Cross-posted from The Christian History Blog

When theologian George Kalantzis returned to the Wheaton College campus last fall after spending the summer in the Holy Land, he had a very pleasant surprise. While he was out of the country, two donors had approached the college administration about funding a program that would encourage interaction between Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism over their mutual legacy from the early church.

No one at Wheaton knew just how much these donors would fund, but George and his colleagues decided to dream big: they envisioned a Center for the Study of Early Christianity, with a vertically integrated program from undergraduate courses up through master's and doctoral studies.

Their big vision was rewarded.

Two physicians from San Diego, Frank and Julie Papatheofanis, have now made that dream possible. (Julie Papatheofanis is a Wheaton alum.) You can see the beginnings of this vision at the Wheaton Center for Early Christian Studies website.

Evangelical Christian interest in the early church has been growing for about 30 years. Much of the impetus for that interest can be traced to the work of the late Robert Webber, who was teaching at Wheaton in 1978 when he wrote Common Roots about the importance of the early church for evangelical life. "Without the work of Bob Webber, this would not be possible," George told me over coffee in Wheaton's Beamer Student Center. "He plowed the ground," George continued, alluding to 1 Corinthians 3:6.

There seems to be a real hunger for the systematic study of the early church. Wheaton College has not yet begun to advertise this program and already, George says, he has close to 30 students engaged with it. On his desk are about 10 applications for the master's program, a similar number for the undergraduate certificate program, plus a number of students applying for the doctoral program (only one doctoral student can be accepted each year).

A handful of teachers at the conservative Protestant colleges and seminaries have specialized in patristics. Dan Williams at Baylor University is a leading light. Others George mentioned to me include Bradley Nassif at North Park University, Bryan Litfin at Moody Bible Institute, and Jeff Bingham at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Students interested in patristics can take courses here and there, but Wheaton is the first to offer such a concentrated and structured study opportunity.

What does George Kalantzis hope to accomplish? He is very clear that this should not be a nest from which students can swarm to Eastern Orthodoxy. It is not what the donors had in mind (although they are themselves Greek Orthodox). Instead, this program is about seeing the early church tradition as the common roots of evangelicals, Catholics, and Orthodox.

"By studying the early church," George says, "we are studying about our commonalities much more than our differences.

"Our goal is to understand our common tradition, explore it, live with it, be with it, instead of just going back and plundering it - finding the eight quotes to justify whatever I want to do."

One reason for George's emphasis on the tradition we hold in common is his own biography. He was born in Greece in a Greek evangelical home. As a fourth-generation Greek evangelical, he is unwilling to surrender the Great Tradition to the Orthodox, as if it were their exclusive property.

The Tradition belongs to Protestants as well, he reminds us. Without the story of the early church, the Protestant Reformation would make no sense. The Reformers appealed to the pattern of the early church. We cannot be true Protestants without knowing that history.

A few other facts about George:

• He came to America to study medicine, but after his first year of medical school, he says, God opened his eyes to a different calling, the study of history and theology.

• He chose to do his doctoral work at Northwestern University in order to stay in Chicago and relate to the Greek evangelical community here. While at NU, he wrote his dissertation on Theodore of Mopsuestia's Christology.

• After his doctoral work, he taught at Garrett Evangelical Seminary for 10 years. If you visit ratemyprofessor.com, you'll see what his students thought about him. One student from 2006 wrote: "George is FABULOUS and his lectures are brilliant. He doesn't coddle anyone but has very high expectations."
  

Well, we think Wheaton College and the Doctors Papatheofanis are FABULOUS for opening a new Center for the Study of Early Christianity. And we have very high expectations. Congratulations to all on a ground-breaking move.

* * *

Image credit: Icon of the First Council of Nicaea via Wikimedia Commons.

Posted by David Neff at April 30, 2009 | Comments (7)

Broadcaster Pat Robertson announced his plans to retire next summer as president of Regent University, the school said today.

Robertson, 79, will retire July 1, 2010 and continue to serve as chancellor and on the board of trustees at the 4,500-student, Virginia-based school.

"As chancellor and a trustee, I will now focus on helping guide the university toward the next level of strategic growth and the implementation of our master plan," he said in the statement.

A newly appointed search committee will name a new president by the fall semester of 2010, according to the release.

Robertson founded numerous organizations, including the American Center for Law and Justice, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and the Christian Coalition. He unsuccessfully campaigned to become the Republican Party's nominee in the 1988 presidential election but became widely known as a leader for the Christian right.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at April 28, 2009 | Comments (2)

Cedarville University students will not publish the final issue of their student newspaper Cedars to protest the school's new policy that public relations staff review the newspaper.

"The public relations department, directed by university trustees and some administrative officials, now reviews, approves, censors and cuts the content of your student newspaper," Cedars staff members wrote in a circulated letter. They wrote that public relations employees approved every published article beginning with the second issue this spring.

The students write that review and censorship by public relations breaks the operating model approved by the administrative council on October 9, 2006, which says "The student editors prepare copy for print and take responsibility for making decisions, along with the Faculty Adviser, for what ends up in print."

"...the PR department's excessive attempt to censor Cedars necessarily violates our operating model, and the Cedars staff has thus decided to cease publication," the students write. "Review by the public relations department undermines our ability to think critically and engage culture. We grieve the loss of free expression and healthy discourse once found in your newspaper, traits that ought to characterize all vibrant institutions of higher learning."

Carl A. Ruby, vice president for student life, wrote in a campus-wide e-mail that the newspaper will not be in publication until spring 2010. He said that the newspaper will reorganize and return next year under a new journalism program.

"We acknowledge that finding the right balance of freedom of expression is difficult, especially in the context of a community of believers who voluntarily give up some of our freedoms for the sake of our shared mission," Ruby wrote. "This has been a difficult arrangement, both for the students and for our staff in Public Relations and we recognize that it probably isn't the most ideal approach to editorial oversight for the future."

Update: Sara Lipka at The Chronicle of Higher Education offers more details of why the public relations office was reviewing the newspaper in the first place.

Cedars attracted attention last fall after the Viewpoints section ran columns disapproving of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, arguing that "there was nothing wrong with homosexuality," and suggesting that "abortion wasn't a black and white issue," said a writer for the newspaper who preferred to remain anonymous.

Lipka writes that a counterpoint on vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin became "particularly touchy," which led to a decision by the trustees to have public relations review the paper. She reports that the public relations staff did pull material from the newspaper, including satires of Cedarville's mandatory Bible minor and debate over biblical certainty.

The public relations staff asked the newspaper's faculty adviser to ensure that the semester's final issue of Cedars had no controversial content. English professor Scott D. Calhoun eventually resigned from the adviser position.

"It was an understandable request but fundamentally at odds with the enterprise of scholastic journalism," Calhoun told The Chronicle.

Cedarville is a Baptist university with about 3,000 students and a member of the Coalition of Christian Colleges & Universities.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at April 23, 2009 | Comments (25)

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled yesterday that a California law school could lawfully bar the school's Christian Legal Society from being recognized as a student group for requiring its members to sign a statement of faith. The ruling could set a precedent for the way Christian organizations can or cannot retain their distinct religious beliefs at public colleges with nondiscrimination policies.

The CLS chapter at the University of California's Hastings College of Law filed a lawsuit in fall 2004 against the college for denying it status as a registered student organization. According to CLS's brief, it was denied official recognition for requiring members to sign a statement of faith, which, among other things, prohibits homosexual conduct. Hastings officials had said CLS's standards violated the school's nondiscrimination policy, which says all student groups "shall not discriminate unlawfully on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation."

