Theology of My Life

A Theological and Apologetic Memoir

Frame

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781532613777
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

This book is an autobiographical memoir. It tells the story of how God prepared me for the work of theology during childhood and during my schooling at Princeton, Westminster, and Yale. It focuses on those events that shaped my theological convictions and led me to develop my distinctive emphases in theology, apologetics, and philosophy. It seeks to honor God's providence in leading me from one point to another in my life as a son, husband, father, theologian, apologist, and churchman. My goal in the book is to show how one's theological convictions are products, not only of logic and reasoning, but also of the events of one's life and the people one interacts with.

1

God Found Me in Pittsburgh

Western Pennsylvania is not usually considered part of the Bible belt, but it is, even today, one of the more religious parts of the United States.1 A recent statistic says that in the Pittsburgh area 71.85% of the people are affiliated with a church, compared with 50.2% of the nation as a whole.2 68.7% of these adherents are Roman Catholic. By far the largest Protestant membership, 6.5%, belongs to the Presbyterian Church, USA. That last percentage reflects the large number of Scotch-Irish immigrants, mostly Presbyterians of various kinds, who settled there in the eighteenth century. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century immigration, especially from Eastern Europe, was mostly Roman Catholic. But one writer described Western Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century as the “Presbyterian Valley.”

In our family lore, the first of our Frame line to migrate there was “Irish Jimmy” Frame, who lived from 1727–94. My father, Clark Crawford Frame, was born in 1908 in Erie, PA, but was raised largely in Franklin, a small town eighty miles north of Pittsburgh. He studied industrial engineering at Penn State and the University of Pittsburgh. After graduation he worked for Westinghouse Electric. He played a major role in solving a labor dispute at the Westinghouse plant in East Pittsburgh and was then promoted to be the Director of Labor Relations for the whole company, with an office in one of the new high-rise buildings on the “point” in Pittsburgh—where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers combine to form the Ohio. He kept that job until his retirement in 1973. On retirement, he was honored both by the company and by the labor unions. He and Mom moved to Boca Raton, FL shortly after that, and in 1980 Dad died of leukemia.

My mother, Violet McElphatrick Frame, born in 1911, was also raised in Franklin. Her father, G. Domer McElphatrick, in his youth had been on course to become a Christian minister. He was named after a pastor respected by the family. But he reported losing his faith after discovering various problems in the Bible. Instead, he became an oil prospector. The American oil business had begun in western Pennsylvania, but Domer traveled wherever there were rumors of oil discoveries. So he went throughout the country and later told his grandchildren exciting stories of the Wild West. After he married, he remained for the most part in the Franklin area where he managed an oil lease into his old age. But on one occasion, he took his family west. He had heard stories of oil discoveries in Texas, so he moved his family to Fort Worth for a time. But his wife and three daughters (including my mother) complained so persistently about leaving their Franklin friends, and about the conditions in Texas, that Domer moved them back to Franklin.

Mother experienced a major trauma through an auto accident that killed her mother. She was a teenage passenger at the time. I don’t think she ever felt safe in a car again. But she persevered at learning to drive and at teaching her four children to drive as well. Occasionally she would place unreasonable restrictions on us (e.g., “drive five miles under the speed limit”). But we made allowances and tried to ease her discomfort when we were behind the wheel.

A talented actress and musician, Mom studied at the University of Wisconsin. But money for tuition ran out in the Great Depression, and she did not graduate. The family sold their musical instruments, among many other things, and mother resumed her life in Franklin. After marrying Clark Frame, she was a homemaker and occasional volunteer worker. Early on, she acted in community theater. She was my first piano teacher and also taught me to read and write before I went to school. That was the main source of my academic success. She died in 1996, from a combination of illnesses. The top priority of both my parents was their children, and they provided everything we needed for our physical and educational well-being.

Sunday School

I was born in 1939, the oldest of four.3 Religion was not a major component of our family life, but Dad came from a long line of Presbyterians, some of them devout, and he and Mom thought that the kids should have a religious education. So they took me to Sunday School at the Edgewood Presbyterian Church, near the apartment where we first lived. When I was six, they moved us to Mt. Lebanon, a more upscale suburb of Pittsburgh, with a reputation for excellent schools. The nearest Presbyterian church was the Beverly Heights United Presbyterian Church,4 and we kids joined the Sunday School there.

Me, with siblings at our grandmother’s house in Franklin, PA, probably around 1955. John, Martha, David, and Clark in order of age

For me, Sunday School was first of all a place to meet friends and for us to play practical jokes on one another. I remember once entering a contest with another boy to see who could accumulate the biggest pile of hymnbooks. We would steal them from other kids and put them in a pile near where we were sitting. In time the teacher would intervene, and we would try something else. The Bible lesson was not much more than ambient noise to accompany our games. Some have told me that I had the reputation of being the worst-behaved kid in the class. To that charge I plead no contest.

