5. Unplanned College Lessons

College was much more a continuation of high school than I wish it had been. I was not only “staying in town” for college, in Lincoln, but I was living at home and I was literally continuing, without interruption, my work at the radio station. The biggest break I made that summer of 1960—ironically, the one that I thought would symbolize that I was now to be a hootin’ tootin’ “college man”—was a break that I regretted for several years after that.

I parted company, painfully, at least for me, with a high school girlfriend that I had grown very fond of over more than two years, someone who meant a great deal to me. She was smart and very attractive and funny and stunningly talented, and she seemed to like me a lot. What idiots we men can be! The only problem in my youthfully dumb way of looking at the world that summer was that she was still in high school for another year and I needed to get ready to meet the new college girls.

College for me was not a “liberal arts” education, something else I would come to regret in many ways in later years. That does not mean I did not get a decent education. For what it was, I think I did. But it was not, by any means, a normal education, not even a normal ministerial education. I have wondered over the years how life might have been different if I had attended a good traditional liberal arts institution. Money was a problem; we had relatively little, as I understood. My father was the Dean of the college in Lincoln, which meant that I could attend it tuition-free. From my point of view, though I was embarrassed that I could not go away to college, I really did not have a choice. A thousand times later in life I wished that I could have headed east to get a strong Ivy League style undergraduate education.

Yet my life was clearly formed by my unusual small town college experience, and in the long perspective I have learned to look back grateful at the unusual and unexpected things I did learn from my four years in that little religious school. As it turned out, I traded a broad-based liberal education for several indispensable orientations that have motivated almost everything I have done in life.

My four years at Lincoln Christian College in the early 1960s were a cross between a low level seminary education, minus the theology, and a “trade” school on how to function as a modest leader of a small church. For most Protestant denominations, the educational plan consisted of a four-year liberal arts undergraduate degree followed by three years of graduate seminary education. Those last three graduate years amounted to the “professional” clergy training, intended to prepare one to take up a position of leadership within the denominational or church structure. It my church, though, it was different.

Lincoln Christian College, as I indicated in my father’s story, emerged from Lincoln Bible Institute (LBI) to serve a significant number of loosely-related independent congregations, called simply “Christian Churches.” In the years before and during World War II countless Christian Churches throughout Illinois were dying out for lack of a minister, a leader. The churches in the small towns of the Midwest were simply disappearing. The idea to start a school to train young ministers to serve the dying churches was devised by Earl C. Hargrove, the minister of fairly large and strong Lincoln Christian Church. The school was launched in 1944.

In high school, as I have indicated, I, too, was drawn toward church ministry; so it turned out to be natural, in that sense, that I would attend the school in Lincoln to prepare for a leadership role in the Christian Church, as I knew it. Of course, I had no idea what lay ahead or how my plans for some leadership role in “my” church would unfold. But I liked my college. I was surrounded by some really bright kids who were as committed to church leadership futures as I was. What I found was not a church or Bible School atmosphere, but a real college atmosphere. And the fact was that Lincoln Christian College had, by that time, attracted some fairly impressive faculty members, a few, in fact, who had received advanced degrees from impressive seminaries.

What did I learn and what did I carry away with me from that college?—questions that I have asked myself time and again over the years as life kept taking unexpected twists and turns. I think, in retrospect, I can sum it all up by saying that I learned three overarching things, all of them somewhat unconventional and certainly unexpected.

First, I learned the Bible—I really learned it—and enough about the Bible, to become impressed with it, and to become a very good student of it. Schools like mine were often pejoratively referred to as “bible colleges,” which, realistically, they were, even though to this day I hate that designation. As a growing child, I had been to church camps and spent hours upon hours in Sunday School and so-called Vacation Bible Schools, so I knew a lot of the old Bible stories, both from the Old Testament and from the life of Jesus. But in college, we had to learn the “content” of the Bible—and in a way that even sophisticated seminarians (as I was later to discover) seldom know it. Over the years, that sense of “really learning what is in the Bible” has proved far more important in my work than I realized it would be at the time. I even harbor a pride in knowing the Bible, in knowing its stories, its language, its organization, and even its details.

In addition, I learned a great deal about the Bible, also far more than I realized I was picking up at the time. There were good courses in biblical backgrounds, in Greek, the language of the New Testament, and introductions to numerous specific books of the Bible. But the Christian Churches, while not fundamentalist are relatively conservative, so this “background” stuff was not generally pushed nearly as far as it could have been.

We were not really supposed to be exposed in college to the so-called a “higher criticisms” of Biblical study, meaning studies of the “problems” with biblical documents and texts. Those issues were considered much too “dangerous” by most at the college, including my father the Dean. As it turned out, though, I had a couple of young professors who, with a fresh theological Ph.D. from a Vanderbilt or some other great seminary, were more than willing to make us aware on the sly of what the biblical “critics” were saying about the Bible’s origins and controversies. It was then, for the first time, that I became very aware of just how intensely I was attracted to thurnings, to ideas, to situations, that seemed dangerous and potentially destructive. It was an awareness that would return often in my life. I was clearly drawn to living "on the edge," not physically but intellectually and situationally.

