A Different Mission : Religion: The new president of the School of Theology in Claremont sees an opportunity to train people who will have a positive impact on the church's role in society.

By DENISE HAMILTON

Sept. 30, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CLAREMONT — In his 12 years as a congressman from Philadelphia, Robert W. Edgar had plenty of time to scrutinize the political process. He came away convinced of one basic truth.

“Congress and senators are followers, not trend-setters,” says the 47-year-old United Methodist minister, who left the House after the 1986 session. “Trends come from the bottom up . . . from a groundswell.”

It was this belief in grass-roots power that led Edgar to abandon the East Coast political world this summer to take over as president of the School of Theology at Claremont.

“We have an opportunity here to train people who want to make a difference on planet Earth,” says Edgar, leaning forward in his study. “These people . . . will make a positive impact on the revitalization of the church’s role in society.”

A pastor since age 19, Edgar’s religious convictions are idealist and pragmatic, progressive and conciliatory. His ability to define God’s work in broad strokes has allowed him to feel equally at home on Capitol Hill and before his United Methodist congregation in Claremont. Different pulpits, that’s all.

In a recent address to students that was more syncopated hymn than speech, Edgar quoted from minds both theological and secular: Martin Luther King Jr. on race relations, Dwight D. Eisenhower on the need to balance the arms race with the human race, theologians John Cobb and David Griffin on divine life, Abraham Lincoln on struggling for a just cause.

But Edgar also likened himself to a Drano-wielding plumber called on to unclog the School of Theology.

“We have clogged arteries of communication, we have stopped-up hurt feelings that must be heard, we have vocal complaints, unanswered questions and widespread suspicions that would clog even the best of institutions. All of us must spend the next few years in an honest exploration of our individual and corporate need for reconciliation,” he said.

Administrators at the School of Theology have high hopes that Edgar’s vision will help surmount the theological infighting, financial scandals and shifting demographics with which the school has grappled in recent years.

“We were very un-Christian to each other for a long time; basically we were poking each other in the eye,” Edgar says of imbroglios that beset the School of Theology before his arrival in July. “I want ego disarmament on campus. I want to be known as the reconciler, the peacemaker.”

The new president is candid about the school’s past troubles. In the last three years, he says, two financial managers for the college embezzled a total of about $285,000.

After the first embezzlement of $15,000 was discovered, the board of trustees voted unanimously to have its treasurer, John Kirkman, take over as business manager and set things straight, Edgar said. Instead, Kirkman was convicted last May of embezzling $270,000, Edgar said. The School of Theology is recovering the money from Kirkman, he adds.

Edgar also inherited a long-running campus feud of uncertain origin between the School of Theology and the Disciples of Christ, another mainline Protestant denomination that maintains an office on campus and formerly owned several college buildings.

The new president has extended the olive branch and both sides say they are trying to put past misunderstandings behind them.

“There’s a new openness on the part of the president,” says Don Reisinger, president of the Disciples Seminary Foundation. “He brings a freshness to the School of Theology and looks to the future and not to the past.”

The school, whose roots at USC date to the last century, was established as an independent college in Claremont in 1958. Today, many of its faculty hold joint appointments at the Claremont Graduate School and the School of Theology serves as the de facto religion department for the Claremont Graduate School, Edgar says.

Although the college is owned by the United Methodist Church and 47% of its students are Methodist, 25 other Protestant denominations from 18 countries are also represented on campus. About 47% of the student body is nonwhite, laced with a large number of Korean and Chinese theologians, which has led to some cultural clashes, Edgar says.

Some classes are taught in Korean and Chinese. More delicate negotiations were necessary recently when some of the male Korean students initially refused to take instruction from female professors.

But where some see unruly students, Edgar sees soldiers on the front lines of mainline Protestantism.

“As we send each of these students back to their countries, they’re going to be powerful forces,” he says.

Edgar calls the liberal church “a sleeping giant” and says it’s unfortunate that the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other fundamentalist Christians have given the impression that they are the sole purveyors of religious activity today.

Although Edgar believes in the separation of church and state, he jokes that “as long as there are final exams there will be prayer in school.”

