Against ambiguity
A response to Richard Hughes
In 2004, Pepperdine’s Center for Faith and Learning published a booklet called “Scholarship, Pepperdine University, and the Legacy of Churches of Christ,” comprising a series of essays by religion professors Richard T. Hughes and Thomas H. Olbricht. The idea was that the booklet would help orient faculty and staff to Pepperdine’s ongoing relationship with Churches of Christ and provide some ideas about the conceptual resources available in that faith tradition to support the work of the university.
My favorite essay in the collection is “Faith and Learning at Pepperdine University” by Hughes, whom I admire as a historian of both the university and Churches of Christ. It offers a great overview of 65 years of the university’s history, focusing especially on how the institution has related to the church.
Hughes and I disagree, however, about one part of this essay, where he argues that George Pepperdine’s vision of how the college should relate to the church was fundamentally ambiguous, allowing different factions to exploit the inexactness of his (i.e., the founder’s) statements to take the church relationship in two different directions over the history of the university. Hughes writes, “Because Mr. Pepperdine defined his school in terms of character and piety, not in terms of theology or orthodox belief—and certainly not in terms of church control—he created a sizable pocket of ambiguity surrounding the church relationship.”
I won’t tarry too long on this point because the crux of our disagreement lies elsewhere, but I do want to express my confusion re: Hughes’s accusation that Mr. Pepperdine didn’t define his school in terms of orthodox belief. Hughes seems to think that, because Mr. Pepperdine’s 400-word “Founder’s Statement” in a June 1937 college bulletin contains few references to particular doctrinal requirements, orthodoxy must have played no part in his thinking about the college.
This claim is puzzling if for no other reason than that Hughes himself recounts on the same page a July 1937 letter from Mr. Pepperdine to the college’s first president Batsell Baxter, listing all the doctrinal requirements for faculty and giving a fairly specific definition of what he means by “Church of Christ.” The letter requires the faculty and the board of trustees to endorse “fundamental Christian faith” and “sound doctrine,” including the deity of Christ, the virgin birth, Christ’s miracles, the atonement, the inspiration of the Bible, the authority of the New Testament for church practices, and a particular understanding of baptism characteristic of Churches of Christ. It also requires faculty and board members to be “members in good standing” of a church that regularly observes communion and excludes instrumental music from worship.1
If this letter is not evidence that Mr. Pepperdine’s conception of his college involved significant concern with orthodox belief, I can’t imagine what kind of evidence would suffice. Hughes downplays the letter by speculating that it was actually written by Baxter and only signed by Mr. Pepperdine, a speculation that has not been adopted by subsequent historians as far as I know. But even if the letter didn’t originate from the founder’s pen, I don’t see why that should cause us to discount the seriousness with which he envisioned the orthodoxy of the faculty and board. After all, Hughes himself also writes that Mr. Pepperdine embraced the doctrine of Churches of Christ “as enthusiastically as anyone of his era,” citing his (i.e., Mr. Pepperdine’s) tract “More Than Life.”
Still, putting aside the question of orthodoxy, the root of my disagreement with Hughes is that I just don’t think Mr. Pepperdine’s vision of the church relationship was all that ambiguous, at least, not in the sense that he (i.e., Mr. Pepperdine) didn’t know what he thought or that his writing about the school’s church relationship is indistinct or doubtful.
To the extent there’s any ambiguity at all in Mr. Pepperdine’s writing on this subject, it’s because he spoke about it differently for different audiences. On the whole, he was freer among audiences that shared his background in Churches of Christ and more guarded among wider audiences.
For instance, at the 1949 Pepperdine Bible Lectureship, he gave a speech to the brethren entitled “What is a Christian College.” He spoke freely of his intention that members of the church keep control over the direction of the institution: “The George Pepperdine College trustees are 100% members of the church of Christ and likewise all the faculty in the religion department. Our faculty teaching academic subjects—the regular or permanent members of the faculty—are largely members of the church of Christ.” He was also clear that non-members were welcome to come as students or to hold certain faculty positions: “Shall we close our doors to other students because they are not members of the church of Christ? There are many young people of other faiths and many with no religion clamoring to get in. The Bible does not say anything about how a college should be run.”
If Mr. Pepperdine’s view of the church relationship were uncertain or open to multiple interpretations, you would not expect to find him speaking about it as clearly as he does in this speech and in his 1937 letter to president Baxter.
