William Stafford on a Career in Theological Education

Our guest on this episode of Crossings Conversations is Reverend Dr. William Sutherland Stafford.  The Reverend Dr. Stafford has taught church history at CDSP as a visiting professor for the past decade. Prior to his post at CDSP,  he was a professor of church history at the University of the South and Dean of the School of Theology,  David J. Ely, Professor of church history at Virginia Theological Seminary, and served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and vice president.

For over five decades, the Reverend Dr. William Sutherland Stafford has been educating and forming scholars, theologians, and leaders in the church. Beyond his significant gifts as a teacher and administrator, the Reverend Dr. Stafford is an accomplished scholar, Pastor, preacher, liturgist, and community leader. We're so grateful to have him here with us today will be reflecting on his career to date and pondering what lies ahead.

This interview was conducted by Carly Lane, specialist with Learning Forte and contracted by CDSP.

About the Show: Crossings Conversations is a co-production of Church Divinity School of the Pacific and Trinity Church Wall Street. If you enjoyed the show, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or share it with a colleague. You can learn more about the only Episcopal seminary on the West Coast and subscribe to Crossings magazine at cdsp.edu.

Transcript

Carly Lane
I'm Carly Lane, and my guest today is the Reverend Dr. William Sutherland Stafford. Although nominally retired, the Reverend Dr. Stafford has taught church history at CDSP as a visiting professor for the past decade. Prior to his post at CDSP. He was a professor of church history at the University of the South and Dean of the School of Theology. Before that, he was the David J. Ely, Professor of church history at Virginia Theological Seminary, and served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and vice president. for over five decades he has been educating and forming scholars, theologians and leaders in the church. Beyond his significant gifts as a teacher and administrator, the Reverend Dr. Stafford is an accomplished scholar, pastor, preacher, liturgist, and community leader. We're so grateful to have him here with us today will be reflecting on his career to date and pondering what lies ahead.

Reverend Dr. Stafford, welcome. Thank you.

What was the Cultural Historical context in which you were formed spiritually and intellectually? 


Rev. Dr. William Sutherland Stafford
I was raised in the Presbyterian Church. And my father was a Presbyterian minister, and my grandfather was a Presbyterian minister and missionary. And my mother.

I think that today, she would certainly be ordained as a minister, but she was not able to in those days, nor did she recognize that calling. But boy, she sure taught a lot.

She used to say to my siblings and me, “Your father preaches one day a week, I preach six days a week.” And that's pretty much how it was, it was a very intensely Christian religious environment. That's really how I was formed. A deep love for Holy Scripture and deep love fora deep recognition of Jesus Christ's love for humanity. For us, for me, I was raised in a setting in which there was just a great deal of love. one of the characteristics of my own work has been that all of my work until I came to CDSP, was done in residential theological education and of CDSP. That's the only part of it I've done. I haven't engaged in remote education at all, which is now the new direction for CDSP as a whole, that did not occasion my retirement, I think it was just time for me to retire. And I made that decision long before the announcement was made. But it's in a way, it's just as well. I'm very adapted to and observed diligently in residential theological education. And I'm fairly clueless about how to do it remotely. When we were in COVID, and unzoom, I was not as good a teacher as I am face to face. So I will, in any case, my colleagues who are involved in all of that have been very patient with me and understanding of me, and I've been very grateful for that.

Carly
You've got this line you say, “I study and teach as a Christian and a priest but with an open ear to the non-Christians around me.” I would love to hear a little bit more about what that sentence means to you and why you chose to include it, and what you hope others will take from it.

Stafford
Well, to some extent that was implicit in how I was raised. My parents only subscribed to two magazines. One was Christianity Today, the evangelical banner publication.and The other was the New Yorker, which was definitely not that. I went to Stanford University as an undergraduate, which was, in those days, no hotbed of piety.Quite the contrary. So I needed to learn how to listen to other voices than those that came from the heart of the gospel.

I've never been very successful and learning how to talk back to those voices. But I have been eager to hear and to learn from and to, without leaving behind my faith, without leaving behind any sense of what God is doing in the world by the Holy Spirit, in the name of Jesus Christ, which is what I have always cared about, and what I still do absolutely care about.Those are my deepest, deepest loyalties. But I need to hear what's going on around and learn from it. 

My graduate education was in the 70s. I did not have a single woman who taught me even at Stanford. I only had one class that was taught by a woman. Quite a lot of what I think moved the church in the direction that the Holy Spirit wanted us to move was voices from outside the church that were demanding justice. The same is true with racism, and ethnic studies. There was none of that even available, as far as I know, when I was an undergraduate and certainly none of it in in my graduate education, except a loyalty to the Civil Rights Movement, which ran very deep, and was very strong, both places and in me, but that was more a recognition of the long standing abolitionism of my family. That and, and of how we came at things that way, it was to have any kind of practical sense of what changes need to be made in the life of the church from that. And the voices while Martin Luther King's Jr's voice was from inside the church. There were also voices that were almost as eloquent that came from outside that we needed to hear that I needed to hear and that made a difference in my ministry quite, quite strongly.

