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That was fun, buddy. How do you know those were the first people I've talked for three years? You didn't know what killed Mrs. Harris.

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At one time I timed him, 19 minutes. Welcome again to the centennial celebration of Austin Presbyterian Seminary. We're delighted that you're here tonight for this second of three lectures. The third one will be at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning here after the 9 o'clock coffee fellowship to which you are all invited.

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We will shortly sing together, but we're not singing the seminary hymn tonight. But I've been asked to tell you that throughout the year of 2002, you may copy it and use it as freely as you want to without anybody's written permission. And I got that from the man of the big medallion.

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Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth or ever you had formed the world and the earth from everlasting to everlasting, you are God. Let us sing to God's praises using the blue hymn books, number 457, 457, the Calvin hymn, which has been sung so many times in this chapel before. Let us join again, and if you can, pluralize the pronouns so that we're singing, We greet thee, our hearts, as we are all together here tonight.

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Let us sing. Let us pray. Our prayer is an adaptation of Francis of Assisi's best-known prayers. Lord, make us instruments of your peace.

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Where there is hatred, let us show love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith. Where there is despair, hope.

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where there is sadness, joy, and where there is darkness, light. O Divine Master, grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, not so much to be understood, as to understand not so much to be loved as to love for it is in giving that we receive it is in pardoning that we are pardoned and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life and let the people say In our family's 42-year membership in the Austin Seminary community, there have been very few years that some member of the Texas Curry family has not been deeply involved in the life of the school as teacher, student, trustee, or supportive friends.

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We are all grateful. Jane and our four children and those who have shared our life here are all grateful for the shared memories which include such unforgettable, giving people. Tonight, I have the privilege of presenting the Reverend Dr. James Stewart Curry, the second Curry, to research and write the history of our beloved school.

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as he continues his illuminating, solid, insightful reports on our most recent quarter century. He and Joanne, who are both here, are both leaders of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Houston, where he is the pastor and she is the director of Christian education. We welcome them. and all of you to this chapel and this campus, which has been, in a sense, our weekday home church.

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And we expectantly prepare to listen to calming times, building times, 1985 till now. Following his lecture, he will lead us in prayer, And then we will recess to the reception in McChord. Jim provides me with what my doctoral professor, William F.

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Albright, whose biography was entitled A 20th Century Genius, what he called and confused us all with the greatest privilege of the professor, learning from his students. Jim, we're glad to be here to learn from you tonight. Thank you, Prescott. And again, I want to reiterate the word of thanks that I tried to express last night to Dr.

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Shelton and to all the members of the seminary community and administration for helping me produce these lectures and the research that went into them. I mentioned last night that it's both an honor and something of an awkward privilege to do this. That should be -- the latter part of that should be very clear tonight as the portion of the history of Austin Seminary that I'm covering tonight includes the presidencies of two men who are in the audience tonight.

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I discovered last night after last night's lecture that not every single thing that I said was absolutely accurate, and it was not intentional, but that's the risk I run by violating Jack Stott's principle of not teaching about dead people. I'm grateful that you are alive, Jack and Bob, but I hope that You will be as gentle with me tonight as you were last night, and I hope that this is close to being not only accurate, but truthful. So welcome to This Is Your Life, part two.

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Changes were afoot in this country in the decade of the 1980s. One development was the way in which women assumed more visible positions of leadership in the United States. In 1980, a conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, was elected president.

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It was President Reagan who appointed the first woman Sandra Day O'Connor to the United States Supreme Court. In 1983, Sally Ride, whose sister is a Presbyterian minister, became the first American woman astronaut to travel in space. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro became the first woman candidate to appear on a major party ticket.

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when she was Walter Mondale's vice presidential choice on that ticket. Internationally, in 1985, the year that Jack and Virginia Stotts moved to Austin, Konstantin Chernenko, leader of the Soviet Union, died and was replaced by a young, dynamic leader by the name of Mikhail Gorbachev. At 54 years old, Gorbachev was of a different generation than that of his predecessors and called for more openness in Soviet society through a policy called glasnost.

