Technically Ken Monroe was not my first college professor, but he was by the far the best professor I had while an undergraduate student. He had come to Westmont a few years before me after a long career at a well-known Bible Institute, with a doctorate from Pittsburg Theological Seminary. He taught Bible and Theology, as well as Introduction to Philosophy.
Ken Monroe was a quiet, thoughtful and gentle fellow, with wry sense of humor. When he spoke in Chapel he often began with a joke. Once he held up a book saying simply: “I have in my hand a book”. We did not know whether to laugh, but soon from the look on his face we realized that this was his idea of a joke. Another time he announced that when he and his wife went to the Holy Land, they went Third Class because there was no Fourth Class.
Ken Monroe was respected by faculty and students alike as the only real scholar on the faculty. He had read widely and still walked from his near bye home to the college every morning reading a book.
I took several classes from Ken Monroe and always found them interesting and mind-stretching. He invited his students to his home each semester for an evening of fellowship, partly so we could get to know each other, but mostly so he could get to know us. He and his wife were the only faculty members of this fundamentalist college who became members of the local Golf and Country Club and who joined the First Presbyterian Church.
When my wife and I snuck into the movie theater to see “King of Kings”, about Jesus’ life and death, because the college forbade seeing movies, we were heartened to see Ken and his wife walk down the aisle in the dark after the film had started. They obviously had a broader view of things than the college stood for. Incidentally, Ken ‘s and his first wife had been divorced and this raised a lot of eyebrows among the college community.
Indeed, after I had finished my Master’s degree I loaned a copy of thesis on Reinhold Niebuhr’s view of the relationship between reason and faith to Ken. After reading it he asked me if I now thought Niebuhr was a Christian, an absolutely ridiculous question for anyone not knowing the fundamentalist mindset, since Niebuhr was a thinker whom everyone else thought to be a paragon of the Christian faith. I answered that I do think Niebuhr is a Christian. Ken paused a bit, and then replied, “That’s what worries me about the college.” Our college, Westmont, was still then a fundamentalist school. It is now a broadminded evangelical college.
I kept in touch with Ken over the years until his death at 81 years of age. In the context of a Fundamentalist school seeking to become an Evangelical school he was a guiding light. He opened my mind toward a posture that embraced both reason and faith simultaneously. I have spent the past 70 years striving to affirm and live this broader posture toward life.