What's So Liberal about the Liberal Arts?

Integrated Approaches to Christian Formation

Lewis, Mittelstadt

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781498231459
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

FRAMEWORKS is a series dedicated to interdisciplinary studies on the integration of faith and learning. Given Jesus' command to "love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength," the time is ripe for confessional scholarship and education across the disciplines. We implore God's Spirit to change us through the great works of history and literature alongside developments in science, psychology, and economics--and all of this--through intense engagement with the Scriptures. We want to celebrate God's work across the disciplines. We seek the likes of psychologists in conversation with philosophers, ethicists with historians, biblical scholars with rhetoricians, scientists with economists, environmentalists with neurologists. As these conversations continue across the disciplines, the "framework" from which to draw our individual and collective testimonies will only enlarge. We invite you to think, behave, preach, sing, pray, research and indeed to live this multi-faceted journey with us. If indeed our stories are never complete, we invite future contributors and readers to join us in pursuit of deeper personal and collective transformation.

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Watchers: James and Twila Edwards as Models of Integrated Faith and Learning

Gary Liddle

Every college has them: watchers, keepers of the flame. Sometimes they are administrators but usually faculty and staff, who often have more longevity than top leaders. They are like long-serving civil servants in government at every level; they contain within their commitments and practices the institutional wisdom and ideals that propel and guide good procedures. When they leave, they take institutional memory with them, often to the detriment of their agency or school. They serve as examples and mentors to younger faculty, often unofficially and unintentionally. Others measure themselves by the best characteristics of these exemplars. In such ways is the school’s mission defined, elaborated, embodied, and passed on to others. James (hereafter Jim) and Twila Edwards were such persons for forty years at a small, church-supported college in Missouri.

They had come from different parts of the country—he from Midwest prairies, she from northern Pennsylvania forests. Both from homes of modest means; his father was a Pentecostal preacher, her parents were dedicated church members in Erie. Their formative years were similar: small tightly-knit family life and religious experiences of intense Pentecostal and what-is-now-known-as fundamentalist variety—with the pluses and minuses associated with them, including legalism and sexism. Jim’s father and Twila’s mother seem to have had the greatest influence on them, respectively.

After successful high school years—including sports for Jim (football) and music for Twila (piano and accordion), they both made their way to Central Bible Institute (CBI) in Springfield, Missouri in the mid-1950s. CBI was one of a score of Bible institutes sponsored by the Assemblies of God (AG). Such schools had been common among evangelical groups since the late 1800s. A.B. Simpson founded the first American example—now Nyack College—in 1882. The foci of Bible schools were English Bible studies, practical training for Christian service, and a disciplined life. They usually required practical ministry experience, such as teaching Sunday school, conducting street meetings a la Salvation Army bands, preaching at out-stations, and personal evangelism (students turned in weekly reports of their ministry efforts). Their primary purpose was training for professional and lay church vocations, rather than so-called secular professions. Originally as brief as six-weeks, many Bible schools by the mid-twentieth century offered a three-year diploma.

At their best they produced pastors, evangelists and missionaries in large numbers. When coupled with indigenous church principles, Bible schools became for the AG and other groups the main educational tactic in missionary strategy (over one thousand schools overseas sponsored by the AG alone). Frank Gaebelein called Bible schools “nothing less than a new educational genre and . . . one of America’s distinctive contributions to Christian education.” He also praised the missionary movement “in which the teaching of the Bible and the establishment of schools has had a major part on an ecumenical scale reaching beyond the Western world to every continent.”10

In a still relevant 1979 book, however, Richard Lovelace pointed out some downsides to the Bible school tradition in America. Perhaps epitomized in the name of Frank Sandford’s Bible school “The Holy Spirit and Us” where the only textbook was the Bible, some schools were “addicted to experience and dismiss[ed] doctrine and any informed use of the mind as irrelevant to spiritual maturity.”11 In addition, while professing trust in the Holy Spirit’s power to sanctify, some erected a “training-code morality” (Lovelace’s phrase) comprised of Puritan taboos: no theatre, dance, cosmetics, novel clothing styles, playing cards, or religious graphic art. To these most Bible schools added tobacco and alcohol usage. Perhaps, Lovelace suggests, some evangelicals were actually teaching salvation by sanctification, and sanctification “by will power more than by grace.”12 John Ortberg calls this “boundary-marker Christianity,” by which he means “highly visible, relatively superficial practices—matters of vocabulary or dress or style—whose purpose is to distinguish between those inside a group and those who are outside” (emphasis original).13

Another downside articulated by philosopher Arthur Holmes of Wheaton College is curricular. In The Idea of a Christian College, Holmes writes that Bible schools often achieve more of a conjunction of Christian witness with a minimum of general education “rather than the integration of faith and learning into an education that is itself Christian.” He goes on to say that “[t]o enlarge a person’s biblical and theological knowledge and to train him for Christian service is not the same thing as helping him to work in the arts and sciences and thereby to understand all of life from a Christian perspective.”14 A number of writers have traced the varied degrees of anti-intellectualism present in twentieth and twenty-first century American evangelical churches, so I won’t belabor this point.15

A third area where the Edwards perceived a disconnect between Pentecostal theory and practice on one hand, and biblical truth on the other was the role of women. For most of its one hundred year history, the AG has been open to women in ministry in theory. In practice, however, opportunities for leadership at the local, regional, and national levels of the AG were difficult to find. For example, there has never been a female District Superintendent, and only in the most recent decade has there been a female member of the Executive Presbytery and the Executive Committee of AG World Missions. In the 1950s Twila herself had served in the Deaf Ministries Department of AG Home Missions, and was especially sensitive to the struggle of female students trying to reconcile their sense of God’s call with the practical difficulty of finding a place of ministry.

One can only speculate about how much of these trends—code morality, intellectual defensiveness, and chauvinism—were present in their Pentecostal upbringing and at CBI in the 1950s. When I reflect on the subsequent themes of the Edwards’ careers at Evangel College—later University—however, we can see their desire to change their tradition toward what they saw as holistic Christianity.

They met at CBI, courted, and married. Jim was credentialed with the AG and pastored for a short time in north Texas while working on a Master’s degree in English. Graduate study itself was a risky venture for a Pentecostal pastor at the time—in English no less—since there was plenty of prejudice against graduate education in general, particularly for pastors. CBI was in the throes of a debate over adding a fourth year and enough general education to warrant a Bachelor’s degree and accreditation with the Accrediting Association of Bible Colleges (now the Association for Biblical Higher Education). Soon the debate widened to whether Central Bible College (CBC) could develop a Master’s program and still retain its spiritual vitality. “Prophetic” voi...

Table of contents

• Series Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Why Frameworks? My Storied Explanation
• Chapter 1: Watchers: James and Twila Edwards as Models of Integrated Faith and Learning
• Part I: Historical Developments
• Part II: The Liberal Arts as Interdisciplinary Experience
• Part III: the liberal arts in practice
• Index of Authors Cited