GCTS: 1974-77

After renewing an email relationship with a seminary classmate from the mid-1970s, I began to let my mind wander back to those halcyon days of my life and the modern Evangelical movement--a time before the word "Evangelical" became a household word in America. I have already written a few essays on that time and school; one is on President Harold Ockenga and one introduces classmate Mike Ford. In this and the two next essays I would like to recall my world and the world of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in the mid-1970s. It was a time when GCTS was receiving its decisive "stamp" or, alternatively, carving out its unique position in modern Evangelical Protestatism.

I will begin, however, with how I got to GCTS as a student in the first place. GCTS would seemingly have been one of the last places for me to consider for seminary. After all, I was an honors graduate in religious studies from Brown University. The religion faculty at Brown in the early 1970s was really a stellar cast, but all of them were educated either in liberal Protestant schools (U of Chicago; Boston University; Harvard; Yale; Princeton) or were Jewish or Catholic. The Protestant Evangelical movement was simply not "on the map" in those days, and when I went to my advisor saying that I wanted to go to Seminary, he solemnly said to me: "Well, Mr. Long, there are two that you should consider: Harvard or Yale." Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, "And if you want a really conservative option, go to Princeton."

Personal Background

The faculty knew that my heart had been strangely warmed by some mysterious religious potion (I had an Evangelical experience of faith in CA in the late 1960s) but they also figured that I, their top undergraduate student, would go to one of the established and prominent divinity schools. For not the last time in life, I ignored good advice and decided to head up to GCTS. The reasons are not far to seek. I grew up in the cradle of New England Congregationalism but a move to CA in 1967 upset me culturally and religiously. Ever since I was a child in CT I went to Sunday school and church with jacket and tie, looking like a junior corporate type that most of my Sunday School classmates would no doubt soon become. But when I arrived in CA, with a cloud of violence over Oakland and a cloud of marijuana smoke over San Francisco, I was plunged into a world of sandal-wearing, reefer-smoking, long-haired, peace-seeking types that either didn't go to church or, if they went, came accoutered in jeans and beads.

Well, I didn't know what to make of all this, so I promptly became an Evangelical. What I mean by that is that my family decided to attend the most prominent Church in the mid-Peninsula (Menlo Park Presbyterian), which was staffed by conservative graduates of prominent Eastern schools (i.e., Princeton before the "Fall" of the 1930s), and I quickly fell under the spell of a religion that combined an East Coast Reformed theology coupled with semi-California cool lifestyle. Groping for some kind of identification with the more secure world of the East, I quickly adopted the message that my pastors were preaching--that one had to have an experience of grace or faith in Christ. I eagerly signed up.

Once I signed up, I became a true believer. I thought that if what my pastors were saying was true--that Christ really died for me to bring me to God--this had to be the most important thing in the world. Since all this is communicated through the Bible, then the best thing I could do with my life was to spend as much time as I could mastering the Bible. After all, if these were God's words, they were much more valuable than the words of the NY Times or any of the tons of prominent scientists who were living just down the street at Stanford Univ. They were, in fact, the greatest treasure imaginable.

Armed with this understanding, I spent nearly every waking moment in the next five years (until I went off to Seminary in Sept. 1974), studying the Bible. I would memorize large swaths of it, make up songs and put Biblical words to the songs, learn Hebrew and Greek, write small essays expositing various passages (I began writing extensive biblical expositions when I was 21 or 22), teach it whenever I could. I suppose I eventually got my "reward"--the highest score ever on the (Presbyterian) Bible Content exam (for prospective ministers), but all I could think about in those years was ingesting the very words of God.

Undergraduate Days

This strategy not only gave me a leg up on God, I thought, but ended up helping me considerably when I majored in religious studies at Brown (I began my work at Brown as a pure math major, because I had done very well in math in HS; my family was a "math and business" family and I thought I had to do what I was good in..). That is, I so knew the Bible that I had the text mastered when I took classes in Bible or ancient Judaism or early Christianity. Professors quickly took note. Rather than asking off-the-wall questions like most of the students who studied religion in that day (e.g., "Professor, isn't this Jesus guy sort of like Buddha?" or "I am interested in religion because I want to explore a new way of being"), I would ask questions like, "How does Paul's concept of the law evolve in the course of his letters?" or "What are the strengths and weaknesses of Bultmann's program for demythologizing Christianity?" I was text-driven, and I could explain myself. Therefore, I never got below an A in any class in the department.

But even though I was greatly indebted to my professors and I respected them a great deal, I felt that I wanted to continue to study the Bible because it potentially had answers to all of life's problems. I was very involved with, and helped initiate, the Brown Christian Fellowship, the Evangelical alternative to the "University Christian Movement." The UCM was the liberal Protestant group supported by the school. While we in the BCF would spend our time in prayer, Bible study and evangelism, the UCM folk, with their tweedy coats, pipes (You HAD to smoke a pipe), penny loafers and overstuffed chairs, would sit around sipping wine and discussing Kant or Kierkegaard or Niebuhr. I tried to attend a few of the UCM meetings and worship services, but I was completely text-driven in those days and didn't understand what they were talking about. I doubt if they did, either.

With this background, you can perhaps understand why an Evangelical seminary like Gordon-Conwell began to sound attractive. My pastor in CA knew the President of the seminary, Harold Ockenga; one of my friends in the BCF was seriously considering GCTS; and I even attended a "seminary for a day" program at GCTS during the Fall of 1973. Professors told me that if I went there I would study both the conservatives and liberals, while at Harvard I only would study the liberals. This claim actually turned out to be mostly untrue; at GCTS we were strongly encouraged to look almost exclusively at the conservative folk. At Harvard, where I ended up taking a course, we did, arguably, only study the "liberals" but the liberals were far better scholars than the conservatives. The liberals may have had their hang-ups or may have been reacting to their restrictive religious upbringings, but they were more creative and more broadly educated. Evangelical scholarship in those days had a wooden, defensive, uncreative and non-engaging mode of presentation.

The next essay speaks of my GCTS days.

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