Timothy George

Published on July 25, 2017

Photo of Timothy George "I'm a scholar, I'm a teacher, I'm a preacher, but one day I got a call out of the blue from the president of Samford University...Dr. Corts said, 'We are thinking about starting a new seminary, a new divinity school, here at Samford University.'"

Chapters

Introduction and Poverty-Stricken Childhood Home

Timothy George discusses being raised by his two great-aunts in an incredibly poor, integrated community. Despite hardship, however, there was a strong sense of community and friendship among those who lived there.

Play Segment

Childhood Experiences and Education

Timothy George discusses the strong influences that his religious and public school education had on his life. He learned to be a theologian from arguing about the Mormon versus Baptist faiths and realized his love of reading and preaching thanks to "Book-mobiles" and supportive teachers.

Play Segment

Call to Ministry

Timothy George was called to ministry on August 6th, 1961, when he read an article in the Royal Service magazine that convinced him he was meant to preach. He would practice preaching in front of a variety of audiences as a child and eventually focused on youth revivals.

Play Segment

Higher Education

After high school, Timothy George attended the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and then went to Harvard Divinity School. His studies at Harvard allowed him to participate in Baptist mission pastoral work, to study with his role model George Williams, and to expand his horizons.

Play Segment

Job at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Timothy George chose to work at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary after attending Harvard and soon afterward started his family in Louisville, Kentucky. Despite tense political situations near the end of his time there, he thoroughly enjoyed the ten years he spent working at Southern.

Play Segment

Move to Beeson Divinity School

Timothy George received a call from the president of Samford University asking for help in starting the new Beeson Divinity School, and after extensive prayer, he decided to accept the new job offering. Despite widespread skepticism, George believed in Ralph Beeson's vision and has since received considerable support at Samford.

Play Segment

Transcript

EVAN MUSGRAVES: I’m Evan Musgraves. I’m here with Dr. Timothy George. When
and where were you born?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: I was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee,
January 29th, 1950.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: Okay. Who raised you?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: My father was an alcoholic, my mother had polio. Neither one of them were able to
care for me or for my sister. I have a sister, two years younger, Linda. She was
brought up in a Baptist children’s home and I was left to be brought up by two
great-aunts on my father’s side, who, kind of, loved me and nurtured me
through my early years, through at least the first grade, so I was brought up in
a section of town that was not very wealthy. It was called Hell’s Half acre
between 23rd Street and Main Street, if you know Chattanooga and I was brought
up in the care of these wonderful great-aunts, neither of whom could read or
write, but they encouraged me to go to the library and do all kind of things.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: What was that community like, Hell’s Half-acre?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: Hell’s Half-acre was—this was the 1950’s, so it was an integrated
community in the 1950s, well before Civil Rights, simply because it’s where
the poorest people lived, whether they were white or black. So I grew up with
African American neighbors, not because we were trying to make a social
statement or were uppity liberals, but simply because that’s where we could
afford to live. So, there was a sense of depravation, of not having very much. I
remember, for example, waiting while people would bring Thanksgiving baskets.
You know that tradition? They bring poor people Thanksgiving baskets with
turkeys. I remember that. But at the same time, I would have to say it was not
terribly unhappy as in my memory, because these were friends, we knew them, we
loved them, we played with them, we did a lot of things together. There was a
closeness. It seemed odd to say both of those at once, in that it was quite
poor, poverty-stricken would probably be the word, and yet there was the sense
that we would be, we were part of a community that mattered.

