The West Coast Religion Teachers Conference: A Model for the Church

The 2017 conference in the context of a 45-year history.

The West Coast Religion Teachers Conference is an unofficial annual meeting of the religion faculty of the five western Adventist colleges and universities. Rotating the annual meetings between La Sierra and Loma Linda in the south and Pacific Union, Walla Walla and Burman (CUC) in the north, the Conference convened this year at WWU, April 7-9, its 45^th annual session since the first meeting at PUC in 1972. Except for 2015, it has met every year since then. Organized by the host campus each year, the conference provides the opportunity for fellowship and serious conversation on topics relevant to academic and church life.

When I started writing this report for Spectrum, it began simply as a straightforward report. But the more I worked on it, the more complex it became. And Augustine’s dictum proved true for I “learned many things I never knew before . . . just by writing.”[1] After a fair bit of initial work on this piece, I had two “revelations,” both of them surprising, and one potentially revolutionary. The first “revelation” was that the WCRTC is an astonishing and unusual gathering within Adventism. The second “revelation,” the potentially revolutionary one, is that it could become a model informing the General Conference in session! More about that in conclusion.

So what makes the WCRTC unusual? First, it has no constitution or by-laws and no elected officers. Second, in its early years, it was out of line with church policy: the campuses represented two different unions and, therefore, needed “permission” to cross union lines. When CUC/Burman came on board, three unions were involved. But with the support of campus administrators from all five institutions, the Conference has continued to this day. And if this year’s Conference is any measure, it is enjoying robust health.

I will survey the events of the year’s Conference under three headings: “Attendees,” “Presentations,” and “Sidelights.” I conclude under the heading of “Implications.” That is where my potentially revolutionary “revelation” comes in.

ATTENDEES

While the faculty from the five campuses form the essential nucleus of the Conference, the list of other attendees as determined by the host campus reflects some of the sensitivities that must be negotiated when church-employed Adventist academics meet to talk about church and academia.

This year, the combined effect of the unity document, the issue of women in ministry, and the proposed IBMTE plan to require “endorsement” for tertiary teachers formed an ominous backdrop to our meetings. Surprisingly, however, those issues were scarcely touched in our formal sessions. Given the potentially explosive nature of those issues, however, the question of invitees became delicate. Should select students be included? Area pastors? Conference and/or Union representatives?

This year, our answer was "no" to all those groups. Thus, the list of additional attendees was limited. All spouses were included (and always have been), and some with close ties to WWU, especially former faculty, were also invited.

The distribution of attendees from the five campuses was intriguing. LLU brought twelve faculty, the largest contingent. After arising as early as 2:00 a.m. to catch their flight from Ontario, they flew through San Francisco to Portland where they rented two vans for their final Portland-Walla Walla leg, a four-hour trip which, in recent years, has expanded for them into something of an excursion through the Columbia gorge. Someone in the LLU crowd suggested that next year when the WCRTC is at LLU, the WWU group should fly into Phoenix so that we, too, could enjoy a long road trek before arriving at LLU. This year, however, for time on the road, the three faculty from Burman took top prize, driving twelve hours from Alberta. PUC and LSU each sent two representatives. At LSU, bereavements involving faculty families and Bailey Gillespie’s sudden life-threatening encounter with liver cancer clearly affected their attendance and cast a somber shadow over the conference. These sobering events and these precious people were the focus of a special prayer session Friday night.

The content of the presentations will be noted below, but the distribution of presenters by campus and by age was significant. Of the nine presenters on Friday and Sabbath, four were from LLU, three from Walla Walla, and two from Burman. And for the first time in a long time, younger faculty members balanced out the older. Given the dominant presence of archeologists in our midst (Larry Herr, Burman; Jody Washburn, WWU; Doug Clark, LaSierra), I will borrow their terminology to represent the presenters by age: three were Early Bronze (Jon Paulien, LLU; Dave Thomas, WWU; Bruce Boyd, Burman). Three were Middle Bronze, though dangerously close to being Late Bronze (Paul Dybdahl, WWU; Zane Yi, LLU, and Ted Levterov, LLU). And three were clearly Late Bronze (Whitny Braun, LLU; Jody Washburn, WWU; Kevin Burrell, Burman). Jody and Whitny are actually brand new, first-year faculty on their campuses.

