Via Pam’s House Blend…the implosion at Patrick (you know…that guy who said, "give me liberty or give me death"…) Henry College continues…

Nearly a third of the faculty members at a small evangelical Christian college in Virginia are reportedly leaving the school following disputes with its president over theology and academic freedom.

Christianity Today reports that five full-time faculty members have announced they will not be returning to Patrick Henry College in Purcellville next year. Nine professors have left in the past year, as well as four senior executives in the past 18 months. The departing professors accuse outgoing PHC president Michael Farris of squelching academic freedom on campus and disparaging Calvinist theology. 

According to the school’s statement of doctrinal neutrality, Patrick Henry College "welcomes all people who have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ" and "does not take sides on certain doctrinal matters that often separate … believers." The statement reads: "The College itself is neutral on the doctrinal distinctives which go beyond the points covered in our Statement of Faith and are outside the mission of the College."

This is really starting to remind me of H.L. Mencken’s saying how theology is an attempt to explain the unknowable, in the terms of the not worth knowing.  But then again it’s not the theology that’s the issue here.  This is a fight between two irreconcilable views of what constitutes knowledge.  Not truth…knowledge. 

Think of it as the difference between sitting like a couch potato in front of your TV set, passively receiving information, verses looking through a pile of books in your local library for the answer to some question you have.  The TV tells us everything it thinks we need to know.  We don’t get to ask it questions, we just trust and receive.  It takes a little sweat sometimes to find what you’re looking for at a library.  You have to work for it.  The answers don’t just jump off the shelves into your lap.  And sometimes the books contradict one another, and you have to judge between them.  On the one hand you have those who believe that knowledge is something that is revealed to us.  On the other, those who believe knowledge is something that is searched for and discovered.  Knowledge as something that is given to us, and which we should regard as a gift, verses knowledge as something we have worked to uncover, and must treat with care, because we are fallible.  We do not have the perfect God’s eye view.

Once upon a time, Baptists generally found the latter view more agreeable.  The Truth is out there…but we all have to find our way to it ourselves, and take a measure of humility with us along the way. 

Well…not anymore…

Farris, a Baptist minister, has publicly expressed views that have shocked some professors and students. "He said St. Augustine was in hell," said Root. "I heard it with my own ears." Other professors and students said Farris has repeatedly disparaged Calvinist theology.

"There is a sense that you face antagonism as someone who is theologically Reformed," said Bates, who sparred with Farris over a speech he was planning to deliver at the college’s annual Faith and Reason Lecture, and again over the use of Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology textbook. According to Bates, Farris considered it "too Reformed."

"We are put in a hard position," said Bates. "We’re told this is an open dialogue, but if you engage in open dialogue, you’re in trouble. It’s infuriating because you’re an academic and want to engage in ideas."

Bates said that at a meeting with Farris, "He told me that a person of the Reformed position to which I hold cannot in good conscience sign the statement of faith. When I responded that I failed to see the discrepancy between the two, he replied, ‘I define the statement of faith.’"

I define the statement of faith…  Okay.  Well I guess we know who the source of all knowledge and truth Really is now…