There are 32 lectures that are currently being edited, from recordings I made in 1968, the last time he delivered the course. Walters academic pedigree began at Greenville College where he earned his B.A. He then went on to Asbury Theological Seminary (B.D.), Princeton (Th.M.), and Yale (Ph.D.) where is studied archeology and translated cuneiform tablets.
Although Greenville was associated with the evangelical Methodist tradition (and Armenian in theology), Walters had a liking for the discipline displayed by Anglican theologians like John Stott, C.S. Lewis, and other British thinkers and historians such as Plymouth Brethern F. F. Bruce and Quaker Elton Trueblood. To further broaden his theological resume he spend years after academia ministering in Presbyterian (Calvinism) parishes in Canada and the U.S.
As will be evident from the lectures, he was not a "faith alone" advocate, but lectured heavily in favor of "faith and reason." He preferred critical evidence to blind ideology. The training we received to think critically about religious ideas and our faith focused on the logical, historical, and personal religious experience as empirical evidence that verified Scripture revelation. Such evidence, we discovered, could not be denied and could be repeated.
So, without more at this point, the following posts will offer up excerpts of the lectures to tease you enough that you'll want to buy the book when it comes out...and when that is we have no idea. There's much work that remains. Except the first few lectures I may post in their entirety. (Stan Williams)
Lecture 1 - The Goals of This Course
Stanley D. Walters, Ph. D.
February 1968 - Greenville College
The BOP Method
Now there are different ways of convincing people that certain things are so. There is the “BOP” method which is often employed here. As a result of the application of this technique, you end up believing things which are completely unrealistic. Further, you end up...
with no evidence to support the beliefs, which may go counter to all the rest of your best judgment.
What techniques are employed at a school of this sort to bring you to a belief in matters relating to the Christian faith? Are similar techniques employed, so that after a statement of highly improbable beliefs and doctrines, an academic BOP is applied, and you, of course, for the sake of the grade, meekly agree that you believe what you are supposed to believe?
I think there probably are people who practice the bop method of evangelism, and bop method of conversion. What I shall try to do in the class in which you are enrolled is not to apply this kind of technique. We will rather, from the beginning, try as hard as we are able to make clear what are the evidences supporting Christian belief and we’ll leave you to make your own conclusions as to whether you accept Christian belief or not. Now, it is a course in basic Christianity and that means you can expect to hear a lot about what the Christian faith is and you may expect to hear a lot about why the teacher thinks it is plausible. I suppose that most of you think it’s plausible too, though a lot of us come with questions that have never been satisfactorily answered and I’ll say more about this in a moment.
No Nose Flattening
But from the beginning I want you to relax. Because no nose flattening procedures will be used in order to elicit your assent to any tenets of Christian belief. The most I will expect of you in this class is that you know what Christian belief is and why there are some people who consider it plausible. So, whether or not you want to consider it so yourself will be entirely up to you. In any case, I want to assure you at the beginning that to the best of my ability the class will be an effort in evidences and not in coercion.
Aims of the Course
Now it may be well for us to begin with some kind of discussion of what the aims of the course will be. And after I’ve covered two or three of these things I will turn to a discussion of some of the handouts which you picked up as you came in. If you didn’t get the handouts you can pick them up after class is over.
1. An Adult Level Understanding of Christianity
All right, let’s begin here. One of the things which I hope the course will do for you, will be to develop in you an adult level understanding of the Christian faith, and of its plausibility.
Now of course, I don’t really know what level of understanding you have of the Christian faith. This is a freshman course and most of us when we hit college are carrying with us a lot of ideas which belong to the level of understanding of the grade school and the high school. This will not be true if you’ve gone to a high school with strong academic programs and I’m sure that many of you come with very sophisticated understandings of some things, science perhaps, mathematics, or perhaps also the social sciences.
One of the things which gets omitted even in the best public high school programs is the development of a sophisticated understanding of religion. There are good and sufficient reasons for it. But this means that even though you may arrive at college with something like an adult understanding of many facets of life’s experiences, most of us come to college with what is basically a grade school or a junior high school or a Sunday school understanding of the Christian faith. This has a lot of disadvantages from my point of view. For one thing all the time that you are learning new concepts, new ideas in matters of science, history, literature, language, you are not learning anything new in the matter of religion. Everybody knows that grade school science has to give way to a high school understanding and in turn High School understanding’s, say in science, have to give way to college level understandings.