PRESENTATIONS

Instead of focusing on a specific theme this year, WWU took a page from an old LLU playbook and simply invited presentations featuring current research interests. It worked. I could even wax enthusiastic and say it was wildly successful. But here my comments on the nine presentations are very uneven, even unfair. Some superb ones get less attention and some very preliminary and unfinished ones get more. But I hope I drop enough hints along the way to suggest the reasons why.

The first formal presentation was Friday night by Paul Dybdahl (WWU), “Adventism and Other Christians.” Building on his family’s experience in Thailand and then on more recent in-depth interviews with Buddhists and Hindus, Paul followed in the footsteps of his father Jon and argued for a both/and approach. The discussion was wide-ranging and insightful, pointing toward a more inclusive perspective that contrasts with the separatist and isolationist impulses found in some Adventist circles.

After Paul’s presentation, our program called for an hour of open discussion on “Church Issues.”  But instead of zeroing in on the major issues noted above, the group spent more time reflecting on how academics could be a positive influence in the church, especially when they are often viewed with suspicion. Would posting more material online help? Several voices suggested that it could even make matters worse.

A number expressed gratitude for church administrators who attend meetings with academics. Words of appreciation were spoken for Dave Weigley, Columbia Union President, and Ted Wilson, General Conference President, both of whom were mentioned as having been present at recent Adventist Society for Religious Studies(ASRS) and/or Adventist Theological Society(ATS) meetings. Other voices urged support for progressive administrators whose positions could be at risk as the wave of conservatism sweeps through both country and church. On balance, the consensus seemed to be that caution is very much in order in an era of volatility.

On Sabbath morning, we met in Village Hall, the former College Place Village Seventh-day Adventist Church. Jon Paulien (LLU) delivered an excellent paper, “Creation in the Gospel and Epistles of John.” Though he warned us that very little had been written about the theme in scholarly sources, we hardly would have guessed that from his impressive, thoroughly documented paper.  Bruce Boyd (Burman) argued in his paper, “Equipping University Students to Be Peacemakers,” that university students were not as reticent as ordinary members to address tension points within local churches. He buttressed his conclusions with intriguing statistics. Ted Levterov (LLU) presented a tantalizing survey of church documents on the evidence for and against the ordination of Ellen White: “Ordained! . . . Yet, Not Ordained: Ellen G. White’s Ministerial Credentials.” The evidence points to a kind of de-facto ordination without the laying on of hands. It was even suggested that the raising of hands to vote the approval of her ministerial status could be seen as the equivalent of the actual physical laying on of hands.

The Sabbath morning session closed with worship, a high point of the weekend. Over the years, the WCRTC group has sometimes worshiped with the larger campus community and sometimes by themselves. This year we met separately. And it was a feast. WWU’s president, John McVay, is a recognized New Testament scholar, an experienced pastor, and a dynamic public speaker. His sermon, “When Jesus Sets You Free,” took us through Acts 12, the narrative of Peter’s miraculous deliverance from prison. I personally found it very moving. Our music was led by archeologist Jody Washburn at the piano, our departmental executive secretary, Heather Huether, an accomplished cellist, and New Testament scholar Brant Berglin on the guitar. The whole worship experience was a powerful reminder that we are, after all, a body of worshiping believers, not just academics.

A cluster of three and a cluster of two papers followed on Sabbath afternoon. Under the title of “The Family Tomb as an Inscribed Artifact,” Jody Washburn (WWU) excerpted material from her newly-minted UCLA dissertation to illustrate how textual and pictorial inscriptions blend together in a family tomb at Beit Lei in Israel.

