“Seeking Truth: Three Views on the Calvin Approach to Academic Freedom” by Anthony Diekema, George Marsden and Nicholas Wolterstorff, The Calvin Spark, Winter 2009
“Can Homosexuals Be Christian?” by C. Michael Patton, Reclaimingthemind.org, January 4, 2010
“Love of Unimaginable Proportions” by Mark Galli, ChristianityToday.com, March 4, 2010.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
A Calvin College panel on academic freedom, comprised of a former president and two former professors of the school, respond to the trustees’ attempt to limit the range of acceptable views on homosexuality that Calvin employees might express.
Marsden, a world-class historian who taught there for 20 years, points out: “All academic communities, whether secular or religious, have their bounds,” as illustrated, he notes, by political correctness, speech codes and selectively privileged “diversity”.
Wolterstorff, a world-class philosopher who taught at Calvin for 30 years and has been a keynoter for Evangelicals Concerned, agrees with Marsden: “Every college and university places limits on what it allows its faculty to say and do.” Focusing on the board’s ruckus over homosexuality, he notes that Calvin faculty members sign the historic Reformed confessions but do not sign allegiance to Calvin’s Christian Reformed denomination: “Every employee of the CRC has always been free to criticize positions of the church.” He explains: “Deep in the Reformed tradition is an aversion to rule by persons and a strong preference for rule by law and due procedure.” Citing Kuyper’s idea of sphere sovereignty in the Calvin tradition of academic freedom, he shares his own experience of “total freedom” in his field of philosophy, e.g., his public criticism of the Vietnam War and his public support of the cause of the Palestinians – two unpopular views in the CRC. “Academic freedom at Calvin is a unique and precious heritage,” he observes. “It has been and remains the envy of every other conservative Christian college in the land. I have often heard the envy expressed.”
He closes by affirming: “It is Jesus Christ as revealed in Holy Scripture whom you and I ultimately serve, not American society, not the American state, not any political party, not our academic guilds, not the Christian Reformed Church, not the Heidelberg Catechism, not even the Reformed tradition – Jesus Christ as revealed in Holy Scripture. Your freedom, as scholars and teachers at Calvin College, is fidelity in His service.”
Patton, a Dallas Seminary grad, is “primary contributor” to the blog of his Reclaiming the Mind apologetics ministry.
He repeatedly declares that “homosexuality is a terrible sin”, “a terribly destructive one,” and assures readers that he “in no way endorse[s] homosexual behavior or seek[s] to relativise its abominable standing before the Lord.” He’s also insistent that lifelong homosexuals “are not necessarily excluded from the Kingdom of God.” Asking rhetorically, “Can sinners be Christians?”, he responds: “Is there any other kind?” To those who grant that, sinners can be Christians but they must overcome homosexuality, Patton points to the fact that none of us overcomes all of what he calls our sinful “bents,” adding, “I don’t believe that those who have that bent should be seen differently than others.” Yet Patton, himself, sees homosexuals differently.
Given his own heterosexuality and his lack of theological preparation for a better understanding of homosexuality, Patton’s heart is nonetheless in the right place. But just as he knows his own heterosexuality is more than a “bent” – he joys in being “married to the most beautiful gal in the world” – he fails to see another’s homosexuality as more than a “bent”. So he fails to relate Golden Rule love to those he rightly assumes were exposed to “genetics, upbringing and influences” to which he was not. He fails to realize that sexual orientation, whether heterosexual or homosexual, is an inherent need for a cherishing intimacy with one’s own “most beautiful gal [or guy] in the world.”
Galli is senior managing editor of Christianity Today. His essay rebuts “the quid pro quo god” heresy, i.e., the belief in a god “who does something for us if we do something for him.” He grants that, “we’re all disciples of the quid pro quo god to one degree or another”. Galli mentions the pain experienced by this god’s worshippers – a woman who assumes she’ll be punished for continuing to listen to classical music and for collecting vintage copies of Vogue, a pastor who fears God won’t bless his church unless he stops looking at porn, and he might have included a 14-year-old Christian kid who’s terrified he’ll be tortured in hellfire forever unless he somehow stops being gay. Galli says that, “most of the time, we realize this is a demonic lie”, reminding his readers that our God graciously gives rain to all, and “it has nothing to do with our behavior.”
He quotes Barth: “Man is no longer seriously regarded by God as a sinner. … He has died to sin; there on the cross of Golgotha. … The turn has been achieved once and for all.” Galli adds that, while we need to discern how we live, “the cardinal rule of the Christian life is not ‘do this and don’t do that,’ but ‘all things are lawful but not all things are profitable.’” He urges rejection of the false god because “a god who punishes when we do wrong … could never be a father, let alone my father.” He urges that when we pray to our Father, as Jesus taught us to do, “we’ll soon find ourselves in the presence of a love of unimaginable proportions.”
This is the Gospel, the Good News, the Evangel! But tragically, in Evangelicaland, the preaching is too often propagation of “another gospel”. In exchange for the true Gospel’s Quid Pro Quo – the sacrifice of the sinless Son of God for the sinful sons of Adam and daughters of Eve – there’s the wretchedly self-saving quid pro quo that Galli correctly critiques, the horrible perversion that’s pushed at gay folk who’ve been kicked out or have left the local “communion of saints” that demands they stop being gay or, at least, fake being straight.