Called to Teach

Excellence, Commitment, and Community in Christian Higher Education

Christopher J. Richmann, J. Lenore Wright, Christopher J. Richmann, J. Lenore Wright

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781532683183
  9781532683190
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532683206
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Lehrmethoden

The call to teach means different things to different people. This collection contends, however, that, at the very least, faithful work in the teaching vocation involves excellence, commitment, and community. Representing diverse disciplines and institutional perspectives from a Christian research university, the contributors present reflections based on personal experience, empirical data, and theoretical models. This wide-ranging collection offers insight, encouragement, and a challenge to teachers in all areas of Christian higher education. Building upon the legacy of thoughtful teaching at Baylor University while looking toward the future of higher education, this collection is framed for Christians who teach in higher education but who are also committed to research and graduate training.

Part 1

Excellence

1

Baylor’s Intellectual Heritage

Robert Baird

When I graduated from Little Rock Central High in 1955, I was headed for a small Methodist college in Arkansas and then on to law school. Religious experiences the summer before college led me in a different direction, however, and that fall I found myself in a small Baptist college in Arkansas planning to enter the ministry. But one day in the spring of that freshman year, my English professor asked me to stay after class: “You may not know it,” she said, “but the questions you’re raising about the literature we are reading are philosophical questions. We don’t even offer philosophy here at the present time. You should transfer to Baylor University and study philosophy.” I did, thus encountering the intellectual world of Baylor. My life was forever changed.

So there is much emotional satisfaction for me to begin this book by introducing the intellectual heritage of Baylor. Let me do this in two ways: first by reflecting Baylor’s intellectual heritage as it was first introduced to me, and then with brief vignettes of some of Baylor’s notable teacher/scholars.

My Experience as a Baylor Student

Early in my Baylor career I had among my teachers Ralph Lynn in history, Glenn Capp in debate, and Jack Kilgore in philosophy—all three well on the way to becoming Baylor legends.

In Ralph Lynn’s history course early in the semester he was lecturing on Russia, the United States, and the Cold War. After class one day—
everyone else had left—I said something to Lynn that seems to me now incredibly naive, even for a college sophomore. “The thing is,” I recall saying, “the Russians know that we are not going to attack them. But we don’t know that they will not attack us.” My unstated assumption, of course: we were the “good guys,” they the “bad,” and furthermore, everyone knew it, even them.

Patiently, Lynn turned to the wall, pulled down a map of the world. “With this chalk,” he said, “I am going to put an “x” everywhere the United States has missiles aimed at the heart of Russia, and an “x” everywhere Russia has missiles aimed at us.” When he finished, I stared at a map that had Russia virtually surrounded by U.S. missiles and a United States scarcely threatened by Russia. What a moment! The old cliché: the scales fell from my eyes. All of a sudden it was clear to me that if I had been a sophomore at the University of Moscow that morning, I might have been petrified of the United States.

But even during that moment, I knew that the lesson I was learning had to do with much more than the Cold War. For the first time in my life, I was realizing that we see things through “colored glasses,” through assumptions and presuppositions absorbed from our surroundings. But if our conclusions are colored by where we live, by what we’ve been taught, by whom we have become, how can we be sure that we have the truth? The door to critical thinking, Baylor style, cracked open.

I also took a course in debate from Glenn Capp, the founder of a program that had become, under his leadership, one of the premier forensic programs in the country. Capp had assigned us to read some old speeches. I came across one written by a 1936 Baylor undergraduate. It began as follows:

On a Sabbath morning in 1914 (the great conflict, World War I, had just begun), they held a prayer service in Berlin. The Kaiser was there. The aisles were jammed. A German minister mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between Gideon and the Midianites (and how God favored Gideon), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel; and then they said: “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed: “God of Germany, give the victory to Germany. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”

On that Sabbath morn they held a prayer service in Paris. The war ministers were there. The aisles were packed. A French priest mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines (and how God favored the Israelites), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel; and then they said: “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed, “God of France, give the victory to France. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”

On that Sabbath morning they held a prayer service in London. The King was there. The aisles were packed. An English bishop mounted the stand and, reading from the Old Testament the account of the battle between David and his enemies (and how God favored David), drew across the centuries a 1914 parallel. And then they said, “Our strength is our God.” Then they prayed, “God of our fathers, God of England, give England the victory. God of righteousness, give the victory to right.”

My sophomore’s mind was reeling. The Germans see God through German eyes, the French through French eyes, the Br...

Table of contents

• Called to Teach
• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Epilogue