Jody’s clear but technical paper contrasted sharply in both style and content with Whitny Braun’s presentation: “Adventism in Pop Culture: An Article Series for the Huffington Post.” In quite different ways, both were captivating and maintained high levels of interest from Conference attendees. Jody’s paper was a synopsis of finished research while Whitny’s was a preliminary foray into pop culture. Having agreed to provide a cluster of 1000-word, Garrison Keillor-style articles for Huffington Post, Whitny was now looking for help in true collaborative style. She wanted possible “Adventist” topics on which she could write. A barrage of suggestions followed, representing a wide range of ideas: Pathfinders, Nuteena, Baby Fae, Adventism in Siberia, Dr. Harry Miller and the adaptation of soy milk for babies in China, Harry Orchard, John Weidner, Uriah Smith, James White—to mention just a few.

But just as intriguing as the project itself was how she was drawn into it. Sponsored by Claremont School of Theology where she was working on her PhD, Whitny went to India to study Jainism and was subsequently invited to present a paper on Jainism at the Parliament of World Religions in Salt Lake City in 2015. Before she had even given her paper, however, the Huffington Post representative saw her name and topic in the official program and looked her up. After inquiring about Jainism, he casually asked her if she knew anything about Seventh-day Adventists. Everything he had discovered about Adventists thus far, he said, simply struck him as weird!

Whitny surprised him by immediately identifying herself as a Seventh-day Adventist with impeccable credentials, a seventh-generation Adventist and on her mother’s side, Baptist roots back to the Millerite movement.

As far as I can remember, Whitny’s foray into collaborative work was unique for the WCRTC. She did not present a paper but simply asked for help. Her efforts were warmly received and should result in some intriguing exposure for Adventism in the world of pop culture.

In striking contrast with the preliminary, collaborative, and informal presentation by Whitny, the third presentation in the initial Sabbath afternoon cluster was a fully polished paper presented by Kevin Burrill, a second-year teacher at Burman. Taking advantage of the 500^th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Kevin chose to deconstruct some of the laudatory praise of the magisterial reformers. His title: “Five Hundred Years of Reformation?: The Ambiguous Legacy of Reformation Christianity and Global Christian Expansion.” The final line of his abstract, succinctly summarizes his sobering assessment: “As the most potent ideology of the Western imperial project, Christianity provided the moral justification for conquest and unmitigated greed.” It was the kind of paper that deserved a formal response from a well-prepared colleague. But that was not the format of this year’s session. His paper was well-researched and thoroughly documented. I suspect that it will appear elsewhere in print.

The last two papers on Sabbath afternoon moved into philosophy and theology. Zane Yi (LLU) presented a paper titled “Re-thinking Thinking: Overcoming (Mediational) Epistemology.” But what he was really after was collaborative help with a chapter that he had written for a book manuscript: “Opening the Frame: Charles Taylor’s Philosophy of Religion.” Originally, he had placed the chapter at the beginning of his manuscript. But he confessed that he had struggled with it and had not come to clarity. So he moved it to the end of the manuscript. A double-blind reviewer, however, spotted the difficulty, too. So Zane had re-written part of the chapter and was asking us whether the revisions made the material more readable. The consensus was that he was headed in the right direction.

The final paper by Dave Thomas (WWU), titled “The Presumption of God,” addressed “one of the great and pressing issues of our time: namely, the rather rapid departure of large numbers of well-educated and well-informed people away from theism into agnosticism or even outright atheism.” Exploring issues of world views and anthropologies, Dave argued that the crucial element lies in the clash between two competing anthropologies. The classic Christian perspective holds humans to be “noble beings made in the image of God” but who have been “seriously damaged by sin.” The contrasting model posits a “pristine self,” encumbered by “junk” that has imposed “limits” on the “self and its desires.” Thus, “human beings flourish only to the degree that they are free to chase and satisfy their own personal desires.” From such a view, God is a hindrance. This new anthropology explains the atheist’s fervent wish that there be no God. Speaking to “the fear of religion itself,” atheist Thomas Nagel is quoted as saying: “I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself. I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” Dave concluded his paper with the rather brisk statement “that our profoundest deliberations pro or con” cannot affect the actual existence of deity “one whit.”

