In a long and highly public career, Martin Marty has been many things: church historian, man-about-town, author of more than 40 books, cultural commentator, media favorite, after-dinner speaker, pastoral theologian and magazine columnist.
One thing he has avoided, however, is becoming a church politician.
A decade ago, as his church was joining with two other Lutheran denominations to form the 5-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Marty declined to take part in the negotiations.
And though Christian unity has been one of his favorite themes throughout his career, he has not been one of the ecumenical engineers toiling behind the scenes to bring churches together.
“I have never spent a moment writing a denominational document,” Marty said this week. “You’re not going to find many people who are more bored than I by ecumenical negotiations and official documents.”
Bored or not, this consummate observer suddenly finds himself, sleeves rolled up, in the thick of it. Last fall the ELCA picked Marty to revive one of the most ambitious–and thus far, disappointing–efforts at Protestant unity, the Lutheran-Episcopalian Concordat.
The Concordat was 28 years in the making before both churches voted on it last summer. Some viewed it as the last, best chance for some like-minded Christians to show that their differences were temporary, and secondary to the belief that binds them.
Just a whisker shy of merger, the Concordat would have declared that on essential matters of faith, Lutherans and Episcopalians agree. Clergy would be free to minister in either denomination, and worshipers would be free to take communion in either denomination, though each church would retain its own structure and culture.
Marty was a fan of that approach, but he was happy to comment on it rather than politic for it. For various audiences, he put the issue into 500 years of historical context. He dissected the modern church culture, examining aspects that were either friendly or resistant to ecumenism.
And Marty was far from the ELCA assembly floor when the proposed “Concordat,” previously approved by the Episcopalians, fell six votes–out of more than 1,000–short of the two-thirds majority needed to seal the deal.
Before that vote, Marty had told me that if the Concordat, product of 28 years of negotiations, fell short, it would be a generation or more before such an effort could be mounted again.
Now Marty is just a few weeks shy of retirement, leaving the professorship at the University of Chicago Divinity School that has been his anchorage throughout his career. He has been channeling his efforts toward his new Public Religion Project, a sort of clearinghouse and round table for information on American religions. And, of course, the offers to speak, write, edit and appear keep rolling in.
In short, he has every excuse you could want to turn down the difficult, unglamorous and, frankly, unpromising task of reviving the Concordat before both Lutherans and Episcopalians lose interest.
So why did he agree to do it?
“The bishop asked me to do it,” Marty said.
H. George Anderson, presiding bishop of the ELCA, called Marty last fall and made the request. Marty did not hesitate.
Though he is seldom identified this way, Marty is an ordained minister in the ELCA. Anderson is his boss. And though his ministry is not something he needs for the reason most of us need our jobs, though he has not spent most of his time in a congregation, before an altar, Marty does not take his ordination lightly.
“For me the word `vocation,’ or calling, is a huge concept,” he said. “I have a call to be of service to the church.”
“I do really love the `one, holy, catholic and apostolic church,’ ” Marty added, citing the Nicene Creed that most Christians profess. In fact, Marty’s first book, more than 30 years ago, had four chapters: One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.
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Marty and his fellow Concordat writers, Rev. Todd Nichol of St. Paul and Dr. Michael Root of Strasbourg, France, will meet with a group of appointed advisers later this month and begin figuring out how they can revise the Concordat so that it meets the approval of its Lutheran opponents without unraveling its support in the Episcopal Church.
They hope to finish the revision in time for Lutherans to vote on it in 1999 and Episcopalians to vote on it in 2000. Marty is not making any predictions, except one: “Up or down, I’m going to have fun doing it.”
Not laugh-a-minute, volleyball-on-the-beach fun, perhaps. But there is an old-fashioned kind of fun that comes from hearing a call, knowing it is for you, and answering it.
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