BY ROBERT GREGORY
The Bowdoin Polar Bear and the Bowdoin College Chapel share the sentimental and the geographic center of the Bowdoin College campus. I think the Christian student lives somewhere between that Polar Bear and the Chapel; the Polar Bear representing the current cultural life of the College, and the Chapel representing commitments to the teachings and practices of the Christian faith which were the principle reasons for the founding of the College in 1794.
The foundation stone for this Gothic chapel building was set in 1844 during the tenure of Bowdoin College’s fourth President Leonard Woods. The building was completed and dedicated in 1855. The murals which line the interior walls depict Old and New Testament themes of biblical theology. Adam and Eve, Moses Giving the Law, David and Goliath, The Baptism of Christ, Peter Healing the Lame Man at the Beautiful Gate, and St. Paul Preaching on Mars Hill in Athens are among the larger than life pieces that remind the visitor that the chapel’s purpose was to provide a place for Christian worship on the campus of Bowdoin College.
The Polar Bear sculpture dates to 1937 when the graduating class of 1912 presented the granite bear as a gift to the College in memory of the April 6, 1909 successful expedition to the North Pole by Admiral Robert E. Peary (Bowdoin class of 1877). Standing guard at the rear doors of the Chapel, the Bowdoin Polar Bear is a strong and imposing mascot to the cultural values of the College, appearing on sweatshirts, knapsacks and baseball caps across the campus.
Enter the Prophet Jeremiah
The Bowdoin College students who have been studying the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah at the Joseph and Alice McKeen Study Center examined early in the semester God's call to this reluctant prophet to stand critically between the corrupted cultural and political rulers of Judah six centuries before the birth of Christ, and the priest, prophets and elders who failed to serve as the barriers to false religious teachings about Solomon's Temple and the corporate life of Judah as a worshiping people.
The prophet Jeremiah wrote oracles of prose and poetry to warn the political and religious leaders of Judah of the coming seventy-year exile to Babylon that awaited the priests, prophets and religious elite who controlled the temple precincts, as well as the family of the ruling monarchy who controlled secular spaces. Jeremiah's awareness of these cross pressures is evident in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of Jeremiah as the brooding prophet.
This essay will examine how the burdens of Jeremiah are similar to the responsibilities of a Christian student on a secular college campus. The normative stance of the Old Testament prophet was simultaneously critical of religious officials and secular rulers. This sounds like “church and state” to the modern ear, and it should. That legal doctrine however, whatever it means to American constitutional law, has become mischievous to Christian college students learning the practices of a Christian life and worship on a deeply secular college campus. Old Testament prophets like Jeremiah spoke with one voice to the religious and secular leaders, to the priests and monarchs, to the Chapel and the Polar Bear.
I propose to combine the insights of former Oxford professor of moral philosophy Oliver O’Donovan regarding the loneliness of the individual who becomes “load bearing” when the structures of a collective memory erode, with the observations of Rabbi (and member of Parliament!) Jonathan Sacks, that 70 years of exile offered to the remnant of Judah the ideal conditions for the formation of a new “creative minority.”
The Secular and the Sacred
The priests did not say, ‘Where is the Lord?’ Those who handle the law did not know me; the shepherds transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal and went after things that do not profit.“ Therefore I still contend with you, declares the Lord, and with your children's children I will contend. (Jeremiah 2. 8-9 ESV)
The prophet's denunciation of the secular monarchy and of the religious priests and prophets, brought together under a series of oracles the failures of those charged to govern both secular and sacred space. Christian theologians remind us that the alternative to the secular is not the sacred or spiritual, but the eternal. The saeculum refers to the passing age where institutions which have essential meaning for our time will be displaced and rendered either unnecessary or redundant when the Kingdom of God has fully come. The task of the monarch is important, but all Kings will surrender their thrones to the King of Kings when the time for secular rule has passed and their provisional authority is displaced.
