Wheaton's Divisive (and/or Courageous) Stand

Scot McKnight, author of an article about the evangelical-Catholic conversion phenomenon titled, From Wheaton to Rome, chimes in on the Wheaton College controversy:

Is the Roman Catholic commitment to the authority of the Church tradition inconsistent with [Wheaton's faith] statement? I think not.

Here’s what many of us would also say: what Wheaton is actually doing is not claiming the authority of Scripture over against the dual authority of Scripture and Tradition, but affirming one tradition’s interpretation of Scripture over against another (the RC one). In other words, it is saying “evangelicals are not Roman Catholics.” It wants to define evangelical in such a way that it affirms the five hundred year-old debate that has separated them: evangelicals are not Catholics.

There is no reason here to get into protracted debates that have occupied theologians for five hundred years. Wheaton has the right to do what it did; I doubt myself that it is as clear-cut as the newspaper article’s representation makes it. My understanding is that the Tradition of Roman Catholicism is not an equal authority but the divinely-blessed carrying on of that biblical authority.

And over at First Things, Joseph Bottum brings a different perspective:

The problem, really, is the difficulty in crafting a faith statement that can be signed by every Protestant—from the highest of high-church Anglicans to the lowest of low-church fundamentalists—but can’t be signed by any Catholic. In the end, all such things are likely to run on a wink and prayer, which says a great deal about the incoherence of some Christian disunity. And the whole thing is sadly hard on Professor Hochschild, who has suffered a pay cut to teach at a Catholic school, and only because he has taken a principled stand on questions of faith—which is the exactly the lesson schools like Wheaton hope to teach.

And yet, principled stands are supposed to cost something; otherwise, they’re not stands but merely poses. In the end, Wheaton is, I think, to be applauded for trying to prevent the decline of religious identity . . . .

Getting rid of a serious, principled, and popular medieval philosophy professor is a sad example of the cost of Christian divisions, against which we pray ut unim sint: that they may be one. But 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.

Rob

UPDATE: Here are two statements by Wheaton College president Duane Litfin (offered in 1998 and 2004) explaining the no-Catholic policy in more detail.