firsthand

Oral History Transcript

Biola University Centennial Oral History Project

INTERVIEWEE: Edward Curtis

INTERVIEWER: Brandon Rogers

DATE: October 27, 2006

BRANDON ROGERS: Welcome back to the broadcast. We’re here with Edward Curtis, Biola theologian and scholar of the Old Testament in the department at Biola University and Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. You came to Biola in the late seventies, is that right?

ED CURTIS: Yes, in 1978.

BR: And you’re interested in theology and Old Testament scholarship?

EC: Yes.

BR: That’s right. We have some interesting conversations for the segment tonight. We talked about the history of Biola, how Biola plays into history of, the broader history of American evangelicalism. And, most importantly, how Biola has participated in preserving the biblical mission in Christian education.

How, what I want to do tonight is to focus on two key areas of the last fifty years of American evangelicalism. And see what was going on in American culture and get you to comment on what you think evangelicalism was thinking, how we responded to what happened in culture, and specifically, how Biola University responded to culture. Let’s start in the ‘70s.

The '70s: The Secular-Evangelical Divide

EC: In the 70s we had…well, before the ‘70s we had this play between evangelicalism and secularism conformed to culture. From the beginning of the twentieth century, we had a pretty robust evangelical presence in America. The self-control of culture, they had a pretty big presence. But then, right before the century, some things happened where secularism really took hold and liberal school of thought pushed in on the church and The Fundamentals came out. The evangelical church sort of wanted to make a stand against liberal infection, secular infection of the church. They withdrew a little bit, part of the evangelical church withdrew a little bit, and liberal part of the church regained some control and secularism eventually, after World War II, took over control of the culture. And the secular golden age lasted about forty till about fifty years or so.

And then, the American culture sort of experienced this phenomenon where American culture lost, didn’t immediately, finding what they were looking for. American secularism promised a lot, modernism promised a lot and didn’t deliver. So, the sixties, I think, characterized by American culture’s search for an identity, something of substance. And we saw a chance for the Christian church to do something, to respond, to say: Hey, you know, secularism is wrong for these reasons. Maybe, as to your comment, what do you think, how did the Christian evangelical church respond in the sixties and then later in the seventies and eighties, to this ongoing quest of Americans of something of substance.

Biblical Authority

Well, it seems to me that you probably have to recognize a couple of other things. There were certain struggles that were going on in the church. One of the major issues that goes all the way back to the beginning of the twentieth century was the question of biblical authority. Where does the real authority for knowing truth lie? Does it lie in scripture, as the church had affirmed generally throughout history; the secular onslaught was beginning to raise serious questions about that. And in many circles the authority of scripture was being completely denied because they believed that the authority of scientific thinking or modernity or rational thought or whatever you want to call it, had clearly demonstrated that that’s where the authority lay.

Modernity Project

Well, that’s characteristic of the whole modern era. And so, I think, probably before World War I, that the approach, what we often call modernity, that had really promised a lot. The idea was the so-called Modernity Project. The idea was that if you use these methods—empiricism, rational thinking—if you used these principles and you applied them rigorously, it will provide the solution to basically every issue and every problem that faces mankind. Well, the First World War began to erode that thinking a bit. The Second World War, I think, was probably the final straw in that. So what became apparent is, as good as those methods may be, they simply did not have the power to address issues like interpersonal relationships, aesthetic values. There are many things that are part of human life that the methods of modernity just cannot answer and cannot provide solutions. Moral values, for example.

BR: Well, cause modernity thought that we can know things through our rational mind and that we can know things in a certain way through the rational mind.

EC: Yes.

Enlightenment Thought Patterns

BR: Philosophers like John Locke posits certain intuitive ways of thinking about life and culture and reality. And they thought they can derive all of life, morality and so forth. All culture from that, basically, we can know through our senses. When that seems… What do you think the error was that, the simple error that led us astray and that caused the modern period in America—the first fifty years of the century?

EC: Well, I would argue, that there are simply some questions that can’t be answered through those methods… Where they went astray was when they tried to reduce everything down to those approaches and those methods. I saw an interesting documentary once when I was in Europe teaching class in a seminary there. It was a story of a British city, I don’t remember exactly which city it was, the city that had been bombed by the Germans during World War Two. And the documentary was quite interesting because it showed the city planners and all the people who were, with some enthusiasm, looking forward to designing this city, to rebuilding it in a way that would eliminate all social problems and would sort of create, as a result of their modern engineering, both human and architecture-wise; it would create a perfect city where you would never have any of those issues. Well, obviously, it didn’t work out that way. And so, I think they failed to recognize their limits. As we experience more and more problems, not just World War Two…

I remember another story. I think this happened sometime in the early forties. They brought together a group of scholars, the top scholars espousing these methods, and they brought them together and their goal was to forge out a set of moral values that every thinking person would have no choice but to embrace. And they couldn’t even begin, they couldn’t come to any sort of consensus, on that. So, I think, the fault was they made promises that failed to take into account the limits of the method.

BR: Of human reason, of knowing all of reality and morality.

EC: That’s right. And so the question becomes, are there any ways we can answer any of those questions. One of the biblical books that I’m particularly fascinated by, and I will tell you in advance that my take on it is not everybody’s take on it, but the more I study it the more convinced I am that this is a point that’s being made. It’s the book of Ecclesiastes. The author of Ecclesiastes is concerned about questions like, what is the meaning of life? Is there any meaning in life? And so he pursued a number of paths that look like they might be promising in helping to determine the meaning of life. And then, every cul-de-sac he leads us down, we come to the same conclusion: “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” And so he shows us what doesn’t work. But I think he’s doing that with a certain intent in mind. He is showing us that there are certain questions like the meaning of life: is there a way to live life so that you generate a profit that death cannot rob you of. And the point he’s making is, if there is any way to answer these questions at all, it will be by faith. I mean, the methods of modernity simply, they would reject that out of hand. But that’s the claim of biblical message. And something that I think the church has tried to promote as they have responded to culture, maybe not as articulately as they could have done. But one of the things that I think they are trying to show is that there are answers here that modernity certainly can’t provide for. The sexual revolution of the sixties couldn’t provide the answer, although that was one of the things they were looking for. Post-modernity reacted to those limits of modernity and affirmed those limits, sometimes correctly. We have been left with a culture that is looking for answers to those questions and a church that, at one level at least, is claiming, we have some of those answers.

