An interview with Dr. V. Bruce Rigdon

Last fall, accomplished scholar and former Dean of the Faculty Dr. Lewis “Lew” S. Mudge died at the age of 79. Mudge was deeply invested in the ministry of teaching and convicted of the inherently ecumenical nature of the Reformed tradition. In a recent interview with his close friend and colleague, Dr. Bruce Rigdon, Emeritus Professor of Church History at McCormick during Mudge’s tenure, I learned that this high-minded, Ivy League Presbyterian was, in his own way, a thrill-seeker. He “loved to chart courses,” Rigdon said, and not just because he had a passion for precision, but because Lew Mudge was fearless in the face of a challenge. And that’s just what this newly appointed dean found in mid-1970s McCormick – a community in tremendous flux, having just relocated from Chicago’s Lincoln Park to the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park and trying to reconstitute itself in just about every way.

The following is an interview with Bruce Rigdon on the late Lew Mudge.

What’s important to know about Lew’s background, his theological formation, and how he came to be known for ecumenism?
Something people forget is that Lew’s father was for 18 years the Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Lew went to Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary for his undergraduate and graduate studies and so you have someone who is about as Presbyterian as you can possibly look.

But one of his earliest jobs was to go to Geneva to be the study secretary for the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to be responsible for a worldwide Presbyterian study program. He was both in the midst of Calvinism but also happened to be literally down the hall from the World Council of Churches. So his ecumenical passion began at least here, if not earlier.

Lew always entered ecumenical circles as someone who was unapologetically Reformed, but I have no doubt that he would say that persons of the Reformed tradition are necessarily ecumenical. His use of the Reformed tradition, his constant venturing out into new horizons, was never parochial. Lew’s reading of the Reformed tradition took on a multi-disciplinary character so that he engaged with sociologists, ecologists, lawyers, and all kinds of people. He really did believe that the world belonged to God and that the best we could say of ourselves is that we’re given permission, maybe even forced, to care about issues of social justice, ecology, and the like precisely because it is God’s world and because that conviction comes for some of us most powerfully out of the Reformed tradition.

How would you distill Lew’s contributions to the Seminary while he was here? Was there a McCormick before and a McCormick after?

I came in 1965, and McCormick had just been through a very traumatic experience. Many of its older distinguished faculty had left in anger. They wanted to come to the University of Chicago and the Board said, “No.” So some of them left for Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago – they went in all sorts of directions. When I arrived, a new president was under instruction by the board to form a new faculty. Two years into it, the new faculty decided to throw out what was basically the classical curriculum and create what was the most creative, risky and exciting curriculum imaginable. It was one that allowed students enormous independence based on passing qualifying examinations, and then they would go on to headier stuff. It would’ve worked well if America hadn’t been experiencing its own revolution. Suddenly there were riots in the park and we were occupied by the Poor People’s Coalition, the Welfare Mothers, and others groups. The result was that we went through some shattering years trying to figure out how to live in a world that was changing faster than we could describe it.

And then in the wake of those difficult years, there was the move to Hyde Park in ’75, which meant all kinds of adjustments – new ecumenical partners, and a new environment. At that stage, we needed someone who could help us integrate “where we had been” in the larger sense and what it meant to be in Hyde Park. And that was Lew’s contribution.

What were among the most difficult adjustments resulting from the move?
Unless you have experienced this for yourself, it’s hard to imagine what it meant at the end of a workday for the faculty to get into their cars and drive in different directions. Previously, we all gathered together at the dining hall for dinner after classes.

So he helped us become a different institution that was still partly residential, but in radically different ways from the old campus. It was also a commuting population, with much more diversity. As I think about this, I wonder if Lew wasn’t part of the first wave of heightened diversity that has become a trademark of the seminary.

He certainly supported everything that would internationalize us. I worked very hard on taking students to what was the Soviet Union as well as Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Lew was very supportive in a time when there really wasn’t a place in the budget or the established curriculum as there is today with the annual travel seminar.

Can you look back on your time with Lew and identify an experience that you feel is emblematic of who he was?

There’s one story above all, and it was before either of us had come to McCormick. Lew was at Amherst and I was getting my Ph.D. at Yale. We both belonged to the Society for Religion and Higher Education – now called the Society for Values in Higher Education – had gone to an annual meeting at Notre Dame. It was an immensely tumultuous time in the life of our country and the March on Washington was only days away. Early in the week, we were walking on one of the campus trails together and I turned to him and said, “I’m really glad to be here in this beautiful place, but I have to admit that my heart is in Washington. I would really like to be there the day after tomorrow. Lew stopped and said, “I feel exactly the same way. Let’s go.” I said, “OK, but how are we getting there,” to which he said, “I flew my plane here. I’ll fly us to Washington.”

So early the next morning we went out to the airfield in South Bend and climbed into this little plane. Lew’s personality changes completely and he starts speaking this utterly foreign, technical language into his radio, adjusts various dials and we roar down the tarmac and into the air. I remember looking down as we were approaching Washington and I had never seen so many planes in my life. There were commercial planes and private planes – everyone was flying into Washington for the march. I asked him how on earth were we going to get down. “Quickly,” he said. We circled tightly until a voice over the radar suddenly commanded, “Dive! Dive!” Well, we dove. It was just like being in a rollercoaster.

People at the seminary didn’t know that Lew was an excellent pilot. My wife and I flew with him and Jean all over the place. He was also a very good sailor. I think, again, he took enormous pleasure in charting courses. He was always calm no matter what was happening.