Mrs. Marsha Zimmerman joined the Admission staff in August of 2005. She graduated from Concordia University Chicago with a BA degree in elementary education. She has been a seminary wife, the mother of a recent seminarian, and has served as a pastor’s wife in several parishes. She is married to Rev. Thomas Zimmerman, one of the seminary’s Advancement Officers.

 As you consider enrolling at Concordia Theological Seminary, Marsha will be happy to work with you on answering your logistical questions, especially those focusing on housing, employment and schools. She can be contacted at marsha.zimmerman@ctsfw.edu.

St. Paul wrote: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy— think about such things (Phil. 4:8).”

Many Christians read this passage and focus on the pure & lovely.  But notice that the first word Paul uses is TRUE.  Think on the truth.  Not every truth is delightful to behold.  According to the pure & lovely standard, narrowly understood, one might need to exclude important scriptures such as the beheading of Goliath, the global destruction of the flood, the slaughter of the priests of Baal on Mt. Carmel, or the torture and murder of Jesus.  Those are horrifying scenes indeed.  I know of people who have been deeply upset to learn of such excessive violence in Holy Scripture.  In some cases, their very faith was shaken.  The book of Ecclesiastes often takes fire for being, in the eyes of some, a hopeless text.  The Gospels are blamed for inciting hatred against the Jews.  The epistles of St. Paul have several rather harsh blasts of holy anger.  My point is that the Bible itself contains much distasteful content.  It is, at times, disturbing, unsettling, and infuriating.

Other important works of literature may not pass the pure & lovely test either, including the plays of Shakespeare (Macbeth, Hamlet, Titus Andronicus), Homer’s Odyssey, the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Graham Greene, and John Steinbeck to name only a few.

Some Christians will disagree with me vehemently, but I think the latest cinematic Batman episode, The Dark Knight, written and directed by Chris Nolan, is a work of genius.  Yes, it is dark.  Yes, parts of it are hard to watch.  But it tells the truth, at least part of it.  An important part.

I’m no expert on the work of Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross, but I am familiar with his great work entitled “Dark Night of the Soul.”  That phrase has come to refer to those times in the life of a person when God seems particularly distant, when the soul is alone with his corruption.  That’s what this movie is about.  The Joker is the archetypal man.

Much of contemporary culture is infused with a deadly optimism about human nature.  And this is a demonic lie which blinds people to the depth of their need for someone more than a super-hero, a true white and noble Knight to rescue them.

Mutilation.  Disfigurement.  Anarchy.  Random violence.  Betrayal.  It’s no Frank Capra flick.  Chris Nolan did not make a “feel good” picture.  But he did make a great movie that tells the important truth of mankind’s deep inbred narcissism.  Without external restraints, we are worse than savages.  Apart from restoration in Christ, all people are disfigurements.  Deep beneath the veneer of civility, all human beings are unfunny clowns who appear to thrive on mayhem.  At one point, the Joker says, “Madness is like gravity.  All people need is a little push.”

One extremely useful insight the film conveys is the utter meaninglessness of evil.  We don’t want to believe that.  We constantly want to explain away our bad behavior, to make excuses, to justify ourselves.  I steal because I’m poor.  I hate because I’m ignorant.  I kill because I’m a victim.  Ultimately, that is just baloney.  We do those things because we are bad.  That’s all.  Sinners sin because they are sinful.

The Joker says, “Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don’t have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am, Harvey? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do if I caught one. I just *do* things.”

Alfred, Batman’s butler, gets it.  He says, “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

In the dark night of the soul, when God is absent, there is no meaning, no purpose, no direction.  Even an evil direction would be more bearable than having none whatsoever.  Of course, Chris Nolan’s masterpiece knows nothing of the dawn, the Morning Star (Rev. 22:16).  But if you can sit through the 2 1/2 hours of “Dark Knight” and not exit craving the sunshine, you are made of cement.

The untimely death of actor Heath Ledger several months ago, makes his performance particularly bitter to watch.  What a loss.  His Joker strikes me as one of the most amazing on-screen performances I’ve ever seen.  Of course, it goes a bit over-the-top.  It has to.  Otherwise most of us would scarcely notice.  As Flannery O’Connor once said, “you have to make your vision apparant by shock, to the hard of hearing, you must shout.  And for the almost blind, you draw large and startling figures.”

In my judgment, this is not a movie about Batman.  It’s about the Joker.  Which is to say that it’s about me.  The Joker is a mirror, a truth-teller of unpretty realities.

