Chapter Twelve: What the 1939 Split Revealed
In 1939, the Brethren Church went through a fracture that would shape everything that followed. The immediate trigger was a dispute at Ashland College’s school of theology over the doctrine of eternal security — the question of whether a genuinely saved believer can ultimately lose their salvation. A group of conservative theologians, including Alva J. McClain and Herman Hoyt, were dismissed from the Ashland faculty. Their supporters walked out of the general conference and formed what is now known as the Fellowship of Grace Brethren Churches (now Encompass World Partners), establishing their own institutions — Grace College and Grace Theological Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana.
The split left the Brethren Church holding a deliberately open position on eternal security. That matters beyond the specific doctrinal question. Eternal security isn’t a peripheral issue — it’s directly tied to how the tradition understands salvation itself, the basis of assurance before God, the sovereignty of God in redemption, and the completeness of what Christ accomplished on the cross. A tradition that intentionally leaves these questions open has created a theological environment where the foundations of salvation are, from the start, more unsettled than in traditions that have worked through them and come to clear conclusions.
But the most telling thing about 1939 isn’t the specific doctrine. It’s the pattern. Conservative theologians were dismissed from an institution for their doctrinal convictions. The institution kept moving in a more accommodating direction. Those who held traditional positions found themselves increasingly outside the circle. That pattern would repeat itself throughout the following decades.
Students of church history will recognize it. Theological drift in an institution almost never announces itself as drift. It presents itself as growth. Maturity. A courageous refusal to be “narrow.” The people who leave or get pushed out are framed as the problem — rigid, uncharitable, divisive. But when the smoke clears, what actually happened is that the institution moved, not the dissenters. The dissenters are still standing in the same place. The institution is somewhere else.
Chapter Thirteen: When the Expert Becomes the Final Authority
One of the most spiritually dangerous features of progressive theological drift is how quietly it elevates academic expertise as the real authority in theological matters — gradually displacing both Scripture and the plain judgment of ordinary faithful believers. This is especially visible in institutions like Ashland, where the accumulation of advanced degrees in church history, biblical languages, and related fields creates a class of scholars treated as the only people truly qualified to say what the tradition means.
The problem isn’t education. Serious study of church history and theology is a genuine gift to the Body of Christ. The problem is when the academy becomes a substitute for Scripture rather than a servant of it — when the tradition’s meaning gets defined by the most credentialed voices rather than by the plain sense of the biblical text read in community. At that point, ordinary believers who trust what Scripture straightforwardly teaches start to be made to feel like they’re simply not informed enough to hold that position.
The Greek and Hebrew Credential Trap
One of the most effective weapons in progressive theological debate is what you might call the language credential: invoking expertise in biblical Greek or Hebrew to shut down a theological conversation before it can properly begin.
The pattern is consistent and recognizable. An ordinary believer cites a biblical passage in support of a traditional position. The progressive scholar responds not with a counter-argument from the text but with a credential: “Well, in the original Greek…” or “The Hebrew actually says something quite different,” followed by a reading that conveniently supports the progressive conclusion. The message is unmistakable: you can’t engage with this argument because you don’t have the linguistic tools to evaluate it. The conversation is over before it starts.
This move deserves to be named plainly: it is intellectual manipulation. Not because Greek and Hebrew scholarship is unimportant — it’s genuinely valuable — but because the appeal to that scholarship is being used to establish authority rather than to actually illuminate the text.
And when you examine it carefully, the move is far less impressive than it appears. Consider one historical fact that cuts the argument off at the root: the Church Fathers who established the orthodox doctrines this paper defends wrote in Greek. Not translated Greek. Not studied-at-seminary Greek. Their own Greek. Chrysostom — “golden-mouthed” — was one of the most celebrated Greek communicators of the ancient world. Athanasius wrote his defense of Christ’s full divinity in fluent, sophisticated Greek prose. Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa — three theologians from Cappadocia (present-day central Turkey) whose work shaped the final form of the Nicene Creed — were among the finest Greek writers of their era. These men did not need a lexicon. They were native or near-native speakers of the language in which the New Testament was written. And they arrived unanimously at orthodox Christology, the substitutionary nature of the cross, the exclusive saving role of Christ, and the authority of Scripture. If the Greek text actually taught what progressive theology claims it teaches, these men — more qualified to read it than any modern scholar — would have been the first to see it. They were not confused. They were clear.
Here is the second problem with the credential argument: language knowledge doesn’t eliminate interpretation. It only moves the interpretive decisions upstream. Every reading of a Greek or Hebrew text is still an interpretive act, shaped by the assumptions, theological framework, and cultural context the reader brings to the work. The scholar saying “the Greek actually says something different” is not delivering raw, unfiltered data from the text. They are making interpretive choices — which lexical meaning to apply, which grammatical structure to favor, which parallel texts to weight — and every one of those choices is influenced by the framework they already hold. A scholar trained in a progressive theological framework and fluent in Greek can read meaning into the text just as effectively as anyone else. The language credential establishes competence. It does not establish neutrality.