The church has, in my judgment, not always been effective in getting that message out. The church has struggled with the interaction between culture and faith—theology, whatever you want to call it—in some interesting ways. I mean, today, with super-sensitive churches we’re trying to get the people in and we’re trying to give people what they want to identify what they want, what will get them to come, and then, I think the hope is that, once you get them there, then they’ll be exposed somewhere to something that will provide some answers to their questions. But the tensions within the evangelical church I think swirl around those central issues.

Biola and the Question of Inerrancy

When I first came to Biola, one of the major issues that people were people were embroiled in, you could not avoid being embroiled in the issue, came out of a book that Harold Lindsell had written called The Battle for the Bible. And so the question of inerrancy was a burning question.

BR: This was in what time period?

EC: Well, I came in the late seventies; this would have been the early eighties, maybe mid-eighties. And so, there were schools that were affirming inerrancy—schools like Biola—and saying that the Bible, in its original autographs is true. That there’s no error in it.

BR: On a note on the issue of inerrancy and the implications, the importance of that, in the history of evangelical church… Beginning the twentieth century with the onslaught of secularism, the evangelical church sort of split in some ways.

EC: Yes.

BR: ‘Cause over a lot of issues of inerrancy, I think that some of the issues that the liberals—liberal Christians, liberal evangelicals—thought, if they do away from some of these really hard issues, controversial issues like inerrancy in the Bible, that they would invite a lot more people to come to church. So you do more good with eliminating some of these ideas like inerrancy, you know, that doesn’t really matter. Now the Bible’s a good book and some of the ideas of modernity play really key in the cyclical nature of the American church. And so in the time you’re talking about now, we’re responding to it again and again, and so keep going on how we responded to this.

EC: Yes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, prior to the twentieth century, the orthodox church—whatever we mean by that—had just taken inerrancy as a given. Nobody really questioned it. But as critical scholarship applied scientific methodology, I read one article by a scholar who said that we should approach the Bible with no presuppositions beyond the fact that there is order in the universe. So the idea of God, you don’t presuppose that. The idea of revelation, the idea of a supernatural world, you don’t presuppose any of that. You approach the text in a purely secularly way. So, as those approaches were being made and making a major impact on biblical studies, the vision came at that point. One group of scholars said, no, the Bible is true and the other set of scholars who were saying that the Bible was just like any other book. And the one thing that we recognize is that, when the Bible talked about a miracle like the Exodus event, what actually took place there was something that is simply natural cause and effect.

European Challenges to Inerrancy

BR: What types of groups, who were the groups and who were they associated with, how these sort of views of changing traditional meanings?

EC: Well, many, many, many scholars in Europe and in universities, that’s much of it was coming from. As that sort of thinking began to impact major schools like Princeton and Yale and Harvard, that’s where some of the major battles took place.

BR: Yeah, so the ideas that maybe were created in Europe or at least first took hold in Europe.

EC: Yeah, no question about it.

BR: And they sort of immigrated into American universities and the top ones first, generally. Bright scholars in Europe who converted our schools. Now where was Biola’s stance on this idea of inerrancy in the beginning of the eighties? And how were they responding to… Well, what kind of things did we produce: texts, office books, professors…

EC: Biola had its origin in the fundamentalist movement that affirmed the truth of scripture. But that group, between the beginning of the twentieth century and, say, the 1950s, there had been a certain evolution that had gone on. There was one group who called themselves fundamentalists who took pride in that designation, it was not for them a derogatory term, but they had remained with their thinking pretty much unchanged. And they were pretty content to just do their work and their faith and their church pretty much isolated from the broader culture, and certainly the intellectual life of the broader culture. But at the same time, there was another group—in fact, another division had taken place by that time, a division between the fundamentalists and the evangelicals.

BR: What time period did that take place in?

EC: Well, it seems to me it took place in the fifties and sixties. And so, the evangelicals were beginning to say, we are committed to the authority of scripture, we’re committed to the truth of scripture, we’re not going to compromise on that but we need to be more involved socially. We need to be more interactive with our culture. We need to contextualize the message. And so as people proceeded along those two paths, evangelicals began to discuss certain issues like inerrancy. And so, I don’t know if this is cause and effect or correlation, but to get your training, to get your advanced degree you needed to go to schools that were typically not fundamentalist schools and not evangelical schools. They were simply not offering those degrees, that was not what they were doing.

BR: Now, who wasn’t offering those degrees?

EC: Nobody.

BR: Degrees in fundamentalism?

Biola Upholds Fundamentalism

EC: Well, there were some schools but they did not offer anything beyond the bachelors degree, in essence. And so, as evangelical scholars were more and more influenced by those ideas, they began to raise questions and began to take positions that appeared to deviate from inerrancy. And they said that, well, there may be some mistakes in the Bible but the real issue is the authority of scripture, not whether there are any mistakes. There may be some historical errors and some scientific errors. So in that discussion, Biola remained in the fundamentalist camp, at least as far as the inerrancy of scripture.

BR: Are you saying that inerrancy is strictly as what?

EC: Well, it’s a given. That scripture in its original autographs has no errors in it. When it speaks about science, when it speaks about history, it is accurate. Whereas many people at many different schools were saying, oh, there are some historical errors but that doesn’t matter. When it speaks salvically, when it speaks about theological issues, it is true, but there might be some minor discrepancies here or there.

BR: I see that trend going on in culture even today.

EC: It is. It’s just the contours of the battle have changed and there are more groups (laugh). The divisions have split a little differently. When I came to Biola that was really the central issue. And so there were certain schools who were affirming the authority of scripture but not the inerrancy of scripture. And so when Lindsell’s book kind of brought that whole thing…it made the battle public. And in many ways made it necessary to really take sides and to come down on one side or the other of the issue. So when I came to Biola that was the central theological issue that was being debated. And so Biola did not deviate on that. And so, to this day, inerrancy is one of the fundamental requirements for teaching at Biola.

BR: Now, what other seminaries associated with Biola and the evangelical movement, how many of them held similar views? How many of them held more progressive or liberal views on inerrancy?

