Spring Institute for Lived Theology 2005 Proceedings
April 26 - 29, 2005
Session 1: Professor Jürgen Moltmann
Reborn to a Living Hope: Personal Experience and Political Consciousness
I would like to speak about theology on the personal level of understanding your own faith, and then speak on theology in a parish because I was a pastor in a parish for five years, and then in a church seminary, and then in a state university, and then in retirement. So this will take us to before coffee, and after coffee I would like to introduce some ideas of what we called in Germany, in post-war and post-Auschwitz Germany, "political theology", to be involved in political questions.
Ok, I prepared myself of course because I didn't know who you are and who I was going to meet here. Because Charles said this was the Project on Lived Theology I looked in my files and found a manuscript on lived theology. And I thought it may fit.
Well, my way to theology was untraditional and very strange. Things in my life have generally turned out differently from what I intended. I wanted, as a young man, to study physics and mathematics, for the heroes of my youth were Max Planck and Einstein and all the others. And then when I was 17, in 1943, I only barely—and by a miracle—survived a firestorm that destroyed my hometown, Hamburg, in July of 1943. We were drafted from school to the anti-aircraft batteries in Hamburg, and my family was at the center of Hamburg, so I was at the center of this bombing of Hamburg. The royal air force named this operation, biblical as British soldiers were, "operation Gomorrah", so it was to destroy the sinful city of Hamburg. 40,000 people died on the last night of that bombing when the firestorm destroyed the eastern part of Hamburg, and my friend Gerhard Schopper, who was standing right next to me, was blown to pieces by my side. And at that time, for the first time in my life, I cried out for God. Where is God? God where are you? And then the second question was: Why am I not dead? What am I alive for? Well, these questions are still with me today. And to find an answer to these two questions became more important to me than the formula of Einstein.
I came from a secular family. My grandfather was a great master of the freemasons in Hamburg and wrote articles against Christianity and these dark people in these superstitious organizations called churches. My father had learned in WWI to respect the hidden God above us, and the moral law within us, under which his weak son had to suffer. We went to church only once a year on Christmas Eve, and later, as my father confessed, not to celebrate the birth of the Redeemer but to celebrate the sacred family—father, mother and the first child.
I was drafted to the German army when I was 17. When the attack on the bridges of Amheim began in 1944, we recruits, barely trained, were thrown onto the front line at Helmond. After the first tank attack only half of our company survived. In 1945, I put my gun aside in a wood and was taken prisoner by English soldiers who liberated me, at least from lice.
The war ended for me on May 8, 1945, in Belgium. We were looking forward to going home. This was a very dark and poor camp. There was, until the end of the war, a lot of Nazi terror in the barracks at night. We had doubts about the victory of the German army and Hitler got beaten and…this was a very poor camp.
Well, we were looking forward to going home, but instead of homecoming I was brought to England and then up to Scotland, first in a labor camp in Scotland where we built roads and construction work, etcetera, and I served as an interpreter for the German prisoners who worked there. And this was my first encounter with human kindness of the Scottish workers and their families. They took us not as prisoners, former enemies, or as the numbers we had on our back of our jackets, but as human beings. And this was a great experience for me because we were treated in the German army not as human beings, but as (muffled) who were ordered to the front lines to die somewhere. So this was the first experience for me of human kindness after a long time of experiencing inhumanity.
Then I was brought to a special camp, the Norton Camp near Nottingham. This was a camp of a kind of reeducation of young prisoners of war in England, run by the YMCA and an American businessman, John Bowvick (sp?), who put his money into the education of German prisoners of war for a post-war Germany. This camp had three parts: he first part for those who had not passed the final examination in school, and I belonged to that; and then there was a camp for the education of teachers; and another camp for the education of pastors. So after passing my examination, I had to decide to become a teacher as all my forefathers were or to become a pastor, which was new in my family. And I decided to study theology; this was due to certain experiences.
