The year was 1988, Beeson Divinity School’s birthday year. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were the leaders, respectively, of the United States and the United Kingdom. The Berlin Wall was starting to crack but had not yet fallen. The internet was about to be born, though Google was still ten years in the future. In February of that year, in response to a historic gift by Ralph Waldo Beeson, Samford University announced the creation of a new divinity school. My charge from President Thomas E. Corts was to organize and open this new theological school by the start of the fall semester.

“How does one start a new divinity school from scratch?” That was the question I posed to my mentor and friend James Earl Massey. Some things are obvious and urgent. One must recruit an inaugural class (we had 31 entering students that fall), and a founding faculty to teach them. One must get up a budget and devise a curriculum. But Dr. Massey emphasized something else: the character of the school and the kind of graduates it would send forth in the service of the church. From the beginning we wanted Beeson to embody two ideals: clarity and charity.

We wanted Beeson to be a community of conviction. We wanted Beeson to be a school where the Lordship of Jesus Christ was preeminent, where the Holy Scriptures were believed, honored, and obeyed. We would be, we said, a confessional school, one committed to the Great Tradition of Christian believing, worship, and mission. As a school at once confessional and interdenominational, there are many matters about which we perforce differ among ourselves. But hard-wired into our DNA, at the core of our identity, is a commitment to historic Christian orthodoxy embodied in the evangelical essentials of our school’s confession, and the Apostles Creed, chiseled in stone in Hodges Chapel and frequently confessed in our community worship.

What we believe, what we stand for, really matters. But so does how we live together and carry out our work as a community in covenant with Christ and with one another. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together—perhaps the most used textbook in the history of Beeson—shows us how this was done by a small group of faithful followers of Christ in one of the darkest moments of modern times. We frequently quote 1 Peter 3:15, a summons to intellectual rigor and scholarly depth—"Always being prepared to make a defense (apologia) to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you.” But we often stop without reciting the rest of the verse—“ yet do it with gentleness and respect.” In 1988, our first students drew up an inaugural covenant which we still recite at the beginning of every academic year. It calls on us to be “cautious in criticism and prompt in forgiveness.” Even so, we will certainly have disagreements and may not always be able to avoid controversy. But we will, with God’s help, resolve to embody the fruit of the Holy Spirit in all that we do, living by the rules of prayer, forgiveness, and brotherly and sisterly love.

The word “nexus” comes from the Latin nectere, to bind, to connect. Clarity and charity form a nexus in the life of a place like Beeson Divinity School. They are coinherent. One without the other will not do. Clarity without love leads to arrogance and empty legalism. Charity without clarity issues in a fibreless faith and sloppy sentimentalism. In these 35 years, Beeson has been blessed with a wonderful community—faculty, staff, students, now alumni and friends as well—who follow the lodestar of these twin commitments which have guided our labors together since the inception of our school. As H. Richard Niebuhr reminded us so well, together they declared that:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

Timothy George is distinguished professor of divinity and president of the Evangelical Theological Society.