Joel Belz
Joel Belz is founder of WORLD magazine and God's World News children's magazines. He writes a bi-weekly column for WORLD, and is co-author of Whirled Views, a collection of columns, with Marvin Olasky.

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Reclaiming Erskine

The ARP makes a bold move against doctrinal drift at its college and seminary | by Joel Belz

I realize this advice comes a little late for high-school seniors, and their families, in the final stages of deciding where to enroll for college this fall. But news about continuing developments at Erskine College in South Carolina suggests maybe the advice is always timely.

The Erskine news comes as a follow-up to my column here last July 4, where I reported that the denomination that sponsors Erskine—the 30,000-member Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church—had voted to appoint a blue-ribbon committee to investigate reports of doctrinal drift among the faculty both in the liberal arts college and in the denomination's seminary on the same campus.

Last week, that committee submitted its report to an unprecedented specially called middle-of-the-year meeting of the denomination's highest court. The result was that, by a two-to-one majority, the court voted to replace the existing board of the college and seminary with a board more likely to reflect the denomination's more con­servative stance. If so radical an action has taken place in the last century or two in American higher education, no historians I've read have noted it.

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