EC: Oh, I don’t even know how to parcel it out. But, I don’t know, if you want me to name names (chuckle)… I spent a year at Southwestern Seminary in the early sixties, no, in the…yeah, I guess it was the early sixties. And most of the professors at Southwestern were not committed to inerrancy. In the Southern Baptist Convention, there were people committed to it and people who thought inerrancy was important but they were not in the majority. Now the school was still committed to the authority of scripture but not to inerrancy. So they would have affirmed that there may be some mistakes here and there. Schools like Fuller, Fuller had, in its beginning, been committed to inerrancy. That’s one of the reasons Lindsell had written the book. He had taught at Fuller, I think maybe had some close connections with Fuller, and he was very upset over what he saw as deviating from, in his mind, an essential position. Many in the schools that Biola…

Seminaries and Inerrancy

BR: First off, why did you see Fuller make sort of this move or slide away from holding to inerrancy? Like what years would you say that was around?

EC: Oh, I think it was around—since I wasn’t there and those were not issues that were on my radar in those days. I think it was probably was the late fifties, early sixties.

BR: OK, I thought that was much later. So, late fifties, Fuller perhaps made that transition?

EC: Well, certainly by ’78, they had gone in that direction.

BR: That’s what I thought you were going to get at.

EC: And it could have been in the sixties; I was in Southwestern in ’64, I think, ’65, ’66. And I think Fuller was there at that point as well. And so, you know, Biola affirmed the inerrancy of scripture while there were other people who were taking different views. And they do it for a variety of reasons. The question you asked earlier, in those much earlier… Well, let’s take a New Testament scholar like Rudolf Bultmann. Bultmann, a professor mine said—I never heard him preach—but a professor of mine said if you heard Rudolf Bultmann preach, he sounded like a fundamentalist because he knew that the message of scripture is what transforms people. But in terms of his own personal commitments, he didn’t believe any of it was true. And so Bultmann is famous for something called demythologizing. What he wanted to do, he felt that at one level you had to look at what scripture says, to examine it scientifically. And in terms of what was actually true, it was only those things that would pass the scientific test. But when you…and so what you needed to do, what you needed to get out all of the stuff—stories about miracles and the like—because they are not credible to an audience today. And so we need to readjust the thinking of the church, at least the message we proclaim, because we wanted to appeal to people.

Now that’s actually not a new idea. You go all the way back to the first century. There was a Jewish scholar named Philo of Alexandria and he was concerned that the Jewish people in people who were, of course, getting a Greek education, they were not finding the message of the Old Testament compelling. And so, Philo began to use a method of reading the Old Testament that we call allegorizing. And he did it with the intention of making the Old Testament text palatable to people who had been educated with a Hellenistic education. So he thought it was important for Jewish people to know the Old Testament but he felt one needed to adapt its message so it would be credible to them in their culture. So, you see the same kinds of things happening with Bultmann and…

BR: What year was Bultmann? What years was Bultmann writing?

EC: Well, it was in the late fifties, early sixties, because I was at Southwestern and I believe it was actually ’55, ’56. And that’s where a professor said that if you heard him preach you would have thought he was a fundamentalist.

Should the Church Adjust to Culture?

BR: Those sort of things about wanting to give culture something and having the culture really looking for something different was what… I think the Christian church experiences today and experienced in the seventies. This idea that there was one story of this church that George Marsden goes into in his book, one story of this church—actually a lot of churches—they changed their music to be really popular and exactly like culture. But then, this was attracting a lot of people, but then some people in American culture finally, they started going to the New Age movement. Cause they were looking at something real different, they wanted something different than secularism. Not exactly what Christianity truly is, but these churches were offering them a version of Christianity which is similar to what they had in secular culture.

EC: Yeah, yeah.

BR: And so they, eventually they left the Christian church because it was just the same thing that culture was, they found on TV. The same thing.

EC: Sure.

BR: You see this same sort of, what was going on in Philo’s time in the first century, and taking a Greek education and demythologizing the Hebrew education that fit with the Greek education is a really similar way to what is going on.

EC: That’s right. You see that really comes down, it’s the question of authority. Where is the authority: does the authority lie in culture and culture’s understanding of things, or is there authority in the revelation of scripture, or in the message of scripture which claims to be a revelation from God? That’s really the central issue: where does the authority lie?

BR: Now, in the seventies, how would you describe what was culturally going through? Some historians say, it was still part of the sixties’ American search for identity or relevance or significance. The seventies was kind of a crazy time—I didn’t live through it, you did—it was right as you were coming to Biola. How do you think that, how do you see culture reacting to the search for identity as it went into the seventies and got into the eighties? How did you see that as the culture incorporating their Greek secular education with their Hebraic and Old Testament Bible teachings?

EC: Well, I’m not sure exactly when this began to kick in but it seems to me that one of the things that happened, as culture and experience and history made it clearer that modernity—the methods of scientific thinking—were not going to deliver us, were not going to solve our problems. People began looking in all kinds of other places. I think one of the things you see in the sixties is the people were looking, they were hoping that their own personal experience would provide that key. And sometime that personal experience was in pleasure, in drugs, in all kinds of things. And it didn’t seemed to have worked all that well. But you have modernity still playing a major role but at the same time, many of the currents of post-modernity already beginning to express themselves. Well, we really can’t be sure about anything. There are, you know, what is reality and so I think those are questions that were beginning to be asked. And so it was contributing to a disillusionment on the part of many people. But at least my experience in the seventies, it didn’t seem like there were many definitive answers that were being presented.

BR: In the seventies, there weren’t as many sole answers being produced by culture or by the church in general?

EC: I mean the evangelical church, the evangelical churches claimed, we got the answers. Because we got an authoritative message from scripture that is the answer. At least the certain centrally important questions. It’s not going to help you, you know, make a better cell phone or get better TV reception. But it’s a message that addresses those fundamental issues of life, like whether there is meaning to life. And where that meaning is to be found. Whether there is an afterlife? Those kinds of things.

BR: There were certainly the questions that were going on in the sixties and seventies, and through much of history.

EC: Well, anybody who thinks very much (laughter) comes up against those questions.

The '80s: Biola's Integrative Approach to Biblical Education

BR: What did Biola do in their thinking, in the books they wrote, and how they were training the students, to really—going forward in time a little bit towards the eighties, when you were teaching here at Biola in the bible department? And how did , what was the mission of Talbot and the bible department, to really come back to this issue, of searching for identity in the face of questioned authority? And in the case of using reason in questioning the Bible? Questioning inerrancy. Questioning scholars who wondered things were really the way the Bible said they were, whether the Bible was right.

