Last week, James K. A. Smith—a prominent theologian among evangelicals and an influential philosophy professor at Calvin University—proposed that the school sever ties with the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC). As a Calvin alumnus and a pastor in the CRC, I read this with genuine sadness.
The CRC founded Calvin in 1876 as a ministry of the church, which means it reports to and takes direction from the CRC synod. However, Calvin has historically allowed faculty to take exceptions to the Reformed confessions.
Three years ago, synod voted to affirm the CRC’s historical position that “unchastity” in the Heidelberg Catechism includes homosexuality. Last summer, synod tasked Calvin’s board with developing “language and processes in alignment with those in the CRC.”
Recently, the board told the CRC that it valued their “deep and enduring relationship” and proposed, among other things, that the school discontinue offering a template for the expression of confessional difficulties. Instead, the exceptions would be granted on a case-by-case basis.
Last week, Smith responded. In as many words, he proposed that Calvin ask the CRC for a divorce. As a pastor for 16 years, I know the ugliness of that word and have developed a pastoral curiosity about the pain that lies behind such requests. In this case, that institutional and personal pain is real, and I don’t wish to discount it. I also don’t want to relitigate theological issues of human sexuality or ecclesiastical issues of confessional gravamina that animate the discussion’s front edges. But I do want to engage the central issue.
Smith contends that Calvin’s ongoing alignment with a confessional denomination hinders and doesn’t help the school live out its educational mission. The best way for the university to stay capacious is to break covenant with the church. The proffered way for faith to continue to seek understanding is for the academy to sever ties with the ecclesia.
I respectfully disagree. I do so informed by what I regard as a more honest view of history, a distinctively theological approach to academic freedom, and a hopeful case study of an alternative approach.
History as a Pedagogy of Patience
Smith isn’t arguing that Calvin has never been served by its connection to the CRC. Rather, he argues that Calvin is no longer served by connection to what he views as the newly confessionally defined denomination the CRC has become. In response, I don’t grant the premise that the CRC has fundamentally changed its approach either to confessionality in general or to human sexuality in particular. And I object to Smith’s uncharitably dismissive attitude of sisters and brothers in Christ in the present CRC as anti-intellectual. That isn’t the ethos I see among my colleagues or congregants.
In addition to making a caricature of the present CRC, Smith makes a caricature of its past. He’s insufficiently curious about historic tensions between the church and academy. Almost since Calvin’s founding as a seminary, synods have wrestled with the boundaries of sphere sovereignty under the shared grammar of scriptural authority. The past held no panacea.
Yet the college and the denomination valued each other enough to press through the challenges. Smith’s jump to divorce appears more in step with our contemporary cultural liturgy of division than with the enduring practices of long-suffering and respect or of a gracious dialectic that approaches such discussions as opportunities for shared discipleship.
Academic Freedom as a Function and Fruit of Christian Community
Smith’s proposal to sever ties assumes that deep, confessional commitment on the part of a denomination is inimical to Calvin’s ambitious kingdom vision. On the contrary, the CRC’s confessional commitment provides generative resources for that same project. That conviction is rooted in a Reformed understanding of the nature and function of academic freedom.
As framed in the American Association of University Professors’ seminal 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, “The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free expression.” Such a conception finds its genesis in an Enlightenment epistemology: Truth is best discovered by the application of human reason and empirical observation, unfettered by imposition from outside authority.
In contrast, the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities grounds academic freedom in creational intelligibility and human identity while recognizing the noetic effects of sin. Christian conceptions of academic freedom find their source and limits in God’s revelatory action in both his world and his Word, mediated in the discernment and accountability of the community of faith. As George Marsden observes, “Intellectual inquiry always takes place within the context of particular communities, traditions, and unproven assumptions.”
Finding grounding and accountability in the communal discernment of a confessional denomination is thus not an imposition on Calvin’s academic freedom but rather a vital dimension of it. Faithful submission to Scripture—understood in the CRC as the truth summarized in the confessions—results in more academic freedom and rigor, not less, as it grounds human inquiry in divinely revealed truth. As we communally run in the path of God’s commands, our understanding is broadened (Ps. 119:32).
Dordt University: A Case Study
There’s another way. The congregation I pastor is in a small college town in the northwest corner of Iowa. Surrounded by acres of corn, Dordt University is one expression (along with Calvin as well as Trinity Christian College, King’s University, and Redeemer University) of the CRC’s manifold kingdom vision for higher education. Founded in 1955, Dordt is an affiliated school of the CRC. While it isn’t tied to the CRC by its corporate ownership, it is in its board governance.
Faithful submission to Scripture results in more academic freedom and rigor, not less, as it grounds human inquiry in divinely revealed truth.
I served on the Dordt board for nine years, most of them as chair of its academic affairs committee. That gave me a front-row seat to a constructive paradigm of church and academy. Rather than approaching a vital connection with the church as a burden, Dordt approaches it as a blessing. It wasn’t uncommon to reference James Tunstead Burtchaell’s Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches as a cautionary tale of the almost inevitable result of the sort of church-academy divorce that Smith proposes.
The beneficial effects of such links go beyond the organizational benefits of students and funding that Smith both references and dismisses as unimportant. There’s also a theological mystery. The body of Christ isn’t a concept; it’s a community, as embedded in time and space as the second person of the Trinity was in Bethlehem’s manger or Calvary’s cross. It can be refracted into diverse denominational communities but not abstracted into diverse theological systems.
For example, First Methodist Church, as an incarnational community, is part of the body of Christ. Methodism, as an abstracted theological system of belief, isn’t. When Smith proposes using “Reformed Christian,” which locates Calvin within a theological system of thought, instead of “Christian Reformed,” which locates Calvin within an actual community of churches, he’s proposing a qualitatively different connection to Christ. By remaining vitally connected to an actual expression of Christ’s body, in this case the CRC, Calvin remains vitally committed to the very Christ in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17).
At Dordt, the living ecclesiastical linkage finds institutional expression in professors who still covenant to demonstrate commitment to Christian education, seek membership in theologically resonant congregations, and enthusiastically engage in life and scholarship within a shared confessional approach to doctrine and life. Dordt is enriched. So is the church.
Better Prescription
The pain that Smith speaks from is real. But his prescription is wrong. If Calvin wants to deepen its project as a Reformed expression of higher education, severing an almost 150-year relationship with the confessional Reformed denomination that gave it birth isn’t the path to get there.
Rather than divorce, this is a time for the academy and church to again lean in together to a common Lord. Rooted in separate spheres in the same virtues of honesty, humility, and submission, Calvin and the CRC have a symbiotic mission: serving Christ, who is preparing his Bride for her wedding day.