CLS's lawsuit claimed that Hastings was practicing viewpoint discrimination and violating CLS's right to expressive association. It claimed that Hastings was applying its policy inconsistently. CLS's brief, page 14?18:

Hastings allows other registered student organizations to require that their leaders and/or members agree with the organization's beliefs and purposes. . . . Outlaw [a pro-gay rights group] is free to remove officers if they fail to support the organization's pro-gay rights purpose; Silenced Right: National Alliance Pro-Life Group may require its members to support its pro-life purposes; . . . Hastings' nondiscrimination policy is viewpoint discriminatory, as it allows a vegetarian club to require that officers and members not eat meat, but prohibits an Orthodox Jewish group for requiring its officers and members to abstain from pork for religious reasons.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did not interpret Hastings's nondiscrimination policy that way, however. Its two-sentence ruling from yesterday:

The parties stipulate that Hastings imposes an open membership rule on all student groups - all groups must accept all comers as voting members even if those individuals disagree with the mission of the group. The conditions on recognition are therefore viewpoint neutral and reasonable.

CLA has not posted a response to its website yet. It is facing similar fights at other colleges, including the University of Iowa, where more than 100 faculty and staff have signed a petition calling for the school to stop funding its CLA chapter. CLA won similar cases in summer 2005 against Arizona State University and Southern Illinois University.

Inside Higher Ed and The San Francisco Chronicle covered the Hastings story.

Listen to the oral arguments here, and check CT's website later for deeper analysis of this case's implications for religious organizations on public college campuses.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at March 18, 2009 | Comments (1)

Vanguard University, a Southern California Assemblies of God school that was warned last fall about its financial oversight from an accrediting body and went through a string of leadership transitions this January, may be facing sunny days again.

School officials met with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) February 18 to show that they had taken recommended steps to remedy the fiscal and management issues noted by WASC during its September visit. College president Carol Taylor announced last week that WASC had granted the school's request to defer action on its accreditation review until its June 2009 meeting.

"In granting a deferral, the WASC Commission recognizes Vanguard's progress and has noted that this deferral provides the University a window of time to bring to fruition key initiatives that have been undertaken," President Taylor said in her online message. Deferment gives the CCCU member school time to show it can run with an independent board of trustees and implement sound financial management, which it had reportedly lacked for years.

Four days after the WASC meeting, Vanguard learned that Bruce Lindsay, a millionare who hung out on campus every day and became known as the school's "campus grandpa" and "student advocate," had died and left his fortune to the school, which is $42 million in debt.

According to the Los Angeles Times profile, Lindsay, 79, was known for his frugality and made his fortune in part by buying low-cost oil leases and flipping beach homes. The worth of Lindsay's estate is still unknown, but Vanguard has said part of the donation will go toward renovating its cafeteria, where Lindsay ate three meals every day.

Posted by Katelyn Beaty at March 11, 2009 | Comments (1)

The board of trustees of Oral Roberts University unanimously elected Mark Rutland, president of Southeastern University, according to a news release.

The Ledger in Florida includes a bio of Rutland, who has been president of Southeastern for the past 10 years. From Cary McMullen:

Since becoming president of Southeastern in January 1999, Rutland has presided over dramatic growth. Enrollment has expanded from 950 to 3,079 students in September 2008. The school has undertaken 16 construction or renovation projects, including two new dormitories and a proposed office and classroom building, totaling more than $50 million, according to information released by Southeastern.

Rutland is the author of 13 books, hosts a syndicated radio program and is the founder of ministries in Ghana and Thailand. He is noted for his interest in leadership education, and in 2006 he began an annual conference, The National Leadership Forum, that has attracted nationally known speakers, including former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

In October 2008, Oral Roberts settled with two professors who alleged that they were forced out after detailing financial and ethical wrongdoing by Richard Roberts, the school's former president who resigned. It also announced that it will cut 100 jobs, about 10 percent of its workforce this year.

Yesterday, icy weather postponed hearings in two lawsuits against the school. An ORU accountant alleges that he was forced to commit fraud and a former student claims that he was unable to complete his degree.

Christianity Today has followed the developments at ORU on the higher education section of liveblog, and CT also published an article in September 2008 detailing the school's path to healing.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at January 28, 2009 | Comments (3)

Westmont President Gayle Beebe released a statement yesterday that said no Westmont students were to blame for starting the California fire that destroyed more than 200 homes and several campus buildings.

Ten men and women, ranging in age from 18 to 22, built a bonfire Wednesday night to warm themselves, authorities told the Los Angeles Times. Other schools in Santa Barbara include the Brooks Institute of Photography, Santa Barbara City College, and the University of California Santa Barbara.

The Westmont Horizon posted Beebe's statement on its liveblog.

On Wednesday afternoon at approximately 2:45 p.m., Drew Sugars, the public information officer for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff�s Office officially informed the college that no current Westmont students were present nor in anyway involved with this tragic incident.

It should be noted that at this point, the group of individuals responsible for starting the fire are under the jurisdiction of law enforcement authorities. Again, no current Westmont students were involved with this incident.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at November 20, 2008 | Comments (0)

The fire that swept through Westmont College last week was started by a bonfire created by students, authorities told the Los Angeles Times.

Ten men and women, ranging in age from 18 to 22, built a bonfire Wednesday night to warm themselves. Catherine Saillant and Jean Merl write that the students told fire investigators that they thought the bonfire was out when they left early Thursday morning.

Brown declined to identify any of the men and women involved, saying that the matter was still under investigation. However, he said they all lived locally and attended the same school. He declined to say which one.

Westmont College, a Christian university with 1,200 students, sits immediately below the mountain ridge where the Teahouse is located. But Brown would not confirm or deny that students from the private campus were involved.

The group could face charges of negligence or recklessness with fire, he said. It will be up to the district attorney's office to decide what, if any, criminal charges will be filed once the investigation is completed, Brown said.

Investigators learned about the group's late-night outing from an anonymous tipster who called a fire hotline, Brown said.

The fire destroyed 210 homes, damaged nine others, and at least 25 people were injured, three of them with burns in Santa Barbara County.

Nancy Phinney, a Westmont spokeswoman, said the college did not think that any of its students were involved. The school lost several buildings and 14 faculty homes in the fire.

"We have been working closely and cooperating fully with fire officials and at no point has anyone said that any of our students have been implicated," Phinney said.

At Westmont, the fire destroyed three academic buildings, more than 30 dorm rooms, and 14 of the 41 college-owned faculty houses.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at November 19, 2008 | Comments (4)

California fires ripped through Westmont College last night, destroying several buildings at the Christian liberal arts college.

The flames destroyed several buildings that house the physics and psychology departments, a dormitory and at least one faculty home, college spokesman Scott Craig told the Associated Press.

An automated message on the college's switchboard says, "Westmont College has suffered major damage due to a wild man fire, but all students and employees are safe. All major campus buildings are unscathed, but we did lose 8 smaller buildings and 14 faculty homes in the adjacent development." Classes are canceled today, but the college hopes to resume on Monday.

The fire burned around 1,500 acres and destroyed at least 80 homes in the surrounding neighborhood, according to the Los Angeles Times. The fire is not yet extinguished, but authorities believe they have contained it.

The AP reports:

Hundreds of students fled to a gym, where they spent the night sleeping on the floor. Some stood in groups praying, others sobbed openly and comforted each other.

Beth Lazor, 18, said she was in her dorm when the alarm went off. She said she only had time to grab her laptop, phone, a teddy bear and a debit card before fleeing the burning building.

The college's website and student newspaper website are currently down, but Ray Ford has photos of the fire on his site.

