The Mind in Another Place: My Life as a Scholar

By Luke Timothy Johnson

A witness to the peculiar way of being that is the scholar’s 

Luke Timothy Johnson is one of the best-known and most influential New Testament scholars of recent decades. In this memoir, he draws on his rich experience to invite readers into the scholar’s life—its aims, commitments, and habits. 

In addition to sharing his own story, from childhood to retirement, Johnson reflects on the nature of scholarship more generally, showing how this vocation has changed over the past half-century and where it might be going in the future. He is as candid and unsparing about negative trends in academia as he is hopeful about the possibilities of steadfast, disciplined scholarship. In two closing chapters, he discusses the essential intellectual and moral virtues of scholarly excellence, including curiosity, imagination, courage, discipline, persistence, detachment, and contentment. 

Johnson’s robust defense of the scholarly life—portrayed throughout this book as a generative process of discovery and disclosure—will inspire both new and seasoned scholars, as well as anyone who reads and values good scholarship. But The Mind in Another Place ultimately resonates beyond the walls of the academy and speaks to matters more universally human: the love of knowledge and the lifelong pursuit of truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781467463690

Luke Timothy Johnson

Luke Timothy Johnson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. His well known New Testament studies include The Writings of the New Testament (1986), The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (1996) and Religious Experience in Earliest Christianity: A Missing Dimension of New Testament Studies (1998). He often lectures at universities and seminaries worldwide. He is a noted critic of the Jesus Seminar, often taking stances against Burton Mack, Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan in discussions of the "historical Jesus."

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- PART ONE -

Becoming a Scholar

Chapter One

CHILDHOOD (1943–1955)

MY FIRST ELEVEN YEARS WERE SPENT IN F IFIELD , Wisconsin, a tiny village of about four hundred people in the far north of that state, about sixty miles south of Lake Superior. It was always a hard place to get to, but in my boyhood, the Soo Line Railroad, whose tracks ran less than a hundred yards from our house, still carried passengers, newspapers, and mail from the big cities of Milwaukee and Chicago. Today, the railroad no longer carries passengers, and Fifield is even more remote, accessible only by the two state highways (13 and 70) that intersect it.

The biggest building in Fifield was the redbrick schoolhouse. In addition to a town hall, the village had two groceries, two churches (Roman Catholic and Congregational), three sets of gasoline pumps, and many taverns—one of them (The Northwoods) was, in regional parlance, a supper club, which meant that it served food as well as the beer and brandy that the natives consumed in impressive quantities. The Northwoods—located about one hundred yards from our house—also had a small bowling alley that provided employment for teenage boys as pinsetters. Lying in bed at night, I could hear from one side the whistle of trains and, from the other side, the crash of bowling pins.

Apart from a tiny sawmill and a creamery, the town had no industry. The town of Park Falls (population ca. 2,500), four miles north of us, had a flourishing paper mill, which offered employment to many. Some younger men worked on the rails. Otherwise, the school bus delivered children, grades 1 through 12, from the hardscrabble farms scattered through the area. Once part of the great economic boom connected to the deforestation of the upper tier of the Midwest—my mother’s father and brother still worked as loggers—Fifield, with the other villages dotting highway 13, remained economically mired in the Depression throughout my childhood, and in most respects still does. The many taverns, supper clubs, and rustic resorts on lakes reflected a desperate dependence on the wealthier folk from Milwaukee and Chicago who came up in the fall to hunt deer and in the summer to fish, and who spent some of their idle hours and extra cash in such establishments, drinking and telling tall tales. Lakes in the area were legendary in number and beauty. Equally legendary were the number and size of the mosquitoes that bred around them.

Even more beautiful than the spring-fed lakes was the Flambeau River, the south fork of which ran through the town and offered young people a place to skate in winter and swim (down by the footbridge) in summer.¹ During my childhood, winters were bitterly cold (I remember an absolute temperature one day of 40 below zero), but summers were mild and breezy. In the depth of winter, the Flambeau froze in spots a foot thick, and even in summer the briskness of the river was a challenge to the fainthearted.

