Where God Met Me

Its original, now-dated cover art of a green-and-blue maze was no doubt someone’s idea of a design that would catch a modern reader’s eye. Its title’s non-inclusive use of “man” would never pass muster today. But open the pages any day, and this now fifty-year-old book is as timeless and classic as it was in its first printing in 1972. In Where God Meets Man, Gerhard O. Forde gave us a lucid, pithy, and humane piece of theology that all these years later still holds the possibility of bestowing real faith on its readers. It’s what happened to me.

I started seminary in 1986 thinking I wanted to be a pastor because I wanted to help people. It would be a perfect career for a child of an alcoholic who had wicked mad skills in managing others’ emotions and in eliminating family drama wherever possible. I’d worked a couple years in a nursing home, so some hash of ministry/gerontology sounded good. Yes, I wanted to help people, and, because that’s what pastors did, I was in seminary.

Then I encountered a word unlike any I had ever heard. First-year MDiv students were required to take a team-taught course on worship staffed by a worship maven, a specialist in hymnody, and a theologian who would each bring their specialty to the fore. Call it multi-faceted teaching. I loved learning the ins and outs of liturgy: albs and stoles, the te deum and kyrie eleison, and hand gestures you could use to land a 747 down the center aisle. Hymns were what drew me into the church as a sixth grader (well, hymns if you broaden the definition to include “Let There Be Peace on Earth” and “They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love”). But systematic theology was another matter entirely.

In a dysfunctional family like mine, a person is yoked to emotions. Nothing about addiction makes rational sense. Thinking about things never solves anything. Theology stood just this side of the horrifying realm of philosophy as dark territory whose fence line ought not be breached. That was for students who were more intellectually gifted and sophisticated (and certainly less fun) than this prairie kid who, his first sophomore year, earned a 0.8 GPA. I was a theological Stuart Smalley. I wanted to be able to perform the rituals that made people feel warm and tingly, not think actual deep thought.

But, somehow, I knew enough to plant myself front and center in the classroom, square with the professor’s lectern. Gerhard Forde (that’s fer-dee not ford) stepped up and changed my life. Silver hair and close-cropped white beard. Wire-rimmed glasses lagging a couple steps behind fashionable (what my father-in-law, in looking at the selection of free pairs at the VA optical shop a couple decades later, decried as “birth control glasses”). A set of steely eyes looked through those lenses, and, with a central-Minnesota lilt, he said something along the lines of, “Well … I suppose we ought to get started.”

It was always the introductory “Well … ” with him. Inevitably, in that class and in many others in which I was a teaching assistant, a student would balk at the frightening scope of the freedom they inferred from Gerhard’s justification-by-faith spiel and would ask, “But … isn’t there anything we need to contribute to our salvation???” His standard response was, “Well [insert long pause of anticipation here], what do you want to do? If God has created faith in you, don’t you suppose the Holy Spirit is directing the desires of the new you?”

I’d like to say that what Gerhard did in that worship classroom was open a door for me into the delights of studying theology. But that’s far too mild a description. What he really did there and in subsequent courses on creation and redemption, on the Lutheran Confessions, on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and on the grand arc of Luther’s theological program, was rummage around in my brain and re-order everything I ever knew about the world, the church, the gospel, and the Lord. I was so unformed theologically that he hardly needed a demo day. He went straight to my core and took the Lego chaos that was my understanding and, brick by brick, constructed something new.

Over time the edifice came to look less like earthly success, pain management, congregation strategies, or pastoring as either leadership or a helping profession and more like a couple rough-hewn beams pegged together on a rock outcropping and a tomb carved into another rock. Forde’s program worked on me as it has done for so many others. He gave me what the subtitle of Where God Meets Man declares: a “down-to-earth approach to the gospel.”

What Gerhard meant by that phrase was a corrective to the theology of glory that hinged on the assumption that almighty free will produced better religion, and which in 1972 he regarded as having run rampant in the church. (I’d argue that nothing has changed.) He used the story of Jacob’s dream at Bethel in describing a theology built on climbing Jacob’s ladder. The church’s proclamation and witness had been weakened by offering sinners works they could do to ascend to godly heights of personal piety and religious fervor, something akin to another [false] gospel Paul accused the Galatians of having succumbed to and which always placed Christ in a penultimate position at best.

In contrast, Forde declared, God knew well our paltry climbing ability and instead chose to be emptied of divine power and instead to meet us — not on a level playing field but down deep where our sin and brokenness can’t be denied. How deep? Well … about six feet. That awful 1972 cover graphic of a maze on the first edition of the book functions so much better than the new fiftieth anniversary-edition-with-study-guide that inadvertently glorifies Gerhard and his book, which is far from what I think he intended. No grave needed here.

But the old maze does the trick nicely, because what lies at its center is not a trumpeting of the author’s brilliance but a small cross that, once you arrive there, becomes an explosion radiating outward. It’s a highly stylized supernova worthy of the James Webb Space Telescope. Some readers over the last fifty years have decried Forde’s approach as space debris at best and often as a black hole that devalued the freedom of their will and the goodness of their intentions. But Gerhard knew well Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

That means Where God Meets Man has always been uninteresting to religious people with grand plans for changing the world and anathema if you’re a climber, striver, or macher, to use a fine Yiddish term. But I was ripe for the picking. I didn’t know how low my anthropological potential was, but as a former bed-wetter, a high school letter-winner in declam of all things, a now-grown kid who, try though he might, couldn’t fix his family, I had certainly experienced the reality of the grave. I knew what it meant to die helpless under sin. When Gerhard said, “Well … I suppose we ought to get started,” he became the baling hook God used to reach into my deadness. The message of our Lord and his cross on Forde’s lips and on the pages of the green-and-blue book wasn’t foolishness to me. It was the power of God given to me and for me.