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Within four years, this policy would lead to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the rise of democracy in many former Soviet satellite countries. The election of Jack Stotts as the new president represented a new beginning of sorts for Austin Seminary. The steady and calming leadership provided by Ellis Nelson, as we saw last night, did much to create a sense of eagerness and goodwill as the seminary community anticipated the arrival of Dr. Stotts.

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A native of Dallas, and a graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio, Stotts had grown up in the United Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, the northern branch of the two main strands of the Presbyterian Church. He received his BD from McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago in 1957, where he studied under such scholars as George Ernest Wright, Frank Cross, Ed Dowie, who happened to chair the committee that wrote the confession of 1967, and Hulda Niebuhr, the Christian educator.

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In 1957, he began work on a doctorate at Yale Divinity School, where he studied under H. Richard Niebuhr, Hulda Niebuhr's brother. While a student at Yale, Stotts also served as assistant pastor of a congregation in Wallingford, Connecticut.

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When he came to Austin in the summer of 1985, Stotts had been at McCormick for 22 years, the final 10 years as president. He had become a recognized leader in the United Presbyterian Church. In addition to numerous articles, Stotts had published two books while at McCormick, Believing, Deciding, Acting in 1968, which was designed to serve as an introduction to Christian ethics for laypeople, and Shalom, The Search for a Peaceable City in 1973, which focused on Christian social ethics.

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It should be noted that each book was published during particularly turbulent times in this country, when ethical questions were not only being raised, but heretofore accepted ethical assumptions were being seriously challenged on seminary campuses as well as on college campuses in the church as well as in society. Now it may have surprised some that a person with such national standing as Stotts would come to a school that in many respects was still considered a predominantly regional school. Only one other Austin Seminary president had ever previously served as president of another school before coming to Austin.

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T.R. Sampson, the seminary's first president, had served as president of Austin College from 1897 to 1900 before beginning the second effort to establish a Presbyterian seminary in Austin. Stotz offers the following thoughts on his acceptance of the call to return to Texas and to become president of Austin Seminary. Quote, My coming to APTS in 1985 was, in my mind, important as a symbol of the new unity our predecessor denominations affirmed and celebrated in 1983.

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My history had been one of participation in the northern branch of the church, and by the school's invitation to me and my acceptance, represented the oneness we had and the oneness we sought. Having had a visibility in the northern church because of my presidency of McCormick, I believed that my going to APTS, a former Southern Seminary, was not unlike Randy Taylor's going to the presidency of San Francisco Seminary. Both demonstrated our oneness. I believe I brought with me some credibility in the Northern Church for APTS in the former precincts of the PCUSA. Unquote. In his first year as president, Stott set two main goals for himself. Quote, becoming familiar with the internal life of the seminary and getting to know, while representing Austin Seminary to, the external constituency. Unquote. The matter of restoring trust between the seminary and its various constituencies was critical to the well-being of the seminary.

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One way in which this sense of trust could be measured is in the enrollment of the student body. In 1983, the last year of Maxwell's presidency, enrollment of Master of Divinity students was down 23% since 1956, when there were 85 students and 37% since its high point of 103 students in 1964. In the 1982-83 academic year, there were 65 students enrolled in the MDiv program at Austin Seminary. And while this could be attributed to the demoralization among students and faculty here, it was a trend that was not unique to Austin Seminary. Between 1981 and 1982, Princeton, McCormick, Dubuque, Columbia, and Union-Richmond all showed decreases in enrollment. Louisville, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco reflected increases in the number of MDiv students during the same period. In contrast, the number of Doctor of Ministry students grew from the very beginning of that program in 1976, when there were 40 students enrolled. By 1981, there were 71 DMIN students. By the next year, that number had jumped to 87. In fact, in 1981, DMIN students accounted for 43% of the total enrollment at Austin Seminary, while M.Div. students represented 46% of the enrollment. The following year, the number of DMIN students outnumbered M.Div. students by 50% to 36%.

