November 17, 2009
An October 28 Christianity Today article began:
The homosexuality debate that has torn apart mainline denominations is fanning faculty and student protests at Calvin College, and highlights a growing issue facing evangelical schools.
The occasion for this was a memo from the Calvin board of trustees that prohibited faculty from "advocacy of homosexual practice and same-sex marriage." That is, the Calvin board exercised its governance responsibility by affirming a position held by the Church for the past two thousand years and that can be traced even further back to Moses.
It is also the position on homosexuality in the 1563 Heidelberg Catechism, one of the confessional documents of the Christian Reformed Church to which every Calvin faculty member must subscribe. Faculty "pledge to teach, speak, and write in harmony with the confessions."
So from an historical point of view, there was nothing in the least bit controversial about the trustees' memo. It merely reminded the faculty of their confessional commitments to a traditional Christian and Reformed understanding of sexuality and marriage, commitments that had been in place for centuries and are, in some quarters of the Church being challenged.
Of course, that wasn't how the Calvin faculty or the students received the memo. They viewed it as an assault on academic freedom, as a trampling of due process—the faculty senate had not been consulted—and as a pronouncement having a chilling effect on, as Christianity Today put it, "Calvin's tradition of vibrant Christian inquiry."
They, in effect, said that despite more than two thousand years of agreement in the Church on sexuality and marriage, college faculty and students get to make up their own minds as to what Scripture says and what obedience to God looks like today.
"To me," remarked a trustee at another evangelical Christian college, "academic freedom means I can interpret Scripture in any way I see fit."
Can the result of this thinking possibly be anything but doctrinal and spiritual chaos, a situation where, echoing the Book of Judges, everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes?
Just as the debate in the Protestant mainline are emphatically not about homosexuality, the debate at Calvin and at other evangelical schools is not about homosexuality either. The debate is about authority. And that debate goes back to the roots of Protestantism.
"Unless I am convicted by Scripture and plain reason," averred Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521:
…I do not accept the authority of popes or councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.
Luther's statement can be taken (incorrectly as we shall see) as the central tenet that most Protestants—including evangelical Protestants—share: my conscience, captivated by the Word of God above all else.
In his essay in The Future of Christian Learning, Notre Dame historian (formerly at evangelical Wheaton College) Mark Noll quotes Johann Eck's response to Luther.
For what purpose does it serve to raise a new dispute about matters condemned through so many centuries by church and council? Unless perhaps a reason must be given to just anyone about anything whatsoever. But if it were granted that whoever contradicts the councils and the common understanding of the church must be overcome by Scripture passages, we will have nothing in Christianity that is certain or decided.
The exchange between Luther and Eck can be taken as the archetype of debates that have run through the Church ever since including the current one at Calvin College. Trustees ask with Eck, "For what purpose does it serve to raise a new dispute about matters condemned through so many centuries by church and council?" The faculty each respond with Luther, "I do not accept the authority of popes or councils… my conscience is captive to the Word of God." That is, to the Word of God as I with no higher authority looking over my shoulders choose to interpret it.
