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Secondly, the Sloan administration sought to strengthen the engagement of faith and learning. They recruited distinguished Christian intellectuals who model faith/learning engagement. They offered seminars in the dialogue of faith and learning to help interested faculty understand and participate in such a dialogue. They were convinced that a first-rate Christian university had to foster this sort of engagement so that students could be whole Christians, that their minds as well as their hearts could be transformed by the Christian faith. This did not mean the rejection of worldly knowledge, but rather a lively dialogue with it.

"I believe if you look back over the last decade, you will see ample evidence that President Sloan has led Baylor through a period of tremendous growth and progress," stated Will Davis, the board of regents chairman.

No doubt about that, but "the natural side effect of change is conflict," Sloan said at his resignation news conference. And conflict there was and is. Some object to the pace and manner of the changes. Others object to the debt the school incurred to finance all the expansion. One faction wants Baylor to be less religious, with no disciplined inquiry into the faith of new hires. Another wants Baylor to give up its ambition of being a first-rate research institution; they would much rather remain a dominantly "teaching" institution. Yet another wants Baylor to be a provincial university—Baptist, Texas, populist.

One should not discount the "ego factor" in all this. Sloan's accomplishments have upstaged some of his predecessors, and some of them and their progeny are leaders in the "insurrection." Sloan himself is a strong-willed man who pushed things through and made many decisions that angered others. Larger-than-life Texans engage in larger-than-life conflicts.

But the most serious—and incendiary—issue is the question of Baptist identity. To understand what is going on at Baylor requires the broader perspective of the fundamentalist struggle and its aftermath. Nonfundamentalist Baptists are in a quandary about who they are today. As a result, they do not know what kind of institutions to support, especially among their colleges and universities, and even more especially, Baylor.

The Sloan administration has proposed a view of Baptist as orthodox, doctrinal, evangelical, ecumenical, and in the Free Church tradition. It affirms that Christianity has intellectual content that should be shared by all Christians, and that provides the substance for serious faith/learning encounter. It has bolstered the university by inviting Christians from the great magisterial traditions—Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran—to enrich the rather thin Baptist intellectual tradition. It has hired and nurtured Baptists who are open to this kind of ecumenicity.

This movement has enraged old-line Baptist pietists who believe that these "ecumenical Baptists" are selling out the "soul freedom" and the "priesthood of all believers" that are the essential marks of being Baptist. They believe this "new Baptist" thrust is creedal and prizes a systematic account of Christian belief, both of which are anathema to them. Further, the emphasis on the engagement of faith and learning is to them an imposed religiosity that violates both Christian and academic freedom.

In this fight freedom is the opposition's constant watchword. But freedom itself doesn't yield a faith worth having; it simply is a precondition. Faith means binding oneself to certain essential Christian beliefs and practices. Without them it wanders into confusion and impotence, upon which one cannot build a strong Christian university.

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March 2005, Vol. 49, No. 3