St. Richard John Neuhaus, 1936-2009

The pro-abortion flag is being planted on the wrong side of the liberal/conservative divide.

-- Missouri Synod Lutheran Pastor and liberal activist Richard John Neuhaus, 1968

He was an anti-Vietnam activist who hobnobbed with the Berrigans, a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor who transcended the stereotyped attitudes which so frequently characterized those belonging to a church body in which it was possible to go literally from kindergarten through to one's Ph.D without ever attending a school not run by the Synod and populated by conservative, Republican Nordic types demographically identical to oneself.

He was one from whom those few of us in the LCMS whose commitment to just-war theology outweighed the reflexive cultural impulse conservative German Lutherans feel to automatically bless the cannons took inspiration. Later- after the Seminex crisis and the formation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America- he was the de facto leader of those of us in the ELCA who still identified with the historic Christian faith, and could not countenance its confusion with any of the various permutations of frank and open Marxism which, under the label "Liberation Theology," so fascinated that denomination.

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

-- Richard John Neuhaus, de facto leader of the conservative resistance in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 1997

After my own ordination in 1986, I- an ELCA minister committed to the theology of the Lutheran Confessions- drew courage and inspiration from Neuhaus's insightful, witty and clear-sighted observations in the monthly Forum Letter, a secondary publication of a magazine he edited, the Lutheran Forum. The Forum was, in those days, the voice of the resistance in the ELCA. It would take a while before it became clear that the several strains of Lutherans who were unimpressed with the post-modern direction the ELCA seemed from the beginning to have charted for itself had very little in common other than their dissent from the line of Higgins Road. Catholic wannabes, Pietists, Charismatics, and generic "Evangelicals" there were aplenty in the ELCA- and somehow, still are; those of us who remained committed to the Lutheran Confessions to which we had sworn at our ordinations to conform our teaching and preaching were always few and far between.

But Richard John Neuhaus had a significance which transcended denomination. His book The Naked Public Square soberly and sensibly challenged both the proto-Calvinist view of the religious Right that it was somehow the duty of the Church to dominate the political life of the culture, and the insipid misreading of the Founding Fathers which confused the ideal of the separation of church and state with the impossible goal of separating religion and state. Neuhaus quite properly insisted that there was a great deal of difference between political power on one hand and the prophetic speaking of truth to power on the other, and that it was not only possible but desirable and necessary for America's religious traditions to contribute to our ongoing debate over ethical matters without in any way imposing sectarian beliefs on anybody.

I remember the day when I heard that Pastor Neuhaus had turned Catholic. I was devastated. Even then, I sensed that despite the widespread dissatisfaction among conservative Christians in the ELCA, effective resistance to the leftward ooze of my church body was never going to gel. There was enough dissatisfaction, perhaps, to delay the outright blessing of homosexuality all but guaranteed by the ELCA's early, strategically-worded statements on the subject. But there was not enough theological coherence or simple courage to stem the tide. Whenever Neuhaus or others left ELCA (as I myself eventually did), there was no shortage of people who said that they preferred to stay and fight. Stay, they certainly did; they did precious little fighting, then or since.

I did not agree with Fr. Neuhaus in all aspects of his theology- obviously, since I remain a Lutheran. But I certainly respected his desire to affiliate with something which the ELCA clearly was not, from the moment of its founding onward: a living Christian tradition, standing in some arguable theological continuity with the prophets and the apostles. I understood his decision, at least to a degree, even as I mourned the loss of the only voice within the ELCA which really had the stature and the authority to challenge the nomenkultura in Chicago and the apostate tendency so widely recognized by many in the ELCA, and so sparsely resisted.

The one-time anti-Vietnam activist became religion editor for the National Review. The Lutheran pastor who had won a Catholic award for his editorial arguing that liberal compassion and concern for extending the boundaries of the community and of our compassion to the weakest and the least should make the Democratic party and the left the natural home of the pro-life movement (leaving it to stony-hearted conservatives to coldly dismiss the unborn's claims to humanity) became, as a Catholic priest, one of the most thoughtful and influential of social conservatives. The intellectual big fish in the small pond of the LCMS became one of our best thinkers on the place of religion in public life, an advisor to presidents, and a clergyman whose influence far transcended the Church.

I met Fr. Neuhaus precisely once. He was still Pr. Neuhaus back then. I was serving my first parish in the suburbs of St. Louis, and he was giving a talk at Concordia Seminary. I still remember one line- which I've quoted before in this blog- in which he summarized the position of religion in our national life.

The most religious nation on earth, he observed, was India. The least religious and most materialistic, he continued, was undoubtedly Sweden. America's dilemma, he said, was that we were a country whose people were Indians, but whose cultural elites were Swedes- "and the Indians are getting restless."

They remain restless. But the influence of the Christian faith on the Western world seems to continue its slow ebb. If anything, it's picking up in speed. What a parishioner of mine said back in 1990, when Neuhaus left the ELCA to convert to Catholicism, remains true: the battle is the Lord's, and no one man is indispensable to Him in fighting it.

But he will be missed by all of us, including those who do not know his name. Richard John Neuhaus died of complications of cancer Thursday- surrounded first by friends, and then by angels.

Like Neuhaus, I was an anti-Vietnam Missourian with a concern for civil rights, and another ELCA clergyman compelled to go elsewhere in ordter to retain a living membership in the historic Christian tradition, and also forced by life issues to embrace political conservatism to a degree which I never imagined possible. Consequently I've always tended to identify with the man even when I couldn't agree with him. True, the cause of the Kingdom will not be deterred by his passing, or by the passing of any man. But he will be greatly missed.