Rapture Fever

196 RAPTURE FEVER
Sign#icant change rarely comes without sign+cant pain and challenge.
None of the seven fizll-time facwlty contracts will be renewed fm next
year. [Italics in original]
You may have wondered why President Davis and the Board
fired Professor John C. Whitcomb in 1990, when Whitcomb
had only three months to go until retirement. Whitcomb was
the only Grace Seminary faculty member with a reputation
outside the campus, as the co-author of The Genesis Flood. Some
people could not understand why he had been fired, and President
Davis’ official explanation was, to put it charitably noninformative.
Well, now we know. “Significant change” was in
the works, and Dr. Whitcomb had been warning against it. He
wound up analogous to John the Baptist: decapitated.
My friends, when the entire fill-time faculty of an institution
is fired in one shot, we are talking about something greater
than rearranging the academic furniture.
Then President Davis went on: “We will be discontinuing the
Th.M. and Th.D. programs. . . .“ That is to say, Grace Theological
Seminary is leaving the field of advanced academic studies. It
will no longer grant an advanced academic theological degree.
The other “practical” degrees will remain - degrees for men
who want preaching jobs: Master of Divinity, Doctor of Ministry,
etc. Also, Grace Theolo#”calJournal is being discontinued. In
short, Grace Theolop”cal Seminary has just committed suicide at the
professwnal academic level. The question is: Why?
In part, because Grace is facing universal pressures in theological
education today. Small, struggling movements can no
longer afford the luxury of full-time faculties that teach a handful
of academic specialists. That is to say, they can no longer
a.i%ord to pay their faculty members to reproduce themselves.
They can no longer afford traditional academic certification.
Dispen.satwnalism is becoming a small, struggling movement. Paralysis
has produced attrition. Attrition is steadily shrinking the dispensational
movement. Yet no one inside admits this in public.