Chapter 29 Middle East College

It was after dark when the plane landed in Beirut. By the time I cleared customs, it was 9:00 p.m. I called the number I had been given.
“Maharbah.” I presume that's what the person said. Whatever it was, it wasn't English. They sounded sleepy. They made some more foreign sounds then went silent. I hoped they were going to find someone I could understand. After a few minutes someone who spoke a bit of English came on.
“Hello.”
“Hi, I'm John McLarty from the United States. Is this Middle East College? I was told to call this number when I arrived.”
“Okay. Yes, yes. . . . the mix of Arabic and thickly accented English was beyond me. I thought I understood the words, “Somebody come.”
I hung up and sat on my suitcase. Eventually Bjorn Storfjell, one of the religion teachers showed up. We drove to the college. He woke the men’s dean who showed me to a room on the second floor. There were four beds. One was empty.
“Get some sleep,” the dean whispered. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

The view from the college out over the city was breathtaking. In January, 1973, Beirut was still outwardly the Paris of the Middle East, cosmopolitan, wealthy, inviting. My roommates were a Nigerian, a Finn and a Ugandan.
The Nigerian was married. An educator, he had left his wife and son to come to MEC to get his degree so he could return to his country to improve Adventist education there. He did not have enough money to go back and forth during breaks. He would see his wife in five years after he completed his masters. His devotion to education astonished me. He'd sit on his bed in the evening, reading over letters from home, his homesickness and longing almost palpable. What kind of world fueled that kind of devotion to education? What kind of person made those kinds of choices?
The Finn was a tall, quiet guy. He hung out with a couple of Norwegians, all of them comfortably supported by government scholarships. We did field trips together and traveled together on holidays.
My Ugandan roommate was ethnically Indian. The previous August, his family, along with other Asians, had been expelled from Uganda by Edi Amin. He was literally a man without a country. He dreamed of immigrating to the U.S., but the odds of getting a visa were remote. He asked if my dad would consider sponsoring him. I didn't know what to say.
Another friend at MEC was a theology student from Egypt. He, too, dreamed of getting to the U.S. In fact, it seemed like it was all he talked about. I was offended by his crude materialism. How could he be a theology student and remain so fixated on migrating to a place whose only appeals were greater ease, comfort and wealth? After we got better acquainted, I challenged him. “Why are you so determined to leave your own country and go to the United States? You know the Egyptian language and culture. You can be far more effective representing Jesus to your people than any Westerner could ever be. Why don't you focus on taking the gospel to the people of Egypt?”
He responded with a single question: “Where are you going when school is over?”
He said it with a smile apparently forgiving my crass insensitivity. Still I was stung to silence. What could I say? My sermon to him about the nobility and value of sacrificial service cost me nothing. Living it would cost him dearly.
The meager resources and narrowed choices available to my friends from developing countries haunted me then (and now, when I stop to think about it). The gulf between their world and my privilege state is inconceivable. How can one ever measure up to the enormous responsibilities implied by such privilege?

I took Old Testament from Jack Bohannon, archeology and Greek from Storfjell, Western civilization and church history from Baldour Pfeiffer, and Islam from Jack Darnell. Darnell was legendary. He was so immersed in the culture of the Middle East, he walked like an Arab. He had an astonishing memory. Not long before I arrived on campus, so other students told me, he had spent three weeks on an itinerary through eight countries. At the mission committee meeting when he returned, he gave a ninety-minute, day-by-day, interview-by-interview report without any notes. Darnell evinced deep appreciation for Mohammed and Islam. He saw both the prophet and the religion as essentially good, though flawed. As I remember it, his theory was that Mohammed had actually received visions from God. He was called by God to deliver a prophetic message, however, like Balaam he was unfaithful to his calling, perhaps through the seductive influence of power that his prophetic gift brought into his life.
Taking archeology was an obvious choice. Our frequent field trips took us to sites all over Lebanon.
In history, Dr. Pfeiffer pushed us hard. He knew his material. He expected us to know ours, to be fully conversant with everything in the textbook and outside reading. He taught dialogically, quizzing us, debating with us, pitting our ideas against each other. His exams, in typical German fashion, were essays. When I got my first test back, I was disappointed. A B-. From class discussions, I knew I was one of the top students in the class. Another American in the class who was not academically inclined got the same grade I did. How could that be? I went and protested my grade to Dr. Pfeiffer—without mentioning the other student, of course. What did I have to do to get an A on his test? Dr. Pfeiffer ripped my essays, giving very specific criticisms. My problem was not an incorrect facts but sloppy, ineffective writing. His negative evaluations stung, but I couldn't argue with his observations. They were right on.
The next test I got a B. I went back to Dr. Pfeiffer. Again, he gave me pointed, detailed criticism. It was the same on all of the tests. Once, he gave me an A-, the rest of the time, he gave me B's. I studied and studied. I tried to remember his criticisms as I wrote my essays. To no avail. On the final test, he gave me an A, and gave me a solid A for the term. He later explained that if he had given me an A earlier I would have quit pushing for greater competence. He knew I could better.
Dr. Pfeiffer's academic competence was intimidating. His spiritual life was intriguing. I remember his mentioning off hand that he was reading The Imitation of Christ with his family for worship. [The Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis is a classic of medieval spirituality written by a monk.] Wow, that impressed me and perplexed me. I was impressed he would share with his family a classic of Western Christian spirituality. I was already moving beyond the notion that anything Catholic was evil. I growing in my appreciation for the long history of Christian spiritual life. Still, I was a little perplexed by his choice of a Catholic writer instead of an Adventist for “worship.” If I were going to read a Kempis, I would do it at some other time than during morning worship. It would be “extra-curricular reading” not the heart of my devotions.
Dr. Pfeiffer further unsettled my faith by his answer to a question I had about the interpretation of a phrase in Ellen White. I wanted to know what she meant when she wrote, “the pardoned soul goes on from grace to grace.” Did this mean the person experienced more and more grace? A different kind of grace? Did it mean the person entered grace and then was accompanied by it through all stages of growth? Just what exactly was Mrs. White trying to say?
Dr. Pfeiffer said, “I don't know. Ellen White was not a systematic theologian. She was using this phrase the way a poet uses language. She was evoking a meaning. So I can't tell you 'exactly' what she meant. I don't think anyone can. Her words here do not have an 'exact' meaning.”
His words made immediate sense cognitively. But they were deeply disturbing. If Ellen White was God's messenger to the remnant, how could it be that her words did not all have an explicit, unmistakable, denotative meaning. This idea that some of her writing was “poetic,” that it evoked rather than denoted meaning . . . this hinted at far more subjectivity in the interpretation of our prophet's writings than I was prepared to accept. But how could I argue? “From grace to grace” certainly made more sense as poetry than as a formal theological statement.

In the spring, after the rain, when the flowers were out and the weather warmed, war broke out. The Lebanese army against the Palestinians. One of the major Palestinian refugee camps was at the bottom of the hill below the school. We watched as Lebanese air force jets screamed over the city and swooped to bomb and strafe the camp.
Public sympathy on campus among the larger groups—Iranians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Americans, Europeans—was solidly with the Lebanese military. As the planes whirled and dived on the camp a large group of students watched from the front lawn and cheered the explosions. Sigve Tonstad, a Norwegian, and I finally ran among them protesting, “Don’t you realize there are people in those buildings? Mothers and children are being killed by those bombs.”

We didn't change anyone's political sympathies, but the cheering stopped.

After a couple of weeks the fighting died down enough for classes to resume. I finished the year and headed home.