The Chronicle of Higher Education writes that last night, the website listed structures partially or completed destroyed as including "the Physics Building, the old math building, Bauder Hall, and the Quonset huts."

The college lost electricity after a natural-gas line broke, interrupting the fuel supply for the college's generators. The Red Cross brought cots and blankets to the gym for people who wanted to remain there, but students and others who wanted to leave the campus were being allowed to depart.

Update: Westmont's student newspaper, The Horizon, is up and running, and Robert Gutierrez is liveblogging.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at November 14, 2008 | Comments (7)

Oral Roberts University reached a settlement with two former professors who sued the university a year ago, alleging that they were wrongfully terminated, the Tulsa World reports.

The details of the settlement were confidential. The professors alleged that they were forced out after detailing financial and ethical wrongdoing by Richard Roberts, the school's former president who resigned last year.

Christianity Today has followed the developments at ORU on the higher education section of liveblog, and CT also recently published a lengthy article detailing the school's path to healing.

The university has gone through rapid changes in the past year, including new leadership. Mart Green, whose family founded Hobby Lobby and the Mardel Christian stores chain, was made chairman of the board of trustees. (Clarification) Cameron Strang, founder of Relevant magazine, told me earlier this month that he has also been added to the board of trustees at his alma mater.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at October 23, 2008 | Comments (0)

Baylor University's board of regents has fired president John Lilley, whose presidency began and ended with disputes over tenure.

In 2006, associate professor of church-state studies Francis Beckwith was denied tenure. His appeal became a cause celebre in some evangelical academic circles, and he eventually prevailed. Lilley, however, continued to be viewed with suspicion by some Christian observers.

But it was April's decision to deny tenure to 12 candidates that really set the drumbeats going. Most years, about 10 percent of faculty up for tenure are denied. This year, the 40 percent rejection rate sparked accusations of a "purge" and capricious standards. Seven of the ten faculty who appealed ended up receiving tenure.

A press release from Baylor says board member Harold Cunningham will be acting president until an interim president is named.

Updates to follow. The Waco Tribune-Herald will no doubt have coverage throughout the day.

Posted by Ted Olsen at July 24, 2008 | Comments (0)

In March, the trustees of Westminster Theological Seminary suspended professor Peter Enns over theological concerns regarding his book Inspiration and Incarnation.

The controversy got a lot of people talking about the authority of Scripture and two weeks ago even made the front page of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

No doubt the discussion will continue in theology circles (Enns will be on a panel discussing his ideas on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament at the upcoming Evangelical Theological Society meeting, for example).

But the higher ed part of the story though, seems to have more or less come to a close today. Enns and WTS issued a joint statement announcing the end of his employment at the school. A hearing on whether he whether he should be dismissed was to begin August 25.

The statement:

The administration and Prof. Peter Enns wish to announce that they have arrived at mutually agreeable terms, and that, as of 1 August, 2008, Prof. Enns will discontinue his service to Westminster Theological Seminary after fourteen years.

The administration wishes to acknowledge the valued role Prof. Enns has played in the life of the institution, and that his teaching and writings fall within the purview of Evangelical thought. The Seminary wishes Prof. Enns well in his future endeavors to serve the Lord.

Prof. Enns wishes to acknowledge that the leaders of the Seminary (administration and board) are charged with the responsibility of leading the seminary in ways that are deemed most faithful to the institution�s mission as a confessional Reformed Seminary.

Prof. Enns expresses his deep and sincere gratitude to the Lord for his education and years of service at Westminster Theological Seminary.

That it was a joint statement may solve one of the dilemmas as described by John Frame in that Inquirer article: "Humanly speaking, it's hard to imagine how the school will survive. ... If Enns leaves, he will take with him a huge constituency. If he stays, another group will withdraw support."

Previous articles from Christianity Today and Books & Culture about Enns include:

Westminster Theological Suspension | Peter Enns's book Inspiration and Incarnation created a two-year theological battle that resulted in his suspension. (April 1, 2008)
Westminster Theological Seminary Suspends Peter Enns (Mar. 27, 2008)
Two Testaments, One Story | Top evangelical scholars team up for landmark commentary on New Testament use of Old Testament. (Feb. 8, 2008)
Messy Revelation | Why Paul would have flunked hermeneutics. (Books & Culture�s review of Inspiration and Incarnation)

Posted by Ted Olsen at July 23, 2008 | Comments (3)

Now that Peter Enns's suspension from Westminster Theological Seminary on account of his 2005 book, Inspiration and Incarnation, has gone into effect, the tenured professor has begun to post "thoughts, musings, interactions, responses?about or inspired by the book" on his blog.

At the request of Westminster, he submitted a 38-page paper responding to his critics:

My original intention was simply to leave the matter where it was, in the hands of the faculty and board, so as not to draw undo [sic] attention to seminary matters (even though I felt that this paper would have proved helpful to numerous readers). As it stands now, the attention drawn to this issue is quite pervasive, comes from various sources, and without any aid from me.

In light of these developments, reproducing certain portions of that paper makes a degree of sense.

What he is posting now are discussions with (and responses to) his critics and an abridged and appended version of the parts of his paper that he feels best relate to the theological discussion.

Here's Enns on the authority of Scripture:

That an emphasis, etc., on the humanity of Scripture somehow compromises biblical authority is not only wrong, it also fails to capture the intention or content of I&I. To put it directly, neither I nor I&I deny, implicitly, functionally, or any other way, biblical authority. To put it even more directly, biblical authority is not the topic of I&I.

On the Westminster Confession:

To expect [the Westminster Confession of Faith] to give the final word on, say, Genesis and [Ancient Near East] literature or the [New Testament] and Second Temple literature (to name just two general issues), even in principle, strains credulity and places a greater burden on this tremendous document than it can bear, and may in fact come very close to making it, rather than Scripture, the final court of appeal.

On inerrancy:

If I may offer a thumbnail definition, the Bible as it is is without error because the Bible as it is is God's Word.

And on his intended audience:

I&I is aimed at lay readers for whom a commitment to Scripture as God's Word is deep and non-negotiable, but for whom things like the historical context of Scripture have been posed to them as a threat to inspiration, and therefore to the Bible as being God's word. This is a very real, and we feel often neglected, population of evangelicalism.

The board will decide whether to terminate Enns' employment by December 2008.

Previous articles from Christianity Today and Books & Culture about Enns include:
Westminster Theological Suspension | Peter Enns's book Inspiration and Incarnation created a two-year theological battle that resulted in his suspension. (April 1, 2008)
Two Testaments, One Story | Top evangelical scholars team up for landmark commentary on New Testament use of Old Testament. (February 8, 2008)
Messy Revelation | Why Paul would have flunked hermeneutics. (Books & Culture's review of Inspiration and Incarnation)

Posted by Susan Wunderink at June 9, 2008 | Comments (0)

For the past couple of days, an article on the demise of foreign language programs at colleges and universities has been among the Chronicle of Higher Education's most-read pieces. (Chronicle articles requires a subscription; for free reading on the same topic, check out this U.S. News & World Report blog entry.)

Such programs, it appears, are feeling the pressure from two directions. On one side is the ongoing movement to abandon liberal arts in favor of professional and business programs geared to the marketplace; on the other, an impulse among college deans to emphasize more politically oriented (and politically correct, perhaps) programs on cultural studies.

This second impulse makes it easy to drop Spanish classes in favor of courses where students read about Che Guevara, Hugo Chavez, and Evo Morales (all in English, naturally). As the article's authors write, "[T]he abandonment of [languages] . . . implies that art and literature do not matter unless they can be turned into surrogate politics. ?Relevance' these days is understood in an extremely narrow sense."