Gathered together for the sake of the young men and women of our church, over 200 volunteer and full-time youth workers descended upon the Westin in downtown Indianapolis to learn, grow, and be rejuvenated and refreshed by the word of God, prayer, laughs, and interaction in a community with a common identity and purpose. The theme for the week was [something better], coming from the Book of Hebrews.

We were there to offer help and support for the godly work these men and women do for the young men and women of our church. We were there to lend ears and bear witness that we are here to help them meet the challenges of today, not aggravate and compound them. We were there because we live in challenging times, and this can be especially true for the young men and women of our church and world.

Oftentimes, these young men and women are seen as the future of the church, which is true, they are the future. But they are much more than that. They are members of the church even now, they are every much a member of the body of Christ as those who have attained their majority. And we, as teachers and leaders in our churches, have been given the task as their brothers and sisters in Christ not only to prepare, enrich, and teach them for their future life and service in and for the church and world, but also to listen and learn from them today. We listen because they are full members of the body of Christ. And they offer keen insight into a culture that longs for authenticity and integrity in a world fragmented and fractured by sin and death. And it is precisely this that the rich heritage of the Lutheran Church offers in the proclamation of Jesus Christ’s life-saving and life-giving cross. This proclamation in word, deed, and sacrament gives meaning and significance to the empty, and creates order and wholeness amid the world’s manifest chaos.

So, our hats are off to the folks we met in Indianapolis, and we will keep them in our prayers, even as we know that we will be in their prayers.

Yesterday I blogged about the atrophying of the imagination of modern Christians.  I made the point that church leaders are often concerned about either over intellectualizing the faith, or under intellectualizing.  About emotionalizing too much or not emotionalizing enough.  Those balances are necessary to keep, but it seems to me that there is also a severe aridity of imagination in the church today.

In particular, I tried to point out that there is a problem when believers, especially pastors, diminish the importance of fiction and poetry by concluding that such things are not practical, have no benefit beyond mere amusement, and, as some have claimed, are a waste of time.  These are often the same pastors, I think, who feel that three hours listening to an aged home-bound parishioner detail her battle with sciatica for the ten gajillionth time is not an afternoon well spent.  Having a healthy imagination is critical to having an ability to empathize with others. Everyone knows instinctively that every meaningful story bears repeating.  Ask any toddler who pulls the same ragged choo choo train story off the shelf night after night.

Peter Leithart makes a fascinating case in this article that there is a serious theological flaw in large segments of Protestantism which disables them from writing creatively.  There may be more behind the feeble state of the arts in Christendom than just this one thing, but I’m sure he’s correct, up to a point.

In 1529, reforming churchmen gathered in Marburg to attempt to compose a statement of agreement.  Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli were the two main headliners.  The parties drafted a document with fifteen bullet points and everyone could agree completely on the first fourteen.  It was the final point, the one dealing with the presence of Christ’s Body and Blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, where they parted.  Luther was for it.  Zwingli was agin it.  This, according to Leithart, is the root cause for the dearth of great literature from the Zwinglian (evangelical, fundamentalist, protestant) wings of Christianity.

He makes his case more effectively than I can here.  You should read his article.  As Lutherans, we would probably make a similar case, though a bit differently.

I could argue this psychologically and say that the part of the mind which allows one to accept the notion of Jesus’s real bodily presence in the bread and wine is the same part of the brain which permits one to suspend his disbelief to become enthralled in a novel.  This is not to say that the presence of Christ is a fiction.

I hope I can do justice to Leithart.  Zwingli denies that Jesus is bodily present in the supper to be eaten and drunk because he finds such a thing unreasonable.  The finite (bread and wine) cannot contain the infinite (God).  Of course, the Lutherans know that this is not just a statement about the Lord’s Supper.  It is an attack on the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ.  If Zwingli is correct that the finite cannot contain the infinite, then how, as St. Paul teaches, could the fullness of the Deity dwell in bodily form?

Leithart accuses the modern theological heirs of Zwingil of a type of Manichaenism, a vast separation of finite and infinite, body and spirit, sign and reality.  No so within classical Christian thought.  That signs can be more than empty symbols, hollow mental constructions, is central to a Lutheran understanding of the Lord’s Supper.

Is it too much of a stretch then to conclude that an incarnational, sacramental theology - in the broadest sense - is necessary to fully appreciate the brilliance and power of myth / story / poetics?  Not really.

Christians sometimes over- intellectualize the faith, making God a mere object of study.  Other times, we over- emotionalize, making the Holy Spirit captive to our fickle moods.