I was startled when Dave’s paper drew a sharp critique from one of our colleagues: “I was looking forward to your paper and wanted it to be true,” he said. “But I was disappointed.” The intensity of his brief critique was unsettling, but Dave responded with disarming grace, and the result was an instructive dialogue. In a sabbatical quarter just concluded, Dave worked on a manuscript on “world views,” and his hard work showed to good advantage in his paper. But perhaps most valuable was the gracious spirit in which Dave responded to his critic, a worthy model for academics and church administrators alike. And he could not disguise his joy at having a conversation partner in Zane Yi, someone who understood his vocabulary and his love of theology and philosophy. Given WWU’s emphasis on biblical studies over the years, our resident systematician has rarely had a kindred spirit for a conversation partner. But in this case, Zane engaged Dave with philosophical and theological precision. It was fun to watch and hear.

One further observation on the nine presentations: some of them included technical material that was beyond the expertise of some of us. Whitny Braun’s presentation was a delight because suddenly we were all experts. But speaking for myself, I was approaching deep water with Bruce Boyd’s statistics and Jody Washburn’s archeology. Similarly, I could not have added much to the Thomas-Yi dialogue. Yet all of these presenters were down-to-earth enough so that I could be adequately engaged.

After breakfast on Sunday, we exchanged news from the various campuses and finished by 10:00 a.m. so that the LLU people could get back to Portland for their return flight.

SIDELIGHTS

While I hope the final “Implications” will be seen as more significant, a couple of fun and funny events from the weekend are worth noting. First, the food. And judging by our conversations, the food was much more than a sidelight. You see, a number of years ago at one of the WCRTC campuses, three of our WWU faculty ended up in an otherwise abandoned wing of a men’s dormitory. They even had a long trek for showers. But what kept bubbling up in our planning sessions was the food narrative from that event: no plans had been made for Sabbath morning breakfast for these three abandoned brethren. Finally an apologetic faculty member from that campus scurried in with two muffins for the three guests to share. That was their breakfast, and the miracle of the five loaves and two fish was not repeated.

So we vowed to feed our guests and to feed them well. Our president’s wife, Pam McVay, has been endowed with a double portion of the gift of hospitality. She worked with our campus food service (Sodexo) to produce four extraordinarily good meals. Sabbath morning breakfast was in faculty homes. But all the rest of the meals were catered by Sodexo under Pam’s watchful eye. We feasted, but only the WWU insiders knew that the fine food was motivated, at least in part, by the memory of three hungry faculty who once had just two muffins to share among them.

The other memorable sidelight involved a youngish faculty member from another campus (I promised to protect his identity). Actually, if one didn’t know that he had a family and a PhD, he could pass for a teenager. On Sabbath morning, he went out for an early-morning jog. Upon his return, he was finishing up with some stretching exercises on what he thought was the front porch of the home where he was a guest. Wrong house. The owner came to the door and was neither pleased nor amused. After our guest had found the right house, a College Place police cruiser arrived on the scene and the ensuing dialogue was intense until the police were finally convinced that they were not dealing with some teenage hooligan intent on making mischief.  On our Sabbath afternoon walk around campus, several of us listened with rapt attention as our guest regaled us with his unlikely tale. But now to the serious stuff.

IMPLICATIONS

Having been a regular on the WCRTC circuit almost from the beginning, I found myself reflecting on its role in my life and work over the 45 years since its first meeting in 1974. Three of my papers (1978, 1980, 1985) have led to major church publications in times of wide-spread anger and frustration. In all three cases, the WCRTC venue provided both the motivation and platform for doing the research and preparing it for presentation. Perhaps even more important, WCRTC is a smaller and more private venue than that provided by ASRS for example. That makes it possible to “safely” explore potentially explosive topics in a setting where we can receive the wise counsel of trusted colleagues before the material is published for the larger church.

The 1978 and 1985 papers reflected both my alarm and my anger at the authoritarian impulse that has frequently haunted the church, especially at the General Conference level. The research for these two papers fed into my (anonymous) contribution to the NAD publication: Issues: The Seventh-day Adventist Church and Certain Private Ministries. This “Purple Book,” as it is sometimes called, addressed three dissident and increasingly troublesome independent organizations: Hope International (Ron Spear), Hartland Institute (Colin Standish), Prophecy Countdown (John Osborne).

