We are talking about F***** Seminary right? Any chance there's a link to the fact that they were one of the first evangelical schools to let go of inerrancy in their statement of faith?
It depends on who you talk to about it. The current president seems quite satisfied with the direction and even a little proud of their openness (as was his predecessor).
The former president wanted to establish the school as an "open" evangelical institution. In my day the largest group of students were from the PCUSA. It was considered a conservative school by mainline standards. The former president, a brilliant OT scholar and graduate of another one of my alma mater institutions, Westmont, wanted to encourage students to distinguish themselves from the narrow sectarian mindset of fundamentalism and (increasingly in the minds of faculty members) evangelicalism. He served on a committee in CA back in the 70s advocating evolution in schools and discrediting creationism as wrong-headed hermeneutics.
The current president has a very inclusive view of the faith. He wants to position the school with an open door to everyone for dialog. So, you find him in Salt Lake apologizing for evangelicals to the Mormons, with rabbinical reps, with Inmans and Islamic scholars, etc. His Grand Rapids Calvinism (honed as a trained philosopher, founder of Evangelicals for McGovern back in the early 70s, and former prof at Calvin) positions him to prefer asking leading questions to giving answers.
One of the residents in the retirement home where I work (and a dear friend) is Dan F*****, son of the founder. He was perhaps the first name evangelical to go in print with a limited inerrancy view back in the late '60s. Lindsell said it was the effect of Barth and Cullmann on Dan when he was doing a second doctorate in Basel.
I think it was his conservative nature. He is a deeply pious man who can bring you to tears with his prayers. However, he struggled with the phenomena of the Bible. One of his existential struggles was over the fact that Jesus said that the mustard seed was the smallest seed and we know it wasn't. His recourse to "defend" inerrancy was to narrow the scope of the affirmation to merely the salvific areas of Scripture.
After Dan went public in the 60s with modifications, it did not take long for cutting edge profs to push for a less embarrassing less "fundamentalistic" doctrine of the Bible. The change to the seminary doctrinal statement came a few years before my arrival as a student.
In my day we were taught that the Pentateuch was "mosaic" only in the sense that it was a mosaic of bits and pieces cobbled together hundreds of years later (700s?); Jonah was only a literary device, a parable if you will; Daniel was penned during the time of Antiochus Ephiphanes as a pious forgery; Jesus never said many of the things attributed to him; Paul did not write Ephesians; only God knows who wrote Revelation; and while heterosexual marriage is to be seen as God's ideal, a realistic church will bless gay unions as an alternative to one night stands. The most definitive things taught (that I can remember) were that Francis Schaeffer was a rationalistic and divisive sectarian, Carl Henry had a paper pope and reason for his god; Harold Lindsell was a number of very unfavorable things; and that, theologically considered, Jesus was the prodigal son who went into the far country). I can even remember that one of my profs wrote a book defending Judas as still within the universal love and redemptive purpose of God. Also during my years, one of the profs was quoted in the L.A. Times defending the errors in the Bible as proof of its inspiration. An errorless Bible would be docetic, don't you know.
One of the students (and a favorite of the faculty) was a Roman catholic monk working on his PhD in theology. If memory serves me, he was a T.A. for some of the theology profs (this could be errant, but it is accurate to the best of my recollections).
So, steadfast7, it all depends on what came first: the chicken or the egg. An historian writing about the period a century from now will probably place the blame/credit on my friend Dan. However, during my time there he was in the top one percent of the most conservative faculty.
My wife often comments that she is embarrassed to have her degree from ["The-School-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named"]. When some new outrage surfaces, she threatens (so far merely threatening) to send her diploma back. My threshold for cognitive dissonance is evidently pretty high so my reaction is alternately one of grief and bemusement. At this stage of my "pilgrimage," my conservatism is probably more of an embarrassment to them than they are to me.
