From Corwin Smidt
Steve taught at Calvin before I arrived, but he served in the Michigan legislature during my early years at Calvin. Though I had met him on different occasions, during the years, it was only after he began to teach at Pepperdine that our paths crossed with some regularity. Then, after he retired from Pepperdine, he returned to Grand Rapids, where he served as a Research Fellow for the Henry Institute while I served as the Director of the Institute, and then after my retirement, we served together as Research Fellows for the Henry Institute under the current Director, Kevin denDulk. In other words, I know Steve more as a scholar than as a politician. And, while I am sure there is much that can be said about his life of public service that would be worthy to note, I cannot really address such matters. So I will limit myself to his scholarly life.
Steve always took his Christian faith and his life as a scholar seriously. He saw his scholarship as a reflection of his Christian faith, and he constantly sought to find ways to strengthen Christian involvement in scholarly life. Steve and Paul Henry were among the central scholars who first formed the Caucus on Faith and Politics among political scientists during the 1970s. When that organization began to foster the broader study of religion and politics within the American Political Science Association (APSA) during the early 1980s (a move to make the study of religion more relevant to the discipline and a move that Steve approved), the Caucus on Faith and Politics largely help to form and then merge within what became known as the Religion and Politics subsection of the APSA. However, Steve felt that it was essential to continue to have some form of “faith-based” expression within the discipline, and, so he was among several scholars who helped form a new association, Christians in Political Science (CPS), which continues to this day. In so doing, while the old Caucus on Faith and Politics was composed largely of scholars from the evangelical Protestant tradition, Steve sought to broaden the appeal of CPS to enable scholars from the Catholic tradition to join the association—something which he successfully accomplished.
Likewise, Steve long had a vision for a graduate-level program in Christian faith and public service, something that might be geared toward those who work in government. Though this vision has not as yet come to fruition, it was something that, over the years, he sought to implement though various proposals he drafted and conversations he had with potential backers.
Steve understood that Christians could come to support different positions related to the complex matters of politics. While he held a particular perspective on many political matters, Steve recognized that other faithful Christians might come to a different perspective, as there is rarely, if ever, “the Christian position” in matters of public policy. He acknowledged that there may be certain policy positions that faithful Christians cannot endorse, but recognized there can remain a variety of divergent positions which Christians can still adopt in relationship to any particular matter of public policy.
Steve was also concerned about helping the broader Church of Jesus Christ be become citizens who more faithfully exhibited their Christian faith in public life. Over the years, a number of Steve’s books were geared toward helping parishioners think and act more faithfully in their civic and political life.Steve was a gentleman and a scholar in the truest sense of those words. His ultimate identity was not some partisan label, but his Christian faith. He sought to encourage Christian scholars in the academy, to advance Christian scholarship within his discipline of study, to promote a more faithful understanding of public life within the church. He was a faithful disciple of the Lord whom he served.
From Richard Hughes
When Steve requested that I speak at his funeral, he struck an ambivalent note. “I would like you to speak,” he said, “about a very important chapter in my life—my time at Pepperdine. But don’t speak about me. Speak instead about God, for to God must go the glory for anything I have accomplished.” A few weeks later, Steve had a change of heart. He decided he didn’t want me to speak at his funeral at all. “When I asked you to speak,” he explained, “I’m afraid my ego had gotten the best of me.” And he told me again, “To God must go the glory.”
I told Steve that I would honor whatever his request might be.
A few weeks later, Marty called and said, “The family wants you to speak after all.”
I tell this story because it says so much about the kind of person Stephen Monsma was. Indeed, “To God be the glory” was the standard by which he lived and the standard by which he died.
It is true that God deserves the glory for Steve’s accomplishments. But that great truth should not prevent us from remembering today some of the great achievements God worked through the life of his servant, Steve.
Jan and I first met Steve and Mary in the fall of 1988. They had moved to Pepperdine in 1987 and we had returned for a second stint at Pepperdine exactly one year later. Both our families lived in the campus faculty condos, and because we lived only two doors apart, we got acquainted early on. That acquaintance quickly blossomed into a deep friendship marked by the profound respect we felt for Steve and Mary and their entire family.
We had not known Steve and Mary long before Steve said something to me that would turn my life—and, indeed, the life of Pepperdine University—upside down. Thanks to his rich experience at Calvin College and thanks to Almighty God whose grace bore such fruit in Stephen’s life, he arrived at Pepperdine deeply committed to academic work informed by a Christian worldview. Calvin, of course, had nurtured that kind of faith-based work for years. But Steve quickly discovered that Pepperdine had done nothing along that line at all.
It wasn’t long before Steve began sharing with me his deep disappointment at Pepperdine’s failure to nurture scholarship and teaching that was rooted in a Christian perspective, and he urged me to join with him in making a difference in that regard.
I must tell you that before Steve pressed that vision on me, I had never given a moment’s thought to what it might mean to ground one’s scholarship and teaching in a Christian worldview. I say that to tell you this—that this vision was Steve’s and Steve’s alone, planted in his heart by the God of grace and glory who had nurtured Steve throughout his life and especially through his years at Calvin College.
But while this vision was new to me, I heard what Steve was saying, and he and I began to dream of what could be accomplished at Pepperdine in the context of faith and learning. In order to win administrative support for his proposal, Steve needed someone who stood in the Christian tradition to which Pepperdine was related. And that was me. And I needed someone with the vision for the kind of work that should be done. And that was Steve. And the two of us became a team.
Very quickly he and I began to dream of week-long faculty seminars through which we could encourage Pepperdine’s faculty to think deeply about how to ground their teaching and their scholarship in their Christian convictions. When we approached the administration with this idea, they were generous to a fault. They gave us a budget line of $50,000 and told us to go to work.
Neither Steve nor I had ever led a faculty faith/learning seminar, and we weren’t entirely certain how to proceed. But we knew who the experts were and we invited their help. And so those members of the Pepperdine faculty who participated in that very first seminar in the summer of 1989 were treated to a week of rich conversation led by four of the stars in the field—George Marsden, Nathan Hatch, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Ron Wells.
It wasn’t long before Steve and I proposed to the administration that Pepperdine create the Pepperdine University Center for Faith and Learning—a center that has now been promoting teaching and scholarship grounded in the Christian faith for almost twenty years.
And what must be said is simply this—that none of this would have happened had it not been for Stephen Monsma and the God who planted in his heart and mind a vision for teaching and scholarship grounded in a Christian understanding of reality.
It was that same Christian vision that drove and inspired Stephen’s own teaching and scholarship, including the many books and articles he wrote on the intersection of religion, public policy, and politics.
It was that same Christian vision that prompted Stephen to place at the center of his work one simple question: how might the Christian faith inform the good society.
It was that same Christian vision that prompted his passion for social justice, especially for those Jesus called “the least of these.”
It was that same Christian vision that inspired his Pepperdine colleagues to invite Steve to chair the Social Science Division.
And it was that same Christian vision that prompted other Pepperdine colleagues to solicit his service on the team that planned the curriculum for Pepperdine’s new School of Public Policy.
By any measure, a man like this is a spiritual giant, and today we give thanks for his life, for his work, and for the ways he enriched his friends, the communities where he lived, the politics that governed those communities, and the universities where he served.
And after witnessing such an extraordinary life we can only stand in awe and confess once again that singular sentiment that Steve would rejoice to hear. “To God alone be the glory!”