A BAPTIST LOOKS AT 'EX CORDE' : A lesson for Catholics?

Why should Catholics care about what goes on among the Baptists? Odd as it may seem, Southern Baptists and Roman Catholics may have more in common than first meets the eye. The new revised Southern Baptist Convention sometimes looks more like an authoritarian stereotype of the late medieval curia than their Free Church forebears, while Vatican II calls for the embodiment of the priesthood of all believers in a way that would have surprised and pleased the Reformation radicals. Moreover, the most recent controversies over theological orthodoxy in America's two largest religious bodies have many of the same social and political dynamics at play. Since the Baptists have for the most part settled their conflict and Catholics are in the midst of trying to resolve theirs, maybe there is something worth talking about after all.

Several years ago I joined a group of Baptist professors for a joint meeting with a Catholic theological society. Many of us were casualties of the battles that had purged our institutions of their supposed liberalism. We came at the invitation of our Catholic colleagues, and were unaware of the initial rumblings of Ex corde ecclesiae and its requirement that teachers of theology "must have a mandatum from competent ecclesiastical authority" (Canon 8.12). The next year our societies again met jointly. This time we listened to speeches by university administrators and church officials who spoke of the essential relationship between faith and learning, interlacing their talks with references to the mandatum. They discussed Ex corde, which asserts: "Catholic theologians, aware that they fulfill a mandate received from the church, are to be faithful to the magisterium of the church as the authentic interpreter of Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition." To the once-burned but twice-wise Baptists, the whole scenario seemed like a surrealistic rerun of our own struggle where professors were being forced to teach "consistent with and not contrary to" a certain confessional statement.

"The Battle for the Bible" began in Baptist life in the 1970s with the publication of Harold Lindsell's book of the same name. Fundamentalist shrills warned that unless the convention took action, our schools would soon go the way of such former Baptist citadels of higher learning as the University of Chicago and Brown. Like the prophet Elisha they warned of "death in the pot" (2 Kings 5:40) that would poison the faith. Liberalism, they intoned, would erode the biblical foundations and send our institutions cascading down the slippery slope toward the chaos of socialism, Darwinism, and atheism. The resolve had to be uncompromising and decisive. Those who still held to the fundamentals were challenged to do battle royal for the truth. In the 1980s a great fundamentalist army rose up, and by the 1990s they successfully drove the Philistines from the Baptist Zion.

There were, to be sure, significant differences between the Baptist and the Catholic controversies. For one, the Catholic conversations were more orderly and the tone more civil than ours had been. The institutions at stake for the Catholics were their universities, and for the Baptists it was primarily our seminaries. The Catholic hot buttons mostly concerned issues of moral theology. Ours had to do with subjects of biblical interpretation. And of course there was the small matter of polity. They had a pope and a curia. We had a convention and a confession of faith. Still there was an eerie similitude too striking to ignore in the interplay between religious authority and academic freedom. Our professors were being dismissed. Would theirs be? There was a chilling effect on intellectual life. Would Catholics suffer a similar fate?

Of course to anybody who knows anything about Baptists and Catholics, the suggestion that they are even remotely similar seems ridiculous. What two religious groups could be any more different? In Baptist life when it comes to matters of faith and practice, as long as it doesn't lead to dancing, everybody gets to vote regardless of whether they know anything or not. For Catholics the guys in the dresses and pointy hats decide everything. But when it comes to questions of how to relate to the academic institutions they support, Catholics and Baptists both reflect the ethos of their common democratic culture more than the convictions of their particular ecclesiological traditions. In the politics of the academy, boards rule, not churches.

The basic lines of disagreement over Ex Corde and its mandatum are clear enough. On the one hand are those who argue that the bishops must see to it that Catholic theologians uphold their responsibility to teach in harmony with the church. On the other are those who emphasize the academic freedom of theologians and the institutional autonomy of universities. Yet both positions are fraught with ambiguities. There is no consensus about who qualifies as "a theologian" or what constitutes teaching "in full communion." Moreover, academic freedom is an Enlightenment chimera and autonomy is a secular principle, not a Christian virtue. Catholics are polarized around these issues in the struggle for the integrity of their universities. The unresolved question is to what extent academic theologians will have a determinative role in defining the ongoing relation between the church and the university.

In the case of the Southern Baptist seminaries, all boards of trustees are nominated by a committee which is appointed each year by the convention president. The fundamentalist "takeover" was possible because of the overt politicization of this process: only fundamentalist presidents were elected, and only fundamentalist trustees were nominated and subsequently appointed. They in turn forced out nonfundamentalist professors, regardless of tenure. The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith can only imagine what it would be like to wield such power.