It was intriguing stuff, all under the table really, and while a couple of those young professors (as it turned out) did not last very long at Lincoln Christian College, their influence on some of us in the early 1960s was not insignificant. They pointed us directions for intriguing and provocative reading, and some of us were more than ready for the challenge to find out as much as we could about what was going on out there in the larger theological world. It was those “aside” matters, cloaked in their aura of danger, that ended up stoking an interest in the biblical studies that I would return to so intensely in my middle years. Strangely, they began with great fellows like Prof. Phillips back in those not-so-innocuous college days.

The second big thing I learned at that ministry college in the early ‘60s in Lincoln was that Protestant churches of all kinds, not just the group that I was involved in, were in trouble, deep trouble. I think the reading started in a church administration course, but I stumbled onto several books that had a profound effect on my awareness of the church, and awareness of the plight of almost all of the Protestant Church. For example, one of the books I devoured was The Comfortable Pew by Pierre Berton. It was not the only one, but these books together made a devastating case for the fact that Protestant mainline churches were dying, really disappearing. Large denominational church buildings, ornate buildings in the centers of great cities, buildings that once held hundreds of people were down to not more than a few dozen aging souls on a Sunday.

Part of it was people fleeing the cities for the suburbs. Part of it was that people had more crowded lives than in times past, so there was less time for church. Those weren’t it, though. Most of it was, as church scholarship of the 50s and 60s made crystal clear, that interesting, challenging, electrifying preaching of the past had itself disappeared. Vibrant preaching had died, the argument went; and where dynamic preaching disappeared, the churches shriveled up to nothing. The statistics were all there. To paraphrase the Elvis scholar, the people had left the building.

Apart from my classes, it was the first time I went hunting for books like those to read. The idea that I found heavily documented and discussed—that Protestant Churches had lost their “relevance,” their ability to “communicate.” The churches were empty shells, and preachers, what there were of them, had grown listless and passion-less. If once there had been fire in the pulpit, it had largely died out. Reading this material conjured up my recollections of and deep interest in having listened intently to my father’s magisterial preaching back in my youthful days in Mt. Pulaski. Because of what I remembered, I had grown to really like something about preaching, its elegance, its sense of power and control, the rapt ways in which people seemed to hang on it. In high school at Lincoln, I had heard the same thing again in the sermons of Leon Appel, that church’s remarkable preacher. And yet now in college I found myself reading about churches dying because of the decline of preaching. It was a powerful theme in the 1950s and early 60s, and, on my own, I was becoming immersed in it, digesting it, and thinking about its meaning for my own life.

There was also another dimension to it for me at the time. I realized that I was learning and thinking—for the first time—completely on my own, if I can say it that way. I had picked up something outside of a class that captured me, and I was, for the first time, reading intensely and thinking for myself just because I wanted to. That may sound strange, but it was a kind of new world at the time. I remember sitting in restaurants and reading and thinking about those books with a kind of exhilaration. I was caught by the idea that, in the larger church world “outside” of what I knew, preaching was not working—and classy public speaking in church was something that I really was developing an interest in. And I was finding the same general argument in book after book at that time. I found myself carrying books with me—just to read in them when I had a few minutes.

I was a “radio person,” a media person—that was already a part of my young identity. Now I was reading about communication “problems” in the outside Protestant churches. It was about that time, too, that I took my introductory class in preaching at Lincoln, a required homiletics course—taught by, of all people, my dad. I was motivated in a course like I had never been motivated before. This was my first big bite into the process of “communicating” in front of people in a professional way. Like my dad, I was quickly hooked on its elegance and even on its potential power.

That was the idea that would grow within me through the rest of my undergraduate classes at Lincoln. It was the idea that would change my whole outlook, not just about myself, but about what I truly wanted to do once I got ready to move out into the big wide world. I started for the first time not to think in terms of just “my own church,” my Christian Church, and being a “minister” in it.

About my junior year at Lincoln, though, I started to think about finding a way to move out into that larger Protestant Christian world; and about something other than being “just” a minister to a single congregation of people. It was a very important time in my life, probably the most significant, and jarring, period of time that I had experienced up until then. In a real sense, during those middle months of my four year college experience I was being attracted in a powerful way not to the ministry, but to the world of scholarship, the world of thinking and problem-solving. When I finished college, all of that would play out in a way that I could not in any way foresee at the time.

There is one other important strain to what I learned in college at Lincoln, something that only amplified all of this in what came afterward for me.