Extremes of wealth and poverty were not on obvious display, although there were degrees of economic security within the overall poverty of the region. Managers at the paper mill and new car salesmen were well-off by local standards, while those we used to call hobos and bums (many of them alcoholic) were manifestly without means, needing help to get by.² Within that range, my family, even after the death of my father in 1944, which left my mother a widow with six children, could be considered moderately comfortable. We had a paid-for house, an (older) automobile, and the basic amenities of a 1940s’ household: Maytag washer, oil heater, Singer sewing machine, plus the minor luxuries of an upright piano and a handsome combination radio-phonograph console.

Like everyone else, though, we wore hand-me-down clothes and socks that were darned more than once. Like everyone else, we relied in winter on the vegetables we had grown in our backyard garden, which our mother canned. The lack of iodine in local diets led to frequent cases of goiter or hyperthyroidism; chocolate-tasting iodine tablets were regularly distributed to grade school children as a preventative. For people without much cash or credit, barter was a common means of exchange: for doing a farmer’s taxes, my mother could get a bushel of fresh corn; for helping make a tavern owner’s insurance claim, she could receive several bottles of spirits.

Demographically, Fifield had a similar range of slight diversity within a predominantly European-based population. I never saw a person of color before I moved to Mississippi in 1955. The Native American Ojibwa reservation at nearby Lac de Flambeau made little impact on us in the days before the Chippewa established a casino there. But I well remember how ethnic and religious differences mattered to first-, second-, and third-generation European immigrants.³ The epithets of Canuck and Mick and Bo-hunk and Polack were casually tossed about. Catholics were papists, and Lutherans were heretics. Since there were not many of them, Congregationalists were given a pass. In Park Falls, the Norwegian Lutheran church was despised for its laxity by the German Lutheran church.

A mixed marriage involving diverse European ethnicities was not quite as serious as one involving a Catholic and a Protestant (which needed a formal dispensation on the Catholic side), but it required careful consideration, nevertheless. Since my family drew from such a variety of European stock (French Canadian, Dutch, English, Scottish, Irish, German, and Nordic), we did not get caught up in such competition, although spiritually we all thought of ourselves as essentially Irish.

Family arrangements also were more diverse and sometimes casual than might be suspected for a small village in the late 1940s and early 1950s. My brother and I discovered just how diverse when we entered homes to collect payment for our paper route. Besides the sometimes bewildering and alien smells that enveloped us as we came out of the winter cold into porches and kitchens, we observed virtually every family arrangement now trumpeted as social advancement. One example: among my mother’s good friends was Fritzi who lived with a married couple and was possibly the partner of one of them. She dressed as a man, drank with the men, and did man’s work. She was universally accepted, liked, and even admired. When money was low, she cut our hair in the kitchen. She was my first boss when I was maybe nine or ten: as she tended the town cemetery’s lawn, I clipped the weeds around the tombstones.

MY FAMILY

My ancestry did not predict the emergence of a scholar from that little place on the map. There were no professors, lawyers, doctors, or other professional types among my forebears. We were, like others in the area, lower middle class, laborers and small business owners. My grandparents on both sides had grade school educations. My father, Merland Ferdinand Johnson, graduated from Fifield High School, sold insurance, ran a small service station, and served as town clerk. My mother, Bernice Nola Teeters, graduated from Park Falls High School and, after her husband’s death, took over his insurance business and town clerkship while raising six children—the youngest of whom was me, born two months before my father’s death and given the baptismal name of Timothy Robert Johnson.⁴

As I remember things, the lack of higher education among my elders did not mean a lack of intelligence, grammatical speech, or clear writing. Literacy was assumed, as was (especially in the days of war when sons were in the military) an avid interest in world affairs. The Milwaukee papers (Journal in the morning and Sentinel in the evening) were avidly read, as was the local news made available by the Park Falls Herald.⁵ My father’s side of the family contributed wit and laughter; my mother’s side contributed drive and ambition.

