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Vol. 30:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 2002
Documenting Life in the Margins:
David J. du Plessis, Fuller Theological Seminary, and the Safety Net of Collective Memory
by Roger G. Robins
Archives are the safety net of collective memory. Unfortunately, that net comes in wildly variable mesh and is rife with gaping seams. Individuals and movements aligned with prosperous and socially established institutions stand a very good chance of having the documentary evidence of their nature and existence preserved. The problem is that much of what is truly formative in society occurs, as we say, "outside the box," driven by some creative dynamo standing beyond the protective canopy of our existing social framework. The non-, trans-, and anti-institutional impulses have nowhere exercised more influence than in American religion. Consequently, the documentary record has nowhere been more ravished by time's forgetfulness than in that domain.
David du Plessis, the grand old man of Pentecost, ca. 1984. (David du Plessis Center, Fuller Theological Seminary)
David J. du Plessis spent the better part of his life, by choice or compulsion, outside the box. Born in South Africa in 1905, his parents were expelled from the Dutch Reformed Church a decade later for their involvement with a small but vibrant sect, the Apostolic Faith Mission. The "Apostolics," as they were called, had recently sprung from a dynamic international religious movement, Pentecostalism, which had started in America at the turn of the century and then rapidly globalized.
Pentecostals claimed to have revived the supernatural wonders, charismatic gifts, and ecclesiastical order of earliest Christianity. In practice, that meant ecstatic worship, a valorization of supernatural phenomena like faith healing and glossolalia, and a fierce rejection of all existing religious organizations. Indeed, many Pentecostals rejected organization as such, since all order was expected to emanate directly from the Holy Spirit, not human agency. Finally, Pentecostalism was deeply millenarian. Not since the Adventists of the 1840s had a movement so certain of the Return of Christ and the End of Time hit the American scene. With their eyes on the eastern sky and their artillery trained on the apostate establishment, it would be a while before they began to contemplate archives.
Young David du Plessis thrived in this society of outsiders. By age 15 he had earned his stripes as a fearless street-corner preacher-an important rite of passage within the spiritual-warrior culture of early Pentecostalism-and in the decade following he emerged as the man to watch among South Africa's Apostolics. Bolstered by his natural talent, the patronage of his organization's president, and the endorsement of the famous British faith healer, Smith Wigglesworth, he reached the Apostolic Faith Mission's second highest office, General Secretary, while still in his thirties.
Du Plessis' boundless energy and visionary ambition, however, would not let him rest content. By the time he reached the General Secretary's office he already had his eye on a global ministry. Extensive travels in Europe and the United States had increasingly drawn him into the circuits of international Pentecostalism, and in 1947 he resigned his post in South Africa and transferred his base of operations first to Switzerland, and then to the United States.
Meanwhile, the worldwide Pentecostal movement had been alternating between exponential and explosive growth. As one might expect from a movement congenitally hostile to organization, however, numerical growth and geographical expansion only compounded the problem of disunity. True, some of the largest bodies, such as the Assemblies of God, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, the Church of God in Christ, and the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), had evolved into virtual "denominations," but the movement as a whole remained a collectivity of coalitions augmented by hundreds of independent ministries.
Intra-Pentecostal relations ran the gamut from warm fraternity to closet rivalry to internecine warfare. But even when Pentecostals exchanged insults, they were at least talking. Between themselves and mainline Protestants, however, they had raised a veritable Iron Curtain guarded by a reinforced barbed wire fence. As for Roman Catholics, they existed mainly as mythical villains, a cross between rank apostates and minions of the Anti-Christ. Into this crossfire stepped David du Plessis. He would spend the better part of his life cultivating harmony within a factious movement and building bridges of understanding between it and a larger religious world that it instinctively viewed in oppositional terms.
Du Plessis began his career as a mediator by facilitating exchanges among those he knew best, his fellow Pentecostals. In sociological terms, the schismatic mode had perhaps served the movement well. It guaranteed local control, adaptability, clear boundaries, sharp identity, and high commitment. But factiousness cut both ways, and weakened as well as empowered the movement. Pentecostalism could capitalize on the social and cultural potential that its remarkable growth had afforded only if a spirit of collaboration prevailed among the welter of bodies and "anti-bodies" it had spawned.
Du Plessis' extensive contacts, along with his administrative, interpersonal, and linguistic skills, made him one of the few Pentecostals then qualified for the delicate diplomacy that such a task entailed. Formal unity, or course, was never a consideration for this diverse and rapidly evolving religious family. But Du Plessis did help orchestrate conversations that culminated in Pentecostal World Conferences in 1947 and 1949. Out of those meetings grew a series of triennial conferences that continues to this day.
