I never met a cooler man at Pacific Union College (PUC) than religion teacher Wayne Judd (b. 1942). He was high-energy, hilarious and his family hosted my family many times in the late 70s to watch wholesome things on TV.
One Sunday in January 1979, I went to the Judds to watch the devastating Super Bowl XIII where the Steelers edged my Cowboys 35-31. At half-time, we all played touch football in the yard. I was on Wayne’s team that day and I’ve been on Wayne’s team ever since.
I was a strange kid, prone to saying cruel things, and many people kept their distance. Not Wayne Judd, and for his tolerance I’m grateful.
His wife Audrey Judd was my seventh-grade teacher. She wore sunglasses and exuded her own star power. I was not a good student. I was rude to my teachers (I told them to “shut up” several times until I was put in my place), I lacked boundaries, and I was lucky to not get thrown out of school. The very prospect frightened me so much that I immediately committed to good behavior when Mrs. Judd suggested one morning on our way to chapel that I might be happier receiving home schooling.
In 1980, when my father Desmond Ford (1929-2019) lost his Adventist ministerial credentials, word got back to me that Wayne Judd said I would turn away from the church as a result. As soon as I heard the words, I felt permission to do exactly what I wanted, and to flee the church, just as his sons ended up doing (along with all of my Adventist friends from childhood).
When I was down for the count with chronic fatigue syndrome circa 1993, I reached out to the good man and he called me back and brought me energy and joy, the two things I needed most.
In 2022, he published a memoir, In Motion: My Stories.
Amazon says:
Wayne Judd has lived his entire life in motion, from birth all the way to his 80th birthday when he sat down at his computer long enough to write his life stories.
Born in a tiny farmhouse beside the Long Prairie River near Staples, Minnesota, Judd grew up in poverty. The Judds farmed with horses, milked cows by hand, lighted the tiny farmhouse and barn with kerosene lanterns, and used an outdoor toilet.
At the center of his life was his faith. . . until it wasn’t. In Motion captures his dramatic faith pursuits from childhood to retirement, from faith to unfaith.
He studied theology and music in college, then went to the seminary to become a minister.
Pastoring didn’t work for Judd, so he abandoned the pulpit for the classroom, first teaching religion in high schools, then in college. His flamboyant personality and revisionist ideas soon got him into trouble in his very conservative college. He was called upon to defend himself for five hours by a committee of the college board. When the board and administration decided to fire Judd, students raised such a ruckus that the board relented, and he left the college on his own volition two years later, finished an MBA, and completed his work life as a strategic planning and mission management executive in a 20-hospital health system.
Judd’s memoir captures both his energy and brash confidence that were his signature approach to life. He is both plain-spoken and fair with his antagonists, showing exuberant affection and joyousness for his collaborators and fellow mischief-makers.
The book reveals an astonishing level of detail. Over and over, Judd wrests the arc of meaning from ordinary moments—the sign of someone who has always told stories very successfully and who has lost none of the lecturer’s engaging knack for bringing forth a tale well-told.
One chapter is called, “Des Ford, Music and Me.” It’s delicious. Here’s a taste.
“Wayne, I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t bring Desmond Ford in as a guest lecturer, do you?” Pacific Union College president Jack Cassell said to me one day. Adventist Church leadership in Australia had approached him, requesting relief from a major Australian theological debate. The controversy had created two highly polarized factions in the country with Desmond in the middle.
“We’re pretty secure here at PUC,” Cassell added. “Let’s give the Australians some time to cool down.”
When Ford arrived, I knew in our first handshake that the college was in for a rough ride.
“Hello, Wayne” (it sounded more like “wine” because of his Aussie accent). “I’ve appreciated reading your articles and papers.”
I responded that I was pleased to meet him, too. And I was. I liked Des, and we became good friends.
“You Americans are far too congenial,” he commented, an unusual thing to say on our first encounter. I didn’t respond but took note, aware that the Aussie scholars are fighters, clinging fiercely to their “positions,” as they called their approaches to theological and biblical studies.
The polarization immediately invaded the Pacific Union College campus, and in fact much of the West Coast of the United States and beyond.
What Cassell had apparently overlooked in his confidence that the college could provide relief for the Australians was that Des’s presence on the West Coast would create an even greater need for it in America.
