In his biography of Harold S. Bender (1897-1962), Albert Keim wrote, " 'The Bible Department is becoming quite weak,' he [Bender] told Wenger. 'We cannot afford to have Norman Kraus become the chairman, and no one else is ready.' " Then Keim adds, "Bender was concerned about Kraus's theological stance" (pp. 505-06). Now, some forty years later, the current changes on the Mennonite theological scene make a further explanation of the content of this "theological stance" desirable for the record.

Business sessions of the Bible faculty, which included all teachers in the college Bible and the Th.B. program, during 1953-60 was dominated by Bender's plans to upgrade the Th.B. to a graduate seminary degree. This required that the Bible faculty be divided into undergraduate and graduate divisions, and the accreditation association did not approve of graduate teachers teaching in the college Bible curriculum. The "weakness" of the Bible Department in the early 1960s that Bender indicates simply refers to the fact that most of the teachers in what had been a combined College Bible and Theological Seminary faculty had been shifted to the newly separated seminary, leaving the undergraduate Bible Department inadequately manned.

While Bender was busy forming the new seminary organization, curriculum, and faculty, he insisted on also remaining the chairman of the college Bible Department. Unfortunately in his zeal to form an independent seminary he had not given the needed attention to forming a strong Bible faculty or to developing an undergraduate curriculum. He made it clear that he expected J. Lawrence Burkholder and me to continue as teachers in the Bible Department. Presumably Burkholder would be the chairman of the Department. But at the time of his remark to Wenger (1960) Burkholder was leaving for Harvard and I would not return from Duke University for another year. The faculty for the coming year would be largely made up of temporary and part-time teachers.

I do not think there was any suggestion that either Burkholder or I were considered weak teachers, or unqualified for the positions. Indeed, Bender acknowledges in his statement that I am the only one qualified to be chair of the department. That was his problem! In the summer of 1960 I had made a special trip to Goshen to talk with President Mininger and settle the conditions under which I would be willing to return from Duke to teach at Goshen. While I had no qualms about my reputation as a teacher, there was as yet no tenure policy for Goshen faculty, and the "theological" situation was tense. Thus I think Keim's conclusion that Bender's problem was my "theological thrust" is most probably correct.

I had received a B.A. degree in Bible from Goshen in 1946, and a B.D. in 1951, and I had been on the faculty since 1951. (Keim incorrectly says that my B.A. was from Eastern Mennonite College.) I had recently received my Ph.D. from Duke, and I was returning to the Bible Department as the lone representative of the 1951 faculty. Even though Bender's close colleague, Paul Mininger, had become president of the college, and the president's office retained its special prerogative to regulate the department, Bender was fearful that I could not be trusted to chair it. So while he was still in charge he arranged for John C. Wenger to stay with the college as chairman of the Bible Department. Positions were still somewhat fluid at that point, so it is not quite clear whether Wenger was being asked to "stay" or to "return" to undergraduate teaching.

I was quite willing to work under the chairmanship of Wenger. We were longtime colleagues and friends, and heading the department was the only possible rationale Bender could give for asking him to move back into undergraduate teaching. As it turned out Wenger was not at all happy to have been left out of the newly formed seminary, and after Bender's death Mininger arranged for him to move to the theology department of the seminary. Thereupon I became head of the undergraduate department and worked with President Mininger and Dean Carl Kreider to develop curriculum and recruit faculty.

It was no secret that Bender was suspicious of my "theological stance." I felt that he had distinctly cooled toward me by 1955 when I returned from a year at Princeton Theological Seminary. It was my experience there that made me decide to pursue American religious studies rather than follow his lead into sixteenth-century Anabaptist studies. And it was no secret that he associated me with John W. Miller, a Concern group member and colleague on the Goshen faculty, who, as Keim indicates, was not in Bender's good graces. He had planned the dismissal of John in a not-too-subtle arrangement: he was to take a leave, and was then not to be hired back.
But what were the theological issues? First, I must note that they were only in the most general sense "theological." Orientation or temperament would be a more accurate designation than "stance." I will not try to list the items of tension in any order of chronology or significance. Most of them, as it will be clear with their listing, have long since ceased to be issues in the church.

One of the major causes of tension concerned the concept of the church and church organization. Influenced by the Concern Group's theology some of us younger faculty organized a "koinonia group" in which we sought to find renewal and integrity as followers of Christ. Keim refers to this in his biography on pages 469 following. We even had the temerity on one occasion to share the Lord's Supper. Since the group happened to be meeting at my home that evening, and since I was an ordained minister at the time, Bender reminded me that I had seriously overstepped my prerogatives in the Indiana-Michigan Conference. He ticked off the offenses. I had assumed the authority of a bishop. I had not gotten permission from my bishop to have a communion service, and I had not asked permission of the bishop in whose district the event took place. Further, the koinonia group was not a recognized congregational body. Shades of sixteenth-century Zurich! He was very concerned that our group would become a schismatic faction. Ironically, in this situation he was much nearer to Ulrich Zwingli in spirit than he was to Conrad Grebel, the Anabaptist leader whom he idealized in his biography.

