Biola University: The Bible Institute That Became a Research University

The campus visible here is Biola University, and its name is actually an acronym that tells you exactly where it came from: Bible Institute of Los Angeles, founded in nineteen oh eight by Lyman Stewart, the co-founder of Union Oil Company, and a Presbyterian minister named Thomas Corwin Horton.

Stewart had made his fortune in California petroleum and decided to spend a portion of it on evangelical education at a time when American universities were moving toward secular models and the theological fights of the early twentieth century were running at full intensity. He and Horton established the institute in downtown Los Angeles on what is now Sixth Street, dedicated to training men and women in scripture and sending them out as missionaries, pastors, and evangelists.

The institute became unexpectedly influential in a broader fight. Between nineteen ten and nineteen fifteen, Stewart funded the publication and free distribution of three million copies of a series of essays called The Fundamentals, ninety articles defending Protestant orthodoxy against higher biblical criticism, evolution, and secular philosophy. These pamphlets, sent free of charge to ministers, theology students, and missionaries across the English-speaking world, gave the emerging fundamentalist movement both its name and its most widely circulated intellectual framework.

The school grew through the twentieth century, moved to its current La Mirada campus in nineteen fifty-nine, became Biola College in nineteen forty-nine, and took its current name of Biola University in nineteen eighty-one as it added graduate programs in psychology, education, theology, and the arts. Today it enrolls roughly six thousand students and holds regional accreditation alongside its distinctly evangelical identity, an unusual combination that has made it one of the larger Christian universities in the western United States.