I say this not to be cute or to solicit admiration for my roguishness. I was a sinner, and what I describe above is the least of my sins. What I did was hurtful to others, rebellion against the teachers, and opposition to the word of God they were trying to teach us. Several people in the congregation took on teaching our class as a divine calling, praying earnestly that God would enable them to present the Scriptures so that we would believe. But they regularly failed, so far as anyone could tell. I heard of women teachers who were in tears because of us. One year we had our class around a table, and one kid brought a penknife. Every time a teacher quit, that kid would put a notch in the table, as one cowboy villain put a notch in his gun for everybody he put away. The knife was not mine, and the notches were not my doing. But the loss of each teacher was in part my responsibility.

But something got through to us. Beverly Heights had a Bible memory program. They gave every child a booklet called “Bible Verses to Remember.” In that book were fairly long passages of Scripture: the Ten Commandments, Psalms 1, 23, 121, 1 Cor 13, and others. My parents had little thought for our spiritual nurture, but they cared a lot about our academic reputations, and they didn’t want the humiliation that would result if one of their children failed to complete the Bible memory program. So every Sunday morning they drilled my siblings and me on the Bible verses we were supposed to remember for that day. In time I completed the memory program and received a Bible (King James Version, of course), the first I ever owned.

Another positive influence on me was the general impression I had of the church as an institution. For a period, our Sunday School met at Markham School, the same school I attended from Monday through Friday. At Markham, in the grade school, there was Scripture reading and prayer before each class. Some students (not I) were excused once a week to go to religious education classes at various churches, of which one was Beverly Heights. This was before two Supreme Court decisions declared these practices unconstitutional. But while they persisted, they gave me the impression that the church and the school were partners in our education. The church taught the Bible; the schools taught about the world in general. It never occurred to me that there was any conflict between these. None of my public school teachers ever criticized what the church was teaching me, nor vice versa. What I learned at church and what I learned in school were just two aspects of the great fund of human knowledge. As much as I respected the one, I respected the other. I misbehaved in both contexts and therefore was not very receptive to either type of instruction. But I saw both institutions equally as embodiments of the authority of society, authority that, for all my childish disdain, I had to respect.

In the Presbyterian Valley, not only Catholics, but also Presbyterians, had cathedral-like church buildings.5 Some were financed by multi-millionaires (billionaires easily in today’s dollars). So even by sheer weight of physical architecture and wealth, the church was an impressive institution. The church administered colleges and seminaries, and the opinions of pastors appeared in the newspapers. As a young child I could not have described all this, let alone appreciate its meaning. But I certainly had no reason to question that the church was the equal of any other social institution, and so what the church said was worthy of acceptance.

My point here is not to say that the social status of the church is a reason for trusting its message. Later I would come to believe, as I do today, that big buildings and concentrations of wealth are most often distractions from the gospel. The wealthiest churches are often the least trustworthy. But as a child, the position of the church in society seemed to me to be worth something: what the church said came with at least the same force as the message of my family, of the schools, of government officials, of the newspapers and radio. I had no reason for distrusting the church, any more than I had reason for distrusting any social institution. And later in life, when others in society objected to the teachings of the church, I placed the burden of proof on them, and concluded that they could not bear that burden.

My problem with the church was not intellectual, then, but moral. I simply did not like the thought of obeying God, or obeying anybody other than myself. I cultivated the image of the rebel, the dissenter, the kid who knew more than anyone around him.

Markham Elementary

At Markham, I did not find that image difficult to cultivate. My mother had taught me to read phonetically before I entered first grade, and that gave me a huge advantage over my peers. The school itself had abandoned phonics and had begun to teach what we would later call a “whole language”6 approach to reading. So in my reading group, the teacher would encounter a word, say fish, and would not even suggest that the kids could sound it out. She asked questions like “have we learned that word yet?” I was frustrated waiting for everybody, and regularly I blurted out the word. Eventually I got a reputation. When I was in first grade, sixth graders would bring their geography texts to me and I would read them fluently (without, of course, understanding them very well). Eventually the teachers put me at my own table in the classroom and gave me more advanced books to read, “enrichment” projects, to keep me interested. That privilege failed to ease my boredom, but I did everything they asked of me, hoping in vain that I could be promoted to a higher grade.

Markham School

Of course, sitting at a table by myself did not do much good for my social standing at the school. I was, and still am, socially maladept, and I was even less adept in athletics. Regularly I was chosen last for sports teams, with good reason. One gym teacher, when I was in, I think, fourth grade, set a bar for a high jump and told my g...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: God Found Me in Pittsburgh
• Chapter 2: I Was a Teenage Theologian
• Chapter 3: Evangelical at Princeton
• Chapter 4: Reformed at Westminster
• Chapter 5: The Most Tendentious Guy at Yale
• Chapter 6: Westminster Again: The Boy Wonder
• Chapter 7: Collegiality in California
• Chapter 8: Confessionalism in California
• Chapter 9: Winsomely Reformed at RTS