Thoughts on the New Direction of Biblical Seminary
or, Has Dave Dunbar Done What He Said He Would Do?
or, an open letter to BTS alumni

Greetings, fellow BTS alumni, and other interested parties,

I'd like to "join the conversation" about the new direction of our alma mater. I and a lot of other alumni are not so enthusiastic.  In this post I'd just like to make a beginning, by looking at three portions of Dave Dunbar's employment application, in which he listed his qualifications for the job of president of Biblical Seminary and spoke of his vision for what direction he wanted the Seminary to go in the future.  I compare what he said then with what he has done since and is doing now, in order to assist alumni and others in evaluating whether Biblical Seminary is worthy of ongoing support. I will quote the three items from his application and then comment. 

#1. I have benefited greatly from the education I received at the seminary and am especially appreciative of the exegetical and homiletical emphases that have been the trademark of Biblical’s approach to theological education.  My own concern would be to maintain these distinctives of the seminary (p. 3).

For its 35th anniversary (2006), the seminary adopted the slogan “Celebrating the Past, Engaging the Future.”  I asked a former professor & BTS alumnus (who was fired on the initiative of Dave Dunbar) what he thought about BTS’s claim to celebrate its past.  Here is what this long time faculty member said:

I don’t understand their claim to “celebrate the past”. They certainly do not mean “celebrating our [the BTS] past”.  I was told a number of times by John Franke (then Chair of the Faculty), David Dunbar, and Todd Mangum (present Moderator of the Faculty) that I wanted the “old Biblical”, and they were not at all interested in being or becoming “old Biblical”. The same individuals spoke quite disparagingly about “old Biblical”, saying that it was “all right for its time”, but then qualifying that by adding that they weren’t sure that even “then” Biblical was doing what the church really needed. I cannot cite dates and times, but I heard these statements and others like them a number of times, increasingly during my last two or three years there (e-mail, February 9, 2007).

Contrary to his deduction, “celebrating the past” is meant to refer to the BTS past, which is clear from the fact that the dates 1971–2006 appear under the slogan.  It looks to me like this professor was fired for wanting to do as a professor what Dave Dunbar said in his employment application he would do as president (maintain “the trademark of Biblical’s approach to theological education”).

Read more for the next two points:

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#2.  It is imperative then for the seminary to maintain its strong stand on biblical infallibility and inerrancy, its commitment to original language exegesis, and to powerful preaching (p. 4). 

The same ex-professor also had this to say:

I chaired the ordination committee of the Philadelphia Presbytery (PCA) for more than twenty years, and am now a member of the corresponding committee in the new Metro-West Presby.

If a BTS student or grad approaches us for licensure or ordination, I will be as attentive as possible to every nuance of thought about Scripture, about theologizing and theology, about their view of the Church (and “church”), &c. I would especially look for signs of incipient or impending neo-orthodoxy in their views, and would be extremely cautious about approving them for ordination before being very well satisfied indeed that their views were orthodox. And I would be doubly (triply?) cautious if they held the LEAD MDiv.

Our committee [in the past] found men from Biblical better prepared for ordination than men from any other seminary (including WTS, Covenant, RTS, Gordon-Conwell, TEDS). That statement was made by a member of the committee with no connection to BTS apart from knowing me and examining these men. There was a “presumption of innocence”, if I may use that term. Today, I would “presume guilt” (innocent guilt, perhaps) of a BTS grad. I do not know the extent to which “John Franke’s Neo-orthodoxy” (to quote a WTS prof) comes through in his courses, but I am not very sanguine (ibid.; emphasis added).

The Biblical Seminary doctrinal statement on scripture reads as follows:

The sixty-six books of the Bible are the inspired Word of God, the complete revelation of his will for the salvation of human beings. They are true in all that they affirm and without error as originally written, the only infallible and sufficient rule for faith and life.

