Scot McKnight: February 2006 Archives

2/28 update on Bob Robinson, and a call to prayer and fasting:

Linda Robinson reports that the ICU nurses had Bob sitting up in a chair this morning! He was calm, alert, non-verbally responsive, and showed various emotions (happy to see people, sad about his current state, etc.). Two good bowel movements show that his digestive system seems to be working well again. He kept trying to speak, but because of the respirator he can't do so. He was also trying to write, but couldn't hold the pen tightly enough because of swelling and all the needles and tubes attached. He could understand that Linda was only permitted to stay for a certain amount of time, and was watching the clock--he clearly didn't want her to leave. All of this is very encouraging!

Yesterday we had decided to set Friday, March 3, aside as a CCO day of prayer and fasting for Bob. This good news only makes us more committed to coming before the Lord to thank Him for this progress in Bob's condition and to implore God for a full recovery for Bob. If you are willing and able, please consider skipping a meal or two and/or setting aside time to pray especially for Bob. Here in the CCO office, we've scheduled three optional prayer meetings in the conference room:

9:00 to 9:30 AM
12:00 to 12:30 PM
3:30 to 4:00 PM

You may want to schedule some time individually or with others to pray for Bob on Friday. Keep him in prayer at other times, too!
Herb Kolbe

I weighed in some time back when Wheaton fired a philosophy professor who converted to Roman Catholicism but who said, in spite of what the President of Wheaton thought, that he could sign the doctrinal statement in all good faith. Now my alma mater, Cornerstone University, has fired a Roman Catholic -- but the person worked in technology and was not a professor. So the newspaper reports. Correct me if I've got anything wrong. I hope President Rex Rogers has an explanation for this somewhere. (Scroll down to "21 Feb o6 Students respond to firing of Grave.) (HT: Greg Mutch.)

Or read it here:

Students respond to firing of Graves, WOOD-TV 8 story Sarah Heth 21.FEB.06 There has been a lot of talk around campus about the IT staff member fired, allegedly, because he was Catholic. Reactions have been angry, upset, disappointed, and unbelieving. One might wonder, what with so many Protestant students on campus, what the Catholic students on campus think about all of this. The Herald caught up with six such students to get their response on the now infamous event.

Alex Marzolino, a Cornerstone sophomore who grew up in the Catholic church (although he would not consider himself a practicing Catholic now), and whose family is still Catholic, first reacted with disbelief. “When I first heard about it, I didn’t believe it,” he said.

When he realized it was not a joke, Marzolino was not happy. “I don’t think it’s right. It’s still a Christian religion. Other schools hire people of different denominations-why can’t we?”

He was not alone in those feelings. Ashlee Ducat agreed. “I don’t think it was right, because if he’s a practicing Catholic, he’s going to church, and that’s what he put down on his application.” She went on, "There are a handful of Catholic students here. What are they going to do, kick us out next? I just didn’t think it was fair.”

Jason Binder, a senior, was also disappointed in the affair. “In a nutshell,” he said, “I feel like the school often times doesn’t think about how some actions play out in the future. I don’t think they realize this affects the value of each student’s degree.”

Andrew Lindquist, a junior at Cornerstone, wasn’t angry because they fired him, but that they hired him first. “I wouldn’t be mad if they had said first off that he couldn’t have a job,” he said. “I’m more mad that after two days, they said ‘you have to give up your church attendance.’ I thought maybe they’d have looked at it and picked up on it before they hired him.”

Another junior, Kate Fedoruk, had similar thoughts. “I…feel like, if it was something that was such a big deal, they should have noticed it first off,” she said.

Sami Jo Greiner, a sophomore, felt that because he got hired, this was actually a personnel problem. “I take it for what it is: a guy who was hired when he shouldn’t have been. It’s not his fault, it’s the fault of the person who hired. We need not discuss our policy, but we need to discuss the person who did the hiring, and why something like that slipped through,” she said.

Most of the students felt that the man’s denomination (Catholic) shouldn’t matter. Laura Carlson is a freshman who, like Marzolino, grew up in the Catholic church, has a family that is Catholic, but would not consider herself a practicing Catholic anymore. “I really thought that it was just ridiculous because you can’t know a person’s true faith by simply their denomination,” she said. “There can be Catholics that have just as great of faith as Protestants.”

Fedoruk, who is “not Catholic anymore, but I still respect it,” said “If he wasn’t a Christian, that would be a different situation, but if it’s simply a different denomination, then it shouldn’t matter. They both believe in the same God, so I don’t see what the big deal is…Your worship style is different than mine, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t still love you and respect you.”

