Melissa Woodland

Dr. Robert Black is Professor of Religion at Southern Wesleyan University. He is the author of How Firm a Foundation, a history of Southern Wesleyan, and co-author of The Story of the Wesleyan Church. Dr. Black is a graduate of Southern Wesleyan University and has taught there since 1986. He is planning on teaching a C.S. Lewis Seminar in the Spring of 2018. Any students interested in taking the class are urged to enroll. 

ME: Tell me about the town that you were raised in.

BLACK: My dad was a minister and so my earliest years up to third grade were in Gastonia, North Carolina, not too far up 85 from Spartanburg. But my real hometown is where we moved when I went into third grade, Asheville. So I grew up in Asheville. Dad pastored there for 14 years, so I was there through college. And so that is the place I remember most. The most beautiful city in the world. It has changed a lot in terms of its demographics since I was there, but it was a great place to grow up.

ME: You actually answered my second question, which was, ‘Were you raised in a religious home?’ Your father was a minister, so was that the same [denomination] that you are now?

BLACK: Yes. He was a Wesleyan minister.

ME: Have you always been active in church?

BLACK: Since day one, really.

ME: What positions have you held in the church?

BLACK: Well, when I was a kid, I was the church janitor. How about that? That was an important position. That was my first part-time job. I have been an active participant ever since I can remember. But then, I’ve been a pastor. Our church has districts, each local congregation belongs to a district, and I’ve served in the district office as well. And then the denomination’s headquarters are considered the general church, and I spent four years there working at denominational headquarters. I’ve really had an opportunity to serve the church on a local level, the district level, the general level and now in one of its educational institutions. So, very, very, closely tied to it.

ME: Tell me about the person that most influenced you in your life.

BLACK: That would be my dad.  Wonderful, wonderful role model. [The] most down-to-earth person that you would ever want to meet, even though he rose to high office in the church. He was just everybody’s friend. He showed me how to be a dad but he also showed me how to be a pastor. I grew up with him as my pastor, so when I became a pastor, that [was the] kind of model that I followed. He died when I was in my 40s and I still miss him. He was just a wonderful man.

ME: Is there a major event in your life that has shaped who you have become today?

BLACK: I would have to say when I accepted an invitation to the headquarters that I mentioned a while ago. Until that point I had always thought I would spend my entire ministerial career in pastorate. I got an invitation to work at the headquarters with the department of youth. I was 29. That appealed to me tremendously. I thought, “I’ll go there for three or four years, it will give me a big overview of the whole church and I’ll get to work with youth and youth pastors and then I’ll come back to pastoral ministry.” And while I was there, I did stay four years, I really felt led by the Lord to go into education of ministers instead of into the pastoral ministry again. And [I] applied to a doctoral program because I had seminary after college, went to college here and went to seminary before I pastored. I applied to doctoral programs, got in, finished my doctorate, began to teach in Christian colleges. And it started with that decision to leave the pastorate to go for a temporary position, in my mind, at headquarters. I didn’t see that coming at the time, but it turned out to be a real dividing point in my life.

ME: That actually answers another one of my questions, too.

BLACK: Wow, I’m good!

ME: You are! You are very thorough. I was going to ask why you chose teaching instead of preaching. It sounds like you’ve done both.

BLACK: I have. And friends said to me, when I said, “I really feel called to the classroom,” they said, “You know your preaching has always leaned heavily on the teaching side.” And I hadn’t thought about it until then. And then I began to do some self-assessment and realize they were right. It was preaching, they weren’t lessons, they were sermons, but it was more like what today is called a teaching pastor in a church. Looking back on it, I could see that the Lord was kind of leading me that way and gifting me that way. I had friends who were much more gifted in other areas of the ministry than I was, and I could spend my whole life there and not be as good as they were. And yet, this was the way the Lord was preparing me to serve and I didn’t see it at first. Other people saw it before I did. And then when I got accepted in the doctoral program and then when I began to teach, everything just fell into place. I’ve had some invitations since then to go back into the pastorate and didn’t even feel any hesitation. This is where I am supposed to be. Why go somewhere else when that’s true? You know, if this is satisfying, if you feel like it’s what the Lord wants you to do and gifted you to do, then you don’t need to think beyond that to know that something else wouldn’t be a sidetrack.

