firsthand

Oral History Transcript

Biola University Centennial Oral History Project

INTERVIEWEE: Fred Sanders

INTERVIEWER: Brandon Rogers

DATE: December 7, 2006

BRANDON ROGERS: Welcome to the broadcast. Tonight we have Dr. Fred Sanders, theologian and Bible scholar at Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. We’re going to talk about American religion, Christianity, and fundamentalism. And how fundamentalism played in the evangelical movement in the twentieth century. Fred Sanders, welcome, thanks for coming. We’ve talked and had some great conversations in class; we find you very interesting. So our topic for today is, how do you see American culture today and how do you see how American evangelicalism relates to American culture? And what do you see in the evangelical movement, how do you see the differences and how different parts of evangelicalism relates to American culture?

FRED SANDERS: Well, where we are now, compared to say a hundred years ago when Biola was founded, we’re certainly downstream from decisions that were made then—cultural decisions—widespread. And divisions that set in back then—it’s almost as if you wonder if we learned any of the lessons from that time period, because it in many ways we’re replaying them again. In one way, the founding of Biola, the founders of Biola were trying to reform the American Protestant denominations from within. They saw liberalism setting in to the denominations. All of the colleges and seminaries that were founded among the Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian—all those called the mainline churches. All of them had historical criticism and denial of essential elements of Christian doctrine, sort of the hard doctrine is always the first to go. These institutions were being taken over by this kind of teaching. And the original insight of the fundamentalist movement was to reclaim those denominations. So the fundamentalist movement began…

BR: Well, what part of the turn of the century would you say…? When did it first start and when did it come into fruition and really get going?

FS: There was a…you can talk about fundamentalism as sort of militant evangelicalism, that is to say, anti-modernist evangelicalism. So the question has to be, when did modernism or liberalism or whatever its proponents began to refer to it, when did that take on a profile which could be identified and opposed? Because, what you’ve got coming out of the nineteenth century—let’s start with something like the end of the Civil War—that’s a good point to say, well the rise of some of the revivals, the rise of the YMCA movement, prayer meetings, Dwight Moody’s ministry, mid-century, mid-nineteenth century.

So Dwight Moody was associated with the fundamentalists when they first gathered, right? Well, what’s you’ve got in the nineteenth century, late nineteenth-century, is strong, confident evangelicalism. There are modernists and liberals scares going on, here and there, but someone like Dwight L. Moody can kind of stay above that fight and not have to go into militant mode. So there are heirs of Dwight Moody on the liberal and on the conservative sides—all of them point back to Moody and say, that guy really got it. He didn’t have to choose sides.

So, say in the 1920s, there were huge fights over who was the true continuer of Dwight Moody’s ministry. R.A. Torrey claimed that he was the true continuer; he was a conservative evangelical, an anti-modernist, world-traveling evangelist. But Dwight Moody’s son could also say that he was the true continuer though, in late of later twentieth century realities, that line of Moody’s followers turned out to be more on the liberal side.

BR: Lay out for me what sort of time frame of all these events and place the fundamentalist movement in a timeline so we can get a little spectrum. And the fundamentalist movement began, in terms of twentieth century, and who was really involved? And give a little precursor to that, why it started going.

FS: Well, it’s a little bit artificial to try and fix an exact date but one handy way to do it is the publication of The Fundamentals. If someone later would look back on the whole movement as marked by the publication—I believe it was twelve books mailed out, free of charge—to something like three million Christian workers. The idea was, it’s an ecumenical, it’s an interdenominational coalition of conservatives…

BR: The fundamentalists?

FS: Yes, but I want to talk about the publication of The Fundamentals, which is done by two concerned laymen. They were published anonymously and funded by these two concerned laymen who, as it turns out, were Milton and Lyman Stewart—Lyman Stewart in particular. Milton is also important but Lyman’s kind of the driving force here. Lyman Stewart, of course, put the money behind The Fundamentals. He started the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles. He funded YMCAs, gave a lot of money to places like Occidental College. And then eventually, in 1908 decided he needed to focus strategically and kind of his pet project from 1908 on—having done all that other philanthropic giving—his pet project became the Bible Institute of Los Angeles.

