TRIBUTE TO MELVIN E. DIETER
by
Paul Merritt Bassett[1]
Let us be a Wesleyan/Holiness class meeting pondering questions put to us by some Kierkegaardian soul who has wandered in and addressed us. In the spirit of the pseudonymous Johannes Climacus, she chooses to make our celebrating difficult.
She has said something like this: "When you Wesleyan/Holiness types speak of a Lifetime Achievement Award, whatever can you be talking about, especially on this occasion? First, the recipient is still very much alive. Don't you really mean a Life-Achievement-So-Far Award? Surely you hope for more from him for years to come, for he looks young and hale. Or is it that you believe he is going to backslide one of these days and you had better honor him while you can? I understand that you believe in backsliding. Second, you really seem to mean Life-Understood-As-Adult-Life-Achievement-So-Far-Award, in this particular case, Life-Since-About-1946-Until-Now-Achievement-Award. True, our recipient showed signs of precocity as a child and youth, but at least twenty years went by before he either wrote or said anything memorable or notable about the Wesleys, Wesleyanism, or the Holiness Movement.
But even deeper than all of this lays a very serious anomaly. It is this: What are you Wesleyan/Holiness people doing handing out awards anyway? Modesty, humility, inconspicuous piety-these are your "thing." It is your tradition that keeps harping to the rest of us about the necessity of "unconditional surrender" and "unconditional love to God and neighbor" as the ultimate goods of the spiritual life, and about how such grace destroys pride. You used to sing, "I'm going through; I'm going through; I'll take the way with the Lord's despised few." Not all that long ago, you folks had few kind words about earthly kudos. You almost convinced some of us that they were the ruination of normal hat sizes. What must it mean for folks like you to give a "Life Achievement Award?"
I should like to thank that perceptive, if a bit bilious child of old S. K. for raising some questions worth considering, for certainly our smiles of approbation, our applause, our bestowal of honors and dignities must be granted in a spirit consonant with our theology and consonant with our spirituality. And we surely would want their granting to conform strictly to our Lord's admonition that our "yea" be "yea" and our "nay" be "nay," for anything other than this is from the Enemy, whose name is Deceit and Delusion.
Well, we can let all of that stand as a prelude to the great honor which is ours this evening-the honor of presenting the Life-Since-About-1946-Until-Now-Achievement Award to one who truly has exemplified the modesty, humility, and inconspicuous piety that are "our thing" as a spiritual and theological tradition. This one truly has exemplified the servant-leadership, scholarship, and Christian collegiality which is "our thing" as an academic society. It is my honor to say something about him.
A fascinating year for Americans was 1924. Like 1996, it was an election year. President Warren Gamaliel Harding, about whom only his middle name was angelic, had died the previous year, and 1924 was filled with news of scandal after scandal in his administration. His Vice-President, now President Calvin Coolidge, had responded to the scandals with swift justice and took the Republicans into the election that autumn with great optimism. Like us Wesleyan/Holiness folk, Silent Cal wasn't charismatic, but he was clean. The Democrats had taken 103 ballots to nominate the stolid and even brilliant, but lackluster John Davis of West Virginia, and went glumly into the campaign. The Progressives noisily followed Wisconsin's Bob LaFollett. Coolidge won handily in that November seventy-two years ago.
But for us gathered here this evening, the really important event took place a month earlier, on Columbus Day, 1924. Harold and Laura Dieter of Cherryville, Pennsylvania, became parents, and named our honoree Melvin Easterday. Just south of Cherryville lies the city of Allentown. There, in 1921, the International Holiness Church (descendent of the International Holiness Union and Prayer League) had founded Beulah Park Bible School. Less than two years into the school's existence, the denomination (already the product of a number of mergers, with more to come) became the Pilgrim Holiness Church (1922). In 1932 the school called Harold Dieter, pastor at Cherryville and treasurer of the school, to be its president. He was 28. Within a year, under Harold Dieter's leadership, Beulah Holiness Academy, Shacklefords, Va. (estab. 1908) and Greensboro (N. C.) Bible and Literary School (estab. 1903) merged with Beulah Park and the "new" institution was re-chartered as Allentown Bible Institute. Dieter also led in establishing a zone-type model for supporting the denominational schools.
So, since his eighth year, our honoree, the son of that young, new "first family" of a young, reorganized school in a constantly reorganizing denomination with a fairly new name, has lived and breathed Wesleyan/Holiness higher education in one way or another. We must be careful about drawing straight lines of influence in a biography, but it seems appropriate to say that we find in his early years the roots of our honoree's ability to lead in transitions with both a sense of history and a clear vision of the road ahead. Only during his undergraduate years at Muhlenberg College, his period of graduate study at Lehigh University, and a wartime tour of duty in the U. S. Navy, did our honoree live and breathe in other than the Wesleyan/Holiness environment.
