ML interviews
Max Johnson

Johnson’s academic experience includes studies in universities such as Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa; Augustana College in Sioux Falls, S.D.; St. John’s University in Collegeville; and doctoral studies at Notre Dame. When asked whether he had planned to return to Notre Dame to teach, he said that he had never considered it an option.

MJ:  I assumed that I would probably end up teaching in a Lutheran seminary. But that didn’t materialize, and when I finished my degree here in 1992, I was invited to stay here for a year as a visiting assistant professor in theology. And then a position opened up at the School of Theology at St. John’s in Minnesota. I accepted immediately and spent four years there. Then I was offered and accepted this position, and I’ve been here now two years.

Tell us a little about what it’s like to teach in a Catholic university as an ordained Lutheran pastor. 
When I did my PhD here, my board — to which I had to defend my dissertation — consisted of my director, who was a Church of England priest, a Jesuit from Berkeley, an Episcopal lay woman, and a United Methodist pastor. So, in terms of the whole context of teaching here at Notre Dame, the ecumenical context for liturgical studies is simply a given. Our faculty is quite diverse that way. I think I’m the only Lutheran, but there are several Episcopalians, several Christian Reformed, several Roman Catholics and two Jewish scholars. It is an ecumenical program — and I mean that across the board — in biblical studies, liturgical studies, ethics.

With all that bubbling ecumenism on the academic level, when you come down to the parish level, the congregational level, do you think the average Catholic or the average Lutheran would know the differences in our beliefs?
There is a sense in which if you take the covers off the current worship books of several denominations, you may well find that there’s much more commonality than distinction. You almost have to look at the cover to see what church you’re in. Jim White, a United Methodist scholar who teaches liturgy here, likes to say that the major distinction between what they do at his church on Sundays and what the local Roman Catholic parish down the street does is that in his church they use real bread, whereas in the Roman parish they use real wine. In other words, the fundamental ecumenical expressions of faith have been a large result of this convergence in liturgical study that has happened. This has had drastic implications for what we do in parish liturgy.

So you see the convergence of what’s happening on the parish level as flowing out of what’s happening on the academic level.
Well, it has been a two-way street. The liturgical movement in the earlier part of this century brought about a renewed interest in early Christian forms of worship. That in turn led to the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy and the reform of the Roman books first, and that led to the rest of us looking at our own traditions. It’s not quite that simple but as we began looking at our traditions, an incredible influence was happening. There were some real changes in scholarship. One is the whole recovery of the patristic period, in theology, spirituality and ecclesiology, and that comes to be expressed in liturgy. That has serious implications. That fostered some pastoral changes and those trying to deal with too many of the pastoral changes became attracted to studying liturgy as well. So I think it’s a two-way street.

Would most Lutheran pastors know what the RCIA is?
Probably not by that term. They might know it by something like “the catechumenal process” because in so many churches today it is the continuing agenda of contemporary liturgical renewal. Lutherans have produced in the last couple of years something called Welcome to Christ: A Lutheran Guide to the Catechumenate, published by Augsburg Fortress Press. It is an adaptation of the adult catechumenate and very similar to the RCIA. People are hoping that various synods would take some leadership and suggest the catechumenal model as the primary way in which we go about seeking to catechize and form especially unbaptized adult Christians in the United States. But one of the big distinctions between Roman Catholic approaches and others is that even the Lutheran Book of Worship is not a required resource. If a congregation wants to continue to use the 1958 service book and hymnal, no one’s going to tell them they can’t. There are positive things about congregational ownership, but that sometimes makes liturgical renewal difficult.

However variable and culturally determined or adapted, we tend to want to go back and find the one true church and the one true Mass model. Could you talk about that a little bit?
We have tended to assume that there is an original liturgical model somewhere, and so we’ve gone on the assumption that there is such a thing as the sacred liturgy of the church. History is much more messy. We like to think that today we’ve discovered or are discovering multiculturalism, but the church has always been multicultural. It’s very hard for me to sing the song “In Christ, There Is No East or West” because I know there is. There is also a north and a south. Historically, Christian theology and liturgical practice were different in Syria than in Rome, North Africa, Egypt and so on. Today we start to realize that there is a great richness to the early Christian tradition. Maybe there are other models for thinking. For example, all of us have bought into Easter baptism with its Romans 6 theology. Where would Lutheranism or contemporary Catholicism be without Romans 6? In Christ, we are baptized into his death — buried with Christ by baptism into his death. That is important, certainly key. But when you look at the first few centuries of early Christianity, that played a minor role. What was important in early Syria and the early Egyptian tradition was baptism as being associated or assimilated to Christ, the Messianic one. The paradigm was not death but the earth and the Jordan. Now that raises a whole new way— but not incongruous with Romans 6 — to think about the implications and meanings of baptism. All the eucharistic prayers are basically the same format and the same structure. That’s fine; it’s part of the ecumenical convergence, and there are multiple models in early Christianity.

How does that acquaintance with early liturgy and these kinds of issues that happened in early liturgy impact contemporary worship?
I think it can impact it, but it doesn’t always necessarily have to. For example, as the adage goes, history is always instructive; it’s not necessarily normative. The church may make decisions based on theological reasons apart from what we might see. But here’s how it impacted. In what do we recognize our commonality? Does everybody have to be doing the same thing or saying the same thing in liturgy? The study of early liturgy can be very helpful and instructive to us at this point because we can start recognizing that there is indeed legitimate diversity.

One of the most promising things today is the suggestion of a kind of ecumenical ordo that Gordon Lathrop and some others have been promoting. Lathrop’s book, Holy Things,* for example, would be a good required reading for an ecumenical audience. Lathrop says, “What is the ordo of Christian worship?” It’s not so much all the things that are done but “What does the church do?” It gathers. It, in some form, hears the Scriptures together. It prays together. It does the meal together. And it is sent forth into the world to be the Body of Christ. Within that kind of common structure there’s plenty of room for variety and diversity. 

If you take the covers off the current worship books of several denominations, you may well find that there’s much more commonality than distinction.

Recognition of ministries, for example, is also a big question. Everything has a history. Everything develops, and there are different patterns of structuring ordered ministries in early Christianity. Maybe that would be instructive for us to look at again today. For example, one of the hot issues in Lutheranism is the call to a common mission statement which was proposing full communion between the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Some Lutherans are really struggling with that issue because one of the stipulations for full communion is that ELCA now embrace the historic episcopacy. I have been for this call to a common mission precisely because it requires ELCA to finally take on the historic episcopacy. That seems to me to be the confessional preference of the Lutheran documents, and here’s an opportunity for the church to move in that direction. But at the same time, not everybody in early Christianity embraced the historic episcopacy in the same way. There are multiple patterns. Is there not a sense in which today one can recognize the legitimacy of different patterns of ordained ministry not as being church divisive? Perhaps.

What I find so fascinating about Lutheran resistance to embracing multiple ordained forms of ministry is the fact that they sound more medieval than Catholics and Anglicans at this point. Thomas Aquinas kept arguing that there’s one real ordained office, that of priesthood. Consequently, that’s why for several years bishops in the Roman Catholic Church were consecrated; they weren’t ordained. But we cannot think of the offices of bishops, presbyters and deacons as they were thought of in the 16th century. Contemporary Catholicism and Anglicanism have looked back again at the early Christian notion of orders within the church, and the laity is also an order within the church. All are baptized to priesthood, but within that baptismal priesthood there are different orders.
 

Ed. Note: A review of Lathrop’s Holy People is included in this month's Reviews.

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