Yet foreign languages are as needed today as they were 50 years ago, both for doing business and for promoting intercultural understanding. As members of a religious movement that is increasingly based outside of the West, a movement that has always crossed cultural and linguistic boundaries with the Good News of Jesus Christ, evangelicals ought to feel particularly pained by this loss of foreign-language education. After all, we look forward to a day when "every nation, tribe, people, and language" will worship before God's throne together. We are, by identity, mission, and goal, people of many languages.

One of the truisms I heard repeated often during my time working with Wycliffe Bible Translators was that language was the bedrock identifier of any culture, and that preserving languages was the best way to preserve cultures. Canceling a German program at the University of Southern California won't harm the Federal Republic of Germany, of course. But it does harm us. Here's hoping that some colleges and universities will buck the trend.

Posted by Madison Trammel at June 5, 2008 | Comments (9)

After refusing to discuss the details of his divorce, tenured professor Kent Gramm resigned from his English position at Wheaton College.

Wheaton's faculty handbook states that the college will consider employee retention "when there is reasonable evidence that the circumstances that led to the final dissolution of the marriage related to desertion or adultery on the part of the other partner."

But Gramm declined to discuss details. "None of Your Business" headlined Monday's Chicago Sun-Times front-page story.

"I think it's wrong to have to discuss your personal life with your employer," Gramm told the Chicago Tribune, "and I also don't want to be in a position of accusing my spouse, so I declined to appeal or discuss the matter in any way with my employer."

Provost Stan Jones told Inside Higher Ed, "The policy calls for us to try to make a compassionate, thoughtful evaluation of the circumstances, and we are then in a real bind if a person for whatever reason chooses not to discuss those circumstances."

Cathleen Falsani writes in the Chicago Sun-Times that her alma mater needed to employ grace.

"? [O]nce again an evangelical Christian institution earns a reputation, deserved or not, for siding with legalism over grace. And for an institution dedicated, as Wheaton is, to ?Christ and his kingdom,' communicating grace in a world that so desperately needs it should always be the most important part of its mission."

The provost told Wheaton's student newspaper, The Record, that the administration considers one or two employee divorce cases each year on a case-by-case basis, and the specifics of who initiated the divorce are not as important as the reason for divorce.

"Many churches are responding to divorce by saying that it's too messy, this is not our business, we'll just be redemptive," Jones told The Record. "This response is problematic because you're basically declaring divorce not to be a moral issue. It doesn't seem that Scripture gives us that latitude."

Officials told the Chicago Tribune that they were willing to allow Gramm to remain at the college for another year as he sought work, but he declined. He is still looking for work.

"I plan to live happily ever after," he told The Record. "The next time someone says to you, 'Hello, welcome to Walmart,' be nice to him. I already have clothing with a W on it."

Gramm's story poses questions for many religious institutions of whether divorce should be a criterion in professional standards.

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam at April 29, 2008 | Comments (59)

Clyde Cook, the recently retired president of Biola University, died April 11. He was 73.

Known for several years as "Mr. Biola," Cook served as one of the nation�s longest-serving university presidents, leading the California university from 1982 to 2007.

Cook faced enormous challenges when he took the helm. A budget shortfall of 37 percent forced him to cut $1.3 million. And just two years into his presidency, he had a major heart attack at the age of 49. Also, Biola�s enrollment dropped from 3,181 in 1980 to 2,566 in 1989.

However, Biola�s enrollment has nearly doubled to 5,752, and the university added 20 acres to the campus and nine extension sites. Cook handed the reins to Barry H. Corey last summer. The university celebrated its centennial in February, and the Los Angeles Times wrote about how Biola has both evolved and stayed the same.

"When Ken Bascom arrived at Biola College in 1967 to work on his master's degree in history, his fellow students, almost all white, stuck to a strict dress code and had a 10 p.m. curfew on weeknights," wrote reporter Tiffany Hsu. "Last weekend, a multicultural throng of students, several with dyed hair, piercings or tattoos, celebrated the centennial of the private evangelical school -- a university since 1981 -- at a rock concert that extended into the early morning."

The New York Times featured Biola in 2004, when Samantha M. Shapiro wrote, "Evangelical Christianity's dance with secular culture has always been a complicated one." In the early 20th century, Biola sponsored a series of pamphlets called "The Fundamentals," which laid out the principles of the fundamentalist movement. The pamphlets opposed biblical and theological modernism, naturalism, Darwinism, and democratic socialism.

"When I spoke with Clyde Cook, Biola's genial president, he explained that the university is as committed as ever to the principles articulated in 'The Fundamentals,' although, he said, 'we've found different and more effective ways to deliver those truths.' ... [T]he school thinks it is preferable to have students internalize Christian truths through a process of questioning."

The Chimes, Biola's student newspaper, created a blog for people to share their memories of Cook.

"If it's possible for a man who towered over most people physically to walk gracefully and humbly, Clyde Cook had mastered it," wrote Chimes Features Editor Mitchell Young. "If there's one image I will always remember, it's a man whose list of accomplishments could fill books (and probably has) sitting at a crooked Caf table and eating with plastic silverware on one of the days that the Caf decided to give its dishwashers a day off."

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Posted by Sarah Pulliam at April 14, 2008 | Comments (7)

Two of the hottest issues in evangelical theology right now are the New Testament�s use of the Old Testament and evangelical textual criticism. Peter Enns�s 2005 book, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, aimed to pose difficult questions about the human aspects of Scripture. It received both praise and criticism from noted evangelical scholars.

And it made things difficult for Enns at his school, Philadelphia�s Westminster Theological Seminary. A battle over whether the book undermined or contradicted the Westminster Confession of Faith has been raging for some time now, and apparently came to a head Wednesday at the meeting of the school�s board, which decided to suspend Enns.

This note is now circulating from board chairman Jack White:

Thank you very much for your prayers for the special meeting of the Board of Trustees that was held on March 26 to address the disunity of the faculty regarding the theological issues related to Dr. Peter Enns' book, Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. After a full day of deliberation, the Board of Trustees took the following action by decisive vote:

"That for the good of the Seminary (Faculty Manual II.4.C.4) Professor Peter Enns be suspended at the close of this school year, that is May 23, 2008 (Constitution Article III, Section 15), and that the Institutional Personnel Committee (IPC) recommend the appropriate process for the Board to consider whether Professor Enns should be terminated from his employment at the Seminary. Further that the IPC present their recommendations to the Board at its meeting in May 2008."

In order to provide the entire Westminster community with a more complete understanding of the Board's decision and to offer an opportunity for questions and dialogue, the Chairman and Secretary of the Board will join the President on campus for a special chapel on Tuesday, April 1 at 10:30 am. Students and staff are encouraged to attend and participate. Following that special chapel, they will hold a separate meeting with the faculty.

Our concern is to honor the Lord Jesus Christ and assure a faithful witness for Westminster for years to come. To that end, please pray for everyone involved during the next two months.

The campus politics are particularly sensitive, since the seminary faculty had voted 12-8 to support Enns. In the meantime, both supporters and opponents of Inspiration and Incarnation had framed the debate as a battle for the future of the school.

We�ll have more on this story and its implications soon.

Posted by Ted Olsen at March 27, 2008 | Comments (43)

On Friday, the trustees of Northern Baptist Theological Seminary elected a new president, ending a two year interim since the departure of Chuck Moore for Hillside Chapel in Dayton, Ohio.

The new president is a Scot - Alistair Brown, general director of the Baptist Missionary Society in Didcot, Oxfordshire, UK. Brown has a Ph.D. in New Testament from the University of Edinburgh and an MBA from the Open University. Before his 12 year stint at the BMS, he was for 10 years senior pastor of a church in Aberdeen.

