Remembering Gil Bowen

01-01-2024

Rev. Dr. Gilbert Bowen was a gift…a gracious, thoughtful, insightful, and caring gift. Gil was a pastor with purpose, a pastor who didn’t just preach about big things, but did big things and motivated others to do the same. He made us all better and he and his wife of 63 years, Marlene, made this world a much kinder and caring place and continue to do so through generous gifts to McCormick and other important ministries. Rather than share details here of Gil’s and Marlene’s wonderful life and ministry or offer a personal reflection, we wanted to share Gil with you in his own words from interviews he did at Kenilworth Union Church. We also wanted to highlight how Gil viewed McCormick in his formation.* We start after Dr. Bowen describes his growing up in a modest Baptist church and heading off, at the urging of his church choir director, to Wheaton College, the “West Point of Fundamentalism,” as Gil described it: “If you have to go to an evangelical school, that’s the one to go to.” He starts with a discussion of the evangelicalism he grew up with and witnessed at Wheaton and contrasts that education with what he learned at McCormick. One cannot help but consider how that contrast plays out in so many ways in conflicts across the country and around the world today.

David H. Crawford
President

(Editor’s Note: we have made minor edits for clarity and added occasional emphasis to the transcripts of Dr. Bowen’s interview.)

In His Own Words

So I ended up at Wheaton, and it was a very interesting experience, because where I came from, everybody sort of believed the same thing, and it was good and we were all committed to it. I got to Wheaton, and everybody believed the same thing, but they argued about it all the time. The first course I had was a course in Apologetics. And I learned that there were all sorts of insidious forces out there in the world that were undermining the gospel. Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and Bultman and all the other German “B’s” and Paul Tillich. And the guy would set them up and knock 'em down. That's a good teaching technique. The only problem was, I thought he set 'em up better than he knocked 'em down. And I ran for the library.”

And when I got to McCormick Seminary, where half the guys it seemed were engineers out of Purdue who'd never even opened the Bible, I was loaded for bear. I'd read most of the stuff I was going to read. So Wheaton did me a great favor in that regard. They stimulated me intellectually and then I went to McCormick Seminary and entered a whole new world. And for want of a better term, let me simply say it was a world of liberal criticism and not words of God, but nevertheless concerned with what God might have to say through the manuscript. And we called it Neo-orthodoxy. I was there in what was known then as the heyday of Neo-orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in the sense that it was an attempt to shore up the message of the Bible at the same time while the criticism of the text and its development was accepted. (All this I'm doing in an oversimplified fashion.) So if Moses didn't write the first five books of the Bible, is there an inspired message in the first five books of the Bible that we can hang onto, even if we realize that it was written by guys like (alphabet soup) J, E, D, P, the Priestley, the Deuteronomus, the Yahwus, the whole apparatus of the critical scholars as to how it got done? Is there nevertheless a message in the middle of it which is inspired and is from God which we can hang onto? The word that was used for "message" is the word charigma, which is a Greek word which means, "the message." (That's what we always do in scholarship, think up Greek and German words for normal English ‘whatevers.’) The one thing I didn't get into with respect to where I came from was the whole business of being born again….

But the emphasis in evangelicalism is upon experiential, emotional worship of one sort or another. That's a big deal. When I went to McCormick, the emphasis was upon intellectual integrity, typically. Having a faith that can be intellectually defended, that is coherent. That makes sense. It didn't have to make sense at the Baptist church where I grew up. It was in the book, it was preached, and that was it. So it was a kind of authoritarian. If I can use the term with the Baptist experience, an authoritarian experientialism. Can I put those two together? Because the minister preached the Bible. And the Bible was to be accepted as inerrant and literal in every sense. And the heart of your religious experience was to accept Jesus Christ as your own personal lord and savior. The McCormick Seminary experience, on the other hand, involved much more of the question of intellectual integrity.

But why was it important to me? I suppose that's where I should come back. Because interestingly enough, after my studies at Wheaton, I had real problems with the idea of a Bible that was without error and that was to be understood literally. In a sense, ironically Wheaton College pulled the rug out from under me in terms of-- I'll say this very simply--my capacity to approach the Bible that way. Now, I say it exactly that way because I realize that there are people who can approach it that way. Probably a lot more people who can than can't, if you're talking about the larger Protestant population in this country. You know the good southern Baptist has no difficulty with that. But by the time I got through, in some respects I made the mistake of reading the whole Bible. And I could not handle a God who punished his people because they made the mistake of letting the women and children go when they wiped out a village. It's there in Joshua. You can read it for yourself. There were all kinds of problems like that. So what McCormick Seminary did for me is give me a way to hang on to the central message, without necessarily swallowing all the problems in the Bible. I forgot who it was that said, maybe it was Mark Twain, "I don't have problems with things I don't understand in the Bible, I have problems with things I do understand." There is a message that has integrity in the biblical text, that can be found and defended because it is coherent, it is reality-specific, and it'll make a difference in your life if you trust it. That's sort of where I came out of McCormick.

Now, at McCormick,  I would say I had an experience which began to alter the way I looked at the biblical message, and that was the death of my father. My father, whom I respected deeply, was a businessman but also a man of great faith, moderator of the congregation. [He]died of leukemia. He was 48 and I was 24. And here I am at McCormick learning what? How to preach the message of God’s love; assuming, I suppose like everybody does, that the message of God’s love means that He helps us, takes care of us, answer our prayers, etc. Needless to say that was an occasion for an adjustment of my understanding of the love of God.

And in a sense, I was forced to go back to the Bible and the creeds to ask the question as to what the love of God was all about. And I did come to the conclusion, with the help of a fellow by the name of Paul, and Jesus, that maybe God does not exist for us in love in order to rescue us. And, I came to the conclusion that even if you pay attention to the Bible, God is not basically an interventionist god. He doesn't spend his days reaching down and fixing things.

Now, the interesting question is of course why do we assume that in the first place. Well Freud had something to say about that as a matter of fact. The kind of god we want is the kind of god who fixes thing. And I think we sort of assume he'll probably do that, for us at least. Because I've heard people say, "It's not fair- why me? I can think of a lot of people who deserve this, but I don't."

So that in the course of my McCormick studies, in order to sustain some sort of integrity about my own faith, I had to make an adjustment around the question as to what the love of God means. And I found ample basis for believing that the love of God does not mean bailouts, folks. It means that He's with us. As the apostle Paul says, we can face anything with Him who gives us strength. But, no guarantees. And I must confess, I like the other version.

But that's where I came out as a result of that life event with respect to my father.

I came to Kenilworth Union Church…and also realized that intellectual integrity is not saving faith. Can I repeat that? Intellectual integrity is important, but it’s not saving faith. And the thing that occurred to me is that is some respects, both the church I grew up in and the theology I learned at McCormick, elevated in the life of faith the business of intellect to a very high level.

*For more details on his life and the contributions Gil and Marlene Bowen made to communities stretching from towns in western Michigan where he and Marlene grew up, to his first call in Blue Earth, Minnesota, to the Chicago suburbs, and across eastern Europe and the Holy Land, go to: https://kuc.org/blog/remembering-the-reverend-dr-gilbert-bowen/.

Rev. Dr. Gilbert Brown