by David G. Duggan ©
March 6, 2025
While the world agonizes over Ukraine, Trump’s speech to Congress, and the unsolved mystery of the death of Gene Hackman and his 30-years younger wife Betsy Arakawa, as we enter Lent matters spiritual should be top-of-mind. In this regard, the death last week of the Rev. Dr. Martin E. Marty 3 weeks after his 97th birthday deserves note.
Dr. Marty was a longtime professor of church history at the University of Chicago’s divinity school (few know that the U of C got its start as Northern Baptist Seminary until John D. Rockefeller came around with mega-donations totaling nearly $35 million during his lifetime), but got his start as a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor in the Chicago suburbs. One of the few theological academics with practical experience in parish ministry, Dr. Marty traveled and lectured widely, finding time to edit The Christian Century, a monthly journal of “progressive Christianity,” write a bi-weekly newsletter Context, publish 60 books, hundreds of scholarly articles, essays, and columns and then deliver commencement addresses. He also served as a doctoral adviser to budding academics looking to add the gilt-and-maroon-edged diploma to their CVs.
In the ‘60s, Dr. Marty was active in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam movements, founding “Clergy and Laity Concerned,” sort of an antipode to Billy Graham’s public indoctrination by Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Conceding his march to Selma, invited by Dr. King, and as potential Vietnam-era cannon-fodder, I have found academics’ anti-war protests troubling: protected by tenure, they get the cheap grace of not having to sacrifice for their beliefs.
I heard Dr. Marty speak several times: once at the Newberry Library some 20 years ago just after Martin Luther’s 130-volume opus was boiled down to 30 CDs; and another time at a Northside Chicago parish where he discussed the religious movements which derived from Chicago’s 1893 Columbian exposition (including the introduction of Hinduism to the States). Within those 130 volumes, Luther defended a married clergy as consistent with Scripture (cf. Matthew 8:14–15; Mark 1:29–31; Luke 4: 38-39; Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law; which sort of implies that he was married). I asked whether there was anything in those 130 volumes dealing with homosexual clergy which Luther himself had encountered during a pilgrimage to Rome. My recollection of Marty’s answer was that there was nothing.
More recently, with Dr. Marty I have been participating in a zoom Bible-study coordinated by my local Lutheran parish. I am not now, nor can ever become a Lutheran: I worship Jesus, and even if his apostle Luther is as responsible for my Christian faith as anyone in the last 500 years, I cannot bring myself to adhere to a denomination so embedded in a Germanic culture which inter alia gave us World Wars I and II. Not that there is any virtue in the Episcopal denomination of my upbringing, but the shibboleth which distinguishes Lutherans from Anglicans–among Lutherans, the only schism is heresy; among Episcopalians, the only heresy is schism– is at best a glib glossing over of a theological divide which hasn’t been bridged in those 500 years.
Dr Marty had suffered a fall recently and had moved from his John Hancock Bldg apartment to Minnesota, closer to the state of his origin, Nebraska, which punches well above its weight in theology and law, two disciplines which I follow (legal scholars Roscoe Pound and Karl Llewellyn were cornhuskers as was Harold deWolf, Martin Luther King’s dissertation advisor). Martin Emil Marty, Ph.D. and servant of the Risen Christ: RIP. We shall not see your likes again.
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