One big thing some of the students had a problem with was the fact that he was a technology staff member. “He’s only a web designer,” said Fedoruk. “He’s not teaching theology. That’s what I can’t get over.”

Lindquist agreed that he had a problem with “the fact that he didn’t have any interaction with the students.” Carlson felt the same way. “Especially because it’s a tech position,” she said, “and his faith isn’t going to affect as many people.”

The students also felt that they have not gotten all the information about the situation. “I guess I’d like to see the school say something more about it,” Binder said.

“We don’t have all the facts,” Greiner said. “We just have to wait for the facts to come to us.”

Here's the earlier story:

Katie Stanfield & Luke Stier 14.FEB.06 Late last week, WOOD-TV 8 ran a news story accusing Cornerstone University of firing Tony Graves because of his Catholic faith. The WOOD-TV 8 report aired on Thursday, Feb. 9 during the 6 p.m. news and again Sunday, Feb. 12. During that report, Graves said that Cornerstone University officials gave him an ultimatum: “I was told to deny my religion, change my religion, or get fired,” Graves said.

WOOD-TV 8 acquired a tape recording from Graves of the meeting in which he was fired. On the recording played during the news report a man, who Graves claims is a university official, said, “You could opt to change your church attendance to one that falls within that definition of a theologically conservative and evangelical, biblical church.”

Graves had applied for a job in the Information Systems department at Cornerstone. Because of school policy, which requires all staff and faculty to attend an “evangelical, biblical church,” all applicants are required to list the name of the church they attend as well as sign the Cornerstone confession of faith. Although Graves listed a Catholic church, the name of which has not been disclosed, on his application, the Cornerstone official who hired him failed to see this until two days after he had been employed at the university. The Herald was unable to learn the name of this official.

Once the church attendance issue had been discovered, Graves was told that he would have to change his religious affiliation or the university would have to terminate his employment. On the recording of that meeting, the same voice can be heard telling Graves, “You would not have been hired in the first place because of the church attendance policy requirement.”“I chose to stick with my religion.” At that time, after only two days on the job, Graves was fired by Cornerstone University.

Jeff Herman, director human resources, said, “We have a process we go through [when hiring new employees]. We try to follow it as best we can. It is a process.” Herman felt that overall the university handled the situation in a “professional, appropriate way. We are who we are.”

WOOD-TV 8 reported that Graves had filed an employment discrimination lawsuit with the Kent County Circuit Court. The case was, however, settled out of court and because of a settlement noindisclosure agreement between the two parties reached this past January, neither side can talk specifically about the case. However, Rex M. Rogers, president of Cornerstone University, told The Herald that the timing of the situation was “relatively recent.” WOOD-TV Target 8 investigator Henry Erb said that the interviews conducted with Graves were from last June and at no point during the story would Cornerstone officials talk to the station.

Although law prohibits hiring discrimination based on religious beliefs, there are rights set forth to protect religious organizations in these cases. According to Timothy Visser, attorney and adjunct business law professor at Cornerstone University, the school falls into this category. “A religious organization like the college has a religious right,” he said.

Rogers said that he was pleased with the way the situation was handled once the error had been discovered. “Our people handled this matter professionally and appropriately with a Christian spirit,” he said. “They did a very good job.” He also cautioned the Cornerstone community from jumping to conclusions about the situation. “When you hear or see something on the news you’re getting a very limited piece of information, or even misinformation,” he said.

Commenting on e-mails he had received from members of the CU community, he said, “I cautioned those I wrote back to about making snap judgments. They don’t have all the details.”

During an interview with The Herald, Rogers stressed that the university’s employment policies are a matter of self-definition, not judgment. “What we don’t want to imply is that because we’ve defined ourselves a certain way that means we’re pointing fingers at somebody else,” he said.

Other Christian colleges, such as Calvin, have similar hiring standards for faculty members, but the standards for staff members at some of these institutions are more lenient. When asked why Cornerstone holds the standards it does, Rogers said, “A staff member at this institution can be just as influential in modeling and teaching a biblical worldview, and ministering to and counseling a student as any faculty member. We want all of our community to be involved in our mission and thoroughly supportive and committed to the same belief system.”

When asked why these principles do not apply equally to students, why, for example, Catholic students are invited to attend the university, Rogers said, “Students are receivers of the product, not the deliverers of the product.”

Rogers said he sees the situation as the university being true to its core values and beliefs. “If the message someone takes away from it is that Cornerstone is faithful to its faith, then OK,” he said.

Peter's readers are exhorted to put behind them their previous lifestyles -- and the sins of that lifestyle are communal-distortions: malice, deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and slander. Getting rid of sins is not the whole story: growth in grace is both ridding ourselves of sin and acquiring something new. What is that something new?