I learned about that church, that so-called Christian Church, which mother and dad had attached themselves to literally at the beginning of their marriage. Put another way, I learned the history of this “denomination” into which my father had become a minister and to which, particularly during my high school years, I had become powerfully attached to as well. That was a part of my education at Lincoln Christian College, and even though I did not fully appreciate it until a few years later—not until graduate school—the seeds of its importance in my life were planted there in college.

The oddly-named Christian Church, with some designation in front of those two words—as though all “churches” are not Christian Churches—came into existence during the opening years of the Nineteenth Century. Its origin is invariably credited to the work of a charismatic father and son team, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, who came as a family from Scotland to the United States between 1800 and 1810. Thomas and following him his son, Alexander, were both clergymen, first in the Presbyterian Church, into which Thomas had been ordained while in Scotland, and, after leaving it, in the Baptist Church.

Once on the American frontier, though, both father and son, being confident independent souls, were profoundly unhappy with and frustrated by the denominational hierarchy as well as many of the traditional Protestant doctrines prevalent in both denominations. The Campbells, along with others who became their allies here and there, imbibed deeply—and quickly—of the independent spirit of the frontier. More than that, both were profoundly influenced by the Jeffersonian democracy of the new nation; they believed that it should not only govern the life of the new political world but the life of the Church on the frontier as well. In short, they wanted a church more firmly planted in the spirit of the Enlightenment than in Calvinism or any other creedal system tied to a great thinker of the past.

In spirit, the Campbells were individualists and egalitarians who, even as clergy, valued their independence and believed that God had given them strong mental faculties that enabled them to think for themselves about religious matters, rather than take orders from any other human beings. They cherished the Bible as God’s ultimate statement for humankind, and argued for the right of every person to read and interpret it for himself or herself. Based on that, they believed that the Bible contained the plan and model for what God intended the Church to be and be like.

In good Enlightenment fashion, they argued that humans were primarily good and not evil, and that when every good person read the Bible intelligently and honestly a consensus about its meaning would emerge. It was John Locke’s empiricism at its best. So they contended on the frontier for an end to any authoritarianism as well as an end to even classic Christian creedal statements, and championed a “return” to the Bible alone as a pattern for polity and doctrine. They argued for a “restoration” of the primitive church of the New Testament alone—contending, ironically, that when every denomination joined in that, it would lead to a new “unity” of the Church. They were the forebears of contemporary ecumenical movements. Their movement then came to be called the Restoration Movement.

It was an absolutely intriguing idea, despite being highly utopian—the frontier spawned such utopianism—and deeply flawed in countless ways, as I would later believe and contend, despite my returning to its churches again and again. What I really learned from that uniquely American religious story, though, was the utter independence of spirit and thought that propelled it. Just as I had been impressed with the independence of American Mormons during the same first half of the Nineteenth Century when I encountered it in my family during high school, now I was doubly impressed with the utter independence and even courageous intellectualism of the tradition in which I now found myself. Whatever else the great souls like Thomas and Alexander Campbell were, they thought for themselves, believed in the value and goodness of their own intellects, took little if anything from anyone else, trusted their own minds and hearts, and acted, whatever the consequences, on what they came to reason through and conclude on their own.

These were my own spiritual and intellectual ancestors in the life of the Church as I was beginning to devote myself to it. I would later come to write critically of a lot of things about their assumptions, their ideas, and even their conclusions. But I could do so—as I would say openly—only because I was a committed part of what I was critically evaluating.

I liked the Christian Church, its origins and its spirit, a Church that was strikingly at odds with much American Protestantism, out of which it had come. It rejected infant baptism, but so did the Baptists, though its reasons for doing so were not the Baptist ones. It advocated a weekly Communion Service or Eucharist, believing that the biblical evidence was that the earlier New Testament churches practiced it. It rejected church organizations and affiliations, not finding evidence of them in the New Testament. It created an egalitarianism between lay people and clergy, creating a kind of congregational democracy. I liked these things. I liked my church’s rejection of Calvinism’s original sin, and its embrace of Enlightenment rationalism and intellectualism in its approach to the Bible, despite the conservatism with which it was usually tempered. I would rebel against that conservatism.

The bottom line of this, for me at least, was that I learned I was in a church tradition that, in its history, valued independent thinking and acting. As far as I was concerned as college came to an end, that was the great new blessing that I was inheriting. I could be my own thinker, my own voice. I could evaluate things and draw my own conclusions, and do with within the context of an Enlightenment church tradition that had valued and nourished that from its very beginning. It was a marvelous heritage.

I would be, I determined, a devoted Christian; and in the commencement address I was selected to give when I graduated, I tried to say that. I also tried to say that, as a member of this great Christian Church tradition, I would value my independence and my ability to think and speak with my own voice and no one else’s. Whether and how I would do that, I had no idea at that point.