ME: I would agree with that. What class have you taught in the past that you would like to teach again?

BLACK: My degree’s in church history, so in the past I have taught some electives in church history that I would dearly love to be able to teach again. But our division is so busy teaching the normal load that we do not have a lot of time for [those] kind of electives. When we do offer electives, it’s almost always Bible electives because more people need those. It would be nice to be able to teach just a course on Martin Luther, or a course on John Wesley, or a course on the great revivals in American history. I teach the history of Christianity course and I teach the history of [the] Wesleyan church and I can weave those things in there. But it would be a lot of fun just to be able to take a whole semester and do a specialized study on one those things, [but] I am not able to do that.

ME: Why do you believe church history is valuable?

BLACK: Unless we know where we came from it’s hard to know where we are going, or where we should be going. When I was in college, I had a church history teacher who was a substitute, the regular teacher was out that semester doing graduate work, and the substitute teacher was a very nice man but he was not a good teacher. History was not my high point in college. But when I got to seminary, probably the best teacher in the whole seminary was the church history teacher. And I saw then what it could be. I just fell in love with it, it excited me, and I thought if I can impart this to somebody else…  Because most of the time, people make a face when you mention history. It’s not their favorite thing. And I just had this conviction that everybody likes a story and history is really just a story, it’s not just a list of dates. It can be taught in a narrative form, like story form, maybe there won’t be that knee-jerk reaction against it that you often get when you talk about history. When I went into my doctoral program, I went into [the] church history program and loved it even more so that’s what I would do. I haven’t had a chance just to teach it all the way through because our school’s not that big. We have to teach a wide variety of courses, but most of my writing has been on church history. So I’ve got a chance to explore it that way.

ME: Can you recall any students who you have impacted the way your father impacted you? And what have they gone on to do?

BLACK: There are some. Our denomination has a general superintendent who leads the denomination and then there are four general officers under them that are in charge of programs: one’s in charge of missions, one’s in charge of the local church, one’s in charge of educational institutions, and that kind of thing. It’s been my privilege to teach two of the four. So it’s been great to see them in positions of leadership. My pastor right now is Tom Harding at Alive Wesleyan, which is one of the fastest growing churches in the denomination, and he was my student. That’s really rewarding. One I think about is a student that I had in the late 80s, who was just an average student and satisfied to be average and get by. And in class one day, just out of the clear blue, a lightbulb came on for him and he saw the virtue of study and he saw the joy of learning and he became one of the best students I ever had, overnight.  Instead of being just average and satisfied with it, he became exceptional and not only just made top grades but two or three times a week he’d call me at night and say “I’ve been reading something. Got a minute to talk about it?” Nothing is more fun than that to a teacher, when someone really catches fire.  Right now he’s in a doctoral program. He’s getting his PhD and he’s going to teach on a college level. Those things are really rewarding, when you feel like you had a role in somebody’s life.

ME: I can imagine. You’ve been teaching for 30 years now, correct?

BLACK: Thirty years here. I taught at another Wesleyan college, Oklahoma Wesleyan, for four years before that, so teaching for 34.

ME: Is there any other staff on campus who’s has been here that length of time?

BLACK:  I am the old guy on the hill right now.

ME: You’ve got seniority!

BLACK: I’ve got seniority! That means I have to carry the mace at graduation.

ME: What is the biggest difference you’ve seen in your students in the classroom over the years? Study habits? Or personalities?

