A Pulpit in the Home

He peers dourly at the TV camera through opaque, black-rimmed glasses, moves about the studio with the air of someone mentally counting his steps, speaks in a professorial baritone surcharged with a raspy German accent. He has none of Billy Graham's charismatic fervor, or Fulton Sheen's high-gloss oratory; in a tired-blood contest, he would probably run a dead heat with Ed Sullivan.

It matters not. These days the Rev. Dr. Hagen Staack, 50, is just about the biggest star in the field of religious broadcasting. Last year, on NBC's Frontiers of Faith, his 13-week series of lectures on The Book of Genesis captured a regular Sunday audience of more than 3,000,000 and drew more than 15,000 letters--by far the best response to any program put on by the National Council of Churches in televi sion history. Last Sunday, Frontiers of Faith presented the first lecture of a new series by Lutheran Minister Staack. His theme this year is "living personalities of the Old Testament," and it promises to do just as well as Genesis did.

Prison & Princeton. Staack, who is head of the department of religion at Pennsylvania's Muhlenberg College, is the same kind of teacher on screen as off. "I deliver my TV programs much as I do my lectures in class," he says. "I feel that if I can stir the interest of 30 college students, I can do it for a million people over television."

In picking Staack for its Old Testament lecture series over 20 other candidates, the National Council chose a well-qualified scholar with some hard experience in secular life as well. Staack studied at the universities of Berlin and Hamburg, was ordained a minister of the Hitler-hating Confessing Church in 1939. As it did with many other rebellious Lutheran pastors, the Nazi government drafted Staack for army service in 1939; he was wounded five times in eastern-front combat and spent ten months in Russian and British prison camps. He came to the U.S. in 1949 as a graduate fellow and lecturer at Princeton Theological Seminary, joined the Muhlenberg faculty five years later.

Stupid Samson. No fundamentalist, Staack constantly relates archaeological findings to Scriptural passages, he believes that the divine revelation coming to man in the Bible is expressed within the limitations of a historical frame work. Thus he violently opposes the "glorification" of Biblical figures that commonly takes place in Sunday school teaching. "Look at the use God makes of humans," he says. "Moses was hotheaded, but God loved him and used him. Stupid Samson was found useful; so was cruel Joshua. Throughout the Scriptures, real people are used by God --not people who have been placed on an artificially high level."

Staack's success is unquestionably due to his skill at relating Biblical themes to modern spiritual needs. He is most interested in proving to his listeners the ecumenical value of Old Testament study. "I want to remind people that the Old Testament was the only Bible Jesus himself used," he says. "I want to remind them that Jews and Chris tians have the Old Testament in common, and that examining it for its meaning may help us understand that j we are all spiritual Semites. Finally, I want to help Christians regain the heritage of the Old Testament that they have lost through inattention and lack of understanding."

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