Only two of my mother’s seven siblings had a college education, one of them (Bernard) at West Point. The military was for us, as it was for many in small midwestern towns, one of the premier avenues of advancement for folk with such humble origins.⁶ My mother’s sister Laura made a career in the Women’s Air Force. My oldest brother, Mickey, enlisted in the air force straight out of high school, served as radar technician in B-29 flights over North Korea, and used the GI Bill to get a BA from Millsaps College. Among my other siblings, my sister Nancy began training as a nurse, and when circumstances interrupted that, she also got a college degree later in life. My brother Pat received a PhD in clinical psychology from Catholic University. Clearly, my parents instilled in their children a hunger for education—and the circumstances of their children’s lives turned out to stimulate that native drive, by giving them little option except to find their own way forward.

The Johnson family, as of November 20, 1943, consisted of my father and mother and six children. Mickey was thirteen, Mary Jane was twelve, Nancy was nine, Margaret was seven, Pat was three, and I was the newborn boy. Two hardworking parents, by all accounts passionately in love and popular members of the town,⁷ and six hardy children, bright-eyed and (at least in their own eyes) good looking and smart. Life in the household seemed secure, and my older siblings tell me what a joyful time they had starting their lives in that time and place and with those parents. For gatherings of family and friends, my mother played tunes old and new on the piano, joining her lovely soprano voice to my father’s fine baritone.

But then, one late fall day, my father went out in a snowstorm to help someone whose car was stuck in the snow. He got chilled, caught a fever, and, in the days when antibiotics were reserved for the military, quickly succumbed to an infection. Within weeks ( January 31, 1944) he died of acute nephritis, at the age of thirty-six. My mother was left a widow with six children to raise and, somehow, a living to make.

I naturally do not myself remember how things went in those awful days when in the midst of her grief Mother needed to learn everything my father knew, take over what work of his she could, and hold the family together. I know that the older children helped. My brother Mickey got a special driver’s permit at age thirteen to take my mother on her insurance calls; he kept the gas station going for some months and then went to work all through high school at my uncle Bill’s garage in Park Falls. My twelve-year-old sister, Mary Jane, became, by all accounts, my chief and best surrogate mother. Until her death, she thought of me as hers in a special way. All I remember myself, sadly, is her singing me to sleep at naptime, lying next to me and crooning the tune Baa Baa Black Sheep with special emphasis on one for the little boy who lives down the lane. By the time I started grade school at age five (we had no kindergarten), Mickey was in the air force and, shortly after, Mary Jane married Warren Fellinger, another member of the air force, who spent much of his military life doing secret electronic things in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The family I personally remember, then, was reduced both in number and in resources. My sisters Nancy and Margaret were in high school, and my brother Pat and I were in grade school. Mother was the center of our lives and our guiding force. I know all sons think this, but I believe that it is fair to call my mother a remarkable woman. Even though she had to scramble to earn a living, using her brains in whatever way her neighbors’ needs made available, she sent us off to school every day with oatmeal in our bellies and had a hot supper ready in the evening. On Saturdays she did the wash, cooked, and baked simultaneously—cookies, coffee cake, bread. In the days before frozen food, everything was from scratch, including wonderful birthday cakes made to order for each child. Even with all her children helping at this chore or that (ironing clothes, scrubbing the kitchen floor, pounding dust out of rugs on the clothesline, changing window screens for storm windows and back again according to season), she would rub her arms and state distractedly, I have so much to do I don’t know where to start.⁸

Despite never seeming to have a spare moment, certainly not for herself, Mother somehow managed to gift each of us with a sense of very special and individual significance in her eyes, and in God’s eyes. She had the ability to combine seriousness, and at times severity, with an attitude of complete trust in her children. We enjoyed a kind of freedom—of thought, of movement, of enterprise—that seems no longer possible for today’s youth. When I sat in the elm tree across the driveway from our house reading Tom Sawyer, I recognized even at nine how his Hannibal adventures paralleled what we experienced growing up in Fifield.