EC: My sense is, when I came to Biola, that they was a lot of thinking about integration that was going on. But Biola had decided that the right approach is not the approach that I mentioned before where you do education the way everybody else, like UCLA, like USC, they way Michigan State does education. And then you just have a religious component that’s added on somewhere, where students have to go to chapel or encouraged them to pray occasionally. But Biola was committed to an integrative approach where, in every single class, ideally, students would get not only what that discipline does and teaches, but they would also try to think as a Christian about those issues and about that discipline. So that was the goal. So Biola was trying to forge out, what does that look like.

BR: What did it look like in the seventies?

EC: Well, we had some departments like Rosemead where it was being done quite well.

Integrating Psychology and Faith

BR: What do you mean by…how did Rosemead do this integration of, well, how did Rosemead do that exactly?

EC: I think there were several people at Rosemead who saw that as a central focus of what they do. People like Bruce Narramore or John Carter. They were two of the people who, as they thought of the discipline of psychology… Again in psychology, you’ve got psychologists who are just purely secular and they do everything from a purely secular perspective. Now some of those may be Christians. But in terms of how they function in their discipline is just a purely secular approach. Then you’ve got people at the opposite end of the continuum who would argue that psychology and the Bible are two totally different entities, and to try to mix them is like trying to mix oil and water.

BR: I see that all of over the place in our own university, in Biola University, and everywhere else. They try to separate disciplines. But you really can’t separate disciplines so much as they pertain to what reality really looks like and what’s true.

EC: Yeah, yeah. But it goes back to what we were talking about earlier and that is that there are some people who believe that human beings, that human depravity, has a sort of effect that makes it impossible for people to discover truth. Now, I don’t think that’s the case.

Reason's Role in the Christian Life

BR: How does Biola—yeah, that’s sort of an interesting question—how does Biola think of that? Does Biola hold that human reason is fallible, we can’t rely upon it much, we need to just memorize the Bible and do what it says? We can’t think about it too much. What can you generalize about Biola’s stance on that?

EC: When I came in 1978 it depended on who you talked to. There were people who were very serious about doing integration, and doing it. Bruce Narramore, for example, I still team teach a class called Psychology and Christian Thought, and the purpose of the class is to help students learn how to think as a Christian about the discipline of psychology. When I first started teaching that class, I taught it with Bruce Narramore. Now, Bruce and I didn’t agree on everything we talked about. But Bruce was dead serious about taking the Bible and theology seriously. Bruce was a knowledgeable man when it came to psychology, and he was serious about taking those truths that psychology has uncovered seriously. And he was serious about trying to put them together. There were people on campus at that time who were very suspicious of all those efforts because they seemed to think you just go by what the Bible says.

BR: Psychology is an interesting subject, probably one of the most tricky. And one of the most important ones in the last twenty years, the most popular ones. I’ve seen this trend in culture, in American culture, go way toward the subjective side. And wanting to find meaning not in culture, not in truth, not in the external truth, but inside myself. We all see this every day.

EC: Sure.

BR: And psychology is exactly the study that people look to in finding, in trying to find truth inside themselves. You see psychology, secular psychology, is like another trend in American culture, of individualization…

EC: Yes.

BR: Trying for yourself which leads to certain sayings like, you know, that came out of, I think it was the late sixties, maybe it was the seventies. Yeah, the seventies. Things like, do your own thing. Be your own person. Let it all hang out. Whatever you have, express love and awareness for all beings. Keep the good vibes. Those little sayings that we hear even today, like do your own thing, in the twenty-first century, you know, thirty years later. But it came out of the seventies. And it’s all part of that, I think part of that individualization.

EC: Yeah, it is. And so that, say that focus on the individual—I think to a great extent, came out of Enlightenment thinking.

BR: So you would say it’s not so much a part of a Judeo…

EC: Oh, no. Certainly not part of a biblical perspective because they never thought of people—well, I shouldn’t say that—but that was not their default mode. (chuckle)

Individualism

BR: The idea of individualization…

EC: You get a guy like Ezekiel affirms the importance of the individual but he’s doing it to counteract a misunderstanding. They thought of who they were, they thought of their identity, in corporate terms, not in terms of individual terms.

BR: So they would mean, like, I would think, as a student of Biola University, I would think of myself as a member of the community of Biola University and a member of my family.

EC: That’s exactly right.

BR: Even in personal terms you can see of how I, in fact, am. I’m totally influenced by how I am at Biola and the culture around me. And so, in terms of psychology and how the study of psychology, whether it’s done poorly or well or excellently, in the extent, if it’s excellent, how much should it incorporate Christian thinking? And so the interesting question that comes to my mind is, if you’re thinking of psychology maybe through a secular lens, you’ll think of it in the terms individualization of yourself. But essentially, in psychology, how can we use—what is the truth of psychology pertaining to the truth of Judeo-Christian culture and the Bible pertains to community and your individual identity found in the relationship of the self to the community?

EC: Well, I think that culture plays a major role in how we view ourselves. And, as I mentioned earlier, I think individualization ultimately comes out of modernity. But then it takes some interesting twists and turns because, think about it: the thing that modernity affirms, if you want to know truth, if you apply the methods of the Enlightenment, the methods of modernity, whatever you want to call them, and you base your study, your search for truth on good empirical work and careful logic, you will be able to reach conclusions that nobody can question. And, if you do your work right, you’re not answerable to anybody. You can stand alone with an authoritative statement of: this is truth. Cause you’ve done your work right.

So the individualism, I think, was sort of set up in that way and then people began to think in slightly other terms well, you know it’s all about me. The Doll’s House, for example, the woman—a mother, a wife, in Sweden—and she decides she’s just not being fulfilled by her existence. And so there’s this scene at the end of the play where she announces to the family at dinner that she’s leaving to go to burg, to go to the university, to find herself. Well, when that first came out, I think in the twenties, it was shocking. People were offended by that. But what it’s doing, it’s showing that it’s a different twist on individualism. But it’s basically saying that one individual has the right, it is her duty, in a sense, to be fulfilled. And she does whatever she has to do and the fallout for other people doesn’t really matter. Well, it was shocking when it came out. My son read that play in a class in high school, in English class, and at the end of their discussion, the teacher asked the class: How many of you think she did the right thing? My son was the only person in the class of probably twenty-five who said she had obligations to her family, to her children, that overrode her own personal satisfaction. So that shows you how our culture has changed.