When Bob Dale of the NAD asked me if I would write the chapter on “Historic Adventism,”—I would be pinch-hitting for an over-committed George Knight—I was candid with him, noting that if I were to write the piece, I would have to develop a two-fold thesis. If he agreed with that two-fold approach, I would make a serious effort to camouflage my style so that it would not jeopardize the acceptance of the document. The explosion over my recent book Inspiration: Hard Questions, Honest Answers (RH 1991) was very much on my mind!

My primary thesis: Historic Adventism is a simple nucleus with room to disagree; my secondary thesis: The strong rhetoric of lock-step unity coming from church leaders was actually working against unity since anyone with a conviction running counter to current orthodoxy would be conscience-bound to move toward a hostile, independent perspective.

Dale agreed and I wrote the chapter, drawing heavily on the two unpublished WCRTC papers. The 1978 document was a strong reaction to the authoritarian impulse during the Robert Pierson presidency; the 1985 paper was a similarly strong reaction to the same authoritarian impulse during Neal Wilson’s presidency.[2] In the 1992 NAD publication, my contribution appeared virtually unchanged as chapter 3: “Historic Adventism—Ancient Landmarks and the Present Truth” (n.d. [1992]). The moral of this story is that the collective wisdom represented by the West Coast Religion Teachers Conference made chapter 3 possible.

Another even more explicit illustration of academic consultation and cooperation involved my 1981-1982 Adventist Review series, “Sinai-to-Golgotha,” a narrative showing how I saw both Scripture and Ellen White moving from a fear-centered view of God to one motivated by joy. My preliminary and exploratory paper was presented at the WCRTC at PUC in May 1980.[3] Not only did the resulting dialogue help shape the series, it also opened my eyes to important aspects of Desmond Ford’s perspective and laid the foundation for greater understanding, appreciation, and dialogue with my colleagues.

While I believe that the examples cited above show the positive value of academic interaction in service of the church, just three weeks after this year’s WCRTC, I also had the opportunity to glimpse the tragic results of failed interaction. Our alumni weekend this year (April 27-30) celebrated the 125^th Anniversary of the founding of WWC/WWU. As part of the festivities, I was asked to speak briefly on one aspect of the future of WWU. I chose to focus on the aftermath of the accreditation debate of the 1930s, an event that nearly dismantled the School of Theology.

As part of my presentation, I noted how the fundamentalist movement in the early 20^th century had resulted in a great gulf between thinkers and believers, breaking down nearly all the bridges between the two sides. Under those circumstances, accreditation had become an acrimonious issue in Adventism.[4] And here I excerpt several cryptic paragraphs from my 2017 paper:

“Strong voices wanted no worldly standards. Yet Loma Linda insisted that new medical students distinguish between a liver and a kidney. That meant an accredited liberal arts college, not a Bible college.

 

“The ‘yes’ in the overnight letter from our accrediting body in 1935, reeks of providence. The GC plan for only 3 colleges did not include Walla Walla. But when our President Landeen plunked that telegram in front of the GC President, that war was over. [5]

 

“The academics welcomed accreditation, but tragedy lurked.[6] Church leaders had become alarmed at teachers with non-SDA degrees. The Walla Walla board met, and on Monday, February 7, 1938, Landeen announced four resignations to students and faculty in chapel: his own and two from the most popular theology teachers on campus, Frederick Schilling and Harold Bass. Says Terrie Aamodt, ‘The school was in an uproar.’  But when student leaders met with Landeen, he urged caution.

 

“The students listened. In what is now a deeply-rooted Walla Walla tradition, they helped defuse the crisis, skipping one issue of the Collegian and then simply honoring each of the four departed under the heading of “A Salute.” They did not attack.

 

“But on a Friday in March, Schilling handed in his credentials and he and his wife resigned church membership. On Sabbath they moved to Pasco, Washington, 50 miles away, on Sunday he was an Episcopal priest. That fall Bass became a Methodist pastor.