CARLY
I'm struck by what seems like a rhyme here between your personal faith and practice and your commitment to listening to what people say in the secular world are saying and letting that inform your understanding of how the Holy Spirit is working. You're regularly looking to these non ecclesial sources. So you're looking at people who are in the laity. You know, that they don't understand themselves to be doing church work, and yet their insights are, I don't know if you would say they're urgently needed by certainly they have an influence on how the church understands itself and where the theology goes.

Stafford
I have always been interested as a scholar and personally, in what ordinary people made of the Christian religion, people who were not ordained people who are not professionally responsible for the life of the church. That was what my research was in the Reformation in Strasburg, essentially, what, what was the most interesting part about it was about the revolution that the people of Strasburg had against the medieval clergy, and how they transformed the place of the clergy in the most radical way, as a result of the Reformation.

And the most exciting discovery I made in the archives was when a member of the city council had unilaterally blessed a marriage between a priest and the daughter of one of the major attorneys in the town. And then the brother of the young woman who was married, sued the city, on the grounds that it was against Imperial law to do anything like that, which was true. And he had to take statements, actual testimony, written testimony, from everyone involved in that whole event, the mother of the young woman, the young woman, the member of the city council, who did it, the lawyer who was involved and the young man who was making the suit himself. And it was a window in the middle of the Reformation movement into what was going on in the lives and minds of ordinary people who had to earn a living.
And, yeah, and that fascinated me, and that was really, in certain respects the heart of that scholarly work.

Carly
Can you tell me a little bit about that move into the Episcopal Church?

Stafford
Basically, two things happened in me and also in my wife, Barbara. One is that my enthusiasm for the Reformation was qualified. After studying it so closely. I studied the late Middle Ages, just as intensely. And I came to the conclusion that the Reformation was really wrong to judge that the whole medieval church was a giant conspiracy against the laity that they were exploiting, knowing that they're teaching a false gospel, exploiting people for their own financial advantage. That didn't, that wasn't consistent with an awful lot of the people I studied in the late Middle Ages, and in the Reformation movement itself.

I could not believe that the papacy as such was the Antichrist. So that led so I sat a little bit looser to the Reformation, even though I am very loyal to some of the basic doctrines of the Reformation that were justified by grace alone through faith alone. It seems totally taught in the New Testament as such, and I don't see any particular desire, I have no desire to get around that. And I've taught out of that heart for all the time I've taught. And, and I should say, parenthetically that when I teach, I teach enthusiastically, about the movement that we're studying. I'm not as interested in all that was wrong with it, as in what was right with it, and what the spiritual power behind it was. So when I teach the Reformation, I teach it very, very enthusiastically, more enthusiastically than I am.

The other aspects in my version, the other aspect of my conversion to the Episcopal Church, is that I came to believe what many Anglicans do not believe, but which many do in the real presence of Christ's Body and Blood in the Eucharist. And that belief, which I share with Luther, was not at home in the Presbyterian church at all, and I found, and when we were, when I was in my I was, in my first years of teaching at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island.

We found that the nearest church to us and one more he had an early service where we could get to and I couldn't get home and get back to work was a very high Episcopal church, St. Stephen's Providence, and we instantly found a home there. It was right for us. And then when we had a personal tragedy, the liturgy there simply carried us. And so did the care and love of the people and clergy there. So, but the liturgy, above all, and that it just made sense for us to get confirmed at that point. And that's what we did.

Carly
So you were confirmed, then in your in your late 20s. And by your mid 30s, you are pursuing holy orders in the Episcopal Church? 

Stafford
When I was teaching, their students simply couldn't understand why it wasn't ordained. They just couldn't understand it. And I kept on saying, I don't need to be, I don't particularly want to be I don't feel called to be necessarily, but they kept on asking the question. So I went on a series of retreats to, to try to see if that question was alive in me. And it was, and I had a pretty clear experience of God's call to the priesthood. And I answered that call, as best I could. It was hard to do, in many respects, partly because I was teaching full time at Virginia seminary, which was very much a full time job. More than full time, I had a family with young children. A after my first couple of years as a priest, I got a chance to go on sabbatical for a year, and ended up in a little Anglo Saxon church with a vicar who needed help, because of all the other things he was having to do. And he made fast friends with his family and with him. And in many respects, I was really formed as a priest in England as much as I was in America, in that very secular environment there, but with faithful and devoted people who actually did come to church, and, and it was just a wonderful formation, and, and a lot of wisdom from the priest I was working with.

And he was very generous to me. So that that too is part of the story. I've my closest to full time ministries in a parish church that I've really had, besides a couple of times in this country was where in England I was member, the North North Durham ministry team, or the north part of Durham city, in the north of England, for most of the year, and, and that was a most interesting and formative experience to being part of the ministry team, in a new model for ministry, that was not one priest, one parish, because they couldn't sustain that anymore. So that was, that's, that's part of the story about how that happened. 