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In the spring term of Stott's first year, the spring term of '85-'86 academic year, there were 149 students enrolled in the MDiv courses, over 100 of whom were full-time students. This represented the highest enrollment in the MDiv program ever at Austin up to that point. At the same time, there were 71 DMIN candidates enrolled. And while there may have been a variety of reasons for this increased enrollment, certainly one might have been the anticipation of a new start for Austin Seminary. And certainly there were other schools students could have chosen to attend. The increased enrollment reflected increased trust in the leadership and the future of the school. By the spring of 1986, 55 students had already been admitted to the M.Div. program for the following school year, in contrast to the 38 students who had been admitted at the same time in 1985. By the time Stotz retired in 1996, the enrollment of M.Div. students had reached 163, and the number of D.Min. students was 99. The total number of special students, that is non-degree students, was 52, and there were 22 students enrolled in the Master of Arts program. And so I suggest that the sense of confidence that was restored under Ellis Nelson's interim presidency continued to grow under Jack Stotz and was sustained throughout his presidency.

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While the arrival of Jack Stotts in Austin brought increased visibility to the seminary, his role as moderator of the, quote, special committee to prepare a brief statement of the reformed faith for possible inclusion in the Book of Confessions of the Presbyterian Church USA, unquote, that was appointed by Dr. J. Randolph Taylor, moderator of the 1983 Reunion General Assembly, contributed, if indirectly, to added stature for Austin Seminary. The brief statement of faith, 80 lines long and trinitarian in structure, was approved for conclusion in the Book of Confessions by the 203rd General Assembly in 1991. Moderating a 21-person committee that represented widely diverse theological perspectives represented a daunting challenge. But in the end, the committee succeeded under Stott's leadership in reaching agreement on a document. One of the members of that committee, Jack Rogers, offers the following thoughts on the final product. These thoughts are recorded in his Rogers book, Presbyterian Creeds, A Guide to the Book of Confessions. He writes, quote, A brief statement of faith in two pages confessed the faith of the Church, Catholic, Protestant, and Reformed. Without conscious intent, the committees, drafting and revising, had developed a document

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that contained the elements mentioned in Chapter 2 of the Form of Government in the Book of Order, along with other traditional emphases. Additionally, a brief statement extended the Reformed tradition into new areas not previously articulated in the Book of Confessions. It provided a narrative of Jesus Christ's life and ministry, generally omitted from previous creeds. It unequivocally announced that God makes everyone equally in God's image. For the first time, women were specifically declared equal to men and called to all of the ministries of the church. And as no previous confessional document had done, it derived feminine as well as masculine images from scripture to illustrate the love and faithfulness of God. Rogers goes on to write, Other nuances showed evidence of sensitivity to the concerns of women and racial ethnic persons. While the committees had concentrated on faithfully affirming the Reformed tradition, they had also faithfully applied it in new ways to the understanding of scripture given by the Holy Spirit in their time. Unquote. During Stotts' 11-year administration, the faculty grew as the student body grew. With that growth came inevitable changes. Continuity and change characterized the development of the faculty over the next 11 years. According to the 1986-87 seminary catalog issued after Stotts had been president one full year, there were 15

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faculty members. That included Stotz himself as president, Cal Klimt as librarian, and C. Ellis Nelson as visiting professor of Christian Education. By the time Stotz retired in July 1996, the faculty numbered 22 members. Among the changes in the faculty over Stotz's 11 years was the increase in the number of women. In 1986, There were two women faculty members, Cynthia Campbell and Laura Lewis. During Stott's tenure, that number grew to five. Lewis, Ellen Babinski, Christine Blair, Cynthia Rigby, and Sharon George. Another development that occurred among the faculty during these years was something that did not happen among many of the faculty members. A growing number of them chose to stay at Austin Seminary when given the opportunity to move elsewhere. The seminary seemed to have become less and less a stepping stone to more prestigious positions. It had become at least as attractive to stay at Austin as it might be to move on to another school. When asked why this was so, faculty members offered a variety of answers: collegiality among faculty members, the absence of a politically charged atmosphere, the freedom to exchange ideas, and the support and the encouragement of the administration.

