I just finished editing a transcription of Bill Gothard's Basic Seminar, session 1. I ran the audio through Nuance's Dragon Professional Individual, an automatic transcription program, after which I pasted the rough transcript into Express Scribe and gave it a close listening and edit using my foot pedal.
70 minutes and 28 seconds of speech comes out to 12.5 pages without paragraph breaks, and 16 or 17 pages with paragraph breaks in Arial 12 point font.
I agreed with what Gothard says about tracing behavior problems and habits to heart-attitude problems, which is a big improvement on my earlier impression of him as constantly attacking things teenagers liked in the 1960s, such as rock music or counter-culture clothes. I see him now as trying to help parents who were already reacting against such things to approach their kids with more humility and talk about deeper things. This persona that Gothard takes on of trying to be a friend of both parents and teens reminds me of Joshua Coleman's demeanor toward parents trying to reconcile with their estranged adult children.
In terms of his Scriptural interpretation methods and general moralistic focus, I think Gothard would have been really good friends with folks like Evagrius of Pontus, Origen, Pelagius, or the Desert Fathers and their hagiographers. And I don't mean that as an insult. He is clearly steeped in Scripture, and he takes a very imaginative approach to application that doesn't always fit the grammar-historical method, and yet his rhetorical skills are quite powerful as he piles up examples, stories, mnemonic lists, ever toward his main point of taking personal responsibility to change.
Like those thinkers of late antiquity or early Christianity, he was ostensibly celibate and had a cult following. His reputation has fallen on hard times, both because of his speculative additions to doctrine (like Origin and Evagrius) and his harmful behavior toward women working for him -- unlike, I hope, these others I mentioned, although Evagrius himself had his own scandal from which he fled from the city to the desert; Gothard finally, in the last ten years, retired to his own house and left his organization to others.
There's still something appealing about the way, despite his failures, how he tried to turn the Bible into a mnemonic system applied to the moral issues facing young people in his time (the 1960s). Maybe part of the reason his seminar hasn't aged well is that it hasn't been updated since 2002, and the issues, or at least some of the ways of talking about them, have changed.
There might still be one or two things I can learn from him, if I take him with Evagrius in mind.
See the video and transcription below.
