A bishop who listens

A bishop who listens
We had visitors earlier in the week, the bishop of Skara diocese, Church of Sweden, Erik Aurelius and his wife, Eva Haettner Aurelius. Skara is actually my home town, but this was the first time we met properly. While he was called back to Sweden to serve as bishop from Germany, where he had been a professor in Old Testament at Göttingen University for seven years, she is a professor of comparative literature at Lund University. It was our pleasure to be able to introduce them to our university, UWC.

This is an extremely busy time of the year. The teaching has just started and due to various delays some students have not yet been properly registered. I wondered how we would be able to accommodate our guests in a proper way. We need not have worried. Their curiosity and genuine interest made it very easy and pleasant to have them as our guests – and we had received, before we knew it, a bishop who can listen.

The first evening we had a long discussion at our dinner table. We covered many subjects. It was not a matter of small talk only. What seemed to impress was the political situation; despite painful shortcomings in terms of some of the leadership, the arrival of Cope as new political party opened up for a situation of democratic choice. More difficult it was to see the way forward for the church, including our Evangelical Lutheran Church in Southern Africa. The Aurelius couple had just arrived from the consecration of bishop Buthelezi in Durban. As so often we would say something like, “it is a pity that the churches aren’t more ecumenical, as they could play a decisive role in the transformation of South Africa”.

On the Tuesday bishop Aurelius was invited to introduce a paper at our seminar at the Department of Religion and Theology at UWC; the paper was about the Old Testament and Christian preaching. Quite a number of people came, especially post-graduate students. Aurelius stressed for example that the Old Testament was the bible of the first Christians, that’s where God spoke to them as the one God. At the same time the Christians had a new way of looking at the OT: they would do it from the point of view of Jesus Christ, the Messiah who was to come. However, Aurelius also demonstrated that it is not only the New Testament that would be the criterion how the Old Testament should be understood. The OT also spoke to the New Testament and to the gospel (as example he mentioned Isaiah 9).

The paper was short enough to enable a discussion that was just as long, so there was a very meaningful engagement with the topic; for example a number of the students and staff are of the Reformed tradition, and they were now confronted with a Lutheran interpretation of the OT. Those who know will know that there are a lot of tensions here. The bishop, who gave a most worth while paper, came out as someone who also knows how to listen.

Even more so when I invited the Aurelius couple to my postgraduate class on Liturgical Theology that same afternoon; I thought it would be interesting for the students to hear about liturgical trends in Church of Sweden, but the discussion turned around. The students were only too willing to tell their stories about church life in Africa and after having listened for a while the bishop responded saying: well I can hear you, you span a wide variety, from a lot of singing and dancing and perhaps charismatic expressions to quite a strict liturgical form that has its roots in the Last Supper of Jesus. This seems to be exactly what we experienced at the bishop’s consecration in Durban last Sunday, six hours of all these things together in one.

So, while being able to contribute with some major insights regarding the Old Testament and Christian proclamation as well as the worship of the Lutheran church in current South Africa, it is clear that we have been paid a visit by a bishop who knows how to listen.