EVAN MUSGRAVES:
What was your early religious life like?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: Well, my Aunt Mary…I
had two great-aunts, Aunt Mary and Aunt Hattie. Aunt Mary took me to a little
Baptist church. All the rest of that part of the family were Mormons, for
example, her brother, my uncle Willie, was a dyed-in-the-wool Mormon and I
learned to be a theologian arguing with him and the Mormon missionaries who
tried to convert me when I was quite young, to the Mormon faith. I had to learn
all of that stuff; read the bible and argue about the Bible, but Aunt Mary was a
Baptist. She’d never become a Mormon and so she took me to the Boulevard
Baptist Church in Chattanooga. That was my early Christian religious training.
Our grandmother, also, who was not a part of this, but she lived a little
distance from Chattanooga, my father’s mother, had a great influence on me and
I would spend the summer times with her and visiting her country church, Mount
Pisgah Baptist Church, near Ringgold, Georgia. So those were my early days, very
rural, even though we were in inner city Chattanooga, the people in that church
had all grown up in the country and they still smelled like the country, they
worshipped like the country and so it was a little bit of the urban-rural mix.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: What were some of your favorite things to do as a kid?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: Read; as soon as I learned how to read, I began to read—there used to
be something called the “Book-mobile.” I don’t know if we still have those
anymore, but in those days, the public library would send out Book-mobiles into
different neighborhoods and the children could come and check out a book for a
week. Well, I remember one summer, I checked out 50 books and I read them all.
They were mostly biography and I guess in a way, that’s where my interest in
history was born. So reading. I liked to chop wood as a kid, because we needed
it, for one thing. It was a chore that needed to be done, because we had a wood
stove, a coal-burning wood stove for fire, but also was fun. I guess it was a
way of doing a little exercise, not much, but I just loved to chop wood.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: What was your education like from elementary school through high
school?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: Nonstop. I started the first grade and went straight to
the public schools of Chattanooga through the 12th grade. I would just have to
say enormously good things about my teachers. Teachers took a special interest
in me and encouraged me. It was in one of those classes, I was asked to make a
talk—it must have been the 3rd or 4th grade—and discovered I could speak and
it was kind of fun. That was about the same time I started preaching, but all
that was encouraged by the school system. I had wonderful teachers all the way
through. I can hardly remember a bad teacher. I had some great teachers and some
teachers I’m still in touch with, actually, now. One of them is 95 this coming
summer. She was my music teacher in junior high school, Eloise Litz meant a
great deal to me. I could probably name 10 or 12 others who did, so it was not
overly structured, but it was, in a way, the two places in my life, I guess,
growing up in the kind of environment I did with little, you might say,
financial resources, or family, extended family resources, were: one was the
church, the other was the school and I guess they still are the two most
important non-family institutions of my life.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: Describe your call
to ministry. When did you sense that?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: August 6th, 1961. I give
you a specific date, because I remember that date. I had gone to church—we
were going to a church at that time, not Boulevard, but another church, very
Baptist kind of church, but there was something, an organization called the
Woman’s Missionary Union. Have you heard of it? WMU?

EVAN MUSGRAVES: Mmhmm.

TIMOTHY GEORGE: They still exist, but there not as maybe well-connected in all
the churches as they used to be, but in those days, my mother was a part of that
and so she brought home a magazine called the Royal Service and I remember one
night, just reading, I guess it was a devotional or Bible study in the Royal
Service, based on Romans chapter 10: “How beautiful are the feet of those who
preach the Gospel” and so forth and that was the passage that kind of gripped
my heart and I felt that that was meant for me, that I was to be the one to go
over the hills and the mountains preaching the Gospel. I was called to preach
and in the kind of church I grew up in, no one ever told me that you had to go
to college or seminary and get ordained and certificated and all that to be a
preacher, so I just started preaching and youth Sundays, youth days, I told my
pastor, he’d give me opportunities to preach, so that’s how it started.

EVAN
MUSGRAVES: What were some of your early preaching experiences like?

TIMOTHY
GEORGE: Well, I wanted to preach so badly, that sometimes I would preach at
recess, that is the little time between class when you’d go out and play, so I
would collar students; I used to be a bully, you can hardly tell that by looking
at my gentle countenance now, but I’d say, “You’d better come over and
listen to me” and I’d actually preach a sermon to the kids on recess.
Another thing I did, I would do when I would be chopping wood sometimes, is I
would string up bottles along the sill, I’d preach to Coke bottles and stuff
like that. Once I had a bird’s funeral, I remember. This was when I was early
starting out, but then I graduated to youth revivals. That’s what Baptist
people like me did in those days. I was a Baptist preacher boy and I did a lot
of youth revivals, all the way through high school. My last senior year in high
school, I did 28 youth revivals, so almost every other week, and loved it all.
Somehow I managed to graduate, I don’t see how now. I wouldn’t recommend it
[laughter].

EVAN MUSGRAVES: So after you graduated high school, where did you go
from there?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, which
was the University of Chattanooga, in my first year. Then it became part of the
state system, as it is now, UTC, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. So, why
did I go there? I was offered a scholarship at a couple of Baptist schools:
Carson-Newman, Belmont in Nashville and I thought about it, but I needed to be
home, to be with my great aunt, my mother. This was a good school. I was highly
recommended by people I knew who had come there and I have no regrets, having
gone to the state University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. I could’ve done
better, had I not been preaching so much and doing so many other things, but I
don’t blame the school for that and they did give me a very good foundation
for what I would do later on in my academic work.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: From UTC, you
went…