Prophets, priests and kings, called to set boundaries and to correct wrong thinking about God and about the ordering of a common life, had themselves become culpable agents of evil within their respective jurisdiction. Priests failed to do priestly things, prophets failed to do prophet things, and the monarchs failed to do the princely things of just governance with their coercive powers of the sword. This decline in Judah was an inside job, and Jeremiah experienced the individual pressures of a lonely prophet carrying alone the burden to speak against collapsing institutions of religion and government:
the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests rule at their direction; my people love to have it so, but what will you do when the end comes? (Jeremiah 5.31 ESV)
The Lord provided Jeremiah with an intelligence report that even those closest to him would betray him:
5 “If you have raced with men on foot, and they have wearied you, how will you compete with horses? And if in a safe land you are so trusting, what will you do in the thicket of the Jordan? 6 For even your brothers and the house of your father, even they have dealt treacherously with you; they are in full cry after you; do not believe them, though they speak friendly words to you.” (Jeremiah 12:5-6 ESV)
As the venerated commentator Matthew Henry writes, "[t]hose who desert religion, commonly oppose it more than those who never knew it." The Chapel and the Polar Bear, like the priesthood and the monarchy, are geographic markers of this tension between the transcendent and the immanent, which for the present moment occupy common space in the architectural landscape of the College and in the awareness of the Bowdoin College Christian student that I belong here – but in a certain sense – only as an exile in a foreign land. (Psalm 137.4 ESV)
The Deconstruction of Religious Life – The Polar Bear and the Chapel
We learn from the Bowdoin College website that 150 years of Maine winters compromised the mortar that cemented together the granite stones of the Bowdoin Chapel. Between the spring of 2003 and the fall of 2004, the chapel was dismantled "stone by stone," with each stone numbered for reassembly using more modern architectural technologies. Those who are familiar with the words of Jesus about the destruction of the Second Temple walls "stone by stone" will recognize that Jesus was meditating on the prophecies from Jeremiah regarding the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in the 6th century BC.
6.1 Flee for safety, O people of Benjamin, from the midst of Jerusalem! Blow the trumpet in Tekoa, and raise a signal on Beth-haccherem, for disaster looms out of the north, and great destruction.2 The lovely and delicately bred I will destroy, the daughter of Zion. 3 Shepherds with their flocks shall come against her; they shall pitch their tents around her; they shall pasture, each in his place.4 “Prepare war against her; arise, and let us attack at noon! Woe to us, for the day declines, for the shadows of evening lengthen!5 Arise, and let us attack by night and destroy her palaces!” (Jeremiah 6 ESV)
13 And now, because you have done all these things, declares the Lord, and when I spoke to you persistently you did not listen, and when I called you, you did not answer, 14 therefore I will do to the house that is called by my name, and in which you trust, and to the place that I gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. 15 And I will cast you out of my sight, as I cast out all your kinsmen, all the offspring of Ephraim. (Jeremiah 7 ESV)
In the hours and days before his passion, trial, and execution by crucifixion, Jesus confronted his disciples with his own prophetic predictions of the coming destruction of the Second Temple that had been rebuilt in Jerusalem when the exiles returned to Jerusalem in 539. BC. Under the new leadership of priests and the prophets like Ezra and Nehemiah, returning exiles were instructed to restore the sacred and the public spaces in Jerusalem. As Jesus walked among that second temple, Matthew records:
24 Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. 2 But he answered them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” (Matthew 24 ESV)
The Gospel of John suggests that this predicted destruction of the Second Temple fulfilled in 70 AD stone by stone may have been a frequent subject of conversation between Jesus and his disciples. Shortly after Jesus called his disciples to follow him in the early days of ministry, John records how Jesus instructed the disciples that the catastrophic destruction of the Temple was a sign-act pointing to his own death and resurrection:
18 So the Jews said to him, “What sign do you show us for doing these things?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” 20 The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” 21 But he was speaking about the temple of his body. 22 When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken. (John 2 ESV)
For the errant people of Judah in Jeremiah’s day, it would require an experience like the destruction of Jerusalem, its Temple, and 70 years of exile to cure them of their superstitious reliance on the presence of the Temple of Solomon at the sentimental center of Jerusalem. In his famous Temple Sermon recorded in Jeremiah 7, the prophet chided them,
