OF THE HORIZON

Horizon is, among some other things, a tale of one theologian’s crisis of faith, not over his religious convictions, but over the character of his service to those ideals. Reinhart Poole has been asked to leave the seminary where he teaches ‘ethics’. His teaching methods are Socratic and exciting, drawing from the Bible surprising insights and provocative questions. It is just these insights and questions that have landed him in trouble with the stolid, self-righteous, or simply ignorant powers of his day.

Reinhart Poole is working on his last lecture. During the night he will talk with his wife Patricia; he will imagine himself teaching, he will recall conversations with his father and mother and he will speak with the ghost of his brother. Reinhart will wonder if he has the patience and restraint for a ministry outside the classroom. He wonders if he has the talent for the life of a pastor. He fears he has become too accustomed to the control and freedoms of his academic world, his marketplace of Christian ideas within the seminary. This night in the life of Reinhart Poole is a kind of desert he will have to cross; it’s a deserted road he has to walk down.

Reinhart will also reread a play he is writing in his spare time – a story of two timeless masons endlessly creating and recreating the foundation of a church. "It helps to free my mind" he tells his wife Patricia. And it does.

THE STAGE IS SIMPLE – some cinderblocks and boards with which the artful masons may build their foundation, chalkboards and desks of the classroom, and a Bible, a notebook, and some index cards. Add to that some architectural drawings and a painted landscape, and the picture is complete.

The horizon in Reinhart’s world is metaphysical even implied by two physical matrices – the earth and the air, the source of our strength (and pain) and the character of our dreams (our desires). From a distance, only, can we appreciate it. "One must step back from it to see it at all," writes Reinhart in his notebook.

The basis for many of the ruminations in Horizon is a modest study of the life and ideas of REINHOLD NIEBUHR, an influential American theologian and social theorist. But although those familiar with Niebuhr’s ideas may see the ghost of them here, one ought not to strain the comparison.

My grandfather Thomas D. Rinde, a Lutheran minister, taught religious history at a seminary in Fremont, Nebraska, also serving as its director for many years. I like to think he would be pleased to find himself implicated here in my imagined teacher Reinhart Poole.

This landscape, this horizon, the convivial energies of Lincoln where this piece was born, the Nebraska horizon, the prairie here, have made me step back and look again. I’m grateful.

Rinde Eckert

September 2005.