by Sandy » Sat Aug 27, 2011 8:19 pm
If it is distancing itself from Baptist families by high tuition and fees, accepting an increasing number of Catholic students and professors, and now is seeing its ties to the BGCT loosened, where is it going to find a "distinctively Christian" identity.
The school where I now serve as administrator identifies itself as "distinctively Christian," which sets us apart from "obviously secular" in some very specific ways that our constituency recognizes and expects. This includes complete integration of Biblical truth into every aspect of the curriculum, under the belief that education is a quest to understand the revealed truth of God (as opposed to the creation of new knowledge), and having all of our employees, administrator, teachers, office staff, nurses, coaches, bus drivers, maintenance and janitors, be people who can testify to a personal salvation experience with Jesus and a living faith that includes active membership in a local church whose basic beliefs are compatible with the school's statement of faith. In our area, that's a rather broad and diverse constituency, including individuals from non-denominational churches, Reformed, Evangelical and PCA Presbyterians, Evangelical Free, three or four different kinds of Baptists, Christian and Missionary Alliance, Mennonites, Missouri Synod Lutherans, Bible churches, Free Methodist, Nazarene, and a few Catholics and Methodists who have discovered that the Bible is authoritative, is God's written word, revealed truth and infallible. The school's statement of faith anchors the definition of "distinctively Christian" to belief in the Bible as God's written word of truth without error, salvation by grace through faith in Christ, and assurance by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Those are distinctives that the vast majority of conservative Evangelicals recognize and agree upon as essentials. There's a big difference between being merely "conservative," defined as simple opposition to homosexuality and other liberal social issues, and conservative from a theological, doctrinal position. A theologically conservative university would not recognize academic tradition as authoritative over Biblical teaching, and it would generally not consider the teaching of Christian principles or Biblical theology as "religion".
It seems to me that Baylor's separation from the BGCT is a sign that it is "distinctively religious," but not necessarily "distinctively Christian."