In the Scottish labor camp one day an army chaplain came to us, to visit us—I'm not quite sure whether he was British or American—and he distributed small Bibles. Most of my comrades thought he should have given us cigarettes (laughter). And I started to read, and there was an appendix with some Psalms. Psalm 39 was the first text of the Bible that spoke to me. This is a Psalm of lament…and this gave words to my experiences of abandonment and isolation and loneliness in that situation. So this was the first time I read the Bible because there was no religious education in my family before. I was educated with good German literature and idealism and that sort of thing, but those poems I had learned by heart didn't speak to me in this situation of isolation. But the Psalms did. And then I read the gospel of Mark, and when I came to the death cry of Jesus, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" I all of a sudden had the impression: there's one who understands you, who speaks of the heavy weight on your conscience, on your heart. And so Jesus became my brother in need and my redeemer from this loneliness and forsakenness by his being forsaken himself. I think I never made a decision for Jesus, but I'm certain that he found me when I was lost and accepted me. And this was the reason I turned, in this education camp, not to the teachers quarter but to the pastors to find out what is true about Christian faith. I had not the intention to become a pastor because I had not known any pastor in my life. There were only the teachers around me—my father, my grandfather—but no pastors. But I studied then theology to find out the truth.
So my theological virtue was theological curiosity. (laughter) It's true, because everything was fabulously new for me—the Bible, the Christian tradition, was all new. And so I had a fresh approach to the tradition. We were aloud to write postcards home. When I wrote to my father, my humanistic father, that now I wanted to study theology instead of mathematics and physics, he replied that I should not forget to procreate a family. (laughter) I did not know what was in his mind, but I think he thought his weakly son would become a Catholic and as a Catholic would become a monk, and this was a disaster for the family tradition, and the family tree. Well, I satisfied him later: we have four girls and now four grandsons, and so everything's OK with the family tradition. But that was his reaction.
Later he was very kind and followed me and at the end of his life he wrote a religious testament for me to be read after his death where he stated what he could believe—the Sermon on the Mount, for example, and the Ten Commandments; but not the miracles of Jesus and not the resurrection. So when Charles (Marsh) brought me to Monticello I felt very much at home with Jefferson. (laughter)
In April of 1948 I returned to Hamburg, to the damaged home of my parents which was full of refugees from east Prussia; this was a problem of post-war Germany when millions of Germans had to leave Prussia and Silisia and be housed in west Germany.
Then I learned Greek with the help of my mother who was a teacher in Greek and history and German, etcetera. And upon examination I came to Göttingen to study, and I studied everything I could because I was completely hungry and thirsty for wisdom, and for everything, so I studied philosophy and theology, and every guest lecturer who came. And at night we saw French films and read refugee literature and the first American literature that came to us (we were excluded from the rest of the world in Nazi-Germany for a long time).
I slept at first in the seminary cloak room because there was no other place, and ate subsidized student lunch for a few pence, and in the evening listened to Professor Iwand, who was my hero, and spent time talking about Martin Luther's theology by candlelight because of electricity cuts at that time. It was a wonderful time. We lived only the life of the mind. My father financed my study with one hundred marks which was not very much a month and then set my time certain limits. I had six semesters, three years, and then he would finish subsidizing my studies.
But after two semesters I fell in love with a certain girl. Elizabeth was her name. She was already a doctoral student with Otto Weber, and in order to become a little closer to her I went to him and asked him if he would also accept me as a doctoral student. And he gave me a very special topic for a doctoral dissertation on early French Huguenot theology. This was completely unknown to me but I found it, and during my time as an undergraduate, besides everything else, I wrote this dissertation to finish in these three years.
In 1952 I set my doctoral exams and oral exams and got married within a fortnight. I took on a little too much I think, but things still haven't changed much in this respect.
Well in my time at Göttingen University we students were always struggling with each other (muffled words) and we threw catch words into our faces like "demythologization", or "imminent Trinity", etcetera. This was a time of a theological culture of dispute before hard controversy degenerated into disorderly dialogue and dialogue turned into trivial pluralism and then fell silent. So I always ask students to make up their conviction and struggle and not let everything go. So this post-modern way of "anything goes" is the end of all silence and theology. Nobody is taking anybody seriously.
Ok, so then after a period through which different local and regional churches of Germany, in Berlin, and because my wife was born in Potsdam in east Germany at that time, we wanted to go there to build up a church in those destroyed regions. But I was not allowed to get into the Russian soil because I was not in a Russian prison camp but an English prison camp and they expected spies or sleepers or whatever.
