Professor Timothy Erdel: Anabaptist, Evangelical, Kindred Spirit

An assignment for a class I'm taking called MA Colloquium (seminary version of Intro to College) required me to interview a person in the field I intend to go into. Since my desire is to eventually get back into Philosophy I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to get to know Professor Timothy Erdel better and finally step foot on Bethel College's campus in Mishawaka.

Earlier this year I decided that God wanted me to be more missional in my choice of church community. I had been driving every Sunday to a good Southern Baptist church in Mishawaka, but began to feel late last year that this wasn't where I belonged. It's hard to really form community with people that don't live near you and I don't know how to minister to a community I'm not a part of. I decided I needed to find a church in the same neighborhood my seminary is in so I could at least be better aware of how to pray for this community.

I decided to start with Zion Missionary Church. I'd never heard of the Missionary Church denomination until I came to Indiana when I met a couple students that belonged to the Missionary Church. They were some of the few other evangelicals at the seminary, so they became friends of a sort. My first Sunday visiting Zion by God's providence happened to also be the first Sunday Professor Erdel was guest teaching a short Sunday School series on bioethics. we happened to meet during worship and chatted for awhile after the service was over. I found myself excited to meet someone who belonged to a conservative evangelical denomination, was committed to his Anabaptist roots, and taught philosophy as a kind of generalist. We chatted a few more times over the next few weeks we were both there and expressed mutual interest in keeping in touch. Several months later I finally contacted him again hoping he would remember me and be willing to do this interview assignment with me. This post is the answer to that question.

Prof. Erdel grew up in Ecuador and spent many years abroad as a missionary before coming back to the US to take up archival duties at Bethel in 1993. While at Bethel and in the midst of his duties as an archivist and theological librarian he continued to do what he did in the mission field which was to teach a miscellany of courses in Church history and other areas he was not specialized in. In Fall 1999, Bethel officially began their philosophy program and Erdel finished his dissertation in Philosophy of Religion at University of Illinois writing on the topic "The Rationality of Christian Faith".

Prof. Erdel's path to philosophy began with being a reflective youth concerned with apologetics. He related a story when during a church prom alternative it was predicted that he would earn a PhD in Philosophy. Erdel didn't remember this event until years later when he was given a copy of the program to that function. He regularly, throughout the interview, went back to how his missionary and apologetic passions and commitment to a Biblical Christianity drive what he does. These same passions and how they've helped him in his journey thus far have also brought him to be more of a generalist than is common among philosophers these days. Erdel humbly admitted that he didn't think he was a very good philosopher and that the best advice he can give to a student wanting to get into philosophy is to not do anything he did.

By his estimation, Prof. Erdel has taught 89 different courses on everything from philosophy to ethics to church history to theology to world religions to literature. He has had a hand in about 300 publications and presentations all as diverse as his interests. The next presentation he will give will be in cooperation with another scholar on nursing history comparing Nazi nurses and Mennonite nurses during World War 2 for a presentation at Baylor. The next presentation more in the field I'm interviewing him about will be about the Sermon on the Mount as a radical critique of Plato's Republic.

Erdel's professional society participation exhibits the same trend. He is connected to about 30 societies and organizations related to library science, archival science, history, biblical studies, theology, philosophy, missions, and missiology among others. Level of involvement in these organizations ranges from a kind of lurker that reads publications and doesn't do anything else with the society to being on executive committees and involved as an editor for the society's journal. When I pinned him down to name a few he's most involved in presently he mentioned the Missionary Church Historical Society, Evangelical Philosophical Society (where he serves on the executive committee and is the book review editor for Philosophia Christi), Evangelical Theological Society and Evangelical Missiological Society. He tries to attend three to four conferences per semester (mostly regional) and reads a large and diverse group of journals including Review of Biblical Literature, Church History, Fide et Historia, Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society and Faith and Philosophy.

When we discussed philosophical influences there were some that Erdel has spent much time interacting with but none that he would have claimed to be the kind of inspiration that drive a career of exploration like his has been. He mentioned the likes of C.S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder and Alvin Plantinga as people whose ideas he's regularly interacted with throughout his career, but the real inspiration for Erdel has come from a much more humble place. In the acknowledgements section of his dissertation he named several Ecuadoran Christians that have taught him the life lessons that have been the fuel and guiding wisdom for much of his life. These people he says did not go to college, many never finished high school and some were barely literate, yet these simple, faithful people have demonstrated a profound wisdom for Prof. Erdel.

While it may be true the jack of all trades approach to academia doesn't promise much there were some other bits of wisdom I found helpful in my time with Prof. Erdel. He mentioned the unpredictability of academic interest and how that has affected his ability to publish. He noted that some of the papers that were dearest to his heart and he put the most effort into were never picked up by anyone while some of the papers he thought were unlikely candidates for publication have gone places. To an extent it is probably his wide interests that have sustained him through some of this unpredictability. I found it reassuring to have him mention this because it means that ultimately a good academic keeps his/her nose to the grind stone and doesn't obsess over their own scholarship because what becomes of it isn't necessarily a reflection on their ability as a scholar.

Above is a pretty full summary of the interview I conducted with him. It is a privilege for me to have been granted the opportunity to get to know Brother Tim better. He is truly one of a kind in the field with his Anabaptist and conservative evangelical background. More importantly I find someone who has “made it” and seems in some ways just as uncertain about what to do next as I am. Brother Tim and I share quite a few things in common besides theological commonalities. I've always felt a similar drive to provide a certain kind of unorthodox apologetic for the faith that is rooted in a commitment to the Great Commission. This has driven me to interact with a variety of subdisciplines in my search for a creative answer to theological questions bogged down in tired methodological problems. I've got interests in nonsense literature, logic, philosophy of language, phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, Church history, Baptist history and theology, Anabaptist history and theology, missiology, theological ethics and probably more I can't think of. There are a number of great Christian minds that have inspired and challenged me including Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Yoder, Watchman Nee, Merold Westphal and others, but the ones who challenge me the most are the laity in the pews. I may not always write for their level, but they are constantly in my mind when I write anything. I find Brother Tim's devotion to his denomination encouraging despite disagreement with where it may be going in regard to some of its practices. I have always felt the same combination of hope, frustration, disappointment and anxiousness with regard to my own Southern Baptist upbringing. Brother Tim is a kindred spirit both in his scholarly style and faithfulness to God and the Church and it seems rare any more to get such a great combination of the two commitments.