He had started there publishing these Fundamentals and it was…he went out and got the best scholars that he could find, conservative evangelicals from broad ecumenical and interdenominational coalition. B. B. Orfield put an essay in, James Orr of Scotland… Here’s some other big names, one of the people in the first volume was a Canadian Episcopalian whose main publication…

BR: So, R.A. Torrey

FS: …was on the prayer book. And Lyman Stewart kind of formed or gathered these preexistent people that already had these ideas of the fundamentalist movement trying to… There movement was trying to lock down exactly what it mean to be a Christian, what the fundamentals of the faith were, what the church cannot deviate from and still be Christian. Yeah, and they didn’t have any sense that they were doing anything new. They were looking around saying, everywhere we look people are denying the atoning death of Christ, eternal punishment for the wicked, the second coming of Christ, the reliability and historical accuracy of the Bible. All they wanted to do was keep living in the nineteenth century evangelical dream, a big happy Dwight Moody evangelicalism.

BR: What was Dwight Moody’s evangelicalism that people were trying to live?

FS: Well, it’s just conservative evangelicalism from the nineteenth century, the revivals and the proclamation of the Gospel, confidence in the witness of Scripture. What changed from the time of Dwight Moody, and other people like him—there were lots of such people in the major urban centers—what changed between that late nineteenth century and the early twentieth is the constant denial and, from the fundamentalist’s point of view, defection from clear witness from God’s truth. So The Fundamentals, twelve volumes, ninety chapters…

Often what people do is look back at fundamentalism, isn’t that the decision to draw the line around five things and say, these are the things that make you a Christian? There were ninety chapters in The Fundamentals, it was broad and it was a vast interdenominational project. So it wasn’t a constricting kind of a course; it was militantly anti-modern. You may have heard recent seminary teachers say that Jesus’ death on the cross was not an atoning sacrifice. Well, they’re wrong; this is what we’ve always believed. And so a lot of historical awareness…

BR: What changed in the evangelical culture so that these fundamentalists thought it was necessary to do this. It was believed by everybody at all times, these fundamentals—why did they think it was necessary then to write it all down?

FS: Yeah, because they weren’t trying to do anything new, it was a conserving movement. You can call it conservative; you can also call it conservationist. I think they were looking at traditional Christian doctrine as sort of an ecosystem that had been violated by the intrusion of new species, a liberal species they would say. What had changed was, in the mainline denominations—the Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Episcopalians—in the seminaries, in the centers of power in the denominational headquarters, people with a different faith had entered. I don’t mean another world religion. I mean an interpretation of Christianity that denied miracles would be one way to look at it.

BR: And this was in the beginning of…what time was this in?

FS: It reaches a crisis point right at the turn of the century.

BR: And so they started to deny certain things of Christian faith, miracles being one of them. Maybe…what else would you say?

FS: Well, if you think of miracles, it’s one thing to think about uber-miracles happened. But it’s another thing to think that Christian doctrine, traditional Christian doctrine going back to Augustine and the immediately post-apostolic period. Try to think of Christian doctrine without miracles—meaning no resurrection of Christ, no virgin birth, no divine inspiration of Scripture. Scripture could be a wonderful book but it couldn’t be “the word of God” sounding through our human words.

BR: So denying things that certain people, especially secularists would think sort of a silly thing, anyways, have really serious implications for the Christian faith.

FS: Right, right. So the original fundamentalist strategy—it’s divisive, there’s no doubt about that—they’re not trying to do anything new. But what they’re trying to do is come up with ways of stating Christian doctrine that would make the liberals and modernists—I’m using their own pejorative terms here—liberals and modernists so mad that they’ll leave the churches. In other words, what you’ve got is the situation where, when I go to my good old Methodist church, what I hear is the denial of the virgin birth or the denial of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, to take two doctrines that are very different in importance, but both of them involve a miracle. So what do you do when your pastor at your Methodists of Congregationalist Church is preaching a non-miraculous Christianity? The fundamentalist’s strategy was to irritate them enough that they had to openly declare that they were teaching what J. Gresham Meacham of Princeton Seminary would call a different faith. Meacham wrote a book, he was the most intellectual of the fundamentalists, J. Gresham Meacham wrote a book in the twenties called Christianity and Liberalism, the thrust being these are two distinct religions. But they’re living in the same institutions. So the original fundamentalist’s strategy was to irritate the liberals enough to get them to openly declare their principles and leave the good, old traditional denominations.

