TRANSFIGURATION: A LUTHERAN'S JOURNEY
Paul O. Ingram
Pacific Lutheran University (Emeritus)
According to the 2018 liturgical calendar, February 11 was Transfiguration Sunday. Transfiguration comes at the end of the Season of Epiphany and the Sunday before Ash Wednesday’s reality therapy on February 14—“remember, you are dust, and to dust you will return.” “Epiphany,” in Greek epiphaneia literally means “manifestation,” for example, God at the transfiguration of Jesus. According to Mark, six days after Jesus predicted his death, he:
. . . took with him Peter an James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” he did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved’ listen to him.” Suddenly, when they looked around they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. (Mk 9:2-8)
Read through the lenses of process theology, “transfiguration” happened because the historical Jesus’s “subjective aim” for himself became one with God’s “initial aim” for Jesus, probably beginning at his sojourn in the desert shortly after his baptism by John the Baptist. And in the process, he, Peter, James, and John experienced God’s incarnated presence in their own distinctive ways. For Jesus, the experience of transfiguration lead him straight to Jerusalem to a horrible death.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote shortly before his execution by the NAZIs that, to paraphrase, “When God calls a person, God calls that person to his death.” Not always or most often not an actual death—although Lent reminds that death is always in our futures—but a death of thinking of ourselves as separate selves so that we cease behaving as if we were the center of the universe, not clinging to permanence in an impermanent universe; so that we might apprehend reality—the way things really are moment to moment in our experience—and acting accordingly; so that we become “servants of all.” It all starts with “transfiguration,” surrendering our subjective aims for ourselves to God’s initial aim for us.
On this year’s “Transfiguration Sunday, my pastor, John Beck, noted that while Jesus’s transfiguration experience was unique to the historical Jesus, these experiences are pluralistic in nature and no two are alike. One thinks on Moses on Mount Sinai, Elijah hiding for his life in a cave on Mount Horeb, the eight, seventh, and sixth century prophets calling their people away from powerful oppressive economic and political power structures so that, in the words of Micah, they could “do justice, behave compassionately, and work for solidarity of community.” Then Pastor Beck asked the congregation to raise their hands if they had ever experienced a “transfiguration.” After a few seconds, hands began to rise up, then everyone present raised their hands. “This is how grace (what I call God’s initial aim) operates. Responding to transfiguration (our subjective aims) is “faith.” At this point in the sermon, I mentality raised my hand and starting thinking, the result of which is what follows.
At age fifteen I joined up with a youth group called the “CYF” or Christian Youth Fellowship because I was chasing a girl. That didn’t work out, but I eventually joined First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Santa Monica, California. This required that I undergo baptism by immersion. I was previously baptized as an infant in the town of my birth, Pueblo, Colorado, at my father’s United Brethren church. But the disciples didn’t recognize infant baptism or baptism by sprinkling. So I had to have the full immersion. I am probably one of the few Lutherans who have been baptized twice. For Disciples, baptism was only offered to “adults”—I was fifteen at the time—as a means of “washing one’s sins away” But my friends tell me that even two baptisms were probably not enough.
The Disciples of Christ movement was the outgrowth of various Protestant denominations (especially Presbyterian and Baptist) coming together in the nineteenth century under the leadership of Thomas and Alexander Campbell (father and son) and Barton Stone. More associated with the Anabaptist reaction against the Catholic, Lutheran and mainline Reformed traditions of American Protestantism, the Disciples claim to have no unifying theological doctrines or liturgy. Some local congregations are quite progressive, but most are fairly conservative while some border on Pentecostal fundamentalism. The congregation I joined was rather progressive in its social outreach while the minister was theologically conservative.
In 1957, the year I began my freshman year at Chapman College (now University), I decided to “enter the ministry.” This goal lasted until my senior year. By that time, “being a minister” just didn’t fit into my developing interest in philosophy and history of religions. The problem was that I had been accepted for admission to the School of Theology at Claremont (now known as the Claremont School of Theology), and I wasn’t sure I should pursue this avenue of education given my decision not to pursue ministerial studies. I had to make a decision: either begin my studies at Claremont or get a job for which a philosophy major was mostly useless, like the job I was offered selling soap for Proctor & Gamble after graduation from Chapman.