BR: And that really happened over the course of sixties, seventies, and we’re talking about the eighties…

EC: Yeah, that’s right.

BR: …when the play came out.

EC: Well, that’s The Doll’s House. That originally came out in the twenties or thirties.

BR: OK, that’s right, you mentioned it happened in the twenties.

EC: People were shocked, people were offended by that idea.

BR: You probably had some connection with the student body here, conversations with students in the course of your thirty years.

EC: Yes.

Students Respond to Individualistic Thought

BR: And in the eighties, how did you see students deal with these issues of individualization, connected with culture and dealing with their biblical education versus their secular immersion in culture?

EC: Well, particularly in those early days, the early eighties, I’m sure they were focused on the individual. And you could have found narcissistic people then, just as you do today. But, see, I was new to Biola, I didn’t have Biola roots. I didn’t grow up even aware that Biola existed. In the early sixties I heard some programs on the radio that Biola had produced, met a few students. But when I came out here for an interview, I really knew very little about the school and the student body. So one of the things I did in the early days is to ask the students, why did you come to Biola? Thirty units of Bible—why did you come to Biola? Over and over and over I got the answer: I came because of the thirty units of Bible. I could study nursing anywhere. I could get a teaching credential anywhere. I wanted the thirty units of Bible.

And as I talked to those students, they were really concerned about their culture. They were concerned about making an impact, about making a difference. Then I think I saw a shift in our student body. For one thing, we would ask them about the thirty units, they were a pain that they had to endure. (laughter)

BR: When did you see this shift?

EC: Oh, it was probably, maybe the late eighties, the early nineties. And so there were all these complaints about the thirty units. Why do we have to take that? I just want to be a teacher. I just want to be a nurse or whatever.

BR: And that feeling’s just like…part of this other theme I wanted to talk about, too, is over-pragmatization of American culture. We thought education’s only good for getting a job. We became this glorified, really expensive, vocational training school. Pay a hundred thousand dollars to become a teacher.

EC: Yeah.

How Should Biola Conduct General Education?

BR: They used to be…education used to be different, didn’t it?

EC: Absolutely.

BR: It used to be, before the world wars, you have this capstone class in those universities of how to be a gentleman, how to be a lady.

EC: Yes.

BR: But that was part of…people went to school to become a gentleman or a lady. You learned how to…what does it mean? Tell me about that. And what is it like today versus education in, like, then?

EC: Yeah, this is a question, the discussion is still an ongoing one. I’m on the GE Council of Biola and so we meet twice a month. Then one of the things that’s probably a constant discussion, but one of the things is what should be the core curriculum for general education. And it all comes back to those same ideas. But, you’re right, that it was considered that there was a certain core curriculum that anyone who is well-educated should know about these things. Should have this kind of knowledge. And a part of that was how to be a civilized human being. How to function, you know, in society. But there’s another issue that I think is a very important one. Particularly before World War II, the people who went to the university were, by and large, people who were rich. Because farmers couldn’t afford to send their kids to college.

BR: And after the world wars, the government took more of a place in funding…

EC: That’s exactly right. And so the G.I. Bill and we had what was really the democratization of education. It was decided—a political, social decision—it was decided that every American has the right to a college education. And so, I think, that’s where a major turn came. And so now we begin to start thinking in different terms.

BR: That’s interesting ‘cause some people thought of this change in American education as just being the downslide of American culture. It became more over-pragmatized and part of that whole thing. But there’s other, it’s also true the other factor to consider is the fact that the government funded lower classes to go to school. And that changes the nature of the institution, where you have a lot of people that just really were not cut out in their upbringing for the really serious intellectual work that maybe we didn’t before. Or maybe honors programs.

EC: Yeah, but you see those are political decisions and so what you just said is not a politically correct statement. (laughter)

BR: I know, I’m not politically correct. No, in the issue that is sort of politically correct is that there are some people who simply wanted to go to school but they couldn’t afford to go to school and really spend all that time to study philosophy and history. They had to go to school to get a job, ‘cause they had to provide for their kids.

EC: That’s right.

BR: And so that’s fine to do. It’s not ‘cause they’re any sort of different kind of people or like that. Simply that the fact of the matter is, certain people in culture had a certain life they had to live and a certain family to support, that’s fine. And yet education had to be accommodated for those people to, which in fact turned out to be a lot of people, and sort of a lot of education had to incorporate that.

EC: Well, one of the questions then in Europe that they still do it in a different way. At least in countries like Germany. They still identify people early on as the people who go to the university. They identify other people as people who would go into trades. And they then provide them with the kind of education that they need to do their, to have the greatest success at whether their trade is a technical trade, you know, working in a laboratory somewhere. And so they differentiate it and then they have education that’s designed with respect to the outcomes. Whereas what we do is send everybody to the university and we then are faced with the reality of trying to put together a curriculum that will sort of be all things to all people.

Career-focused or Liberal Arts?

BR: Now, what is (pause) it’s really one of the important issues. What did Biola do to accommodate for that? And did Biola in the late eighties, early nineties maybe, did they have this sort of conversation about realizing when you have a lot of students that are not going to want to maybe do one type of work, maybe honors type of work, and one type of students that just want to come here and get a job. Do we have that kind of conversations in your meetings?

EC: Well, before I came, Biola’s history had been a bible institute, so the major purpose was to provide biblical and theological education for people who would go into some kind of ministry. Before I came, a decision had been made—when I came, Biola was a Christian liberal arts college. So that they had added a number of majors that they didn’t have in the early days. And so we had some business classes; we didn’t have a business school but we had some business classes. You could get a nursing major and a variety of things like that. So we expanded our focus, we’d become a Christian liberal arts college. At some point after I came—I don’t remember exactly when it was—but we had decided to move to a Christian university. ‘Cause, when I first came, Talbot was there but it was really, it was under the broad umbrella of Biola University; it was just kind of its own entity and did its own thing. No attempt was really made to integrate the school. We had a department of intercultural studies. We had a department of psychology. But these were not schools and so we went to another model of the university, a model that brought all of that—and at that point…

BR: Integrated.