BR: Some (garbled) thought that he saw, inside the evangelical church, there was two denominations—the liberal and the fundamental. Two different things because the difference being, what, holding on to certain key parts of doctrine, like inerrancy, maybe into miracles?

FS: Yes, so strong doctrine of scriptural authority and infallibility, miracles in that broadest sense that would include anything from, really, creation as a divine action from outside the closed system of scientific causes, because it, of course, establishes the (laughs) the closed system of scientific causes.

BR: But now that sounds a lot like the secular thought we have today and the naturalistic philosophy that came up from the modern period. What did the fundamentalists of the time period…what did the evangelical in the church whole in that time period? What were they responding to the culture when they responded to certain things like natural thinking? What were they responding to? What infused that sort of thinking into the culture of that time?

FS: Well, you use the word secularism, that’s a big part of it. Though, intellectually thinking, secularism showed up as an attempt to sever divine causality from any explanation of the world. So here’s one hot point in the biological sciences: Darwinism, of course, was just making its way. Remember, Darwin’s contemporary with Abraham Lincoln, so we’re dealing with the mid-nineteenth century phenomenon here. As Darwinism comes to America, becomes popular,

R. A. Torrey—the first dean at Biola Institute—he was an undergraduate at Yale in the 1880s and he learned at Yale University that Darwinism was just not good science, did not have enough explanatory power, couldn’t deal with the gaps in the fossil records, etcetera, etcetera. That was not a religious point of view that he learned as an undergraduate at Yale. That was just the science of the day. American biological teaching at Yale University in the 1880s was, hmm. Darwinism. Interesting idea, not good science yet, can’t account for this other information. So R. A. Torrey with the rest of his life—he didn’t die until 1928—he went the rest of his life opposing Darwinism, not on religious grounds; he would actually theorize now and then, hmm, I could probably reconcile those religiously, I don’t know. But I don’t see why I would have to because I learned at Yale that it was just not adequate science.

BR: R. A. Torrey went to Yale. And he was in contact with most of the thinking that was popular in the high intellectual period at the turn of the twentieth century, Darwinism being one of them. What else would you say characterized intellectual thought in the twentieth century that was distinct to that period?

FS: Well, a lot going on in social thought, of course; Marxism begins to make itself known at this time. In Christianity, biblical criticism, that is to say, a skeptical, historical method of approaching scripture so that you apply a kind of historical criticism and skepticism to everything you read in Scripture. Such as your first question is, did that really happen? (laughs) As opposed to, Wow! Look at all the wonderful things that happened. The skeptical, historical, critical mindset comes to it always with verification questions, always with a high bar of proof. And so you can trace this out in any of the ranges of biblical studies, in the Old Testament, the first five books of the Bible—the Pentateuch—the ascendancy of the documentary hypothesis which is this German higher critical theory that there are at least four, and probably many more sources you can identify in the books traditionally taught to be by Moses. So there’s one author who calls God, Yahweh, there’s another author who calls God, Elohim. Then there’s this priestly author who gets a hold of it and later on a Deuteronomist gets a hold of it and edits it in various other ways.

BR: That’s an argument for, what would you say, for the certain inerrancies…no, no, for what?

FS: It’s just a theory of layers of composition evident in Scripture that is not a part of the church’s traditional confession. It could be put forward in a…you could have had views like that, just in terms of literary observations about what is going on in the text.

BR: What if these higher criticisms were sort of brought …not true to biblical tradition at the turn of the twentieth century, and people at Biola, how did Biola respond to this higher criticism of the Bible at the turn of the twentieth century?

FS: Biola’s called into existence in order to combat this. This is considered the big problem that the denominations and seminaries were not doing an adequate job confronting. People in the denominational seminaries were saying so, you know, D. B. Warfield and J. Gresham Meacham were yelling about this at the top of their lungs within the schools. Sam Sutherland—to jump to sort of the middle of this group at Biola—Sam Sutherland would be president of Biola in the middle of the twentieth century. Back in the twenties, he was a student at Princeton Seminary where—picture Sam Sutherland in, say, 1922, studying at Princeton Seminary—only to see Princeton Seminary going the way of modernism and expelling, in fact, J. Gresham Meacham form its ranks. So he had to go out and start Westminster Seminary.

