I never had Hochschild as a professor, but I have an enormous amount of respect for his colleague Jay Wood, who is quoted briefly in the article and whose sentiments I agree with:
Describing his ex-colleague's conversion as "a real act of intellectual and spiritual courage," philosophy professor W. Jay Wood says Wheaton could enhance its quality by "expanding the extent to which it draws on evangelicals within the major Christian traditions -- Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant."
After all, even Mark Noll, Wheaton's star scholar, says the reformation may be over.
What bothered me the most about the descision to fire Hochschild (which happened over a year ago, despite the recent dateline in the Journal) was that he was still willing to sign the college's statement of faith. Wheaton's president, Duane Litfin, denied that he could do so:
Wheaton's 12-point statement doesn't explicitly exclude Catholics. But its emphasis on Scripture as the "supreme and final authority" and its aligning of Wheaton with "evangelical Christianity" were unmistakably Protestant, Mr. Litfin wrote to Mr. Hochschild in late 2003. Because Catholics regard the Bible and the pope as equally authoritative, a Catholic "cannot faithfully affirm" the Wheaton statement, he continued.
It bothers me a great deal that the administration would decide who can and cannot "faithfully affirm" a statement of faith. This action and others like it on the part of Litfin tend to instill fear and stifle individuality, something that is already problematic at Wheaton.
For all that, Litfin has surprised me as much with his good decisions as with his bad ones, and the Journal's characterization of him is unfair. They mention that he was a "minister from an evangelical church in Tennessee" before becoming college president, without bothering to note that he holds a PhD from Oxford. And so continues the grand media tradition of assuming that all Christians are uneducated southern country bumpkins.
