Thoughts for Bill Placher
Writing about one’s mentor is a risky task. When you owe so much to somebody there is always the danger that you might subconsciously want to discount your debt in order to minimize the burden of its payment. Inspecting any relationship of dependence is fraught with the temptation of resentment and envy, but the opposite reaction is no less precarious. Idealization is a strategy of denial as real as any other. We idealize someone when we do not want to think too hard about how even the best of lives barely makes a scratch in the dust of human transience.
I think I can acknowledge Bill’s life and work without envy or adulation, but I do not know about regret. Like a lot of academic relationships, Bill and I had found ourselves on opposite sides of an escalating wall of differences that finally led to a definitive parting of ways. We did what we thought we had to do, which amounted to protecting each other’s space from any hint of our own presence. So it is hard to pay homage to someone when you were barely at the point, when they died, of working up to saying hello in the hallway. What can I say that will not be overshadowed by the ruin our friendship had become? How can I think clearly when everything I think is colored by sadness—and other motives I can hardly admit? If even I do not trust these words, why should anyone else?
Nonetheless, Bill gave me so much that it would be churlish to turn down an invitation to write a tribute to him. He would not want my praise, but we held back so much from each other that at this point that is the least I can give him. Every conversation about the dead is at least a little bit indiscrete. To be silent about the dead is to do them an injustice, but to talk about them in any tone other than gratitude and respect risks silencing them, since it denies them the last word.
One thing Bill taught me is that God’s judgment of us will coincide, in the final judgment, with God’s forgiveness. In this, as in so many things, God is utterly unlike us. When we forgive each other, we suspend judgment, and when we judge each other, we decline to forgive. What we give always has strings attached, and we forgive only as a roundabout way of giving something to ourselves. Still, it would have been nice had Bill lived long enough for us to forgive each other.
Among the Greeks and Romans, the man of prestige and power could be forgiving because, if he were truly a man, nothing could possibly hurt him. Forgiveness was just an expression of power held back in reserve. Bill and I held back from each other as a first step, I thought at the time, on the way toward forgiveness, but now I see that we held back out of weakness rather than strength. We did not know how to get started talking again about theology without talking about everything else.
I actually dealt with the dilemma of returning a gift to Bill in a very concrete way. Before we had our troubles, Bill gave me a package containing instructions for his funeral and a request that I preach a traditional, Christ-centered Gospel sermon instead of the usual panegyrical oration. I gave it back to him soon after we stopped talking to each other. I’d like to think that I did what he would have wanted had he been able to express himself in this awkward situation. After all, why would he have wanted me to speak at his funeral, after what we had been through? Yet how could he ask me to step aside? It would have been rude for him to ask for his gift back, and besides, we weren’t talking to each other! What he couldn’t ask for, though, I could give unbidden, or so I thought.
When Bill came to the Wabash Religion Department to teach, he had graduated from Wabash only a few years earlier. He was the newcomer in a department already quite established, and when he died he was the department’s senior member, having left his stamp on its subsequent transformations. When I had him in class, he was really not much older than me, although even back then he seemed like he had lived with the great minds for so long that he was becoming one of them. All of his students, it seems, have a story about Bill involving chalk and an encounter with the chalk board.
When I was a senior in college, he was just finishing his first book, and he invited me to read it in draft form. In my innocence, I expected to read something as hard as Heidegger. I was thus amazed that what I read was instead so accessible and inviting that I decided I could write theology too. I had no idea at the time of how hard such effortlessness is. I think it is interesting to note that as easy as he made writing look, writing did not come naturally to Bill. He worked extremely hard to make hard ideas look simple. The only time I ever saw him express the least bit of resentment was when he thought others did not appreciate how much work that took.
Bill said to me more than once that there must be something wrong with people like us who write so much. Writers are creatures of their reading habits, and Bill was an avid reader of detective fiction, a genre which shaped his theology. He had a very systematic approach to writing and a near-compulsion for clarity. One of the problems with trying to give back to Bill is that he worked his prose to the point of elegant perfection, so that when he asked me to read something before publication (which was rare), there was ridiculously little I could contribute.
He was an impeccable theological stylist, but he was an even greater preacher, in fact, one of the best preachers I have ever heard. Many times, listening to him deliver a homily to a handful of students and colleagues during Wednesday morning Chapel at Wabash, I marveled at my good fortune and found it hard to believe that these sermons were heard by so few. When I would grumble about the lack of a local audience for such priceless treasures, he would pass on to me the wisdom Eric Dean, his mentor, passed on to him: you preach the same, whether it is to two people or two hundred.
As much as our differences widened over the years, we also agreed on some fundamentals. We both had a fairly low view of the state of contemporary theology, and yet we knew nothing better to do with our lives. (Mercifully, Bill died with his boots on, doing what he loved best—he was on sabbatical, writing a book on the Gospel of Mark.) We both believed in substitutionary atonement, which put us at odds with most of our contemporaries. We also believed in a pretty high doctrine of providence, which helped us to not worry too much about our careers. We both also believed firmly in the incomparable nobility of small schools over research universities. We both loved teaching Wabash students, although in completely different ways. He once told me that when he went from being the older brother to his students to being their father-figure that his teaching was harder to pull off. I think he ended up being a kind of wise and gracious uncle, the family relative you always wished you could have gotten to know better and spent more time with.
Before we had our final break, Bill said that we should both try to find jobs elsewhere, on the assumption that perhaps one of us would be successful. Before that, he had talked about not wanting to retire in Crawfordsville. Wabash is such a student-oriented school, and Crawfordsville is such a small town, that retired faculty can find it hard to live here without being a part of the relationships that build on the daily labor of the classroom. I don’t know what Bill would have done had he been faced with the choice of retiring here or moving somewhere else. I don’t think he would have been happy either way. He was spared that choice. One might think that his death would make it easier for me to stay at Wabash, but I am finding the opposite to be the case.
Bill thought about death a lot, as did I, and we shared those thoughts with each other, as much as one can share something that is so hard to think about. Bill wrestled hard with the Christian hope in the afterlife, and for a long time he was a skeptic about the continuation of individual identity in heaven. That might be the only theological topic I was able to move him on, because I believe he gradually came to affirm the traditional teaching of the Church on the resurrection. In terms of this earthly life, though, I am not sure that he wanted any more life than what he already had. There is no such thing as an abbreviated life, he would say. The only time we know is the time God allots us, just as God’s time is the life of Jesus Christ. All of his theology, I think now, was commentary on that sentiment. Perhaps it is true that asking God for more life would be a bit ungrateful, but God can give back to us what we do not know how to give to him. I am confident that God will give Bill what he was sometimes afraid of desiring. Even now, I trust, Bill is enjoying the conversations of the saints, and some day we will rejoin where we should have left off.
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