TIMOTHY GEORGE: Went to Harvard Divinity School. I was there for seven
years. I did a master of divinity and then stayed on for a doctorate theology
degree. Why did I go to Harvard? I don’t really know, even now, looking back
on it, except that I had some teachers at UTC whom I respected said, “You
ought to think about going outside your region, outside your denomination,” so
I applied to five or six schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and so forth and was
accepted at most or all of them and then had to decide and so I guess the lure
in the name “Harvard” was a part of it, but there are two other reasons,
maybe more important. One was the fact that I was a pastor at that time at
Fellowship Baptist Church in Chickamauga, Georgia, had been the last two years
of college, and so I wrote to what we now call the North American Mission Board.
We used to call it the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. I
said, “I’m a pastor. I’m thinking about going to Harvard Divinity School
for theological studies. Is there anything I can do in mission work up there?”
They wrote back and said, “Yes, actually, there’s a church that needs a
pastor and we would be glad to talk to you about doing this job while you’re a
student.” Well that was just unbelievable. So I did become the pastor of the
First Baptist Church of Chelsea, Massachusetts during my first years at Harvard
and got $300 a month from the Home Mission Board, so that was, I thought, an
answer to prayer and a confirmation that’s where I should go. The other thing,
already at that time, I was very interested in studying history and studying the
Reformation in particular and there was a book I had read by George Huntston
Williams, a great, great historian, church historian, who taught at Harvard. And
I said, “Wow, it would be great to study with this man.” So I went to
Harvard with those two things in mind: one, to be involved in Baptist mission
pastoral work, the other was to study with George Williams. As it turned out I
did both of them while I was there.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: What was it like being a
Southern Baptist at Harvard?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: [Laughter] Well, it wasn’t that
bad. You know, I fit in somewhere between the Buddhists and the Salvation Army.
I mean, Harvard, in those days, did not have a strong ideological caste to it.
It was not a seminary in the sense that we think of a confessional community. We
were a center for the study of religion and theology and the classical
theological disciplines. No one ever made fun of me for being a conservative
Baptist at Harvard. Now, you know, I needed to learn quickly to articulate why I
believed what I believed and to do that in discussion with other ideas, other
students who had different ideas, but that was good for me. I came out of
Harvard; I would not say more conservative than when I went, but knowing more
clearly why I was a conservative than when I went in, because they allowed that
freedom and that breadth there. I had some wonderful teachers at Harvard. They
had a great influence on me and still today, I look to them and read their
stuff. We had a small group. They weren’t just Baptists. I would call them
evangelical students at Harvard. Not a big group. five or six or seven of us
maybe and we would meet to read the Bible together, to pray together, to have
coffee together, as students say now, hang out together. We didn’t use that
expression back then. It’s very common now, “hang out.” Hang out together
and they were also an important part of my experience there and then of course,
also, I was a pastor, so I was preaching every Sunday. I was doing all the
things a pastor has to do when the rubber hits the road, real life, death and
life issues and that was very important. I learned how to do ministry in stereo.
Sort of, the academic stuff over here, my mind being stretched in all kind of
incredible ways and then coming home in the evening on the weekend to kids from
the street to people getting divorced to all kinds of drugs and everything else
going on. I had to deal with that as a pastor and so I was learning to do
ministry while I was studying ministry and that sort of still, I would say, it
shapes the way I think ministry should be done.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: After Harvard,
you went to Southern.

TIMOTHY GEORGE: I did.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: You went straight
to Southern after Harvard.