Hard on the heels of these conferences, Du Plessis' career took the fateful turn that would later define him for posterity. The mid-century had witnessed an explosion of interest in Pentecostalism among mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics. At 50 years of age, it had just been "discovered."
Two interrelated developments helped bring this about. First, scholarly authors like Lesslie Newbigin and Henry van Dusen began to write about the movement, and popularized their findings for mass circulation weeklies like Life and Time magazines. This alerted the public to the fact that, while no one was looking, Pentecostalism had grown into a burgeoning "Third Force"-alongside Protestantism and Roman Catholicism-in American Christianity. Second, a nascent "Charismatic" movement had begun to spread within the mainline denominations and the Roman Catholic Church. Often inspired by Pentecostal parachurch groups like the Full Gospel Businessmen's Fellowship International, the new movement had Catholics and middle-class Protestants raising their hands, strumming acoustic guitars, and speaking in tongues.
With Pentecostals on the newsstand and Episcopalians speaking in tongues, ecumenicists everywhere scrambled to catch up. Real, live, old-line Pentecostals were in great demand, and David du Plessis was one of the few ready to talk. The movement could not have found a more congenial ambassador. For the next 30 years he would interpret Pentecostalism for the mainstream, and try at least to interpret the mainstream for Pentecostals. An invitation to the 1952 World Missionary Conference led to his attendance at the 1954 World Council of Churches. His continuing involvement with the WCC opened up contacts with Roman Catholics. Those encounters produced an invitation to attend the Second Vatican Council as an official observer. In 1972, a series of Roman Catholic/Pentecostal dialogues were launched that would continue for the better part of two decades. David du Plessis had become the world's first "Ecumenical Pentecostal."
During these pivotal years, Du Plessis' professional fortunes moved, simultaneously, in opposite directions. As his star rose in the ecumenical and charismatic world it plummeted-for precisely that reason-among old-line Pentecostals. The main bodies of organized Pentecostalism had, to be sure, made their own overtures to the broader religious world. But that had taken the form of membership in the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), where they made common cause with moderate fundamentalists and evangelicals for whom Roman Catholics and WCC "liberals" were still anathema. Du Plessis, for his part, noted that his "liberals" had proved far more open to Pentecostal gifts-witness the Charismatic movement-than had the conservative evangelicals of the NAE.
Ecumenical activism came at a price. Since immigrating to America, Du Plessis had held ordination with the Assemblies of God. Now, the denomination asked him to stop jeopardizing its reputation by consorting with Modernists. When he refused, it terminated his standing. Other Pentecostals also drew back from Du Plessis. He was even ostracized from the Pentecostal World Conference, which he had helped to start.
But Du Plessis persisted, continuing to reconnoiter the religious terra incognito. Slowly but surely, even his detractors began to come around. Additional venues, like the Society for Pentecostal Studies, emerged for the kind of interdenominational exchange he championed. Pentecostal distrust of Charismatics began to thaw. A new generation of Pentecostals, better educated, more irenic, and eager to engage the world, worked its way into positions of leadership. By the 1980s, Du Plessis had come full circle. Now celebrated as the grand old man of moderate Pentecostalism, even the Assemblies of God welcomed him back, reinstating his credentials.
Throughout his lifetime, du Plessis had been a voluminous correspondent and a prodigious collector of documents. His was a well-recorded life. But it was also a liminal life, and for that reason no clear repository existed for these valuable records. Du Plessis had a collection in need of a home.
Du Plessis, right, with Dean Russell Spittler, left, and project archivist Kate McGinn, center, at the 1995 grand opening of the post-NHPRC grant Du Plessis Center. (David du Plessis Center, Fuller Theological Seminary)
Fuller Theological Seminary was born in 1947, the year Du Plessis left South Africa. Like Du Plessis, Fuller stood out as an ecumenically minded maverick in a sectarian world. In effect, it tried to do for evangelicalism what Du Plessis sought to do for Pentecostalism. From its inception, the seminary had assembled a distinguished faculty that steered fellow evangelicals away from cultural insularity and militant antimodernism and toward "neo-evangelicalism," a rigorous but charitable orthodoxy committed to academic excellence, social relevance, and religious toleration. Moreover, Fuller's founding president, Harold Ockenga, argued to broaden the definition of evangelicalism to include Pentecostals, and his views prevailed when Pentecostals were included as charter members of the National Association of Evangelicals.