Baptist universities are more insulated from political control than the seminaries. The boards of Baptist universities, unlike the seminaries, are not entirely subject to the approval of the state conventions. They retain greater autonomy. Consequently, stronger schools with larger endowments and alumni bases like Baylor, Furman, and Wake Forest have been better situated, and in some cases more willing, to sever ties with their parent conventions and go their own way. Smaller schools, because they are more dependent on the budgetary support and good will of their Baptist constituency, have been more hesitant to bolt.

How then are the Baptist conflicts instructive for Catholics? If a bishop refuses or revokes a mandatum, or a theologian refuses to seek or accept one, the issue for Catholics, as for Baptists, will be resolved by the university board of trustees. Catholic boards may well find themselves in a situation similar to that of their Baptist counterparts in the 1980s, charged with a responsibility to intensify or safeguard the orthodoxy of their institution. Catholic universities may also be pushed to prove their loyalty to the magisterium in the way Baptist seminaries and colleges have been forced to demonstrate their loyalty to the Southern Baptists or state conventions. That this analogy holds may be seen in the fact that Catholic theologians are already adopting postures similar to their Baptist colleagues'. Can Catholic higher education escape the ballyhoo that befell the Baptists? Will Catholic theologians find a way of doing theology that is constructive and faithful, in service to the academy, society, and the church?

I offer the following personal observations in hope that my Catholic colleagues might learn from Baptist mistakes and successes. In the Baptist battles, six distinct types of Christian scholars emerged. Like any typology, these are generalizations, but I believe there is enough truth in them to clarify the events of the past and perhaps even generate new possibilities for the future.

First there were the naive pietists. Uncomfortable with the bellicose rhetoric and overt politics, they attempted to calm things down: "Why can't we all just get along?" It was not so much a question as a directive based in part on nostalgia for the good old days. But as cowboy philosopher Will Rogers rightly observed: "The good old days ain't what they used to be, and they never was." Either the pietists did not or could not see how deep were the theological issues that divided us. University- and seminary-educated ministers gradually embraced a theological perspective that was in tension with the growing ethos of fundamentalism. The naive maintained that we should stop our theological nitpicking and cooperate for the purpose of world missions. But how long can those who are not reconciled continue to walk together on mission? There is little hope that the pietist strategy will work any better in Catholic life than it did for Baptists.

Next there were the wishful thinkers who positioned the controversy in the context of a long tradition of controversy. (Long for Baptists is relative, since our history only goes back four hundred years and not to John the Baptist as some used to teach!) One social critic opined that if conflict is an indication of how much people care, Baptists must care more about their faith than anyone else. The wishful thinking crowd recognized the deep differences between moderates ("liberals") and conservatives ("fundamentalists"), but they thought that the matter would blow over. They were wrong. In view of the history of the Catholic Church, there is even more reason to understand the current crisis as a mere blip on the screen. However, there is little to suggest that it will just go away, at least within the foreseeable future.

Then there were the pragmatic loyalists who sensed the changing winds of doctrine and said: "We've got to try and hold things together." Many of the loyalists suspected that the divisions were deep, yet they were willing to compromise for the good of unity. Some were optimistic. Others were opportunistic. The opportunists were willing to switch their commitments and to champion a retrograde theology if it meant being or staying in power. One fundamentalist wag instructed the convention: "If Baptists believe that pickles have souls, then professors should teach their students that pickles have souls." Some gave in to the pickle pedagogy of the populist sensus fidelium. There appears to be little danger that even the creeping infallibilism of the magisterium will mandate theologians to teach that pickles have souls, although they might be asked to explain why Aquinas thought males were ensouled at forty days and females at eighty. But it is not hard to imagine the shibboleths that may lie ahead if ordinary fallible magisterial teaching is elevated to dogma and de fide truth. Pragmatism is not a good strategy.

The hardened ideologues on both sides figured prominently in our battles. Although Baptist academics tended to lean to the left, there were enough on the right to stoke the fires of controversy. As the arguments became more stereotypical, theologians and scholars increasingly talked past rather than to one another. The rhetoric grew more strident and stigmatizing. The convention became polarized, and the middle ground gradually vanished. There is no shortage of ideologues in American Catholicism. If their voices become dominant, they will poison the discourse and polarize Catholic intellectual life between obscurantist orthodoxy and arcane heterodoxy.

Not to be overlooked in the controversy were the paranoid prognosticators who saw grand conspiracies and sinister plots everywhere. They imputed the very worst of motives to those with whom they disagreed. This is not to suggest that there was no real effort to constrain the freedom of academic theologians. Indeed, the conservative resurgence was aimed at the control of denominational boards, agencies, and institutions. That desire to dominate tended only to foster the paranoia. As academic life grew more removed from the convention, the prognostications became self-fulfilling prophecies. Catholic theologians must be cautious not to portray the bishops as mere curial puppets whose strings are being pulled by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The church must likewise reject the myth of Catholic theologians as radical subversives bent on destroying the faith of impressionable young students.

