Tuesday, January 10, 2006

The joy of being post-protestant and post-evangelical

Just one more wonderful reason why it's soooooooo good to be post-evangelical, and post-protestant....

Wheaton fires a professor who converts to Catholicism.
WHEATON, Ill. -- Wheaton College was delighted to have assistant professor Joshua Hochschild teach students about medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, one of Roman Catholicism's foremost thinkers.

But when the popular teacher converted to Catholicism, the prestigious evangelical college reacted differently. It fired him.

Wheaton, like many evangelical colleges, requires full-time faculty members to be Protestants and sign a statement of belief in "biblical doctrine that is consonant with evangelical Christianity." In a letter notifying Mr. Hochschild of the college's decision, Wheaton's president said his "personal desire" to retain "a gifted brother in Christ" was outweighed by his duty to employ "faculty who embody the institution's evangelical Protestant convictions.""...

For many of us, the protest is over!!! Let peace bring unity! Jesus is happy when his children get along!!!! I like making Jesus happy!


More quotes from the article:
....In a 2004 book titled "Conceiving the Christian College," Mr. Litfin[Wheaton's President] argued that hiring Catholics would start Wheaton down a slippery slope. Wouldn't having Catholic faculty, he asked rhetorically, "lead to a gradual sacrificing of Wheaton's distinctives?"


...President Litfin's office is across the street from the Billy Graham Center, named for the famed preacher and Wheaton alumnus who has sought to reconcile Protestants and Catholics. The president says he has also been "a part of this rapprochement." But, he maintains, the core doctrinal issues separating Protestants and Catholics "have by no means gone away."...

...Meanwhile, Wheaton hasn't replaced Mr. Hochschild. One obstacle: Most scholars of medieval philosophy are Catholics.

4 comments:

Cindy said...

Thanks for Posting this, Jeff. That's twice in a week! You're getting the hang of it!

Zeke said...

You clearly aren't on board with the whole "Whore of Babylon" thingie. :)

Zeke said...

To the Whore of Babylon reference: there's a not-so-fine tradition in Reformed Protestantism that interprets Revelation's Whore of Babylon as the Catholic Church. See here.

Jeff Kursonis said...

To Zeke's perceptive comment:


Here are some of the other whores listed on that wikipedia page:

United States as the Whore of Babylon
Soviet Union as the Whore of Babylon
Rastafari: the Queen of the United Kingdom as the Whore of Babylon

Looks like it's everyone's delight to call the people they don't like, not only the representative of the evil place called Babylon - but the self debasing, leg-spreading-for whoever-wants-to-pay, whore (of that place).

Cool. Even more cool that so much of it was done in the name of religion.

I'm thinking that if even Christ does not know the hour of his return, that it might be a little presumptuous for us to try and identify the whore described in Revelations as one of our contemporaries we don't like. That's just hate propaganda conveniently trying to prop itself up by expropriating biblical language.

It is humility at seeing the debased parts of our own tradition (evangelicalism) that allows us to again accept our Catholic brothers who do have some weird beliefs, but in the midst of some weirdness is some awesome truth. Some of us are just now seeing our own debased parts, and a fitting response is to not only be patient with our own people, but with others likewise. (emergents are humble and not angry!)

And as for our Roman Catholic brothers, as the guardians of major portions of our faith that would have disappeared if we had been charged with preserving them, I not only don't protest them, I thank them. (mystery, meditation, iconography, reverence, etc.)

(that's a lot of thought to be generated from your offhanded comment!!)

Jeff