So we returned to west Germany, and then I accepted a pastorate in Bremen-Wasserhorst. The village lay on a dike on a river near Bremen, seven miles long, 60 farms (500 meters between one farm and the next—very important for peace), 500 souls, 3000 cows, 20% church-goers, 80% communicants two times a year as this was a reformed congregation where all the young of the village in youth groups and women's meetings for old and young. Now you can imagine the gap between two theologians equipped with doctorates and this village. Luckily I had learned to play Skat quite well in the camps and barracks, and after glorious victory over the best of the farmers I withdrew as long as my reputation was still intact. In this little church in Wasserhorst I learned to preach to many fewer people. I found it difficult because I had never heard any sermons—I was a young man—and was not a particularly gifted speaker. Those were hard years but very good ones. We lived in a rectory with eight rooms, though at first we used only one corner of one room until the children came. We heated the place with a primitive iron stove. We were flooded from the river. We occasionally had rats in the cellar, mice in the kitchen, owls in the roof and wild cattle in the garden. In these years our first children were born and in the mornings in this rural village I had time to study because when I tried to visit the farmers in the mornings they were very upset and disturbed; the pastor should come in the afternoon or evening, but not in the morning and not into the kitchen. So I was able to study, especially the reformed tradition. In these five years I learned to love life. I was not a very professional pastor but I liked being confronted with the whole breadth and depth of life: children and old people, men and women, healthy and sick, birth and death. I missed this later when I became a professor and had only to deal with the educated or uneducated youngsters of other families in the distance between the podium and giving lectures. Giving lectures in a seminar is different from being a pastor in the full range of life.
I should have liked, as a theologian, to remain a pastor and we had in mind to move to another congregation when our common doctoral father Otto Weber came and said "we need you in the Church Hochschule in Wuppertal", a confessing church founded in Germany in 1935 and closed by the Gestapo the next day. And then they went underground and had education for students of the confessing church in Germany (muffled words). And he (Weber) told me they needed me. And so against my own will I became a professor at the Church Hochschule in Wuppertal. During my doctoral studies, I was transformed from a despairing but still confident Kierkegaardian to a Barmen-Confessing Church Barthian. But I saw no future for systemic theology after Karl Barth because in more than 8,000 pages he had said everything and he had said it so well the only criticism one could raise was: 8,000 pages? How can the truth be so long? Well I was freed from this error when I met the Dutch theologian Arnold van Ruler and learned from him the "Theology of the Apostolate" and his "Coming Kingdom of God Theology", eschatology as we call it. Van Ruler started a lecture which converted me or convinced me that one can make theology even after Karl Barth. He started the lecture with the sentence: "I smell a rose and I smell the Kingdom of God." And if you look out here at the beauty of the flowers (pointing outside) you see something of the Kingdom of God. But I had never heard this from Karl Barth [or others]; there was only the sovereignty of God and obedience. In 1958 I started teaching in Wuppertal.
I started with lectures on the Kingdom of God. We were a young faculty and we developed our own theology without looking over our shoulders at tradition, and the great word proceeded us. This was a great opportunity for us to develop new theologies. Pannenberg with his "Theology of History", and I with "Theology of Hope". This was our theological new beginning, away from an era of German restoration and the existentialism of the 1950s. Because after the war the restoration of the old institutions were at the forefront ...At the beginning of the 60s we got out of this fortress of restoration and tried new things. (muffled sentence) With the social democratic party coming into power, we said "try more democracy". This is now our new experiment.
Well, in 1958, together with the faculty, we drew up a protest, "Fight Atomic Death" against the rearmament of west Germany. For two years I was even a member of the Rotary Club. During holiday in Switzerland I read Bloch's principal of hope; he lived in east Germany at that time and understood himself as a religious Marxist—a strange thing. When I first met him I said, "but Professor Bloch, you are an atheist, why do you speak so much about religion?" And then he answered, "I am an atheist for God's sake." Only a Jew can say that, because the second commandment says to not make any images or concepts for God, because God is present and if God is present you need no image, you must just live in his presence.
I was deeply impressed by him and then I wrote the "Theology of Hope". He (Bloch) started with a condition of atheism and a kind of messianic atheism, and I started with a theism of the biblical history of the problems of God and the commandments of God in the old testament and the resurrection of Christ in the new testament. I published this (Theology of Hope) in 1964. There's no need to go into that further; I was bowled over by the response. I only recovered from the response in 1967 after moving to Tübingen. I raced after my own shadow with lectures around the country and later all over the world, which did not leave much time for my students or my family.