But then, my luck began to change, or perhaps grace was again at work in my life. New students at the School of Theology were required, if possible, to visit the campus for an interview with a member of the faculty before the beginning of the academic year. The academic dean, F. Thomas Trotter, interviewed me. He listened patiently as I explained my decision not to become a Disciples of Christ minister and that I wasn’t sure if seminary would be a good choice for me. When I finally stopped talking, he leaned back in his chair and flashed a grin. “Just give us a try,” he said. “You may have decided the ministry isn’t for you, but there are other avenues to pursue. You won’t know which until you explore them all.” So, I “gave it a try” and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
The faculty at Claremont was incredibly excellent. Trotter taught a course called “Tragedy and the Christian View of Life.” I had to plow through Moby Dick in an undergraduate course in American literature. But I had not made the connection between literature and theological reflection until, under Trotter’s guidance, I read it a second time. My professors in Biblical Studies, Systematic and Philosophical Theology, Church History, and my eventual field History of Religions were all great scholars and teachers who helped me connect the life of the mind with the life of faith. I was beginning to connect theological lyrics with the music of Christian faith. I also disassociated myself from the Disciples of Christ.
Then at the beginning of my second year at the School of Theology, I met Regina Ruth Inslee. She graduated from the University of Redlands with majors in debate, speech, and sociology and after her graduation from the School of theology in 1964 began her career as a medical social worker. Her father, Robert Ray Inslee was, according to the professionals in his field, one of the most important church architects of his day. By the end of 1962-63 academic year Gena and I were engaged and set our wedding date for early August 1963. We moved into married student housing that September.
My wife and her family were life-long Lutherans, first the Lutheran Church in America, which later merged with the American Lutheran Church to become the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in the early 1980s. I hadn’t realized that the structure of Lutheran services followed the liturgical traditions of Roman Catholicism. There are differences, of course, that reflect Luther’s break with Rome in the sixteenth century. Among other things, unlike Catholicism, confession is communal rather than individual and private. Lutherans do not often meet with their pastors to confess a laundry list sins in order to seek absolution. In Lutheran understanding confession is communal and public and the pastor merely announces God’s universal forgiveness to the whole community. The “priesthood of all believers” is the centerpiece of Lutheran theology, as is the notion that human beings can do nothing to earn “salvation” by anything human beings do or not do, that is, by “works.” Like God’s love, grace is an unearned gift that transforms human beings when they apprehend that they have been swimming in it since birth. None of this, absolutely none, was taught, preached or liturgically reenacted in the Disciples of Christ churches I attended—which in fact ignore Christian liturgical tradition and theology
While I was drinking all this in Gena and I attended the dedications of church buildings designed by my father-in-law. It was a rather cheap date because Dad Inslee used to take everyone out to dinner to some very fancy Los Angeles restaurants. Before the services of dedication, he would take Gena and me on a tour of the buildings and explain how he sculpted the theology of a particular denomination into the building’s architecture. “Sculpting theology,” “painting theology,” literary theological reflection in poetry and novels and essays by writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Dillard, Loren Eiseley, and other great literary figures was my final push into Christian faith.
But it was Lutheran liturgy that opened the door. I discovered that liturgy took me places I had never before imagined, often in the most unexpected ways. In the second century, persons seeking admission to the church did not receive catechetical instruction about the distinctive doctrines of the Christian Way. Instead, they were gently led into the rhythms of liturgy—confession and forgiveness of sin, the repetition of creed, singing hymns, listening to sermons, offering resources for the poor and needy, repeating the Lord’s Prayer, the reception of the Eucharist. It wasn’t until early Christian “newbies” had participate in the beauty and rhythms of liturgy for at least a year that they received catechetical instruction in Christian doctrines and creeds. This ancient pedagogical practice reflects my experience. Liturgy helped me hear the “music” supporting the “lyrics” of Christian teachings and practices. And there was no going back. I became a Lutheran in 1968 in Indianola, Iowa, where I had assumed my first teaching gig at Simpson College, named after an Abolitionist preacher named Matthew Simpson.
