Tag: wheaton (page 1 of 1)

February 26, 2025

dueling letters

Those of you uninterested in Wheaton College or in Christian higher education more generally — which is to say, most of you — should feel free to skip this one.

UPDATE 2025-02-27: And if you are interested but want a more recent and intimate account than my own, please read this wonderful reflection by a 2024 graduate of Wheaton, Anna Catherine McGraw.

So the open letter by Wheaton College alumni denouncing the school for capitulation to wokeness, which as I write has 1277 signatories, has been countered by an open letter by Wheaton College alumni denouncing the school for failing to repudiate Project 2025, which has 1653 signatories.

I therefore declare the lefties the winners of this referendum!

Just kidding. I do, however, have some thoughts.

I notice that while the first letter (“For Wheaton,” hereafter FW) denounces Wheaton for allowing “unbiblical” practices to occur on campus, it does not actually cite the Bible. The other letter (“Open Letter,” or OL), by contrast, cites thirty-six passages from Scripture. Hey FW, you seriously need to raise your game in this regard.

FW is pretty explicit in what it wants, most notably “an audit of every single faculty and staff member’s commitment to the Statement of Faith and Community Covenant” — an interesting idea, since it directly copies Ibram X. Kendi’s old plan for every university to have an “antiracism task force” appointed by university administrators and unaccountable to standard procedures of governance. I wonder how such an audit would work. Would the task force decide in advance what is and is not biblical and seek to dismiss those who disagree? Could those whose views are deemed unbiblical defend themselves by citing relevant scriptures? What happens to people who fail their audit?

OL is less programmatic, but it says that Project 2025 is “antithetical to Christian charity” and that “Silence in the face of such an anti-Christian vision is complicity.” So presumably (?) this means that Wheaton should denounce Project 2025 rather than be “complicit” in it. But what is “Wheaton” in this scenario? The President? The administrative cabinet? The Board of Trustees? And what to do with faculty or staff who think that Project 2025 is perfectly consistent with Christian orthodoxy?

Five years ago I wrote that there are two political parties in America today: the Manichaeans and the Humanists. It seems to me that FW and OL alike belong to the Manichaean Party; they just represent two mutually-hostile wings thereof.

More specifically, it seems to me that both sides here — but FW more belligerently, in “tough negotiator” mode — are demanding the same thing of Wheaton: Tell me that God endorses my politics. But I don’t think Wheaton will do that, because it’s foundationally built on the idea that people who affirm its Statement of Faith and Community Covenant will not agree about everything in the political and social and personal and even the theological realm but will be able to argue charitably and constructively on the basis of their shared commitments — which are substantial indeed, but not without controversy.

If people at Wheaton can disagree about when Christians should be baptized, about the proper form of church governance, about predestination and election, about the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life, you’re going to tell me that there’s no room to disagree about DEI initiatives and immigration policy? If so, then you’re placing political unanimity above theological conviction, and — I have to consider this possibility — that just may say something about what your actual core commitments are. And if your political commitments are non-negotiable, then maybe — probably — almost certainly — Wheaton isn’t the place for you and you should devote yourself to some other institution. Wheaton is a place where faith seeks understanding; those of you who have already solved all the problems that beset the political realm and don’t want to face disagreement likely would be happier at a more seeker-unfriendly institution.

If Wheaton ceases to orient itself to controversy and disagreement in the way it historically has, then I don’t know what its raison d’être would be. To settle this mess by taking one side or the other would be to yield a great victory to the Manichaean Party at a great cost to Christian charity. That may be tempting to the people who run Wheaton simply because Manichaeanism is increasingly dominant on our political scene, but, for one thing, I don’t think that it will always be so dominant, and, for another, I don’t think Wheaton’s survival at that price would be worth it. What does it profit a college to achieve political unanimity but lose its soul?

FINAL WORD ON THIS, 2025-02-27: One of the leading critics of Wheaton from the Right, Eric Teetsel, says:

“The problem is people who intentionally undermine orthodox Christian teachings as affirmed in Wheaton College’s Statement of Faith, which every faculty member, staff member and student is required to sign … Those are guerrilla warriors for a progressive agenda. They are knowingly and intentionally and willfully undermining the Statement of Faith in their classrooms, and they tend to close the door just before they do it, because they know they’re doing it.”

