Commencement 2008

Co-Presence with Wolves
by Iain R. Torrance

Princeton Theological Seminary President Iain R. Torrance delivered his farewell address to the graduates at the Seminary Commencement exercises on May 19, 2007, in the Princeton University Chapel. This is a slightly revised version of that address.

I congratulate you. This is your day. Even with the little teaching I do, I know that degrees are not lightly bestowed and that those who acquire them have gained something of which they may be proud. Some of you came straight from college and are now at the end of seven long years in school. Some gave up established careers to study here. Some of you from overseas have been parted from spouses, children and parents. I acknowledge the sacrifices you have made. My hope—and here I speak for board, faculty, and administration—is that what you have gained in knowledge, skill, and friendship will be precious to you and will serve the church well.

Very many of you will enter or return to ministry in some form or other. I am well aware of the brittleness of human persons and of how volatile it can be to nurture someone’s spiritual growth. In this short address, I am trying to think about ministry and public space.

It is a familiar cliché today for an older person—anyone over 35—to deplore another person—usually younger—who retreats into the private space of noise-blocking earphones. There is the allegation that there is something selfish or indulgent about such a retreat. It is avoidance of the real world, even unhealthy. However, one is then forced to ask: What is the quality of the public space? And that will be another of my themes.

Who are our role models today? We are in an election year. I am deeply interested by Barack Obama. Like him, I want to see change. I am dismayed by the damage caused by out-of-context manipulation of select quotations from his pastor. This country still suffers from a segregated and racist past. I feel keenly for those still marginalized, and this country is neither invisible nor inconsequential on a world stage. The wider world looks on amazed by the conflict within the Democratic party. The wider world is not, I believe, spellbound and entranced over who does and who does not claim the superior moral ground for or against Jeremiah Wright. The wider world is much more concerned by the inward looking that tends to be a character of our culture as a whole. That raises again the question of the quality of the public space.

Ministry, if it is truly in service to Jesus Christ, always challenges the edge of the public space, bringing, in the words of the formula I have just used so frequently, every thought into conformity to the work of Jesus Christ. That is, ministry always challenges the no-go areas; ministry always obliges us to look at our wider context; ministry always exposes our inward looking. It is a cliché now for would-be sophisticates to have a go at the European Enlightenment. Yet there is much there that we lose at our peril. It is terribly trendy to be antiglobalization and to pour scorn upon Adam Smith and the “invisible hand” of the market. Yet that same Adam Smith, in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, reminded us that whenever we want to pass judgment on whether we have acted well or badly, we have to consult others, for, insofar as my judgment is not shaped by their view, it may be shaped instead, and therefore distorted, by self-love or self-interest. For us to act truly as moral agents, Adam Smith argued, we need to have recourse to what he called “the impartial spectator.” We forget that at our peril, and what is diminished is the quality of our public space and the integrity of our utterances.

I am still interested in the quality of public space. I have been intrigued by Rich Ling’s new book, published a month or two ago, entitled New Tech, New Ties. Rich Ling is a sociologist who specializes in the social effect of the mobile phone. He finds that new technology has disrupted the unspoken social rules that previously governed public space.

With mobile telecoms, we are now all nomads. It follows that in an effective organization today, there need be no “insiders” and “outsiders,” yet, as everyone knows, physical copresence may always be trounced by those who are remote, but with whom one has a different kind of tie. For example, presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, in the middle of a recent public speech to the National Rifle Association, took a call from his wife. One of our new life skills is learning how to relate both to those who are co-present and to those who are remote while inhabiting the same public space. This illustrates how complex single ownership of space has become.

In April, the Center of Theological Inquiry celebrated its thirtieth anniversary, and various of us gave papers looking forward or backward. Francis Clooney, a Jesuit from Harvard and a specialist in the relationship between Christianity and Hinduism, looked forward to the issue of how we may share public space. He maintained that in the future church we need to learn both how to be confessing of Jesus Christ and how to be hospitable of other faiths.

So here is a further complexity to public space—how to be both confessing and hospitable. It is partly a matter of faithfulness and partly a matter of willing to permit changed boundaries. I believe that this is precisely what the Apostle Paul did. “I am all things to all people ….” Paul was providing a model for making complex the public space in a pluralist society.

Let me gather the strands together. Ministry is, at the very least, concerned with speaking the words of God in public. St Paul gives us one model for complexity. At one stage in his distinguished career, Stanley Hauerwas, the great moral theologian at Duke Divinity School, gave us another model for occupation of the public space—the idea that the Christian is a “resident alien.” This was creative and evocative, but a profound simplification.

As you proceed in ministry, your professional life will complexify as much as the public space you occupy. Practice will enable you to grow beyond the narrow guilds into which education tends to place you. All living professions today are in turmoil. The pluralism of skills today is eroding fossilized guilds and permitting interdisciplinary creativity.

This is well illustrated by James Neal, vice president for information technology and university librarian at Columbia University. In a recent article entitled “Raised by Wolves: Integrating the New Generation of Feral Professionals into the Academic Library,” Neal shows how the best research libraries in America are increasingly populated not by professional guild librarians but by doctoral graduates in specialist subjects, such as databases, fund-raising, or publishing. He finds that “new professional groups that have been ‘raised’ in other environments…bring to the academic library a ‘feral’ set of values, outlooks, styles, and expectations.” This creates a scenario of “untamed” versus “domesticated” professionals. The new professionals have a different “hunger” and former library managers “must commit to a more ‘ferocious’ staff orientation” and “seek out creative opportunities for employees to ‘pack’ together more routinely.” These analogies stretch our imagination about ministry and public space.

Stanley Hauerwas dealt with pluralism with his famous metaphor of “resident aliens.” Building on this, I want to use the “feral” nature of the evolving professions, including ministry, and the negotiation for space between copresent and distant addressees to offer you a model of being “copresent with wolves” in place of “resident aliens.” Jesus said: “I send you out as sheep among wolves.” That is another model for pluralism. What I am trying to illustrate is the truly dynamic nature of Christian faith in the context of a rapidly changing world.

May God bless all of you.

“Raised by Wolves: Integrating the New Generation of Feral Professionals Into the Academic Library,” Library Journal, volume 131, 15 February 2006, 42–44.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6304405.html?q=&q=raised by wolves, page 1 of 4.

Ibid, page 3 of 4.