March 28, 1999

BOOKEND / By DICK TERESI

Is Franz Bibfeldt for Real? Yes and No

t is 1999, and time to reconsider the work of Franz Bibfeldt. Bibfeldt slouched into my life in the summer of 1997. I had just published a long, tedious, yet superficial essay for The Atlantic Monthly on the Year Zero, or rather the lack of same, in the mathematically challenged Christian calendar. This anomaly makes it difficult to reckon years from B.C. to A.D., and impossible to determine whether the new millennium begins in 2000 or 2001. In July a letter arrived, smelling faintly of petits fours and scrod -- it having been forwarded from The Atlantic's Boston offices -- from a Colleen Cullinan, a student at the University of Chicago Divinity School, who expressed her disappointment that I had neglected to mention the contributions of Bibfeldt, the eminent neosyllogistic existential theologian.

Bibfeldt, I learned, had in 1927 submitted his doctoral thesis, ''The Problem of the Year Zero,'' to the University of Worms. It was Bibfeldt's hypothesis that the Roman Empire collapsed, eventually, because the Romans counted backward, with 44 B.C. following 45 B.C. and so on. Robin Lovin, the dean of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University, sums up the problem of the 1-B.C. man who finds himself inebriated on New Year's Eve: ''One minute you're a full year before Christ, and then, BOOM, one minute later, you're into the first year of the Christian Era, with nothing in between.''

Bibfeldt devoted his life to this overarching theme: the search for the missing middle. In his seminal 1951 work, ''The Relieved Paradox,'' he sought to reconcile all to all, to insure that theology fulfills its mission to ''make things come out right.'' He responded sharply to Soren Kierkegaard's ''Either/Or'' with his own treatise, ''Both/And,'' but later, in a conciliatory gesture, published ''Either/Or and/or Both/And.'' Still, the rift between the two was never repaired, Bibfeldt hailing the theology of Kierkegaard as ''nothing that a month in Acapulco wouldn't cure.''

Franz Bibfeldt was born (one day premature) in 1897 at Sage-Hast bei Groszenkneten, Oldenburg, Niedersachsen, Germany, though some say reports of his birth have been greatly exaggerated. The University of Chicago sponsors a more-or-less annual Bibfeldt Symposium, which is celebrated over bratwurst and beer on the Wednesday closest to April Fool's Day, and at which the Bibfeldt family coat of arms -- the god Proteus rampant on a weather vane -- is prominently displayed. Bibfeldt himself, however, rarely makes public appearances. He is so devoted to the Year Zero problem that he has become time-impaired, and invariably arrives at meetings a year late or a year early. He has granted but one interview, and that, unfortunately, was to Howard Hughes. We know Bibfeldt well, however, from his distinctive prose, which is liberally dotted with the phrases ''Perhaps, perhaps'' and ''Yes and no! Yes and no!'' Young people know him as the first theologian to write about computer glitches in the year 2000. (See ''Y2K? Why Indeed?'' September 1978 Omni.)

Martin E. Marty, the director of the Public Religion Project at the University of Chicago, and Jerald C. Brauer, a former University of Chicago Divinity School dean, point out that ''at midcentury, the golden age of modern theology, the names of most prominent theologians began with the letter B: Baillie, Balthasar, Barth, Bea, Berdyaev, Bibfeldt, Bonhoeffer, Brunner, Buber, Bultmann. Only a few names like Niebuhr and Tillich were exceptions to the B rule.'' Of all those B's, only Bibfeldt remains extant.

Though he was flexible (or, as the Germans say, l Bibfeldt was rejected the least by the Church of England, described by George Plimpton as ''all that stands between us and Christianity.'' Bibfeldt was fond of saying, ''By the grace of God, the church moves forward even while constantly sidestepping.'' His negotiation of the via media has been of immense help in fund-raising. ''It is more difficult for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,'' Bibfeldt wrote. ''Yet, with genetic engineering, we can now breed very small camels.''

