By Arthur J. Bellinzoni,
Professor Emeritus of Religion 

We’ve all heard the story about the professor who after 30 years of teaching is still lecturing from the same, but now yellow, notes developed in the first year or two of his or her career. There are few new ideas being developed or introduced into the classroom, and students are quickly bored with the instructor and the course. Of course, we have never had such professors here at Wells College.

The ideal for any college professor is to be not only an excellent teacher, but also an active scholar - to contribute his or her own research and new ideas to peer review by delivering papers at professional meetings and by publishing original scholarship in professional journals or books. By this, I do not mean appearing at the local Rotary Club or even before the Wells College faculty club. I mean the opportunity to speak and write specifically for scholars in one’s field of expertise, both to receive critical feedback and to advance learning. Speaking for myself, I cannot imagine an educator not wanting to speak out and influence thinking not only among students, but also among fellow professionals and even among the general public. To illustrate my point, let me speak about my own personal and professional career and what I call "the integration of life."

I was fortunate to have had the finest secondary education possible, when I was enrolled in a private country day school in my hometown of Brooklyn, New York. There I was exposed to excellent teachers in small classes and was required to study English grammar and literature; two foreign languages for four years each (I studied Latin and French); biology, chemistry, and physics; mathematics; history; social studies; music and the arts. The program also included an hour and a half of athletics each day. When I entered Poly Prep at age 13, I already knew that I would someday be a doctor, and so I worked very hard at all of my studies.

From Poly I entered Princeton and pursued more of the same liberal arts, building on the fine foundation that had already been laid for me. But those dreaded distribution requirements that we all have had to fulfill in one form or another forever changed my life. To satisfy my humanities requirement at Princeton, I had to choose two courses in either history, philosophy, or religion. For reasons that I can no longer remember, I initially chose a course in religion, a fateful decision that would forever change my career and my life.

That first religion course at Princeton shook the foundation of my own personal faith. When I went to the university’s Catholic chaplain to discuss the matter with him and to get advice and counsel, he told me that I was reading dangerous and forbidden literature, that I should not do all of the course readings, and that I should probably drop some of my courses. As an exceedingly naive sophomore, I could not imagine NOT doing all of the assigned readings or dropping courses that I found both exciting and challenging. Without really understanding what was happening, I was undergoing my own personal enlightenment, fully two centuries after the fact, and struggling with a pre-enlightenment personal faith in a society that was also still basically pre-enlightenment. On my own and against the advice of the chaplain, I was certain that if I took just one more religion course I would have answers to all of the questions that had been raised in my mind in that first course. Talk about ingenuousness!

Well, to make a long story short I majored in religion at Princeton, even as I pursued the rigors of the full pre-med program. By the fall of my senior year, I was not sure whether I wanted to go to medical school or pursue advanced study in religion and teach. I was beginning to realize that there were two ways of healing society, one through the practice of conventional medicine, the other by exposing young people to the same rigor I had experienced from teachers at Poly and Princeton. It was only in the late spring of my senior year that I chose graduate school over medical school in what may have been the most difficult and important decision of my life.

Grad school meant five years at the Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and from Harvard I came to Wells College, where I have spent my entire professional career. I chose as my focus at Harvard the study of the Bible, particularly the New Testament and second century Christianity. But those of us who studied religion had to study the full complement of world religions and related academic disciplines. There is no discipline of religion per se. Religion is what I call an umbrella study under which students and scholars need to develop the skills of historians of religion, philosophers of religion, sociologists of religion, psychologists of religion, anthropologists of religion, and so on.

Wells afforded me the opportunity to use those skills and teach a wide range of courses ranging from Major Problems of Religious Thought, to Basic Christian Ethics, to The Dead Sea Scrolls, to Prophets Ancient and Modem, to The Contemporary Middle East in Historical and Religious Perspective, to Biblical Hebrew, Biblical Greek, and Medieval Latin. But the core of my teaching was always the Bible, both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. I am primarily an historian of religion by trade. Over the course of 38 years I taught a wide range of lecture courses and seminars, my own personal favorites being The Old Testament and Hebrew Beginnings, The New Testament and Early Christianity, and The Quest for the Historical Jesus.

