Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary: 1974-77 II

And so I arrived at GCTS in September 1974. The school had recently undergone a merger (Gordon Divinity School and Conwell School of Theology), but the result was a school in an Evangelical mode that was heading further to the right each year. Essential to understanding the dynamics of the place in those days was a conflict between the Theology and New Testament departments. It was simmering when I arrived, broke out into the open when I was leaving, was egged on by a prominent member of the Board of Trustees and then turned into a bloodbath shortly after I left. The result, of course, was that TRUTH was established while the enemies of truth became hewers of wood and drawers of water at lesser institutions, like SW Missouri State, for the remainder of their careers.

The problem centered on what Evangelicals call the inspiration of the Bible. In what manner was the Bible inspired? All at GCTS would admit that the book was inspired, but that never was enough. You had to use words like "inerrancy" or "infallibility" (the latter was considered a weak version of the former) to describe it if you really were going to be a loyal GCTS faculty member. The only problem is that the senior NT faculty were educated down the road at Harvard (Glenn Barker and William Lane, who had just left the school, were also Harvard-educated) while the theology faculty were much more conservative people, being educated in Europe or at conservative American universities.

Well, to put names on the two sides, the New Testament people in those days were Ramsey Michaels, David Scholer, and Gordon Fee, with Andrew Lincoln coming in 1975. In fact, Lincoln was hailed by the conservatives as a NT scholar whom they liked, but he shunned theological battles and soon headed back to the more genial theological climate in England. Scholer had long argued for the propriety of women's ordination to the ministry and Michaels' favorite book was the Gospel of John, a book where he could indulge his mystical inclinations, without having to commit himself to the "historicity" of anything. Though these two men were the "liberals" in the Biblical deparments, they had even more liberal colleagues in social ethics (Stephen Mott) and preaching (Deane Kemper), but when heads roll at Evangelical schools they always first go after the Biblical scholars. After all, social ethicists are supposed to read Niebuhr and Marx; preaching professors can be excused if they use literary license. But Bible professors need to toe the line.

The Battle

Who said so? Well, none other than Roger Nicole (b. 1915), the multi-lingual theology professor and knowledge colossus who had been at the school and its predecessor since 1945. Roger was so learned that he even spoke his native tongue (French) with an accent. Roger had an irenic personality, except when trying to get others fired or when he lost a vote in the faculty, but I believe he was subject to the pressure of Trustee Harold Lindsell, the Editor-in-Chief of Christianity today, who wanted and to make GCTS the bastion of conservative Evangelicalism. For Lindsell had seen something in the early 1970s that made him shudder. One of the other major Evangelical theological seminaries, Fuller (Pasadena, CA) not only had the same New Testament/Theology divide but had a former Biblical studies professor as President of the Seminary (David Alan Hubbard), and Hubbard was sympathetic to modern trends in Biblical scholarship--i.e., German historical criticism.

It was too much for Lindsell. He had "lost" Fuller Seminary (he was a founding faculty member of that school in the late 1940s); the same just could not happen at GCTS. The doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible was the way to make sure that GCTS would not "drift" to the "left" as Fuller had. Simply put, the GCTS faculty had not only to sign a statement of faith proclaiming that the Bible was inerrant, but they had to follow Roger Nicole's understanding of what inerrancy meant. Well, after dancing on the head of pins, one realized that Nicole's inerrancy had to do with an inerrancy in the original mansucripts of the Bible. Everyone admitted that the text of the NT, for example, consisted of thousands of full and partial witnesses, with the complete Bible codices only coming from the 4th and 5th centuries. Thus, errors had "crept in" between the time of the original disciples and the date of Codex Sinaiticus, for example. But Nicole asserted that the Bible was inerrant in all that it asserted in its original manuscripts. One of the NT professors wanted to dismiss the doctrine of inerrancy with the observation, "Even the phone book is inerrant, but we don't worship it." Of course, the original manuscripts don't exist, so to affirm the inerrancy of something that doesn't exist and can never be shown to exist (is there an original manuscript of the NT? Or, weren't there just a bunch of separately circulating documents, probably in multiple copies, for decades, if not centuries?) is asking us to believe in moons of green cheese or a primordial egg out of which we all hatched.

Nevertheless, Nicole pressed on. The school convened a conference in 1976-77 on the "authority" of the Bible. Leaving no doubt where he, or the institution stood, Nicole led off with the following ecumenical statement, 'Some have suggested that there are two doctrines of inspiration of the Bible here at GCTS. This conference will show that there is only one.' So much for reasonsed discourse. Heads rolled within a few years.

Other Dynamics at GCTS

If you really had ears to hear, then, you would have "heard" that the NT/Theology tension was the subtext for almost everything that happened at GCTS in those years. But most of us either didn't have those ears or were living more on "surface" realities that faced us day by day. I think the two most prominent dynamics beyond this "great tension" at GCTS were the character/s in the faculty and the "tone" of the student body. Let me talk about the latter, first. The largest slice of the student body in those days were Presbyterians. Presbyterians flocked to GCTS because they were disenchanted with the "big church" (UPCUSA). That disenchantment had been rising for a long time but the lightning rod for it was a $10,000 gift by the Council on Church and Race to the legal defense fund of Angela Davis early in 1971. Davis was a member of the Communist Party, and it was alleged that her gun was used in a prison breakout in which some people were killed. She was later exonerated of all charges.

Nevertheless, the donation split the Church right down the middle, and dozens of youngish Presbyterians were talking about how the Church was an "apostate" Church or one that was "on the ropes." A lot of these people, mostly men, came from the Pittsburgh area, where they had fallen under the influence of a conservative theology Professor from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary (a Presbyterian school) named John Gerstner. I heard Gerstner debate Krister Stendahl (Dean of the Harvard Divinity School) on the inspiration and authority of the Bible during my seminary days; I felt at the time that Gerstner was a sort of blowhard who was more interested in trying to confuse people through rhetoric than to convince them by patiently considering a variety of arguments. Nevertheless, the Pittsburgh Presbyterians, among whom were some of my friends and who really were mostly pains in the ass, tried to up the pugilistic ante by being "anti-New Testament Department" at GCTS. But their opponents were not only the NT faculty; after all, students in those days didn't generally fight faculty. So, the Pittsburgh guys had to find another opponent. And they found an easy target in the "charismatics."

The modern charismatic movement had really taken off in the late 1960s, and by the mid-1970s a number of people touting the "gifts of the Spirit" and speaking in tongues were flocking to Evangelical Seminaries. While the charismatics were "Spirit" people, the Presbyterians from Pittsburgh were "Word" people. And the charismatics were the focus of withering attack by the Pittsburgh folk. While "liberal" schools were just beginning to "out" gays in that day (really a decade later), the conservative guys at GCTS were interested in "outing" charismatics. I heard almost every negative thing you could say about someone being said about charismatically-inclined Christians in those days at GCTS. One of the Pittsburgh guys even used to imitate the charismatics when he said his prayers before meals. He would look around, wave his hands above his head as if "touched" by the Spirit, and then dig in to GCTS' unappetizing fare. To make matters worse, for the charismatics, most of them were Arminian in theology. You have to be in the innermost bowels of theological education for this to mean anything to you. Suffice it to say that Arminians emphasize "human ability" in being able to respond to God's grace, while the hyper Reformed guys stressed "human inability." Well, considering the intellect of many of the Pittsburgh guys that I knew, inability isn't a bad word to use to describe them.

The final essay speaks of the faculty, as I remember them.

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A Glimpse Into the Faculty