Then came the Christian-Marxist Dialogues, which was very important for Europe at that time because we had a military build-up in the east and in the west [muffled], so we needed this Christian-Marxist dialogue. The last one was in Czechoslovakia in May of 1968. I became friends with Johann Baptist Metz and with Milan Machovev and Viteslav Gardavsky in the Czech Republic.
In 1963 I was invited to a chair in Bonn. This was a state university with a theological faculty and if you become a professor there you become a state servant. I did so with considerable hesitation, for what happened in the Third Reich was still a vivid memory. So to be in a church seminary would give you more freedom over against politics, than if you were in a state university as a state servant, etcetera. I found Bonn difficult at that time. I was no longer a good Barthian, but a post-Barthian, and the old Barthians were critical of me.
Then came Tübingen. We had intended to stay at Bonn for a while but when Ernst Käsemann, new testament scholar, came and said we need you now in Tübingen, he spoke to me with apocalyptic ferver: he told me "if you don't come you are disobedient to the Lord", so I could not resist any longer. I had only one brief semester in Tübingen and then we had already planned to spend one academic year at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, by invitation of my friend Fred Herzog.
And so I came then in 1967-68 to Duke University. We traveled via Paris to bid adieu to European culture, crossed to New York where we lost ourselves in the labyrinth of Manhattan, and after that flew to North Carolina, the land of long-leaf pine trees, golf courses, and black ghettos. I had to teach undergraduate students at that time, and they were chewing gum and eating popcorn during the lectures, and when I was able to catch their attention, their jaws dropped down and I felt lucky I got my ideas through. At that time the English translation of Theology of Hope appeared and was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times, and that morning my students came with big eyes and said, "You have made it." (laughter)
And then in April of 1968 there was a large symposium on the Theology of Hope; this event was very memorable. Just at the climax—I was discussing with (muffled name) the concept of history in English and the concept of geschichte in German, which is untranslatable—Harvey Cox burst into the lecture room crying, "Martin Luther King was shot!" The ghettos went up in flames all over the country; we saw at night the fires and the outrage of blacks. That night the conference broke off, everybody went home as soon as they could, and there was curfew in Durham, so we could not go out at night. It was a state of emergency. And then something unforgettable happened.
When I came to Duke in 1967 I got the impression of a nice, well-educated, country-club university; this, I thought, is not the place where the action is. It was kind of sleepy and no one was really interested in theological debates. But then after the assassination of Martin Luther King and the breaking up of this conference the students, otherwise slow and hard to move, set up a demonstration—400 students, men and women, sat in the quadrangle for six days and six nights, part of the time in rain, and mourned Martin Luther King. On the sixth day black students from a nearby college came, danced through the rows and sat down beside the white students, and after a while we all sang "We shall overcome someday". Since that time Duke University became alive and a place where the action was. And this was very important for me because I saw the face of the other America (muffled).
Deeply moved, we returned to Tübingen after this in April of 1968. In Berlin Rudi Dutschke was shot at. In Tübingen the students protested in rage. "For OUR sake, not only for MY sake" was the cry, with Gerhard Ebeling returning to Zurich where the world was in order, and Joseph Ratzinger to Regensburg. He (Ratzinger) later said when he saw the students asking these questions, that he saw into the face of Satan and the destruction of the world, and out of this apocalyptic fear he left us alone in the battle with the students and retired to Regensburg, where also the world was still right, and where his brother lived, etc. Now he is Pope, and Tübingen was one of his changing experiences. (muffled sentence)
Well, I was open for discussions with the students at the time because they could have been my children. Ebeling and Ratzinger had no children, of course, and they couldn't understand that these were our own children protesting against our way of thinking and our traditions, etcetera, etcetera. So this was a big problem. Also I knew Karl Marx—I wasn't a Marxist so I was not accepted by all the student groups who changed from theology to Marxism for a while.
Through the Theology of Hope and the World Council of Churches where I served on the Faith and Order Commission for a while, and then through the Catholic Reformed…(muffled) where I served on the editorial board for about 20 years, I came into contact with liberation theology in Latin America, especially Gustavo Gutierrez; black theology in this country—Jim Cone is one of my oldest friends and whenever we come to New York we meet with Jim; with Minjung Theology in Korea; and Kairos Theology. So the relationships were very important to me at that time.