Of course, this brief description of moments of “transfiguration” are my own and should not be taken as models for the progress of anyone else’s life. Each of us experience transfiguration in our own distinctive ways on our own terms—if we conform our subjective aims for ourselves to God’s initial aim for ourselves. In my case, the events of my past could have led to different choices, which means the course of my life would have taken other directions. Again, in Whiteheadian language, I could have followed God “initial aim” for me or my “subjective aim” apart from God’s initial aim, which means following my subjective aims in isolation from perceiving that my life is interdependent with all sentient beings and with God. Had I not chosen to major in philosophy; had I chosen to accept a job offer selling Procter & Gamble soap instead of Professor Trotter’s advice to give the School of theology a try; had I not chosen to study philosophical theology under John Cobb; had I not listened to my Hebrew teacher’s advice (Willis Fisher) to “follow my bliss and enter the Claremont Graduate University to pursue a Ph.D. and become a university professor; had I not married Regina or engaged with the Lutheran understanding of grace through faith alone as this is symbolized through liturgical practice, these particular moments of transfiguration would not have occurred and I would have literally become a different “Paul Ingram” than the person writing these paragraphs. Remembering the past and comprehending it is the heart of faith, whether one is a Lutheran follower of the Jesus Way, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jew, of a follower of the Confucian or Daoist Ways or both, or a follower of one of the numerous aboriginal traditions, or an atheistic humanist.
Accordingly, the experience of transfiguration—the historical Jesus’s or ours—teaches two lessons. First, our memories lead us through time, forward and back, seldom in a straight line, most often in spirals. Each of us is moving and changing in relationship to the world, and if one is grasped by Jewish, Christian, or Islamic faith, to God. As we discover what our memories of the past teach us, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intently do we discover when our separate memories converge. It is at points of convergence that I have experienced transfigurative moments of creative transformation.
Second, as a Lutheran, it strikes me as a bit glib to suggest that “faith” is reducible to “commitment to doctrines.” While I am convinced that it is of utmost importance to guide the practice of faith through theological reflection, faith must never be reduced to belief in doctrinal propositions. The moment we do, doctrines will hide the reality to which they point like heavy clouds blotting out the sun on a rainy Pacific Northwest day. So while guiding the practice of faith through the filter of theological constructs is “faith seeking understanding,” as Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) put it, theological propositions are no more than pointers. And as my Buddhist friends have taught me, if we cling to a pointer, we only have the pointer and we will miss the transfiguring reality to which pointers “point.”
. . . took with him Peter an James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” he did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved’ listen to him.” Suddenly, when they looked around they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. (Mk 9:2-8)
Read through the lenses of process theology, “transfiguration” happened because the historical Jesus’s “subjective aim” for himself became one with God’s “initial aim” for Jesus, probably beginning at his sojourn in the desert shortly after his baptism by John the Baptist. And in the process, he, Peter, James, and John experienced God’s incarnated presence in their own distinctive ways. For Jesus, the experience of transfiguration lead him straight to Jerusalem to a horrible death.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote shortly before his execution by the NAZIs that, to paraphrase, “When God calls a person, God calls that person to his death.” Not always or most often not an actual death—although Lent reminds that death is always in our futures—but a death of thinking of ourselves as separate selves so that we cease behaving as if we were the center of the universe, not clinging to permanence in an impermanent universe; so that we might apprehend reality—the way things really are moment to moment in our experience—and acting accordingly; so that we become “servants of all.” It all starts with “transfiguration,” surrendering our subjective aims for ourselves to God’s initial aim for us.
On this year’s “Transfiguration Sunday, my pastor, John Beck, noted that while Jesus’s transfiguration experience was unique to the historical Jesus, these experiences are pluralistic in nature and no two are alike. One thinks on Moses on Mount Sinai, Elijah hiding for his life in a cave on Mount Horeb, the eight, seventh, and sixth century prophets calling their people away from powerful oppressive economic and political power structures so that, in the words of Micah, they could “do justice, behave compassionately, and work for solidarity of community.” Then Pastor Beck asked the congregation to raise their hands if they had ever experienced a “transfiguration.” After a few seconds, hands began to rise up, then everyone present raised their hands. “This is how grace (what I call God’s initial aim) operates. Responding to transfiguration (our subjective aims) is “faith.” At this point in the sermon, I mentality raised my hand and starting thinking, the result of which is what follows.