Wouldn’t this also be true of our understanding of the Christian faith? It seems to me a kind of demoralizing thing when a person is learning new and perhaps exciting ways of looking at everything except religion. And religion he keeps on looking at in the same old Sunday school way. Now that’s nothing against Sunday school. It’s nothing against grade school understanding. That’s fine for grade school people. When you become a college person you want to develop a college level understanding of the Christian faith.
Evidence Based
This is one of the reasons that I try to center the class on evidences rather than on a dogmatic affirmation. What you can’t explain to a child you may be able to explain to a college student. I will talk to you differently than I talk to my boy. I like to explain some things to him, and go in deeper than I do, but I know that he can’t follow those things and he has to take my word for a lot of things.
Well, part of developing an adult level understanding of the Christian faith will involve us then in the consideration of the evidences for the plausibility of the Christian faith, and this I hope will help your religious thinking, your theological thinking if you please, keep pace with the development of your scientific and other thinking. If it doesn’t keep pace what ends up is one of two things.
One, you compartmentalize your life so that the religious, the theological area is one in which you hold rather tenaciously to what you were taught when you were young and you never really examine it. That means that you develop a fine, elaborate, well-grounded understanding of everything except religion. And you just kind of don’t look at religion, but you sort of hold on blindly and go through life. Lots of people go through life holding on. You could do worse. But it somehow seems to me that just holding on cuts our mind up in parts and that we [should] want to be able to think openly and honestly about all dimensions of experience.
Two, the other thing you can do is give up your belief in religion, and maybe you should. Grade school belief and religion won’t do for adults. Therefore, I can understand why adults whose theological thinking has never gotten beyond the elementary level give it up when they become adults. It doesn’t mean anything to them. And so, they get rid of it. I say if we don’t find some way for our religious understanding to keep pace with the understanding that develops in other areas then we become sort of blind and dogmatic Christians or we give up our belief in the Christian faith altogether. All right, here is one thing which we will start in this class. We won’t finish it but we will at least start the development of an adult level of understanding.
2. Skill in Thinking About Life from a Christian Standpoint
A second thing which I hope that we can do will be to develop, or to begin to develop, skill in thinking about life from a Christian standpoint. It probably doesn’t occur to us all the time that there is more than one way of looking at life and that often the different ways of looking at life will either be mutually exclusive or we’ll have some kind of tension or conflict between them. The Christian way of looking at life is one way. There are many others. Usually we don’t think about this. The result is that we may end up being persons who are looking at life in a way that isn’t Christian without being aware of it. We try to use an illustration or two here. These are things that I’ll talk about later on in more detail but I at least can help illustrate what I mean by this second point.
Let’s suppose that you know someone who says, “Miracles can’t happen. Not in a scientific age. We know how things happen. There are causes and there are effects. All of these things are perfectly accessible to the research tools of science. And when you say something is a miracle I say you just don’t understand it, that’s all.
Now the person who says this is looking at life like this: “Everything that is real can be touched or seen or felt. Nothing can happen which has any sort of causation or contact, in an unseen realm.” This position is very well known. A great many people in Western Civilization generally share this point of view. I’s a naturalistic point of view. It’s called naturalism because it says that nature is everything. You can touch it, you can see it, you can smell, it you can put litmus paper in it. You can weigh in on the scales, you can grind it in a mortar and pestle, or you can heat it over a Bunsen burner. And what you can do that with is all that there is. Nature is all. The natural level is all.
Now mostly, Christians don’t share this viewpoint. The Christian thinks there is more to life than what you can see and touch. He thinks that there are some things which are very real which can’t be seen or touched. God is one of them. Now when you come to compare these two ways of looking at life they’re worlds apart. Actually, the Christian way of looking at life is the broader way. It’s the more encompassing way. It can account for more phenomena, for more data and more facts. The naturalistic way is a truncate and a constricted way. It says reality is limited to this. The Christian says reality is much bigger than that, much richer, much more variegated. And reality includes a lot that we can’t see or touch.
Now, you really have to take a choice on this. And yet a lot of you, and I have to number myself in this group at least a point in the development of my thinking, are very, very sympathetic with the guy who says, “Miracles can’t happen.” Why are we so sympathetic with this? Well, that’s another question, but do you see that we have got to develop skill in looking at life from the Christian point of view?
I have to come back to this whole question about miracles. Later on, this semester, it’s a hard question and we’ll take a stab at it. Let me use another illustration of what I mean about thinking about life.