My response is: Name names. Name the people who are “intentionally and willfully undermining the Statement of Faith,” and tell us which items in the Statement of Faith they are undermining. To say that you know that such people exist without naming them is the classic McCarthyite tactic: Ol’ Tail Gunner Joe liked to wave around his papers listing the “known Communists” in the U. S. State Department … but wouldn’t actually show anyone the papers. That’s what Teetsel is doing, to the letter. Name names, or else you’re just wantonly imperiling the careers of totally innocent people. You’re not a Christian critic of institutional drift, you’re an irresponsibly malicious gossip.

February 14, 2025

here we go again

I’ve had to write this quickly and may be revisiting or expanding it later. Stay tuned.

On my first official day as an employee of Wheaton College, in the summer of 1984, I attended an orientation session for new faculty. We heard from various people who worked for the college in various endeavors; they gave us outlines of what they do and why they do it and how they might be a resource for faculty members. One of them was a man who oversaw a program that sent Wheaton students overseas, primarily to the global South and (in those long-ago days) behind the Iron Curtain, to see how Christians lived there, what they needed, how we could learn from them and how we could help them. It sounded like a wonderful program. During the break after his presentation, we were standing around drinking coffee, and he casually asked me whether I knew whom I would vote for in the upcoming Presidential election. I told him that I supported the reelection of President Reagan. He cocked his head at me and said, “You’re really going to vote for that warmongering racist? I think you should reconsider that decision.”

I was pretty surprised by this because I had assumed that the evangelical Christianity of Wheaton would be accompanied — perhaps not exclusively but dominantly — by political conservatism. It turned out that matters were a little more complicated. Wheaton certainly had far more Republicans (and other kinds of political conservative) than almost any other American college or university campus, but the overall political orientation of the faculty was pretty similar to that of the country as a whole. It wasn’t far from a 50–50 split, and I think a significant variability of political stances has been consistent throughout the modern history of Wheaton. Well, until quite recently.

And it should, shouldn’t it? The question of how the teachings of Jesus and the more general witness of the Bible translates into political belief and action is a notoriously difficult one. Only for the dim-witted or bigoted (on the Left and the Right) is it utterly obvious. The more we know about the history of Christian faith, practice, and teaching the more cautious we will be, I think, about assuming that we can map our Christian beliefs directly onto the political options readily available to us in our time and place.

But over the past half-century or more we’ve seen a great many people who think that evangelical Christianity should directly correspond to the policies of the Republican party, whatever they happen to be at any given time. (They are quite different now from what they were in the time of Ronald Reagan, which might help to account for a recent imbalance in political preferences among faculty.) So some 30 years ago, as a professor who taught a class in literary theory, I was the subject of the same kind of hit piece that Daniel Davis has just written for First Things about current Wheaton professors, though in my case the piece appeared in World magazine. It was my view that my students, almost all of whom were English and philosophy majors, needed to understand trends in recent thought about literature and interpretation, and needed to be able to assess those ideas from a theologically informed perspective. But this meant reading controversial figures charitably, to try to understand not only what they say but what they are trying to accomplish in saying it, and then to ask ourselves whether, even if in the end we must strongly dissent from their key claims, we might learn something from them.

It was this that my critic found unforgivable: my job, he felt, was to teach students only what I agreed with and thought they should agree with. (With anything I thought wrongheaded, I take it that my job was to denounce it and tell students not to read it.) My failure in this respect made me a betrayer of trust and a Bad Influence.

My reasonably well-informed guess is that my former colleague Keith Johnson – whom I have heard in public conversations making strong defenses of both the uniqueness and the universality of the gospel of Jesus Christ – does the same kind of thing I do. But of course, I certainly wouldn’t be able to know that from this article. Davis writes that Keith Johnson “assigns (and commends) liberation and feminist theology for reading” — but I’d like to know what liberation and feminist theology he assigns, why he assigns it, and if he does indeed commend it, on what grounds. But Davis isn’t going to tell us that because this isn’t a piece meant to inform us of anything; it’s just a smear. I also might ask Davis whether he thinks that people who study theology at Wheaton need to emerge without knowing what liberation and feminist theologians actually say. Is ignorance bliss? Or is it for Davis, perhaps, merely virtue?