That MBA may come in handy as Northern Seminary seeks to sell its extremely valuable property in Lombard, Illinois, and relocates to less expensive digs. See Madison Trammel's 2007 news story, "Retooling Seminary" for more background.

Posted by David Neff at March 10, 2008 | Comments (3)

I wonder how the findings in this article--"Conservatives Just Aren't Into Academe, Study Finds:Divergent life choices may explain the dearth of right-wing scholars," (Chronicle of Higher Education)--apply to Christian higher education.

It has been my experience that Christian college professors are more liberal than their students and than Christians in general, and that politically conservative professors are an increasing minority. But my experience is limited to a handful of colleges, and I'm willing to be challenged on this.

The article shows its own subtle liberal bias, especially in the way it frames liberal and conservative motives, but the larger issue remains, and I suspect even for Christian colleges. If true, this has all manner of consequences when it comes to offering students a balanced and intellectually rigorous education.

(Cross-posted at Galliblog)

Posted by Mark Galli at February 19, 2008 | Comments (21)

The Wheaton College student newspaper, The Record, reports today that the influential evangelical college's president, provost, and chaplain have removed their names from a letter to Muslim leaders that has attracted criticism in some quarters.

"Loving God and Neighbor Together" was published in the November 18, 2007, New York Times as a response to an October statement from 138 Muslim scholars and clerics calling for interfaith cooperation. Wheaton College president Duane Litfin and provost Stanton Jones were among the signatories, along with pastors Rick Warren and Bill Hybels, National Association of Evangelicals president Leith Anderson, Youth With a Mission chairman Lynn Green, Frontiers mission founder Greg Livingstone, theologians Miroslav Volf and John Stott, and Christianity Today Media Group editor-in-chief David Neff.

"I signed the statement because I am committed to the business of peace-making and neighbor-love," Litfin wrote in The Record. "I did not savor the document's unnuanced apology section, but swallowed that in order to be a part of reaching out a hand to these Muslim leaders who had courageously taken the initiative. Though the statement was not written in the way I would have written it, it seemed to me that I could sign it without compromising any of my Christian convictions."

But in the last month, the statement has been sharply criticized by several other evangelical leaders, including Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Al Mohler, pastor John Piper, and Focus on the Family's CitizenLink newsletter.

(A Christianity Today news report on the statement and its critics appears in the March issue of the magazine; we'll post it online shortly.)

Such critiques, Litfin said, prompted him to rethink his signature. "[O]n this occasion my eagerness to support the statement's strengths caused me to move too quickly," he wrote. Rereading the statement, he says, he found it was

not carefully enough crafted to avoid encouraging that basic premise of civil religion, i.e., that we are all worshiping the same God, climbing the same mountain, just taking different paths. It appears to me that the statement could have been written so to avoid this problem while still reaching out a gracious hand to these Muslim leaders. ? To speak unqualifiedly of "our common love for God," as if the Quran's Allah and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ are one and the same, and as if what it means to "love God" in these two faiths means the same thing, is to say more than I am willing to grant. I do not criticize others who do not share these qualms. But as for me, I needed to back away.

Litfin emphasized that he was not pressured or even encouraged to take his name off the statement. "No one had suggested it or even knew I was taking this step,' he said. "It was simply a matter of conscience, combined with the fact that I had put the College on the line in a way I was no longer comfortable in defending."

And in fact Litfin implicitly answered some critics who had argued that interfaith dialogue undercut evangelism:

As to the related question this incident raises of evangelism and inter-faith dialogue, surely the best answer is a balanced one. If we truly believe the Gospel and love our neighbor, evangelism will lie near the core of our relationships without occupying the whole of it. Our friendships with non-Christians transcend evangelism in the sense that those friendships continue even when Christ is not received. In other words, our friendship is not contingent upon that reception. But nor can any genuine friendship with non-Christians exclude an evangelistic concern. Our relationship may be in pre-evangelistic phase, or evangelistic phase, or a post-evangelistic phase, but a desire to see our friend find Christ must never disappear from the frame. If our love is genuine, we will always retain sight of our friend's deepest need and stand ready to serve it if the opportunity arises.

Jones and Wheaton College chaplain Stephen Kellough said they agreed with Litfin's conclusions, and similarly withdrew their names to further distance the college from the statement. Roy Oksnevad, director of Muslim Ministries at Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center, kept his signature on the document, and told the Record, "I still agree [with the statement]. I don't have reservations."

Also of note in the Record this week: presidential candidate Mitt Romney had wanted to hold a rally on the campus two days before Super Tuesday, but was turned away. "Only in extraordinary circumstances do we open the college community to Sunday activities," Jones told the student paper. "Particularly a political event at noon on Sunday is very incongruent with our religious identity."

More articles on the Muslim statement, "A Common Word Between Us and You" and the Christian statement include:

• An early call from Fuller Seminary's J. Dudley Woodberry for a Christian response to "A Common Word."
• NAE president Leith Anderson on why he signed "Loving God and Neighbor Together"
• Mike Edens of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary on why he signed.
• Rick Love, International Director for Frontiers, responding to John Piper's concerns.

Posted by Ted Olsen at February 8, 2008 | Comments (16)

After a night of tornadoes and power outages, Union University's website is back up and running. But to keep tabs on the post-tornado emergency news, they have created a new website UUEmergency. You can view a slideshow there, or use the "comments" feature on one of the posts to leave messages for students.

Posted by David Neff at February 6, 2008 | Comments (3)

Both the Jackson Sun and Baptist Press have updated their stories and posted photos of the wreckage and rescue operations at Union University following last night's tornado damage.

A tornado struck the Tennessee campus last evening about seven o'clock, trapping 12 students (according to Baptist Press, or 13 according to the Jackson Sun) in dorms that collapsed. All have now been freed from the debris.

Union's website is still down this morning, and classes have been cancelled until February 13 to allow the administration to assess damage and lay plans for the future.

Posted by David Neff at February 6, 2008 | Comments (3)

According to a Baptist Press e-mail bulletin just sent out to news organizations, Union University in Jackson, Tenn., "sustained heavy tornado damage Tuesday evening at approximately 7 pm when a line of heavy thunderstorms rushed through the area."

At 8:15 central, news and information director, Tim Ellsworth, reported that students were still trapped by debris in their dorms. At least four of those students have been rescued. Dorms in both the men's and women's areas have been destroyed.

"We currently have no serious injuries that we know of and rescue operations are still continuing," Ellsworth said. "Many buildings sustained heavy damage."

Electrical power is out at Union and their website is down. The school is "trying to provide parents with information," but with the power outage, that is a major challenge.

The Jackson Sun details further damage to the campus and to the surrounding area. Nashville's WKRN appears to have posted a video report, but the site is too busy right now for the video to load.

If you have friends or family at Union, you'll want to keep checking the Baptist Press and Jackson Sun websites for updates.

Posted by David Neff at February 5, 2008 | Comments (6)

David A. Skeel, professor of corporate law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, will soon publish an article in the Emory Law Journal called "The Unbearable Lightness of Christian Legal Scholarship." In it, he chronicles the scandal of the Christian legal mind:

[T]he scope of Christian legal scholarship in the American legal literature is shockingly narrow for such a nationally influential movement. Why is there almost no trace of the intellectual underpinnings of the recent movement? ... Although evangelicals re-engaged American political life in the 1970s, the skepticism of religious perspectives, and the absence of a critical mass of Christian legal scholarship, lingered. There is now a substantial interest in Christian legal scholarship, but surprisingly little scholarship to turn to.

