A complicated man? Yes. A contradictory one? Not really.

It seems more accurate to say he’s someone unafraid to chase his passions—however dichotomous they may be. It’s made for a life that alumnus Ralph C. Wood seems to have had little trouble in finding meaning.

“Life has a strange way of making sense,” he says, explaining that was certainly the case with his landing here for his college years.

Ralph left Linden, his small hometown cradled in the deepest of pinewoods, for East Texas

State University perched on the open blackland prairie. Here he would flourish, not only earning two degrees (bachelor’s and master’s in English, 1963 and ’65) but also cultivating a companionship with the quiet man who would forever affect his own practice of Christianity—Dr. Paul Barrus.

At first, however, East Texas State, as he (admittedly stubbornly) still calls it, wasn’t where Ralph really wanted to be. Baylor was the place “where Baptist preachers are supposed to go,” and Ralph meant to be a minister. But like many who’ve found their way to A&M-Commerce, Ralph could better manage this University’s tuition, which was about $200 a year compared to Baylor’s $2,000. These days, however, Ralph says it’s clear there was more at work than the pinching of his pennies; there was the hand of providence.

“Had I not gone to East Texas State, I never would have met Paul Barrus, never have studied under a Catholic professor,” he says. (Baylor now has a number of Catholic faculty but at that time had none.)
Dr. Barrus, one of the University’s most beloved professors, was Ralph’s literature professor, but he also would become a spiritual mentor to the young student. “Paul Barrus introduced me to the wider world of Christendom, exploding the myths I had about Catholics.” Which just happened to prove crucial to his own career, Ralph says, since he would spend a good deal of time teaching a number of Catholic writers, including Flannery O’Connor, a favorite.

But life wasn’t always so immediately decipherable. Ralph’s roommate committed suicide. A teacher died. So did his own father.

He says, “Questions pressed in very hard.”

Forced to confront tragedy and rejecting easy answers, he would plumb the darkness and depths of his faith.

Helping him do so was Dr. Barrus. “When my college roommate committed suicide during his first year of medical studies, I went straight to Paul Barrus’ office for consolation and instruction,” Ralph would say later. But it was also the professor’s sympathetic teaching of both Christian and atheist writers that would profoundly affect Ralph’s approach to his own grief. Through Dr. Barrus, Ralph embraced the role honest doubt could play in developing a deeper faith in the face of tragedy.

Years later Ralph would write “In Defense of Disbelief” in which he states: “A healthy dose of Christian disbelief or ‘holy skepticism’ would serve as a much-needed antidote to the soft-core spirituality that saps much of contemporary Christianity . . .”

It’s no surprise then that Ralph’s students tackle the great works, both the faith-filled and the faithless, of authors from St. Augustine to Kafka. “I’m convinced,” Ralph says earnestly, “that Christianity has to confront all that counts against it—all the tough challenges it must face in order to be valid and convincing in our lives.”

His continuing fascination with how literature addresses the dynamics of faith and doubt would eventually lead him to the fulfillment of his dream—teaching a combination of religion and literature. And teaching it at Baylor, for that matter. Make that two dreams come true.

In 1998 Baylor administrators named Ralph the first of only four University Professors—a program described as one that would enhance the school’s reputation by bringing in high-profile scholars as permanent faculty members.

From East Texas’ sandy uplands and then ETSU’s blacklands to Waco’s flatlands, it’s a journey that may well have snapped Ralph’s good judgment, because he professes to find Waco lovely.

Baylor’s setting is one of “barren beauty,” he claims, and for good measure throws in an O’Connor quote: “When you don’t have much to look at, you look at it very carefully.”

And that in itself may explain part of his enthusiasm for O’Connor, who penned fewer works than many authors of her importance. Apparently, though, what she lacks in volume, Ralph makes up for with his own. As in the volume of his guffaws when he reads her. “I find her uproariously funny,” he admits. “I never read her without bursting out in laughter.”

For the record, a couple of O’Connor’s more well-known quotes include: “Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham,” and “I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

They’re the kind of O’Connor lines that call for a wholehearted hoot, at least for Ralph, who rarely seems to find anything to recommend in a halfhearted response.

His notion that moderation might not be a particularly credible position began with Dr. Barrus, whose witness led Ralph to confront the fact that “to be Christian is to go against the grain of the world.”

“Christianity is radical,” Ralph says. “Faith is drastic and stark. It makes a real difference. Moderation may be a great political virtue, but it is a religious vice.”

Which makes it all the more interesting that he is a professor in the Truett Seminary.

Last year the Baptist General Convention of Texas voted to redirect $4.3 million from six Southern Baptist seminaries to more “moderate” ones, including Truett, which stands to get $1.3 million a year.

That kind of money—an amount that would make a hefty one-time gift, much less an annual one—“will mean Truett can grow and produce more and better students,” Ralph says. “Truett can leave behind its status as a struggling seminary and become a thriving one.”

Nevertheless, Ralph says, “I would not apply the word ‘moderate’ to myself,” and he will continue his efforts to expunge the word from even his students’ vocabulary.

Though the current conflicts between more liberal and conservative Baptists have netted Truett some good fortune, both sides are guilty of mistakes, Ralph suggests.

“Matters have been dealt with so badly on both sides,” he says. “To conservatives the Bible is a book of wooden rules, and liberals attribute to Scripture an equally wooden accommodationism.”

The ultimate criteria for our actions should be Christ, he explains. While conservatives would have wives submit to their husbands, he says, and liberals would have them grasping for a secular version of equality, “the Bible says a husband rules a wife by dying to her.”

“By the world’s standard, that’s no standard at all—because what man will really do that?” he asks. It’s the kind of human perspective that makes the debate “a sterile one that misses the heart of the matter,” Ralph says.
“We’re all to be mutually submissive to one another,” he says. “Both sides miss that.”

Ralph once said that Dr. Barrus had a “sterling integrity of mind” and a “deep generosity of heart.” And what will he want said of himself?

“That I was faithful to my calling,” which, as it turns out, wasn’t to preach but teach. “I teach, not because I disdain preaching, but because I revere it. I tell my students I don’t marry, bury, baptize, or serve Holy Communion as they will. I don’t pray with people as they’re dying or as their children are born.”

His calling may be one he defines as “secondary” to that of his students’, but “I have no regrets,” he says with assurance. “I may not have found something higher than preaching, but I’ve found something to love.” Immoderately so.