But he also believes that thoughtful religious scholarship has an important role to play in formulating public policy. He is pro-choice on abortion, thinks religious communities should spend more time helping the homeless and feeding the poor, and sees liberation theology as an important emerging force. Liberation theologians encourage the downtrodden to demand basic human rights, often challenging Third World governments.

Edgar wants to send students to Washington to study public policy. He wants to add a “semester abroad” program that would allow theology students to live and work in the Third World. He wants classes on world hunger and food. Next spring, he will teach a class titled “The Church and Public Policy.”

“I have opinions and positions on real-life issues,” Edgar says. “Some of our students got arrested at a Nevada test site last spring (for protesting nuclear weapons). They’re not condemned for that on this campus.”

Edgar points to the important role the church has played in the revolutions that swept Eastern Europe last year: The Romanian Revolution was sparked when church members rallied to prevent the arrest of a Transylvanian bishop. In East Germany, Lutheran pastors played a decisive role in organizing nonviolent opposition.

In Poland, Catholic priests sympathetic to Solidarity gave that deeply religious country hope during the long years of martial law, including the 1984 kidnaping of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, a priest who was tortured and killed by Polish police.

“Governments throughout history have tried to oppress people’s faith, but the more they oppress, the more it springs up,” Edgar says.

Today, he adds, “our religion must be real, radical and revolutionary. The old church says: The meek shall inherit the earth, so between life and death the meek should keep their mouths shut. The new church says: The meek shall inherit the earth and the meek have a right to their inheritance now. They have a right not to be beaten or raped or exploited or killed. They have a right to live.”

These principles echo throughout Edgar’s life, first as an urban activist steeped in Kennedy-era idealism, later in politics and finally, in public policy and administration.

Graduating from Drew Theological School in 1968, Edgar was ordained a United Methodist minister and served as united Protestant chaplain of Drexel University in Philadelphia. He cut his activist teeth in Philadelphia in the early 1970s, co-founding the city’s first shelter for homeless women and mediating between black and white residents of warring housing projects.

Edgar honed his ministerial skills on Saturday nights, riding with the police clergy unit through streets littered with junkies overdosed on heroin and young men dying of gunshot wounds.

Next came politics. Edgar was a “Watergate baby,” one of a large group of young Democrats who won election to public office in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s resignation from the U.S. Presidency in August, 1974.

Without any previous political experience, Edgar won election at 31 to the U.S. House of Representatives from a suburban Philadelphia Republican district that hadn’t elected a Democrat since 1858. The Philadelphia papers called the minister’s election a miracle.

As a freshman in the House of Representatives, he helped revolutionize congressional procedures and push through reforms, according to William Schneider, who wrote about the Watergate babies in the Atlantic magazine last year.

“The Class of ’74 in the House of Representatives was a remarkable group, and it had a remarkable impact on Congress,” Schneider said in a story headlined “JFK’s Children.”

The group “was dominated by politicians whose inclinations were anti-Establishment, whose careers were independent of political party, and who had to survive in unfriendly political territory. A new kind of liberal emerged out of this context: unorthodox, reform-minded, iconoclastic, and staunchly independent of Democratic Party tradition.”

In 1986, after six terms in office, some of them following narrow victories, Edgar decided it was time to move on to avoid “getting stale, ingrown.” He chose not to run for reelection, instead making an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, then won appointment as a Eugene Lang Visiting Professor for Social Change at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, teaching “Politics of the Future.”

In 1988, he became national finance director for Sen. Paul Simon’s presidential campaign, raising $7 million before Simon dropped out. Then he served for two years as director of the Committee for National Security, a progressive think tank.

To his new flock, Edgar brings a host of disparate experiences: minister, politician, grass-roots organizer, motivator, idealist, global thinker. He says he looks forward to selecting talented academics in key fields who will enhance the reputation of Claremont’s School of Theology as a place for first-rate thinkers.

“Our definition of community has been too narrow,” Edgar says. “We haven’t been as creative and innovative as we need to be. To be on the cutting edge, we have to be willing to take risks.”