BLACK: There’s a level at which human personality is human personality. And I can see students today who make me want to pull my hair out, and I think, well, I went to school with people that teachers would have felt that way about too in my day. And I’ve taught people all along that 34 years who were the same way. And by the same token, people who are just a joy to teach. There’ve always been people like that, too. It does seem a couple things are true today. One is the influence of technology on learning. It’s so easy for students to do research now when it used to be a really acquired skill. Now, you hit a couple of buttons and you know what you need to know. That also can be a trap because it’s the easy way out, and so, number one, you don’t really learn as much as you might if you had to dig for your information. Number two, they sometimes go to sources like Wikipedia which are suspect anyway, they come up with suspect data. Technology is definitely one thing that’s made a hugely different playing field, including things like online learning. I’m a low tech person. I don’t teach online courses, if I weren’t nearing retirement, I’d be nearing retirement, because that’s the way education is moving and that’s not me. But the other thing is a more human problem: I think there is today a greater sense of privilege among a lot of students. They feel like they deserve a high grade, whether they work for it or not. They’re used to getting a trophy for everything from age 5 on and when the grade they get doesn’t look like a trophy, sometimes you get that phone call. And that’s disappointing. There are always, in any generation, there’s students that make grades that are lower than they could make, underachieving students. But it’s disappointing when they don’t say, “Yeah, you’re right” but instead they say “Well, I deserved it anyway” or “Hey, I need this grade to get into grad school.” That would have been a great reason for you to have studied harder when you had a chance. It doesn’t affect what your grade looks like when the semester’s over.

ME: I’ve witnessed the same thing. What have your students taught you?

BLACK: A great deal. I love being with students, I love being in classrooms, I love being with them in life. Some of the hurdles they’ve had to overcome just leave me breathless. Life is ten times harder for them because of a physical disabilities or because of a home life that just seems destined for them to follow in the same failed patterns that their parents did. I don’t just mean broken homes, I mean the kind of negative outlook on life that almost ensures failure instead of success. The ravages of alcohol and drug abuse and things like that. But these students have overcome that and they’re just shining examples of how you can rise above your circumstances, rise above your environment. We just graduated Champ Squires. I don’t know if you were in class with Champ, the boy in the motorized cart who had cerebral palsy. He transferred here from junior college and finished up with us. I’ve never met anybody like him. He had the most upbeat spirit and attitude and he had what others would have given into as a debilitating disease and he just was able to rise above it in ways that still, when I think about it, just blow my mind. He never used it as an excuse. In fact, he never wanted to acknowledge it. His favorite expression was, “No, I got it.” If you tried to open a door for him, “I got it, I got it.” To the point where we actually kidded him about it. You’re too self-sufficient, let somebody help you, for crying-out-loud, every once in a while. But it was such a pleasure to teach him and to see him succeed. He had perfectly good reasons for not being able to go to college and he came. And for not being able to graduate, and he did.  For not getting into grad school, he’s applying to grad schools. I believe he’s going to get in. Stories like that inspire me, and I mentioned a while ago some of my students who have gone on to succeed in ministry or in other fields, they inspire me too. I really love the fact that I can be under the leadership of someone who once sat in my class. That’s true at church on a Sunday morning, it’s true of my district leadership. There’s students I taught who are now leading our district, so I get to sit under their leadership for a change. It’s role reversal.

ME: That shows a great humbleness on your part, as well. Many people like to be in a position of the “teacher” and feel less valuable when those go on and rise above where they’ve gotten to. That shows great humbleness.

BLACK:  That’s a shame if somebody has that attitude because it really means that the universe is working the way it is supposed to. That God is bringing a new generation of leadership on, and that’s not going to happen if the old generation refuses to let it go.

ME: That’s true. Do you feel like teachers should be perpetual students?

BLACK: Absolutely. I am 70 years old, people are saying “Why aren’t you retired already?” but I don’t feel like it. I just feel like continuing doing what I am doing, at least for the time being. I feel like continuing to learn. I am using a new text this semester I have never used because I don’t want to just coast on the old text. I want to challenge myself with something new. So I’ve got to do reading just like the students do. I can’t just go to the file and pull it out five minutes before class. I think you start to die a little bit when you start coasting, so I’d rather not do that yet.

