Related articles and links |  1 of 3

Thanks to a daring vision generated by its faculty and administration, Baylor University (where I am a professor) is attempting to become a top-tier Christian school known for its research as well as its teaching. This innovative effort—popularly referred to as Baylor 2012, after a 10-year vision statement—has met with both vehement opposition and passionate vindication.

Much of the antagonism has been directed against President Robert Sloan, but his presidency and Baylor 2012 were last month resoundingly upheld by a 31-4 vote of the Baylor board of regents. The conflict, however, is not over. Such debate will continue until we address the theological problem still bedeviling us: We have over-privileged the Enlightenment as it pertains both to Christian faith and Christian education.

Even our categories are impoverished. Baptist conservatives and Baptist liberals both embrace strategies that, ironically, are legacies of the secularizing Enlightenment. Conservatives have sought to establish watertight proofs for Scriptural inerrancy that will serve as a bulwark against the miracle-denying rigidity of a cause-and-effect universe. Liberals, in turn, have subscribed to John Locke's ideal of tolerance—an ideal that stresses inclusivity and openness above all else, often to the neglect of real theological convictions.

The revolution occurring at Baylor fits none of these Enlightenment concerns. First-rate Christian scholars are coming to Baylor from the most outstanding universities in the world precisely because we are attempting at once to engage and to challenge the Enlightenment paradigm. Faculty hiring, for instance, has been opened to a new variety of scholars. Far from producing an ideological unanimity of either the left or the right, Baylor enjoys greater religious diversity than ever.

Recent faculty appointments have included Catholics and Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians, Methodists and members of the Churches of Christ, no less than Baptists, Pentecostals, Jews, and even Eastern Orthodox Christians. A Roman Catholic philosopher was recently chosen as the founding dean of the new Honors College neither to combat fundamentalism nor to promote tolerance, but rather to make use of his excellence as a Christian thinker, writer, and leader.

The Heresy of Solitary Faith
The visionary changes occurring at Baylor have been met with consternation because we have dined too long at the Enlightenment table, without setting richer food alongside its meager fare. Our failure to contest Enlightenment individualism, for instance, has landed us in ludicrous heresies. Luther's classic doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is a case in point. It has been corrupted into the heretical and essentially Gnostic idea of the priesthood of the solitary believer. Instead of serving as priests to each other in obedience to our one High Priest (and thus engage in the radically communal life of the church and its institutions), each individual is supposed to become his own priest.

A Baylor regent recently declared that no one can tell a Baptist what to believe about the Bible, since every Baptist interprets it according to the dictates of the individual's own heart. So sacred is this alleged Baptist doctrine that, according to this same regent, only Baptists can teach in Baylor's department of religion. Thus does an uncritical kind of Enlightenment individualism turn Christian faith into a largely a private affair. Such solitary piety may issue in benevolent deeds, but it denies the sacraments and doctrines that empower the Christian life. Insistence on orthodoxy of either belief or practice is said to block authentic Christian liberty—to make us a narrow and exclusive and oppressive people.

next page... |  1 of 3

October (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47