The Groves of Academe

This time a year ago, I had lunch with A. J. Conyers at the local Quizno’s. Chip was preparing to begin another semester at Baylor’s Truett Theological Seminary, where he had taught theology for the past decade. Yet he was also working out the complicated system that would allow him to receive intensive chemotherapy treatments every week in Houston while at the same time making sure that, with the help of a graduate student, all of his classes would be taught. I used the occasion to express sentiments to Chip that I had never voiced before, since it seemed obvious that he was dying of the leukemia that he fought so valiantly for a decade.

I expressed my enormous admiration for the way he had dealt with his illness—neither raving with rage at being struck down in the full flower of his career, nor sinking into the self-pity that would have made his disease the defining event of his life. I quoted a Presbyterian friend, a retired pastor who has seen many parishioners face death and who still holds to the difficult Christian doctrine of particular providence—the Pauline confidence, namely, that God is at work in all things, not by way of some vague general oversight, but by means of quite concrete and particular will. While visiting from North Carolina a few months earlier, this friend had briefly met Chip, but even this cursory visit had revealed to him what so many of us had found so remarkable about him. “Never have I seen a dying man face the end with such serenity, with such courage and grace, with such confidence that God’s will is being done.”

Chip received this tribute with his typical humility, but then he offered a surprising addendum. “Among those splendid words,” he said, “there’s one that you’ve left out.” I inquired, of course, about the missing word. “It’s puzzlement.” How could he not be vexed at being cut off in his prime? Nearing the end of his fifth decade, Chip knew that his work was blossoming in new and unprecedented ways. He was producing books of remarkably high quality and deep theological insight. St. Augustine’s Press had recently reissued his fine little study called The Eclipse of Heaven. His treatise on toleration had enjoyed a very positive reception from many quarters. At the time of our conversation, he was at work on a book dealing with vocation, and he had plans for yet another on baptism. He was teaching the very best students at our seminary, where he had a large and faithful following. How could a believer in particular providence not be puzzled? So much promise coming to such an unpromising end?

That Chip spoke of his puzzlement with a smile assured me that he was not putting me on the spot, not demanding that I do the impossible, not insisting that I answer Job’s question. Yet in a brief moment of inspiration I recalled a saying from Flannery O’Connor, the salty Georgia writer who was also one of Chip’s favorites. I reminded him of O’Connor’s thorny confession upon discovering that her lupus would probably kill her early rather than late. “I can take it all as a blessing,” O’Connor said, “with one eye squinted.” “Yes!” replied Chip. “That’s it exactly.” We then talked briefly about Romans 8:28, and how authentic faith does not exclude but requires an eye-squinting skepticism, a pained puzzlement over the seeming godlessness of the world’s natural operations.

This was the first but also the last time I ever spoke with Chip Conyers about his illness, even though we had several other visits, including one in the hospital only a few months before his death. It wasn’t that Chip wanted to avoid the morose subject. Exactly to the contrary: he had so fully come to terms with his death that he wanted to get on with his work, and thus to talk about the coming semester, the books we were reading, the theological ideas that we were percolating, the students who showed special promise. Thus did he embody—like none other I’ve ever known—the central Christian conviction that we are already living in the New Age, that the Kingdom of God is not an idealistic hope to be realized in some far off time but a present reality in our midst, that in Christ and his church we are made living witnesses of the glad tidings that by death he has done down death.

There are so many good things to say about this man’s life and work that one quails at saying anything at all, lest it be pathetically too small. Yet when I think of Chip’s unique contribution to Baptist life in particular and to the ecumenical church in general, I think of his steadfast avoidance of cliché. He refused the deadly error of making the obvious still more obvious—as one wag has added—in perfectly obvious terms. A single example of Chip Conyers’ originality of mind will have to suffice. It concerns the danger that David Solomon warns against when he says that Southerners and Baptists of our generation who came of age in the ’60s cut our teeth on the easiest moral issue of the 20th century: race. Once we discovered that segregation was a monstrous denial of the humanity of our black brothers and sisters, we were then tempted to treat other ethical and theological questions as if it they were equally simple.

As a native son of the South and a convert to Baptist tradition, Chip Conyers sought to penetrate the evil that has so sorely vexed both his region and religion. He saw that racism was not a uniquely Southern problem but a manifestation of a much more pernicious disease afflicting the whole of modern life—the commodification of almost everything. Chip discerned that the real root of our troubles lies in the 16th and 17th centuries with the burgeoning of the tools of production and conquest.

With devastating clarity, Chip Conyers came to see that this modern way of living no longer valued human beings as particular persons offering their unique and irreplaceable gifts to a communal enterprise. Rather did the Enlightenment make us into solitary individuals having equal rights because we are equally interchangeable parts in the gigantic machine of the commercial and martial state. We are little more than instruments of production and profit and warfare. The masters of the market and the military are willing, in turn, to “tolerate” the religion of their slaves only if it is reduced to the private sphere, where it remains essentially harmless. Far from being the regressive invention of benighted medievals, therefore, chattel slavery was what Chip rightly called “the eldest child of modernity.” For in the figure of the Negro slave we moderns created the ultimately autonomous person—one who no longer belongs to family and clan, to region and guild, to community and church and God, but only to oneself as the servant of those who possess total political and commercial power.

Thus did this ever so gentle man, this revolutionary conservative, this quietly radical theologian who died just as his work was beginning to soar, offer his drastic Christian critique of the slavery that once held black people in bonds but that now enslaves us all in the name of tolerance and liberty. Yet Chip’s final word was not Nay but Yea, not angry admonition but joyful summons. In his soon-to-be-published final book, The Listening Heart: Vocation and the Crisis of Modern Culture, he addresses the clamant late-modern concern for diversity and difference. Rather than declaring differences to be either insignificant in the name of a bland universalism, or else all-significant by way of a vicious tribalism, Chip saluted the difference that is meant to make for unity:

While giving expression to what is temporally divided, we begin together to give witness to what is finally united. For the end of all things is the God who calls us, in whom we find rest, by whose one light we find our separate ways toward that city “not made with hands, eternal, in heaven.”

Those were among the words read at his funeral. In the mystery of divine providence, Chip Conyers was taken from us while giving vital witness to the transcendent unity of all things in the love of the triune God. That he did it so well in a life that seems so brief is a blessing beyond all telling.

Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University. His most recent book is Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans).