We have moved a few dozen times. Our new neighbor said she does not know where to start in cleaning her house, so she was a bit jealous of our radical change. Readers who have been in the same home for 30 years or more have said the same thing.
My favorite books are in a bookshelf that I remember from childhood, because my mother bought it and used it wherever she lived. We also have a table and a rocker she bought, plus a small set of shelves. Siblings have furniture my father built during the Depression, when he stayed in high school and took woodshop, because there was so little work. All that furniture is still being used, after 80 years, because it was well made and real wood.
Some things are remembered for being lost. Most of our diplomas are gone now, because a certified transcript has more value than a diploma. Some items pass out of history, like the Ark of the Covenant, and all we can do is recall when we last had them. The most important are memories, such as often-told stories of the children and remembering when the grandchildren were tiny.
LI put the chapel network online last Saturday. When he was doing this, I had a flashback to a time we put his Atari computer together. "Dad, help me put this together." That was 30+ years ago. I endlessly brag that the two of us sold Mrs. Ichabod on the Atari as an educational tool. In fact, we really wanted to play games on it - and we did. But LI also went through the manual, page by page, and learned things that amazed a chemical engineer who also owned an early Atari. LI's venture into Unix got him his first and only professional job, and mine into Cisco got him involved in network engineering. I also took Unix, which was my entry point in university teaching.
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| Roland Bainton did not earn a photo in Wikipedia. |
I learned from doing some research about Yale professors that the famous ones from a few decades ago are now mostly forgotten. Roland Bainton was a super-star for writing gonzo bestsellers while earning praise for scholarship and teaching. I had to work hard to gather a few digital photos of him. I was reading his booklet about buildings named after famous Yalies. Many of them are known only through the booklet today.
Long ago I put together a collection of letters about Roland Bainton, all written by his former students. The letters are now in the Yale University archives. Bainton supplied me with the names and addresses, and I wrote to his distinguished graduate students, many of them retired now. One of them was a Roman Catholic bishop, the same one who marched with the Bethany Lutheran Seminary (ELS) faculty when one of the Marvin Schwan buildings was dedicated. When I got the announcement from the Mankato paper, I wondered, "Is that the Bainton student?" The PR announcement from Bethany boasted about the bishop's status as a Roman Catholic. He gave the lecture to start the ecumenical series. The same Erling Teigen event, when printed in the Bethany yearbook, omitted the salient facts for some reason.
When we pare things down, as we must, many values diminish. Do I really want to keep JFK Reckless Youth? No, but it is a good book to give away.
I have owned Luther's Sermons, Lenker edition, for decades. Some volumes look very beat up from reading in various locales. At least one is missing. Eight volumes cost me $40 new. That set and Galatians (Kregel) are my favorites for reading at any given time.
UOJ is going to be a passing fad, as time goes on. Knapp is so forgotten that Lutherans will not admit the Stephan-Walther cult got its double-justification from him.
The Biblical concept of justification by faith alone will be taught and remembered, if only by a few. UOJ turns into brassy Universalism, because it is only one step away from that heresy while remaining impossible to teach from the Scriptures, Luther, or the Confessions.
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| Walther approved the double justification language, which appeared first in the Woods translation, then took root in Germany. |