It's a curious thing about theology. If I reflect on the experiences of these last 40 years, problems come up, are discussed to a point of personal recrimination, at least in Germany, and then, still unsolved, quietly disappear. Pensioned off, so to speak. What was controversial in the "secular" 50s, or the "secularized society" (Bonhoeffer) was never solved, but replaced in the 60s by the debate of the capitalist society and Marxist criticism of the New Frankfort School, etcetera. This disappeared. Ten years later "revolution" gave way to "religion" and interfaith dialogue as if there were no unreligious persons anymore; we have only now inter-religious dialogue, but not dialogue with unreligious persons or atheists. Where are all these atheists? (muffled sentence) And then the 80s came with the "Me Decade" and the inner search for identity and the new thrust toward individualism in the Western society. Theological books were ousted by book on personal problems. Counseling, esoteric, took over from theological ideas.
Not least, then, new feminist theologies emerged, and first pushed us men aside. I think there was a turning point in my life in 1977. There was a conference in Mexico City. Jim Cone was also present and he said, "Jurgen, they want to crucify you," and there were liberation theologians, many of them members of communist parties who were waiting for me to struggle with me because I was not a real Marxist or whatever. I was a liberal theologian from the first world while they were liberation theologians from the third world. When they had finished with me (laughs) Jim Cone stood up and looked them all in the face and said, "As far as I know there are more blacks living in Brazil and Latin America than in the United States of America, but I don't see a black face among you liberation theologians, so where's the race question with your liberation theology?" Well this put them to some reflections and self-criticisms. But then (name muffled) from Cuba stood up and said, "Well as far as I know 50% of humankind is female, but between you liberation theologians and you black theologians I don't see a female face. Where are the women?" And then it became clear to me: I supported these new contextual theologies to the best of my ability, but I am not black so black theology is not for me, at least not authentically; I am not oppressed so I cannot be a liberation theologian; and I am not a woman so feminist theology is not my authentic possibility. What shall I do?
So as this became clear to me I supported these new theologies to the best of my ability, but I myself withdrew into a productive disengagement and concentrated on long-term theological problems and I began my systematic contribution to theology—a social doctrine of the Trinity first and then an ecological doctrine of creation, God in creation, and then on the way of Jesus Christ.
Then came something very unexpected. The closer I came to the end of my academic life, the more I enjoyed the companionship of students and lectures, and so after 60 I began with a French courage. Things developed rapidly and unremittingly, and I was then, which I had not planned, writing The Spirit of Life on pneumatology of the life of the Spirit, the life-giving Spirit, because there were not many books on the Holy Spirit in Germany at that time. We were Christocentric but not Trinitarian, not in a Trinitarian way open to the experience of the Holy Spirit…(muffled). If you—here's a theological reflection—in the Nicene Creed you have the filioque, that the Spirit comes from the Father and the Son, then the Spirit is always number three; if you take this out, then you can say "Father, Spirit, Son", "Father, Son, Spirit"—the Spirit can also be number two. And this would fit the interpretation of the Synoptic Gospels much better than that Jesus came from the Father through the Holy Spirit; and for most of the time of his life the Spirit was the leading figure in his life: the Spirit came upon him and rested upon him, and in baptism the Spirit brought him into the dessert, and the Spirit worked through him in healing and in accepting people, etcetera, etcetera. Only after the cross and resurrection does the Spirit come from the Son; but if you have this filioque you cannot speak about a Spirit Christology, you must tell the story of Jesus without referring to the Spirit. And therefore this was important for me. Strangely enough this book, The Spirit of Life, brought me into contact with orthodox theology in Romania, and with Pentecostal theology in Latin America and Korea.
Well, German professors have to retire at least at the age of 68. I drank the last drop of the joy and burden of academic life until the last day in 1994 after a terrific farewell party in the theological seminar in Tübingen when I discovered that the pleasures of academic life remained. It was only the burdens that I was able to shake off; life went on as before—reading, writing, traveling and talking.
And now I'm coming to the end of the first part. I made some statements for my students when I had this farewell party.