ME: You wrote How Firm a Foundation. How long did it take to do the research for this? Seeing as you grew up in the church.

BLACK:  Yeah, grew up in the church and went to school here. So number one I have a love affair with the school in the first place. How Firm is the history of the first years of the college. It took six months plus to do the research for it, and it took another six months to write it.  Now, during the six months when I was writing I would do additional research. I would come to a point and say, “I don’t know enough about this,” so I would go back and dig some more. But the preliminary research was spread over about six months and then the writing took another six months, so I put a year in on that project.

ME: What was the most fascinating thing that you learned?

BLACK: Some of the hurdles that the school had gone through in its earliest days. I came to school here in 1963 which was right after the fire in the girl’s dorm where Crystal Bennett and Myrna Stuart were killed. Stuart-Bennett is named after them. The old girl’s dorm stood on the spot where Stuart-Bennet stands now. So I knew about that crisis in the school’s history first hand; the school was still recovering from that when I came the next fall. But what I didn’t know all about was some of the things that happened in the Depression, some of the things that happened in war-time. When the school lost, temporarily, almost every male student, it became virtually a girl’s school for a while because of the draft. I just found it fascinating to study those things. My parents both went here in the 30s, so I could tie what I knew about their stories into the bigger history of the school as well. It was just fun to dig into all that and try to put it together. Again, my view of history is that it ought to be a narrative, so I’m trying to construct a storyline that runs from 1906 to 2006 when the book was published. So it’s not just who was president [and] what buildings were built, but what’s the nature of the school, what’s the personality of the school, how is it handling its challenges, how is it celebrating its victories over 100 years of history.

ME: Have you found the personality to remain consistent?

BLACK: I found it remarkably consistent. And I would say the continuing trait of the school is the willingness of its leadership to go above and beyond. Not to work 9 to 5 but to do what has to be done to make the school succeed. Sometimes at personal sacrifice. There were times in the 30s where the faculty didn’t get paid because there was no money and they’d show up the next week and keep teaching. And after three weeks, six weeks sometimes, the paychecks would come through. They’d just help each other over those hard times. Those people didn’t teach me, because that was in the 30s, [but] those people taught people who taught me. So you start to see a network of influence from generation to generation so that nobody that comes to school here is starting with a blank slate. They are entering a picture that is already developing, or they are entering a story that’s already being told. And today’s school is not that different, I think, from those days. Thankfully we don’t miss paychecks. But the paychecks aren’t too generous. You know, we are tuition driven so the school can only do what it can do. And yet, people say it’s okay, it’s where I want to be, it’s where I’m supposed to be.

ME: Historically, people have turned to the church when they are in trouble. Can you think of a time when someone has come to you in crisis and expected you to have the answer but you don’t? How do you handle that?

BLACK: It’s always fun when you can say “I know the answer to that,” but you’re right, there are an awful lot of times where you say “I don’t know either.” But the way to handle it is one of the key words in the Bible, and that’s faith, which means that you trust even when you don’t see the answers, you trust even when it’s not clear to you. Corrie Ten Boom, who survived the holocaust, she was put into a concentration camp as a Christian who saved Jews. Her analogy was, we see life as a tapestry and we see the back of it. The back of a tapestry is just knots and discolored threads running randomly. What we can’t see is the front of the tapestry, a beautiful picture. God sees the front of the tapestry. And so we deal with our limited knowledge, our partial understanding and we have to look to Him in faith for the rest of it. There are a lot of times where I will end a counseling session just praying with students saying, “Lord, we don’t understand, but we trust You in all this.” That’s exactly what the Bible means when it says, “The just shall live by faith.” We don’t always have those answers.

ME: When you are counseling people, is it difficult to distinguish or separate out your individual Biblical opinions versus what’s straight from the Bible?