Finally, and in my view most important, were the mediating theologians. They were servants of the Word and the church, but they also served the goods of scholarship and academic inquiry. These were men and women committed to reconciliation but also to truth. They recognized that not everything conservatives said about the seminaries was wrong nor was all that moderates did to defend them right. The mediating theologians attempted to chart a course beyond liberalism and fundamentalism, which as offspring of modernity were siblings under the skin. Among the Southern Baptists they turned to the practice of writing (and re-writing) the denominational confession of faith. These efforts were unable to reconcile those who demanded an authoritarian imposition of doctrine and others who resisted any authority over the free choice of the individual soul. In the end the authoritarians prevailed by consistently outvoting their opponents, and the libertarians were forced out.

Baptists would have done well to attend to their polity and spirituality in search of ways to attain the unity of the faith as envisioned by John Henry Newman who argued that the consensus of the faithful is the teaching of the infallible church. No doubt Baptists would reformulate Newman's thesis to affirm that the consensus of the faithful is the teaching of the infallible Word. However, it would be a mistake to assume that everything about which we agree is faithful to the Word or that whatever is taught as gospel is infallible. The issue is a matter of finding ways for those who stand together under the life-giving Word to move toward consensus. Such a task today, as in the apostolic community, demands our reception of the Holy Spirit because reconciliation is finally God's work (John 20:22-23). Perhaps the controversy might have turned out differently if Baptists had practiced what Newman preached with mediating theologians leading the way. The fact is that the role of Baptist theologians has become increasingly marginalized from our conventions and congregations. But Catholic theologians have a unique opportunity to shape the direction of their intellectual tradition if they can move the church in the direction of a consensus fidelium that gets beyond authoritarianism and libertarianism.

What then can Catholics learn from the Baptist battles? First, stay in conversation. That Baptist theologians were not able to continue serious discussions with political forces in the convention is partly to blame for our problems. For Catholics there is a window of opportunity. The bishops have invited ongoing dialogue as the process of implementing the mandatum begins. It would be a mistake for theologians to opt out. The bishops displayed good faith in responding to concerns about due process and appeal. If theologians drop out of the conversation at this point, others will step forward to take their place. The bishops' new dialogue partners may not be so theologically articulate or intellectually inclined.

Second, speak the truth. Baptist theologians found it difficult to keep a tension between their integrity as critical scholars and their fidelity to communal convictions. In the end the balance proved too delicate to maintain. One of the needling concerns about Ex corde is that the traffic of truth goes one way: from the magisterium to the world. Catholic theologians are right to worry that the church may not be so easily receptive to truth that issues from the academy and that often is in tension with magisterial teaching. But as Ex corde rightly points out, Catholic theologians also have a responsibility to give account of divine truth to the world--even the academy. They may find this difficult. A mediating course will not always be understood or appreciated. I have cooperated in joint endeavors with a group of Baptist theologians, whose attempts at developing a mediating theology have been described as Calvinist and Catholic, liberal and conservative, Anabaptist and anti-Baptist. Still I am convinced that this is the proper direction.

Third, serve the goods. Catholic theologians face the challenge of trying to show the bishops and the faithful how independent scholarship can serve the goods of the university, society, and the church. Perhaps this was the area in which Baptist academics were most unsuccessful. In all honesty these different publics do not pursue the same goals, but theologians ought to be able to demonstrate that their work is of service to the church, not just the research ideals of the academy or the utilitarian designs of society. Academics are often disingenuous about how in subtle but powerful ways universities serve the liberal democratic principles of liberty and autonomy but are unsympathetic to the convictions and confession of the church. Catholics who fear curial control would do well to ask just how much freedom they might have to pursue certain questions of theology in a secular institution where the search for truth is supposedly open. Those who follow such a research agenda might actually discover that some doors in the university are rightly closed and inquiry is not always free.

Catholic universities on the other hand are one of the few places left in America where scholars can practice what Jean Leclerq once called "the love of learning and the desire for God." My point is not that mediating scholarship is merely the most effective course of action for Catholic theologians. It is the one that in the end is most faithful to the gospel. As one Catholic bishop observed: "There has been more constructive theological conversation in the last five years than in my entire ministry." Such conversation may be a greater mark of success than any procedure that can be implemented. To be sure, our attempts to attain the unity of the truth are faltering at best. So we must set our minds and our hearts heavenward in hope, for as the apostle Paul reminds us: "Jerusalem above is free, and she is our mother" (Galatians 4:26).

Curtis W. Freeman is Research Professor of Theology and director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School. He was visiting professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton in 2001.