The ADI Editor’s Wild Hair: The Mercer University Hyperbole

Introduction: The actual story behind this article was that little Mercer University in Macon, Georgia had shown up in Playboys Top Ten Party Schools list in 1987 and the fundamentalist Christian denomination behind the university was not at all happy. I wander far afield from the controversy of a Christian university just showing up in party school list in Playboy Magazine (ah remember “magazines” and the allure of “dirty magazines”?), to what makes something “Christian,” to the cycle learning institutions go through between their conservative roots and academic aspirations. It was a very long time ago, but the question of the what happens when distinct cultural beliefs overshadow core values is still happening today. I also go on a lot about Biblical Inerrancy, which is why this is labeled “The ADI Editor’s Wild Hair” (being someone with a B.A. in Biblical Studies and all…). Enjoy. 2024-03-02

The ADI Editor’s Wild Hair: The Mercer University Hyperbole

August-December 1987 ADI Vol. 1, Issue 3. The Los Angelas Times front page headline read: “Fundamentalists Seeking to Control Baptist School, University Fights ‘Debauchery’ Charge.” It was probably the first time in months that the press had covered a story on American Protestantism that didn’t involved Jim and Tammy Bakker. As a result most of you probably missed it. I kind of wish I that had.

It seems that Baptist affiliated Mercer University (enrollment 6,000) had been ranked as being the ninth best “party school” in the September “Back to School” issue of Playboy Magazine (anyone that’s played in a summer volleyball league can attest to how competitive Baptists can be—probably got all pissed off ’cause they didn’t rank in one of the top five spots). Anyway, according to the Times, this was the latest in a string of episodes (which included a condom ad in the school newspaper and a school sponsored showing of the R-rated film, “Beverly Hills Cop”) that brought the university into conflict with the denomination’s fundamentalist controlled state board.

1987-10 Playboy cover - top Ten Party Schools — 1987-10 Playboy cover – top Ten Party Schools

What was at stake here, according to the fundamentalists was the school’s standing as a Christian institution. But according to the school president, R. Kirby Godsey, what was at stake was the school’s academic integrity and freedom.

Pretty boring stuff to the average reader (but then, no one would ever accuse a reader of ADI of being an “average reader”). As such, this business of “academic integrity” and Christian affiliation was part of a controversy that I encountered when I was a student at another conservative Christian university, Biola University (La Mirada, CA).

As a biblical studies major at Biola (1979-81) there were no Playboy rankings or pictorials. We had to make due with a cerebral/esoteric conflict centered on the question of “Biblical Inerrancy” (talk about wild times at good ol’ BU).

The person who believes in “Biblical Inerrancy” (the Inerrantist… not to be confused with Jesuits who wrestle demon-possessed little girls) explicitly holds that there are no errors in the Bible in anything that it states as fact, whether history or geography or any other subject that it may speak about. To the hordes of humanity that approach any biblical question with the phrase, “well, everyone has their own interpretation of the Bible,” strict Inerrancy implies that there is one true interpretation for any given verse.

To the person who doesn’t give a rip about the Bible this Inerrancy business no doubt ranks among the all-time bores of the universe. But to the poor slobs who major in biblical studies or are professors in biblical studies departments or teachers in Inerrantist organizations, towing the party line can be life and death stuff.

One thing that the non-religious may not understand is that when one becomes a Christian or submits oneself to the academic study of the Bible they don’t take your brains away (granted, the organ is temporarily sedated, but if the thing ever worked before conversion it should “wake up” after about five or six years). Thus, intellectual differences arise and because this whole thing is tied to a “belief system” it becomes a moral question. And in my time at Biola one professor was fired and a department chairman quit over this stupid issue.

I was a left-leaning moderate which means that I accepted about 55 percent of the Inerrancy decorum but spent a majority of my time looking for alternatives that were nonetheless “Christian.” (That was pretty vague. What I mean is, I believed in the principle behind the Inerrancy argument but I refused to tow the party line).

The mistake I made back then and the mistake that I think those involved in the Mercer University controversy are making today is assuming that this problem is a problem of “knowing” something to be true and therefore it is just a matter of proving that the other guy is wrong. “It involves the Bible, let’s haggle it out intellectually using the Bible.”

One author that I used to haggle with over this issue (via his books) was Francis Schaeffer. If the name Schaeffer conjures up for you images of late night TV and a short balding man with glasses at the keyboards, you are not altogether wrong. The Schaeffer that I am referring to was an odd little man who ran around the Swiss Alps sporting Judge Bork’s beard and a dutchboy’s knickers and ran a bible school for Evangelical Christians recovering from intellectualism. He was known among conservative Christians as something of an intellectual (by definition, he could be only “something of an intellectual” because being an “intellectual Christian” is considered heretical in some quarters and an oxymoron in others).