In that article, which Skeel first wrote in 2006, he acknowledges some counter-evidence, but concludes, "It is still much too early to tell if this new scholarly activity will have a sustained impact on legal scholarship generally, or on internal debate within Christian circles. But it might. In ten years, or possibly even five, this article's laments may come to seem quaint. I pray this is so."

As it turns out, the article may come to seem quaint even before it's published. Skeel has a new paper out claiming

that a real renaissance [of Christian legal scholarship] may finally be underway. Several promising articles have appeared in the law reviews in the past year, and more seem to be on their way. ... There are hints that a new normative Christian legal scholarship may be emerging. The most important illustration is the vibrant literature on international human rights. In domestic law, several scholars have recently asked the question of when and how the law should be used to police morality. ...

It's not surprising that Skeel thinks that Christian legal defense funds "are not a promising seedbed for Christian legal scholarship." Even those groups would be likely to agree that "they are designed to defend Christian positions, rather than to debate or wrestle with the appropriateness of the particular position. This is not a recipe for the kind of intellectual give-and-take that is likely to inspire innovative Christian legal scholarship."

It might be surprising, to some readers at least, that Skeel sees Regent Law School as a sign of hope. He puts the school, which was widely disparaged last year during the Justice Department firings debate, alongside Pepperdine as a "promising development" because of its "willingness to nurture and reward religiously informed scholarship" and its potential to "seriously [engage] the best scholars in their fields." It may be surprising, but only if you believe the caricatures of the school.

Skeel's most provocative assertion is his prediction "that many of the most exciting developments in Christian legal scholarship in the next generation of work will come from outside the domain of traditional philosophical analysis." He likes Alasdair MacIntyre, Alvin Plantinga, and Nick Wolterstorff a lot, and thinks philosophical work is extremely important in Christian legal scholarship. But "underexplored issues and perspectives offer opportunities for exciting new contributions," he says. Likewise, he says,

in the hands of us legal scholars, moral philosophy often becomes a debate about abstract propositions, and never quite gets to the street level business of trying to make sense of how the law actually functions and the lessons that can be learned from this. Rather than abstract propositions, the focus of the coming generation of Christian legal scholars will, I think, more often be on the orientation of the law: does it reflect the God who welcomes back the prodigal son, and who became flesh and dwelt among us?

Thankfully, even in his brief article, Skeel keeps his eyes on that God. He writes, "It is important not to overstate the potential effect of Christian legal scholarship. Law, Christians believe, is not what saves us; only God's grace can do that." But Skeel grasps how understating scholarship in light of God's transforming work has already damaged the academy, the church, and society. One hopes that the Christian legal scholarship boom is even more vibrant than Skeel sees.

Posted by Ted Olsen at January 21, 2008 | Comments (3)

"We're going to go on with the call of God on our lives," former Oral Roberts University president Richard Roberts told The 700 Club today. "God will deal with people and false accusations. All I can say is that it's not true, and leave it at that. God is the ultimate judge."

Roberts said he will remain a "spiritual regent" to the university and CEO of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association as he returns to a full-time healing ministry.

"The healing ministry has always been my first love," he said. "I am immersing myself fully back into the healing ministry, which was what I was doing before I became president of ORU."

Our background here. Tulsa World has a year-end roundup here, here, and here.

Posted by Ted Olsen at January 3, 2008 | Comments (56)

The wrongful termination suit between three ORU professors and college administrators is going to arbitration, but meanwhile there has been a shakeup of sorts on the school's board of regents.

"The evangelist Creflo Dollar has resigned from the Oral Roberts University board of regents, and another evangelist, Benny Hinn, has lost his status as a voting member of the board," the Tulsa World reported.

The newspaper notes that the move comes as Dollar and Hinn balked at requests for financial information from Sen. Charles Grassley, but the school had no comment on the reason for the changes. Are Dollar and Hinn distancing themselves from ORU, or is ORU distancing itself from them?

Posted by Ted Olsen at December 18, 2007 | Comments (25)

Young earth creation science is out of the front page, with the Dover decision on its way into the history books alongside the Scopes trial. But creationism is still the view of 45 percent of Americans; and with that many supporters, every time any school board discusses science standards advocates for and against evolution will come out of the woodwork.

The argument against creation science is usually that it's not science, it's religion, philosophy, theology. Whatever it is, it isn't science.

The New York Times took a look at a group of young earth creationists who are trying to change that. In Rock of Ages, Ages of Rock author Hanna Rosin (who has a chapter on young earth creationism in her book God's Harvard) visits the First Conference on Creation Geology. (Full disclosure: the conference was held at Cedarville University, my alma mater.)

Creationist geologists are now numerous enough to fill a large meeting room and well educated enough to know that in rejecting the geologic timeline they are also essentially taking on the central tenets of the field. Any "evidence" presented at the conference pointing to a young earth would be no more convincing than voodoo or alchemy to mainstream geologists, who have used various radiometric-dating methods to establish that the earth is 4.6 billion years old. But the participants in the conference insist that their approach is scientifically valid. "We're past the point of being critical of evolutionists," Whitmore told me. "We're trying to go out and make new discoveries and actually do science."

Obviously, the 3,300-word article is skeptical of the idea that scientists could believe in creation as described in Genesis as well as science. Perhaps the most telling example of the compartmentalized mind these scientists with Ph.D.s from major research universities need to have is the story of "Marcus Ross, 31, the latest inductee into the movement, who got his Ph.D. in environmental science from the University of Rhode Island last summer."

Ross subsequently wrote a 197-page dissertation about a marine reptile called a mosasaur, whose disappearance he tracked through the Cretaceous period, about 65 million years ago. Fastovsky described the paper as "utterly sound," and the committee recommended very minimal edits.

At the conference I asked Ross whether he still believes what he wrote in his graduate thesis. His answer confirmed him as the product of the postmodern university, where truth is dependent on the framework: "Within the context of old age and evolutionary theory, yes. But if the parameter is different, portions of it could be completely in error."

Ross and other scientists are working on providing scientific legitimacy for the significant percentage (45) of Americans who believe in the Genesis account of creation. But they're rather patronizing toward their fellow believers without Ph.D.s. Rosin writes,

Like any group of elites, they were snobs about their superior degrees. During lunch breaks or car rides, they traded jokes about the "vulgar creationists" and the "uneducated masses," and, in their least Christian moments, the "idiots on the Web." One leader of a creationist institute complained about all the cranks who call on the phone claiming to have seen dinosaurs or to have had a vision of Noah's ark.

And their scientific method leaves Rosin skeptical. "'We don't subscribe to this idea of the ?God of gaps,' meaning if you can't explain something, then blame God," [John] Whitmore [a professor at Cedarville] told me before describing a method that hardly seemed more scientific. "Instead, we think: ?Here's what the Bible says. Now let's go to the rocks and see if we find the evidence for it.' "

Their work is likely to cause only more headaches for proponents of evolution on school boards across the country. Armed with whatever evidence these scientists come up with, creationism proponents (or teach-the-controversy proponents) will be crashing the gates of school boards for decades to come.

But it's not only secular evolutionists who are playing defense. In fact, "The new creationists are not likely to make much of a dent among secular scientists, who often just roll their eyes at the mention of flood geology." Rosin writes, "But they have become a burden to many geologists at Christian colleges around the country."

Christian evolutionists are the ones really bugged by this movement. "Geology at Wheaton is presented and practiced much the same way as at secular universities," Stephen Moshier, the department chair, says. However, young earth creationists have a lot of influence, Moshier says. "It can get so frustrating," he said. "Many of us at Christian colleges really grieve at what a problem this young-earth creationism makes for the Christian witness. It's almost like they're adding another thing you have to believe to become a Christian. It's like saying, You have to believe the world is flat to be a Christian, and that's absolutely unreasonable."

