Black & White
My years of doctoral study were spent among the seminaries and divinity schools of Chicago’s Hyde Park, in a consortium of academies that gave the student access to what was perhaps the world’s best-known collocation of theology faculties and teachers. Each of these schools encouraged its students to take advantage of the extraordinary depth and range of acclaimed expertise available at this notable encampment of demons, devoted to the torment of Christ and the confusion of his Church.
The professor under whom I was studying at the time of this story was an expert on one of the most important liberal Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, and was in fact one of this theologian’s last doctoral students. He was an excellent pedagogue, some of whose teaching methods I purposed to imitate once I stood behind the lectern myself (which I never did) and needed ways to render the very difficult accessible to a theologically exposed but unsophisticated audience. The professor was also haughty and unpleasant, a player of favorites, and especially attentive to pretty female students—defects remarked upon but unpenalized in the upper regions of the Ivory Tower, at least in those days.
A Restive Young Man
Also attending this class was a young man in whom I noticed increased restiveness as the course progressed—confused expressions, a hand struggling to go up but called back before it actually did, and body language signaling discomfort. One evening as we walked toward home from the hall where the lectures were given, his frustration crested and he opened his mind to me. As if he thought I would not believe it, he said of the professor, “Steve, I don’t think that man is even a believer.”
His remark did come as rather a shock to me. I was used to the environment, but this poor chap was a babe in the woods. What kind of person even expected theological professors in this liberal enclave to be believers, or would use terminology like that heard south of 47th and north of 63rd Streets?
Once he told me more about himself, however, I understood. He was the pastor of a little rural congregation in Mississippi and, because he was coal black, a trophy with a price above rubies in the Hyde Park world. He was there, and paid to be there, because of his color and the enviable poverty of his parish. He and his family hated Chicago and were miserable there. He wondered if I could possibly understand why he was almost resigned to giving up a rich fellowship and going home.
I could, and by no means discouraged him. He reminded me of another young minister who had been offered much by a liberal church establishment and had turned it down—my grandfather. Different colors, to be sure (Grandpa’s friends called him Whitey), but the same situation.
Not Deceived
This is one of the encounters in my own life in which I believe God did something out of the ordinary by bringing us together, for I, too, was a stranger in a strange land, who understood this young pastor’s difficulties—his unhappiness and his desire not to dishonor the Lord by giving himself over to powers that would remake him—likely into an important person in the church world, an establishment preacher of salvation by politics—instead of leaving him a mere backwoods advocate of the Old Time Religion. I had been in these environs for much longer than he, and I did not expect theologians to be believers—Milton understood: they are primarily creators and addressers of false problems—so encountering yet another one of them, for whom faith was not required for the work, was no shock to my system as it was to his.
I don’t think he finished his degree but, in a kind of spiritual extremity, took his family home and resumed his pastorate in the rural South, chock-full, as it is, of poor black folks who naively think, along with the ministers who care for them, that Jordan is death, Zion is heaven, and the true brother is the fellow-believer—and who are not deceived by substitutes.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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