3.2 Education: Physics, Philosophy and Theology
I graduated from Wichita East High School in 1962. I had become very interested in physics and decided to major in it in college with the goal of teaching it someday. I went to Texas A&M my freshman year on a basketball scholarship, and chose physics as a major. My studies went well, but the basketball didn’t (plus I had a girlfriend in Wichita) so I came back home to Wichita State initially on a basketball scholarship. My middle brother, Gary, was the assistant coach. When he became head coach the following year, I switched to an academic scholarship to avoid any conflict of interest issues.
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Although WSU had an excellent physics department there, I soon discovered upper level physics courses demanded an aptitude for math I definitely didn’t possess. I was becoming more and more interested in philosophy, which led me to take enough philosophy courses that I could graduate with a B.A. in physics and philosophy in 1966 (a somewhat unusual combination which gives me a good grounding in natural science and a humanities subject essential for theology and politics). I got a graduate scholarship and teaching assistantship in philosophy at W.S.U. and studied for two years with the chair of the department, A.C. Genova (left, Ph.D., University of Chicago; he went on to become chairman of the Philosophy department at the University of Kansas; he died in 2010). He was a very important philosophical teacher/mentor for me. His gentle-but-rigorous pedagogical style became a model for my own teaching, and he passed on to me a lifelong love of philosophy, even though I moved on to a different intellectual and professional field. My wife, Claire, teases me because I choose to take philosophy books [!!] rather than novels with me on vacations).
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I share Genova’s judgment that Aristotle is the greatest ancient philosopher as is Kant in the modern period. This has consequences for religion and theology (as well as politics). For example, Aristotle’s influence on me means that I have a philosophical “faith” that human spirit/mind is intimately connected with the physical/material dimension of the world and cannot have an existence apart from it (as opposed to Plato’s ancient or Descartes’ modern dualism, which posit a metaphysical separation of a perishable body and an immortal, non-material soul/mind, with a preference toward the latter as the primary reality.)
In 1968 I was fortunate to receive a scholarship to the Graduate Program in Religion at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, at the time one of the best American graduate schools in religion, to study theology. Initially, (see right, top to bottom) I planned to study with Schubert Ogden, a prominent liberal theologian. However, I soon found myself gravitating more to two other S.M.U. scholars, Albert Outler (perhaps the best Wesley scholar of the 20th century) and John Deschner (a Methodist who had done graduate study with Karl Barth in Switzerland). In the process, I became a committed Wesleyan Protestant attracted more to Reinhold Niebuhr, H.R. Niebuhr, Paul Tillich and especially Dietrich Bonhoeffer (below, left to right) than to Ogden’s theology. I received an M.A. in Religious Studies in 1977 with a thesis on Bonhoeffer’s doctoral thesis and first book, Communio Santorum (The Communion of Saints), under Deschner’s supervision. |
As I will explain more fully on the next page, I chose to work as a lay professional in local churches in teaching and administrative ministries from 1973-84. I received a call to ordained ministry in the late ‘70s and attended the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado, half-time for two years in order to earn the necessary M.Div. in theology, which I did (with honors) in 1981. My most important theological mentors there were Jean Miller Schmidt (Church History, Ph.D. University of Chicago with Martin Marty), Del Brown (a liberal process theologian who carried on a long centrist dialogue with a prominent conservative evangelical theologian) and Harvey Potthoff (one of the gentlest scholars I’ve ever met, and also one who was highly supportive of his students).
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In addition to these formal educational experiences, my lifelong learning has been vitally important to who I am today. Revolutionary developments in the natural sciences, philosophy and theology began to take hold just as I was finishing at S.M.U. in the late '60s and early '70s. It became apparent that the scholarly world was changing and, if I wasn’t going to get left behind, I’d need fairly extensive work in my fields of interest in addition to my degree programs.
(I’ll indicate on the page after next the theologians and biblical scholars who have influenced me the most in recent decades.) Here, let me just say a little about the three philosophers who have most shaped my thinking through some of my independent reading:
(I’ll indicate on the page after next the theologians and biblical scholars who have influenced me the most in recent decades.) Here, let me just say a little about the three philosophers who have most shaped my thinking through some of my independent reading:
The first and most significant philosophical influence on me is Paul Ricoeur. (For convenience, I’ll repeat here what I wrote earlier in Section 1, page 1.3.) Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005) was a French philosopher (also a Reform Protestant who wrote biblical interpretation and theological works) who taught at the University of Chicago as well as in France. I find his prolific work the best principled centrist philosophical position of the postmodern period. He takes up and builds on the ancient Greek centrist, Aristotle, and the modern German centrist, Kant, among many others in several dimensions of his thought. One of the most significant is his synergistic bridging of Aristotle’s ethics of “the good” with Kant’s morality of “the right”--a long standing polarization in Western philosophy. |
Ricoeur also was able to bring together the best insights of the large polarized schools of thought of his own day--Continental Hermeneutics and Anglo-American Analytical Philosophy--while at the same time deal effectively with relativistic Postmodern sceptics. His generous, synergistic philosophy--bringing together so much of the the best of the Western philosophical tradition with his strikingly new insights for our time--is the deepest philosophical foundation of my worldview.
The second key influence is Martha Nussbaum (an adult convert to Judaism now teaching in the philosophy department and the Law School at the University of Chicago), who in many ways is more of a modern than postmodern philosopher. It was initially her philosophy of literature that attracted me; she traces Platonic and Aristotelian influences on Western literature, much preferring the latter. Also, she strikingly argues that philosophical ethics cannot be complete without interdisciplinary help from great fictional narratives. This dovetails with Ricoeur’s work on the importance of narrative for philosophy, as does her most recent work on the significance of “capabilities” (for global human development for her, and for the foundations of philosophical anthropology for Ricoeur). |
The third key influence is Cornel West (a Christian who is quite open about the vital influence of his religious faith on his philosophy), who teaches at Princeton. He is a powerful, social justice public intellectual whose thought is grounded in his postmodern pragmatic philosophy. While his positions are further to the left than mine on many issues, I believe he correctly names the deep problems that are significant threats to American democracy today that all of us need to be more aware of, even when our solutions are more centrist than his. One area where he is quite centrist is his view about the limits of our human capabilities to deal with our problems--one key phrase of his is “tragicomic hope.” We’ll see just how close this is to similar thoughts of other centrists. |
(See the next page for a little information about my professional history.)
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