Similarly, I don’t know what Davis thinks “critical race theory” is or what it says — I’ve written about this problem at some length — but the phrase, in his usage, isn’t meant to convey any specific content, it’s just meant to scare the children. Ditto the title the piece bears — echoing William F. Buckley’s critique of his alma mater, Yale — which nicely elides the rather significant fact that, whatever their politics might happen to be, everyone employed by Wheaton signs a robust and classically orthodox statement of Christian faith. (But then, perhaps the Christian God isn’t the God Davis feels that Wheaton has betrayed. Hard to say.)

At this juncture I find myself remembering the many students I advised who participated that program that sent them overseas. I remember one young woman, very conservative theologically, who came to my office on the first day of a new semester, just having returned from six months in Mozambique. She greeted me, sat down — and burst into tears. The abrupt transition from six months among a great many very poor but very joyful Christians to our beautiful, well-appointed, technologically sophisticated, and extremely clean campus was more than she could handle. She would spend the next few months, and probably the next few years, grappling with the implications of an evangelical Christianity that flourished more powerfully in the global South than in the United States, even with almost none of the resources we enjoy.

This kind of experience is a characteristic result not just of that program but more generally of the liberal-arts education on offer at Wheaton, which is always based on the understanding that, if the evangelical movement started in Europe and among white people, it has spread throughout the world and to every “race” and culture, and we in the West neither own it nor control it. The job of liberal education, especially in a Christian context, is never simply to confirm us in what we already know, or believe we know, but to challenge and push us to deeper and wider understanding, and to do so with confidence, because we ground our pursuit of learning in the conviction that “in Christ are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3).

(I use the first-person plural here not because I still teach at Wheaton — I left eleven years ago — but because I learned at Wheaton how to think in this way, thanks to the tutelage of many wise saints, and I hold today to the convictions I developed there.)

The faculty and administration at Wheaton understand all this, and therefore see that the American evangelical movement has not always acknowledged its debts to cultures beyond our own, has not always been willing to learn from Christians whose experiences are very different from ours, and has not always made welcome people from outside a certain and rather narrow cultural context. (Some of the people who have felt unwelcome are Wheaton students and even faculty members, including many who love the place with what often seems like an unrequited love.) It is the picture of evangelical Christianity as a truly global phenomenon that has led Wheaton to try to reckon with the blind spots in its own history, and to make amends to the insulted and the injured when amends are called for.

In trying to make this reckoning, Wheaton has, I believe, made mistakes. For instance, it seems to me that when an alum gets appointed to high office, perhaps especially if you have serious concerns about the tendencies of that government, it’s appropriate for the college to acknowledge that and to promise prayers. Also, I think a few years ago the administration got on board with a DEI regime that may look superficially like a Christian form of reconciliation but in fact is a very different beast, and the college deserves to be criticized for that. But I’d rather a Christian college make mistakes in trying to follow Christ more closely, more faithfully, than to sit back in the smug confidence that it knows everything and has no one outside its own orbit to learn from.

P.S. The threatened UPDATE, comprised of two points:

Note that Davis’s prophetic claim that the Glory of the Lord is passed from Wheaton isn’t based on any deviation from the biblical witness or the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Wheaton still proclaims Jesus as Savior and Redeemer, the Bible as the word of God, and so on. But it turns out that the Glory of the Lord doesn’t care about any of that stuff. The Glory of the Lord only cares about whether an organization is or is not woke. I don’t know what the name of this religion is, but it’s certainly not Christianity.
When Wheaton got itself into the social-media crosshairs a few years ago — the story then was not “Wheaton is Woke!” but rather “Wheaton is Racist!” — Wheaton alumna Ruth Graham wrote an outstanding reflection for the New York Times covering the controversy but also drawing on her experiences at Wheaton, and in so doing she made clear distinctions between (a) the actions of the college administration and (b) the beliefs, practices, and attitudes of professors, some of whom had made a big impact on her own life. In the current round of criticism some Wheaton grads are not being so circumspect. When they hurl mud at “Wheaton” they do not care how much of it hits professors who taught them, mentored them, cared for them. They do not care. And that’s pretty sad.

P.P.S. My friend and former colleague Tim Larsen has made a couple of interventions in this debate: here and here. The second one raises an especially important question: If those who say that Wheaton has become un-Christian through being too woke recommend that students instead go to colleges that require no Christian beliefs at all from their faculty, then what God do those critics worship?

