Glen Stassen: Incarnational Disciple of Jesus

Glen Stassen: Incarnational Disciple of Jesus
By Jiyong Lee and Laura Rector

Who was Glen Stassen? When Glen died after battling can­cer on April 26, 2014, his colleague and friend David Gushee broke the news of his death to the world. Amongst other things, in an article for Associated Baptist Press, Gushee wrote, “Glen will be remembered as the paradigm of how one serves as a teacher-mentor.”¹ In an interview on MSNBC, Jim Wallis talked about the legacy of his friend “who always talked about Jesus.”² The New York Times described him as “a Southern Baptist theologian who helped define the social-justice wing of the evangeli­cal movement in the 1980s.”³ The Los Angeles Times’ obituary reported that he was “a Christian ethicist who left a budding career in nuclear physics to study theology and who went on to develop a biblically based framework for peace activism.”⁴ No one descrip­tion of Glen Stassen seems adequate, but perhaps the best description is the one that Stassen would have used to describe himself: incarnational dis­ciple of Jesus.⁵

Family

Stassen came into this world as a leap day baby, born in Minnesota to Harold and Esther Stassen on February 29, 1936.⁶ His father was the youngest governor of Minnesota and served in Eisenhower’s adminis­tration. Harold Stassen helped charter the United Nations, was prominent voice in the Republican Party, and ran nine times for United States President,⁷ but it was just as impor­tant to Glen to tell students and other faculty that his grandfather was an immigrant tomato farmer with a deep commitment to integrity.⁸ His mother was an artist and instrumental in her husband’s political career. Glen’s par­ents were married for 70 years, and they also had a daughter, psychologist Kathleen Stassen Berger.⁹

Harold Stassen was away for part of Glen’s childhood while fighting in

 World War II. This and his father’s active pursuit of human rights profoundly affected Glen. He would spend his adulthood advocating passionately for non-violence, justice, and human rights.¹⁰ As one of Glen’s PhD graduates Michael Westmoreland-White points out, Stassen spent his life “seeking justice for those marginalized by racism and economic injustice and striving for peace and human rights in a world constantly on the brink of war. His family would ensure that he was in the midst of these issues.”¹¹ Glen originally planned a career in nuclear physics, earning a degree in the subject from the University of Virginia in 1957. He left physics to pursue theology in studying at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary before transferring to Union Theological Seminary, where he earned a BD in 1963. He earned his doctorate from Duke University in 1967.¹²

Glen married Dorothy (Dot) Lively Stassen in 1957. They had three sons: Michael, William (Bill), and David.¹³ At Glen’s Pasadena memorial service, Bill pointed out that his father’s love was not finite. He poured all the love and enthusiasm into his family that he poured into his teaching.¹⁴

Teaching

And Glen certainly poured love and enthusiasm into this teaching. His PhD students produced two other Festschriften in his honor during his lifetime.¹⁵ This memo­rial collection by his international students and friends makes the third outpouring of such gratitude for this scholar. In the academy, it is usually considered a great honor to be the recipient of even one such collection. The majority of Glen’s PhD students stayed in constant touch with him, even after their graduations, and counted him as friend and father figure. Glen was extremely proud

 of his students, wanting students, not faculty members to speak at his retirement luncheon.¹⁶ He taught at Duke University, Kentucky Southern College, Berea College, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Fuller Theological Seminary in a career that spanned 51 years.¹⁷ That career only ended with his final hospi­talization.

