The Weeks in Review (June 8, 2024)

1. Two weeks have passed. All projects continue. Biblical Hebrew for the Novice is almost done. Finished editing the "Rural Church Ministry" microcourse for Kingswood. Almost done with Wesleyan Church History and Discipline and Theology of Holiness for ordination with Campus and Kingswood.

My cousin Carl Shepherd got married yesterday. Angie and I went to his reception. Saw old family acquaintances there, including two of my Shepherd cousins. Headed to Florida to be with my mother this week. May work a little on family history with her. Blogged through it once upon a time. She just turned 98 last month.

2. A couple deaths of significance this past couple weeks. Alan Miller, who used to do a lot of PR for IWU, suddenly passed. Good guy. Very loyal. Wrote a history of the Barnes presidency that was kept from publication because some thought it was too explicit about some people. I think it's sitting in the IWU archives. I hope it is eventually published.

This is a dynamic that is a little unfortunate. The real opinions and history of things sometimes dies with people because of the desire not to offend some of the living participants in such events. For example, I have strong opinions about the last ten years at IWU and Houghton that may not ever see the light of day because of politeness. I suspect I have been annoying with some of the material I've blogged about people like David Riggs, Kerry Kind, or Keith Drury but I have wanted to preserve my memories of them and events involving them.

Back when I blogged through the history of Houghton University, I stopped at President Dan Chamberlain. His was the second death of great significance these last two weeks. I believe his presidency overall was the high mark of Houghton's history.  As I posted on Facebook, I never met him, but I admire the accomplishments of his time there. Here are some of his accomplishments:

• Under his presidency, I believe Houghton solidified its identity as the Wesleyan Wheaton. It remains a quality academic institution today, although it has faced invasive cuts in programs and faculty these last 15 years. 
• He gave the campus its current look, building the Paine Science building, the Chamberlain classroom building, and famously moving Fancher Hall in 1987 to its current location after tearing down Gao girls dorm.
• London Honors and the Tanzania programs started under his presidency. The Tanzania program was ended my last year in town. London Honors thankfully remains.
• He significantly expanded the Buffalo program, which went strong under him. It moved under Dr. Mullin, and I believe has closed under Dr. Lewis.
• He brought Houghton to its now mythical 1200 enrollment. It hasn't come anywhere close for years. When I left, I believe it had experienced something like 12 years of consistent enrollment decline. I believe last year it managed to creep a smidge back above 800, which is where it was when I arrived before COVID.
• The death of six students in a car accident in 1981 left a lasting impact on the campus. A monument in front of the Campus Center remains to this day in their honor. 

I wonder if lessons for Houghton could be learned by examining his presidency. It's of course easy to Monday quarterback. It just seems like Houghton had a certain magic during his time. Those were the days of Tim Fuller, for example. He would have made a nice college president somewhere, I suspect.

3. It is interesting to watch the Global Methodist Church wrestle with the question of whether to put "inerrancy" into its Articles of Religion. The online journal Firebrand has had several position pieces. Almost 20 years ago, I blogged on the Wesleyan sense of inerrancy. The word entered the Wesleyan Methodist Articles in the early 1950s under the urging of Stephen Paine (former president of Houghton). That was the era when evangelicalism was strongly pushing the idea. It was not in the more revivalist Manual of the Pilgrims.

My own sense is that the term has a lot of epistemological baggage from the twentieth century. I prefer the Asbury/Lausanne wording that the Bible is "without error in all that it affirms." In my blog pieces, I argued that this is in effect what Wesleyans mean by the term. We've never defined it narrowly. In fact, it is very difficult to define narrowly because, once you get into the details, it gets rather complicated in its clarification.

The late Bob Lyon was asked to affirm inerrancy to work at Asbury. He initially resisted the term given the culture wars over such things that were going on in the 1970s. He was asked, "If it means this and this and this and this, can you affirm it." He said yes, but is that really what people are meaning by the term? That was enough -- they just needed him to say Shibboleth -- and they hired him.

I thought Collins had an interesting point about the Evangelical Theological Society in the piece I linked above. ETS is overwhelmingly Reformed and Calvinist. Many broader Wesleyan scholars who are orthodox believers and affirm the truthfulness and authority of Scripture are excluded because they do not feel comfortable with the term as ETS defines it. I myself have never joined because the feel of it has always seemed off to me as a Wesleyan. For example, it is a sea of complementarian men, with a fairly small number of women. It also has seemed for many years as if the main preoccupation of ETS is who to kick out next. 

In any case, I have had no trouble affirming inerrancy as a Wesleyan. We have never really fought over the term. The only ruckus over it that I know about is when a faculty member at Houghton was let go on the pretext of it in the 90s. That was one moment of Chamberlain's presidency of some interest. He was apparently a gentle soul, and he assigned a friend of mine to take care of the situation while he himself went off to China for a few months. The person he assigned to take care of it was eventually ousted by the faculty, perhaps in large part in revenge for doing the dirty work of getting rid of the faculty member.

4. In related matters, it would be nice to write a little book on epistemology before I die.

P.S. As a footnote, Jurgen Moltmann also died this week. He was all the rage among some of my friends at Asbury. He never gelled with me probably for several reasons. 1) I didn't speak his language and no one really translated him for me. If ChatGPT had been around, maybe I would have taken more interest. 2) he emphasized social action now in anticipation of the coming kingdom. That wasn't a page I was on in the 80s, I don't think. 3) He depicted the cross as the suffering of God. While I think the cross does show God's identification with human pain and suffering, I don't think God "feels" anything. Patripassianism remains a heresy for me. I remain a scholastic when it comes to God.