May 17, 2021

thick and thin

I taught for many years at Wheaton College, which has a detailed Statement of Faith that everyone on campus signs. From this detailed statement emerges what we might call a thick theological anthropology, built up from layers of Biblical interpretation and historically orthodox theological formulations. By contrast, this is what my current employer, Baylor University, asks of its faculty:

Faculty members at Baylor University are expected to be in sympathy with and supportive of the University’s primary mission: “to educate men and women for worldwide leadership and service by integrating academic excellence and Christian commitment within a caring community.” The personal and professional conduct of each faculty member should be supportive of and consistent with this mission.

That’s it. There can be a lot of debate about what it means to be “in sympathy with and supportive of the University’s primary mission”: in the Honors College, where I teach, it certainly requires open and substantive Christian commitment, but that’s not the case everywhere at Baylor, and as I have said before I think of us in the HC as Baylor’s equivalent of Tom Bombadil. Baylor talks a lot about being “unambiguously Christian,” but the statement on expectations for faculty strikes me as an ambiguous one — and surely intentionally so, because it gives to the administration a great deal of leeway in determining whether a particular candidate is, as administrators like to say, a “good institutional fit.” It would be possible to interpret it in ways that do not require from the faculty any religious belief at all.

There are eminently defensible reasons to do things Baylor’s way rather than Wheaton’s; if I didn’t think so I wouldn’t have changed jobs. But it’s obvious that thin communal commitments do not lead to, and are not even conducive to, a thick theological anthropology, and it would be foolish to expect people held together by such weak confessional ties to share views that only make sense within the robust account of human life generated by historic Christian orthodoxy.

October 14, 2016

True Confessions (Wheaton College edition)

This long article/essay/meditation by Ruth Graham on the disturbing events at Wheaton College last year — click on the “wheaton” tag at the bottom of this post for some of my thoughts about that situation, and other issues related to Christian higher education — is by far the best thing that anyone has written on the subject: the most deeply researched, fair-minded, and thoughtful. I commend it to you whole-heartedly.

I’m going to take a personal turn now. Ruth was a student of mine, so I’m especially gratified by passages like this:

During my four years at Wheaton, I drifted away from evangelicalism. But I never contemplated transferring to another school. I was reading Foucault and Judith Butler (Shakespeare and Milton too); my professors were brilliant and kind and I found plenty of kindred spirits. When the religion scholar Alan Wolfe visited Wheaton for a cover article about evangelical intellectualism in The Atlantic in 2000, halfway through my time there, he found a campus whose earnestness was both endearing and impressive: “In its own way, campus life at Wheaton College resembles that of the 1960s, when students and a few professors, convinced that they had embarked on a mission of eternal importance, debated ideas as if life really depended on the answers they came up with.” At a suburban dive bar on the edge of a marsh, we drank illicit Pabst on Saturday night and talked about politics, music and philosophy like undergraduates anywhere. Then we got up on Sunday morning and went to church.

(By the way, Wen Stephenson, who became my friend during his work as an editor on that Atlantic story, interviewed me about its topic. I can’t bring myself to re-read that interview, but there it is.)

During my 29 years teaching at Wheaton, I saw many students “drift away from evangelicalism.” I didn’t always regret that — it depended on what they drifted to. Evangelical Protestantism is by no means the only way to be a faithful Christian, and for some people it proves impossible, or at least very difficult, to be a faithful Christian in that tradition. But sometimes I did regret the drifting, if it led away from Christian faith altogether.

Still, we all, among the faculty, accepted that risk — it was and is built into the DNA of Wheaton (as it is in my current academic location, the Honors College at Baylor). As I’ve commented elsewhere, “The likelihood of producing such graduates is a chance Wheaton is willing to take. Why? Because it believes in liberal education, as opposed to indoctrination.” So I understood and accepted that the exposure to new and powerful ideas, some of them quite alien or hostile to Christianity, has a tendency to change people, sometimes quite dramatically.

