Wheaton's Narrowness

As a convert to Catholicism with a sister who is a Wheaton College grad and a mom who is a Wheaton College prof, I've been troubled by the Joshua Hochschild story since the news broke a while back.  The WSJ article tries to situate Hochschild's firing within the broader higher ed trend of schools recapturing their Christian identities.  It's an awkward fit, for two reasons. 

First, Wheaton College is not recapturing anything; a convert to Catholicism would have been fired from the faculty twenty years ago, fifty years ago, or one hundred years ago.  This is a case of the institution trying to enforce previously unquestioned boundaries on its engagement with other faith traditions.  (And yes, Catholicism would be viewed as another faith tradition.)

Second and more significantly, Hochschild's firing has nothing to do with a school like Notre Dame trying to hire more Catholics.  Notre Dame wants to maintain a critical mass of Catholics in order to ensure a distinctively Catholic identity.  Wheaton wants to exclude any non-evangelicals in order to ensure an exclusively evangelical identity.  For higher education, that's a key difference.

My discomfort with Wheaton's stance is exacerbated by the fact that we're not talking about the Amish seeking to maintain a fortress mentality against the outside world.  Wheaton College is no inward-looking bunch of folks -- in fact, the school prides itself on its prominent academic ranking and achievements.  Shielding themselves from intellectual or spiritual pollution through unhelpful and outdated categorical Catholic-Protestant distinctions compromises Wheaton's mission.  But railing against religious discrimination in general does not facilitate a productive conversation on this issue, for I fully support institutions that take religious identity seriously.  A more prudent course is continued evangelical-Catholic engagement in an effort to show that for a school devoted to shaping followers of Christ in an academically rigorous environment, Joshua Hochschild is an asset, not a threat.

Rob 

UPDATE: Open Book has an extensive conversation going about the WSJ article.  From the comments, here's an interesting perspective from a Wheaton grad / Catholic convert on why a path beginning in Wheaton often leads to Rome:

I am another whose journey to Rome began as a student at Wheaton (BA '79, MA '85) Why so many of us? Wheaton's emphasis on integration of faith and learning is really very Catholic in its understanding of reason and revelation. Catholic schools could learn from them how to implement the perspective of Fides et Ratio across the curriculum. Also, there was a strong emphasis on history -- I was required to take both the history of philosophy and theology (one year of each) as an undergraduate religion major. My encounter with the Church fathers in historical theology planted the seed that would eventually lead me to Rome. There was an emphasis on serving the "Christ and his kingdom" in both evangelistic and social outreach that is quite consonant with Catholic teaching. The way I was taught to do historical critical study of scripture from the perspective of faith is quite consistent with Dei Verbum and other Catholic magisterial teaching (I encourage my Catholic seminary students to read Evangelical biblical scholarship). The pervasive attention to Lewis, Tolkien and others at Wheaton formed my imagination in sacramental directions. A popular slogan at Wheaton was "all truth is God's truth" and the goal of Christian higher education was presented as the integration of all truth into a coherent Christian worldview. By this concern for fullness of truth centered in Christ, Wheaton invariably starts many (I'm not sure how many) on a road leading to that fullness of truth found within the Roman Catholic Church.

So if they're really worried about the school losing its evangelical identity, instead of firing the Catholic, maybe Wheaton would be better advised to stop teaching Aquinas . . .