BR: They expelled J. Gresham Meacham?

FS: Yes, for…these people are not trying to be schismatic in the twenties. Someone like J. Gresham Meacham was a very respectable fundamentalist; I think what he got in trouble for—I don’t know the history of Princeton Seminary so well—I believe what he got in trouble for was, he didn’t want to give his missions money, his tithe, to his denomination for the work that they were doing overseas which they considered missionary work which he considered not the proclamation of the Gospel. I think he began to support an independent mission board instead of a denominational board, and that’s where a lot of the trouble started. You can see that, trying to be a loyal member of your denomination and thinking, I don’t trust my denomination with my mission dollars. Now what do I do? It’s a horrible conflict that conservatives found themselves in.

BR: Now, what is only… Speaking of conservatives, people—now how would you characterize the evangelical church, going on how it was in the beginning of the twentieth century? How was the middle century? How would you say, how’d it look then and how’s it looks now? Like, in reference to different factions inside the evangelical church.

FS: A comparison between the beginning of the twentieth century and the middle of the twentieth century?

BR: Yeah. How did the evangelical church exist in the beginning of the twentieth century, what sides in the church were for what? And how’d it look in the middle of the century?

FS: Well, the heirs of the founders of fundamentalism in the middle of the twentieth century, they inherit the decisions that were made in the early years. So, the founders of fundamentalism, which includes the founders of Biola,--Horton, Stewart, Torrey, those people, and people like them in other major cities, and this is really an urban phenomenon, the big battles are really going on in the hearts of the major cities of America—they were really trying to rescue the denominations from this encroaching liberalism.

BR: Meaning secularism, in a sense?

FS: Yeah. It looked like they were going to succeed, it really looked like founding an independent Bible institute, as happened in several cities and it certainly has happened in Biola, that independence was going to be really important. We’re going to set up shop outside of the traditional denominations in order to get enough leverage to influence the traditional denominations. And it looked as if the fundamentalists were going to win. In fact, a prominent liberal clergyman who wrote essays like, Shall the Fundamentalists Win? And these were best-selling books that were out there. Because there was concern that they were going to win; they were going to drive the liberals from the denominations.

BR: Why do you think they were winning? Why did you think the fundamentalists were winning?

FS: It was a populist movement. They had most people on their side. Even a sympathetic view of a more liberal clergyman in the early twentieth century would have to say that they believed one thing in their mind—that they learned in seminary—but they had to preach a different thing for the congregation. They would all say—they’re in print about this—they would all say, it’s a difficult problem. You can’t go into the pulpit and preach what we know from seminary. You have to talk about the Bible as if what people, that what the ignorant people in the pews believe is true. Now, that sounds…when I say it that way, it sounds very dishonest.

BR: Now clarify this: what were they learning in the seminaries, more secular-liberal teachings or fundamental teachings?

FS: Oh, secular-liberal.

BR: And they wanted to preach what?

FS: Well, they didn’t want their congregation to rise up and riot against them. So they wouldn’t start a Christmas sermon by saying, Matthew and Luke talk about the virgin birth. But, of course, it’s a myth and it did not occur because miracles like that cannot occur. Because we live in a closed, natural system. You can’t do that at your Methodist or Baptist or Episcopalian church and expect the little old ladies, who pay your salary, to put up with it. So, understandably, they had to try to preach in an elevated tone in a way to affirm the mystery and miracle of Christmas while in fact, you knew from your seminaries—or at least you thought you knew—that the virgin birth did not happen because it could not happen; the earlier writers in the New Testament knew nothing about it. Matthew and Luke made up myths about it and put them into their gospels.

BR: And this sort of thinking is probably evidence of modernity and secularist-type thinking. First, we have to characterize to understand how this sort of teaching develops in the Christian church in the seminaries. Explain to me how you would say best characterizes modern thinking, modern philosophy, and empiricism and how that relates to knowledge of certain things in the Bible?