In subsequent years Fuller's reputation as a sympathetic place for young Pentecostals to get an education grew. Key trendsetters at Fuller, President David Hubbard; Provost Glenn Barker; and Robert Meye, dean of the School of Theology, made students of Pentecostal and charismatic background feel especially welcome. By the 1980s, Pentecostal scholars like Russell Spittler and Cecil Robeck had joined the faculty and risen to positions of influence. The School of World Mission, particularly under the influence of C. Peter Wagner, became a special haven for Pentecostal students, which by then constituted one of the two or three largest groupings in the student body.
Fuller Theological Seminary and David du Plessis shared one further point of symmetry. If Du Plessis had a collection in need of a home, Fuller was an institution in need of an archives. The young and forward-looking seminary had devoted little attention and fewer resources to its documentary legacy. The personal papers of some of America's most influential scholars, and the records of what was now the nation's largest non-denominational seminary, languished in dusty attics and dank basements.
Spittler, Associate Dean of the School of Theology and one of the new generation of Pentecostals who saw in Du Plessis the best instincts of their tradition, began working behind the scenes to bring the aging patriarch to Fuller. He was joined in that effort by Hubbard, who had himself been raised in a Pentecostal home. At a meeting of Christian leaders held at Stanford University, Hubbard met with Du Plessis and extended an offer. A Center for the Study of Christian Spirituality would be established at Fuller in Du Plessis' name. Du Plessis would relocate to Fuller, where he would serve as a consultant and where his extensive personal papers would form the basis of a new archive, managed by the Center. It was a match made in heaven, and in 1985 the Center was inaugurated.
That's when the trouble began. The David J. du Plessis Center for the Study of Christian Spirituality set sail in a giddy tailwind of enthusiasm, fanfare, and hefty financial pledges from the "Friends of David." But it scarcely made it out of port before it was becalmed. Only about 10 percent of the pledge-paper endowment materialized in legal tender, and when Du Plessis himself passed away in 1987, contributions dropped further still.
The Center faced a daunting dilemma. It had in its possession Du Plessis' valuable documentation of one of the largest and most dynamic movements of the 20th century. It had also begun to assemble vital archival records related to Fuller Theological Seminary and its founding sponsor, the renowned radio personality Charles E. Fuller, who was in his own right a figure of signal importance in the history of American radio, the rise of mass media, and the emergence of Southern California as a disseminator of America's cultural and religious fare. All of this was at risk.
In 1990, Spittler turned to the NHPRC for help. His grant-writing fortunes offer sobering but instructive lessons for any institution facing a similar predicament. Between 1990 and early 1993, Spittler twice submitted extensively researched, well-considered, time-consuming proposals. Both bounced back. Instead of surrendering, however, he dug in. Aided by useful counsels from NHPRC staff, the New Testament scholar, writer, administrator, and religious historian now jumped on the steep learning curve of archival science and its funding peculiarities.
The two "starter" proposals also taught Spittler a third lesson: the importance of working locally. NHPRC funding, he realized, was not merely a transaction between the Du Plessis center and a faceless agency in Washington. Rather, it was a collaborative effort between Federal, state, and local networks. In particular, he turned to the State Historical Records Advisory Board, not as a committee of impersonal "judges" but as colleagues and consultants. When proposals failed, Spittler asked questions and sought advice. He found the board members eager to help; one even came to assess the institution's archival needs and make recommendations. Finally, the early proposals revealed the importance of interpreting a project for its reviewers. Archives often seek support for the preservation of records pertaining to individuals or movements that are virtually unknown to the public at large, including that share of the public reviewing its proposal. To address that reality, Spittler recruited a known authority-one of America's leading religious historians-to explain the unknown: the nature and importance of the Du Plessis materials and the urgent need to preserve them.
The third time was indeed a charm. In late 1993, Spittler submitted the proposal that brought the Center the support it so desperately needed. The Center hired its first full-time archivist, Kate McGinn, and took an important step toward professionalism. The years since that time have seen the archives grow toward its dreams. Fuller is currently undergoing a reorganization of its library and archives that may well mandate a more ambitious plan of archival preservation. As the archive, now under the direction of Dr. Cecil M. Robeck, Jr., both widens and tightens its net, and as it matches increased documentary retention with broader access, it will more ably meet its responsibility as a curator of collective memory.
Roger G. Robins is Archivist of the David du Plessis Center at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, CA.