Cassell had also missed another cue. One of the leading religion teachers on the PUC campus was an individual who had himself crossed swords with Desmond Ford in Australia. Erwin Gane had fiercely opposed bringing Des into PUC’s religion department, even though it was billed as a temporary arrangement…
We had asked Eric Syme, PUC’s church history teacher and a somewhat outspoken Brit, to give the response to Des’s presentation. On one occasion, after facilitating a closed department meeting in which Ford and Gane stated their positions, he had emphatically declared, “There’s not dime’s worth of difference between the two of you.” Still, Syme agreed to do the response.
Finally, Adrian, Charles, Eric, Des, and I walked onto the historic stage, surrounded by elaborate old wooden beams, pillars, pulpit, and a wonderful display of organ pipes overhead. Ellen White had
stood at this very pulpit many years before.
I followed directly behind Des. As we entered, I heard him say quietly, “It’s time. It’s time”—only with his Australian accent, it came out “It’s tawym, it’s tawym.” Aware of what he was doing, he
realized that his presentation would violently rock the denominational boat.
And he knew beyond doubt that the audience contained as many detractors as disciples. St. Helena, eight miles down the hill from PUC, was a coveted retirement destination for Adventist ministers and leaders, many of whom had showed up for the Forum meeting.
About halfway through Des’s presentation, Adrian Zytkoskee scribbled a quick note and handed it to Eric Syme, then gave it to me after Eric read it. Adrian understood the historic dynamic much better than I did. He wrote: “Eric, there are some fairly powerful people who are prepared to crucify Des on this issue and drum him out of the church! If there is any way in your response, even if you disagree strongly with his interpretations, that you can demonstrate your solidarity with scholarship in the church and your support of him personally so as not to give aid and comfort to those who want to push him out, it would be helpful. The only reason I am writing this is to let you know the intensity of his opposition.”
This is a participant memoir written more than 40 years after the events, with Judd as both narrator and hero.
He portrays himself as the moderate man caught between zealots. He coins “positionolatry” to put himself above the fight, then spends the rest of the piece settling scores. Because we shared friends and enemies, I love it.
He and three colleagues drove to Newcastle to visit our home, wrote hymn parodies on the way that named Neal C. Wilson (1920–2010) and accused Gerhard Hasel (1935–1994) of plagiarism in verse, sang them around Angwin, and let them leak. Then he marvels at the “vitriol and fear” of the conservatives who came after him. The mockery on his side reads as “cathartic” and “satire.” The response from the other side reads as persecution. He never quite measures the two against each other, and that asymmetry is the real story he half-tells. A man can set another man’s alleged plagiarism to the tune of “A Mighty Fortress” and still be surprised when the target’s allies fight back.
The honest passage comes near the end, on Bill Penner and forgiveness. Judd refuses the apology, calls easy repentance Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace,” and adds “Character flaw? Maybe.” That admission does more for his credibility than the moderate pose does, because it concedes the grudge instead of dressing it as principle. The Larry Mitchel line he reproduces without comment (“I feel like you held me down, while Howard Hardcastle raped me”) tells you the temperature of the room and also Judd’s willingness to leave a brutal quote on the page.
My father Desmond Ford enters as a congenial saint who knows he is about to rock the boat (“It’s time, it’s time”), and the venue migrating from a 25-seat classroom to the 1,000-seat Irwin Hall chapel on October 27, 1979 captures his draw better than any sermon summary could. But Judd keeps my dad at arm’s length. He says he never attended the Newcastle meetings and grew “less and less interested in dogma.” So Judd is not a Fordite in any doctrinal sense. He is a free-speech partisan who got the label and resented it.
Judd sets historic Adventism’s “salvation by character” beside the nineteenth-century Unitarian creed and notes both rest on the ability of man. Ronald Numbers (1942–2023) and his Prophetess of Health sit in the background as the cautionary tale the students already knew, and the escalator exchange (“It was shoddy”) is good scene work even as it flatters the teller.
As a source, trust it for atmosphere and dialogue, discount it for proportion. Judd flags this when he walks back “hundreds” of student letters to “scores, probably not hundreds.” The memoir is strong on what a room felt like and weak as neutral history of who did what to whom.
Rust and Obey: The Hero System of Wayne Judd
Howard Hardcastle, registrar of Pacific Union College, walks out of a neighbor’s house on a warm Saturday circa 1981 and hears singing. Four professors stand in Larry Mitchel’s living room with the windows open. They are setting mockery to the tune of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Hardcastle does not walk on. He steps off the path, into the bushes, crouches, and counts the men as they leave. Later he tells one of them what the singing meant to him. “I couldn’t have been more shocked and offended if you men had been engaged in devil worship.”