In this same vein he one time expressed his disapproval and caution when I urged a large spiritual life conference on campus to give more place and freedom to the Holy Spirit in the life of the church. I made the statement that in effect the traditional Trinity of the Mennonite Church had been "God the Father, Son and Holy Bible," and that we needed to put more emphasis on the authority of the Spirit. In this connection I had quoted Donald Baillie (God Was In Christ, 1948), and he cautioned me about following his theology, although I'm quite certain he had not read Baillie at that point. All this was at least a decade before the charismatic movement impacted the church, and it represented a theological perspective that threatened the authority of church leadership based on "biblical" injunctions.

Further, Bender and my other colleagues knew full well that I had serious questions about the adequacy of the "inerrancy" theory of biblical inspiration on which to ground the authority of the Bible. I had written a paper analyzing the implications and weakness of inerrancy in the mid-50s that was shared with the faculty in duplicated form, but never published. Then in 1958 I read a paper to a faculty seminar, entitled "The Religious Use of Language," which deeply disturbed Paul Mininger. Of course, by 1960 many of us on the Bible faculty questioned the doctrine of inerrancy, and when the Mennonite Confession of Faith was published in 1963 the word itself was dropped. Even John C. Wenger, who had a great deal to do with the formulation of this Confession, was willing to see our doctrinal statement refocused and reworded.

Another area of tension between Bender and me had to do with the limits of academic freedom to examine or debate issues that were considered "liberal." From the reopening of Goshen College in 1924 up until the early fifties, public lectures and discussions of controversial theological topics were carefully circumscribed. For example, during the 1950s public discussion of the theory of evolution was still limited to lectures by anti-evolution speakers. Class texts in the Bible Department were chosen with extreme care. Dependable classics and reprints were used where possible. Each year for his course in The Acts Bender scoured the secondhand bookstores for copies of G. T. Purves, Christianity in the Apostolic Age (1900) that had long been out of print.

Books by authors considered "liberal" or "modernist" were excluded from the library shelves lest students find and read them. When I assigned a chapter for collateral reading from a currently published textbook on the New Testament, a chapter that I thought quite acceptable, Bender reprimanded me, saying, "Don't you think that the students can read other [non-acceptable] chapters as well?" After I returned from Duke, at an opportune moment I suggested to Bender that the time had come to add liberal and modernist books from an earlier era to the library for purposes of graduate students' research projects. He cautiously agreed. The number and quality of the library holdings were a major concern of the accrediting agency, and Bender was determined to have accreditation.

This was a time when the academic options of Mennonite scholars were beginning to broaden. Prior to the 1960s Bender had carefully steered his proteges into the right seminaries and graduate schools. He had also suggested what their fields of study should be. In my case he had chosen Princeton for my Th.M. studies, although he had by then begun to have some doubts about Princeton's theological orientation. While at Princeton I wrote a Master's thesis on the rise of dispensational theology in nineteenth-century American Christianity-a movement that had caused much tension and controversy in Mennonite circles as well. Under the tutelage of Professor Lefferts Loetscher I began to see the significance of understanding American Christianity and became convinced that its study was of critical importance for twentieth-century Mennonites. Thus when I looked for a graduate school to finish my Ph.D., I looked for both a qualified faculty and library resources to study American church history and theology. I chose Duke University, a school not on Bender's recommended list.

Up to the sixties, historical research and teaching of both College Bible and seminary faculty had majored in Mennonite history and the sixteenth century. Now with increasing Mennonite exposure to and participation in American society, I began to realize how little we understood the modern society in which we operated. So I proposed to Bender, who at that time was still head of the Bible Department, that upon my return to Goshen College I be allowed to introduce a new course entitled Protestant Christianity and locate the Mennonite History course within this broader context. I also urged that American Church History be made a staple of the new seminary curriculum and offered to teach it. Bender was not supportive of either suggestion although he did agree to let me teach Protestant Christianity in the college, which became a requirement so long as I was at the college.

These were the major issues upon which we had explicit verbal exchange as I remember them. I found out years later that he and other senior colleagues on the faculty had made trips to Illinois to pacify congregational leaders and parents who were upset by student reports about what I and others had said in class, but he never discussed these with me. I was told by some who had been involved in those discussions that he assured them that we "loved the church" and he thought he could keep us under control. If there were other theological issues, I was not aware of them.
"Dean Bender," as I knew him was a theological conservative, but not a fundamentalist; a pragmatic churchman more interested in denominational unity than in theological precision; and he was a consummate manager who had no qualms about using others as well as himself for the church as he envisioned it. I, on the other hand, was concerned about theological precision and integrity of expression in the life of the church. And, I must add from this vantage point in history, I was extremely naïve in the realm of church politics. Today I suspect that the scenario might have played out differently. We might actually have sat down and talked over our differences.§