do not trust these deceptive words - this is the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord." (Jeremiah7. 4 ESV)
Worship and the SJW (Social Justice Warrior)
The more deeply one reads into the history of the life of Israel, and the criticism by the Old Testament prophets about the departures from the covenant privilege offered to them, the more aware one becomes of a nexus between ethical, moral and social justice failures on the one hand, and religious apostasy and idolatry on the other. Prophesying a hundred years before Jeremiah about the fall of the northern tribes of Israel at the hands of Assyrian invaders, Micah answers the most important question that any person can answer. What does the Lord require? What is required in religious worship? What is required of the moral agent? Micah's answers both questions in a single oracle:
6 “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings with calves a year old 7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? 8 He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6)
On college campuses across America, chapel buildings were constructed in the 18th and 19th century in recognition of the religious mission of that college. College architects reserved the high points and central locations of the campus as spaces for worship. "Stones on stones" chapels were meant to be a visible reminder that there was no uncontested secular space in the life of the college that did not owe public obedience to the God who created those spaces. As in the days of Jeremiah, the chapel, like the Temple of Solomon, was a visible reminder that God would dwell with his people. I understand that message to be: I am here in this public space!
More than any other contemporary scholar of Christian ethics, Oliver O'Donovan grasps how the vocabulary of salvation in both the Old and New Testament has a political prehistory in the deterioration of the moral and social life of Israel. That is why Jeremiah brings in his Temple Sermon (Jeremiah 7) a unified critique against the erroneous thinking about the sacred space of a temple and about the decline of socio-political justice in the public spaces in Judah:
5 “For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds, if you truly execute justice one with another, 6 if you do not oppress the sojourner, the fatherless, or the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own harm, 7 then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your fathers forever. 8 “Behold, you trust in deceptive words to no avail. 9 Will you steal, murder, commit adultery, swear falsely,
make offerings to Baal, and go after other gods that you have not known, 10 and then come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, ‘We are delivered!’—only to go on doing all these abominations? 11 Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, I myself have seen it, declares the Lord. (Jeremiah 7)
Jesus reflected on this passage from Jeremiah’s Temple Sermon when he cleansed the Second Temple of money changers during the days before his crucifixion:
12 And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons. 13 He said to them, “It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers. “Matthew 21:12-13 (ESV)
Lessons about Life Between the Polar Bear and the Chapel
1. It is Contested Space: College chapels and statues of college mascots share common spaces on American colleges and universities. But that space is more contested than it was when this Polar Bear was constructed in 1937 at the north entrance to this Bowdoin Chapel dedicated as a house of Christian worship for students in 1855. The history of the chapel and its biblical artwork testifies to those sacred purposes. So too do the catalog of sermons preached by Bowdoin College's first president Joseph McKeen between 1802 and 1806. See Sober Consent of the Heart, The Bowdoin College Chapel Message of Fist President, Joseph McKeen DD Delivered 1802-1806, Robert B. Gregory, Editor (2011); Joseph McKeen and the Soul of Bowdoin College: An Analysis of the Chapel Sermons of Rev. Joseph McKeen, First President of Bowdoin College, as they relate to his call to serve the Common Good (2016)
Christian students standing between the Polar Bear and the Chapel are tempted to believe that the historic religious foundation for the College has nothing to do with contemporary views of ethics and social justice. First Amendment constitutional doctrines of separation have taught them this. But the Christian students face a second temptation which is greater. That is to privatize the Christian faith and leave to the Polar Bear alone the privilege of forming public values for the shared life on a college campus. As Stanley Hauerwas argues:
Christians in modernity thought their task was to make the Gospel intelligible to the world rather than to help the world understand why it could not be intelligible without the Gospel. Desiring to become part of the modernist project, preachers and theologians accepted the
