By Will Jones
Senior
I remember the talk Dr. Livesay gave to the student body right after the Dr. Morgan situation exploded last year, how he said that we were a family, and that he wanted to keep the situation in the family. I did not completely agree with every decision made, or the rationale for those decisions, but I agreed with the spirit of this statement—I figured that if he was willing to protect the privacy of a professor arrested on felony charges, he would be willing to go to bat for anyone at this school, student or professor.
Now, we are on the edge of changing the statement of faith so that certain professors at this school could not sign it in good conscience.
Aside: C. S. Lewis would not be able to sign it in good faith. See The Problem of Pain, 72-77. Neither would Tim Keller, Os Guinness, Phillip Yancey, N. T. Wright, Francis Collins, and a whole host of other Evangelical scholars whose work laid the foundation for so much of current Christian scholarship.
We do not specify that professors must be Calvinist or Arminian, paedobaptists or credobaptists, premillennial, postmillennial, or amillennial. These are all issues that we have agreed to disagree on. We have allowed our family to decide for themselves what they believe on these incredibly crucial issues that have tremendous implications for our views of scripture, soteriology, and eschatology. We are singling out one issue as a bulwark of orthodoxy. It will only be a wedge. It will isolate faculty who believe differently and force them to leave, or worse, tempt them to be dishonest. Families do not behave this way.
I understand that the stated goal is not to force professors to leave or violate their conscience, but that is what is in effect happening, and it is happening so late in the school year that those who will leave will have very little time to find new positions elsewhere.
There have been meetings over this for months, and only now are our teachers and mentors being informed that they may have to leave Bryan, leave Dayton, and find work somewhere else in higher education.
Billing this change as a “clarification” does little to change the fact that faculty who entered this school and gained tenure under the old statement of belief will no longer be able to sign this new one. Professors who would not be able to sign made their opinion clear for years before this “clarification”; Dr. Livesay signed their tenure papers, their research grants. Billing it as a “clarification” ex post facto does not smooth over this fact, or any other semantic game.
But it is students, not professors, who stand the most to lose. We will lose professors who have proved their love and commitment to this school and to academic excellence every day of every semester they have been here. We will lose counselors and mentors—close friends who have seen us through break-ups and crises of faith. We will lose honest dialogue, and the kind of growth that comes with discussion and engagement of alternate perspectives. We will lose trust for the administration and trust for orthodox evangelicalism—if this is how a Christian family behaves, then we want no part of it. There are too many reasons already to feel cynical about modern evangelicalism to add another to the list.
The administration and the board have earned respect for treating our faculty decently and for loving our students throughout this institution’s history. And they will justly lose much of this respect if they force faculty out over an ancillary issue of the faith in such an unprincipled, dishonest fashion. Bryan will lose the power of its testimony as an institution of higher learning. We will become yet another tired example, not of orthodoxy, but of the disunity that has plagued the Christian church for the last four centuries. And we will not be a family, no matter how loudly or long we say it in our speeches and promotional material. We will be a faction, one of many, and yet another excuse for those outside the church to harden their hearts against it.