Rosin's full article is worth reading. The characters, quotes, and stories she tells give an illuminating look at this movement that keeps rearing its head, to the chagrin of Christians and atheist evolutionists alike.

Posted by Rob Moll at December 4, 2007 | Comments (190)

On Monday this blog asked, "Will Richard Roberts Let Go or ORU?" Concerns had surfaced in both the Oklahoman newspaper and in the Chronicle of Higher Education that because Roberts had remained president and CEO of the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, he would still be able to misuse funds at Oral Roberts University.

I spent a few minutes studying the IRS Form 990s of both ORU and the Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association. The overlap between the boards of the two organizations is so huge that the evangelistic association was obliged to report that these organizations were under "Common Control."

Well, no longer. This morning the Associated Press, the Oklahoman, and the Tulsa World are reporting the promise of a major gift to ORU from Mart Green (founder of the retail chains Mardel and Hobby Lobby). He's offering $70 million to help the school out of its financial pit.

But there are conditions, and from the timing of the gift, it seems that one of them is for the school and the evangelistic association to cut their ties. According to the university's regents, they plan to disentangle the two organizations. Patriarch Oral Roberts has long opposed separating the two, according to the Oklahoman, but has apparently had a sudden change of heart.

The Green family made an initial $8 million gift on Monday, with the balance to be given over the next three months as the university shows progress in reforming its governance and its financial management and in dealing with pending lawsuits. To keep the reforms going, the Green family will likely get two seats on the ORU board of regents, says the Tulsa World.

Meanwhile, the regents' chairman has announced that Roberts will be allowed to remain in the ORU presidential palace--temporarily.

Posted by David Neff at November 28, 2007 | Comments (18)

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I posted a brief note about Richard Roberts resignation as president of Oral Roberts University, the school founded by his famous faith-healing evangelist father.

But how significant is that resignation? Here are a couple of paragraphs from today's coverage on The Chronicle of Higher Education's website (subscription required):

Despite the controversies, Mr. Roberts has declared his intention to remain as chairman and chief executive of Oral Roberts Ministries, the central organization in the empire that includes the university.

Because of the ties between the two groups, Mr. Roberts's resignation from the university will have limited effect on his ability to misuse its funds if he remains in control of Oral Roberts Ministries, Tim Brooker, one of the three former professors who brought the lawsuit, told The Oklahoman, a newspaper in Oklahoma City.

As the university's regents search for a new president, and as candidates' names are rumored about, it will become clearer whether or not they are heading in the direction of reform. The new president needs to have few personal ties to Richard Roberts, or the credibility of his or her administration will need to be established over several years of hard decisions.

And, apparently, ORU's new president will have to make some tough decisions. More from the Chronicle:

The university, meanwhile, has reported itself as more than $50 million in debt. Much of the debt stems from the failure of the university's City of Faith hospital complex, which was intended to combine modern medicine with a belief in the power of prayer.

Posted by David Neff at November 26, 2007 | Comments (31)

CT's December issue (already in your mailboxes, we trust) reported on a lawsuit three former professors brought against Oral Roberts University president Richard Roberts, the university, its regents, and three administrators.

According to the CT story, the lawsuit alleges misuse of university funds to support the lifestyle of the president and his family. It also alleges that Roberts coerced students into working for a politician's campaign and that Mrs. Roberts spent the night with an underage male student. The three professors claim they were wrongly forced out of their faculty positions for having brought the irregularities to the school administration's attention.

Tonight the Associated Press is reporting that Richard Roberts has resigned and that the school will announce a presidential search within a few days. See AP story here.

Posted by David Neff at November 23, 2007 | Comments (18)

While the ballroom sessions of the first day of the Evangelical Theological Society meeting had more attendees, no session was as packed as J.P. Moreland's "How Evangelicals Became Over-Committed to the Bible and What Can Be Done About It." While the average breakout session seems to be attended by fewer than 50 people, easily more than 200 packed the room to hear Moreland's talk, with dozens standing and more listening outside the door.

It's little wonder why so many people attended. ETS membership has only two doctrinal requirements: you must affirm the Trinity and the inerrancy of Scripture. The first part has not been controversial of late, but the second was the focus of the society's recent fight over open theism and was named as a reason why Francis Beckwith could not remain as ETS president after his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

In short, to accuse evangelicals of over-commitment to the Bible at ETS would be like accusing environmentalists of talking too much about climate change at a Sierra Club meeting. But Moreland, who has gained some prominence as a philosopher and apologist, wasn't pulling any punches.

"In the actual practices of the Evangelical community in North America, there is an over-commitment to Scripture in a way that is false, irrational, and harmful to the cause of Christ," he said. "And it has produced a mean-spiritedness among the over-committed that is a grotesque and often ignorant distortion of discipleship unto the Lord Jesus."

The problem, he said, is "the idea that the Bible is the sole source of knowledge of God, morality, and a host of related important items. Accordingly, the Bible is taken to be the sole authority for faith and practice."

Suppose an archaeologist discovered a portion of the ancient city of Jerusalem that was specifically described in the Old Testament, Moreland said:

Could the archaeologist have discovered the site without the use of the Old Testament? Once discovered, could the archaeologist learn things about the site that went beyond what was in the Old Testament? Clearly the answer is yes to both questions. Why? Because the site actually exists in the real world. It does not exist in the Bible. It is only described in the Bible and the biblical description in partial.

Likewise, Moreland argued, "because the human soul/spirit and demons/angels are real, it is possible, and, in fact, actual that extra-biblical knowledge can be gained about these spiritual entities. ? Demons do not exist in the Bible. They exist in reality."

By not researching how demons work, how to fight them, and other such issues by, for example, working with exorcists, Christian scholars are harming the church, Moreland argued. In a similar vein, he thinks evangelical scholars and the movement as a whole are rejecting "guidance, revelation, and so forth from God through impressions, dreams, visions, prophetic words, words of knowledge and wisdom."

"We shut that down because of charismatic excesses," he said. "Because of abuses, we fear teaching people how to use it. We think it's all going to be Benny Hinn or something like that."

A third area where Moreland critiqued evangelical over-commitment to Bible was in the scarcity of evangelical appeals to natural theology and moral law in their political and cultural discussions.

"The sparse landscape of evangelical political thought stands in stark contrast to the overflowing garden both of evangelical biblical scholarship and Catholic reflection on reason, general revelation, and cultural and political engagement," he said. "We evangelicals could learn a lesson or two from our Catholic friends."

That wasn't as provocative a statement coming a few months after the ETS president became one of those "Catholic friends." Catholicism is on the agenda here, and Catholics are both implicitly and explicitly discussed in the meeting's many discussions of justification. But Catholicism doesn't seem to be the "new open theism" at ETS.

No, more provocative was Moreland's argument about why evangelicals became over-committed to the Bible. Rather than developing a robust epistemology in response to secularism, he said, evangelicals reacted and retreated. Now evangelical theologians aren't allowed to come to any new conclusions about the truths in Scripture, and they're not allowed to find truths outside of Scripture. As a result, he said, they're engaged in "private language games and increasingly detailed minutia" and "we're not seeing work on broad cultural themes."

There are, quite frankly, a number of papers here that reflect private language games and increasingly detailed minutia. There will be in a few days, too, at the joint meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature. And there are at just about every other major academic conference I've ever attended. But I think Moreland's critique stung here perhaps more than it might elsewhere. This is a group torn between its desire to do respectable scholarship and its desire to serve the church. Moreland's jeremiad hit them on both fronts.