The Biblical Seminary doctrinal statement is going to be revised.  BTS alumnus Joe Basile asked Dave Dunbar (November 2006) if the new doctrinal statement would include a statement of inerrancy.  Joe said there was a “long pause,” followed by a discussion of inerrancy which left Joe with a clear impression that a statement of inerrancy would keep Dave Dunbar from taking Biblical Seminary where he wanted it to go.  Again, compare this with his intention expressed on his employment application quoted above (“It is imperative then for the seminary to maintain its strong stand on biblical infallibility and inerrancy”).  Dave was asked about Basile’s recollection of their conversation at a February 12th meeting with the elders of Immanuel Leidy’s Church, Souderton, PA.  Dave recalled the conversation with Joe and did not dispute Joe’s characterization of what was said about inerrancy.

#3.  Finally, in regard to Biblical’s position in the evangelical theological spectrum, I would like to see the seminary consciously cultivate a position in what I would call the evangelical center.  This center is one which would maintain basic evangelical distinctives in the context of firm commitment to biblical inerrancy. … It seems that there are strong forces which are at work today, both on the right (Fundamentalism) and the left (Fuller Seminary, et al.), to co-opt the term “evangelical” to other than its historical sense.  There is a need for evangelicals at the center to stand together, lest we awake one day to find that the center no longer exists.  Biblical can and should play its part in securing that center (pp. 5–6).

The statement is somewhat ambiguous as to whether Dave thought at the time (the 1980's), that BTS was part of this “center” of evangelicalism.  One would think that the use of “we” in the second-to-last sentence indicated that he did.  In the February 12th meeting noted above, however, Dave said that the changes he was making at BTS were not going from conservative to liberal but rather from fundamentalism to evangelicalism.  This would imply that when he went to BTS it was a fundamentalist school that needed changing.  How does that jive with quote number 1 cited above, "My own concern would be to maintain these distinctives of the seminary"?

To evaluate his stated intention of putting BTS in the center of evangelicalism we can look at seminary’s new vision, “To be the ongoing choice for training missional leaders for the emerging church of the 21st century.”  [UPDATE: the seminary has dropped "missional" and "emerging" from the vision statement; the theology behind it is still in place, however, as on can see from the Franke videos on the web site].  Dave has been quoting pastor Tim Keller and his statements on the need for the church to be “missional” as foundational for BTS’s new direction.  He has said that Keller’s paper on the missional church was influential in taking the BTS trustees off on this new direction (Dave Dunbar, e-mail to BTS alumni, January 11, 2007).  However, this is what Tim Keller thinks about the emerging church:

The emerging church is moving away from that [historic Christian] orthodoxy and they’re – I do know that the liberal, mainline church has developed a kind of postliberal – you can see it at places like Yale and Duke – a postliberal reaction to the older liberalism.  It puts more emphasis on the canon, it puts more emphasis on reading the text.  The commentaries that come out of this movement don’t tear the book apart but actually try to listen for the text.  They don’t believe in inerrancy, they have a very different understanding of truth, they would say, you know, if the interpretive community says this is truth, this is truth, and so on.  So they’re moving away from the mainline, older liberalism.  It’s less strident in some ways, and I think this group [the emerging church] is a kind of postconservativism, it’s actually coming out in the very same spot.  It’s moving away from evangelical orthodoxy and it has a lot in common with the postliberals.  In fact the only difference between the postconservatives and the postliberals is what they used to be. The postliberals used to be in mainline, the postconservatives used to be in evangelical churches, and they – they’re coming together.

(Source: A Conversation With the Pastors, audio file, starting at about 26 and a half minutes).

I doubt that any observer, pro or con, would describe the emerging church movement as being anywhere near the center of evangelicalism.  Of special interest to those concerned about BTS would be a part of the emerging church movement called “Emergent Village,” an organization with which BTS professor of theology John Franke is officially associated.  Below I give two quotes on the “conversation” with people from Emergent Village.  Keep in mind that both John Franke and John Piper are talking about dialogue with the same people.  First, John Franke:

I love Emergent the movement. I’m part of Emergent Village. I’m on the coordinating group, I represent Emergent, last week I was at two of their cohorts. I think it’s a great conversation. I think it is the conversation for our times. (What do we mean by "Emerging"?)