Ordinary believers facing this kind of intellectual pressure need to know a few things. First, major English Bible translations — the ESV, NIV, NASB, NKJV — are produced by committees of fifty or more scholars, each with advanced degrees in biblical languages, representing multiple theological traditions, checking each other’s work over years of careful revision. When a single scholar claims a passage means something different from what all these translations render, careful scrutiny is appropriate. Automatic deference is not. Second, free digital tools — BlueLetterBible.org, BibleHub.com, Strong’s Concordance — now give any believer direct access to the original language text, multiple lexicons, and major commentaries. The wall of specialized knowledge is lower than it has ever been. And third, the Bereans are the biblical model:
Acts 17:11 — Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.
They examined the Scriptures — not the Greek, not original manuscripts, but the Scriptures as they had them. And the New Testament calls this noble. The Apostle Paul, more linguistically qualified than anyone in that room, commended ordinary people for checking his own preaching against the written Word. That is the apostolic standard: not deference to the credential, but return to the text. The Apostle John reinforces it:
1 John 2:27 — As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you, and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about all things and as that anointing is real, not counterfeit — just as it has taught you, remain in him.
John is not dismissing scholarship. He is protecting his communities from a specific danger: teachers who use the appearance of superior knowledge to establish authority over believers and lead them away from what they received directly from Christ. The Holy Spirit’s presence in every believer’s life is a genuine reality that genuinely shapes what we can know and how we know it. Ordinary believers, reading Scripture faithfully and prayerfully, accountable to the community of faith, are not at the mercy of linguistic gatekeepers. Any teacher who implies otherwise is not serving the Church. They are building personal dependency on themselves.
The Church History Authority Claim
The same dynamic plays out with church history. The progressive scholar who has studied not just one tradition but the whole sweep of Christian history presents their conclusions as the fruit of comprehensive knowledge — implying that those who hold traditional positions are trapped in a narrow, uninformed perspective that would dissolve if only they knew what the expert knows.
This argument has surface appeal but collapses under examination. Knowing more church history doesn’t automatically produce progressive conclusions. The greatest church historians in the Christian tradition — Eusebius, Augustine, Bede, Calvin (whose Institutes of the Christian Religion is a masterwork of historical theology), B.B. Warfield, J. Gresham Machen — knew their church history with extraordinary depth and arrived at thoroughly orthodox conclusions. What determines where you end up is not the breadth of historical knowledge but the framework you bring to interpreting it. The progressive church historian brings progressive assumptions to history and finds progressive conclusions. Athanasius brought orthodox convictions and found orthodox conclusions. The history doesn’t determine the reading. The framework does.
The response is the same in both cases: receive historical scholarship with genuine interest, check its claims against the text and the broader tradition, honor genuine expertise where it truly illuminates, and refuse to be silenced by the credential alone. History serves theology. It doesn’t replace it. And at the end of every historical investigation, the question that matters most is still the one no language competence or historical survey can settle: What does the Scripture say? That question belongs to everyone.
2 Timothy 2:15 — Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.
This dynamic plays out with particular immediacy in the counseling context. Ashland Theological Seminary’s Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling program is accredited by the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (CACREP), which is a corporate affiliate of the American Counseling Association (ACA). The ACA has adopted a comprehensive set of affirming ethical standards regarding LGBTQ+ identity — standards that explicitly treat non-affirming religious beliefs as a form of professional bias requiring correction in counselors.
The result is a direct and unresolved institutional conflict: a seminary claiming to train counselors from a Christian worldview while holding accreditation that requires those counselors to adopt a framework directly at odds with a biblical understanding of sexual ethics. Conservative Christian counselors trained at CACREP-accredited institutions report significant pressure to set aside their biblical convictions in clinical practice — to approach same-sex attraction and gender dysphoria as healthy expressions of human diversity rather than as conditions that Scripture speaks to pastorally and redemptively.
This is not a minor procedural tension. It goes to the heart of what a seminary exists to do. If pastoral training exists to equip men and women to shepherd people toward God as revealed in Scripture, then training programs that require graduates to affirm what Scripture calls sin are working against their own stated purpose — regardless of how compassionately they frame that contradiction.
The broader principle holds for every church leader: when the academy becomes the primary voice shaping a tradition’s self-understanding, and when that academy has drifted from its biblical anchor, the result isn’t a more mature Christianity. It’s a more sophisticated departure from it.
PART FOUR
The Pastoral Consequence and the Way Forward