Chugging on toward its ninetieth year, Pepperdine University is now serving its sixth generation of students. While much about the institution has changed in that period, a chain of curators has preserved Pepperdine’s mission to marry academic excellence with Christian commitment. But I do think the way the university talks about its mission has shifted. I’ll trace that evolution, but first you’d better know something about Admetus.
The Greeks told the story of a crazed old king Pelias of Iolcus, who is overrun with suitors for the hand of his beautiful daughter Alcestis. Pelias announces that he’ll give the princess in marriage to the first suitor who can yoke a lion and a boar to his chariot. Loads of heroes try and fail because lions and boars don’t play nice with charioteers or with each other. Then one day, king Admetus of neighboring Pherae enlists the help of the god Apollo, harnesses the snorting beasts, and drives the chariot to Iolcus to pick up his new bride.
Pepperdine has often conceived of itself as a type of Admetus, heroically wrestling faith and reason into the traces and getting them to pull straight with the help of God, where many have failed before. In a 1976 letter to The Graphic, president William Banowsky explained the tension between Pepperdine’s aims: “What we are attempting, then, is to achieve a delicate balance between spiritual intensity and genuine academic distinction. It will not be easy. It would be simpler, philosophically, to be either a Bible college, on the one hand, or an utterly secular university on the other. To combine spiritual commitment with academic openness is to tread the narrow edge of unrelieved intellectual tension.”1
Counterproductive as this tension might seem, former provost Steven Lemley finds it fruitful: “George Pepperdine initiated the dilemma from which the institution has never escaped. I believe it has proven to be a constructive dilemma and that our unique institutional character has been formed out of our tensions. [...] Most organizations live with their own dialectical tensions, we draw life and energy from ours.”2
This view of the university as Admetus seems to me to have dominated the twentieth century. I find echoes of it more recently both in the university’s vision statement, which suggests faith and learning require “integration,” and in the 2018 annual report in which outgoing president Andrew Benton claimed for Pepperdine a “third way.” I’ve dabbled in third-way rhetoric myself.
But more recently, Admetus seems challenged by a different strain of thought, according to which, far from being in tension with each other, academic excellence and Christian commitment each demand the other. The clearest articulation of this view I’ve found is by Richard Hughes, the founding director of Pepperdine’s Center for Faith and Learning: “In my judgment, it is simply a mistake to assume that tension must inevitably characterize the relationship between Christian faith and the life of the mind. The fact is, the values of the Christian faith are eminently compatible with the values of the academy at every crucial point.”3
This compatibilist view has proven influential over the last 25 years. As provost, Darryl Tippens re-interpreted the founding through this lens, declaring in a speech clearly influenced by Hughes that, “Mr. Pepperdine saw no contradiction between these twin goals. He believed that his college should offer a comprehensive education founded on solid scholarship and faith in the teachings of Scripture.”4
Under the Gash administration, the compatibilist view has received the institutional imprimatur, appearing repeatedly in the 2030 strategic plan Ascend Together. President Gash’s vision for the future of the university favors compatibilism: “We steadfastly refuse to separate the sacred from the secular and reject the notion that achieving excellence in both faith and scholarship is either impossible or incompatible.” And the strategic plan itself affirms that faith and scholarship are “compatible, and indeed, complementary.”
It’s not clear to me how much distance there is between the compatibilist view and the tensionist view within the Pepperdine context. Tensionists wouldn’t urge a balancing act they thought was actually impossible, so they must agree that the balance is possible in principle. But if it’s not compatibility that’s at issue, the question seems to be just how hard we think it is to bring the lion and the boar under the same yoke.
William S. Banowsky, “Banowsky denies secularization,” The Graphic, 9 Apr. 1976: 6.
Steven S. Lemley, “The Power of Paradox,” 5 May 2010, David Baird papers, box 26, folder 4, Pepperdine University Special Collections and University Archives.
Richard T. Hughes, “The Idea of a Christian University,” 19 Sept. 2000: 7.
Darryl Tippens, “Pepperdine, Picasso, and the Idea of the Christian University,” Mar. 2004.