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WSJ story on dismissed Wheaton professor is old, but hot
Is the Reformation over? asks Wheaton College history professor Mark Noll in a book with Carolyn Nystrom (see CT's review and Books & Culture's excerpt). As reported in the top story in the weekend Wall Street Journal, Noll's school has answered the question with a resounding no.

Around Christianity Today, a stone's throw from Wheaton, the dismissal of assistant philosophy professor Joshua Hochschild for his conversion to Roman Catholicism is a bit old news. Indeed, the Journal notes that he left last spring, and the debate over his dismissal goes back to 2003. Furthermore, the debate over limiting Catholic teaching at Wheaton is considerably older. It was a subject of debate when Weblog was a Wheaton undergraduate student more than a decade ago. As the Journal itself reports, Wheaton "has never hired a Catholic professor full time and tells Catholic applicants it won't consider them for such posts. … Aware of Wheaton's Protestants-only policy, Mr. Hochschild recalls thinking he would probably lose his job."

But the Journal sees, as its deck proclaims, "a new orthodoxy at religious colleges."

"A conservative reaction is setting in, part of a broader push against the secularization of American society," writes Daniel Golden. "Fearful of forsaking their spiritual and educational moorings, colleges are increasingly 'hiring for mission,' as the catch phrase goes, even at the cost of eliminating more academically qualified candidates."

It doesn't sound like Wheaton College president Duane Litfin would characterize his actions as fearful. "If you look at the caliber of our faculty, this is an amazing place," he told the paper. "It's thriving. Why do genetic engineering on it? Why muck up its DNA?"

Some conservative Catholics—who just five minutes ago were carping about how Catholic colleges have been losing their distinctives—see this as an example of "they don't think we're Christians." But the issue isn't whether Litfin sees Roman Catholics as Christians (he calls Hochschild a "brother"), but whether he sees them as evangelicals who truly agree with the college's statement of faith.

Not all Catholics are so negative. "The general response of serious religious believers, Protestant and Catholic alike, is likely to be: 'Good for Wheaton.' Or, rather, 'Good for Wheaton—given that the evil of Christian disunity exists,'" Jody Bottum writes on the First Things weblog. "Until those divisions are healed, the shared Catholic and Protestant struggle to maintain religious identity in a secularized culture will occasionally create such disturbing incidents. If Catholics are concerned—as they ought to be—about the Catholic identity of their own colleges and universities, then they must accept the right and even duty of Protestant schools to maintain a Protestant character."

If there is a story in Hochschild's dismissal, it's not the "new orthodoxy." It's the "new evangelicalism." The Journal suggests that all the chips in the Hochschild story may not have fallen. "Perhaps Wheaton College has come to a point where, because of challenges such as yours, it must revise its documents to make more explicit its non-Catholic identity," Litfin wrote to Hochschild. If Wheaton does revise its statement of faith (as it did in the mid-1990s) to make its identity clearer, it will be interesting to see the point or points at which the school says Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism are irreconcilable. Scot McKnight, who once wrote an article for the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society titled "From Wheaton to Rome," suggests that "supreme and final authority" of the Bible may not be the only—or even the main—concern.

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January (Web-only) 2006, Vol. 50