 

“What went wrong? In 1889, Ellen White urged the church to send ‘strong’ young people to ‘the higher colleges in our land’ for ‘association with different classes of minds’ and ‘a knowledge of theology as taught in the leading institutions of learning.’[7] But in the 1930s, many church leaders didn’t believe that. And that battle rages still.

 

“My Walla Walla mentors, especially J. Paul Grove, taught us that the solution is to take all the Bible seriously, all of Ellen White. We come together before the Lord to explore what that means. And students notice. As one of mine, a life-long Adventist, put it in 2010, ‘Never until Walla Walla University have I read or heard of a helpful Ellen White.’

 

“A vivid memory from years ago: Grove took our theology faculty in his motor home to the. . . West Coast Religion Teachers Conference. . . . The twenty hours on that Loma Linda trip allowed us to address all the Adventist issues. But we did it by whittling each other down to size. My colleagues tackled me for making too much of Ellen White’s growth; with Chuck Scriven and Henry Lamberton, the issue was the substitutionary atonement, but on opposite sides of the debate. So we took both of them down a notch. Remarkably, for each issue we chose up sides differently! Grove listened as he drove but never pulled over and told us to stop. Adventism is not defined by voted statements, but by the full range of Adventist voices who work together then write and sign their names.”

And that is where I see the WCRTC as providing a model for the church. The earliest published Adventist “statement of beliefs” was both unofficial and anonymous, though we now know that it was crafted by Uriah Smith. Appearing in 1872, it was blunt and clear: “We have no articles of faith, creed, or discipline, having any authority with our people, nor is it designed to secure uniformity among them, as a system of faith, but is a brief statement of what is, and has been, with great unanimity, held by them.”

Why couldn’t the church take a leaf from our 1872 statement and several leaves from the 45-year history of the West Coast Religion Teachers Conference? That twenty-hour, dialogue-rich sojourn to the WCRTC at Loma Linda in Grove’s motor home suggests that trust and openness can protect the church from a Schilling-Bass tragedy. At the 2017 event, we heard a blend of voices old and new. It was exhilarating. Theology teachers are here to bless the church, and we will not keep quiet. Yet this place does not explode when a Walter Rea or a Desmond Ford comes to town. We listen, pray, then keep on with our work.

And here Ellen White’s comments are to the point. Responding to the furor that grew out of the 1888 crisis, she addressed those who were worried that the church might get something wrong:

“If a man makes a mistake in his interpretation of some portion of the Scripture, shall this cause diversity and disunion? God forbid. We cannot then take a position that the unity of the church consists in viewing every text of Scripture in the very same light. The church may pass resolution upon resolution to put down all disagreement of opinions, but we cannot force the mind and will, and root out disagreement. These resolutions may conceal the discord, but they cannot quench it and establish perfect agreement. Nothing can perfect unity in the church but the spirit of Christlike forbearance. Satan can sow discord; Christ alone can harmonize the disagreeing elements. Then let every soul sit down in Christ's school and learn of Christ, who declares Himself to be meek and lowly of heart. Christ says that if we learn of Him, worries will cease and we shall find rest to our souls.

 

“The great truths of the word of God are so clearly stated that none need make a mistake in understanding them. When as individual members of the church, you love God supremely and your neighbor as yourself, there will be no need of labored efforts to be in unity, for there will be oneness in Christ as a natural result.”[8]

That was the very statement that triggered the comment from my student cited above: “Never until Walla Walla University have I read or heard of a helpful Ellen White.”

In short, we do not need voted statements that we all sign. What we do need is Adventists who express their convictions in books and articles with their own names attached. The composite result will represent Adventism at its best. And then Ellen White’s poignant desire will come close to fulfillment: “When men cease to depend upon men, when they make God their efficiency, then there will be more confidence manifested in one another. Our faith in God is altogether too feeble and our confidence in one another altogether too meager.”[9]

Alden Thompson is Professor of Biblical Studies at Walla Walla University.

Notes and References: