News
A new book by Udo Middelmann
"Neither Necessary nor Inevitable:
History needn't have been like that"
"Neither Necessary nor Inevitable: History needn't have been like that" reminds us of the fact that we are not pushed along in our life by determining forces in the past, either genetic, historic, scientific or divine, but that we have real choices within the limiting context inherited from the past choices of other people.
This emphasis on creativity, responsibility and true human significance contradicts all efforts to simply approve of the way things happen, as if they were inevitable. Unfortunately, even the Christian community has become largely fatalistic, this time under God, as Greek philosophy, Islam, Marxism and scientific determinism have held for a long time.
I want us to recognize our freedom and become more responsible in our choices.
With warm regards,
Udo
About the book:
Historic determinism is a convenient way to tie up the uncomfortable loose ends in the tragic lives of millions and to explain, at the same time, the exceptional opportunities of many of the rest of us. A belief that in an inevitable chain of events or the will of God, or destiny, of historic necessity suggest a formula to justify each situation as inevitable.
Here history is seen like a single track, on which people ride in different cultural coaches In the same direction. Every stop, every departure is part of a natural schedule. It readily leads to resignation for many and arrogance for the lucky. Neither Necessary nor Inevitable argues and illustrates that such attention to the sirens of retrospective determinism gives a false sense of security and a freedom from responsibility. When history swallows the importance of people’s choices, inalienable rights become inalienable conditions.
In Neither Necessary nor Inevitable, Udo Middelmann argues that while written history may tell a story of choice and consequences in a tight mesh, living history is a result of genuine choices, which render the record too chaotic to support the belief in a controlling master plan of material or divine intention. Instead we each lay down our cultural tracks with personally significant choices. Turns and stops are not inevitable, and each choice affects the course of history for generations. Responsibility is not reduced by the belief in a necessary history or a willful God.
Published by Wipf and Stock
New Foot Notes Published as of November 30th 2010.
A note from Udo:
Dear Friends,
I want to start by expressing my gratitude for those of you who have helped us with your gifts and contributions. They encourage us as well as pay the bills. We continue with our seminars and discussions among friends, students and those who find their way to us. Our time in NY ends in December. We shall once again live in Gryon and work from there. Our immediate plans involve a seminary in Germany, a Pastors’ Conference for French pastors, a session with journalists on a Biblical view of the world and writing a curriculum for teaching about work, society and truth in competing cultures. Please continue to pray for and to help us in any way you wish.
The dates of our Summer Study Program in Gryon, Switzerland, will be posted in early 2011 on the Schaeffer Foundation Web site.
With many thanks and warm regards,
Udo
New Foot Notes Published as of September 8th 2010.
REPORT from the work for 2009
Following the invitation of The King’s College in New York to be an Visiting Professor in Philosophy much of the first three month until late March and from September on were spent in New York. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge, the learning and teaching experience, the exposure to a more formal academic world and the interaction with bright and inquisitive students. I will return there for the fall semester of 2010. What follows after that is an open question.
During the remaining months, from April to August inclusive, I continued the patterns of previous years and lectured, and wrote from Gryon. The months cruelly interrupted by two rushed visits to Sweden for our Board Member Staffan Johansson, who died at the end of the year from an insufficiently treated brain tumor. Whether from neglect or by social dictate, he never received the treatment he would and should have received in other circumstances.
One week in early April was taken with a course for young pastors and church workers on “Postmodernism” at the Geneva Bible Institute.
Several engagements in the German Church of Vevey firmed up our contact there. I am a member of their Board, as it is an association endowed by the Jenisch family and now seeks to protect itself from the negative influence of the State Church, to which it belongs, both theologically and financially. I preach there from time to time and had the delight of baptizing a young German woman in the context of that congregation.
I led a long weekend seminar again in Germany in May. A group of German Christians and their friends gathered for the third time for lectures and discussions around a Biblical theme in Giessen. This has become an annual event, always with much stimulation and giving me encouragement.
Our summer study program consisted of two sessions. We hosted nine students from King’s College to expose them to a wider view of things, make them think through some of the ‘positions’ they embrace or are worried about. They came back from a study trip through Albania, which gave us much material to discuss and explore: the remnants of Marxism, totalitarianism and of course also the influence of Islam on society. In the second session we had students from Norway, the US and Germany.
We also took part in a week’s study by a group of students from Kentucky, who arrived with their professor to consider romantic poetry in Switzerland. I gave a lecture on local history and the influence of the reformation, Deborah lectured on the local author C.F. Ramuz and his view of land, mountains and god/fate. One of his works, “The Day The Mountain Fell”, is set right above us at the end of the valley.
