“We Do Bible Better”: While Bible Colleges Are Becoming an Endangered Species, Multnomah Carries on Its Lonely Mission

Multnomah School of the Bible sits on a 17-acre campus in a blue-collar residential neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Whoever designed the buildings (some of which orginally housed the Oregon State School for the Blind) clearly believed in the superiority of function over form and, accordingly, created an architectural paean to painted bricks and flat, warehouse-style roofs.

The students who enroll at Multnomah, however, care little about architectural niceties. They come to study the Bible.

“I think that we do Bible better than most places,” Ronald Frost, who teaches in the youth-ministry program, declared. “That’s the genius of the Bible school.”

The school’s motto, repeated often in promotional materials, reads: “If it’s Bible you want, then you want Multnomah.”

The school stipulates that 52 credits out of a total of 96 required for an associate degree or 128 for a bachelor’s degree fall in the area of biblical literature and theology. Every student majors in Bible at Multnomah, and each may choose to specialize in one of the following fields: Christian education, music, missions, journalism, pastoral youth ministry, biblical languages, or women’s ministries.

The curriculum emphasizes basic biblical literacy, but it also offers an interpretive template through which to view the Bible. Duane Hallof, an upperclassman who also works part-time in the school’s development department, characterizes Multnomah’s theology as “very conservative, but not limiting God. It’s definitely not a charismatic school. They don’t encourage the controversial gifts.”

Biblical inerrancy, he said, is “very high” on Multnomah’s list of theological priorities, as is dispensationalism. Multnomah’s theological pedigree, like that of many other Bible institutes in North America, is very much tied to that of Dallas Theological Seminary, which accounts for the strong emphasis on both biblical inerrancy and dispensationalism. Out of 33 full-time faculty at Multnomah, 16 hold at least one degree from Dallas. John G. Mitchell, the school’s founder, was a member of the first graduating class at Dallas Seminary, and he sought to bring its brand of evangelical theology to the Pacific Northwest when in 1936 he mobilized a group of Portland-area ministers and businessmen behind his idea for a Bible school.

Accordingly, then, the curriculum includes courses in English Bible and theology as well as missions, evangelism, and spiritual life. Students pursuing a B.A. must learn New Testament Greek. Professors are eager to demonstrate the internal harmony of the Scriptures as well as to advance particular interpretations. For example, in a course I visited on the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), Prof. Dale Wheeler devoted most of his 50-minute class period to a demonstration that an apparent numerical discrepancy between Genesis and the Acts of the Apostles was really no contradiction whatsoever.

“Does that blow the doctrine of inerrancy and inspiration?” he asked rhetorically after setting out the problem. “No, not at all.” In the Acts passage, he said, Stephen was quoting from the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible popular during the time of Christ), which had the number wrong. “You will find places where writers quote sources that are inaccurate,” Wheeler conceded, “but if it had been important to the point, the Spirit would have made sure that Stephen did not quote an inaccurate number.”

In a course entitled Ecclesiology and Eschatology, John Lawrence tried to impress upon his charges the importance of understanding eschatology, the doctrine of the end times. “Don’t say prophecy is of no value,” he said. “If it was of no value, God wouldn’t have given us so much of it.”

Lawrence was only beginning to warm to his point. “Don’t let me hear from any of you that prophecy is not important,” he said, his voice rising in earnestness. “I’m reacting to a generation that has said prophecy is not important, that only now is important. That’s poppycock!” It was crucial for believers to locate themselves in God’s plans for the end times, Lawrence said, and he went on to argue forcefully for a literal interpretation of the apocalyptic passages in the Bible. Allegorizing those passages was a “dangerous principle,” he said. “If the literal meaning makes sense, seek no other sense, lest it become nonsense.”

A World Apart

Multnomah School of the Bible was part of a much larger effort on the part of evangelicals in the middle decades of the twentieth century to establish or shore up their institutions of learning against what they regarded as the threat of “modernism” in the broader culture. In the years after the Scopes trial of 1925, which convinced fundamentalists that American culture had turned against them, evangelicals withdrew from institutions they believed had become controlled by liberal ideas and established their own institutions as alternatives. Evangelical schools, associations, and agencies flourished in this period as Christians channeled prodigious amounts of money and energy into this effort.

Because the modernists generally prevailed in the fundamentalist-modernist controversies that convulsed American Protestantism—that is, liberals managed to retain control of denominational machinery and assets—fundamentalists had to start anew, constructing their alternative organizations from the ground up.