presumption that Christianity is a set of beliefs, a worldview, designed to give meaning to our lives. In the name of being politically responsible in, to, and for liberal social orders, the politics of Christian discourse was relegated to the private realm. We accepted the politics of translation believing that neither we nor our non-Christian and half-Christian neighbors could be expected to submit to the discipline of Christian speech. Stanley Hauerwas, Preaching as Though we had Enemies, First Things Magazine, (1995)
2. Shepherds of the Secular are Not Free Agents: Prophets and priests were never to surrender to the monarchs and tyrants of public spaces an unchallenged vision of morality, justice and a properly ordered public square. While monarchs, and not prophets and priests, govern that public space, neither the Kings of Judah nor the despotic rulers of Assyria and Babylon could govern free from the claims of God. Even the despot of Babylon Nebuchadnezzar was a “servant of God .” (Jeremiah 27.6) It was the task of the prophet to sound in a single oracle the criticism of their religious leaders and secular rulers. The resurrected Jesus makes the stunning assertion in Matthew 28 that all authority on heaven and earth was given to him. He then dismissed his disciples to the task of evangelizing all the nations, simultaneously summoning them to religious belief and ethical obedience.
"...teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age."
There was a pattern in Jeremiah's day to the failure of the religious and secular leaders and that pattern is repeated in every generation. Jeremiah 2. 8 quoted earlier in this essay is the prototype of that double failure. The priests did not say, 'Where is the LORD?' Those who handle the law did not know me; the shepherds transgressed against me; the prophets prophesied by Baal and went after things that do not profit. Nothing is more harmful to the life of the Christian student between the Polar Bear and the Chapel than the insidious argument that principles of social justice and personal ethics can be underwritten in the shadow of the Polar Bear without the predicates of religious instruction once taught in the College Chapel.
3. The Load-Bearing Individual when Collective Identities Collapse: In his most important book, The Desire of Nations, rediscovering the roots of political theology (1996) Oliver O'Donovan reads in the prophet Jeremiah a trend from community to the individual in the history of Israel. "To be a human being at all" he writes, "is to participate in one or more collective identities. But there is no collective identity so overarching and all-encompassing that no human beings are left outside it.. . .. We do not meet it in any community, however great, of which we could assume the leadership. We meet it only in the face of Christ, who presents himself as our leader and commander." (Page 73)
O'Donovan's understanding of the teachings of Jeremiah are helping us at the Joseph and Alice McKeen Study Center learn that when these collective identities collapse, as they surely have in this first quarter of the 21st century, "individuals become, as it were, load-bearing so that at the exile the future of the nation has come to depend on individual faithfulness." (Page 73, emphasis added) This single insight more than anything I have read this semester helps me to understand the mission and the ministry of Jeremiah and its relevance to our day. This is how O'Donovan articulates the implications of this trend:
The community is the aboriginal fact from beginning to end, shaping the conscience of each of its members to greater or lesser effect. But when the mediating institutions of government collapse, then the memory and hope which single members faithfully conserve provide a span of continuity which can reach out toward the prospect of restructuring. The fractured community which fashioned the individual’s conscience is sustained within it and renewed out of it. And from having been preserved through single members' memory and hope, Jeremiah anticipates, it will be the stronger, for it will incorporate the direct knowledge of Yhwh's ways which each has won by his, or her, faithfulness * * * the conscience of the individual members of a community is a repository of the moral understanding which shaped it, and may serve to perpetuate it in a crisis of collapsing morale or institution. . ..The conscientious individual speaks with society's own forgotten voice. (Page 80, emphasis added)
4. Neither Translators nor Interpreters: This is the lesson that I hope that the student leaders participating at the Joseph and Alice McKeen Study Center have learned this semester. Life between the Polar Bear and the Chapel is the life of a student who has become more load-bearing precisely because of his faith commitments. The yoke of Jeremiah resting on the shoulders of Christian student leaders is not one of soft translation of the Christian gospel to a campus community. That community believes that the Christian must be lived entirely in a private realm, and that there are no claims that require submission by Christians and rulers of secular spaces alike. Life in the shadow of the Polar Bear cannot be intelligible without the Gospel at one time preached in the Bowdoin College Chapel, even and especially when the chapel occupied Massachusetts Hall which was the only building on campus when Bowdoin's first President Joseph McKeen and his wife Alice arrived in Brunswick from Beverley, Massachusetts with their five children in 1802.
