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The Wall Street Journal did evangelical higher education and, just maybe, the task of Christian unity a favor when it published a front-page story on the plight of Joshua Hochschild (January 7, 2006). A philosophy professor at Wheaton College, Hochschild was dismissed from the faculty after converting to Catholicism. The president of Wheaton, Duane Litfin, ruled Catholic theology incompatible with Wheaton's statement of faith, to which all faculty assent at the beginning of their careers and renew upon signing their annual contracts, a customary practice at many evangelical colleges.
L'affaire Hochschild, as we might call it, is but the latest manifestation of a simmering conflict of opinion over how evangelical colleges should posture themselves toward the future. In many respects, the episode at Wheaton mirrors another celebrated incident from the1980s, when the literary critic Thomas Howard (no relation, oddly enough) was obliged to resign from Gordon College in Wenham, Massachusetts (my home institution) after converting to Catholicism. Like Hochschild, Howard wistfully boxed his books, but his departure raised more questions than it settled. Hochschild's departure raises similar questions.
Is an evangelical liberal arts college (i.e., not a seminary and not a church), and one that prides itself on intellectual engagement, served by a statutory environment that effectively excludes all Catholics, and indeed most non-evangelical Christians, from the faculty ranks? Having commendably avoided the seductions of secularism in the 20th century, do evangelical colleges—such as, say, Wheaton, Taylor, Gordon, and Westmont—now suffer from another problem: superattenuated retrenchment, a defensiveness increasingly unbecoming in a world in which many evangelicals look upon the legacy of Mother Teresa about as favorably as that of Billy Graham? By refusing even the possibility of a single Catholic faculty member—including self-described "born again" Catholics or those with deep sympathy for Protestant theology—are evangelical colleges failing to take seriously the biblical mandate for Christian unity? Would the prospects of genuine ecumenical work be improved if evangelicalism's best and brightest had a chance to rub shoulders with a Catholic scholar or two during their college years?
While the Wall Street Journal article prompts such questions, it misconstrues an important aspect of the contemporary Christian intellectual scene. Its author attributes the firing of Hochschild to a "new orthodoxy" sweeping through church-related higher education, a novel vigilance to uphold the religious mission of Christian colleges. This rings true in some respects, especially for mainline Protestant or Catholic institutions trying to recover religious identities compromised by historical forces analyzed trenchantly in James Burtchaell's The Dying of the Light (1998).
But the problem with many evangelical colleges is not necessarily the dying of the light, but rather hiding it under a bushel, a determined attachment to the certainties of a subculture derived from fairly recent historical experience at the expense of new, promising opportunities for theological depth and ecumenical engagement. Indeed, the phrase "new orthodoxy" for many evangelical scholars today, far from conjuring up strictures in hiring, will call to mind Thomas Oden's recent book, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity (2003). A Methodist theologian at Drew University dispirited by the trajectory of liberal Protestantism, Oden has long called for a "new ecumenism," not the ecumenism in which social concerns often edged out doctrinal considerations, but a unity built around Nicene Christianity, a robust doctrine of the church, and reengagement with a shared apostolic and patristic heritage. Oden's call for an orthodox ecumenism—one that elides while still recognizing the significance of 16th-century conflicts—has been borne out in numerous scholarly projects in recent years. The cumulative impact of these efforts on evangelical thought and culture has been estimable.
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