It is true, however, that Mr. Pepperdine was more guarded before mixed audiences. Hughes discusses at some length the “Founder’s Statement,” in which Mr. Pepperdine forgoes all talk of Churches of Christ in favor of a broader emphasis on a “wholesome Christian atmosphere,” “devout Christian men and women,” and “Christian living and fundamental Christian faith.”
Likewise, in his September 1937 dedicatory address, delivered before an audience of 2,000 that included the governor of California and the mayor of Los Angeles, Mr. Pepperdine again held his tongue on the specifics of his vision for the institution’s relationship with Churches of Christ, preferring to speak broadly of “Christian influence,” “a foundation of Christian character and faith,” “conservative, Fundamental Christian supervision,” and so on.
I don’t think it’s fair to conclude on the basis of these latter two sources, as Hughes does, that “when Mr. Pepperdine defined the religious mission of his college, he avoided any mention of the Church of Christ.” As we have seen in other sources, including the 1937 letter to Baxter, Mr. Pepperdine cast a detailed vision of the school’s religious mission that cannot be understood apart from his particular commitment to Church of Christ doctrine.
Steven Lemley has speculated that Mr. Pepperdine used Christian in settings like these, intending the word to be heard in two different ways by the different parts of the audience.2 Members of Churches of Christ may have heard Christian to mean “relating to Churches of Christ,” while the rest of the audience probably understood it to have a broader referent. Mr. Pepperdine’s talk of “Christian influence” and so forth might thus best be regarded as his attempt to be “all things to all people”—he sought to communicate solidarity to members of the church without alienating his wider audience.
Hughes’s argument re: ambiguity seems to hinge in large part on one line from the “Founder’s Statement,” where Mr. Pepperdine explains that the college “shall be a private enterprise, not connected with any church, and shall not solicit contributions from the churches.” Hughes correctly connects this requirement with the founder’s commitment to Sommerism, which I’ve discussed at some length here, but I fear his (i.e., Hughes’s) talk of “ambiguity” gives undue credence to an unfortunate interpretation of this line that I have come to associate with Woodrow Whitten, a professor of social science at the college who played a role in orchestrating the mass resignation of 1958.
Whitten was part of a faction at the college that Hughes identifies with the person of Earl V. Pullias, the dean of the college from 1940 to 1957. Pullias and Whitten were members of the church, but they and their faction thought that George Pepperdine College would be unable to achieve academic excellence if it were forced to maintain a close connection to Churches of Christ. They preferred to think of the college as broadly Christian but not related to any particular church, and they cited—perhaps cynically—Mr. Pepperdine’s founding statement to the effect that the college should be “not connected with any church” as support for this position, ignoring the context of that statement, which makes clear (i.e., the context does) that Mr. Pepperdine’s disavowal of a church connection has everything to do with the founder’s Sommerite suspicion of a specific funding arrangement (again, see my previous discussion of Sommerism) and nothing at all to do with denouncing a privileged relationship with a particular church, viz. Churches of Christ.
If there’s any lingering question as to the intention behind the founder’s “not connected with any church” line, consider that he repeats it verbatim toward the end of his 1949 “What is a Christian College” speech, where his chief aim is to convince his church audience that the college is theologically sound. In the context of this speech, it is clear that the line is inspired by his Sommerite misgivings about allowing churches to fund colleges rather than a desire to distance the college from the church.
In 1957 when Mr. Pepperdine and the rest of the board of trustees became convinced that the college had drifted too far from the church, they acted decisively to remove Pullias from the deanship, a move that inspired Whitten et al. to resign in protest early in 1958, just ahead of an accreditation visit from the Western College Association, putting the college’s future in jeopardy.3
If, as Hughes argues, Mr. Pepperdine’s statements about his intentions for the church relationship are truly ambiguous in the sense of being “unclear or inexact because a choice between alternatives has not been made,”4 why did he (Mr. Pepperdine) so firmly and definitively oppose the interpretation of his statements promoted by Pullias and Whitten?
Given the evidence, I can see no better alternative than to regard Mr. Pepperdine as having a rather fixed idea of how the college should relate to the church.
George Pepperdine to Batsell Baxter, 21 July 1937, reproduced in Minutes of the Board of Trustees, vol. 1, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA): 22–23.
Steven Lemley, “The Power of Paradox,” 5 May 2010, Box 26, Folder 4, David Baird papers, SCUA.
Howard A. White, “Crisis at Pepperdine College: A Decisive Change in Administration 1957–1958,” “Introduction to Restricted Files” folder, box 63, Howard A. White papers, SCUA.
Definition from Oxford Languages.