His tour of duty with the Navy bears some attention. For some of that time, Uncle Sam stationed him where you might expect the government to station a sailor-Boulder, Colorado. There he learned a language most useful to an historian of the Wesleyan/Holiness Movement-Chinese. Mustering out of the Navy, our honoree entered on the career for which he has surely exhibited the requisite gifts and graces-gifts and graces which, by the grace of God, he has put at the disposal of us all. From 1946 to 1948 he taught and served as high school principal and assistant to the president of Allentown Bible Institute. In 1948, at the very beginning of the school year, that president died in his forty-second year. Harold D. Dieter had literally burnt himself out for Christ and Christ's church through his service to the school and to the Pilgrim Holiness denomination. After a brief interim, Melvin Easterday Dieter was named acting president, then president of the Allentown school. He was now all of 25 years of age-three years younger than his father had been on assuming the office. And he spoke fluent Chinese, which had to be a "plus" amongst the coal miners and farmers around Allentown.
The Dieters never quite fit the stereotype so often laid unfairly upon Wesleyan/Holiness folk. Harold Dieter hadn't known Chinese, but he had read widely and well. Sure, Godbey, Carradine, Wood, Seth Rees, and Martin Wells Knapp were in his library, but so was most of the so-called "western canon," and a lot of theology from across the Protestant spectrum, too. He had brought remarkable stability and constituency support to an institution. He was aiming at a strong liberal arts base for the Bible College student.
His son, Mel, was up to carrying on the job. He had better sense than to believe that love and honor for the father automatically pass on to the son-especially to a son who spoke Chinese, served with the Navy in the Rocky Mountains, and got his college education from the Lutherans. For the next half-decade Mel labored to rework the Bible Institute into an adequately supported liberal arts college. By 1954 it had become Eastern Pilgrim College in name and substantially in fact. But this took great promotional and diplomatic skills, and the instilling of trust in a constituency that was not especially opposed to liberal arts, but was deeply convinced of the need for preachers and teachers of the Word of God.
Our honoree demonstrated these skills over and again, but not with the secularist's artfulness, nor with the coy piety of a supersalesperson who has learned to blush. These were God's gifts and graces, and in Mel they were well used, and timely indeed. One who sharply criticized Mel in those days said to me just a month ago, "It became clearer and clearer to folks like me that here was a man whose favorite pronoun was not "I."
In 1965 Mel laid down the presidency of Eastern Pilgrim College to go to Temple University to work on a Ph. D. But others continually remembered those gifts and graces of leadership. They would not allow Mel to immerse himself singularly in studies. And he could not allow it either. Boothwyn, Pa., wanted a piece of him as pastor; and the Pilgrim Holiness Church needed a piece of him as a "major player" as it moved ever closer to merger with the Wesleyan Methodist Church.
In this latter process, Mel's gifts and graces came to full play as the two very different Wesleyan/Holiness bodies inched toward organic union. This was no picnic. The Pilgrim Holiness Church, since its days of origin in the International Apostolic Holiness Union and Prayer League, had gone about developing strong leadership. It treasured revivalism and camp meeting-style worship. The Wesleyan Methodists had arisen in rebellion against episcopal Methodism's temporizing regarding slavery. They understood a politically strong episcopacy to be the principal villain. Only after the turn of the century had they begun to develop anything like centralized authority. They loved revivals and camp meetings as much as the Pilgrim Holiness people did; but they could not see them as norms for ordinary congregational worship.
Mel's diplomatic skills-both the skills of compromise and the skills for standing firm without alienating-played no small role in the uniting of the two denominations in 1968. He sat at the center of affairs on a number of important committees and subcommittees, and chaired some of them. After the uniting conference, he was elected General Secretary of the Department of Educational Institutions, a position he would hold for eight years. Mel's major tasks were to instill commitment to a common cause and vision, and to halve (at least) the number of schools (11) brought into the new denomination by the merging bodies. The system of eleven stretched from New Brunswick to South Carolina and out to the middle of Kansas. As you would expect, there are no alumni more loyal than alumni of a school about to be closed. Here and there, even yet, some have strong negative feelings toward the process which eliminated their alma mater, either by merger or extinction. But the real wonder lies in the fact that the new denomination accomplished the task with minimal uproar. Mel led in the reduction of the system from eleven to six schools in four years; and he led in the development of a much healthier, cooperative system.
