CMU Professor’s Contribution to Church, CMU Celebrated at Symposium

Church Central to Harry Huebner’s Theology and Life

“Judge a man by his questions, rather than his answers,” said the French writer, essayist and philosopher Voltaire.

Harry Huebner

By that yardstick, Harry Huebner—who retired from full-time work after thirty-seven years as a Professor of Theology and Philosophy at CMU—can be judged to have lived, taught and served the church well.

At a May 24 symposium celebrating Huebner’s contributions to the university and the church at large, speakers noted his willingness to ask difficult and challenging questions—all in an effort to prod Christians into thinking about, and living out, their faith.

CMU President Gerald Gerbrandt opened the event by noting that Huebner’s approach to faith, church and life is an “integrated approach that escapes easy categorizing,” combining theology, philosophy, peace studies and ethics.

Through it all, one thing was clear for Huebner, he stated; “the church was central,” in his theology, “and in his life.”

At the same time, he added, Huebner believed in “challenging the church . . . the church is not the norm nor absolute, but the body of Christ, and as such embodies and echoes the Word made flesh.”

CMU alumnus Joe Wiebe, now a doctoral student at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. noted that his former professor punctuates the claims he makes “with a question mark” that elicits responses from others.

Presenters at the symposium honouring Harry Huebner: (l-r) Cheryl Pauls, Chris Huebner, Joe Wiebe, Jane Barter-Moulaison, Travis Kroeker.

“His genius is not to offer the last word,” he said, adding that Huebner is also “open to the possibility that he may be wrong.”

At the same time, Wiebe added, Huebner cautions the church not to “take a victorious approach to theology,” but to be open to “questioning its own certainties.”

Cheryl Pauls, Assistant Professor of Piano & Music Theory at CMU, shared how Huebner encouraged her to be sensitive and to listen to what people around her are saying—or singing.

“Many bemoan a dearth of good singing today,” she said. “But rather than try to figure out how to fix it, we should try to adapt to it . . . it is an expression of a confused cultural tongue. We need to heed its call, not lament its tone.”

Pauls concluded her presentation by playing Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch—a favourite of Huebner’s—noting that it evokes themes in his writing such as listening, patience, remembering and memory.

Chris Huebner, Associate Professor of Theology & Philosophy, CMU—and also Huebner’s son—reflected on Huebner’s career in Christian higher education. He suggested that the idea of a Christian university itself might need to be scrutinized and questioned more deliberately.

Noting that Christian universities often tell potential students that they are safe and secure places to study, Huebner wondered if they shouldn’t say the opposite—that a school like CMU might be “quite unsettling and painful for students.”

If CMU was honest, he went on to say, it might tell students that it would “shake them, stretch them,” and cause them to feel “despair and hopelessness.” But those are good things, he said, because they can lead to “conversion, rebirth and regeneration.”

Jane Barter-Moulaison, Assistant Professor of Theology at the University of Winnipeg, noted that Huebner not only asks challenging questions, but also “challenges the very questions we pose.”

This, she added, was not the same as saying people should question everything, but rather that “if our questions are certainties and comfortable, they will not lead us to the truth.”

Travis Kroeker, a CMU graduate who now is a Professor of Religion at McMaster University, praised Huebner’s idea that “the church does not point to itself, but to the passage of God in the world.”

He went on to say that the New Testament itself questions traditional notions of success, opening with “a strange wild man in the wilderness,” someone with no schooling, no sophisticated organization, no credentials—someone who lived “on the edges and the margins, away from the conventional markers of success.”

Questions about who is the “brightest and best” do not concern John or Jesus, he stated, adding that the “heart of the Good News” is that it is “not concerned about human reputation.” This, he said, gave Jesus and John “an unsettling sense of power.”

In response, Huebner, a member of the Charleswood Mennonite Church in Winnipeg, noted that his goal was to “not only give Christian answers to questions,” but to “make the questions Christian.”

At the same time, he wanted to “see what we might say if we take seriously our commitment to Jesus Christ,” and also help Christians find ways to “live faithfully in what can be a cruel, broken and heartless world.”

One answer that Huebner is sure of, he said, is that the cross and resurrection of Jesus are “God’s answer to human hopelessness.”

Posted June 1, 2008

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