Bible institutes, which originally built upon the revival successes of Dwight L. Moody and others late in the nineteenth century, appealed to twentieth-century evangelicals for several reasons. First, they provided refuge from the critical scholarship that called into question traditional notions of biblical authorship and cast doubts on the reliability of the Scriptures.

Bible institutes also offered an alternative environment for the education of evangelical youth apart from the corrupting influences of secular colleges and universities, many of which had only recently “gone liberal” and forsaken their religious heritages. With their sons and daughters at a Bible school, evangelical parents could rest assured their offspring would have plenty of help navigating clear of the intellectual shoals of liberalism and the seductive currents of “worldly” behavior.

With the proliferation of such institutions across the North American landscape, from Florida to Alaska, from Texas to Alberta, the Bible-school movement constitutes an intriguing chapter in the history of twentieth-century evangelicalism.

Bible schools were an important component of the evangelical subculture, this network of institutions—churches, denominations, Bible camps, colleges, seminaries, publishing houses, mission societies—that evangelicals built in earnest after 1925. The subculture made possible a wholesale retreat from the larger culture. An evangelical could socialize almost entirely among friends at her church, send contributions to trustworthy evangelical agencies and missions, purchase reading materials from a Christian bookstore, and send her children to a Bible camp in the summers, to a Bible institute for higher education, and, perhaps, to an evangelical seminary for further professional training and a career in “full-time Christian service.” This sense of envelopment within the cocoon of the evangelical subculture held strong appeal for evangelicals who believed that the larger culture was inherently both corrupted and corrupting.

Students With A Mission

Despite the presence of practical courses like Chalk Drawing and Christian Camping, the curriculum at Multnomah is fairly demanding, if for no other reason than the sheer number of Bible courses required for graduation. By the standards of adolescent tastes, the curriculum is also boring. What, then, draws students to Multnomah?

Every answer I received to that question might have been lifted from the school’s public-relations material. “It’s an excellent school,” said John Salters, who wants to go into mission aviation. “The teaching is excellent.”

Brian Stubbs, who transferred from Moody Bible Institute, agreed. “I think all the professors here are right on,” he said enthusiastically.

Gwen Durland, a first-year student from Tucson, Arizona, said she had gravitated to Multnomah because she was thinking about missions. “Basically, I asked God where he wanted me to go, and also my pastor said Multnomah was an excellent school.”

Blaine Butcher, a senior, said he “wanted to learn about the Bible and youth ministry and discipleship.” He pronounced himself satisfied with Multnomah.

“You get the dynamic of the truth set down in the class with the parallel of love to work that truth into the fabric of your life,” Duane Hallof said. “It’s a neat dynamic. I’m a completely different person than I was three years ago.”

Indeed, the school’s new public-relations slogan reads: “Multnomah deals in life change. Don’t settle for less.” Hallof credits the school with helping him to work through a troubled home life. “Multnomah is a general hospital for the church,” he said, “and each individual receives intensive care.”

Several alumni I spoke with expressed appreciation for the spiritual direction they had received at Multnomah. Butcher claims that Multnomah altered his notions about vocation. “Before I came to Multnomah, I was a Christian and all,” he said, “but I didn’t realize that I could have an impact in whatever field of work I chose. Multnomah has shown me how our Christian walk can affect every part of our lives, the way we view the world.”

Rhetoric about the world frequently creeps into conversations at Multnomah, as when Durland describes her “life change” at the school. “One thing I’ve been noticing lately,” she said, “is that before coming to Multnomah I was really conditioned to worldly things, but being away from it and studying the Bible has shown me how conditioned a Christian can become when you’re living in the world daily and you don’t have your focus straight on God. It’s also increased my desire to go into missions, either here or overseas, just seeing how bad the world is. I want to do my part. The world seems so hopeless and desperate.”

Multnomah provides a reassuring environment for adolescents reared on the rhetoric of separatism and suspicion toward the world. “We draw in a number of students who have separatist tendencies,” according to Frost, a graduate of Multnomah and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Identifying yourself as part of the righteous remnant in the midst of a society in moral decay, moreover, allows you to claim the moral high ground. “A lot of schools are really liberal, but Multnomah has held to traditional values,” Durland told me. “Some schools say they’re Christian, but they don’t expect their students to live up to moral standards.”

A Crumbling Fortress

In the broader evangelical subculture, this suspicion of “the world” has dissipated considerably. In the last several decades, and especially since the mid-1970s, evangelicals emerged, albeit tentatively, from their self-imposed exile. The antipathy toward the broader culture so characteristic of evangelicals in the twenties and thirties has given way to ambivalence. Even as many evangelicals retain the old rhetoric of opposition to the world, they are eager to appropriate many of that world’s standards of success.

