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The person anointed to safeguard Baylor's Christian commitment was something of a surprise. When Herbert H. Reynolds announced his retirement from the presidency in 1995, the board turned to a dark-horse candidate: Robert Bryan Sloan Jr., dean of Truett Seminary, Baylor's theological school.

Sloan had graduated from Baylor in 1970, earned the Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, and did his doctoral work at the University of Basel. There he studied under Marcus Barth. The late Kenneth Kantzer of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School offered Sloan a teaching job there, but he declined. "Everybody has his or her own tradition," Sloan says, "and mine was among Baptists."

He taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1980 until 1983, then joined the faculty at Baylor. A decade later he became the founding dean at Truett. Sloan is a rangy Texan from Abilene with a crooked smile and a self-deprecating wit; a section of two-by-four on his desk carries the motto: "A thick skin is a gift of God." But there is nothing modest about his ambitions for Baylor.

Sloan became captivated by the notion of Baylor as a top-flight Christian university, and with a blend of charm, perseverance, and sheer audacity, he sold his vision to the board of regents. He sees Baylor 2012 as a reaffirmation of Baylor's founding principles.

"There's no question that Baylor was founded on a Christian commitment within the Baptist tradition," he says. "We're still a Baptist institution."

The intellectual tensions Sloan felt in his youth had their part in his embarking on the mission of remaking Baylor into both a top-tier and an unapologetically Christian university, he says. As a high school student he had many questions, "and it was very difficult, except within my own church, to find people to talk about my intellectual doubts."

Sloan's questions resurfaced when he arrived at Baylor, where he majored in psychology and religion. "I struggled a lot as a college student," he says. "I had deep intellectual anxieties." He was shaken to the core by the behavioral psychology of B. F. Skinner and by the God-is-dead theology briefly popular in the 1960s.

"I had professors here at Baylor who were very helpful," he says, "although some were on the question side, and some were on the answer side." Sloan became more personally integrated and centered in the Christian faith, but his intellectual challenges continued at Princeton Seminary. There he encountered everything from Marxists and agnostics to evangelicals.

"One of the first New Testament intro lectures I heard was by an unapologetic neo-Bultmannian, who stripped away everything, beginning with the resurrection. He essentially dismissed what I call the cross-resurrection frame of reference."

Sloan remembers that first semester as "a real dark night of the soul. I nearly lost my faith. I came as close, humanly speaking, as you can come." On the verge of leaving seminary, somehow, he persevered. "The Lord brought me through it, not just spiritually—I had to bite the bullet intellectually as well." Sloan credits C. S. Lewis, especially in Miracles, with helping him to develop a Christian worldview.

Like other Christian schools, Baylor during Sloan's undergraduate years pushed hard to attract Ph.D.s to its faculty. "But where do Ph.D.s come from?" he says. "Well, they came from state schools, by and large." The provenance of the faculty, therefore, made it all the more difficult to incorporate a Christian worldview into the curriculum.

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November 18 2002, Vol. 46, No. 12