Everybody knows by now of the Wheaton faculty member who is being fired for her belief that Muslims and Christians worship the same god, and everybody who is interested in these sorts of matters has volunteered an opinion whether she is right or wrong. As it happens, because this is a theological dispute and not susceptible of objective resolution, there are well-known names on both sides of the question.
What nobody has remarked, so far as I know, is how this matter highlights the innate dishonesty of the sectarian academy. Lecturers at sectarian schools are (almost) universally obliged to sign a statement of faith upholding the school’s position on all manner of theological minutia, and their continued employment by the school is contingent upon not deviating from the prescribed positions; if they do, out they go.
The academics in the sectarian academy are forbidden to think, to revise their beliefs on receipt of new evidence, to be persuaded by reasoned argument. They work in an environment in which the Eternal Truth is known, all settled, and unchanging; their only job is to transmit it without modification.
They are lecturers; they are not scholars, and they are certainly not professors.
Now, it is probably the case that at least some of the faculty do indeed believe the prescribed beliefs to the nth-detail; it is quite certain that many do not — but they can’t say that to their students without finding themselves unemployed. Just how, in that case, is a student to have confidence that a faculty member is responding sincerely to a question and giving him the benefit of his best thinking?
No less importantly, how is a student to consider a theological question in its entirety, from all perspectives, when some points of view are simply, literally, unspeakable?
The sectarian academy is dishonest all the way down to the roots.