Here’s a quotation which I copied from an article in Time magazine two or three years ago. It’s a statement made by an important law professor. He says, “You can’t teach honesty in the legal profession. Our students come to us with their values set. I still say that the best way to obtain honesty in the legal profession is to have a few good disbarments.” All right that’s what he says.
It sounds all right, doesn’t it? Let’s analyze that statement for a minute and see what is presupposed by it. How can he come out with that conclusion? He can come out with that conclusion if he has certain pre-suppositions. And what are those pre-suppositions? When we begin to hunt for them we discover that this statement is just loaded with theological and moral judgments. For example. This statement presupposes that there is a difference between honesty and crookedness, doesn’t it?
A lot of people don’t think that there is. They think you ought to do whatever you can get by with, and whatever you can get by with is fine.
But here’s a statement that presupposes there’s a difference between honesty and crookedness. What’s more, it presupposes that honesty is better than crookedness. Lots of people don’t think that. They think that crookedness is better. There’s a difference but they think, you’re stupid if you’re honest. So, there’s another moral judgment in this statement. What’s more this statement presupposes something that I don’t think most of you believe and that is that right conduct should be forced. Doesn’t it? If lawyers won’t be honest you ought to make them be honest? Right conduct can be forced but you don’t believe that. You wouldn’t make so much noise about campus rules if you did. And finally, this statement presupposes that a man will do right more readily because of fear than for any other reason. Let me repeat that. A man will do right more readily because of fear than for any other reason. Is that true? Is that why you’re good? Because you are afraid of something or other, different things. Afraid of your real self being known? Afraid of being caught breaking a rule and getting bounced? Afraid of your folks finding out? I don’t know afraid of what, is that why you’re good? Or don’t you think that you are good for some reason other than fear, that you’re good because...because it’s good to be good.
Now the only point I’m trying to make is that I hope we will learn to look at life analytically, not superficially, but a little more in depth so that we can begin to see that under the surface of most things that we say and do there are theological and moral judgements, just like there are here. We want them to develop skill in looking at life from the Christian point of view.
3. To Provide Answers Some of the Pressing Questions About Life
Finally, another aim of the course is to provide answers to some of the pressing questions about life. Once again, it’s only a start. One reason it can only be a start is that you’re not through thinking. When you’re a sophomore and junior and a senior, when you’re out of college, you will still be thinking about the pressing questions of life and you may still be coming to some conclusions about them, but you at least can start providing answers to some of the pressing questions about life.
How many of us have had bad experiences with inadequate answers to our honest questions? We have many times had a glib answer, a pat answer, and a change of subject. This may have satisfied us when we were younger, but as high school and college students we begin to think that our questions ought to be taken seriously. We begin to think it’s right to expect an answer which will satisfy if we are to keep on believing that thing.
In A. A. Milne’s little book of poems for children...he’s the creator of Winnie the Pooh, Walt Disney is only the popularizer...in one of his little books of poems, Christopher Robin goes down to Buckingham Palace to watch the guards change and he’s accompanied by his nurse Alice. Alice fills him in, erroneously mostly, on details about the functions of state guards and the kingship and so forth. Presently there is a stanza which goes like this:
They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace -Now there’s the quick answer to a hard question. And the change of subject. How do you tell a little kid that the king doesn’t know anything about him? Why you answer the question quickly and change the subject.
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
“Do you think the King knows all about me?”
“Sure to, dear, but it’s time for tea,” says Alice.
And we have had this kind of “Sure to dear, but it’s time for tea” answer to some of our questions about religion. After a while you get tired of asking questions. I heard a silly story about the painter James McNeill Whistler who was always in debt. One day he encountered one of his creditors on the street and the creditor said, “Mr. Whistler. May I ask when you intend to pay your bill?” Whistler slapped him on the back and said, “Of course you may ask my dear man. One ought never to lose his curiosity.”
But when it comes to questions about religion you want more than encouragement of your curiosity. You want an answer and you want it now. I heard a radio broadcast about monitoring certain radio bands in hopes of picking up signals from outer space. There are people who are doing this. They are sending signals and they are tuned in to see if they can receive signals. They haven’t heard anything yet and they don’t know that anybody out there is sending signals. But, they’re transmitting and they’re monitoring. The problem with this is that even at the incredible rate of speed which radio signals travel, if there is anybody out there they are so far that it would take radio signals years and years to get there. So, you not only have the question, “What language are these people speaking, so we can ask them questions,” but you have the problem that you will ask the question but your grandchild will get the answer.
All right. We need answers now. And whether the course will answer your pressing questions, I don’t know. But it is one of the aims which I have in mind for the course that we will try to make a beginning at giving answers to some of the pressing questions about life.