BLACK: Okay, I thought you were going to say my theology from my counselees’ theology. That sometimes is interesting. And yeah, it can be tricky to say, “Am I on firm Biblical ground here or is this a personal preference of mine?” Any counselor has to recognize the role his or her own personality plays, his or her own outlook plays. If a person’s an introvert or an extrovert; if a person is naturally optimistic or pessimistic. It’s going to influence the way that they influence other people. That’s absolutely true. I’m grateful for the fact that I didn’t major in the same thing all the way through my schooling. I majored primarily in Bible courses while I was here. We had a degree program that included preaching and counseling and other things, but most of what I took was Greek and English Bible when I was here. I majored mostly in theological courses in seminary and my doctorate is in church history, so I feel like that I’ve got some preparation in those three major areas, the area of Bible and theology and church history so that I’m not just single focused. When somebody asks for counseling I may end up referring them to somebody if it’s a really serious problem because I think that’s the wisest thing we can do sometimes. I also feel like I can at least begin a conversation with them from a fairly broad point of view because I’ve had a fairly broad education in Christian disciplines through those areas.

ME: I’m going to switch gears just a little bit here. Churches are often thought about for their service, like overseas missions, local missions, food banks, things of those nature. Those are meant to reach the lost. Which form of service do you believe is most important and why?

BLACK: John Wesley said, “You have nothing to do but save souls.” And you read a statement like that and you think, okay, well then the only thing we ought to be doing is just soul winning. We ought to be preaching to people that need to find Christ, we ought to be witnessing to people that need to find Christ, we ought to be helping people find Christ.  And he did all those things. But then he also turned around and expended enormous energy in helping the outcasts and underprivileged in society, and he’s the guy who said we ought to devote all our energy to saving souls. But his definition of saving souls was not just spiritual, it was physical. And so, I really think that the church is the church most clearly and most Biblically when it does both. When it teaches spiritual truth but when it’s also there with a cup of cold water in Jesus’ name. Judy and I have talked about where our charitable giving ought to go, and 10% goes to the church, right off the top, as a tithe. But beyond that we’ve selected half dozen different groups, maybe seven or eight different groups, that we’ll support financially but we’ll also give support to physically. We’ll actually work with them. We’ll actually do things on our own time, you know, on their behalf. What they all end up doing is helping somebody, somewhere, in Jesus’ name. And I think when people get upset at the church, sometimes they get upset because they think they’re just too heavenly minded to be any earthly good, and Wesley was a great corrective in that regard. He never felt like it was inappropriate to spend time helping somebody whatever their need was. I think that’s a good model for us to follow still. We try to do that.

ME: The church is also known as a creative outlet for visual and literary arts. How does that side of the church influence you?

BLACK: I’ll tell you how it influences me: I love it, and I’m worried about it because I see the churches moving away from the aesthetic side of worship into buildings that are pretty plain, into worship sanctuaries that are pretty plain, and depending on technology to produce an effect instead of letting the beauty of color, of art, of music, be that effect, be that change agent in worship. I’ve been with three of our student groups who went to London for a week over spring break in years past. They would always moan, “Oh no, another cathedral,” and I’m thinking “Are you kidding me! What a wonderful opportunity this is. These are some of the most beautiful buildings on earth and just to be in them gives you a sense of the divine that’s so powerful you can almost touch it, taste it.” Yet they say, “Can we wait for you outside?” I could stay all day in a place like that. Admittedly, I’d stay much longer than they would want to stay. But I do want them to catch that fact that God is the author of beauty and in architecture, in art, and in music, we see that. Sometimes we settle for what’s popular instead of what’s beautiful in church. I wish we wouldn’t, that worries me.

ME: How do you believe Christian literature, other than the Bible, has influenced you?