Whereas once evangelicals intentionally spurned higher education as a species of arrogance and compromise with the world, many now openly court such approval. Students who were once content to receive a Bible-school degree now want university or even advanced degrees, which are recognized signs of status within the broader culture.

Bible institutes have keenly felt these changing cultural forces within evangelicalism. With the attention to dualistic attitudes—us versus the world, righteousness versus unrighteousness—the image of the Bible institute as a kind of fortress against the assaults of intellectual liberalism no longer resonates as it once did.

Many Bible institutes accordingly have undertaken their own quests for respectability. The patterns, in fact, are remarkably consistent. With an eye toward accreditation so that it can offer a bachelor’s degree instead of merely a diploma, the school will shore up its offerings in the sciences and the liberal arts. This has the inevitable effect of deemphasizing classes in the Bible, which had been at the core of its curriculum. At some point in the process the parietal rules ease a bit, and the name changes from Bible school or Bible institute to Bible college, then simply to college, and sometimes, with the introduction of advanced degrees, to university.

There are numerous examples of this phenomenon, but none illustrates the process more completely than Biola in southern California. The name Biola originally was an acronym for Bible Institute of Los Angeles, but the school changed its name to Biola College in 1949 and in 1981 became Biola University.

To be sure, there are still many Bible colleges in North America that cling to their heritage: Prairie Bible College, Toccoa Falls College, Alaska Bible College, Columbia Bible College, and many others. Moody Bible Institute of Chicago is probably the best known and the most prominent of the Bible schools. But for every Bible institute that remains, there are two or three that have evolved into liberal-arts colleges or even universities.

What accounts for the difference? Why have some institutions contented themselves with their status as Bible schools while others have sought to redefine themselves? Surely the pressures of alumni and constituency play a role. Some see the introduction of a liberal-arts curriculum as the catalyst for transition from Bible school to Christian college, a kind of slippery slope that leads ineluctably to an emphasis on so-called secular learning at the expense of the Bible.

Multnomah’s president, Joseph Aldrich, and others at the school have reservations about moving toward a liberal-arts curriculum—what Aldrich called the “first-round temptation” for Bible institutes. “We may have to tune our model a bit, perhaps by cutting back from 52 hours of Bible,” Aldrich confessed. “It will be a real challenge for the current and subsequent leadership of Multnomah to resist moving from the heart to the head in what we do. I resist moving toward an environment where the academic reigns.”

Students concur. “They don’t want the liberal arts because that will dilute the emphasis on the Bible,” Duane Hallof said. “History will repeat itself,” he added, citing the examples of Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, all of which, he said, began with evangelical principles but were seduced into liberalism.

Another factor influencing which schools remain as Bible institutes and which evolve into something else may be their geographical and cultural locations. The schools situated in rural areas—Prairie Bible Institute in Alberta, Canada, for example—have maintained their insularity, drawing on the Jeffersonian ideal of the virtuous farmer as opposed to the less-virtuous urban dweller. Likewise, the schools in cities seem to derive their very identity from the juxtaposition of good with evil, righteousness with unrighteousness.

Ever since the late nineteenth century, when non-Protestant immigrants who did not share evangelical scruples about temperance flooded American cities, evangelicals have looked at the city with a mixture of repugnance and missionary zeal. Urban schools like Moody, for instance, with its civil-defense architecture and its maze of underground tunnels, even look like fortresses—an image softened at Moody by some of the campus’s newer buildings. By sending their students out into city streets on evangelistic and social-service forays, these schools act as an evangelical beacon in a hostile and godless environment.

Something happens, however, when a Bible school relocates to the suburbs, as many have done in the past several decades. Suddenly, the environment looks less threatening than it did in the city. The dualistic rhetoric softens, almost imperceptibly at first. The fortress mentality gives way to an accommodation to the surrounding culture—or at least an uneasy peace. It strikes me as no coincidence, for example, that Trinity Seminary and Bible College in Chicago became Trinity College and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School about the time the school took possession of its new campus at Deerfield in the affluent northern suburbs or that Detroit Bible College dropped “Bible” when it moved to Farmington Hills and changed its name to William Tyndale College.

Managing Decline

With its unabashedly conservative theology and social values, an institution such as Multnomah tends to embrace change about as eagerly as a salmon seeks encounters with a hungry bear. The students I spoke with seemed entirely innocent of the cultural forces buffeting Multnomah, but faculty and administrators were keenly aware that the school faced some difficult choices in the coming years.