But here’s my True Confession: what I’ve always found hard to accept is how many of my students — how many of my best students, including the ones I’ve invested the most time and energy in — become so embarrassed about having attended Wheaton that they never, later in life, publicly acknowledge the quality of the education they received there. In their determination to separate themselves from the religious world they grew up in — and also, it must be said, in attempts not to have their careers or social lives torpedoed by anti-evangelical prejudice — they are just not willing to say what Ruth says here: that however frustrating they found the chapel services, and however stiff-necked they believed the college’s administration to be, at least they received a first-class liberal-arts education from smart and caring teachers, most of whom also understood and sympathized with and did not judge students for any drifting from evangelical orthodoxy.

Let me emphasize again that I very much understand the impulse: many of these students can pay a social or vocational price for acknowledging that they attended Wheaton. What a blessing it is that there’s another Wheaton College, in Massachusetts: Maybe people will think I went there. And if people do find out that you graduated from “that fundamentalist school,” then perhaps the best strategy for moving forward is to say that you hated every minute of it, and repudiate it with all your being.

So I get all that. But it makes me sad, you know? Because I devoted my best energies to teaching those students — it was always a heart-and-soul thing for me, it really was. And because, while some graduates of Wheaton hated everything about it and can’t stand anyone involved with the place, many of them place a great value on the education they received there. I know: they tell me. But they only do so in private. And for my part, I keep their shameful secret.

March 9, 2016

Dan Treier on tragedy and wisdom

My friend Dan Treier has written a long, thoughtful, sober, and wise post on what Wheaton College — and other Christian institutions — can learn from the Larycia Hawkins debacle. I hope some of the people, both inside and outside the college, who right from the beginning of the controversy, when little was known about what was actually happening, shouted their judgments and demands from the rooftops will read and heed.

February 10, 2016

a suggestion about the future of Wheaton College

When I was visiting Wheaton College last week I happened to hear a story on NPR about Intel’s attempts to create a more diverse workforce, with more women and minorities. Apparently Intel is putting a lot of energy behind this endeavor, and having some success, though retention continues to be a problem.

I was especially taken by one moment in the report:

Freada Kapor Klein is an investor who funds diversity-focused startups like Jopwell, which connects job candidates who are underrepresented minorities to tech companies. Klein says culture is key.

Tech companies don’t just make new engineers pass a coding test. They have to pass a “culture fit” test. That’s where a huge amount of bias creeps in, she says, as existing teams only want a unicorn. “They are looking for the one-in-a-million person who comes from a different racial, ethnic, cultural, gender background, but in every other respect is identical to the white and Asian men who work there,” Klein says. “That’s not diversity.”

It seems to me that this is a story that the leadership of Wheaton College should meditate on as the college tries to move on from its difficult relationship with Larycia Hawkins. I believe — I have good reason to believe — that Wheaton really, truly, seriously wants to have a faculty and student body that is more reflective of the ethnic and cultural range of worldwide evangelical Christianity. But I also saw, during my twenty-nine years on the Wheaton faculty and several years as director of the Faculty Faith and Learning program, far too many situations in which non-white faculty members were treated, if not with outright suspicion, then at least with bemusement and puzzlement, because they did not express themselves in ways that matched the cultural practices of white midwestern evangelicalism.

Minority faculty were of course not the only ones to have this kind of experience; it happened also to white faculty from charismatic or Pentecostal traditions, and to some others as well. But minority faculty — who not incidentally tend also to be charismatic or Pentecostal — always seemed to be under deeper and more lasting scrutiny.

I remember one black colleague who devoted two weeks to studying a book and then, at the end of that time, said to his class, “I don’t think that went as well as it should have. Let’s do it again. We’ll have to leave out the next book or two on the syllabus.” Some students — I don’t know how many — went ballistic over this. That’s not what the syllabus says! I’ve already bought those other books and now we’re not even going to read them! Some faculty and administrators became concerned over this “lack of professionalism”; they wondered whether Wheaton could afford to have faculty “the students don’t really respect.” Me, I just wished I had the courage to go off-script that far; though I guess the deep-seated reluctance to go off-script is a trait I shared with white midwestern evangelicalism, one that helped make me comfortable at Wheaton, even though I am not midwestern. But I also believe that if I had gone off-script in precisely that way it would not have created the same degree of consternation. I am convinced that my colleague’s race made students, faculty, and administrators wonder what else he might do that deviated from the script.