FS: Well, I keep going back to the denial of miracles. This cuts across, this kind of empiricist-thinking, this kind of closed, historical, natural, causal thinking. Before you even start a conversation about the Bible, it closes out certain interpretative options. So, for instance, Isaiah seems to exercise predictive prophecies, well, that’s a miracle, to tell something before it happens. God announces in the book of Isaiah, thus sayeth the Lord, this is a miracle. I’m God. I tell you things before they happen. That’s a sign that I’m a real God. Well, if in your philosophy of religion, that is impossible, that’s I intrusive, God doesn’t do things like that—then Isaiah must have been written after the events that were prophesized.

BR: So this sort of thing can be seen in one way as imposing a sort of secondary way of thinking, a secondary sort of philosophy, to criticize the Bible. And so before that was really done, what was another way of interpreting the Bible that maybe even the fundamentalists wanted to interpret it? So, what I mean is, one camp of the Christian church—the liberals—were trying to interpret the Bible through the framework of maybe secular-modern thinking, empiricist views, you can’t know anything unless you can verify it through empiricism. But now how did fundamentalists view the Bible, especially the founders of Torrey, the founders of Biola (laughs), like R. A. Torrey and so forth. How did they view the study of the Bible?

FS: In their own self-understanding they studied the Bible the way the church always had: faithfully, believing it. What was written when they built the Bible Institute building, the words carved in stone in the front of the building were: Forever, Oh Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. They affirmed scripture as the word of God and believed that it was true in all that it taught and all that it affirmed. As historical criticism arose…of course, historical criticism of scripture is, in fact, a valuable tool for thinking well about scripture. Now it was employed, it was driven to extremes that were corrosive of the Christian faith, and it was employed as an attack on the Christian faith. A lot of the people who perfected the method were very explicit that they wanted to do this to undermine the Christian church’s proclamation. They were atheists; they had ceased to believe in the God of Christianity. And the reason they wanted to apply these skeptical tools to scripture was to take apart Christian confession. So the first historical-critical lives of Jesus, people like—well, to jump to a little later and take one bit of David Krieger Strauss—the whole point was to study the life of Jesus in this way is to undermine the existence of Christianity. So it was rightly understood on both sides as a life-or-death struggle for the existence of Christianity.

BR: One version…one way of saying this is, Christianity, in a sense of affirming the word of God existing in heaven, is fundamentally opposed to a secular empiricist view of knowledge.

FS: And so the founders of fundamentalism viewed the denominations as increasingly giving up on this battle and just letting this other mentality colonize Christianity. And really re-defining Christianity; you could almost call it Neo-Christianity. J. Gresham Meacham would call it something like that. He’d say, liberalism… He wouldn’t say there was fundamentalism and modernism, it’s not that kind of divide. People like Meacham drew the line, Look, there’s Christianity and there’s this other religion which is calling itself Christianity, which is in fact another faith. Now, those are fighting words. J. Gresham Meacham is no ignorant hick yelling about, let’s go purge the liberals. He was a great Paul scholar; he had a great Greek textbook, a really first-rate intellect by everyone’s admission.

BR: Meacham was at Princeton?

FS: Yes.

BR: And then where else did he teach?

FS: Well, he was expelled from Princeton and founded Westminster Seminary.

BR: He founded Westminster Seminary. Who in the Biola circle of the founders affirmed, I’m assuming most of them did it, but who exactly affirmed this sort of traditional understanding of Scripture?

FS: Oh, everybody. This is the reason Biola came into existence. They were… The founders of Biola—the Stewart brothers and Horton out here in Los Angeles—as Presbyterian laypeople, I think they were all involved in Presbyterian churches, and then they brought in R. A. Torrey as their big celebrity name in 1911. Yeah, they were all committed to this.

BR: What sort of views did most of the founders, what did their views hold to? What were they…what was characteristic of each of the founders? And what did they stand for? Like R. A. Torrey… Who stood for certain understandings of Scripture, and who stood certain rejections of Darwinism? Were there any sort of characterized, characteristic understandings of projects of each of the founders?

FS: Yeah. T. C. Horton—if you take sort of the founding triad, T. C. Horton, Lyman Stewart, R. A. Torrey—you see Horton as a great pastor, organizer, trainer. He would train people in evangelism. Wherever T. C. Horton and his wife—I can’t remember her first name, they just called her “Ma,” Ma Horton (laughter)—wherever they went, they would put this amazing organizational power, they would inspire people to start clubs, they just…everything they touched turned into some kind of club or society—the Lyceum Club for women, the Fishermen’s Club for young men.

