Freedom of Speech, Not For Her

[liberty]

To be consistence you have to say this is ok. There have been people who have lost their jobs before for saying an unpopular thing and I don’t remember any outcry then. And here this lady has a job that requires her to promote a certain statement of faith.


http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wheato ... spartandhp

Wheaton is planning to fire professor who said Muslims and Christians worship the same God

© Provided by Washington Post
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.
Hawkins, a tenured political science professor, posted on Facebook that she would wear a hijab during the Advent season in support of Muslims.
“I stand in religious solidarity with Muslims because they, like me, a Christian, are people of the book,” Hawkins wrote on Facebook. “And as Pope Francis stated last week, we worship the same God.”
It’s unclear what specific statement Hawkins was referring to from Pope Francis, though the pontiff said in November that “Christians and Muslims are brothers and sisters.” The Catholic Church has taught since the Second Vatican Council that Muslims and Christians worship one God, though they view Jesus differently.
The theological debate has centered on how evangelicals teach about a Trinitarian God, meaning that they believe in a three-person God — God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — existing as one being. Muslims do not believe in the Trinity.
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“While Islam and Christianity are both monotheistic, we believe there are fundamental differences between the two faiths, including what they teach about God’s revelation to humanity, the nature of God, the path to salvation, and the life of prayer,” the college said in a Dec. 22 statement.
[Opinion: Wheaton’s controversy ignores the school’s own history]
During Hawkins’s administrative review process, which was paused over the holidays, Wheaton administration requested a theological statement, which Hawkins submitted. She was put on leave through the spring semester pending review.
“Following Dr. Hawkins’ written response on December 17 to questions regarding her theological convictions, the College requested further theological discussion and clarification,” the college said in the statement. “However, as posted previously, Dr. Hawkins declined to participate in further dialogue about the theological implications of her public statements and her December 17 response.”
Hawkins has been asked to affirm the college’s statement of faith four times since she started teaching at Wheaton nearly nine years ago, according to the Chicago Tribune. She was called in over a paper on black liberation theology that the provost thought endorsed Marxism, the paper reported. She was reportedly asked to defend a Facebook photo showing her at a party inside a downtown Chicago home the same day as Chicago’s Pride Parade. And she was asked to affirm the college’s statement after suggesting that diversifying the college curriculum should include diplomatic vocabulary for conversations around sexuality, according to the Tribune.
Last month, college officials said in a statement that Hawkins’s administrative leave came from her theological statement that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, not her desire to wear a hijab, her race or her gender. The statement has sparked a larger discussion over theological questions and the identity of the evangelical college where faculty are required to sign a statement of faith. Attempts to reach Hawkins and college administrators on Tuesday were unsuccessful.
[Opinion: Wheaton professor’s suspension is about anti-Muslim bigotry, not theology]
In 2006, a professor of medieval philosophy at Wheaton who converted to Catholicism did not receive a renewed contract on the grounds that he failed to “embody the institution’s evangelical Protestant convictions.”
Wheaton considers conversion to Catholicism reason for dismissal, though Protestantism and Catholicism are more closely linked than Protestantism is to Islam. The difference has theologians like Timothy George, dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, believing that Hawkins’s statement on Facebook post was theologically wrong.
In 2002, George wrote in Christianity Today magazine that the doctrine of the Trinity (God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit) may be Protestantism’s “most neglected doctrine” because of how hard it is to explain. The idea of the trinity contains a paradox: Three divine persons exist as one God.
But was a statement seemingly in conflict with that neglected doctrine enough footing for Wheaton to put Hawkins on administrative leave?
Roy Oksnevad, the director of the Muslim Ministry Program and Wheaton’s Billy Graham Center for Evangelism, says that the difference between the two religions is a significant one.
Oksnevad, an evangelical, told the Post that Christians and Muslims worship the same God “in a very generic sense,” in that they believe that God is eternally existent and all powerful.
“But when it comes down to specific revelation,” Oksnevad said, “there is a huge difference in that (the Christian) God shows himself as a Trinity. Islam says, ‘Sorry, he is not personable nor is he knowable.’”
Oksnevad dealt with the issue of reconciling the faiths of Muslims and Christians in 2008, when he signed a letter by more than 300 Christian leaders around the world in response to another letter by Muslim scholars and clerics urging Christians and Muslims to consider their similarities.
The letter, published by the Yale Divinity School’s Center for Faith and Culture, was titled “Loving God and Neighbor Together: A Christian Response to A Common Word Between Us and You,” referring to the title of the original letter by Muslim scholars. It focused on the similarities between the greatest two commandments of Islam and Christianity: to love God and to love one’s neighbor. Oksnevad approached the president and provost to ask if he should remove his signature and they said he did not need to.
[Donald Trump will speak at Liberty University, where he finds a friend in Jerry Falwell Jr.]
Wheaton’s president in 2008, Duane Litfin and chaplain emeritus Stephen Kellough, and the current provost, Stanton Jones, all signed the letter as well, but later withdrew their signatures.
Litfin told Christianity Today later that he had been too hasty in his decision to sign the letter, and that upon revision, the letter was “not carefully crafted enough” to avoid making theological suggestions that hinted at the possibility of Muslims and Christians worshiping the same God.
He said that the letter may have encouraged the notion that “we are all worshiping the same God, climbing the same mountain, just taking different paths … To speak unqualifiedly of ‘our common love for God,’ as if the Quran’s Allah and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ are one and the same, and as if what it means to ‘love God’ in these two faiths means the same thing, is to say more than I am willing to grant. I do not criticize others who do not share these qualms. But as for me, I needed to back away.”

[datsunaholic]

It's a private evangelical establishment. Freedom of speech doesn't apply. If she wants to teach religious tolerance, an evangelical college isn't the place (it should be taught, but evangelicals are some of the least religiously tolerant people I've ever met).

In any case, you can be fired from pretty much any job if you violate that company's core values. Which is pretty much what this is. You have the right to take a stand, just not the right to keep your job if you do.

[Lord Jim]

What the Japanese car guy said...

[Big RR]

I can't argue. I think the college administration is pretty stupid in the position they have taken, but I'm sure they don't care what I think.

[MajGenl.Meade]

We already have a thread about this

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=14731

[dgs49]

An "evangelical" college, by its nature, stands for the proposition that "orthodox" Christianity - presumably based as much as possible on the Bible itself - is uniquely correct in its view of the nature of God's relationship to Man. Thus it is only in the most superficial sense that they would agree with the proposition that Christians and Muslims worship "the same God." Digging even the slightest bit below the surface would reveal major differences in who/what "God" is, and what he expects of us mortals.

Her message was not one of "tolerance," which would be acceptable, but one of "agreement," which is manifestly not.

She really needs to find another employer, eh?

[TPFKA@W]

We already have a thread about this

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=14731

The yutz even posted in it.

[liberty]

We already have a thread about this

viewtopic.php?f=12&t=14731

The yutz even posted in it.

Well, I sure did. I forgot, I better start keeping that journal sooner rather than later; I can‘t be that many years behind my mother. However, I am glad to see some of the people here are consistent; they don’t have one set of rules for some and another set of rules for others.