Wheaton College has begun the process of firing a tenured professor who believes that Christians and Muslims worship the same god.
Wheaton College, an evangelical college in Illinois, had placed associate professor of political science Larycia Hawkins on administrative leave after she made a controversial theological statement on Facebook that Muslims and Christians worship the same God. The school has now begun the process to fire her due to an “impasse,” it said in a statement released on Tuesday.
Ho-hum. I feel badly for the poor woman — but not too badly; she should have known better than to hang-out with that crowd in the first place.
Some thoughts, in no particular order.
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Christians and Muslims are both monotheists; that is, they both believe there is only one god. They believe different things about that one god, but they believe there is only one god out there. There is only one Donald Trump, for example. What I believe about Donald Trump is that he’s a demagogic asshole, and what some neighbor believes about Donald Trump is that he is exactly the strong man the country needs.
That doesn’t mean we’re talking about different Donald Trumps.
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Evangelicals point to the Doctrine of the Trinity, which Muslims reject, as proof that they worship some other god. Some history is in order.
The first generation of Christians believed all sorts of incompatible things; some of the people going around calling themselves Christians weren’t even monotheists. When Constantine accepted Christianity ~ 315 A.D., it was a political gesture intended to buy internal peace with the growing Christian movement; he continued to worship the Hellene gods. In 325 he figured-out that it wasn’t working because Christians were themselves divided about the nature of the man Jesus, and so he did what any good manager does today: He summoned the bishops and told them to go down to the conference room and hash it out — and that he didn’t want to hear from them again until it was settled.
The First Council of Nicaea was convened by Emperor Constantine the Great upon the recommendations of a synod led by Hosius of Córdoba in the Eastertide of 325. This synod had been charged with investigation of the trouble brought about by the Arian controversy in the Greek-speaking east. To most bishops, the teachings of Arius were heretical and dangerous to the salvation of souls. In the summer of 325, the bishops of all provinces were summoned to Nicaea, a place reasonably accessible to many delegates, particularly those of Asia Minor, Georgia, Armenia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Greece, and Thrace.
This was the first general council in the history of the Church since the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, the Apostolic council having established the conditions upon which Gentiles could join the Church. In the Council of Nicaea, “The Church had taken her first great step to define revealed doctrine more precisely in response to a challenge from a heretical theology.
They couldn’t reach agreement, and eventually gave-up and declared that everybody was right: Jesus was Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
The Doctrine of the Trinity was a political compromise; it makes no sense whatever but enabled the bishops to hit the buffet-line one last time and go home. The first 10-generations of Christians never heard of the Doctrine of the Trinity so, really, I don’t think it should be a Big Deal that Muslims pay it no attention.
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This is probably politically necessary for evangelicals as a matter of affirming to the laity that they possess Eternal Truth and are special, but it is very harmful to the country. Muslims very certainly do believe — and rightly — that they worship the same god as Christians, and they will probably interpret firing the professor as yet more evidence that they aren’t welcome and that striving to assimilate into American life is wasted effort — that Christians regard them with hostility.
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If the average evangelical actually knew anything about his religion and its history, he’d be asking himself whether the man Jesus ever actually existed at all, not waxing indignant that Muslims believe something different.
Religion causes humanity so much grief precisely because its truth-claims are not susceptible of objective resolution, and this unhappy drama is a good example of the reason that we should all wish to be done with “faith.” It is not a virtue, but an engine of human misery.