Hold that sentence. A grown man hides in shrubbery to gather evidence against a hymn parody, and the parody strikes him as devil worship. Nothing in the doctrine of justification by faith accounts for a reaction at that pitch. Ernest Becker (1924-1974) accounts for it. In The Denial of Death he argues that every man builds a project to outlast his own body, a way to feel that his life counts forever, and that he will defend this project past all proportion because an attack on it lands as an attack on his immortality. Hardcastle is not defending a reading of Hebrews. He is defending the thing that lets him sleep at night against the certainty that he will die.
The whole Adventist quarrel runs on this terror, and Wayne Judd sits at the center of it, telling the story at eighty as a moderate caught between zealots. The self-portrait deserves a harder look.
Start with what the church was protecting. The Adventist hero system of 1981 was a literal answer to death. A man got ready. He lived a holy life, reproduced the character of Christ, and waited for the Lord to return and claim him. The remnant would vindicate God’s name before a watching universe, and only then would the atonement close. The system told a frightened animal exactly how to become eternal. Then Desmond Ford stood in the Irwin Hall chapel on October 27, 1979, and said the work finished at the cross. Grace, appropriated by faith, without good works. He did not soften a clause. He removed the ladder. If salvation arrives complete and free, the getting-ready loses its purpose, and the men who spent their lives getting ready lose the project that held back the dark. That is why retired ministers drove up the hill from St. Helena to shout him down. Ford had not changed their theology. He had threatened their way of not dying.
Judd reads their rage as fear, which is right, and then files it under the failings of the conservative wing, which lets him off the hook. Because Judd has a hero system too, and it runs on the same fuel.
His project is the classroom. He calls it the thing he loved most in his professional life, and the memoir tells you why. A teacher lives on in the minds he opens. His students carry the questions forward after the body quits. When the board moves to fire him, it does not threaten his salary. It threatens his route past death, the only immortality a man of inquiry permits himself. He weeps once at the phone, and the weeping comes the day they call him back to the committee, the day the project hangs by a vote. At eighty he writes the memoir and says the quiet part. “I want to finally control the narrative.” A man who has subtracted heaven still wants to live forever, and the manuscript is where he applies for the position.
Here is the subtraction story, the account of what Judd removed and what he kept. He removes the supernatural machinery. The investigative judgment, salvation by character, the authority of Ellen White (1827-1915), the soon return that organizes Adventist time. He keeps the furniture. He keeps the Sabbath, moving his Camelot performances to Sunday matinees while he plays King Arthur under a stage name. He keeps the hymns, well enough to parody them line for line. And he keeps the moral accounting, the ledger of sin and consequence, long after he has thrown out the God who audited it. Watch him refuse Bill Penner’s apology and lunch invitation years later in Carmichael. He will not let the offender erase the debt while the innocent still pay. “Character flaw? Maybe.” He subtracted the theology and kept the books. The accountant outlived the believer.
Now walk his sacred words through the hero systems where they live, because the same word carries a different cargo in each, and only inside Judd’s system do his words mean what he needs them to mean.
Take freedom. For Judd freedom is the classroom with the door open, the right to ask whether a doctrine is new truth or historic necessity and to follow the answer. Freedom is the teacher’s air, and a teacher suffocates without it. Set that beside other men who would swear by the word. For a parolee, freedom is the morning the ankle monitor comes off and no one owns his Tuesdays. For a Trappist under the Rule of Saint Benedict, freedom arrives through obedience, the surrender that frees him from the tyranny of choosing, the cell that frees him from the world. For a sideman in a Kansas City club at two in the morning, freedom is the eight bars where the chart goes silent and the hand follows the ear. For a Hong Kong bookseller in 2020, freedom is the shipment that clears customs and the title that stays on the shelf one more week. Five men, one word, five projects against death. Judd’s freedom looks like a universal good only from inside the hero system of the scholar, where the unexamined doctrine is the small death and the open question is the breath of life. The monk would pity him.