Both those excesses have their critics and correctives.  It seems to me, however, that contemporary Christianity is in a different kind of pinch that relatively few have even noticed. Our capacity for imagination is atrophying. Our ability to hypothesize and fantasize is anemic. We associate the word “imaginary” with childhood (i.e. childishness) or lunacy.

Our ability to use words to create stories and drama is downright godlike. No other creature can transmit knowledge, elicit emotion and inspire action by storytelling.

Everyone should imbibe great literature but most especially those who wish to be pastors. Personally, I can’t think of anything more practical than reading good fiction and good poetry. If you serve a congregation, what is the best way to gain insight into the people you serve? By conducting scientific surveys, questionnaires, and objective analysis? Or by listening to their stories? When you sit at the potlucks and listen, when you chat with the old-timers over coffee, when you go to their sickbeds or visit them in their homes, you learn how to be their pastor by hearing them tell about their past, talk about their grandkids, complain about their last trip to the doctor’s office.

If you want to grow as a pastor (and as a human), you had better learn how to listen to people’s stories. And how to tell them. The great novels and poetry of Western civilization, whether written by Christians or not, are valuable because they are instructive.

And by “great,” I don’t necessarily mean old or flowery or even well-known. Snobbery is a waste of time. Great books are not necessarily those on the bestseller lists nor on the so-called canons of the past.

Finally, please don’t piously assume that fiction at the religious bookstore is automatically good for you while the pulpy paperbacks in the airport are bad. Don’t underestimate the value of man’s natural knowledge of God or of everyman’s ability to exposit wisdom. There are mountains of insight to be discovered in the talented works of those who confess Christ as well as those who do not. It’s time to mine those mountains.

In the beginning, when all was formless and void, God created all things giving it substance and form, establishing order out of chaos. He did so through the Law. By the Law is meant the eternal, unchangeable Law of God, which is the revelation of His will, the standard of perfection, and the mold and fashion out of which all creatures were formed and conformed, so as they would be happy. God is holy, and His Law is holy. His Law is the image of Himself; it is the word of Life and Truth declaring that of which He is the perfect pattern. ‘Be ye holy,’ He says, ‘for I am holy.’ ‘Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.’

And so it is, that in creation God gave of himself for the benefit of his creatures. He invested in the creation, in his creatures that which is the pattern of his nature: perfection, holiness, righteousness. For his Law, in this sense, is not alien to him, but is the word, the declaration, the picture of who he is, and it is thereby that declaration by which all creatures resemble Him. And when He created them, He provided that it should be to them what it ought to be. And as is becoming a good and kind Father, He created all His children perfect, holy, and righteous. He created them to be His children, not His enemies; beings in whom He might take pleasure; who might be near Him, not far off from Him; whom He might love and who might love him in return. He formed them upon the pattern of the Law; he molded them into symmetry by means of it. He created man ‘in His own image, and after His likeness;’ that is, upon the type of this Law. He put His Spirit within him, and set up the Law in his heart; so that, what He is in His infinite nature, such was man, such was Adam in a finite nature-perfect after his kind.

It was far otherwise with Adam after he had fallen. He then forfeited the presence of the Holy Spirit; he no longer fulfilled the Law; he lost his righteousness, and he knew he had lost it. He knew it before God told him; he condemned himself, he pronounced himself unrighteous before God formally rejected him and expelled him from his abode, the place of his gracious and loving presence, the Garden of Eden. And in this unrighteous state he has remained, viewed in himself, ever since, knowing the Law, but not doing it; admiring, not loving; assenting, not following, not utterly without the Law, yet not with it either; with the Law not entirely within and for him, but before him-not any longer in his heart, as the pillar of a cloud, which was a gracious token and a guide to the Israelites, but departing from him, and moving away, and taking up its place, as it were over against him, and confronting him as an enemy, accuser, and avenger. It was a cloud of thick darkness, instead of a pillar of light; and from it the Lord looked out upon him, and troubled him. For ‘the commandment, which was ordained to life, he found to be unto death.’ What had been a law of innocence, became a law of conscience; what was peace, became dread and misery; what was freedom, became bondage, became slavery.

But what of the law after our Lord Jesus Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection? What is the law to us now post-Fall, post Baptism? We live in the uncomfortable juxtaposition of loving, delighting, and doing; while at the same time despising, abhorring, and rebelling against the law of God. We live as simultaneously sinners and saints.