In the meantime, Mel completed his Ph. D. at Temple University with a dissertation on "Revivalism and Holiness" (1972). His Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century, just now out in a second edition, is a reprise of that research. In it, he more or less takes up the story where his good friend, Timothy Smith, had left it in Revivalism and Social Reform (1957). In that work, in the work he edited which is entitled Five Views on Sanctification, and in the volume The Church which he co-edited with Daniel Berg in Warner Press' "Wesleyan Perspectives" series, Mel clearly demonstrates the kind of diplomacy which we earlier underscored. His is an ecumenical vision, held from a clearly Wesleyan/Holiness standpoint.
This ability to appreciate positively without loss of identity served him well, and in some ways served as the base for his next assignments-teaching church history and serving as Provost at Asbury Theological Seminary. Clearly, Asbury was moving into a new era-a more ecumenical, but still Wesleyan era. More than a few among the various constituencies feared that the changes would bury the school's traditional identity. Here Mel served for almost two decades, a stabilizing and guiding spirit, and clearly a "holiness man," but never a bureaucrat. It is during his years at Asbury Seminary that Mel served also as an officer in the Wesleyan Theological Society (Vice-President in 1976-77, program committee chair for the 1977 Annual Meeting of the Society, held at Huntington (Indiana) College, and as President of the Society in 1977-78). The two years 1977-1978 were watershed years in the history of the Society.
The program which Mel shaped dealt with the historical and theological development of the Wesleyan/Holiness Movement. The place of pneumatology in that development had come to the fore with considerable force. Also on the table was Mildred Bangs Wynkoop's Theology of Love, controversial because its advocacy of a "relational view" of entire sanctification took on more "propositional" approaches to the doctrine. Mel presided over the next year's meeting, held at Mount Vernon (Ohio) Nazarene College. Now the exegetical scholars took up the questions ricocheting from the previous meeting from the standpoint of their disciplines, taking them on primarily in terms of Acts 2, the Pentecost account. More theologians and historians got into action with papers and discussion.
Mel's title for his Presidential Address, which was given at that meeting, fit perfectly-fit his own character and fit the occasion. It was simply "Musings." His musings "on the moment" insisted that the Society must be a principal arena for conversation on issues of concern. He was not about to ask it to conform to the canons of public relations or even to give the slightest opening to considerations of self-preservation. Indeed, he said, the Society must explicate the Wesleyan/Holiness tradition to other traditions and to secularism; and to do this, we must listen to and understand each other as well as listening to and understanding those outside our circle. Mel called for the Society's Journal to enlarge its mission along the lines he had suggested. He called for full and free expression at meetings of the Society.
Earlier in his career, Mel had indicated that his own Pilgrim Holiness tradition had perhaps not been sufficiently Trinitarian in its proclamation-that it had emphasized the Person and work of the Spirit at the expense of the other two Persons of the Trinity. Now again, Mel raised that issue in terms of the Holiness Movement at large. He very thoughtfully and carefully took up both the assets and the liabilities of the tradition's pneumatological language, and called for the development of a truly Wesleyan via media. Finally, he called for a re-emphasis on the authority of the Bible as the means by which a true "middle way" could be found-a means for revitalizing both the doctrine and the spiritual life of the Wesleyan/Holiness Movement.
Permit me to quote the closing paragraph of Mel's address as a summing up of the person and work of the man himself. He said:
We cannot stand still; the experience of the people of God and the theological explication of that experience must go on-but always under the Spirit and the Word as the authoritative arbiters. In seeking any correction of deficiencies of mis-emphases in our theology or preaching, let us not fall under the apt description which as I recall was given by someone to theologians of the past generation: "In their rush to flee excesses they suddenly found out that they had left all their baggage behind." Let us be better stewards of our biblical, theological and historical tradition than that. After we come to our best definitions and understandings, hopefully we can still worship and testify in sentiments like these.
Mel then went on to quote a Charles Wesley hymn:
An inward baptism of pure fire,
Wherewith to be baptiz'd, I have;
'Tis all my longing soul's desire;
This, only this my soul can save.
Straiten'd I am till this be done;
Kindle in me the living flame;
Father, in me reveal thy Son;
Baptize me into Jesus' name.
Transform my nature into thine;
Let all my powers thine impress feel;
Let all my soul become divine,
And stamp me with thy Spirit's seal.
Love, mighty love, my heart o'erpower:
Ah! Why dost thou so long delay!
Cut short the work, bring near the hour,
And let me see the perfect day.
Honored guests and members of the Wesleyan Theological Society, it is my distinct honor to introduce to you this year's recipient of the Society's award, "Lifetime Service to the Wesleyan/Holiness Tradition," Melvin Easterday Dieter.
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