Carly
As you think about the church today, what do you notice has changed in theological education? What are you excited about? What are you concerned about? 

Stafford
I had a former colleague who said that every 500 years the church has a fire sale, and I think one's underway right now. And, and, in many respects, I am clueless about what's going to come out of it. But  I do think that a couple of values need to be held on to and theological education. And I think they will be even in remote theological education. There's a high priority being given to community. They're doing their very best to establish and maintain community in those online groups of learners and faculty.

I don't think that answers all the questions but I think but I think that the community aspects of mutual formation, for for people who are preparing for our nation and for lay ministries, learned lay ministries in the church. is the critical importance. It's obvious in residential theological education. I think they're they've been working very hard on learning how to do that, and remote. And I think it's critical that they succeed in doing so. And I think the early returns from the research into how it's going on is pretty positive.

But, but I think we will know more in 20 years and we know more about how that how that's coming. The other thing, and I think this is very much in the hearts of my call of many of my colleagues anyway.
I think that a fundamental centeredness in the basic gospel, the what we tend to as Episcopalians referred to as the Pascall mystery, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again, finding our center in that central, inexplicable, but life changing mystery.

CARLY
So I wonder. So every historian I know is obsessed with the question of continuity and discontinuity. And I want you to think about your career and your scholarship, your research, where are the continuities and discontinuities. Can you tell a coherent story about what it is that you've pursued and been curious about and written about? I think,

STAFFORD
But I've noticed a certain embarrassment, not just in the Episcopal Church, but across the spectrum of clergy and lay people being willing to use that three letter word sin is not popular. It used to be very popular. And, and way back in the centuries that I mostly studying, and it just isn't any more people are more or less. Well, many people seem to be allergic to the whole idea, no doubt because it's been so badly misused by the church and by others and in many ways, but there is a way in which I think the Christians really need to talk about it. They, the darkness that is in part of the heart of the whole social structure that we're in, like, racism is I think sin. And I think it meets the classical understandings of sin in a corporate way, certainly from the Old Testament. I, I also think that, in people struggles with God, that the role that is played by guilt in their lives some sometimes. And the anger that results from all of that is there's been a block to their spiritual growth. And I, and I think that having an adequate understanding of sin, and above all redemption, God's grace, and God's forgiveness in Christ. I think that that's just central to people making any real kind of spiritual progress, at least many people. And not everybody's like everybody else. But that certainly has been true of me. And of most of the people that I've worked with. So I tried to write the book, to rehabilitate the concept of sin. Now, it's dated now. It's, it's, I'd write it somewhat differently now than I did, then, of course, because it was a couple of decades ago that I wrote the thing. But I, and the world has changed around me, and I've changed with it in certain respects. But I, but I haven't lost that. That conviction, it's very hard to speak of sin in the church, and it's almost impossible to do it in the wider culture.

And I, and yet, I think it's, it's necessary, I do not think that it's adequate to treat major social disorders, like structural racism. For me, without that category coming into play, it's an offense against God. It's an offense against neighbor. And it needs to be repented of, and consistently repented of, and deeply and structurally repetitive. And that's one of the major themes of the book, but  it's true, and lots of other areas of life, too. But I think that the kind of amnesia which our religious culture seems to me to some extent, to be fostering is unhelpful in the long run to the to the work of reconciliation, and then seeking new life

CARLY
Reverend Dr. Stafford, Bill, I want to thank you. Yeah, really, like from the heart. Thank you so much for giving so fully of yourself, is there anything you'd like to add before we close our time together? 

STAFFORD
Oh, except to say thank you to all of my colleagues over the years, including CDSP,  to thank them, living and dead, to thank them for being so such thoughtful colleagues to me patient with me when I was obstreperous and supportive of me when they thought I was doing the right thing. And trying to understand me when I was going in directions that they couldn't fully agree with. I've had wonderful colleagues. And that's very largely why I care so much about the future of faculty community, in the future of theological education. I, it has been, it's been of enormous creative importance to me. And I've been very grateful for it. And I, and I would hate to see it diminished, or that possibility, taking what taken away from younger scholars, because of the new structures and theological education I trust, it won't be, I hope, I hope that new ways will be found forward and that also, I just like to say, how grateful to God I am for the opportunities that have been given to Me in theological education for all these years. God all fit together. So I think, while I don't see the fabric that God is weaving out of our lives, all that clearly, in many ways. That's one piece of it. I do see and my gratitude as well to my wife, Barbara, and to my five children, but especially to Barbara, who's been a formative influence in my life since day one. I'm just grateful to all those people deeply grateful as I look back over a long career from which I am now retiring, and, and, in my own way, letting go, and I'm wondering my own way continuing.

So thank you, Carly. I've appreciated our dialogue very much.

CARLY
Likewise,  it's hard to stop but I'm consoling myself that I have your books to carry me. Thank you.