At age fifteen I joined up with a youth group called the “CYF” or Christian Youth Fellowship because I was chasing a girl. That didn’t work out, but I eventually joined First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Santa Monica, California. This required that I undergo baptism by immersion. I was previously baptized as an infant in the town of my birth, Pueblo, Colorado, at my father’s United Brethren church. But the disciples didn’t recognize infant baptism or baptism by sprinkling. So I had to have the full immersion. I am probably one of the few Lutherans who have been baptized twice. For Disciples, baptism was only offered to “adults”—I was fifteen at the time—as a means of “washing one’s sins away” But my friends tell me that even two baptisms were probably not enough.
The Disciples of Christ movement was the outgrowth of various Protestant denominations (especially Presbyterian and Baptist) coming together in the nineteenth century under the leadership of Thomas and Alexander Campbell (father and son) and Barton Stone. More associated with the Anabaptist reaction against the Catholic, Lutheran and mainline Reformed traditions of American Protestantism, the Disciples claim to have no unifying theological doctrines or liturgy. Some local congregations are quite progressive, but most are fairly conservative while some border on Pentecostal fundamentalism. The congregation I joined was rather progressive in its social outreach while the minister was theologically conservative.
In 1957, the year I began my freshman year at Chapman College (now University), I decided to “enter the ministry.” This goal lasted until my senior year. By that time, “being a minister” just didn’t fit into my developing interest in philosophy and history of religions. The problem was that I had been accepted for admission to the School of Theology at Claremont (now known as the Claremont School of Theology), and I wasn’t sure I should pursue this avenue of education given my decision not to pursue ministerial studies. I had to make a decision: either begin my studies at Claremont or get a job for which a philosophy major was mostly useless, like the job I was offered selling soap for Proctor & Gamble after graduation from Chapman.
But then, my luck began to change, or perhaps grace was again at work in my life. New students at the School of Theology were required, if possible, to visit the campus for an interview with a member of the faculty before the beginning of the academic year. The academic dean, F. Thomas Trotter, interviewed me. He listened patiently as I explained my decision not to become a Disciples of Christ minister and that I wasn’t sure if seminary would be a good choice for me. When I finally stopped talking, he leaned back in his chair and flashed a grin. “Just give us a try,” he said. “You may have decided the ministry isn’t for you, but there are other avenues to pursue. You won’t know which until you explore them all.” So, I “gave it a try” and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
The faculty at Claremont was incredibly excellent. Trotter taught a course called “Tragedy and the Christian View of Life.” I had to plow through Moby Dick in an undergraduate course in American literature. But I had not made the connection between literature and theological reflection until, under Trotter’s guidance, I read it a second time. My professors in Biblical Studies, Systematic and Philosophical Theology, Church History, and my eventual field History of Religions were all great scholars and teachers who helped me connect the life of the mind with the life of faith. I was beginning to connect theological lyrics with the music of Christian faith. I also disassociated myself from the Disciples of Christ.
Then at the beginning of my second year at the School of Theology, I met Regina Ruth Inslee. She graduated from the University of Redlands with majors in debate, speech, and sociology and after her graduation from the School of theology in 1964 began her career as a medical social worker. Her father, Robert Ray Inslee was, according to the professionals in his field, one of the most important church architects of his day. By the end of 1962-63 academic year Gena and I were engaged and set our wedding date for early August 1963. We moved into married student housing that September.