Anyway, in his last book. The Great Evangelical Disaster, he spent 192 pages arguing, testifying, explaining and otherwise “tellin’ the folks at home” that the cornerstone of true Christianity is the belief in a perfect, error-free Bible (Biblical Inerrancy). And I, for my part, argued to myself that talking about a perfect, error-free Bible was meaningless. It was meaningless because even if the Bible were perfect and error-free we, being human (less-than perfect or error-free) can read it, interpret it, and translate it in only an imperfect and prone to error manner (this doesn’t even begin to address how one might “live it”) .

The years passed. Schaeffer died. Biola hired a more conservative president and chairman for the department of biblical studies. And I now lean so far to the left that I use the prefix “ex-” when describing what type of Christian I am. End of story, right? Not quite.

Calling myself an ex-Christian isn’t the same as saying that I’ve lost my religious consciousness or that I’m now devoted to the Gospel according to Hugh Hefner (besides, Hefner hasn’t responded to any of my applications to become the mansion’s in-residence telephone technician). While I was doing my research for this article, pulling up old articles and papers that I had written during the Biola years, it occurred to me that Schaeffer was probably right all along.

In a moment of “inspiration” I suddenly realized that it was not so much that he was arguing for the truth of Inerrancy as much as that abandoning it would bring about the end of the faith (as he understood it). For the symbolically oriented: it’s not X=Y and therefore X is true, but simply X=Y. I realize that this stuff is just a bit dense and those of you who have read thus far deserve some sort of medal of valor for hanging in there, but there really is a simple point behind all of this verbiage.

Whether Schaeffer realized it or not his was a sociological argument for believing in Inerrancy. If he had been a conservative Catholic he would have made the office of the Pope the line of demarcation. If he had been a conservative Mormon It would have been the Book of Mormon; A conservative American politician, the US Constitution; Even a “conservative” Marxist, the writings of Marx and Lenin. There was a term in the Biola catalogue and PR sheets that typified this idea; distinction. Biola representatives used to talk about the “Biola distinctives.”

A distinctive is the stuff that gives a group its sense of self-identity. It answers the question: “what makes me X and not Y?” For the conservative Protestant it’s Biblical Inerrancy, for the conservative Catholic it’s the Papal office, for the conservative Mormon It’s the Book of Mormon, etc. Within the larger group (Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, etc.) it is the self-appointed task of the conservatives to draw their respective movements back to these points of distinction. They are the keepers of the “oracles of Truth.” No problem with that, except when said distinctions come into conflict with the objectives of the larger group.

In the case of Mercer University there is a conflict between the conservatives’ understanding of what a Christian university should teach and the administrators’ academic mindset. Anyone who has pursued a university education knows that an educationally honest professor will present a myriad of positions for any given subject, each with their own particular “appreciation” of the “truth” (then of course he’ll deliver his pet-theory which one will need to memorize to pass the exam). And the closer one draws towards really “knowing” a subject the more the answers become less absolute and the questions more numerous. It is the nature of education to begin from the position of apparent understanding (the oracles of truth) and end in tentative theories. This generally doesn’t sit very well with the intolerant conservative constituency.

How Mercer University resolves its conflict is more a matter of politics and public relations savvy than the victory of “Truth over Falsehood.” These things run in cycles. If the conservatives “win,” the university will become a propaganda mill, “a Bible school,” promoting the one understood truth. Then in another couple years, perhaps decades, someone will lecture on the other positions and ideas. Slowly the university will begin to move back toward being more concerned about academic excellence than “objective truth.” Of course if the current administration “wins” the school will eventually lose its distinctives and, like Harvard or Princeton before it, it will become unrecognizable from the University of Georgia or Georgia Tech (some time before that happens the conservatives will pullout completely and begin their own “school,” beginning the cycle someplace else). In the end, Schaeffer was right: without the given distinctives they all look the same.

But regardless of the results of Mercer University’s problems there remains the underlying question of how the conservatives’ “sacred” distinctives in providing a sense of self-identity for the group may also distract it from the group’s more immediate message. In the case of conservative Protestant organizations (for which I am most familiar) I can’t help but wonder if these distinctives don’t completely overshadow the “ethereal” commandments left by the Master. According to John’s Gospel, Jesus said, “All men will know that you are my disciples if you love one another.” (John 13:36) It would seem that these groups are more concerned with the distinctives (“what makes me X and not Y?”) than this vague directive towards love. Schaeffer may have been right about his distinctives and the cessation of conservative Protestantism, but who the hell cares if it gets in the way of recognizable love. [ADI]

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