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One leading adversary of the attempt to make Baylor a seriously Christian university, for example, boasts that he does not believe in the virgin birth, the miracles recorded in Scripture, or the Trinity. He remains a self-confessed Baptist because, he says, other traditions squash such freedom. He also remains a devoted Jesus-pietist who gives himself generously to good works in the local community. For him, therefore, religious matters should be left entirely to the faculty's and the students' private discretion. The church's only overt presence on the campus should be found in the caring and nurturing environment that Baylor provides for its students. Why such an environment could not be produced at a secular university remains unclear.

One of Baylor's former presidents holds a similar view concerning the place of religion on the campus. He has declared that, when professors do their best in the classroom, they have already discharged their Christian duty. "Faculty are not here to engage in religiosity," he stated. "They're here to teach algebra, political science, the best way they know how, which is to me the Christian way to do it." Certainly the doing of our intellectual best is the sine qua non of academic life. But why call it Christian? Like "care and nurture," must our teaching also remain devoid of specific Christian content and concern?

The Freedom to be Formed and Transformed
Much of contemporary evangelism has also been premised (unconsciously of course) on false Enlightenment assumptions. The notion that we each must make a single untrammeled individual decision to accept Jesus as Savior and then follow him as Lord ignores the traditional Christian conception of freedom. Virtually the whole Christian tradition has iterated, with relentless consistency, that to be free is not to make autonomous choices akin to purchasing an automobile or joining a civic club. To be free is to conform our lives to the will and way of God. And while this freedom may begin with a sudden conversion, it cannot be sustained apart from a lifelong participation in the communal life of the people of God. To do evil, by contrast, is the really solitary and autonomous act. It is not to exercise freedom, but to abandon the life of the self-giving love of God for our own idolatrous purposes.

The choices that matter most, it follows, are not blithely unfettered but blessedly encumbered. Decisions that form our character are laden with aims and attachments that we have not chosen for ourselves; they have been graciously given to us. We are called to respond gladly to the gifts we have so generously received, from our parents and communities, from our friends and neighbors, from our schools and nation—but supremely from the self-giving God of Israel, Jesus Christ, and the church.

The Enlightenment idea of the independent, all-sovereign self therefore contravenes the fundamental Christian conviction that we are covenantal rather than contractual creatures. The triune God has revealed himself to be a community of persons who has pledged to bring us into his own life through the communal life of his people. There is thus no such thing as a solitary Christian having a purely private relation to Jesus Christ, but then joining with other Christians only for the sake of worship, missions, and other common purposes. To be "in Christ," as Paul endlessly emphasizes, is to be permanently transformed by our life in the Body of Christ called the church.

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October (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47