For at least the past five years one quote from a now sainted theologian has rattled around in my head. “Too often,” said Anthony Thiselton, “we attack or defend before we have genuinely understood.”¹ He spoke that in an address he gave in the mid-80s as he took up a post as Principal of St. John’s in Nottingham. He was concerned about the nature, and tenor, of biblical studies and was determined to foster in his students a cordiality and curiosity befitting of both the church and the academy. He understood then what we all know now, people do not listen to understand, they listen to respond.

Well before Thiselton crystalized a problem a I see regularly, in both the church and society, Helmut Thielicke put the same problem in slightly different terms. “The field of historical study,” he wrote, “is full of busy detectives trying to track down the original source of mischief.”² He saw people trying to do “history-writing on the basis of criminology.”³ We don’t simply listen to respond, we listen to find something attack so that we can call the other person out, and maybe, assign them some blame to one such thing or another. But, Thielicke also understood that he was not immune to that kind of pull. He once preached a sermon in the wake of the atrocity and destruction of the Second World War where he counts himself among those who are guilty.

“We all sense that somewhere in the hideous disaster which has befallen the world that there is a great and terrible guilt. If only we know who was to blame.”⁴ Rather than seek to adjudicate and assign blame only to a select few whose hands might have actual blood on them, Thielicke encourages his hearers to look first in the mirror. He writes,

in all the fateful guilt that hovers over the world, its continents and seas, my guilt is a part of it too. What I see is my own heart blown up to the gigantic global proportions; retaliation is a law that rules my little lift too. I know how very much I am merely an echo of those around me. When people are kind and friendly, my face lights up. When they vex or cheat me, my mind and spirit is darkened. We need only to look around us to see the spark of malice  leaping furiously from pole to pole, in a crowded train, for example, or in a queue outside some store or office, where a single manifestation of spite or impatience immediately flashes out and affects the whole group…. I must therefore begin with myself and my own guilt wherever there is anything to be said about the world’s guilt. I cannot simply look out the window and be morally indignant over the great Babylon that lies spread out before me in all its godless darkness. No, what I see out there in global proportions must only remind me of my own “Babylonian heart” (Francis Thompson). And quite involuntarily I will be reminded of the prophet Nathan’s hard rebuke to David: “Thou art the man!” I am the one who needs forgiveness, and the sanitation of the world must begin with me.⁵

Thielicke and Thiselton’s words speak to me today not only because I see the kind of problematic listening and history as criminology everywhere I look in the church and the world, but because I am not immune to it either. If this problem exists in the world it is not simply because they do it, it is because I do it too. No amount of self-righteous indignation can mask the fact that I see this stuff in the world because I see it in the mirror. 

One of the reasons I often reach back to theologians like Thielicke, Thiselton, and especially someone like Martin Franzmann, is because they have a way of showing me my own blindspots in ways that help me not only see them but also address them. That doesn’t mean I succeed, of course, but I hear in their voices people who understand not just “theology” not just “being a theologian” but who understand me and who might be able to offer some correction and direction. We all need those kinds of people, living and dead, to correct and direct us so that we do not get trapped in our blindspots, so that we actually see the faces in the world and the one that looks back at us in the mirror. 

Franzmann, more than others, understood this about theologians. He wrote once that he saw two stages of development in theologians. The first stage is where we acquire all sorts of information and in doing so, our eyes are opened up to all the problems in the church and world, and, what’s so dangerous, we have all the diagnostic and prognostic tools to address them. We can name each problem. We can call it out. We can say who is wrong and why. We can attack and defend because we think we understand all the ways that those people cause problems in the church and world. The second stage, though, is the more mature one for Franzmann, because that is when the theologian takes all of the diagnostic and prognostic powers and bends them back to the person in the mirror, who doesn’t see how all of those people cause problems but sees that he is the problem. I’m working on getting to the second stage, but the first is so hard to leave. 

That piece by Franzmann, though, doesn’t just call me out, it points me to the one who knows the man in the mirror better than the man himself, who knows all the men and women in the mirror and shed his blood for them. That’s the real issue I see in so many of the discussions I see others having and I have in my own head about others, all of us forget that if Christ shed his blood for me, he did it for them too, for the people we cannot stand, the people who do not think like us or act like us or affirm what we do or castigate what we do. Christ died for all. Gave up his life and took it back up again for the people I love and the people I cannot stand as he did for me.

But the truth remains: Only God at work can work the righteousness of God. Our angry impetuosity cannot do it: it can only impede and mar. Our filthiness—that is a strong word, but it fits exactly our dirty self-insistence and self-seeking and self- delight—can only hide the glory of His grace, can only becloud the Giver, God, with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning. So, strip it off; let not our slogan be: “I am the man, and wisdom shall die with me!” but: “Thou my Lord and my God, art He!” Face Him; be swift to hear; in meekness receive the engrafted Word which is able to save your souls. — Martin Franzmann, “Quick to Hear, James 1:19–21.” Lutheran Witness 67 (June 15, 1948) 191–92.

1.  Anthony Thiselton, “Address and Understanding: Some Goals and Models of Biblical; Interpretation as Principles of Vocational Training,” Anvil 3, no. 2 (1986): 111–112. ↩︎
2.  Helmut Thielicke, Out of the Depths, translated by G. W. Bromiley, (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1962), 80.  ↩︎
3. Thielicke, Out of the Depths, 80. ↩︎
4.  Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father, translated by John W. Doberstein, (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1960), 102.  ↩︎
5. Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father, 104–105. ↩︎