(Note: Moreland's paper isn't online, but many of his themes appear in his Kingdom Triangle, released earlier this year by Zondervan.)

Posted by Ted Olsen at November 14, 2007 | Comments (125)

Oral Roberts University president Richard Roberts will take a leave of absence after being accused of mishandling school funds and becoming illegally involved in a political campaign, the Associated Press reports.

The ORU Board of Regents announced today that it has accepted his leave of absence, and board executive Billy Joe Daughterty, senior pastor of Victory Christian Center in Tulsa, will become acting president.

"The ORU Board of Regents regrets that the university family has had to endure this situation during recent weeks," George Pearsons, chairman of the board said in a statement. "The board is fully committed to supporting the efforts of the independent outside professional firms that will review the allegations and the practices in place at the University and report back to the Board."

Three former ORU professors filed a lawsuit on Oct. 2 that says that they were wrongfully dismissed and alleges the spending using school funds, including home remodels and a trip to the Bahamas. It also accuses Roberts of enlisting students in a local political campaign, which would violate the university's nonprofit status.

An amended complaint included details of an internal ministry report that says Richard Robert's wife Lindsay Roberts' contacted underage males. The AP reports that the documents says Lindsay Roberts spent the night in the university guest house with an underage male on nine separate occasions, among other allegations.

"The last three weeks have taken a serious toll on me and my family," Richard Roberts said in a statement Wednesday. "The untrue allegations have struck a terrible blow in my heart. The untrue allegations of sexual misconduct by my wife have hurt the most."

Oral Roberts is a 5,300-student charismatic university and a member of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.

Posted by Sarah Pulliam at October 18, 2007 | Comments (0)

A story in today's Chicago Tribune illustrates one of the tensions of living in an increasingly secular society. The article, "Religious-based education on trial: Christian high schools sue University of California, alleging bias in admissions," discusses a lawsuit that an association of Christian schools is suing the University of California because "the admissions policy at the university unconstitutionally discriminates against them because they teach from a religious perspective."

More specifically the plaintiffs claim that "UC follows the policy of rejecting any course in any subject, even if it teaches standard content, if it adds teaching of the school's religious viewpoint."

The University denies it, of course: "That statement simply is not true," said Christopher Patti, counsel for UC. "There is no prohibition on religious content in UC a-g courses," he said. "If the course adequately teaches the subject matter and adequately teaches the skills that students need in that subject, then the fact that it may also make reference to other theories doesn't disqualify it, even religious theories."

Without knowing more the details of the case, on the surface it seems like another battle in the culture wars than in cultural confusion.

The University, for example, refused to give credit for a course called, "Course: Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic," the text of which was "American Government for Christian Schools" (Bob Jones University Press). The reason rejected was that " Content was not consistent with the "empirical historical knowledge generally accepted in the collegiate community."

Now this could indicate that the University has a narrow, Enlightenment understanding of what constitutes history--it may, for example, rule out miracle a priori as an explanation for an event.

Or it could mean that the textbook and class have not prepared students to participate in classes and conversations that will take place in a modern, secular university on the topic of history. A university has the right and obligation to ensure that when students step on campus, they are familiar with terms, theories, and perspectives that constitute the conversation on campus on any given topic.

Christian schools have an obligation not only to teach from a Christian perspective, but to thoroughly immerse their students in the worldview and perspective of the secular university if they expect them to attend there. This strikes me as a reasonable requirement of the university, but a necessary requirement of those who hope to bring Christ's salt and light to academia. If we demonstrate that we have not listened to or thoroughly understood the point of view of those with whom we disagree, why would they ever give our point of view a hearing?

Posted by Mark Galli at October 8, 2007 | Comments (6)

No one in Washington or in mainstream media outlets seems to be coming right out and saying it, but the implication from much of the reporting and commentary regarding yesterday's House Judiciary Committee testimony of former Justice Department official Monica Goodling seems to be that Christian college graduates shouldn't be permitted in high government positions.

Try to find a news story today that doesn't mention that Goodling is a graduate of Regent University's law school, that the school was founded by Pat Robertson, and that it has a distinctly Christian mission. (Several reports also note that she did her undergraduate work at Messiah College, another distinctly Christian school.)

In fact, Rep. Stephen Cohen (D-Tenn.) spent most of his questions on Goodling's Christian education. Here's the transcript:

COHEN: Miss Goodling, I've read your vitae, and it says that you grew up and you mostly went -- you went to public schools. Was that K through 12?

GOODLING: Mm-hmm. (Affirmative.) Yes.

COHEN: And it says you went -- chose Christian universities in part because they -- value they placed on service. What as the other part that you chose Christian universities?

GOODLING: I chose them because I had a faith system, and in some cases -- I went to American University for my first year of law school and then I transferred. And I enjoyed studying with people that shared the similar belief system that I did. It didn't mean that there wasn't a lot of diversity of discussion, because in some cases I actually found that the debate at Regent was much more vigorous than it was at American University my first year of law school. But I enjoyed being surrounded by people that had the same belief system.

COHEN: The mission of the law school you attended, Regent, is to bring bear -- "is to bring to bear upon legal education and the legal profession the will of Almighty God, our Creator." What is "the will of Almighty God, our Creator" on the legal profession?

GOODLING: I'm not sure that I could define that question for you.

COHEN: Did you ask people who applied for jobs as AUSAs anything about their religion?

GOODLING: No, I certainly did not --

COHEN: Never had religion discussions come up?

GOODLING: Not to the best of my recollection.

COHEN: Is there a type of student, a type of person that you thought was -- embodied that philosophy of Regent University that you sought out as AUSAs?

GOODLING: In most cases, the people at Regent are good people trying to do the right thing, who wanted to make a difference in the world. If the question is, were I looking -- if I was looking for people like that, the answer is yes. I wasn't necessarily looking for people who shared a particular faith system. I don't have any recollection that that entered into my mind at any point. But certainly there are a lot of people who applied to work for this president because they share his same faith system, and they did apply for jobs.

COHEN: Are there a lot of -- an inordinate number of people from Regent University Law School that were hired by the Department of Justice while you were there?

GOODLING: I think we have a lot more people from Harvard and Yale.

COHEN: Well, that's refreshing. Is it a fact -- are you aware of the fact that in your graduating class 50 to 60 percent of the students failed the bar the first time?

GOODLING: I'm not -- I don't remember the statistics, but I know it wasn't good. I was happy I passed the first time.

COHEN: Thank you. That's good.

National Review Online's Byron York noted that Cohen's questioning came shortly after another discussion of higher education:

Earlier, Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee was very concerned that Goodling had asked about the political leanings of a job seeker named Seth Adam Meinero, "a graduate of Howard University, one of the top, outstanding law schools in the nation." (Rep. Cohen did not protest, even though Howard's bar-passing statistics don't measure up to Regent's.) Goodling said she regretted making a "snap judgment" about Meinero's supposed political leanings, although she stressed that Meinero ultimately got the job he was seeking.

Posted by Ted Olsen at May 24, 2007 | Comments (22)

From a press release:

The Board of Trustees of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary has appointed Dr. Haddon W. Robinson as Interim President, effective July 1, 2007. Dr. Robinson succeeds Dr. James Emery White, who has resigned, effective June 30, 2007, due to family considerations which resulted in his unanticipated inability to relocate as planned from North Carolina to Massachusetts. Dr. White will continue to teach as Professor of Theology and Culture at the Charlotte Campus.

White has been president since July 1, 2006. CT's original report to follow shortly.

Posted by Ted Olsen at May 16, 2007 | Comments (0)