BLACK: Hugely. I’m teaching C.S. Lewis seminar, and the reason is because I’ve been reading C.S. Lewis since college and I just can’t get enough. I read and reread him. He’s not the only example, of course. But he’s a great example of the fact that Christian literature beyond the Bible is critically important. Somebody said, “If the Bible’s all you read, you’re not really reading the Bible.” You need to read other things and then go back to the Bible to really understand its message sometimes. And I find that when I read Lewis. When I retire, I don’t know what I am going to do with all of these [pointing to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves brimming with books]. I’ve got bookcases at home as well. I’m a book person. I’ve always loved books. A lot of these books are about the Bible. That whole complete bookshelf and the first three levels over here are all books on the Bible. But the rest aren’t. Books on the Bible and books beyond the Bible, help me understand the Bible.

ME: Are there any works in particular that you believe have helped you to teach others how to build a foundation of faith in learning?

BLACK: The most influential, I think, has been Lewis’s Mere Christianity. It was voted the most influential Christian book of the 20^th century, so I am far from the only one. I really love to read Lewis, and I feel that Lewis communicates to successive generations better than anyone I’ve seen in an awful long time. I also like John Stott. John Stott is England’s Billy Graham, and I’ve been in his church a couple of times in London. I love to read what he writes. F.F. Bruce is my favorite Bible teacher, Bible expositor. He didn’t come from my tradition, but I just the way he handles the Bible is magnificent. So yeah, I’ve got some favorites. And when I teach preaching class, I’ll take some samples of those books in to whet student’s appetites, try to get them to start thinking about who their favorites are and find somebody they can follow on the pages of a book. I don’t know how much longer books are going to be around because of technology, but at least to follow somebody’s writings, digitally if not in print, because they’re going  to need the same thing. [They’re going to] need to be building their base outside the Bible in order to understand the Bible better.

ME: How might students look to the Bible as literature?

BLACK: First of all, by realizing that it’s a library, 66 different books. And there’s poetry, and there’s history, and there’s law, and there’s letters, and there’s biography, and so you’ve got a wide range of literary types in the books themselves. Then within the books, like within the Gospels, you’ve got parables, you’ve got proverbs, and other genres of literature that not only have to be read as Bible, they have to be read as literature. So I think it’s wrong to just read the Bible as literature period, but if you read it with a high view of its authority and its trustworthiness, then to read it as literature also just really makes the pages of the Bible come alive.

ME: Can you think of any specific ways that the Bible has influenced British and American literature?

BLACK: Yeah, watch Jeopardy! A lot of times there will be some quotations or some parallels in [literature] that assume a knowledge of the Bible. Shakespeare assumes a knowledge of the Bible. John Milton assumed a knowledge of the Bible. I mean Paradise Lost makes no sense at all if you don’t have an understanding of Scripture. I think some of the greatest literature in English has been not just fostered by the church, but has been about the Scripture and has taken the Scripture into another dimension; into the dimension of more secular literature but based on an understanding of the Bible. I don’t think you can be culturally literate without being Biblically literate. Even in our society that has less regard, it seems, for the Bible than most previous societies did, most previous generations did, you still assume Biblical knowledge as a part of what you know as a person walking around on this planet. There’s some things that you’re expected to know that came out of the scripture.

ME: Finally, and I think you’ve touched on this already, who are some of your favorite Christian authors and Christian works?

BLACK: Most everything that Lewis wrote. I say most everything because there’s actually a couple things of Lewis that I never got into, I tried.  But 90% of the things that he wrote are way up on my list. In addition to the works that I mentioned a while ago, writers like Stott and F.F. Bruce, there are some historical writers that I love to read, people who have elevated the art of writing history to a higher level—David McCullough and Barbara Tuchman, George Marsden and Doris Kearns Goodwin—I love reading them. There are theologians that I love to read, and they’re not all in my tradition, but I love to bump heads with them when they’re not. Even though I couldn’t do that person-to-person, I get to do it when I read their books. I love to read Wesley, both John and Charles, because that’s my religious tradition. I can’t think of a better foundation for it than their own works and their own lives. When you love books, you love authors, and there’s a lot of them.