As Orthodoxy has gained a more visible presence within evangelical colleges and seminaries, new questions have surfaced on whether Orthodox teachings are in conflict with evangelical statements of faith. The Orthodox conversions of at least ten evangelical college faculty have pushed onto the front burner the debate among evangelicals of whether Orthodox teachings are in conflict with essential Protestant theology (CT, Jan. 6, 1997, p. 32).
Faculty and top administrators at evangelical institutions are commonly required to sign a statement of faith. Individuals who are unable to sign the statement might not be hired or could lose their jobs. In recent instances, professors at two schools have faced administrators who questioned the compatibility of Orthodox dogma with the doctrinal statements at those schools.
Edward Rommen, a recent covert to Orthodoxy, says he resigned from Columbia Biblical Seminary at Columbia (S.C.) International University (CIU) at the end of last fall’s semester after the university’s president asked him to leave.
At Biola University in La Mirada, California, administrators appointed a committee of Talbot Seminary faculty to look into the Orthodox faith after trustees and a student raised questions about whether three Orthodox faculty members, all of them converts, could still subscribe to the school’s statement of belief and doctrine.
The Biola committee’s report, completed a month before the end of the school year, concluded that the teachings found in Orthodox literature are incompatible with Biola’s stated positions on the doctrine of justification and the authority of Scripture. The report found that Orthodox teaching explicitly denies justification by faith alone and that it requires good works and the necessity of sacramental rites for salvation.
Threatened with dismissal after the report, the Orthodox faculty, with two Orthodox theologians who teach at Fuller Theological Seminary, met with Biola administrators and members of the faculty committee two weeks after the report’s release. They rejected the report’s conclusions, arguing that literature cited by the faculty committee did not reflect the true position of their church and maintained that other Orthodox literature contained views of justification and the authority of Scripture compatible with Biola’s doctrinal statement.
Following that meeting, Biola provost Sherwood Lingenfelter recommended to president Clyde Cook that the faculty members be retained while the two sides clarify “what theological hurdles must be overcome for further opening of the Biola community to Orthodox Christians.”
“These men showed me a dynamic side of the Orthodox church that I hadn’t seen in the literature,” Lingenfelter told CT. “It seemed to me that the Orthodox church in the U.S. is more open to evangelicals. They seemed much closer on the critical issues than what we’d read in the literature.”
UNWELCOME CONVERSION: Former CIU professor Rommen grew up in the Evangelical Free Church and spent nearly 15 years as a missionary and seminary professor for that denomination in Germany. On returning to the United States, he taught at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, for eight years before joining CIU’s faculty in 1994.
He joined the Orthodox church in May 1997, even though he detected 10 points of difference between Orthodox theology and CIU’s doctrinal statement. According to Rommen, the only substantive difference concerns end-times teaching: the school holds a premillennial position while the Orthodox are amillennial.
When the fall semester began, Rommen, who had signed a five-year contract that went into effect in June 1997, informed seminary dean Ken Mulholland of his conversion. In November, the school agreed to allow Rommen to teach for a two-year trial period.
Rommen says he received strong support from faculty members and students, who urged Mulholland to keep him. But university president Johnny Miller told Rommen to resign at the end of the fall semester or face dismissal at the board of trustees meeting in February.
Though Rommen says he believes the president’s primary concerns involved constituency reaction to the presence of an Orthodox professor, Miller says his primary concerns were doctrinal. Miller says that Rommen from the beginning understood the doctrinal issues. Miller says, “I think the same thing would be true for a person who claimed to be an evangelical Catholic—what part is evangelical and what part is Catholic?”
CHARISMATIC CONVERTS: The conversions of evangelical faculty members to Orthodoxy reflect how some disenchanted evangelicals have been drawn to Orthodoxy’s ancient liturgy, historic creeds, and family-supportive environment. According to Bradley Nassif, an administrator and adjunct professor of Eastern Orthodoxy at Fuller Seminary, Antiochian Orthodoxy has 200 North American parishes and 350,000 members and has become home to many Orthodox converts. About 75 percent of its clergy are converts, says Nassif, a lifelong Orthodox Christian.
Among the evangelical professors who have converted to Orthodoxy, many are charismatic. Nearly all say they found Orthodox worship more reverent and more God-centered, and they appreciate the emphasis on formalized prayers and strict preparation for worship. “This is not entertainment, not tickling the ears of those who attend,” says Rommen.
Evangelical converts also point out that Orthodox beliefs have remained essentially the same for nearly two millennia. “The Orthodox church hasn’t changed,” says Oral Roberts University (ORU) engineering professor Dave Baumann, who converted four years ago.
DOCTRINAL DIFFERENCES: Orthodox beliefs and practices differ from evangelicals in areas such as veneration of saints and of Mary, prayers for the dead, the use of icons, church governance, the prominence of church tradition, the process of sanctification, and the Old Testament Canon.
But the statements of faith within many evangelical institutions were created in contrast to Roman Catholicism, secularism, liberal Christian theology, as well as to define further the tenets of evangelicalism.
Biola sociology professor Richard Flory, who has studied the development of evangelical education extensively, says statements of faith for schools not tied directly to a particular denomination tend to be broadly written, glossing over differences on less essential theological points to include faculty members from a cross section of Protestant traditions.
“There was disagreement on some issues, but they were agreed on the major issues—the authority of Scripture, the deity of Christ, salvation,” Flory says. As Orthodoxy becomes a more significant influence, Flory predicts schools will be forced to reassess their theological identity. “Schools have to decide,” Flory says, “if they want to be only Protestant and evangelical, or if they are going to be open to anyone who believes what the Bible teaches.”
A move to map the uncharted territory between evangelicalism and Eastern Orthodoxy is being undertaken at Fuller Seminary, where Nassif is director of academic programs for Fuller’s Southern California extension campus. According to Fuller provost Russ Spittler, leaders from Fuller and the Antiochian church are discussing the creation of an Eastern Orthodox studies program at the seminary.
In 1990, Nassif founded and now heads the Society for the Study of Eastern Orthodoxy and Evangelicalism, a scholarly association that explores both religious communities. Nassif hopes the discussions at Fuller will lead to the creation of a degree-track program for aspiring Orthodox priests and other students.
But Spittler expects Fuller to move slowly on that decision. Among the many areas of potential tension are the role of women in ministry and the strained relations between Orthodox and evangelicals in Orthodox-majority countries, such as Russia.
Fuller has firm commitments to women’s ordination as well as world evangelization. Orthodoxy does not allow ordination of women. And, in some parts of the world, Orthodox leaders have actively opposed Protestant evangelical outreach. “The behavior of the Orthodox on the grand scene, in other parts of the world, gives us some pause,” Spittler says. While Nassif admits that a cooperative educational alliance between American evangelicals and Orthodoxy will be opposed by some on both sides, it is “nevertheless a timely and worthy goal to pursue.”
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