Notice what Peter says in 2:1-3. In sum it is this: by feasting on the Lord Jesus they are to be nurtured into salvation. But this leaves us with a distinctive note in Peter's letter: salvation is largely something in the future instead of something in the now. It is, to be sure, both now and later, but his focus is that salvation is something we await.

By feasting on the Lord, the way infants feast on milk, his readers are to "grow into salvation." They've been purified, they've been sprinkled, they've been ransomed -- but salvation is something they are growing into. And it is something they will find at the End of Time: 1:5 is a good example.

How to get there? Desire the Lord. Why? Because he is tasty. Peter's language is clever and potent. They can expect that their yearnings for feasting on the Lord will lead to salvation because "you have tasted that the Lord is good." The word translated here "good" in Greek is chrestos and it clearly a pun: The "Christ" is "chrestos" -- sweet, good-tasting, good.

Good food leads to growth. The "goodest" food for these Christians was Jesus himself.

Peter's strategy for living out the gospel in the Roman Empire was to create a community that feasted on the Lord for its growth and that learned to put social sins behind: put off and put on is Peter's strategy.

What makes this emerging? Because Peter is working out a theology of how the Church relates to the State in his day and in his way. These are powerless people; powerless people have to be good if they wish to influence the State; Peter calls them, therefore, to be good. And they are to be good together -- and this would lead to their salvation.

Some folks, most of them with noble intentions, are vocal and vehement critics of Emergent. Their targets have especially been Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, and Tony Jones. What should the leaders of Emergent do about their critics?

Well, they could strike back; or they could ignore their critics. I've always thought how one responds to criticism is a good indicator of character and intention. No one gets it right every time, but patterns do emerge. Time tells. Listening and learning lead both to standing firm or changing in light of the discoveries of better truths.

I'll tell what you what Emergent leaders did last week, and I was glad to hear about it. Tony and Doug went out of their way to invite some of their most vocal opponents to dinner. Tony invited me, but there were so many at the table, so much noise in the room, and a group of friends wanted to chat with me about a more pressing issue in their own emerging group that I had to excuse myself. We slipped away for more than an hour of great conversation.

What happened in the meeting of Emergent and its critics is that each of these folks met one another (for the first time in some cases), and they saw one another in flesh and blood, and they heard one another's voices and tones and emphases, and they probably got to liking one another enough that they moved toward reconciliation on some issues (not on all, to be sure). In short, when we see one another as Eikons we have a better chance of treating one another with respect and love.

We'll perhaps hear in the blogworld what took place, but this sort of meeting might just lead to some reconciliation -- which would be good for all of us.

As Peter invites his Asia Minor readers, who are resident aliens and temporary residents, to live the Christian life surrounded by non-believers, how does he define the gospel? One place to begin to answer that question is with 1:22-25. His answer is holistic and missional.

Soul-purification, Peter says, occurs by obeying the truth -- and that truth has to be connected to Peter's general message of the redemptive work in Jesus Christ. "Truth" just might be his capsule summary of 1:3-12, the new birth through the resurrection.

Soul-purification leads to authenticity in community relationships. The community love (the Greek term is philadephia) is not to be tainted or damaged by being insincere or inauthentic.

Soul-purification now shifts a bit to "new birth" (1:23): here Peter draws on 1:3. The new birth of 1:3 was connected to the resurrection; here it is connected to the incorruptible seed through the living Word of God (Jesus) -- supported here by appeal to Isaiah 4o:6-7.

And Peter says "this" is the "word" with which we "evangelized you".

What is that "word"? That word is the declaration of Jesus Christ who purifies souls so that a community is formed that authentically loves one another.

The heart of this paragraph is found in 1:22b: "Love one another strenuously out of a purified/cleansed heart." Soul-purification has its goal in loving one another and the means of that purification, the new birth, is the ground out of which this love grows. In this verse we find the center -- grammatically and notionally -- of the passage: new birth creates a community that loves one another. Peter has a community gospel.

How, then, will they live in the Roman Empire as a sectarian community? It begins by loving one another through thick and thin. And Peter is not messing around here with some romantic, idyllic sense of community: the word he uses is "strenously" (ektenos): the notion is stretching one's neck as one strains for the finishing line, or straining one's efforts to get the job done, or working at it because it is hard.

Loving one another sounds good on paper. To ape the words of CS Lewis: "Loving one another is a great idea, until you have someone you don't like that you are summoned to love." Peter knew this, and he made it the goal of what the redemptive work of the gospel accomplishes.