I preached several times during the summer months, first in Lausanne at the International Evangelical Church and then also at The Chapel in Leysin, both about an hour from our home. Each time I tool our students and guests along to expose them to a wider group of Christians. Over the Christmas season we again returned to Champery for the traditional Christmas Eve service. This year the church was completely packed with English, Dutch, German and Americans. Our friend Dolly Johnson was able to play the organ for us as in previous years. It was a great delight and honor to read the texts and sing the carols and preach about the gift of God in Jesus Christ.
In addition, we published two issues of FOOTNOTES during the year and a couple of longer letters. They are mailed to 750 addresses as hard copies and to 539 addresses electronically. I wrote a further manuscript with the working title” History did not have to happen this way” and have submitted it to several publishing houses. I am also writing up my Russian lectures to possibly turn them into a book. I contributed to a book on Francis Schaeffer and offered an article on Nature and Culture to the L. Russ Bush Festschrift, to be published in 2010.
The house “Mon Abri” in Gryon has four apartments, of which one is rented to Edith Schaeffer during the whole year. We take care of her pretty much alone, find and hire people to help us in this demanding task. Another apartment other is rented during the winter months, when we do not have students, to a gentleman from Lausanne for additional income to cover the cost of taxes, utilities and services.
Please continue to pray for our work. Finances are very tight, as they are in many works this year. Give thanks to God to have made possible what we have been able to accomplish in the lives of the various people He sent our way during the year.
With sincere thanks for each of you,
Udo W. Middelmann
July 14, 2010
Update From Our Summer Studies:
Dear friends,
I wanted you to know how much we enjoy this year’s guests and students. Deborah and I returned from New York at the end of May to spend the summer in Gryon. We now are in the midst of our summer study session, which will last into August.
This particular session is in many ways quite unusual. Among the students is one of my translators from the seminars I used to teach in Russia from 1991 to 1997.
Ola is an English teacher at a police academy in the formerly forbidden city of Omsk and is with us again after her first studies with us 11 years ago. It is a pleasure to see her again and to help her in her struggles with isolation, as she is surrounded by people with old communist habits and manners in her work and unthinking Christians in her private life.
Phuong has joined us for one month from Vietnam, where she helps good friends of ours in DaNang. They organize seminars on business habits, human resource development, business plans, habits and organization from the perspective of a Biblical view of the person, the dignity of work, accuracy in accounting etc. My friends have been there for the past three or four years, now they wanted Phuong, who is a very bright young Christian, but without much formal learning outside of Marxist economics, to be here, to learn and to find answers to her many questions.
Calvin from Singapore finished his law studies in Oxford and is on his way back home. He heard about us from his father, who spent a few days with us 26 years ago. Calvin is delightful, sharp, sensitive and full of helpful insights in our discussions around the long mealtimes. We have long conversations about society, law and the distinction between a more Biblical foundation for society and the Confucian values.
Daryl is from England and found us on the web site. She is an actress, a delightful person with a sense of humor bundled into good insights. She came to talk with us, to be encouraged, to be in a Christian context for a while. It is such a pleasure to get to know her and to be able to help her.
Azy was a student of mine two years ago, spent three weeks with us last year to study and has come back to help us with the care for Edith Schaeffer for the next three months.
That has been mostly our exclusive responsibility for the past five years, and it is not easy to arrange her life, see to her care, to supervise various hired people with different tasks: ladies from the social services come to bath and dress her, a neighbor visits four afternoons a week to read, talk and have tea, and Azy is the one who now is there for the remainder of each day: all in an effort to give Edith as valuable a life as possible. With much effort we push her wheelchair to our lunch table, so that our conversation with our students and guests can stimulate her as well; after all, talking with people has been her whole life. She seems to then become much more alert for a time.
On Sunday we all went to church in Leysin and met with people from the church over coffee and croissants afterwards. I preach there from time to time and always enjoy the reaction and blessing of the people there.
Please pray for and with us, especially that we might find another person who can truly step in when Azy has to leave at the end of September. Debby hopes to spend the autumn semester with me when I teach again, this time for just the fall semester, at The King’s College in NY.
For that I am preparing a course on Theories of Social Justice. I shall start with Plato’s search for order in an ideal society as described in “The Republic”, work through various utopian models that never worked and then spend time with propositions of more recent years: Marxism, Liberation Theology and our present form of –is it once again? – quasi-unlimited capitalism. The absence of moral conviction invites more government intervention through regulations. It is a case, so it seems to me, that when the Christian moral obligation to my “socii” (Latin: ‘fellows, neighbors’) is either neglected or left to cases of individual charity, government will step in with one or the other social policy to make the individual pay for social realities. And government is not the most efficient or value-neutral institution in favor of individual human beings.
I send this to have you be a part of the work at the moment, to give you a moment’s insight and to share with you the joy and wonder of times and conversation with very interested and interesting people.
With warm greetings and thanks for your prayer and support and encouragement.
