Foreward, Who Am I?...

I am a "Baby Lutheran" in the sense that my family and I joined the church relatively late in life. My wife and I were 40ish with a four year old daughter, living in the incessantly liberal East Bay Area Oakland Hills.

My wife had an explicit Christian upbringing, I had one in passing, that is my mother made a backhanded attempt to church my sister and I by having us occasionally attend Grosse Pointe's Christ Episcopal Church for a brief period. Sadly, she is no longer a Christian in any but the most vague sense. More about Mom in later posts, I am sure.

My ideological foundations, at least the proclivity to think ideologically, occurred as it did for many in my generation, during the vaunted social and political upheavals of the sixties and seventies.

Unlike many of my co-baby-boomers, I became drawn to a more conservative ideology and way of thinking as I left the pursuit of a career in broadcast journalism for one in broadcast advertising sales. I am not alone. The neo-conservative movement is peppered with and, in many ways, founded by former radicals and left-liberals.

At graduation from college, I was a fully imbued left wing radical who believed fervently that all the ills and evils of the world stemmed from capitalism and its well traveled sibling, imperialism. Like a good leftie, I also held the notion that religion was a bourgeois manipulation.

Yet, being and ideological thinker, I could not stomach living the contradiction of pursuing fame, wealth, even at a modest level, while there was anyone in society who had less. Anything but a monkish life in a collective somewhere would be "selling out".

It quickly became clear to me, after some final (post-grad) radical involvements (San Francisco's White Panther Tenant Union, various causes in Cotati/Sonoma State University) that only capitalism and the free market allows one the opportunity to achieve the self-determinism that my fellow radicals and I had touted for "oppressed" people everywhere.

In fact, as Professor Lindemann, brilliantly pointed out at the outset of his Advanced European Socialism class that I had taken at UC Santa Barbara years before, "freedom and equality" contradict each other. He did so by asking class members on the very first day of class to raise their hands if they believe equality is the most important thing in a society. Most of the hands went up. He then said, "raise your hands if you think freedom is the most important thing in a society." Again, most of the hands went up. "You people are contradicting yourselves".

Thus began the very early seeds of my de-radicalization. I only wish that I had been a faster learner.

You probably realize where this is going. From journalism to sales. From Carter/Anderson to Reagan. I was delighted and refreshed to embark on a life free of the contradictions of my radical, disaffected youth. Amusingly, we registered as Republicans in 1980 to vote in the primaries for the leftie John B. Anderson but ended up keeping our Republican party affiliation in earnest and voting for Reagan in 1984.

Also came (or continued) the realization that I had consciously made the choice to be a radical as retaliation for my parents choosing to break up their marriage. The rebellion began in 1967 while I was still in military academy, where I been placed, essentially, to accommodate said divorce, but also because I was generally an unruly handful of a pre-adolescent except when my father was around, which he wasn't much anymore.

Again, mine was not a unique scenario. Many baby-boomers, raised in the prosperous post-WWII years embraced radicalism as a function of one or another form of indulged disillusionment.

Near the end of my radicalism, my father once said, after receiving yet another earful of my radical observations, "Douglas you don't even believe most of this bullshit yourself." Another pivotal de-radicalizing moment.

My father taught more about life than he went to his grave realizing. I still learn lessons today from things he said and did. More importantly, I fervently believe that he is Christ's arms, based on conversations we had shortly before he died and what I know that his last words were, thanks to his wonderful girlfriend, Norma, who was with him at his departure.

So, after spending the '80's moving evermore to the right as a function of life and its everyday micro-lessons rather than as a conscious ideological choice, I found myself in church. We had decided that our three year old daughter should be raised in a churched family.

But even as in the full blush of my radicalism, Christ was in the back of my mind despite my conscious rejection of Him.

One afternoon in 1970, shortly after the Kent State shootings that resulted in the National Student Strike, I was walking across the UCLA campus in the throes of revolutionary ecstasy, thinking about some coming or past "action" against "the Man". Suddenly, out of nowhere, a voice in my head whispered "but what about Jesus?" That voice, in my opinion, was Grace. God's Grace has always worked in my heart even when I was farthest from God.

Grace is a pivotal aspect of Lutheran theology. The prevailing theology of the current American "evangelical" movement does not understand Grace and its relationship to Faith. You will read about that here, of course.

I will also write about misguided theology on the other end of America's contemporary religious spectrum, Liberal Protestantism (including the more liberal strains of "Lutherans" who have recently voted to include openly homosexual men and women as ordained pastors).

Today's struggles for a true Lutheran; someone who is promulgating Luther's teachings that the Holy Bible IS the inerrant Word of God (as opposed to merely "containing" the Word), are a reflection of Dr. Luther's dual struggles during the Reformation against the horrors of state sponsored Catholicism (really the other way around, so powerful was the medieval Catholic church) and the no less horrific theological misconstructions of the emerging Protestant movements who were likewise adding to, subtracting from and generally misinterpreting Holy Scripture and sullying the concept of Christianity.

When my wife and I decided to start attending church, we did not embark on a long "church-shopping" mission as do so many church visitors that encounter today. Rather we saw a yellow page ad for Zion Lutheran Church in Piedmont, CA saying it was "liturgical, traditional and Biblical". "Sounds good", said we and never looked at another church until moving to Seattle necessitated a new church home.

And the first church we attended in Seattle is the church we still do.

Grace.

Also, I believe that folks who think they participate in their own salvation, rather than the correct Grace of God interpretation of faith and salvation are more likely suffer indecision regarding a suitable place of worship.

I went on to serve as Elder and President of the Congregation at Zion, our first church in California and have been an Elder for around eight years at Messiah Lutheran Church in Seattle.

Posts in this blog are strictly my opinion and despite my affiliation are not endorsed or sanctioned by the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod or any other church body.

I speak only with the meager authority of someone who has spent the last 20 years studying the Bible and Holy word once or twice a week. Sadly, that is more than most people these days, but probably not nearly enough.

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"We are all but beggars at God's door"

--Martin Luther