To my lasting regret, that colleague left Wheaton, under less than ideal circumstances, and I believe he was allowed to leave simply because he wasn’t a unicorn. He was not someone who had dark skin but was “every other respect … identical” to the overwhelmingly white world he worked in. He didn’t “fit the culture” — and note that in this case the lack of fit was not even theological, or spiritual, but (supposedly) professional.

But what if the narrow scope of “the culture” is a bug, not a feature? What if a more ethnically diverse faculty, even if it contained people who made some of the existing faculty and administration and alumni and donors uncomfortable, helped the college to achieve its mission? I made a similar argument some years ago in suggesting that Wheaton should be open to hiring Roman Catholics — my logic here is fundamentally the same. What if an institution’s existing culture, and its concern to hire people who “fit” its existing culture, actually inhibit its ability to fulfill its mission?

Wheaton has a detailed and quite specific Statement of Faith, but again and again over the past few decades faculty who can enthusiastically sign that Statement have been deemed not quite right, not comme il faut, not “one of us.” The (often inchoate) sense of institutional culture and “fit” has too often trumped the college’s explicit statements of what it’s all about. Here’s my proposal: What if Wheaton were to trust its own Statement of Faith? What if it were to open its doors to people who don’t look or speak or think like the typical Wheaton person — but who share the same convictions? Might the college not, ultimately, be greatly invigorated by all that new blood? Might it not come closer to the vision granted to John the Revelator? “After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice:

Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb.

February 7, 2016

a conclusion and a beginning

Now that the crisis at Wheaton College has been more or less sorted out — though the repercussions will continue to be felt for years, and the lawyerly curse of “confidential agreements” means that we’ll never know exactly how it all went down — what should happen is the beginning of a long period of reflection by all involved.

But that’s not the tone of what I’m hearing — though I can only hope that what I’m hearing is not representative. Because it seems that many of the supporters of Prof. Hawkins are in no mood to forgive members of Wheaton’s administration. In a widely leaked email to the college community, Provost Stan Jones wrote, “I asked Dr. Hawkins for her forgiveness for the ways I contributed to the fracture of our relationship, and to the fracture of Dr. Hawkins’ relationship with the College…. I apologized for my lack of wisdom and collegiality as I initially approached Dr. Hawkins, and for imposing an administrative leave more precipitously than was necessary.” And so on. It’s a very full apology. But I have already read a number of comments from Christians that this apology is problematic because it does not acknowledge Wheaton’s history (and present) of structural racism and sexism.

This kind of response strikes me as uncharitable, unproductive, and shortsighted. And I say this as someone who believes that Wheaton really does have serious problems in knowing how to deal with faculty and students who are not white males.

What if, when a brother in Christ apologizes and asks for forgiveness, one were to grant that forgiveness — instead of immediately criticizing him for not having provided a fully adequate account of the reasons he went astray? What about that as a strategy? It has some advantages:

It’s a matter of obedience to a commandment: “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.” And if the response is, “Well of course I forgive him” — no. Forgiveness is never a matter of course. It is too important, and too hard, mere to assume. When asked for and granted, forgiveness should, for a time, be the only air we breathe, we who have been at odds with one another.
To grant forgiveness to one who has offended against us is to open ourselves to the possibility of our sins against them. We may need to ask for the very benefit we have just granted; if so, it is good for us to know we have that need.
It is on the basis of forgiveness requested and received that we can then go on to explore, together, the deeper structural causes of our sins against each other. Those who have been reconciled in Christ can be bold in exploring these deeper causes; knowing the peace of reconciliation, we need not fear even the darkest truths.
To think in this way is to accept that reconciliation that lasts, reconciliation that bears spiritual and moral fruit, is an ongoing process. There is a sense in which the exchange of forgiveness instantly reconciles us to one another; but there is a deeper reconciliation that happens only over a long period of living in one another’s presence (and the presence of the living Christ within us).

So to those who say that Provost Jones’ apology is inadequate, my answer would be: of course it is inadequate. Every act of penitence, including yours and mine, is inadequate. We know ourselves in part, as if through a glass darkly, and in this world will make limited progress in understanding why we act as we act. But every act of penitence is also a beautiful thing, especially when it comes from those who have to do so in public, exposing their shortcomings and sins to the whole mocking social-media world. (Some of those who are currently lambasting or smh-ing at Jones should perhaps do better to be on their knees in gratitude that their own sins and shortcomings have not played out on so well-lit a stage.)

