Charting the Movement of the Spirit: Teresa Berger's Encounter with the Holy

Teresa Berger's journey from her native Germany to her position as associate professor of ecumenical theology at Duke Divinity School has followed the unexpected promptings of the Spirit.

After completing her doctoral work in theology at Ruprecht Karl University in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1984, she planned to do some additional post-doctoral research with Geoffrey Wainwright at Union Theological in New York City.

Not long before leaving on her first trip to America, she received a letter from Wainwright explaining that he had just accepted a position at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C. Her map did not list Durham, and North Carolina seemed as remote as the Australian Outback.

She decided that she could endure anything for the nine months of an academic term and came to Durham in time for the fall semester of 1984.

 

She has stayed for almost 20 years.

Even on short acquaintance, Berger displays a certain adventurousness in manner, a willingness to take a new direction, that is fairly uncommon in scholars of theology. It is a quality that is not lost on her students.

"Teresa is always challenging her students to see things differently," said Pam Allen Morin '89, who works as field coordinator for Wesley Nurse Health Ministries in Corpus Christie, Texas, and has stayed in touch with Berger. "She likes to get to the heart of what a student believes and confront him or her with a completely different and viable point of view."

Berger's title as associate professor of ecumenical theology is as accidental as her initial journey to Durham. Dennis Campbell, the dean at the time, asked her to stay as a visiting instructor at the Divinity School after her year of research. Since she was a Roman Catholic with degrees from Anglican, Lutheran and Catholic institutions, and was teaching in a United Methodist seminary, they came up with the title to serve the single year that Berger planned to spend at Duke.

Her teaching and research interests have changed over the years, but her title has remained. Though ecumenical theology does not begin to cover the breadth of her subsequent scholarship, the title functions in an interesting way. Because she receives questions as an expert, Berger is forced to think of whatever she is researching in terms of ecumenism at some point or other. That constant questioning has changed her vision of ecumenism. The old idea of a truly ecumenical church was focused on repairing the divisions between denominations. As Berger's theology has matured, however, she has found that there are divisions in the church other than denominational fragmentation. The most obvious division dealt with in her work is gender division, but she was not here long before she encountered racial division as well.

In a seminar for local pastors in a rural community, Berger laid out what was then a grand scheme for denominational reconciliation. At the end of her presentation, a distinguished looking Methodist minister stood and began his comments by complimenting her (something she says is peculiarly American).

He then explained that as the pastor of a small Methodist parish in North Carolina, he would have little problem joining in worship with the Baptists across the street or the Presbyterians down the road. But if he tried to arrange a common gathering with the African American Methodists on the other side of town, there would be trouble in his congregation.

She began to see that fissures ran through the church that had nothing to do with denominational affiliations.

One of the methods she uses to discern these fissures is to look at the way a particular group expresses its encounter with the Holy through ritual or liturgical practices.

The order and manner in which members of a particular group worship, engages the material reality in which they live, she said. Where and how a people lives, even the mundane details of what they eat, influences the ways they worship God. Without an adequate understanding of that material reality, theology risks being too alienated from people's lives to truly represent their living of a Christian life.

Berger's colleague at the Divinity School and long-time friend, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, said, "she understands liturgy as ecclesial practice, but insists on placing ecclesial practice in relation to geopolitics and material conditions of Christian life."

Berger assumes that what is considered "traditional" about Christianity will be centered differently in various cultural contexts, but she refuses to consider that difference as inscribing inferiority. She wants to teach her students how to negotiate the various centers to achieve a new center of tradition that includes all the participants.

Instead of talking about the liturgical tradition of the church, Berger points to markers in the textual evidence that indicate multiple and contesting traditions. Those related to women-focused traditions include re-reading ecclesiastical constraints, beginning in the New Testament, instructing churches against allowing women prominent leadership roles, particularly in worship and liturgical matters. Berger provides an alternative, and viable, reading that these are constraints that assume that there was an existing practice of women leading worship.

Writing theology from a feminist perspective opens an understanding of church tradition, especially as relates to liturgy and ritual, that expands what is usually considered traditional.

Berger's theological borders are fluid and flexible, though they are borders. She finds her limits in everyday liturgical practices, especially those of women, that look to "encounter the holy." She traces the movements of the Spirit by watching how those the Spirit touches react and express the import of their meeting. Then Berger works to understand and become a part of that expression.

Her own geopolitical orientation is rooted in post-World War II Germany. She grew up in the West German town of Hanau. She can describe villages only 60 miles to the east split down the middle by what must have seemed an insurmountable ideological divide between East and West Germany. Old houses on the eastern side of the street bricked over windows that faced west.

Her Roman Catholic family provided a comfortable atmosphere where she learned the lives of the saints from a book given to her at 6 months by her grandmother.

Her scholarly bent emerged early “ she preferred studying Latin to the more traditional pursuits for girls of cooking and sewing and keeping a house.

The scars of World War II persisted through her childhood. Many of those scars were literal: the ravaged faces, missing arms and legs, and buildings, hundreds of years old, in ruins. Many of the most profound scars were more obscure “ the silence of the missing, the absence of a once thriving Jewish community.

Berger's experience and scholarship have convinced her that a person's origins and social status make a difference in how God is encountered, and how that encounter is expressed.

Former student and current friend Morin said, "I think this is why the study of liturgy has always appealed to her. Liturgy is a creative attempt of a faithful community to express their experience of God in a collective celebration."

Her new course in Latin American, Latino, and Hispanic theologies is a case in point. Called "Beyond Borders," it attempts to acculturate future church leaders at the Divinity School to the particular cultural space that Latino/a parishioners will carry with them.

The course grew out Berger's experience in her home parish of Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church in Durham. Over the past six years, she has increasingly moved from the English service of mass to the Spanish or bi-lingual mass that grew around the burgeoning Latino community in the Research Triangle area and in her church.

In 1991, Catholic universities in Germany, Switzerland and Austria offered her positions. Before she could accept any of them, however, the Vatican, with little explanation, refused to grant her the seal of approval needed for those positions. She spent much of the next five years in ecclesial litigation to overturn, or at least get an explanation of, the denial. The Vatican court offered her neither.

Though that experience was painful, Berger refuses "to grant them the power to shape my life into bitterness." She considers her accidental position at Duke Divinity the work of the Spirit's providence.

She is also receiving a measure of vindication. In August in Berne, Switzerland, Berger was awarded the Herbert Haag Prize for Freedom in the Church to honor her commitment to issues of justice and equality in Roman Catholic practice. In the Spring 2002 issue of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Berger published a reflection on the feast day of St. Clare. "Of Clare and Clairol" is an academic essay that successfully skirts literary boundaries until it approaches devotional meditation and treats us to an image that represents Berger's methodology and the sense of adventure that theology can produce. "I share the faith of Clare: all radiance that is ours ultimately reflects that uncreated radiance which the Christian tradition has known as lux perpetua, eternal light “ be it the radiance of sunlight on ancient pines, be it luxurious golden hair or the lives of shorn women saints." This profile originally appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of Divinity magazine.