Here is the rub, however, we live as saints in no less authentic way than we do as sinners. That is to say, we are not saints abstractly. We are not saints in a fictitious, disembodied way. We are in fact saints in our flesh, in our members, because God’s word does what it says; it accomplishes the purpose for which it was spoken and does not return to him void and empty. And he is no liar. No, we are embodied sinner/saints. We are saints in the flesh even as we are sinners in the flesh. And this on account of Christ’s incarnation, death, and resurrection, which redeems us from sin, death, and hell. And this redemption renews and reestablishes in Christ Jesus our status before God the Father; and therefore, it also redefines our status with his Law. And so God’s law defines and reveals who we are as those who are in Christ Jesus. It describes who we are, that is, our character by the grace of God given on account of Jesus Christ’s cross. It defines us as sinner, insofar as the Old Adam still clings to our flesh, and it defines us as saints insofar as we are in Christ. They are both very real, very earthy, and every bit of you. For if the one is ever in peril of not being you so also does the other; when one becomes disembodied so also the other. For they are realities not concepts, and these realities are lived.

Q: In your recent articles you have discussed masculinity and manhood. How do you see your own understanding of these differ from the way others use these terms?

Esolen: When a virtue falls by the wayside, when it is no longer a lived reality recognized by a community in its manifold forms, we recall only a scrap of it here or there, or we can only imagine a gaudy caricature of it.

That, I think, is the case now for both manhood and womanhood.

Many millions of boys in America, for instance, are growing up in homes without fathers, so they find “fathers” of their own on the streets or in the diseased and silly fantasies of mass entertainment, musclemen who can take down a city, or charismatic gang leaders who move caches of drugs and make exciting things happen.

They miss the more subtle fortitude of moral vision and farsighted self-sacrifice. Male heroes in popular literature for boys, 80 or 90 years ago, might be all right with a gun or a sword, but they might also be bespectacled dons like Mr. Chips whose discipline was a form of love.

I see manhood as the drive to lead — to serve by leading, or to lead by following loyally the true leadership of one’s father or priest or captain.

The man exercises charity by training himself to be self-reliant in ordinary things, not out of pride, but out of a sincere desire to free others up for their own duties, and to free himself for things that are not ordinary.

The man also must refuse — this is a difficult form of self-sacrifice — to allow his feelings to turn him from duty, including his duty to learn the truth and to follow it.

A man loves his own family, but he also loves his family by refusing to subject the entire civil order to the welfare of his family; he understands that if he performs his duty, other families besides his own will profit by it.

A man must consider his life dispensable for the sake of those he leads; he must obey his legitimate superior; if and only if he does so will he become really necessary and really worthy of the obedience he claims, with scriptural authority that need not embarrass anyone.

The second addresses questions on what Jesus teaches about what it means to be a male and what masculinity means, needs, and does.

Q: What could men learn from Christ, the ultimate man, in terms of developing masculinity?

Esolen: The first thing they could learn is not to be embarrassed by their manhood. It is holy! It has been created by God, and for a reason.

Then they might notice that Jesus is not the cute boyfriend that many of our churches make him out to be, the one who never goes too far — forgive me if that is a little coarse.

Jesus loves women, as all good men must; Jesus obeys his mother at Cana; but Jesus does not hang around the skirts of women; he speaks gently, but as a man speaks gently, and when he rebukes, he rebukes forthrightly and clearly, as a man.

His closest comrades are men, though they are not necessarily the people he loves best in the world. He organizes them into a battalion of sacrifice.

He is remarkably sparing in his praise of them; certainly, as is the case with many good and wise men, he is much more desirous that they should come to know him than that they should feel comfortable about themselves.

From his apostles he seems to prefer the love that accompanies apprehension of the truth, rather than love born of his own affectionate actions toward them.

In fact, they respond to him as men often respond: They admire and follow with all the greater loyalty the man who rebukes them for, of all things, being frightened when it appears their ship will capsize in the stormy Sea of Galilee!

Men can learn from Jesus to seek the company of other men, at least in part for the sake of women, and certainly for the sake of the village, the nation, the Church and the world.

They can learn that there are two ways at least in which man is not meant to be alone: He needs the complementary virtues of woman, and he needs other men.

A soldier alone is no soldier.

I am dumbfounded why Lutherans haven’t spoken about this more clearly and more often. Lutheran theology is so earthy and dirt-level. If there was anyone who could be able to address these current issues, I would think that Lutherans are uniquely poised to do so. Perhaps, there is a richness to what Esolen posits that we desperately need to nurture young men in. But how to do this? The seminary is a great place to retreat and enjoy the company of other men who are searching and seeking to be formed into walking, talking icons of Christian masculinity. Come join us for the journey.