“One Little Hour”

The week after our wedding Jes and I did what any honeymooning couple would do when staying in Pensacola Beach, Florida; we took a tour of Pensacola Christian College.

Growing up as a faculty/staff child at BJU, Pensacola was equal parts bogeyman and comic relief, the bastion of all things King James Only (capitalization not optional). I was a teenager when PCC distributed a video attacking Bob Jones as “the leaven of Fundamentalism” because the BJ Bible faculty promoted versions of the Bible not based exclusively on the same manuscripts as the King James Version. Indeed, my childhood pastor, Dr. Stewart Custer, was the epicenter of that woe-begotten lump. PCC did prove useful for a typical conversational gambit: “Sure, Bob Jones is strict/hard/etc…, but compared to PCC…[meaningful pause accompanied by weighty glance].”

As we drove on to the campus, Jes sternly forbade me from asking any provocative questions. I obeyed, kinda. I’ll provide several general impressions of the school and finish at a later date with my conclusion about what Bob Jones could learn from PCC.

The tour took several hours and highlighted all the major facilities, including the library, gym, classroom buildings, dormitories, fine arts center, and church. Of course the tour guide, a former PCC ministry team leader, took pains to show us the nicest dorm rooms and finest classrooms on campus. Frankly, the facilities were awesome; all the money that poured in from selling home-schooling curriculum was well spent. In thirty years the school’s facilities went from almost nothing to a campus infrastructure that often surpasses the “World’s Most Unusual University.”

From historical plaques around campus I gather that Pensacola initially received cues from Bob Jones, not surprising considering the ties between the Hortons, who founded PCC, and BJU. PCC had an annual Turkey Bowl, a Mission Prayer Band, and Greek letter societies. But today it seems that the situation is reversed with Bob Jones playing catch up. Pensacola builds a new gym in the mid 90s and Bob Jones does the same a decade later. Pensacola cashes in on paperback textbooks, so Bob Jones bets on HomeSat. I don’t find this unhealthy; competition encourages innovation.

Pensacola and Bob Jones do have cultural differences. Compare and contrast the Pensacola and Bob Jones promotional videos. Bob Jones spends far more time highlighting the fine arts, such as opera productions and Shakespearian plays, than does Pensacola. The music produced at PCC has much in common with good ol’ Southern Gospel, while Bob Jones prefers high-church compositions. Bob Jones just built a downtown satellite for their art gallery, the largest collection of Baroque religious art in the Western Hemisphere. Pensacola is spending millions constructing Fundamentalism’s largest wave pool.

[Allow me to take a moment to say that I do not believe that God distinguishes between high and low culture when deciding what pleases Him.]

The historical displays in both schools’ libraries symbolize the contrast between high and low culture. On one of the upper floors at Pensacola is a sentimental mockup of a one-room schoolhouse, complete with bell and 19th century books. On the first floor of Mack Library at Bob Jones is a replica of the room inside Westminster Abbey where translators worked on an updated English version of the Bible in 1611.

The multi-image presentation was interesting because a large portion (if memory serves me it was about a third) of the film was dedicated to the recitation of the central beliefs of Pensacola Christian College. In contrast to the creed of Bob Jones University, the Pensacola affirmation is more specific and includes a number of denominational distinctives. Significantly, any talk of the King James Version was omitted in the presentation. Actually at no point in the tour was the KJV mentioned. The website does say “it is our practice to use only the Authorized Version (KJV) in the pulpit and in classroom instruction. We believe the Textus Receptus is a superior text, and it is used for Greek instruction.” But this is a far cry from denouncing fellow Fundamentalists for heresy.

This post is long enough already, so I’ll hold my conclusions for part two.