At the same conference session from which Tim Keller was quoted above, John Piper was asked “John, you met recently with Tony Jones, who’s the national coordinator for Emergent, and Doug Pagitt, who’s also involved in the leadership of Emergent. Without breaking any confidences, is there anything you can tell us about that meeting, or anything that would be helpful about your time together with them, and how did it come about?” Piper responded as follows:

My guess is there’s just hundreds and hundreds of people who don’t have a clue what emergent church is, so it might be good to have this guy [Mark Driscoll] talk about that, since he has roots that help explain it, I think, but they are two leaders and they took the initiative to e-mail me and ask if I’d be interested in that, I think because they read the blurb on this conference and were ticked off by it.  Pretty strong language was used on Tony’s web site.  I wanted to ask him, you know, “Do you always precede lunch invitations by calling somebody ‘smart ass’?”  But I didn’t ask him that, … It was a very profitable time for me.  I like these guys, by the way.  I like ‘em because I think they’re both hot heads, and I think I am too.  … That was a personal impression.  My root sense is at the bottom is “committed relationships trump truth.”  They probably would not like the word “trump” but rather “committed relationships are a[n] authentic expression of the gospel, and to ask, ‘What is the gospel?’ underneath and supporting the relationship is a category mistake.”  And so I just kind of kept going back on my heels like “I don’t understand the ways these guys think,” and so there are profound epistemological differences, ways of processing reality that make the conversation almost impossible, just kind of going by each other.  My question is sort of “How profitable would it be to press on with that when your world views seem to be so different, and your ways of knowing seem to be different, the function of knowledge in transformation, what the goals of transformation are?  All those are so different, that I’m not sure we would get anywhere, so I can’t make definitive statements about what they believe about almost anything except for a few strong statements about certain social agendas where they would clearly come out of their chair on the hatred of human trafficking or something like that.  But as far as doctrinal issues I can’t tell because as I pushed on them I could tell, “That’s not what we do, that’s not what we do here.  We don’t try to get agreement on the nature of the atonement, that is alienating to friendships to try to do that, so we don’t do that.”  And when that’s not done, I kind of go, “Well then I don’t even know where to start with you then,” which shows how different we are.  Because Galatians 1, “If I or an angel from heaven brings you a gospel different than the one I gave to you, let him be accursed.”  Well that’s no friendship, that’s just no friendship.  So it seems like Paul is putting the gospel down as whether there is a good relationship or not, so I came away frustrated, and wishing it were different, but not knowing how to make it different.

(Same audio source, starting at about 18:25).

Further light on what makes Emergent Village tick comes from an attendee of the Emergent Convention in Nashville, 2005, who made the following comments:

I too was at Emergent 2005 in Nashville. In my small groups, the persistent question was voiced as a concern, not with enthusiasm: “Don’t these guys (John Franke, Bryan McLaren, Alan Roxborough) believe in truth? Are they really saying that there is no truth? What about the Bible–isn’t it true?” I was struck by an apparent gap between what the speakers were saying and the beliefs of those with whom I talked.

[Comment:“these guys”will certainly say that they believe in truth; the question is, why would they speak in such a way as to raise such questions in their listeners?  Back to the quote:]

Second, I want & need to remember that people associate with others for a variety of reasons–some negative (“We’re against/concerned about ABC”), some positive (“We believe/agree on XYZ”)–and that a person is not necessarily defined by his or her associates. In fact, the leadership of Emergent has said (communicated by John Franke) that they are cautious about trying to define “Emergent” positively, because that will drive away people who disagree, but as long as their theme is anger at their conservative evangelical upbringings, they can work together.