Scholarship

However, Glen was more than just a loving family man and caring teacher. Glen Stassen was a scholar whose life reflected his scholarly interests and whose scholarly interests reflected his life. The key word that helps us understand his life and his scholarly work is incarnation. When Stassen taught his students, unlike many other instructors, he did not just deliver his knowledge to his students while maintaining separa­tion from them, but he truly valued his students’ thoughts and interacted with them. He never considered himself above them or in a different sphere from them. This way of life was reflected in his scholarly work. He worked to overcome separation and dualism, and he pursued understand­ing and cooperation with others in an egalitarian manner.¹⁸

He believed that the language of Christian ethics and the language of public ethics had become estranged, and so he argued that Christian ethics must be bilingual and that Christian language and public language can understand each other through incar-national living. He shows how these two languages work together in his books, Just Peacemaking: Transforming Initiatives for Justice and Peace and Authentic Transformation: A New Vision of Christ and Culture. Jesus is the Lord over public life as well as over private life. Christians should not shrink into their private realm or retreat into the church. We have a “shared understanding” in our public

 life because of the sovereignty of God who rules over all life.¹⁹ In class, Glen told his students that “Christian eth­ics is not only for the church, but for the world as well.”²⁰

Glen showed that theological ethics can be incarnated into our lives and that the Bible is still highly relevant to us. His renowned book, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context and his last book, A Thicker Jesus: Incarnational Discipleship in a Secular Age, both illustrate, even in their titles, how he values connecting Jesus to the concrete situations and how serious he was about both the teaching of Jesus and challenges of the current age. He was careful not to neglect either Jesus or culture, and he showed that Jesus’ incarnation was not just a one-time event happening in the past in a certain region, but that it is reiterated in the present as concrete and real for those who follow him.²¹

One major aspect of his work involved reinterpreting the Sermon on the Mount to prove that following Jesus today in concrete situations is not just a slogan, but the deep, thick application of the Bible. He called his understanding of ethics “incarna-tional discipleship.”²² Through his groundbreaking understanding of the Sermon on the Mount as “four­teen triads,” Stassen revealed that the traditional antithetical interpreta­tion did not properly deliver Jesus’ intention. Instead, he argued that the

 antithetical interpretation caused eva­sion and dualism without producing transforming initiatives that could be realistically applied. This caused Christians to marginalize Jesus to the realm of high ideals, and it made fol­lowing the way of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount impossible. In contrast, he showed that the narratives and words of Jesus in the Bible were not idealistic at all, but were practical and deeply relevant to our concrete lives.²³

Finally, one cannot speak of Glen Stassen without speaking of just peacemaking theory. This, too, shows well that his scholarly works are incar-national. His just peacemaking theory proposes concrete and realistic ways to prevent war and promote peace beyond the traditional frameworks of just war theory and pacifism.²⁴

Activism

From the early stage of his scholarly works, Stassen developed just peacemaking theory, and yet Stassen, who valued justice highly, never studied just peacemaking as merely a “theory.” He was not only a scholar, but also an activist pursuing peace and justice. He applied his the­ory to the real world and was willing to adapt, change, and verify it.²⁵ His just peacemaking theory proved its value through Stassen’s concrete appli­cation of it in his activism. Through this work, he concretely and directly shows that how we as Christians can speak a public language and live as Christians in cooperation with society.

 Glen was very active in the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Christian Ethics, but he was also on the boards of organi­zations such as Sojourners and the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good.²⁶ He was part of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign and of the Strategy Committee of Peace Action.²⁷ He also worked to improve state and federal laws to support the education of children with disabilities.²⁸ He was active in the American civil rights move­ment and part of the 1963 March on Washington, D.C. for Jobs and Freedom.²⁹ He told his students that he once shook the hand of Rosa Parks and then joked with them, “Do you want to shake the hand that shook the hand of Rosa Parks?”³⁰ Stassen was present in Germany when the Berlin Wall came down,³¹ and he once rep­resented Baptists in a panel with the President of Iran.³² The list of his activities could go on for many more pages.

Conclusion

Glen Stassen achieved many things in his 78 short years of life. He loved Jesus and he loved people—in a way that he revealed through his interpretation of Scripture and then lived in his family, scholar­ship, and activism. We grieve the loss of this great man, but we celebrate his ongoing legacy through the people he changed through such love.  

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