lost faith, I experienced the exact three reactions that you point out “anger . . . frustration . . . despair.”

When confronted by the experiential evidence for faith, it seemed clear. The problem was not faith, Penrod. The problem was lack of faith.

I finally said to hell with anger, frustration, and despair. I chose faith. I quit waiting to “get” faith. I quit crying about not having faith. I finally chose it!

For ones such as we who are habituated to wallowing in theological high level abstractions, such a simple choice does not come easy. But, I suspect for you, Penrod, who has analyzed the problem and the alternatives so clearly, the choice is only a matter of time.

God Speed,

The Rabbit Hunter,
Box ____
The Hollow log
On the High Pine Ridge
East of the Swamp of Despair
Ash River Trail