 At the same time, those with whom we associate will, over time, influence our thinking, hence the persistent Solomonic warning in Proverbs about choosing friends and associates (e.g., Pr 22.24).

(ninth comment; emphasis added.  The author of the post assures me he has heard the same thing from many different people).

The same web page provides a link to a paper read at the ETS national convention, November 2006, “Essential Concerns Regarding the Emerging Church,” by Brett Kunkle.

Is the “center” of evangelicalism ecumenical?  If so, we’re in big trouble, and yes, that would tend to put Biblical Seminary in the center.  BTS theology professor John Franke represents Emergent US to the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches, and was quoted as follows at the death of Stan Grenz (March 2005):

While an earlier generation of scholars -- like Carl F.H. Henry and Millard Erickson -- helped put evangelicalism on the map, Grenz “really was the pioneer” in bridging the evangelical-mainline gap, said John Franke, and that will be his enduring legacy. “It is vitally important in this moment to heal some of this division that has plagued American Christianity,” Franke said.

Those of us schooled on Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, may have a hard time believing this is happening at BTS but it is.  Grenz and Franke have championed a “generous orthodoxy” that is quite different from the generous orthodoxy of the BTS founders (“Don’t major on the minors,” etc.), but rather a blurring of distinctions between liberals and evangelicals.  Franke commends Brian McLaren’s a Generous Orthodoxy (Zondervan, 2004, 2006) in a foreword:

Brian D. McLaren … has provided a model for those who are seeking to develop, nurture, and practice a postmodern, ecumenical, and missional Christian faith.

This "model" commended by John Franke has recently shown how generous is his orthodoxy, endorsing a book by a homosexual who likes to imagine a homosexual Jesus (one of McLaren's favorite books of 2006).  We have a lot more to say about Brian McLaren and issues related to the emerging church on this site, so you are invited to visit and “join the conversation.”

I have heard so many alumni express such appreciation for the grounding in the Scriptures they received in past decades at Biblical Seminary, their education being foundational to fruitful ministry in the pastorate, on the mission field, in higher education, etc.  When you examine the changes that have been made, there is a call to action: "Consider it, take counsel, and speak up!" (Judges 19:30).

Grace and Truth,

John Ronning, BTS 1979

Read or add comments about this item.

No. 1 :

I commend your research on the changes from what the application stated versus the subsequent actions of Dr. Dunbar. I had spoken to him at the TEDS commencement in 1983 about the possibility of his coming back to Biblical to preside. I was eager to see someone who was trained by the approach of Dr. MacRae and the founding faculty who would carry on what those pioneers had sacrificed so deeply to establish. Following the death of Dr. Taylor, Dr. Dunbar came. Many of us were hopeful that the unique blend of Dr. Murray's passion for communicating the gospel and Dr. MacRae's devotion to true Biblical scholarship would be carried forward. However, there was something many missed in Dr. Dunbar's inaugural address. I am going by recollection here, but he referred to the work Pilgrimage by Richard Peace and described the difference between a settler and a pilgrim. He was advocating the direction of a pilgrim rather than a settler. He championed the idea of not simply continuing with the re-arrangement of furniture but one that was headed into uncharted territories. The following week in the lunch room I asked him when a pilgrim ceased to be a pilgrim and became a wanderer. That was a difficult conversation that made me aware that our seminary was embarking on a new direction that would lead to an abandonment of truth and an embracing of diverse winds of doctrine. Carl T. Martin, BTS 1982,1989

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Submitted by pastorct • 2007-03-09 07:57:46

No. 2 :

Carl,
See the entry "Got a Match" under "Historical Precursors"at http://postbiblical.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=16&Itemid=43
Steve H.

Submitted by STH • 2007-03-13 15:52:02

No. 3 :

The pure delight in obedience adds to the ethical value of choice.
Gerhardus Vos

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Submitted by STH • 2007-03-19 21:11:32

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