Udo
Posted in Amarillo.com's Faith Column on Saturday, February 27, 2010 by Mike Haynes
Author urges Christians to spread ideas from Scripture
I admit that before Mike Bellah invited me to lunch at an Amarillo restaurant, I knew nothing about Udo Middelmann.
I did know a lot about Middelmann's father-in-law.
Bellah, a colleague at Amarillo College, knew I have an interest in Christian writers and thinkers, so I got to be one of about 15 people who met Middelmann and heard him speak at a noon session last week.
The German native, born in 1940, lives in New York City and has credentials of his own. He has written several books, including "The Innocence of God," published in 2007. He has worked with Food for the Hungry and lectures around the world, including at King's College, housed in the Empire State Building.
But that father-in-law? Francis Schaeffer.
Schaeffer, who died in 1984, probably was the 20th century's second most renowned intellectual defender of Christianity after C.S. Lewis. In 1955, the American pastor and his wife, Edith, started L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland, which became a communal place of Christian study and continues around the world today.
Middelmann was one of the seekers who went to L'Abri; he ended up marrying the Schaeffers' daughter, Debbie. Now he speaks out on topics including how the Haiti earthquake certainly was not orchestrated by God and how humans are not at the mercy of an unchangeable world.
He applies the latter philosophy in his 2008 Book, "Christianity vs. Fatalistic Religions in the War Against Poverty." Last week, he said that unlike other philosophies that assume we have to "go with the flow" and exist as pawns to be battered about on Earth, we can influence events. He said the poor and helpless need our help but that distribution of material aid isn't enough. We need to provide ideas, he said, that enable people to change the cycles of life that contribute to generation after generation of suffering and violence.
And those ideas come from God's word.
"We understand God's will not by what happens, but by what he says about what happens," Middelmann told our group.
Since Eden, we have lived in a fallen world, and humans play a part in striving toward the goal Jesus verbalized in the Lord's Prayer: "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." (Matt. 6:10, KJV)
"God created an unfinished world," Middelmann said, and although he sometimes intervenes in that world, part of the job of Christians is to improve things while we are here.
Middelmann has been to Amarillo several times, and he has good friends in the area. The "Footnotes" newsletter that he writes as president of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation even has an Amarillo return address.
There's a lot more Christian work and Christian thought going on here than we see in our pulpits and in the news.
Mike Haynes teaches journalism at Amarillo College and writes for the Amarillo Globe-News
PER STAFFAN JOHANSSON
MARCH 13, 1949—DECEMBER 3, 2009
We grieve deeply over the death of our friend and Member of our Board Per Staffan
Johansson. He is now absent from his body and rich and fruitful life, waiting for the
resurrection. We express, as Jesus did at the tomb of Lazarus, our genuine anger
that death takes away what God had meant to be here forever.
We are thankful for the many years of life and work together and remember even
the last painful days we had together with him in June and August, when his struggle
became so desperate. Staffan was our closest friend and ally in our ongoing
passion for life. The days and years ahead will be bleak without his intelligence,
insight and wit to appeal to.
Books By Udo Middelmann
About this book:
Most literature and many aid efforts concerned with poverty relief and development function on mathematical assumptions. Those who have more should share with those who have less, thus creating equality. Some would add a moral component saying that those having more are morally wrong and must have gained their surplus from outright theft or unfair trade. But on the side of the needy, religious and secular efforts see only a material problem. Both neglect the devastating power of bad ideas based in religion and social customs. Yet what anyone believes about the building blocks of life will have results; their ideas are like eye glasses that either distort or bring into focus an objective reality. Development work must focus on developing people's ideas. Cultural change must precede material changes.
Published by Paternoster and available at your local bookstore or through Amazon.com
Released in October of 2007
by Udo Middelmann
About this book:
The horrors of the 20th century demonstrate the failure of secular and religious ideologies to answer the important questions of life. Is this God’s doing or is he absent, indifferent, or nonexistent? Does our experience of history leave us in an intellectually and morally vacant universe? What, in the face of human tragedy, are sensible answers about life, death, and the existence and character of God? Are we merely playing chess with the Grim Reaper, only to gain time?
The manner in which religious and biblical texts are applied often leaves us with an unjust and irrational God, leading to ideas of alienation and estrangement. The world is manifestly unjust, the human condition essentially tragic. Many believe they can endure this only by abandoning reason and religion, a choice between arrogance and resignation.Yet the deepest concerns of humanity persist.
Instead of blaming God or his absence The Innocence of God presents a startling catalyst for thoughtful dialogue. The God of Judaism and Christianity is not accused of immoral sovereignty or of divine weakness. He works and invites us to work against the flow of history with moral clarity and passion to repair in time a damaged world, a world he deeply loves.
Published by Paternoster and available at your local bookstore or through Amazon.com