TIMOTHY GEORGE: I did, yeah.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: What was
the climate of Southern when you arrived?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: Well, let me say as I
was—I didn’t go to Harvard to become a teacher. I went to Harvard because I
was a pastor. I wanted to be the best trained pastor I could be and I stayed on
to do a doctoral degree for the same reason, but in the course of that, you
know, I began to think about teaching possibilities and folks came to me and
said, “What do you think about teaching here or there?” I was actually in
discussion with three different schools about a teaching job during my last
couple of years at Harvard. One was a school in Switzerland, where I later
taught for a year, Rüschlikon. The other was Southeastern Baptist Seminary,
that’s in North Carolina and the third was Southern. I chose Southern probably
for two or three reasons. It was the best known and I think at that time, maybe
not the largest, but one of the best libraries and academic reputations anyway
and that attracted me. Also, I had met people from Southern who had come to
Harvard on sabbatical and we’d become friends and they were cheerleaders for
me to come to Southern, as was my friend Bill Leonard, who had graduated from
Boston University about four years before I did from Harvard. He was already
there. He encouraged me. Then, I think, maybe in addition to all these personal
contacts, there was the fact that Southern was willing to hire me, essentially
two years before I finished my degree, give me a contract on full salary at
Harvard for that last year. So as somebody said, they bought out my contract
[laugher]. That’s a term they apply with football plays, not theologians, but
anyway, they were very generous with me, let me put it that way and so I did go
there. I actually joined the faculty in ’78 and moved in ’79 to Louisville.
What was Southern like in those days? I loved being at Southern. I still to this
day am in touch with former students. I was there for 10 years, so a big chunk
of my life. Both of our children were born in Louisville, they’re bluegrass
babies. So, great collegiality, it was a great community. I clearly understood
myself to be one of the more conservative members of the faculty. That was clear
from day one but I didn’t feel any particular discrimination or, you know,
people maybe thought I was peculiar because I had these certain ideas or one
person said, “We haven’t had anybody like you around in 100 years.” There
was that feeling but it was not abrasive or it was not in any way condescending,
as I felt it. I had a chance to teach, to preach. I was an interim pastor in a
number of churches while I was there. I look at it now, looking back on it as
kind of a golden time in my life in a way. Our children were being born. We were
buying our first house, you know. All those things were going on Louisville.
Now, toward the end of my time there—I was there for 10 years—toward the end
of my time there, it got a little more dicey in terms, as the seminary was drawn
more and more and to what was then a raging controversy in the SBC and that just
created some tense situations that involved me kind of on a periphery. I was not
there in the thick of it, the way some people were, but because these were my
friends, these were my students, because I had certain beliefs and expectations,
that was not always in jive with sort of the party line, that became a little
bit abrasive, I would say, in the last year or two, but that was certainly not a
factor in why I left Southern to come to start Beeson. That was not even on the
radar. I think I could’ve stayed at Southern and survived and done well at
Southern.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: That was actually my next question. Why leave Southern
and come to start Beeson?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: That’s almost as hard of a question
as why I went to Harvard. In one way it’s hard and in one way it’s quite
easy. First of all, I need to say that I went to Southern. I was there all those
10 years. I never wanted to leave Southern. I never intended to leave Southern.
My goal has always been, you go somewhere and you stay there as long as you can,
as long as you know you’re doing your work and people aren’t throwing eggs
at you too much. That was the way at Southern. I loved what I was doing. I
didn’t want to be an administrator. I didn’t like deans. I used to say very
bad things about deans, which I know now, were spoken in ignorance. If you had
looked at the faculty at Southern in those days and you’d seen me, you
wouldn’t have picked me out as somebody who would become a dean, the founding
dean of the new school. Make things run. I’m a scholar, I’m a teacher, I’m
a preacher, but one day I got a call out of the blue from the president of
Samford University. His name was Tom Corts and Dr. Corts said, “We are
thinking about starting a new seminary, a new divinity school, here at Samford
University.” At that time, there were no such divinity schools on any Baptist
related campus. That was just not heard of, but he said, “We’ve had a gift
from a generous donor and he has some ideas and we wondered if you’d come down
and talk to us about this position” so I did. I met him, I met Ralph Waldo
Beeson, and got a sense of his vision for this school and I prayed about it,
went back to Louisville, and they offered me the job. I said that I needed a
week to think about it, pray about it. So I went back to Louisville, and I
remember the day of decision took place at Cave Hill Cemetery, which is owned,
or a portion of it, is owned by the seminary where I used to go with my students
and talk about the great heroes of the faith who were buried there. It was a
favorite place of mine, so I went there one day, spent the whole day in prayer
and essentially two passages of Scripture over and over and over again. One was
Psalm 119. It’s the longest chapter in the Bible. It has 176 verses. A lot
about the word of God, the law of God, the will of God, the precepts of God, and
then the other passage was Hebrews 11, the first part. Abraham and Sarah called
to go out to a place where they’d never been, went out, not knowing where they
were going, and so I think those two passages of Scripture just kind of
coalesced in my sense of calling to Beeson Divinity School. So I have just a
definite a sense of being called by God to come here and begin this work as I do
of anything else in my life: being converted, being called to preach, and
getting married. I’d put getting married way down. That was not nearly as hard
a decision [laughter], but, you know, a lot of people thought I was crazy to do
such a thing or try to do such a thing, especially those who knew me and knew
that I was no good at this sort of thing and knew how difficult it probably
would be in the vortex of a denominational crisis controversy to try to start a
new theological school, but I kind of caught the vision from Ralph Beeson of the
school that would be evangelical, interdenominational, focused on the global
Christian movement, and that sounded to me like something I wanted to be
involved with and could maybe make a contribution to. So on June 1st, 1988 I
drove from Louisville to Birmingham and as they say, the rest is history
[laugher].