“We’re just about the last Bible school around, at least in the traditional sense of the three-year program,” Garry Friesen, Multnomah’s academic dean, said, his voice betraying a mixture of pride and apprehension. Even Moody, which most people at Multnomah regard as the school’s closest kin, has recently moved in the direction of offering full-fledged baccalaureate degrees. “That leaves us pretty much alone out there,” Friesen said, “with the exception of some of the smaller schools.”

President Joseph Aldrich is an alumnus of both Multnomah and Dallas Theological Seminary. From the perspective of the president’s office for the past 13 years (succeeding his father, who led the institution for 35 years), Aldrich has witnessed important changes in evangelicalism, and he understands better than most the predicament of institutions like Multnomah. “Survival is a real issue in the Bible-school movement,” he said flatly. Thirty years ago a diploma from a Bible institute was sufficient for placement on a church or missions staff, he said, but no longer.

“Our students simply cannot compete for jobs with other candidates who have bachelor’s or master-of-divinity degrees. Increasingly, the rural community is the only one that a die-hard Bible college graduate can service.”

In addition, changes in American culture have left their mark on places like Multnomah. In Ronald Reagan’s America, evangelical adolescents were caught up like everyone else in the headlong quest for affluence, and the road to riches seemed to lead through colleges, universities, and business schools rather than through a Bible institute.

“Like it or not,” Aldrich said, enumerating the difficulties facing schools like Multnomah, “divorce has hit evangelicalism.” As a consequence, he said, the percentage of female students at Multnomah has dropped in recent years as evangelical fathers counsel their daughters to seek an education to prepare them for a career, in the unfortunate event that they might someday find themselves divorced and in need of work. More and more households are two-career families; wives are working. Increasingly, a place like Multnomah finds itself fighting social and demographic trends in the larger culture. “We don’t want to be culturally driven,” Aldrich said, “but we have to be culturally aware.”

Simply swimming against the cultural currents, however, is a good bit different from staking out a positive identity. That leaves Multnomah School of the Bible searching for a niche. The commercial success of Multnomah Press, which publishes books by faculty and other evangelical leaders such as Chuck Swindoll, most of them addressing some dimension of the Christian life, has burnished the school’s image among evangelicals. But that notoriety alone will not ensure the school’s survival.

“We may be managing decline at the undergraduate level,” Aldrich said candidly. The school has added a Graduate School of Ministry to offer professional degrees, including the master of divinity, a three-year program with an emphasis on internships. Even Aldrich, however, seems to have reservations about shifting the locus of pastoral training from the undergraduate to the graduate level. “The seminary movement is not congenial to pietism in the same way that a Bible school is,” he said. “That’s a real loss.”

Multnomah officials also recognize that theirs is a regional school. Out of a total student registration of 761, considerably more than half, 454 students, come from Washington and Oregon. California accounts for another 132 students. Such reliance on the region, however, implies a precarious dependency on what Aldrich calls “the spiritual wasteland of the United States.” Several people during my visit cited statistics indicating that the rate of church attendance in Washington and Oregon is the lowest in the nation. Only 3 percent of the population in metropolitan Portland attend church.

Of the 108 different ethnic groups in Portland, however, no more than a dozen or so are represented at Multnomah. With the exception of a few Native Americans, the racial, social, and ethnic composition of the student body is decidedly monochrome and homogeneous, a generalization that also applies to the faculty. One professor referred to one of his colleagues as “our avant garde figure” because “he goes to jazz festivals and things like that.”

Believing the school’s future is tied inextricably to the spiritual welfare of the Pacific Northwest, Multnomah, in cooperation with the Navigators, has initiated an evangelistic campaign called Mission Portland that in many ways represents a return to the heroic ideals that animated the Bible-school movement. “Mission Portland is a pilot project to see what it will take to conquer an entire city for God,” said Greg Hicks, a Multnomah graduate and communications coordinator for the enterprise, “looking at all facets of ministry required to accomplish the Great Commission in an urban context.”

Only a year into what is shaping up as a ten-year project, it is much too early to guess how successful Mission Portland might be and what effect it might have on Multnomah’s enrollments in the coming years. The effort, however, has drawn early praise for its interdenominational focus and for its ability to bridge the chasm between charismatics and noncharismatics. Some evangelicals in the region even dare to use the term revival. Whatever the outcome, however, it is clear that Mission Portland will have a salutary effect on Multnomah School of the Bible, if only because it revives the place of evangelism and renewal that largely defined Multnomah in its early years, thereby reiterating the school’s importance as a beacon to a sinful world.

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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