All Human Nature is Ultimately Religious
Now, in talking about this law professor’s statement, let me repeat it here for you. He said, “You can’t teach honesty in the legal profession. Our students come to us with their values set. I still say that the best way to obtain honesty in the legal profession is to have a few good disbarments.”
About this statement, I’ve already suggested that underneath the surface of many things that we say and do there are moral issues of great importance. You see you can’t decide whether that lawyer is right until you’ve answered some of those fundamental questions about whether right conduct ought to be forced and why men do good, and even more basic, is there a difference between right and wrong. Much of life is this way. And I suppose not many things that you do in the course of a day are without some moral and theological significance.
A long time ago I came across a very arresting statement which I have used many times in trying to get these ideas across. The statement is made by Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc, an Anglo-French essayist (1870-1953), novelist who happily writes in English. Belloc, who is a Roman Catholic, tells of a statement which was made to him by the eminent English prelate Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808-1892). Belloc says he did not understand the statement when Manning made it, but his respect for Manning was so great that he could not believe the statement was foolish. Later on, he began to understand it and he says, “it has been a search light for much of my thinking.” Here is what the cardinal said: “All human conflict is ultimately theological.”
Now, I’ve shown you how in the statement by the lawyer there really are theological and moral issues underneath the surface. I would like very much for us to begin to see that our everyday life is filled with comments and behavior, under the surface of which, there do lie similar theological and moral judgments. Let me try to illustrate this: “All human conflict is ultimately theological.”
What is one of the great examples of human conflict in American society today? Indubitably, it is the race question. In one way or another this question hangs over the entire country in many ways. Now, what is the nature of this struggle, anyway? How do you account for it? What are the basic differences?
A lot of explanations can be given. You can say that it’s basically an economic conflict, if you wish, that it has to do with the price of labor. The roots go back into Southern aristocracy and their exploitation of the colored person. That the white people wouldn’t be afraid of equal rights for coloreds except they want to continue exploiting the economic advantage which they have. It is an economic conflict.
You can say it’s basically a political conflict if you wish. It’s a matter of the vote and who puts people in office, and where the majorities are. The white man wouldn’t be afraid of equal rights except the present political structure is oriented in a way that would be upset if a colored man got to the ballot box. We afraid of that. We don’t want the political system upset, we don’t want too many people voting the other way. It’s basically a political conflict.
You can say that it’s a social or cultural conflict. You can say there’s no moral issues here, there’s no political economic issues, it’s just social That’s all. There was the Old South and we haven’t gotten over it yet. The Southern aristocracy, with their caste system, the Brahmins of the South and the North too, developed this stratification and we just haven’t gotten over it that’s all. Give us another hundred years or so and some of these social patterns may begin to work out. It is a cultural conflict.
Surely, there is truth in all of these things but when we try to look below the surface for the possibility of other kinds of judgments, what about this: The basic issue in the race question is the nature of man. The basic issue is this, are all men equal, or are there some men who are inherently inferior?
I heard the other day a story about a guy Mr. Burge (the college’s Assoc. Professor of Mathematics) knows, a hippie type whom we met at the university. He has a girlfriend who is very religious. When he goes to visit her home, her mother doesn’t like him at all. He’d been going with her for a long time now and she still refers to him as the boy. She refers to him to his face as this. He said, “I’m not even sure she thinks I’m a full human being.”
The nature of man. What is man anyway? What is the colored man? What is the white man? Now class, any time you begin talking about the nature of man you have opened up a major theological issue, a major moral issue. When you say man IS, you’re making a far-reaching value judgment. All human conflict is ultimately theological. And if we could get agreement among American people on the nature of man we wouldn’t solve the race question. But we’d see a lot of things more clearly than we do and the solution to some of the vexatious social, political, and economic questions would be closer to hand.
Now, I would like very much for you to do some keen thinking about yourself in these terms. If all human conflict is theological then underneath the kind of person you are, the things you say and do, there are probably some value judgments, some theological commitments of this sort. Once a student came running into my office from another professor’s class. No, he wasn’t even into the professor’s class but he’d heard this terrible rumor, “In so-and-so class you have to write a 10-page paper on what I believe about God.” He was really pushing the panic button. “I’ve never gone to church. I’ve never gone to Sunday school. I’m not religious. I don’t believe anything about God.”