EC: Yes, yes, and that was deliberate, it was intentional, and there was focused effort to try to make it more integrated so there would be more interaction and more conversation throughout the university. Because Biola had committed itself to the importance of that kind of thing.

BR: This happened in the late eighties?

EC: Whenever we became a university.

BR: That was earlier.

EC: And I don’t remember; I know Richard Chase was still president at that point.

BR: Yeah, so it sounds like that’s on a track that you were interested in and sounds like the right track to be on. Integrating. Biola’s whole mission, which is to integrate biblical scholarship with functional or vocational training, and training about culture and about… And about the third thing is integrating biblical revelation with the use of natural reason, thinking well. ‘Cause we all want to be people, we want to train students to think well while they think biblically.

A Place for Torrey Honors Institute

EC: And those are discussions that still go on. Now one thing that happened was the introduction of Torrey.

BR: When we come back, I want to talk more about Torrey. I think Torrey is a phenomenal thing in discussing the same thing about integrating culture and biblical revelation, and integrating all of it in some way that… We used to do a lot more today, which goes back to our earlier conversation. So, when we come back, stay tuned for Dr. Ed Curtis as he talks about integration of Bible scholarship, cultural thought, and philosophy.

Welcome back to the broadcast. We’re here with Dr. Edward Curtis, Biola theologian and scholar with the Old Testament department of Biola University and Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California.

What it Means to Be a University

Ed Curtis, we’re just talking about integration of what it means to be a university, what it means to be a Christian university, and what it means to integrate biblical theology with the study of cultures, the study of rational thought, the study of philosophy. What it means to integrate all these things into cultivating a good citizen and one who is culturally literate, biblically sound. We were talking about the late eighties, how Biola University became a university trying to synthesize, integrate, different things it was doing: biblical theology in Talbot, biblical undergrad, thirty units of Bible, psychology school, history school, physics, math… Now we were talking about really interesting stuff before the break. So tell me…let’s pick up right where we left off when we went on break, when you first saw integration happening at Biola. And, more importantly, as Biola is developing its general education program, which you were on the council of…is that right?

EC: I’ve been on the council for a number of years, yes.

Declining Enrollment

BR: You were telling me that something happened that was unique in developing Biola’s education in the curriculum, what happened about certain students leaving, what the council realized about that.

EC: Well, there has been ongoing discussion about what general education should look like and what the goals of general education ought to be. There are different universities that deliver that in a lot of different ways. And so it has been a struggle to gain a consensus in terms of what it should look like. It’s a discussion that continues to go on. But we did have a situation several years ago where we realized that our retention rate was not what it ought to be. And we actually hired a consultant to come in and study that and give us some help in terms of why this was the case.

Torrey Honors Institute: A Solution for Retention Problems

BR: By retention rate, you mean you were losing freshmen. They’d come here for a while…

EC: Yes, people would come here for a year or two and then they would transfer someplace else.

BR: And you were also…why was that?

EC: Well, the conclusion of that study was that we were losing an inordinate percentage, a higher percentage than ought to be the case, at the tops of the very best students who were coming in, and a greater percentage of them were leaving than one would expect. And we were also losing a greater percentage of the students on the bottom, academically. And so the conclusion of the consultant was, we’re teaching to the middle and in so doing, we’re teaching in a way that the people at the bottom simply can’t keep up, they can’t do the work, they’re overwhelmed by… But the people at the top are not sufficiently challenged to stay here. And so, out of that—at least I think that played one role—that was one element in the decision to go to Torrey Honors Program.

BR: Really.

EC: And the Torrey Honors Program was designed to really focus on those top students. Sure, there were probably several things: one is Christian young people, who were really, really good students, they didn’t have a lot of options and so Biola was trying to provide them with an option that didn’t exist, so they could get an excellent, excellent education. The kind of education that would allow them to go to any graduate school they want to go to. And would keep them stimulated and interested.

BR: So Torrey Honors Institute, from my understanding, is four-year great books program in which they read rigorously the great authors that sort of formed the western world from Plato, well start with Homer—the Iliad and the Odyssey—in looking at pre-Socratic philosophers and how the Greek world war moved from a Homeric mythical understanding of the universe and reality and the world and culture. Telling stories that define the reality—they didn’t care if they were true or not—it just helped them out, made sense of what was important to them. Sort of like a tangent, sort of like what we see today.

We’re back on track. And then they went to Plato, read Plato, Aristotle, and the church fathers. And then Shakespeare and the other great works in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth century. Now this sort of great books education sort of caters to the—how would you classify it?—the upper end of the student body.

EC: Well, the people with the highest SATs.

BR: Right.

EC: The people who are the most accomplished in terms of academics. The people who would likely get into the most competitive schools out there.

BR: Torrey was started in the mid-nineties?

EC: I think so.

BR: Under a gentleman called Dr. John Mark Reynolds?

EC: Mm-hm.

BR: Well, he’s a Plato scholar. Now, we were talking a second ago, about, sort of the attempt at integrating Biola’s vision for education, for Christian education. Incorporating the lower end, people that had a certain vision for education, more vocationally-oriented. It was the upper end that had a graduate school-doctoral-intellectual spin on their education. In these two ends of vocational and more intellectual, and the middle leg, and you mentioned something over the break that was very interesting. Before the study was done that rendered this sort of conclusion, you said that, if they were to have asked me, you could have told them that was the case. Why was it the case that Biola was losing the top?

EC: Any faculty member could have. Well, it was that the top group of students were not being stimulated and challenged by what they were getting in class. And the group that are the least academically-prepared are being overwhelmed by what they’re being asked to do. And so, as faculty members, you basically have little choice when you have a broad range of students in your class, it’s difficult to do anything except teach to the middle. And because we had such a wide range, we were losing students at the top and students at the bottom.

BR: You taught to the middle.

EC: Yeah. That’s what you have to do.

A Choice to Avoid Academic Elitism

BR: Now, it seems like American culture, American educational culture, has those schools that caters simply to the top echelons of those that are the premium of the cream-of-the-crop of the elite intellectuals.

EC: Yes.

BR: You know, those that cater towards people who don’t have enough money to go to school, not much ambition. Why can’t Biola do that?

