[Oe List ...] When did Joe Mathews image shift?

Fri Aug 5 15:00:45 EDT 2011

I find the comments about Joe and Outler a bit out of order.  And of course we can invoke the "Lingo rule" that there are as many stories about the Order as there are members.

I began as a student at Perkins the semester after Joe left for Austin.  There was no mention of him being forced to leave.  In fact he was spoken of rather highly by profs and students, and the senior students certainly missed him.  His decision to give up on his dissertation, which he wrote some of it at Perkins (the reason for him being in the stacks), and which was 2/3's the way home when he let it go, was something he decided.  I doubt that Outler could force anyone out.  A little history - Merrimon Cunningham was made Dean of the SMU theology school in 1951.  SMU did not at that time support the Theology School with their funds.  It was done by the churches.  Merrimom recruited and took the Perkins family, a very wealthy oil family from Witchita Falls, to Yale to look at buildings for the theology school that they wanted to donate to SMU.  Somewhere in there it was decided that the SMU theology school would be called Perkins School of Theology and would become the Yale of the South academically.    They and a very few others supplied the money for the buildings and endowment for the professors.  Outler was one of the professors, along with others to take the seminary from a "preacher factory" to a genuine theological school.  Cunningham went after promising scholars.  Prior to this the school had had a tough time with conservative church people both Methodist and Baptist and the school had not been known for its academics.  Cunningham fought for both academic freedom and naturally against the fundamentalist.  He brought Joe to Perkins, and if there had been a dismissal it would have been Merrimom not Outler to do the deed, as Outler was also the target of the conservatives.  Merrimom and Joe were pretty close, as some in the development department will remember.  When Merrimom left Perkins he headed up the Danforth Foundation from which we received generous grants and Joe and Merrimon had a good relationship.  The deal at Perkins was that professors were to have a Ph.D. or were working on one.  I think that is still their policy, though they went off the rails as best I can see some awhile back and surrendered a lot to the fundies and conservatives.

Outler always had good things to say about Joe when I was in conversations where his name came up, but understand Outler was an academician's academician.  He brought John Wesley out of the grave to the Methodist church and humanized him.  I remember him showing some of us a copy of a bill from a pub for the ale of his preachers after a conference.  I was never in his class but he conducted a weekly session for Systematic Theology where all the students gathered into the main auditorium and the various professors debated one another in the old fashioned academic way.  He usually shredded all of them in his polite, humorous manner.  Students, if they dared, could enter in at the close, and he would politely chew them up too.  Whatever argument you brought to him, he would take the opposite view and like a chess master he would run you all over the board.

I don't know for sure, but I think Joe despaired of the academic approach.  He certainly poked fun from time to time at the academic.  This still leaves me with the question of what was Joe's struggle and discernment to drop his Ph.D. and go off to a fairly uncertain future of a very young organization, Faith and Life.  You need to understand that this was a time when Universities and Seminaries were casting about for talent as there was a swell in students and much generosity from donors, had he needed another job.  While never explicit, his speeches and his personal conversations seem to plead for expenditure, giving up life to the world.  There was a scream in there that echoed in your own soul.  

George Holcombe
14900 Yellowleaf Tr.
Austin, TX 78728
Mobile 512/252-2756
geowanda at earthlink.net

‎“...we have the choice: we can gratefully cultivate the relationships that make us part of a vast network, or we can take them for granted and allow them to wither and die.”  Brother David Steindl-Rast, Deeper than Words

On Aug 3, 2011, at 6:12 PM, David Walters wrote:

> I spent a week in the early part of '72 with a friend at Perkins. I was in the library on afternoon prowling in the stacks when I found a small office behind a Mosler safe door. To left of the door I found the name Albert C.Outler. Aha! I went in and introduced myself and we proceeded to have an interesting conversation. At least until I asked him about Joe Mathews. Conversation over. He went back to his work and I left.
>  
> About the safe. Outler had convinced some group in England to loan him all of John and Charles Wesley's papers. I mean every thing. Diaries. Letters. Sermons, the works. Abingon Press published a 25 volume set of the works of John Wesley edited by Outler.
>  
> Bishop Jim in Bending History tells that Oulter was one of Joe's professor's at Yale. One of the 1st courses he took was taught by Outler and required each student to write an assay entitled "How My Mind Has Changed Theologically in the Last Ten Years" 
> Joe left Yale ant to teach at Colgate in New York. When left there to teach Perkins there was his old professor Albert Outler. As I understand their relationship degenerated pretty quick. Some one once said that the major contradiction in their relationship turn on the fact that Outler was committed to intellectual pursuits and Joe was committed to being a radical churchman. Outler eventually found a way to have Joe removed from the faculty.
>  
> Bishop Jim tells a great deal about Joe and H. Richard Niebuhr. During the '47-48, Joe and another student Herndon Wagers had lunch daily with Niehbuhr where they would engage i deep conversation on theological issue of the day . Another interesting comment was about how Joe would go to library in the afternoon and read Nebuhr's works - all of them a rather lage task.  I guess he was trying take Kierkegaard seriously - to will one thing.
>  
> Earlier in the book Bishop Jim talks about he and Joes time at Biblical Seminary. He described it as a middle of the road place - neither liberal or conservative.  He tells that became close to Wilbert W White the schools founder who had done to Yale in the 20s and had been influenced greatly by William Rainey Harper who had founded the University of Chicago. They were exposed to people like  Edwin  Lewis, Karl Hein and Julius Richter, a German who had at one time been the pastor to Kaiser Wilheim. 
>  
> I remember talking once with Bishop Jim and his talking about how they would often attend lectured series' at other nearby by schools like Columbia, NYU and Union Seminary. This would have exposed them to vroad range of thinkers.
>  
> Joe left Biblical after two years ago to go to Drew wher he graduated, Joe was soon installed at a Methodist Church in Conneticut, He then enrolled at Union Seminary which was short commute from his church.  There he studied under Rinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich.
>  
> When I took a PLC in the spring of '700 and when the Cihicago to work on the Locaal Church Experiment therre was something fa
> familar about the stange charts they drawing on chalkboar4ds, especiall those that Joe drew. On of Joe.s professorrs at Biblicall was Dean G. McKee, who would later be mamed its president, In the early 60s he learned of his boards' intention to retire him when he reached 65. He beat them to the punch and obtained an appointment as proffessor at Columbia Theological Seminary, a Presbyertian scgoll in Decatur, Ga. I spent a year ther in '68-69. I never had any of his classes, but when it was his turn to speak at Chapel he wuld arrange for an easel and chalkboard to be place next to the pulpit. There he would draw the same kind of charts I would find in Chicago. When he would  step away from the pulpit and start drawing, groans and snickers would be heard in the congregation from students and faculty alike.
>  
> An interesting note about Mckee, His wife had died about thime he was deciding to leave New York. Three or fours years after I left seminary he married a younger woman who an organist at a lrgee Presbyterian chuch in Atlanta. Dhe had been a student in sacred music at Union in the mid 50s. She is still living across the road in Dr. McKee's house across from Columbia Seminary. I had a delightful conversation with her a few months ago about her late husband and his charts.    
> -David Walters
> 
> --- geowanda at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> From: George Holcombe <geowanda at earthlink.net>
> To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>
> Subject: Re: [Oe List ...] When did Joe Mathews image shift?
> Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2011 16:12:43 -0500
> 
> The other question here is what persuaded Joe to leave Perkins, an established institution, and go to Faith and Life in Austin?  In a discussion I had with Dr. Albert Outler, the famed Wesley expert and professor at Perkins, about a year before his death, he talked about how he had tried to talk Joe into finishing his dissertation, which would have meant tenure at Perkins and a comfortable life, etc.  Something happened, maybe Slicker knows, that sent Joe to Faith and Life, which was a struggling student program in Austin, which conservative church people had taken aim.  His education from WWII had boiled into something.  That illustration about stepping out over 40,000 fathoms of jello, was probably not a cute invention.
> 
> George Holcombe
> 14900 Yellowleaf Tr.
> Austin, TX 78728
> Mobile 512/252-2756
> geowanda at earthlink.net
> 
> ‎“...we have the choice: we can gratefully cultivate the relationships that make us part of a vast network, or we can take them for granted and allow them to wither and die.”  Brother David Steindl-Rast, Deeper than Words
> 
> 
> 
> On Aug 1, 2011, at 7:31 PM, David Walters wrote:
> 
> You have to read Bending History and the other  transcribed talks that we have along  with Brother Joe to understand what happened to Joe in the 40s which are decidedly different from this journey in the 30s. As I remember it, Joe went into the army a year or less after he had finished  seminary in New York where he had encountered the Neibuhrs, Tillich, and others,. I think his experience in the Pacific radically grounded what he had learned from them. Transformation became a new word for him. He finally knew what Wesley was talking about.
> 
> 
> -David Walters
> 
> --- jfwiegel at yahoo.com wrote:
> 
> From: James Wiegel <jfwiegel at yahoo.com>
> To: Order Ecumenical Community <oe at wedgeblade.net>
> Cc: Springboard Dialogue <springboard at wedgeblade.net>, Colleague Dialogue <dialogue at wedgeblade.net>
> Subject: [Oe List ...] When did Joe Mathews image shift?
> Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2011 15:07:11 -0700 (PDT)
> 
> so, I have a question:  what was it that radicalized Joe Mathews?  In 1946, he was going on about how his theology had changed because of the war (WWII).  By the time of these talks he is all about the social revolution and the radical revolution and the people of God are revolutionaries.  What happened?
> 
> Was Joe ever engaged in the civil rights movement?  Did he go to Selma?  I have testimony that David Scott was there, and he met Betty Pesek there . . . What about Bonnie Swain?  did she play a role?
> 
> Jim Wiegel
> 
> Life isn't meant to be easy, it's meant to be life. -- James Michener, The Source
> 
> 401 North Beverly Way, Tolleson, Arizona 85353-2401
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> jfwiegel at yahoo.com www.partnersinparticipation.com
> 
> 
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