First, (I spoke) on theological passion. "Theology has nothing to do with religious management studies. Theology is a passion, which one pursues with all one's heart and with all one's soul and with all one's strength—if you can't do that better leave it alone all-together. Theology comes from the passion of God, from the open wound of God in one's own life, from (muffled) indictment of God, from the accusing cry to God of the crucified Christ, from the missing of God and the experiencing of suffering in the present time. If you reflect on your own experiences, which is in the collective history of my people—Auschwitz and Stalingrad and Vietnam and Bosnia and Chernobyl and now this catastrophe in Asia—then you now what I'm talking about, this open wound of God in one's own life. But that's only the one side. Theology springs from the unbounded joy in the presence of God's Spirit, the Spirit of the resurrection, so that one affirms this life with the whole undivided love of God. And in spite of all life's devastations, God is there and wholly present, so that we are able to love life again. And to love this life in spite of the dangers and injustices, this is important for theology and for me personally. That's divine delight, God's delight in life... (muffled). So the love of life is unconditional, I think, and we strengthen the love of life if we see God for life. So God's pain and God's delight are the two experiences which keeps one in suspense, and I said at that time (at the farewell party), 'I wish you suffering in God, delight in God, and passion for the Kingdom of God.'"
And my second point was personal conviction. "We are theologians wholly and completely or not at all. This is not a religious profession that we practice while on duty in order then to do something quite different in private life. We have to do with the ultimate things, things by which people stand or are for. So don't ask, 'What will the bishop or the superintendent say, or what will the congregation say, or what will my colleagues or the media say?' Don't ask, 'Can I be sure of general assent? Am I qualified myself for a call or appointment?' Don't ask the question, 'Am I generally well-liked?' Faith is a personal conviction. It is the only personal conviction that can support us in life and in death, raise us up, console and accompany us. 'I know that my Redeemer lives'—this is a conviction. And whether people like you or not like you, keep to your conviction. We don't have to believe every dogma and every article of the creed. Every Christian has a fundamental right to doubt, of course, every Christian and every person too. So don't be a super theologian who believes everything that is said in the Christian tradition; be convinced only of what convinces you. No one understands everything at once. There are degrees of importance and steps in understanding. But the right to the liberty of conscience also requires me to never and in no circumstances speak and act against my conscience, neither on my own free will nor under compulsion."
And the last point, imagination for the Kingdom of God. "You're going to be pastors in our various regional churches. You'll be aware that in the old, established churches, looking after all the people is a discontinued model, at least in Germany. People are leaving these established churches to which they belonged by tradition; they'll join a church to which they belong by their own will. So belonging-ness is longer important in west Germany for being a Christian, but your own decision. So the church membership in east Berlin is less than 10%, and what was formerly east Germany is now 20%; the rest are un-churched people or irreligious people. They are no longer protesting atheists, they just lost God and lost the memory of it, and they don't miss anything. That's a very strange situation. In the western part of Germany we are seeing a dramatic new drive towards individualization and a corresponding decline in religious affiliation. So you will no longer be running a parish, looking after a congregation, celebrating just as it was from the cradle to the grave; you will be gathering a congregation and building it up. And you will be living with the un-churched and talking about faith with the Godless. Don't withdraw into your own little pious group. Go to the people who are far off, and to the Godless. I think about Bonhoeffer and one of his letters. He said, 'Between Godless people I am so free to speak about God, but between pious people who know everything already I am ashamed, I am embarrassed.' So go out to the Godless. When I was a pastor in Bremen—I was a student pastor—there were social democrats who had left the church and they were very strict atheists, and to sit together with them and have a glass of wine brought them always to the God question, so much that the Catholic poet, Heinrich Burr (sp?)—he was a pious and committed Catholic—once said, 'I don't like these atheists; they always talk about God.' So this was a good time to be challenged, and one should not avoid being challenged. We don't know what form the church of Christ will take once our established church (in Germany) is at an end, but I'm certain that every end conceals a new beginning because God always hides new beginnings in the end of what is old. And in the crisis of the old we find chances for the new. So in my generation we developed ideas about a participatory church where every church member is not only welcomed but there's a certain place where he/she is used. You will discover the new beginning of Christ's church for yourself. Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and justice of the world, and then the living congregation and the old church will be added unto you just of themselves."
So this is what I said at the end of my professional life and since that time I've been a free-lance theologian (laughs). And so I'm here to learn from you and listen to you.