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The human is
created for transcendence....
This phrase from Gravity and Grace exemplifies the man who wrote
it, Joseph A. Sittler. He was born in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, on September
26, 1904, the son of a Lutheran pastor (also named Joseph) and a
remarkable woman, Minnie Vieth Sittler. He was a graduate of Wittenberg
College and the Hamma Divinity School and began his career in the
ordained ministry as pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Cleveland,
Ohio. For most of his life, however, he was a Professor of Theology,
first at the Chicago Lutheran Seminary in
 Maywood, Illinois, then at the
Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He ended his nearly
58-year career as theologian with fifteen years of association with the
Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago (LSTC); that association included
the title of Distinguished Professor in Residence.
The biographical
statement in the bulletin for the Service of Thanksgiving for his life,
at LSTC in January of 1988, well summarizes his varied and rich
contributions to theology: “Significant areas of his impact can only be
enumerated: a leading member of the Commission on Faith and Order, the
highest theological council of the World Council of Churches (WCC), in
which capacity he gave the keynote address (‘Called to Unity’) to the
Third Assembly of the WCC in 1961 in New Delhi; an important contributor
to the theological self-understanding of the Lutheran Church in America,
especially its Confession of Faith (The Doctrine of the Word in the
Structure of Lutheran Theology, 1948); a commentator upon
literature, architecture, classical and jazz music, science, and
ecology; a theologian concerned with ecology long before it became a
popular
 theme (The Care of the Earth, 1964, Essays on Nature
and Grace, 1972); a profoundly feminist thinker; he gave theological
foundation to the situational approach to Ethics (The Structure of
Christian Ethics, 1958). In the late 1950's, he was featured in a
Life magazine article as one of America’s “Ten Most Influential
Theologians.”
He was a preacher to
the intellectual community without peer. In his prime, he was said to
have been the single most sought after university and college preacher
in America. He gave both the Beecher Lectures at Yale (The Ecology of
Faith, 1961), and the Noble Lectures at Harvard, both devoted to
preaching. Many of his preaching themes are included in his later books,
Grace Notes and Other Fragments (1981), and Gravity and Grace
(1986).”
But such a statement
cannot begin to capture the transcendent humanity of Joseph Sittler. He
delighted in Polish sausage and beer (and conversation!) at
Jimmy’s, an
“establishment” close to the University of Chicago and LSTC. He saw
theological significance in the most ordinary activities of common folk
in everyday life. He relished encounters with all sorts of people and
never conveyed any hint of condescension. He had a marvelous sense of
humor and could be astonishingly frank without ever offending. As his
eyesight failed in later life, he drew on an amazing store of memorized
poetry and literature, and he continued to carry on a vast
correspondence with all sorts and conditions of people – he was never
too busy to neglect noting some important event in the life of a friend
or colleague. He and his wife Jeanne, herself a fine musician and
composer, raised six
children. Sittler died on December 28, 1987, but the legacy he left, not
only in spoken and written words but in the lives of those he touched is
well illustrated in the introduction
to Running with the Hounds, written by Donald Hetzler.
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