Take grace, the word that started the fire. For Ford and for Judd grace means a debt cancelled at the cross, a man saved by something done for him and not by him. For Erwin Gane and the traditionalists, grace without works means license, a church that stops getting ready, the floor giving way. For a borrower whose lender tears up the note, grace means the ledger drops to zero and he sleeps for the first time in a year. For a figure skater, grace means the landing that hides its own labor, the body telling a clean lie about gravity. For a chaplain walking a condemned man the last forty feet, grace means the man reaches the end without shaking. The Adventist conservatives did not misunderstand Ford’s grace. They understood it precisely, and they heard in it the collapse of the project that made them eternal, which is why they answered a theology of mercy with surveillance and hate mail. Grace is the kindest word in the language and it nearly ended careers, because in their hero system it read as the announcement of death.
Take justice, the word Judd reaches for when he asks the administration to seat an independent judicatory and submit his worthiness to peers. Justice for Judd means due process and a fair hearing, and it means something colder underneath, that the offender bears the weight of what he did. That is why he turns down Penner’s Sabbath lunch. Set his justice beside others. For a Calabrian who keeps the vendetta, justice means the books balance in blood across three generations and the family name stands. For a scholar in a Vilna study hall, justice means the case argued from every side until even the losing opinion is written down and preserved. For a witness before a truth commission in Johannesburg, justice means the killer says the crime aloud in open session and then walks home a free man. For a boxing referee, justice is a count you cannot buy and a bell that both men obey. Judd’s justice and the truth commission’s justice cannot share a room. One says the offender pays. One says the offender confesses and is released. Judd chose the ledger over the commission, and he chose it because his hero system runs on a balanced account, the same account the Adventist character-theology taught him before he threw the theology out.
Take witness. Judd climbs the platform after Hawaii and gives what he calls a testimony, borrowing Ellen White’s own opening, “I was shown,” naming the warriors of the right and the left as Brother A and Sister B so the students can decode them and laugh. Witness for him means standing up and telling the true story of the fight, and the memoir is the same act enlarged. Set it beside others who live by the word. For a photographer at the gate of a liberated camp, witness is the shutter, the proof no one can later wave away. For a martyr in the arena, witness is the death itself, the body offered as the argument. For a stenographer in a federal courtroom, witness is the verbatim record, neutral, complete, the thing that outlives everyone in the room. Judd’s witness leans toward the photographer and the stenographer, the man who fixes the record so the record favors him. He wants the narrative he controls to be the one that survives, and survival of the narrative is survival of the man.
How much of this does he see. More than most, less than all. The Penner passage is real self-knowledge, a man watching his own grudge and declining to dress it as virtue. But the larger blindness holds. Judd casts himself as the moderate who only wished the factions would love one another, and he tells you, in the same memoir, that he drove a hundred and three miles to write hymns mocking the General Conference president, that he accused Gerhard Hasel (1935-1994) of plagiarism in verse set to “A Mighty Fortress,” that he let the tape leak and labeled it from a fake address to cover his tracks. The mockery from his side is satire and catharsis. The surveillance from the other side is vitriol and fear. He never sets the two on the same scale, and the refusal to weigh them is the foundation of his self-portrait. The parodists and the men in the bushes perform the same act. Each defends a project against death by treating the other as the agent of death. Becker would say Judd cannot see the symmetry because seeing it would cost him the role of the reasonable man, and the role of the reasonable man is how he plans to be remembered.
So the shape of the hero. Wayne Judd is the teacher who means to outlast death in the minds he opened and in the story he controls, a man who subtracted the doctrine that promised him heaven and kept the appetite the doctrine fed. He traded salvation by character for vindication by record, and he kept the same grammar of debt and payment all the way down.
The unnamed rival is not Gane, not Penner, not Neal Wilson (1920-2010). The rival is Desmond Ford. Judd insists across the memoir that he was never a Fordite, that he never attended the Newcastle meetings, that he grew bored with dogma and walked beside the man without following him. He defines himself against the disciple he refused to become. Ford paid the whole price for the conviction Judd only flirted with. Ford lost his credentials, his classroom, his place in the tradition, and never taught again. Judd kept his job and drove down the mountain humming the doxology. The rival is the man who showed what conviction costs, and the memoir works hard to prove that Judd admired him from a safe distance.
And the cost the ledger cannot price. Judd kept the books and balanced them, and balancing them cost him the Sabbath table at Bill Penner’s house, the reconciliation his subtracted Christianity would have handed him for free. He won the freedom and lost the grace, and the proof sits in the file boxes he still keeps, the documents he leafs through forty-three years on, stunned again at the old fear. The classroom they took from him closed in 1984. He is still in the room. The freedom he fought for froze him at the moment of the fight, and a man who must control the narrative forever never gets to put it down.