BR: These sort of clubs began at what point of the development of the early part of Biola?

FS: If you take 1908 as the agreed-upon founding date of Biola, this was before that. As soon as the Hortons came to Los Angeles, they were ministering in a local church; these clubs started to spring up: evangelistic clubs, Bible study clubs for young women who worked downtown, who lived by themselves and were sort of at-risk, living by themselves as young women in downtown L.A.—the Hortons would start Bible study clubs for them. All this was going on.

Lyman Stewart, meanwhile, was… He had founded the Union Rescue Mission, already there were downtown urban problems and people who needed food and housing. So the same pot of money that started Biola started the Union Rescue Mission, which is still in operation today in downtown L.A. I think it’s the…I don’t want to make any claims whether it’s the oldest continuous, but, you know, it’s got this great heritage going back. It came out of the same pot of money—Stewart’s money. Stewart also really wanted a school that would teach the fundamentals of Christian faith in a faithful way. For years he gave lots and lots of money to Occidental College and a number of other local schools.

BR: Where’s Occidental located?

FS: I don’t know, somewhere down here in L.A. Close.

BR: What would you say…

FS: But he didn’t have enough control. So what you can view Lyman Stewart negatively as kind of a control freak; he was a millionaire and had lots of money and he wanted control over what was taught. And when he couldn’t get that kind of control at a place like Occidental College he decided, well, I’ll start my own school. And he and Horton and, later on, Torrey, all really…they were especially warm-hearted toward the teaching of the soon-return Jesus Christ, the imminent coming of Christ. And they thought this was a doctrine—it wasn’t the most important doctrine, the second coming of Christ—

BR: But this doctrine characterized mush of evangelicalism.

FS: Oh yes, yes. But it was the one that was especially unpopular in the mainline denominations. So, for instance, you can have these wonderful union meetings—union was kind of word that was used as in the title, Union Rescue Mission, union was a word that was used for an interdenominational project. So you would put a big tent up downtown and you would have a union evangelism meeting. The ideas was, all of the denominational churches would agree, this was not the founding of a new church, this was an evangelism event for the city. It was an ecumenical idea of really reaching the city. Whenever they would do this, all the pastors would get together and agree, here’s what we agree on, here’s what the Gospel proclamation is going to be, here’s how it’s going to work—you know, very similar to Billy Graham Crusades from the mid-century. This is what Billy Graham’s crusades were based on.

BR: One thing you mentioned that was really interesting was this… You were mentioning something about…

FS: I was going to say that the second coming of Christ became one of the sticking points. When all of the Lutherans and Baptists, the Congregationalists, the Methodists would get together, they’d say, I don’t want to hear any second coming of Jesus preaching. I don’t want to hear any of that pre-millennial or dispensationalist stuff.

BR: The pre-millennium teaching characterized all evangelicals or only portions? Were there parts of evangelicalism that were opposed to it?

FS: There were certainly… There were some who were opposed to it, who would line up with mainstream evangelicalism in every other way. There were a lot who just were afraid it would make you crazy if you thought too much about it. And they just didn’t want to hear it taught very often.

`The founders of Biola were of a different opinion. They thought, we’re not trying to be obsessive or cultic about this, we just really think this is important. And it’s a pity when in a union meeting, in an interdenominational project, we have to set to one side, this teaching. They had a number of different names for it—prophetic awareness, dispensational teaching, pre-millennial truth. So as a result they said, OK, we’ll keep doing these union meetings and all of the interdenominational cooperation we can but, let’s start a Bible institute that can actually teach the stuff that nobody else was teaching. It’s true, it’s biblical, it’s in there, we believe it, it’s important.

R. A. Torrey described his intellectual conversion to believing in a pre-millennial return of Christ, he describes one of the four major events of his Christian life. He had always sort of believed it but he went and spent a year in German universities studying theology. It’s funny—he had to go to Germany to get pre-millennialism really figured out. He said that when he saw the logic of it, saw it emerge from the Bible, he said, OK, that changes everything. Confident expectation of the second of Christ at any moment, that changes everything about my Christian life.