Bibfeldt's only gaffe came in October 1965, when his subscription to Time magazine lapsed temporarily, and he missed out on the God-is-dead movement. He quickly recovered, and may have saved theology, embracing both sides of the question by stoutly proclaiming the past existence, or ''wasness,'' of God.

The wasness of Bibfeldt himself is now being questioned. In recent years, the quest for the historical Bibfeldt has taken an ugly turn. Revisionists claim that this giant of Lutheran pre-modernism was not born in 1897 but on an autumn Sunday afternoon in 1947, outside the Concordia Seminary library in St. Louis. A freshman seminarian, Robert Howard Clausen, facing a Monday term-paper deadline and angered at the library's Sunday closings, invented his research -- and his footnotes. One of the invented sources, Franz Bibfeldt, caught the imagination of a classmate, Martin Marty. Clausen and Marty both grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, where they worked the same summer jobs together at a rail yard, loading 300-pound ice blocks onto boxcars carrying perishable goods. They distracted themselves by discussing the nuances of Bibfeldt's thought until he gradually ''began to take on consistency and life.''

Marty and Clausen started to create a legend, studding the student magazine with references to their mentor. The librarian went along with the conspiracy, cataloguing the corpus of Bibfeldtiana. The bookstore saw to it that Bibfeldt was always ''on order'' but, as in the library, never available because of ''the long waiting lists.'' In 1951, Clausen and Marty invented ''The Relieved Paradox,'' and Marty reviewed the faux book in the student newspaper; the review appeared beneath the basketball box scores.

The epicenter of the hoax for the past few decades has been the University of Chicago Divinity School, where Marty taught for 35 years (he retired last year on April Fool's Day). The school's graduates have spread Bibfeldt's gospel throughout the world. A session at the American Association of Religions meeting in 1988 was entirely devoted to Bibfeldt, and in 1994 the evangelical magazine The Wittenberg Door named him Theologian of the Year. (The editors may have got the joke; a previous winner was Tammy Faye Bakker.) Bibfeldt is duly noted in the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation.

There wasn't enough money for an endowed chair, but a thoughtful gift to the divinity school did permit the establishment of the Donnelley Stool of Bibfeldt Studies. The proceeds, carefully invested, now produce a yearly income of $29.95, presented to the lecturer at the more-or-less annual Bibfeldt Symposium so long as he or she can come up with a nickel change. At one symposium, Marty presented a ''slide show without slides,'' making clicking sounds with a kids' cricket toy as he described one nonexistent slide after another on a blank screen. The Bibfeldt archives include autographed photos from such luminaries as Jimmy Carter, Spiro Agnew, the Playboy centerfold Sharon Clark (in bikini), Lester Maddox and Mayor Richard J. Daley (''To Franz Bibfeldt, great and esteemed theologian''). Carter, Agnew and the Playmate apparently got the joke. Daley and Maddox did not.

Marty and Brauer have edited a book, ''The Unrelieved Paradox'' (a real book, honest, still in print), that includes all the symposium lectures, delivered by a roster of notable theologians, articles about the hoax itself and a section entitled ''Proofs of the Existence of Franz Bibfeldt'' (a collection of name tags and the like). The book carries a rousing cover blurb: '' '. . . an otherwise extraordinary achievement . . .' -- Anon.''

Back at the conception, at Concordia, one professor who enjoyed the joke was Jaroslav Pelikan, now of Yale, famous for his book ''From Luther to Kierkegaard.'' He has promised a sequel, ''From Kierkegaard to Bibfeldt.'' Other faculty members were less amused when they learned that the German theologian they had become fond of quoting didn't exist. Marty, a self-described ''teacher's pet'' type, was called back early from Christmas vacation his senior year and told that the offer of a plum position at a London mission parish was being withdrawn. Instead, he was being sent for ''seasoning'' to River Forest, Ill., to serve as an assistant pastor at Grace Lutheran Church. Grace, however, required that its assistants enroll in a Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, which in turn led to Marty's long and distinguished theological career. ''I owe more,'' Marty says, ''to a nonexistent theologian than to any existing one.'' To which I'm confident Bibfeldt would state, unequivocally: ''Yes and no. Perhaps, perhaps.''