EC: Well, the…

BR: Why does Biola try to stick with the middle? Why not pick those who are going to do well?(garbled)

EC: Yes. there are schools like Wheaton and Westmont; Westmont is limited by the city of Santa Barbara to a certain enrollment. And so I’m sure there are exceptions but in general they take the top academic achievers. You know, how many are on the list for the number they can bring in that year. Wheaton has defined itself as a Christian liberal arts college and, again, they have a limited enrollment, they have a very limited perspective in terms of what they do. And so it’s difficult to get in. It’s a competitive school in terms of admissions. And then they just do that one thing and try to do it as well as they possibly can. Biola, and there are other Christian colleges like Biola who have determined that they want to try to minister to a broader continuum, and so the feeling is—I’ve heard Dr. Cook express it many times—his feeling is that a Biola education is something that is valuable, it is something that is unique, it impacts the character and, because of what we do, he feels that it’s important that we accommodate as many people as we possibly can.

BR: I’ve heard you say in the past that Dr. Cook won’t allow any Christian who wants to be educated at Biola to not be. He thinks it’s a right.

EC: Well…

BR: In some sense it’s a right of a Christian to be educated…

EC: I’m sure there are people who would like to be educated here but for financial reasons they can’t come. But he feels that to tell somebody: you know, your grades aren’t high enough, you can’t come. Or to exclude… he wants to accommodate as we possibly can because he feels that we’re contributing something to the Christian community that is valuable and he doesn’t want any individual to lose that opportunity.

BR: That sort of says something distinctive about a Christian university that tries to do that. ‘Cause there are two ideas at play here, I think. You have a Christian culture, I’m sorry, an American culture that is success, product-driven: deliver good stuff or you go home. If you don’t deliver the good grades, you go home. But Biola seems to have a mission to that that is not so pragmatically success-oriented in that sense. Of course it is trying to develop excellent, excellent students. But now why do you think, from a Christian worldview, does Biola University—maybe even Clyde Cook—want to do that? Cater to the middle, cater to not let…not allow any student to be left behind?

Reasons for High Acceptance Rate: Tuition-driven Model=

EC: Well, some of it is that we’re tuition-driven. Some of it is that we need to get the students here. Our budget assumes a five percent increase in our student body. And so there are a wide variety of things that we’re trying to accomplish that, you know, that’s just faculty salaries, various things that, in order for us to be able to do those things, we need the tuition money. That’s a part of it.

BR: Part of it’s also because we don’t take any government funding.

EC: Yes, that’s true.

BR: We’re all private funded.

Reasons for High Acceptance Rate: Mission of Character Development

EC: But Dr. Cook’s feeling, and I think this is certainly an important consideration, that our mission is not just about the academics. Our mission is about character. And so he wants people to be exposed to what Biola does, to the contribution they make in developing character, developing a heart for ministry, preparing students for ministry. And his feeling is that, if you get people teaching in the public schools, or you get people in a wide variety of professions, and they have been impact; they have what he sometimes calls a Biola footprint. That that’s going to make a difference in the world, in the culture. And so you don’t always know… Now when the students come in, it’s a struggle—let’s say they don’t have a good high school track record--

Student Selection Criteria

BR: How does the mission committee and the president and just Biola’s thinking about that, trying to accommodate those cases when the student doesn’t have good grades. They want to think that, well, look at a case-by-case basis. If there are certain reason why… Is it a specific mission of the mission committee to try and admit people that do what? If it’s not just excel strictly by grades, what is the criteria they want to bring students in?

EC: Well, yeah, that’s one committee I’ve never been on. So I’m not a good person to ask that. But I would think that you do look at it on a case-by-case basis. The other thing that Biola does, they are committed when they bring students in whose high school performance perhaps raises questions about whether they’ll be able to succeed at this level, they do provide certain programs that help students; they have several different programs in place. Because they really do want to provide them with the resources that they need to succeed. Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t lose students academically; we certainly do. So once you get here, you still have to measure up. But they do have certain programs in place that help students. I mean I’ve had students over the years whose high school records have been terrible but sometimes they become Christians and that changes their motivation.

BR: Interesting.

EC: Sometimes they spend a couple of years working at McDonalds or a couple of years in military service, they come back with a very different motivation than they had when they were in high school. So sometimes it’s just a matter of students, you know, getting into a difference environment and learning a little bit of discipline and learning what they need to do—it turns around for them.

BR: Christian. Biblically-based. That’s our mission policy. Is there anything that seems to be more gonna to promote a better university, a better Christian community? Or a better student, by trying to admit those who have fallen behind or admit those who aren’t doing too well, is there anything distinctively Christian about that?

EC: Well, other than just having another person’s best interest in mind. Trying to show compassion and encouraging people to become everything that they could be.

BR: Why does it that some schools like USC, why don’t they do that?

EC: My guess is that there are some that do things like that. But I think they probably do it for a different reason. I would guess there are universities that do it because it’s politically correct. But Biola’s commitment to it is that they feel it flows out of their mission to try to impact as many people as they possibly can. With a Biola education, particularly wit h that Christian dimension of it, I think of a student that I had years ago. This was a student, he was actually from another country…

BR: What decade?

Success Story

EC: Oh, this was probably maybe late eighties, early nineties. And this was a student who had a, he did not have a high school record that would commend him. (laughs) He graduated from high school, never had any idea that he would go to college. And went into military service for his country. After a couple of years of serving in the military, he got out of the military. I don’t even know how he got here, I don’t know how he got to Biola. But I had him in several classes as an undergrad, then he went to Talbot. And I remember once after he was in Talbot, I had him in a class, and he turned a paper in to me and I wrote some comments on it, commended him for certain things. And for some reason he came to my office to get the paper—I guess he had been absent the day that it had been given back—and he looked at the comments and he said to me, why? He said, you know, when I read comments like this it’s just hard for me to believe. He said, I have my Biola diploma hanging on the wall next to a mirror that I often use as I’m getting dressed. And he said, I see my reflection there and I see that diploma, and I think this is not possible. He said, I can’t believe that I’m just about ready to graduate from Talbot. Because I remember when my father used to help me with math and he would try to explain things to me, and I can still hear him say, “Boy, you’re thick.” And he said, I just had it set in my psyche that these are the kinds of things I could never do, that I could never accomplish. He’s a pastor today and doing a really, really wonderful job as a pastor.