5. Creative Minority Is there hope for a restructured community when the doors of a College Chapel are closed to Christian worship? Jeremiah 30 contains what Derek Kidner says is "one of the boldest but least known Messianic prophecies...a ruler who will be what no King had ever been allowed to be: their mediator and priest." Jeremiah, Kidner Classic Commentaries, (IVP, 1987):
Their prince shall be one of themselves; their ruler shall come out from their midst; I will make him draw near, and he shall approach me, for who would dare of himself to approach me? declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 30. 21) and
Jeremiah saw more clearly than any of the other Old Testament prophets the possibility of the restructuring of community on a New Covenant whose guarantor possessed in his person the functions that had been separated between rulers of secular space and the priests who mediated within the sacred spaces of the Temple.
Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. (Jeremiah 31. 31)
Jesus and his New Testament disciples recognized Jeremiah's New Covenant as fulfilled in the death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and exaltation of Jesus Christ. Jesus pointed to the communion cup as the “new covenant in my blood.” This church, under the rule of Christ, would become, to borrow a phrase from Rabbi Sacks, a new creative minority. The following extended excerpt from his insightful essay is worth our deepest reflection about the teachings of Jeremiah:
What if they saw religion time and again enlisted to give heavenly sanction to purely human hierarchies? What if they knew that truth and power have nothing to do with one another and that you do not need to rule the world to bring truth into the world? What if they had realized that once you seek to create a universal state you have already begun down a road from which there is no escape, a process that ends in disintegration and decline? What if they were convinced that in the long run, the real battle is spiritual, not political or military, and that in this battle influence matters more than power?
What if they believed they had heard God calling on them to be a creative minority that never sought to become a dominant minority, that never sought to become a universal state, nor even in the conventional sense a universal church? What if they believed that God is universal but that love—all love, even Gods love—is irreducibly particular? ….What if these insights led a figure like Jeremiah to reconceptualize the entire phenomenon of defeat and exile? The Israelites had betrayed their mission by becoming obsessed with politics at the cost of moral and spiritual integrity. So taught all the prophets from Moses to Malachi. Every time you try to be like your neighbors, they said, you will be defeated by your neighbors. Every time you worship power, you will be defeated by power. Every time you seek to dominate, you will be dominated. For you, says God, are my witnesses to the world that there is nothing sacred about power or holy about empires and imperialism. On Creative Minorities, 2013 Erasmus Lecture by Jonathan Sacks, January 2014. https://www.firstthings.com/article/2014/01/on-creative-minorities
Jeremiah thought that the period of exile would create a space for the anticipation of the coming of a single ruler who would rule all created space, simultaneously fulfilling the roles of the king, as they knew them mostly in their failures, and the role of priests, as they knew them as mostly failed mediators between man and God. A future King in the line of David would dare of himself to approach the God of creation as none of the Kings, prophets and priests of Israel or Judah ever could. (Jeremiah 30. 21)
The writer of Hebrews instructed the early church that the anticipation of Jeremiah was perfectly fulfilled in Jesus Christ who appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come (Hebrews 9.11) and as the mediator of this new covenant. (Hebrews 9.15) This is the Christ who rules between the Polar Bear and the Chapel. This is the Christ who will fulfill his Covenant to gather a people whose worship of the Creator and obedience to His will would be a single response that conforms all of our "oughts" and all of our "desires" as no human ruler or earthly priest ever could or should.