BR: Now I understand that this understanding of pre-millennialism really characterized much of the evangelical movement. And sort of a lot of what the fundamentalists were about. In that, how would you say that it did that? I thought that a lot of the church just sort of created this waiting period, the church went into kind of a waiting mode, expecting Christ to come back at any moment. Or the age to come to an end and going to maybe a golden age of Christ returned. How did that… Was that true? How would you characterize how the evangelical movement, at least the fundamental movement, acted on this pre-millennial understanding of Christ’s return.

FS: So there are two broad camps here. There’s a kind of… There’s going to be a thousand year reign of Christ and Christ will return either before it or after it, post-millennially or pre- millennially. So; this is kind of a cartoon-y sketch of it. A post-millennial view would say, the church is going to influence culture and the Gospel will go out and people will be converted. And culture and society will be changed; institutions will be changed. Over the course of time until the church and society reaches a point where righteousness really reigns on the earth. And we should now take actions to make that happen.

A lot of progressive politics in America really comes out of that. So everything from freeing the slaves, to go back to the nineteenth century, to women’s suffrage in the early twentieth, temperance—(laughs) you know the various ways that that was worked for, even Woodrow Wilson’s sort of, you now, optimistic, international policy of ending all wars. All this kind of progressive politics came out of a kind of an evangelical mindset.

Now, the other side…

BR: And Biola was characteristically part of this pre-millennial understanding, right?

FS: Well, this will be the other pole. It would be the more pre-millennial side which would say, we should work to preserve culture and to improve things. But, here’s the deal: things are just probably going to get worse and worse, and darker and darker, until Jesus comes back. So, as opposed to a view that things will get better and better through Christian influence, there’s this other view that is more characteristic of pre-millennialism that, no, things are likely to get worse and worse until Jesus returns and redeems the world.

BR: And that’s where Biola’s mission…

FS: Biola definitely has that mindset. Now, if you’re short-sighted about that kind of view, you might not so into culture at all. You might not consider…

BR: How does Biola do that? Is Biola still in culture?

We’ll take a break for a second and come right back.

BR: And we’re back. Thank you for joining us again. Dr. Fred Sanders, we’re going to finish up the conversation, talking about Biola’s mission.

PS: From the time of the founders, there was always an understanding that you could be short-sighted and sort of knuckleheaded about this pre-millennial commitment. For instance, Milton Stewart and Lyman Stewart, as millionaire brothers, had an ongoing argument bout, could we just send… Should we use our money just to send Christian workers with Bibles, get them working? As they argued back-and-forth about this, Lyman Stewart said, no, what we need to do is build brick-and-mortar stuff in downtown L.A. and train people for a couple of years. They’ll be so much better with a couple of years of training. Jesus could come back Thursday but that’s no excuse for sending out untrained people overseas. And so the founding commitment was to make a building, to make a place where you could bring people together for training. For just because we believe in the pre-millennial return of Christ, doesn’t mean we should be short-sighted or not do adequate training or sowing into culture.

Same thing with Lyman Stewart, some fundamentalists would say, Why feed people, you know, you just need to get their souls saved ‘cause they’re just going to die and go to hell anyway if you don’t witness to them. Lyman Stewart, obviously, said, No, we need to build a Union Rescue Mission and feed people and house them. You can’t witness to anyone if they’re too hungry or cold to hear the Gospel. So there’s always that commitment question with Biola—boy, a hundred years later, have we stayed faithful to the vision of the founders?

Yeah, if you interpret the vision of the founders as being committed to this pre-millennial view of Christianity but not in a short-sighted, knuckleheaded way, then you could say—in order to do in 2008 what the founders wanted to do in 1908, we need to do that as a far-sighted Christian university. The world probably didn’t need another Christian university or a Christian university in L.A. in 1908 but, as the century rolled on, as the decades rolled by, there are clear moments of recognition through different leaders at Biola through these transitions in leadership. That in order to do at mid-century what we did at the beginning of the century, we need to offer a four-year degree. In order to do this well, we need to be a liberal arts kind of a school. In order to do this well, we need graduate schools of various kinds.

BR: It’s beautiful. Fred Sanders, Ph.D. in theology and teaches at the Torrey Institute. Thanks so much for joining us.

FS: Thank you.