My scholarly contributions have come principally in the areas of the literary relationships among the gospels, the development of gospel tradition in the second century, and the formation of the Christian canon. I’ve written articles and books, collected and edited the work of others, and translated into English from German and French important contributions of distinguished European scholars. I’ve also made available in English important texts from second and third century church fathers, who wrote originally in Greek. These activities have enriched me both personally and professionally.

My goal at Wells has always been to open minds and to challenge students, even as I was challenged myself in a way that transformed my personal life. The role of the liberal arts is "to liberate" (Latin liberare) or "to free" our minds from past biases and narrow prejudices and to open us to new truths and new ways of thinking that we had not previously seen or understood. Or as Wells has put it in its mission statement: "to teach students to think critically, to reason wisely, and to act humanely."

When Sissy Farenthold came to Wells in 1976 as its first woman president, I learned something new that should have been eminently clear to me much earlier. I learned that I also had a responsibility to act on my personal convictions for the advancement of human rights. That for me is the most important meaning of "to act humanely" in the Wells mission statement. Why did it take so long for a professor of religion to understand the prophetic dimension of religion? I was so involved in studying about religion that I had neglected to understand on a truly existential level the social and personal implications of all religions. I began teaching a course on Prophets Ancient and Modem, which covered everything from shamanism, to Moses, Jesus, Mohammad, Buddha, Confucius, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name just a few.

I did not do what many in the field of religion do, that is go out and preach the gospel. That was clearly not my calling. But I did start to speak out publicly about social issues that plague our society and our planet. In a curious sort of way, I began to understand more clearly the existential dimension of what had for me been primarily the academic study of religion. Religion in general and the Bible in particular took on new meaning for me personally.

In recent years, and now especially in my retirement, I am out fighting publicly for human rights and human freedom, sound Biblical issues. I serve with Sissy Farenthold on the Board of Directors of the Rothko Chapel in Houston, whose mission is to provide a platform for the celebration of all religious traditions, to discover and celebrate the commonality and differences among the world’s religions, and to advance both nationally and internationally issues of human rights and social justice. When asked earlier this year to join the board, Sissy said to me, "Arthur, I am counting on you to help me open the Rothko Chapel to the celebration of same-sex commitment ceremonies. Most members of our board are straight, white males, and Houston is in Texas, not New York." At my first board meeting in March, we voted to open the Rothko Chapel to same-sex unions. No board member voted no, although two abstained.

My activist work has also led me to serve on the national Board of Directors of Washington-based People For the American Way. There I work nationally for issues of human rights and individual freedom. We advocate women’s right to choice, civil rights, gay and lesbian rights, religious freedom, and the absolute separation of church and state, and strongly oppose the political agenda of the Religious Right, which often tries to blur or otherwise remove that separation. I personally have been involved in both state and national campaigns to pass hate crimes legislation. Last fall I worked in Cayuga County in a one-man campaign that focused on calling attention locally to the homophobic policies of the Boy Scouts of America in excluding gay boys and gay men from scouting and from positions of leadership in scouting. The Auburn Citizen considered that story the sixth most important local story of the year 2000. In my mind, my social activism represents another form of scholarship or peer review, perhaps a form more important and even more far-reaching than my published scholarship. Whether you agree or not with the conclusions of my scholarship or with my position on social issues is not as important as is the engagement of us all in the quest for truth and the understanding and advancement of human justice. I call this presentation The Integration of Life. By that I mean that academic pursuits are not only intellectual pursuits, but they have an even higher purpose: to give us the tools to advance knowledge and understanding for its own sake, but more importantly to use that knowledge and understanding to lead richer and more productive lives in an ever-changing world. Isn’t that after all what we are here for: to make a difference not only in own lives, but in the lives of others?

In a sense I have come full circle. It was my own personal enlightenment experience at Princeton that led me to the study of religion and to Wells. Through the course of my professional career and even now, I am trying to lead others to that same experience both through intellectual and academic rigor and by challenging people both young and old to reconsider their values, their commitments, and their lives. This integration of life is to me the most important contribution of the liberal arts.

Delivered May 31, 2001, at Wells College