A BAPTIST LOOKS AT 'EX CORDE' : A lesson for Catholics? - 'ex corde ecclesiae'

Commonweal, April 5, 2002 by Curtis W. Freeman

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.