A Counter-cultural Mission

BR: That’s great. It seems like that’s sort of the mission that Biola has to, as you said, have a concern for somebody other than themselves. Well, off course, that’s easier to understand what you’re talking about, interpersonal relationships. When talking about university it seems they have to keep concern for what isn’t always in their best interest. That’s pretty good for a university. But it sounds like Biola does that and also benefits them, too. Cause they have a lot more enrollment. But also it sounds like that’s just, we do it for the reasons that it’s caring for the Christian community. And that sounds a lot anti-modern, anti-secular, and it’s like biblical Judeo view of community and the view of the person. And it sounds like that’s what the Biola community has been aiming towards. Like a lot of our conversation has been aiming towards. The twentieth century, the evangelical church in community has drawn closer, has gone to wrestling with ideas of modernity, trying to adapt more towards modernity, more towards secularism. The aim of the liberal churches, maybe Fuller, and things like that. But is there one example where Biola has maybe stood their ground on the issues? On trying to not to cater toward the middle, to cater towards those that struggle in life and show concern toward them. Which we’ve actually achieved on this mission of sticking to a Christian milieu.

EC: Yeah. Well, in our doctrinal statement. I mean there are things in our doctrinal statement that, you know, many people would simply not buy into. They would—now this is kind of an exaggeration—but there are things that some people would think are laughable in terms of where we are in our culture at major universities and so forth. but, you know, the behavior standards, the doctrinal statements, the fact that we’re committed to the idea of creation. The fact that we’re committed to the idea of the authority of scripture. These are things that don’t enhance the world’s opinion of us but these are things that Biola is deeply committed to. And we remain committed to, as you put it, we stand our ground on those things because we are convinced on the light of scripture that those things are true.

And I’ll just give you an example. I got my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school. And as I thought of where to go for a degree, I decided to go… a number of people told me you’d be better off going to a university for a Ph.D. because that will open more doors for you. So that was part of my choice. But then what I realized several years after I’d graduated and had started teaching at Biola, that degree did open—it potentially could have opened a lot of doors for me. But as soon as I began teaching at Biola, all those doors closed. (laughs) I had a colleague some years ago who left Biola and was looking for a job teaching and was not having any success. He was actually interested in teaching at a school that was a little more to the left of Biola and couldn’t even get them to return his phone calls.

BR: Because he taught at Biola.

EC: And he finally said to them, well, look, I left Biola because I didn’t agree with their position on things. And the response of the school was, but the kind of person we’re looking for would never had taught at Biola in the first place. And so we do stand our ground. We are committed to what we’re convinced reflects biblical truth, and that doesn’t enhance our reputation in the eyes of a lot of scholars.

BR: How do you see taking that vision of Biola and the vision of Torrey and the vision of integration of biblical scholarship with vocational training excellence… Where are we going as a university? How can we make an impact on culture? Cause we see this essential issue in the evangelical church happening today as it did back in the twentieth century.

EC: Well, what we are convinced, what I am convinced of, I would never have stayed at Biola for as long as I have if I weren’t convinced of this. I’m convinced that the kind of education we do bringing together good, careful study that comes out of the disciplines but bringing together as well biblical truths and theological thinking. Teaching our students how to think, how to reason, how to think critically and carefully. That that gives them a better education than they would get most other places where they might go. And the students we turn out are gonna make an impact on our culture. In many instances, they will make an impact on our culture that the culture never expects.

BR: In what way?

EC: Well because they will demonstrate that this kind of thinking, the character that is developing at a place like Biola makes a difference in how one lives life and how one functions in a profession. And we have people who do excellent work out there, who are at the top of their fields. And they would say that they give credit for that, to some degree, the kind of training they got at Biola.

I remember a student—you have these strange experiences with students sometimes. I was teaching class and I saw this person walk in to the back of the room. He looked familiar. And when the class was over and he came up and said, Dr. Curtis. I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciated the Wisdom literature class that he took from me. He said, that class absolutely transformed my life. He said, I have never thought the same way after taking that class than I did before. And I wanted to write you but I could never put into words what I wanted to say. Now he’s an executive in a Fortune 500 company, so he did very well. (chuckle)

BR: Training someone morally actually makes a person a better person. It also makes him more reliable and more ethical in the workplace. And can also have more influence on culture ‘cause they’re a good person.

EC: Sure! I mean I hear all the time people saying that our nurses, they are not only competent and able to do good nursing. But when hospitals hire them, they know—probably not true for every single case—but in general terms, they know they’re getting a certain kind of person. This is a person of integrity. This is a person who is going to work hard. This is a person that’s going to be responsible. Teachers—there are principals that like to hire Biola graduates because they know the kind of person this will be.

BR: That’s Biola’s mission…

EC: And I think that’s critically important.

BR: It is critically important. That’s the culmination of what the goal of evangelicals… The tension between fundamentals and liberals has been how to deal with culture. And I think one way to do it is to—the liberals want to engage culture, the fundamentals, as you said in the beginning, have tended to retreat into their own insular ways. And they think, in fact the way to solve that, is in fact what we’re doing. The fundamentals, the way you describe, integration, understanding theology, understand what is true, understand God, understand morality, how to be moral and how to be a Christian.

EC: Yes, but becoming that kind of person… When Jesus said we’re to be salt and light, I think that’s what Biola graduates are doing. That they’re being salt and light, they’re going into various pockets throughout our culture, and they’re making a difference. There is a word that’s used at the beginning of Psalm 1: Blessed is the person who… It’s a word that is very interesting—not the normal Hebrew word for “bless.” But it is a word that describes another person’s assessment of this individual. So somebody sees this person as they do whatever it is they do and they say, Wow! There’s something different about that person to be congratulated. People debate the best way to translate it. How fortunate is the person who…

BR: I think American religion is looking for something like that. Their hearts cry out for it, it’s part of the whole human condition to do that. I think that Biola’s providing that and I’m glad to be a part of it.

Thank you for joining the program tonight. This has been Dr. Edward Curtis, the biblical studies program for undergrads at Biola University, Old Testament study at Talbot Theology, La Mirada, California. American religion, Christian evangelicalism, and integration of biblical theology and excellence in vocation. Thank you for joining us.