My wife and her family were life-long Lutherans, first the Lutheran Church in America, which later merged with the American Lutheran Church to become the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) in the early 1980s. I hadn’t realized that the structure of Lutheran services followed the liturgical traditions of Roman Catholicism. There are differences, of course, that reflect Luther’s break with Rome in the sixteenth century. Among other things, unlike Catholicism, confession is communal rather than individual and private. Lutherans do not often meet with their pastors to confess a laundry list sins in order to seek absolution. In Lutheran understanding confession is communal and public and the pastor merely announces God’s universal forgiveness to the whole community. The “priesthood of all believers” is the centerpiece of Lutheran theology, as is the notion that human beings can do nothing to earn “salvation” by anything human beings do or not do, that is, by “works.” Like God’s love, grace is an unearned gift that transforms human beings when they apprehend that they have been swimming in it since birth. None of this, absolutely none, was taught, preached or liturgically reenacted in the Disciples of Christ churches I attended—which in fact ignore Christian liturgical tradition and theology
While I was drinking all this in Gena and I attended the dedications of church buildings designed by my father-in-law. It was a rather cheap date because Dad Inslee used to take everyone out to dinner to some very fancy Los Angeles restaurants. Before the services of dedication, he would take Gena and me on a tour of the buildings and explain how he sculpted the theology of a particular denomination into the building’s architecture. “Sculpting theology,” “painting theology,” literary theological reflection in poetry and novels and essays by writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, William Butler Yeats, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Dillard, Loren Eiseley, and other great literary figures was my final push into Christian faith.
But it was Lutheran liturgy that opened the door. I discovered that liturgy took me places I had never before imagined, often in the most unexpected ways. In the second century, persons seeking admission to the church did not receive catechetical instruction about the distinctive doctrines of the Christian Way. Instead, they were gently led into the rhythms of liturgy—confession and forgiveness of sin, the repetition of creed, singing hymns, listening to sermons, offering resources for the poor and needy, repeating the Lord’s Prayer, the reception of the Eucharist. It wasn’t until early Christian “newbies” had participate in the beauty and rhythms of liturgy for at least a year that they received catechetical instruction in Christian doctrines and creeds. This ancient pedagogical practice reflects my experience. Liturgy helped me hear the “music” supporting the “lyrics” of Christian teachings and practices. And there was no going back. I became a Lutheran in 1968 in Indianola, Iowa, where I had assumed my first teaching gig at Simpson College, named after an Abolitionist preacher named Matthew Simpson.
Of course, this brief description of moments of “transfiguration” are my own and should not be taken as models for the progress of anyone else’s life. Each of us experience transfiguration in our own distinctive ways on our own terms—if we conform our subjective aims for ourselves to God’s initial aim for ourselves. In my case, the events of my past could have led to different choices, which means the course of my life would have taken other directions. Again, in Whiteheadian language, I could have followed God “initial aim” for me or my “subjective aim” apart from God’s initial aim, which means following my subjective aims in isolation from perceiving that my life is interdependent with all sentient beings and with God. Had I not chosen to major in philosophy; had I chosen to accept a job offer selling Procter & Gamble soap instead of Professor Trotter’s advice to give the School of theology a try; had I not chosen to study philosophical theology under John Cobb; had I not listened to my Hebrew teacher’s advice (Willis Fisher) to “follow my bliss and enter the Claremont Graduate University to pursue a Ph.D. and become a university professor; had I not married Regina or engaged with the Lutheran understanding of grace through faith alone as this is symbolized through liturgical practice, these particular moments of transfiguration would not have occurred and I would have literally become a different “Paul Ingram” than the person writing these paragraphs. Remembering the past and comprehending it is the heart of faith, whether one is a Lutheran follower of the Jesus Way, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Jew, of a follower of the Confucian or Daoist Ways or both, or a follower of one of the numerous aboriginal traditions, or an atheistic humanist.
Accordingly, the experience of transfiguration—the historical Jesus’s or ours—teaches two lessons. First, our memories lead us through time, forward and back, seldom in a straight line, most often in spirals. Each of us is moving and changing in relationship to the world, and if one is grasped by Jewish, Christian, or Islamic faith, to God. As we discover what our memories of the past teach us, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intently do we discover when our separate memories converge. It is at points of convergence that I have experienced transfigurative moments of creative transformation.
Second, as a Lutheran, it strikes me as a bit glib to suggest that “faith” is reducible to “commitment to doctrines.” While I am convinced that it is of utmost importance to guide the practice of faith through theological reflection, faith must never be reduced to belief in doctrinal propositions. The moment we do, doctrines will hide the reality to which they point like heavy clouds blotting out the sun on a rainy Pacific Northwest day. So while guiding the practice of faith through the filter of theological constructs is “faith seeking understanding,” as Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) put it, theological propositions are no more than pointers. And as my Buddhist friends have taught me, if we cling to a pointer, we only have the pointer and we will miss the transfiguring reality to which pointers “point.”
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