Was he right? Are there people who don’t believe anything about God? Well, I doubt it. You may want to argue with me, but I doubt it. Even the person who claims he doesn’t think about God, I have to ask, why doesn’t he? Either he thinks God doesn’t exist or he thinks God isn’t important.
By the way those are two very widespread postures in the man’s relationship to God and they are both theological statements. “There is no god” or “God is not important,” are theological statements. They may not sound very pious but they are judgments about matters which belong to the discipline of theology.
The Presuppositions of My Life[1]
Okay, so underneath the surface of everybody’s thinking and living there are commitments which are basically theological or religious. And that leads me to talk about a thinking and writing exercise you will find profitable.
I'm calling this exercise, “The Pre-suppositions of My Life,” and it's a paper I suggest you write.
I want you to do the kind of thinking which is important for a college student to do about himself and about his own beliefs. Now, this is entirely on you. I don’t want you to think superficially and write about what you’ve been taught to believe or even what you think you believe, as though you could now or in 10 or 15 minutes jot down. I want you to think more deeply than this.
Suppose that someone just sees you operating over a period of days and weeks, even in the privacy of your room when you're alone, and then tries to deduce the three things which are most important to you. What would he say? Why do you act the way you do? Now you can answer this question much better than any observer because you know why you act as you do. You may not have thought about it, but it’s there. And I want you to kind of burrow underneath the surface and ask, “What makes me tick?” “What makes me act the way I do?” Because it is these things which are really the important theological beliefs that you hold. You may be able to rattle off the Apostle’s Creed and say I believe all this. But maybe you don’t act as though you believed all that.
I want you to know what it is. I want you to be able to articulate what it is you believe, what guides your life and the decisions that you make. I want you to see what are the things that are really important to you. What are the loyalties, the commitments? What kind of priorities do you have? Every decision you make implies a priority. Think through and write down why you'd rather do this than that, and why.
Here is what I think will happen and how this will sharpen your moral thinking. As soon as you start saying, “This is more important than that,” you are saying, “This is better than that.” And when you use the word “better,” you are right in the middle of ethical language, moral discourse. How do you know it’s better? Why is it better? And you’re off. I’m suggesting that every one of us are acting on pre-suppositions which are essentially religious in character, and I want you to burrow down and find out what these are for yourself.
You may think you are not a religious person. Well, in the sense that I am talking about you are. You may not be a Christian person but behind the things you say and do, there are commitments to certain ideas, perhaps to certain ideals. It’s those commitments I want you to disclose to yourself. When you get them out in the open I think you’ll probably see that they do have moral and theological ramifications.
Now, most of you never thought about yourself this way and it will be a hard thing to do and perhaps painful. I hope you will do it for your own sake. I sometimes wonder why I make this kind of assignment. I don’t give this one every semester, but sometimes. Does it really make anybody do any thinking or not? Once I told this to a girl who had been in my class. She’s long gone from campus now. I said, “I’m not sure that assignment really works.” She said, “It worked on me. I hated you for it.” She said, “I was satisfied with the pre-suppositions I had, and I didn’t want to examine them.” Well, let’s don’t be afraid of ourselves. Let’s don’t be afraid of finding out what really makes us operate if we can.
[Now of course you're on your own. I can't collect papers and mark them from readers of this book of lectures. But set yourself a deadline, no further into the future than a couple weeks. That's all you should need. And, yes, if you were to write this paper at the end of the lecture series your thinking and your writing about your presuppositions might be different. I hope so, at least.
Gives yourself a serious deadline. And don’t wait till the night before. If you do that you'll be giving yourself some superficial, patched up hash, that doesn’t mean anything and it won’t do you any good. For your own sake, the first free period you’ve got begin writing some stuff down to help your own thinking develop. Thoughts will come, if you start putting them down on paper. I often take a topic and begin writing things down just as they come to me. And I hardly ever do this but before I finish writing I’ve gotten a lot of new ideas that I would never have got if I just sat there and cerebrated. So, get your pencil out and begin writing things down. Give your paper a chance to grow and develop.
I heard a story about the humorist Irvin Cobb (1876-1944) to whom someone once sent a manuscript for him to read. Cobb found it terribly dull. When he gave it back to the author he said, “Did you say you wrote this in a week?”
The author said, “Yes.”
Cobb said, “What took you so long?”
Now you don’t want to feel that way about your paper. So, give it a chance to grow and develop.
All right, I’ll see you next time.
[1] Originally, this final section of Lecture 1 describes an opinion paper that each student was required to write for Dr. Walter's review. Here it has been edited as a suggested exercise for the reader.
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