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While teaching has always been a high priority for Austin Seminary faculty, participation in the guild also became increasingly important. The faculty journal Insights, appearing twice a year, afforded faculty opportunities to publish articles. This journal had previously been known as the faculty edition of the Seminary Bulletin. But more and more, Articles and books appeared that indicated that Austin Seminary was firmly grounded both in the church and in the academy. Continuity among the faculty was represented by the presence of Prescott Williams at the seminary since 1959 in the biblical department. Robert Shelton, having come to the seminary in 1970, continued in the academic dean's office and to teach homiletics. John Alsop, who had come to the campus in 1975, continued teaching New Testament.

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And Ralph Underwood, present since 1978, continued to teach in the area of pastoral care. Dan Garza, who came in 1982, continued to work in the field of racial ethnic ministry. C.D.

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Weaver continued to work as the minister in residence, and indeed, under Staunts, assumed the title of Dean of Student Life and pastor to students. Pete Hendrick was re-elected to a six-year term as professor of mission and evangelism beginning June 1, 1987. Robert Paul, who had come to Austin in 1977, was elected to a one-year term as Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Christian Thought, effective June 1, 1986. And C.

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Ellis Nelson was elected to the first of many one-year terms as Visiting Professor of Christian Education. The continuity that these faculty members provided was accompanied by change and growth. Ross Dunn, Professor of Christian Ethics, died on May 1, 1984. In 1986, the Board of Trustees elected Ismael Garcia to fill that position.

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Born in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Puerto Rico, Garcia received his MA and PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at McCormick Seminary before coming to Austin. A layperson, Garcia's membership is in the United Church of Christ. In the fall of 1985, George Straup, professor of theology, announced his resignation, effective at the end of December of that same year, in order to move to Columbia Seminary.

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After two visiting professors from 1985 to 1987, taught theology, David Harned from Princeton Seminary, and Tom Curry, pastor of the Brenham Presbyterian Church at the time. The board elected Dr. Alan E.

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Lewis to the position of Professor of Constructive and Modern Theology, with tenure, effective July 15, 1987. Lewis, a native of Belfast, Northern Ireland, had studied at Princeton Theological Seminary and also at the University of Tubingen in Germany. He'd also served two years as an assistant pastor at a church at a Presbyterian church in Scotland.

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He received his PhD from Princeton Seminary in January of 1977. And for the 10 years before coming to Austin, he had taught theology at New College at the University of Edinburgh. He, his wife Kay, and their son Mark moved to Austin in the summer of 1987. When Lewis underwent a physical examination for immigration purposes in August of 1987, doctors discovered a suspicious tumor on one of his lungs.

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Around Christmas of that year, Lewis underwent surgery to remove the tumor at St. David's Hospital here in Austin. The tumor it was discovered was malignant and was attached to his lung and to his heart. He was not able to deliver his inaugural lecture until the spring of 1988.

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That lecture was entitled Apocalypse and Parousia, The Anguish of Theology from Now Till Kingdom Come, and examined the relationship between humanity and God in a nuclear age. The tumor continued to grow. Lewis underwent surgery again in October of 1989 to remove one lung. Over the next four years, Lewis endured many sessions of chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

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And after long, painful, and valiant battle, Allen Lewis died on February 19, 1994. In his report to the board in May of 1994, President Stotts included a tribute to Lewis. Acknowledging the presence and work of the Holy Spirit in the Austin Seminary community, Stotts continued, quote, It is this Holy Spirit which allows us to rage against and grieve the harshness of premature death, while simultaneously clinging to and affirming the mercy and goodness of the God who gives us life in Jesus Christ.

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Such was the case with the death of Professor Alan E. Lewis. For six years, he struggled physically and spiritually with cancer. In all of that time, he witnessed by his teaching, colleagueship, and life, a faith which indeed was

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a sign of the way God uses human weakness to be a witness to God's love and power. Alan Lewis was a spiritual leader, Stotts wrote, while walking in the valley of the shadow of death, finally fearing no evil, but walking by the light of faith, a light that illumines the way for all of us. He was finally defeated physically, as will each of us be, but by the power of God, he was spiritually the conqueror of death.

