February 24, 2009

Fifty years ago, when a generation of seminarians was cutting its theological fangs, friendship was a disdained term. Anders Nygren’s classic Agape and Eros ruled in classrooms and pulpits, and Nygren had little use for philia—the Greek word for the kind of love friends share. Nygren stressed that divine love, agape, is different from other forms of love. Eros and its correlates, like philia, depend on desire, whereas agape is offered without attachment and without any need for reciprocation.

If you could start a seminary from scratch, how would you do it?

You’d probably try to avoid the straitjacketed theological curriculum of the 19th-century German university, which scrupulously separated the study of the Bible, theology, church history and ministry from one another. You would focus on integrating fields of learning as much as you could without risking your accreditation. You’d try to blend the energy of the evangelical world and the intellectual openness of the mainline. You’d locate the seminary in a city that people want to live in.

As a pastor in Chicago and a teacher at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary and McCormick Theological Seminary, Ray Bakke encouraged pastors to engage the city rather than flee from it. He cofounded the Chicago-based Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE), one of the nation’s major centers for reflection on urban ministry, and he served as senior associate for large cities with the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism from 1979 to 1995.

Bernhard Schlink’s 1995 novel The Reader is a tricky book to adapt to film. The plot—about how Michael Berg, a teenager in Germany in the 1950s, falls in love with an older woman with a mysterious past—may seem neat and tidy, but the story is actually about fear and guilt, ethical responsibility and moral ambiguity. Screen writer David Hare and director Stephen Daldry (who also collaborated on The Hours) attempt to portray these themes, but they fall far short of capturing them.