Finally I decided to take my concerns to Dr. Spitz.  It was apparent from his lectures that he was a huge admirer of Martin Luther.  It was also rumored that he was an ordained Lutheran minister.  Where would I ever find anyone better qualified to hear me out and get some useful guidance from than him?

Then again, almost all our conversations up to this point had been lighter, and were usually leavened by at least a bit of humor.  On top of that, Spitz was the cool professor—always witty and with it.  At least a few of my fellow students thought I was somewhat cool, too.  What I needed to talk about now was almost guaranteed to be excruciatingly awkward and clumsy.

As a result, I was more than a little apprehensive when I dropped in on him during his office hours one afternoon, and laid it all on him.
 
I told him I didn’t doubt the validity of the scholarship in my Western Civ course—especially when a lot of the impressions I had formed were my own, without any prompting at all on the part of the instructor.  But if I couldn’t believe anymore in the things I always had, what was I going to believe in?  I wasn’t looking to join the Church of Last Week.  And I definitely didn’t want to cobble together some nut-case Church of Bob Winter.

Although Dr. Spitz was an extremely eloquent man, brevity was not usually his strong suit.  This time, though, his manner was different.  He leaned back slowly in his chair, steepled his fingers, furrowed his brow, and drew in a deep breath.
 
“You know,” he said, “Martin Luther struggled with that all his life. ‘Bist du allein klug?’ (‘Are you alone smart?’)”

That was all my eminent and loquacious faculty adviser had to say.

It was all he had to say. It was exactly what I needed to hear.
 
It told me I didn’t need to worry so much about burning in hell for believing what I did.  It told me that God wasn’t threatened by my using my brain. And it welcomed me into “playing with the big kids” when it came to thinking about religious matters—which I found incredibly validating for someone like me (after all, I was still just a snot-nosed college kid).

More than that, there were implications in learning that no less a figure in world history than Martin Luther, who was far more learned in these matters than I would ever be, was still wracked by essentially the same kinds of concerns I was having. It cast my own insecurities and feelings of unworthiness in a very different light.  Suddenly they felt less like alarms that I was stepping off a cliff, and more like something that just went with the territory of original thinking about weighty issues—as well as an indication of intellectual honesty and conscientiousness that on balance, tended to actually enhance the credibility of my thoughts, in much the same way they did Luther’s.

Later, I also came to realize that by effectively granting me license to think about these issues on my own, Spitz had mirrored the way that Luther granted it to the world at large, centuries ago.
 
Dr. Spitz had done me a great kindness—on top of having taken me under his wing from the very beginning, and making me feel like a valued part of a towering institution where virtually everyone was brilliant in one way or another—and where it was regrettably common for students who in all their previous educational experience had been known to everybody as uncommonly gifted to suddenly feel like just faces lost in a crowd.

It wasn’t until decades later that I learned I could do something for him that would, at least in a small way, help square the balance—and that all along, he and I had been connected in a way that neither of us could possibly have imagined.