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He resides with God in the communion of saints. His legacy to us endures. For some years, Lewis had cultivated a particular interest in Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter morning. He worked on a book-linked manuscript which examined both biblically and theologically the notion of God's death in Jesus Christ on the cross, a notion that contemporary Christians, in his view, wish to ignore as they move from the cross to the empty tomb.

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Although he continued to work on and revise the text up to his death, Lewis did not see it published. After much labor of editing and seeking a publisher, Kay Lewis and her son Mark, with the help of others, most particularly Professor John Alsop, were able to see Alan Lewis's wish fulfilled last year in 2001 when William B. Erdman's publishing company published the book under the title, Cross and Resurrection, A Theology of Holy Saturday. Dr.

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Alsop wrote the foreword to this volume. Identifying the second day as both a no-man's land and a boundary, Lewis writes that Holy Saturday must be examined and explored more fully, and not to do so would be to miss the power and the meaning of both the cross and the empty tomb. He writes, quote, What is so lacking in the way that the church normally hears the story's own decisive narrative is that Christians have forgotten and make no effort to imagine what the story is when freshly heard, without the benefit of hindsight and the drawback of familiarity. Yet the familiar rendering of the Easter story, heard as it were on mono, is a hopeless distortion of its true sound.

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For the comforting joy of Easter morning already, from the start, anesthetizes Friday's pain. The anticipation of Sunday makes casual and phony the waiting of the second day. since there is never any doubt that there is a new day coming to be waited for. It is, we say again, only the stereophonic sound of both the first-time story and the familiar, which gives the narrative its quality of gospel word and its deepest.

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Perhaps from this perspective, Lewis continues, the second-day boundary between the cross and the empty tomb is also the balance knob which secures equilibrium between novelty and familiarity, between the original story and the oft-repeated. For it is the grave of the second day which makes that original story what it is, a tale of contrast and reversal, of darkness, night, and finally light, of death and nothing. and only then life.

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But once we know about the light and life, the grave becomes the point not of antithesis only, but also of unity, not of contradiction alone, but of identity, and identity in contradiction. For by uniting the first day and the third day in a single event, The second suggests that the darkness is itself illuminating, the defeat victorious, and death both the opposite and the source of life. Such was the depth of faith and scholarship going on at Austin Seminary.

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William Stacy Johnson would succeed Lewis in the position of systematic theology. In November 1986, Robert Paul announced that he would retire effective the following June. Ellen Babinski, a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, was elected Assistant Professor of Church History beginning August 1, 1988.

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John Alsop and George Heyer became full professors in 1987. Andy Dearman became Associate Professor in June 1988, and Fred Holper, who had come to the seminary in 1985-86, received a three-year extension. Change and continuity. Dr.

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John Janssen, a member of the seminary faculty since 1958 and retired from full-time teaching since 1983, died in his sleep in April 1987. Janssen's ability to combine serious scholarship with personal integrity, a love for the Church, and self-effacing humor had a powerful impact on generations of seminary theologues. It was not unusual for students to find him working in his office as late as midnight during the week. Jansen seemed to enjoy telling stories on himself of incidents of his own absent-mindedness.

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Whether it had to do with entering a worship service on Sunday morning prepared to preach as a guest, only to discover that not only was the service already underway, but that he was at the wrong church. Or misplacing a key book containing several keys, including several seminary keys, much to his alarm that Herman Herron would discover that, only to discover that the key book had been on the kitchen table all the while. In his report to the board in May 1987, President Stotts wrote the following: Professor Jansen, upon his retirement in 1983, had completed 25 years as a faculty member of this seminary.

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During that time, he was acting dean for one term, and on top of a busy schedule of teaching, preaching, and ecclesiastical assignments, wrote nine books and innumerable articles, And he was well-loved by students and colleagues and is sorely missed. His widow, Mrs. Mary Jansen, will continue to remain in Austin.

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Our common grief at our loss is, by God's grace, gradually being integrated within our gratitude to God for John Jansen's life and work, and by our hope that rests in God's resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead. End quote. continuity and change. After 7 years on the faculty, Dr.

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Cynthia Campbell tendered her resignation in May 1988 in order to accept a call to become senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Salina.