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grace is universal’, ‘all men are not converted and saved?’ ‘We confess that we cannot answer it.’ This is the doctrine – transmitted via the golden chain of Christ, the Bible, Luther and the Missouri divines – that Ernest Glock taught his sons at their family devotions. Albert later admitted that he had privately scorned his father’s world view, seeing it as narrow and exclusive of all but the concerns of his Missouri Synod flock.

      Ernest Glock was unenthusiastic about his son’s scholarship: he thought basic seminary training was enough. But Albert, young and intellectually hungry, continued to enlarge his field of study. In 1949 he spent a year in Europe studying theology, and took classes in biblical criticism at the University of Heidelberg, and then returned to America to study Near Eastern Languages at the University of Chicago.

      His study of biblical Hebrew would set Glock in opposition to one of the most intellectually constraining articles of the Brief Statement: ‘Since the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God, it goes without saying that they contain no errors or contradictions, but that they are in all their parts and words the infallible truth, also in those parts which treat of historical, geographical, and other secular matters.’ Historical and geographical matters were precisely what interested Albert Glock. His scholarly intellect was too keen, and his nature too individualistic to accept this traditional dogma unquestioningly. Nevertheless, he graduated from Concordia Theological Seminary in St Louis in 1950.

      The following year, he married Lois Sohn, also a German-American, the daughter of a professor of Lutheran theology, and his life seemed set for the quiet and stable life of a Lutheran clergyman. He spent the next seven years as a pastor in Normal, Illinois, not far from where he had grown up, and seemed happy enough in his vocation. In the earnest, collegial spirit of Lutheran pastors, he closed his letters ‘yours in Christ’, ‘agape’ and ‘peace’.

      But his more secular studies in ancient Hebrew continued. While still serving as a pastor in Normal, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where his thesis advisor was George Mendenhall, a biblical scholar who introduced the Marxist-oriented ‘peasants’ revolt’ model of the origin of ancient Israel. Mendenhall’s theory was opposed to the traditional biblical view which held that Israelite tribes invaded Canaan and defeated the indigenous Canaanites. Mendenhall believed that a kind of theocratic liberation movement emerged within Canaanite society, gradually transforming it into what would ultimately be called ‘Israel’. His theory, revolutionary in its day, was an early instance of a history of ancient Israel that was distinct from the biblical account. Mendenhall’s approach was an important formative influence on Albert Glock, who received his doctorate in 1968. Thirty years later, Albert wrote in his diary that he ‘had wasted seven years in Normal, Illinois’. He didn’t have the patient personality a clergyman must have, who as part of his daily business must suffer gladly the lonely, the pedantic and the boring. In 1956, he was offered a job – or ‘answered a call’, to use the Missouri idiom – to teach, the following year, Old Testament history and literature at Concordia College, River Forest, Illinois, the teachers’ college for the Missouri Synod elementary school system.

      The Missouri Synod’s insistence on the infallibility of the Bible created a tension among its scholars that developed in the late fifties and early sixties into a controversy and finally into a split in the church, a trauma from which it has only recently recovered. A liberal wing, acknowledging the ‘higher criticism’ of German biblical scholars like Julius Wellhausen, believed their faith in scripture was not undermined by analysing the Old Testament historically, and seeing it as the work not of Moses, but of later authors, writing from the eighth century BCE and afterwards. The Brief Statement breathes fire on this approach: ‘We reject this erroneous doctrine as horrible and blasphemous.’ The leadership of the Missouri Synod, representing the conservative mainstream, sought to stamp out this heresy, which was threatening to engulf the entire church. To put reason before faith in studying the Bible was the beginning of the end of religion, they argued. Worst of all, this heretical fire had broken out in the church’s theological engine room, the Concordia Theological Seminary. One of the means the leadership used to extinguish it was to demand allegiance to the Brief Statement by the forty or so dissident professors at Concordia, which the professors were unwilling to do, arguing it infringed their right to academic freedom.

      Although Glock was teaching elsewhere, he took the side of the dissidents, since this was the direction he too was following in his biblical studies. His eldest son, Albert Glock Jr, recalled later that in the family devotions he led with his own children, he would teach them about the ‘Yahwist’ and the ‘Deuteronomist’, as two of the biblical authors were named in Wellhausen’s analysis: an approach that defied his own father’s stern literalism.

      In 1960 (aged thirty-five), he wrote an article in defence of the dissidents entitled ‘A critical evaluation of the article on Scripture in A Brief Statement of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod’. The tone of the article was conventionally and respectfully pious, but the criticism it contained attacked the Missouri Synod’s uncompromising doctrine at its heart. The church’s theology is locked in the seventeenth century, he wrote, resulting in ‘a serious breakdown of communication when speaking to our age’. He then went on to propose a tectonic shift in the church’s doctrine, away from its most distinctive feature, its stubborn belief in the literalism of the Bible, towards an emphasis on its meaning and spirit, aware that it was a product of human authorship.

      After Glock read the article at a meeting of his department at Concordia Teachers College, they insisted that it be locked in a safe and not allowed to circulate. For Albert, the episode was his first public act of opposition. He saw it as the symbolic sealing of his fate. Henceforth, he would always be a dissident.

      The rebels of Concordia Seminary eventually accepted defeat. They left the church, and founded Seminex, a ‘seminary in exile’. Their departure strengthened the conservatives’ grip on Missouri Synod doctrine. Seminex survived in the wilderness, training Lutheran pastors who were not recognized by the Missouri Synod until 1988, when it voted itself out of existence and joined the more liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.

      In an essay unpublished during his lifetime, written when he was at Birzeit, Albert Glock described himself as ‘a skeptical white American tending to minority views’. Taking the side of the liberals in the Missouri Synod split was like rebelling against his father. Taking the minority view was an instinct that he was to follow at every crossroads in his life.

      ‘It has occurred to me more than once,’ he wrote, ‘that I have chosen usually the losing side, the down side, in whatever I have done. I suppose the two most notable examples are the left side of the church and the Palestinian side of politics.’ This is the motive that drove him through an intellectual, political, spiritual and personal evolution that he began as a Lutheran pastor, becoming, in succession, biblical scholar, biblical archaeologist, Palestinian archaeologist, and, finally and improbably, intellectual commissar for Palestinian cultural nationalism, which ended in his assassination. All of this was done in a robustly Lutheran spirit of earnestly working things out in the tribunal of his own conscience. In this he was following the example of Luther himself. Glock was always nailing his theses to the door, and taking the consequences.

      Glock’s journey from the plains of the Midwest to the concrete slope of his assassination was an odyssey of gradual, determined metamorphosis. As soon as he completed one stage of personal transformation, he would renounce it, seeing on the horizon a clearer and sharper image of truth; and once a new image of truth appeared to him, he would head towards that, regardless of the consequences. Glock’s goal was to throw off the burden of his own past, his own background. At sixty-seven, he was on the verge of reaching it. And then he was shot.

      His life was an odyssey, but when he died it was unfinished. An odyssey is a process of the maturation of the self, a narrative whose meaning and purpose become clear once it is at an end, once it has come full circle. Ulysses, the hero of the original Odyssey of Homer, goes on a long journey, undergoes trials, and returns home fulfilled. The homecoming completes and resolves the process. Without it, the odyssey is not complete, and its meaning and purpose are not realized. Glock’s long odyssey was violently ended before it reached that point of fulfilment.

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