So why not see an apology such as this not as the conclusion to something, but rather the beginning of something? President Ryken has asked Wheaton’s Board of Trustees to begin an inquiry into this whole mess, to try to understand how it became such a mess. I think that process is more likely to bear good fruit if those who feel, and especially those who have genuinely been, most wounded by Wheaton are willing to be patient and hopeful and generous-spirited as the inquiry proceeds, not least because God has been patient and hopeful and generous-spirited with all of us.

January 14, 2016

understanding evangelicalism …

… is hard. Evangelicalism is a much more complex phenomenon than many of its detractors, and for that matter many of its adherents, are willing to acknowledge.

If you have half an hour to spare, listen to this:

Tim Blackmon is the chaplain of Wheaton College. Listen to his message and you’ll understand, I think, why the evangelical movement — which is simply a movement driven by love of the evangelium, the Good News — can’t be mapped onto any of our conventional political categories. It is intensely local and yet wholly cosmpolitan; it is deeply committed to conserving its traditions and yet revolutionary in its social (and personal) implications. It’s a far richer and more complex thing than almost anyone realizes.

January 10, 2016

What I am telling my Wheaton Art students on Monday

It’s strange that even while this controversy has caused so much grief and suffering, you will likely benefit from it, because you will study harder and learn more than you would have otherwise. I count Professor Hawkins a friend and I value her as a colleague, and I do not know what is happening. There is a dramatic contrast between media reports and the principled interfaith conversations that were happening in Wheaton long before all of this began. If it turns out (God grant it) that reconciliation with the administration is in the future, then we will have reason to rejoice. Perhaps principled protest will be required – I don’t know yet. Your and my civil bearing and Christian charity could have a role in bringing the best out of this situation. Please keep praying for that, and remind me to as well. Jesus was fully God and fully human at the same time. With his help (and with Muslim neighbors like ours) it is possible to be fully truthful and fully loving at the same time as well.

So buckle up, and let’s learn some art history. This could be the best semester of your life.

— Matt Milliner, God bless his hopeful heart.

September 1, 2015

Wes Craven appreciation – Chicago Tribune

As a senior at Wheaton, Craven struggled with the neurological disorder known as Guillain-Barre syndrome. For most of the year he was paralyzed from the chest down, unable to attend classes. “I remember feeling terribly down,” he said in the 1997 Tribune interview. “The illness set back my graduation by nearly a year, but the support I received from students and faculty members through that period was so moving to me. People I didn’t know came to visit, to pray for my recovery. To me, their thoughts and prayers represented the best side of Christianity. I’ll never forget that side of Wheaton College. Never.”

— Wes Craven appreciation – Chicago Tribune

July 17, 2014

academic freedom redux

My professional life has been framed by two very different institutions. For the first twenty-two years of my academic career, I taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. In many ways, my time there was a blessing. The UW is an elite academic institution with an extraordinary faculty and world-class resources. During my time there it boasted five Nobel Prize winners, one of the largest libraries in North America, and was ranked by the Economist as one of the top twenty public universities in the world.

I also made several good friends at UW and benefited from a number of genuinely kind colleagues who took sincere interest in my well being, both personal and professional. Finally, I should acknowledge that I flourished there professionally — in certain respects. I was awarded tenure, rose in rank from assistant to associate to full professor, won the university’s distinguished teaching award, and was accorded a prestigious endowed chair in U. S. history.

And yet while I was experiencing a certain measure of professional success, my soul was always deeply divided….

For twenty-two years I accommodated my sense of calling to this secular dogma, bracketing my faith and limiting explicit Christian expressions and Christian reflections to private conversations with students who sought me out. In his book Let Your Life Speak: Listening to the Voice of Vocation, Parker Palmer writes movingly about the costs of such segmentation. Vocation is a calling to a way of life more than to a sphere of life. “Divided no more!” is Palmer’s rallying cry.

If I were to characterize my experience since coming to Wheaton four years ago, these are the words that first come to mind — divided no more. Wheaton is not a perfect place, nor did I expect it to be one when I came here. But I can honestly say that I have experienced much greater academic freedom at Wheaton than I ever did at the secular university that I left.

– My former colleague Tracy McKenzie