EVAN MUSGRAVES: So what was the response of the Samford community to
founding a divinity school here?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: Well, I should say that in the
first place, on the response of everybody, Samford and beyond Samford, there was
skepticism. On the part of some people, cynicism, but certainly doubts about the
wisdom of doing this. I think I’d been here a week or two when all of the six
SBC seminary presidents issued a common press release blasting President Corts
and me for trying to start a new—something that had never been done before.
“Plowing new ground, why are you doing this? We’ve got our seminary. We
don’t need you.” So there was a lot of external opposition from all over the
quarter. There was also a lot of misunderstanding about what we were doing. Now,
you’re too young to remember, but back in 1988, everybody took sides in the
SBC controversy, so the moderates thought, “Well Timothy George is a
conservative. This is an effort to take over another theological school and to
play into the hands of the denominational fight from a—it’ll be a
fundamentalist school.” On the other hand--That’s what the moderates
thought. On the other hand, the conservatives thought, “This is at Samford
University. Nothing good can come out of there,” and so they thought it would
be a moderate, liberal reaction to the SBC that I’d left Southern fleeing the
conservatives who were taking over, none of which was true and, you know, we had
to kind of deal with those misimpressions and did a lot of talking on the phone,
visiting people, having coffee with pastors, speaking to pastors’ groups, to
denominational leaders. “This is who I am. This is what we’re trying to do.
Pray for us, support us if you can.” Probably did a lot of that for the first
several years and I think won enough friends to be able to make a little launch
off the rocket pad. Nothing too auspicious. We had 31 students in our first
class, but at Samford you ask about—and specifically at Samford—there were
people at Samford in those days, who were I would say somewhat polarized in
terms of the SBC conflict and I didn’t seem to fit into any of their
preconceived ideas and this was jarring to them and so we received some
criticism from some people on the campus. It was not overwhelming and I will say
this. I’ve been here now, how many years? You probably know more than I do.
Since 1988 and in all of my years as being dean I have never felt anything but
unstinting support and encouragement from the president and the provost and my
fellow deans, the leaders of the university. Every recommendation I’ve ever
made as the dean of the divinity school has been supported. Now no dean could
ask for anything more than that, so I have absolutely no complaints about the
support I receive from Samford University to develop this school. There was some
static. There was some incoming fire. There was some turbulence, you might say
that we had to negotiate, but God helped us and we got through it and looking
back on it, I think it made us better.

EVAN MUSGRAVES: Apart from the fact that
the money was there to start the seminary, why keep going ahead to start the
seminary with so much opposition?

TIMOTHY GEORGE: Because of Psalm 119 and
Hebrews 11. It was really because a sense of God’s call on my life to do this
and the sense of the vision for the school that we needed this kind of place, a
place that was not captured by any one denomination, that was evangelical, rock
solid conservative in its core, honored the Bible, believed the Bible, and yet
could train students in a place where we could learn from one another. Be
evangelical, interdenominational. Even though I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Southern
Baptist, that’s the kind of theologian I am. I’m an evangelical, even a kind
of ecumenical theologian, so this was a good place to do that and I didn’t
find places like that just bursting out all over the place. When you look at the
country as a larger places like—in the early days of Fuller, I would say that
was a model. Gordon-Conwell, up near Boston is kind of a model. Trinity, near
Chicago. There were schools like that that were doing something like this on a
different scale in a different context, but in our region of the country and in
our kind of world, there was no such thing. So I felt there was a need for this
and the fact that somebody criticizes you or doesn’t like you, you have to
learn to develop a pretty thick skin. Somebody once said to me—I did one of
these personality tests. Do you ever take these MVVP—now what are they called?
There’s another name for them. Anyway, it turned out that I was inner-directed
and when I first found that I said, “Wow, that’s great. I’m
inner-directed. I don’t need people telling me how good I am. I don’t need
people to pat me on the back. I know what I’m doing. I have a sense of
calling. I’m just going to do it.” But of course, that can cut both ways.
Hitler was inner-directed too. I hope I’m not following his model, but I am
inner-directed in the sense that I have a sense of calling and a vision and I
hope I’ve learned to be sensitive to what other people think and say and not
bull-headed and strong-willed and authoritarian, but I think the fact that I
could be criticized and sleep at night, you know, was probably helpful [laughter].

Audio Information
Attribute	Value
Date	2014-08-18
Interviewer	Evan Musgraves
Interviewee	Timothy George
Repository	Samford University Oral History Collection
Collection	STORI Collection
Accession	SUHist/Faculty/004