The sibling who unquestionably had the biggest influence on me in the years between my first and sixth grades in school was my brother Pat, three years older than I. Like most big brothers, he was both mentor and tormentor, but since this is a book about becoming a scholar, I want to stress the way in which he was my first and, in many ways, best teacher. In those years, I was pretty much an appendage to this skinny version of the all-American boy. Everywhere he went, I went. This meant not only that I swam and skated with the older kids, and played sandlot baseball with them, but that I participated (and sometimes was chief collaborator) in Pat’s astonishing range of interests and activities. He was yang to my yin, who dragged me along on all his many adventures. And as he went, he explained. He had (and has) a remarkable gift for clear exposition, and he poured all of what he was learning into me. Or at least he tried.

Pat and I put on plays in the garage for the neighboring kids; we had an army club (complete with authentic patches donated by our military kin) that actually went into battle with another group of armed kids; we had a construction company that hauled dirt and tried to build a cabin in the woods. Pat and I delivered papers both morning and evening throughout the town—dividing it between us: we snipped open the wire-bound stacks of papers when they had been tossed out of the train, folded them together, divided them into paper-boy bags, and set out to bring the news of the world to our fellow townspeople. On his own, Pat was a Boy Scout avid for merit badges (I was the victim who was bandaged again and again so he and his friends could win a life-saver merit badge); he collected stamps; he built birdhouses and a lumber lift for our wagon.

I will turn to reading in a bit, but I should say here that it was Pat who devoured first the pages of Boys’ Life and Mad magazine, and who had first dibs on the sports pages of the Milwaukee Journal—the Boston Braves’ move to Milwaukee in 1953 was for all of us a transforming event, gluing us to the broadcast of every game by Earl Gillespie and Blaine Walsh—and what we then called the funnies, above all, Pogo (my mother’s favorite), Li’l Abner, the Katzenjammer Kids, and Out Our Way. It was Pat who involved me in reading dozens and dozens of comic books (GI Joe and Superman the favorites) and trading stacks of them with other kids in town; it was Pat who initiated our practice of crouching on the floor in stores and reading all the magazines they stocked.

A perfect illustration of Pat’s entrepreneurial spirit was the publication of the Fifield News by the Johnson brothers, aged twelve and nine. Pat had received a small printing press for Christmas, with paper, ink, slots for type, rubber type, and a tool to fit the slots into the wheel that could be turned under the ink pad. Many boys would have spent a week fooling with the thing. Not Pat. He became publisher and printer of a new commercial venture, for which I was reporter and typesetter. We printed some twenty issues of the paper (about six small pages an issue), and, yes, we sold it around town. Naturally, it sold well, because most of the news it contained was about the comings and goings (and pregnancies and births) in the Johnson family. The grown-up newspaper at the county seat, the Philips Bee, heard about our doings, sent a reporter to our house, and printed an article about these two boys with an enterprising spirit, complete with a photograph of Pat and me setting type out of egg crates. It was actually hard and unglamorous work, from which I derived mostly the ability to read backward and upside down (necessary when setting type by hand). I also grasped early on the connection between research (reporting), writing, and publication.

FAMILY TRAITS

These, then, were the people I lived with for my first eleven years, with my active memory embracing around six or seven of those years. Looking back some seventy years later, I am able to discern four distinct traits of my family that were obvious to me then and seem even more significant now, as I ask how I became the kind of scholar I became. By no means do I claim that any of these characteristics were unique to us, but in combination, they made a distinctive context for my most formative years.

Religious faith. The church easily dominated the school in terms of organizing our lives and influencing our perceptions. Although our ancestors were Protestant, grandmothers on both sides were Roman Catholics. I suspect that we became Catholic on my mother’s side through the Quebecois heritage of my mother’s mother, Mary Amo. On my father’s side, my grandmother Lucy Katon was Irish Catholic. I did not learn how recently we had become Catholic until my brother Pat (in a later-life enterprise) did a complete family genealogy. I could not imagine being anything