Last night, I ran across the following autobiographical note in a recent book by Craig Blomberg:
In college, from 1973 to 1977, I majored in religion at a private liberal arts college that in many respects was running from its Christian heritage as fast as it could.
(Craig L. Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? [Grand Rapids, Michigan: Brazos Press, 2014], 5.)In an endnote Blomberg helpfully supplies some details:
Augustana College, Rock Island, IL., 1973-1977. Until 1962 the college had housed a Lutheran seminary. A long-tenured and highly-beloved president, Conrad Bergendorff, had been a masterful champion of the highest levels of academic achievement within a framework of informed but devout Christian faith. Under Thomas Tredway, the president inaugurated during my student days, attention was given almost exclusively to the academic goals. The religion department (no longer the department of Christianity as under Bergendorff) was most eager to expose students to virtually every perspective except the historic, pietistic Lutheranism (or its equivalent in other denominations) that had characterized the school before the mid-1960s.
(Blomberg, Can We Still Believe the Bible? 229 n. 23.)I sense a pattern here.
