Interview: Part One, Personal Background

Apologia Report Interview with Terry Muck

AR: Tell us a bit about your background before you worked with Christianity Today.

TM: My dad was a pastor when I was young and then became a professor at Bethel College. We belonged to the Baptist General Conference, which is a Swedish Baptist group. I went to Bethel College where my father taught. Bethel had a seminary. I got an M.Div. there. While in seminary I decided I would like to be a college professor like my father.

I love school. Bethel is a very good evangelical school. It has good, orthodox commitments. At the same time one can be inquiring there and ask questions without being made to feel it is inappropriate to even raise issues.

AR: Well, that's a delicate balance. Glad to hear it.

TM: Yes it is. I finished there and decided to go to graduate school. The question was where and what field. The way I decided was by asking myself, "What does the Christian church need the most, and what will it need the most in the next decade or two?" My decision was that the contact with the increased growth of world religions was something that evangelical Christians had not fully stepped up to.

We had -- and still have -- a well-developed understanding of foreign missions. But I didn't think we had a very well-developed "neighborhood theology" -- relating to people of other religions in our own neighborhoods. The average church person basically related either to Christians or lapsed Christians. I didn't think the foreign-missions model, much as I appreciated it, adapted itself very well to the neighborhood function.

The foreign-missions model means we train experts to go over and do evangelism for us. And what we are faced with now is the need for each one of us needing to be an evangelist to people of other religions.

AR: What was the approximate year when you started thinking this.

TM: That was back in 1969 when I was just graduating from college. I started looking at graduate schools in religion. I felt like I needed to go to a history-of-religion or comparative-religion graduate school.

AR: That was when it was still called "comparative" religion instead of religious studies as it is today.

TM: I went to Northwestern and I was very pleased with the education that I got there. At the time the department was a comparative department and you had to choose two religions to focus on. I chose Christianity and Buddhism. Buddhism became my specialty. The last year I got a Fulbright-Hayes grant and went over and spent 18 months in Sri Lanka. I lived there studying Buddhist monks. My dissertation was a comparison of Buddhist monasticism and Christian monasticism, so I did field research and lived in a country that is 86-percent Buddhist. I got a feel for what it is like to be a member of a minority religion. It was a very good experience for me.

AR: During what years did this take place?

TM: I was at Northwestern from '73 to '78 and I was in Sri Lanka between '76 and '78.

AR: Were you single then?

TM: I was married. I got married while I was in seminary. Judy was a medical technologist and she put me through seminary and graduate school.

So I came back and wrote up my dissertation for another year at Northwestern. I then began to look for a job. I couldn't find a teaching job. What I wanted to do was teach world religions in a small Christian college. There were a couple of things working against that. Most small Christian colleges don't have a full-time person in world religions. Secondly, it was a hard time to get a teaching position. It has been hard for the last twenty years or so I guess.

Judy was ready to quit working and have children. I got a job at Christianity Today [Inc.] editing a magazine called Leadership which they were just starting at that time. It was a journal for pastors. I did that for five years and then I moved over to be the editor of Christianity Today for six more years.

I always had this itch to teach. Austin Presbyterian Seminary decided to create a position in world religions.

AR: Were you aware of this development as it came about?

TM: I had gotten to know some of the people at Austin Seminary.

AR: Did they have you in mind when they created the position?

TM: Not really. I think they saw me as a little too evangelical for them. I did know them well enough to get an interview. It went very well and I came here and I've been here for eight years.

AR: What do you teach?

TM: I teach a required class, Introduction to World Religions, which every student here must take. That is basically just a survey of the major world religions and what they believe and practice.

AR: It's impressive that this is a required course.

TM: Yes, this is very unusual. I teach a theology class called "Religious Pluralism and Christian Faith," where I talk about how the growth of world religions in the United States has challenged, and in some cases helped to shape, the form Christian theology is taking these days.

I teach a class in cults and new religious movements. I teach a class called "Indigenous Religions," which is a class in primitive and tribal religious groups -- Native Americans, African traditional religions, things like that. I also teach a class on evangelical theology; it is basically a history of fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the United States in the last 100 years.

AR: That course is somewhat unique, too, in that it is almost assumed knowledge, or "you'll absorb it while you're here," in many evangelical schools.

TM: Yes, I think it is. This isn't an evangelical seminary, of course. The standard theology that students get here is a reformed Barthian neoorthodoxy.

AR: Would the majority of the faculty view themselves as moderate?

TM: Yes, middle-of-the-road, mainline Presbyterian. I'm seen as a representative evangelical. There are three of us on the faculty. We are well accepted by our colleagues. It is a really good relationship.

AR: How long have you been a co-editor of Buddhist-Christian Studies?

TM: This my third issue, so I've been with BCS three years.

AR: What started you down that path?

TM: When I came back from Sri Lanka I got involved with a new society at the American Academy of Religion called the Society for Buddhist-Christian Studies. It was intended to be a dialog group for Christians of all kinds and Buddhists of all kinds.

AR: At the beginning of the BCS journal a bit of its history is described. Wasn't it a Berkeley meeting that began everything?

TM: That was one of them. There was already a theological discussion group going called the Cobb-Abe group: John Cobb, a Christian theologian, and Sao Abe, a Buddhist theologian.

AR: Would this be the John Cobb affiliated with the Claremont School of Theology?

TM: He was with Claremont. He is retired now. They decided that the great interaction they were experiencing should be extended to other scholars and lay people and practitioners such as ministers and priests. It was started by liberal Christians and liberal Buddhists.

AR: There's one value of liberalism for us right there!

TM: That's right. They sometimes get this stuff going. Several of the people who attended said, "We must get evangelical Christians involved with this." John Cobb said, "Well, evangelical Christians don't want to be involved. They are welcome, but whenever we approach them they never respond." Someone mentioned my name as a person who was an evangelical and who was interested in dialog. So John contacted me and asked if I would like to be involved, and I said "Yes."

AR: It is an interesting paradox that evangelicals are largely not interested in interfaith dialog. On the other hand, there is the criticism of the liberal community that they really aren't students of conservative thought. Theologically speaking, conservatives are students of liberal thinking, but it stops there. One of the values of your article is that it brings us face-to-face with the evangelical community's need to go further in its interest in non-Christian belief systems.

Continue to Part 2,

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