and minister to Catholics, and less able to stand up to an intellectual challenge from a well-
educated Catholic.
Evangelicals need to reject a naive primitivism: the idea we should dispense with 2,000
years of church history and tradition and return to a idealized New Testament church. That
idealized church cannot be recaptured, may not have existed, and even if it can and did it lacks
essential elements, for example, the theological work of the early church councils on which
much of Evangelical theology is based.
The integration of Bible, theology, and the social sciences and humanities in Torrey helps
students truly get the point that all truth is God's truth, and therefore their truth.
B.
Methodology
The Torrey context lecture requirement, and some outside funding we've received, gives
us the ability to bring in as guest speakers leaders and scholars from within the evangelical
tradition and outside of it. This semester alone speakers include Marvin Olasky, Os Guiness,
artist Nigel Goodwin, missionary and Anglican priest R. A. Torrey III, Dan Haseltine from Jars
of Clay, theologian Robert Saucy and scientist Robert Kofahl.
Because Torrey is committed to creating whole souls and integrating what they are
learning with what they believe and how they live, it also sponsors annual Torrey Abroad
summer programs, including a missions trip to Mongolia, a Torrey course on the University of
California, Berkeley campus, and a study trip to Europe. A priceless incident in the Europe trip
last summer was the guided tour of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome by a very friendly American
Catholic priest who clearly was skeptical about many fundamental teachings of the Church. On
the bus back to the hotel, we were able to have a very fruitful discussion about the range of belief
represented within Catholicism and the implications of that range for issues such as church unity.