In the first edition (Article I) of this site has occasioned considerable comment. A number of requests have asked for further elaboration. This second treatment answers several of those requests. Again I need to say to the reader, that though serious attempts have been made to garner the facts, this resultant statement must be considered my opinion and only that. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of my informants, but my non-omniscience only guarantees that the resultant conclusions add up to my opinion.
Some have asked why the firing of two professors is so significant. And the answer is that it appears that the firings only reflect a wider attempt to silence the certainty view and advance the assurance-but-not-certainty view (hereafter ABNOC). The Bible department now has six individuals either leaving, forced out, or fired. Jack Riggs, Dean of Humanities, and no friend of the ABNOC view, resigned over the matter of governance, specifically being largely left out of the loop in several personnel matters. Amy Guiselman, who was close to David Mills by virtue of her being the only other professor in the field of philosophy, resigned because of the daily abrasiveness of the environment engendered by the ABNOC view. Michael Thigpen, and Tom Cragoe (both certainty advocates) were terminated with no explanation that has reached the outside observers. Thigpen was terminated with a "confidentiality agreement." When such "agreements" are reached, rational expectations seem to indicate that the employing party does not want the nature of the termination to come to light and that such is not a matter of pride on their part. In the case of Tom Cragoe, the subject was read a multi-page rationale for his termination and then the Academic Vice-President who had composed and read the letter , kept the letter and provided no copy to Cragoe so that he could effectively reply. In the case of David Mappes and David Hoffeditz, both parties have indicated to me personally that the firings come without any previous warning and certainly did not reflect the view that the University went to lengths to take care of them and their families. The University says that severance was offered "almost immediately." Both Mappes and Hoffeditz deny that such was the case. In both cases talk of severance only came after attorneys representing the pair contacted the school's attorney. In the kind providence of God, a white knight has appeared, (unbidden unexpected, and totally apart from human urging) to help out in that potentially difficult circumstance.
There is the further fact that three senior members of the department (Blumenstock, Bjornstadt, and Drullinger) are nearing retirement and can be marginalized. So it appears that all of these elements may indicate a larger movement in play.
The case of Amy-Hope Guisleman seems especially poignant. After spending most of her educational experience (she is ABD at Ohio State) to prepare for a position in Christian education, she voluntarily resigned after six years because the abrasiveness engendered by the ABNOC view has taxed her spirit. She recounted several cases to me of students who had become confused, doubtful and uncertain because of the ABNOC view. She relates this experience as evidence:
"I was teaching on this issue (certainty) this morning in class when one of my students expressed the fact that he was blown away by a course he took here at Cedarville in which students were asked if they knew that the Bible is true. Most responded 'yes' and the professor proceeded to demonstrate to them that they did not in fact know it. They were left with the instruction that though we cannot know that the Bible is true, we must accept its truth on faith."
Guisleman has taken a job at a Beavercreek bicycle shop at a fraction of her previous pay in order to "recover." Her actual descriptor was "recovery." Guiselman strikes one as being guileless, kind, and intelligent. And the fact that she is trained extensively in the history and language of philosophy makes it entirely unlikely that her take on the certainty vs. ABNOC argument is simply imagination. Those familiar with the territory know that there is is real and not imagined issue at stake, But Amy-Hope is now lost to the Cedarville student body. Having prepared for a life of teaching in a Christian environment, she found that unbearable because of the heterodoxy there.
Evidence for the permeation of the uncertainty view has also appeared in the campus newspaper. The following was written by Bryce Bahler, then Managing Editor; this after he had characterized the truth and certainty debate as "silly and useless."
"A Christianity that is built upon proven facts is no Christianity at all. A faith without doubt or failure is no faith at all. "
That may strike the Reasonable Man as the nadir or conceptualism, but is typical of the ABNOCers. Such should probably reprove Dr. Luke for writing that "Jesus showed Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs" (Acts 1:3). Let us hope that ABNOCers don't conduct their lives by the thesis that we don't need "proven facts." The Apostle John reminded his readers right up front that which "we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled...(I John 1:1). That sounds like he is providing sensate facts to his readers. And Paul in I Corinthians 15: 3-8 , enumerates the post-resurrection appearances of Christ to Peter, the Twelve, and more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, James and Paul himself. That is clearly historical corroboration testimony. He is providing proof.
One version of the necessity for uncertainty goes like this: suppose that somewhere in the remotest regions of space, yet unknown to us, is the Ultimate Controller of the Universe. At some future date the Ultimate Controller decides that he will tell the Christian God to change His plans for this world. How would you disprove this possibility? Well, I would quote Isaiah 46: 9 to him. "...for I am God and there is none else, I am God and there is none like me.
On identifying David Mills as a proponent of the ABNOC view, some ask for specific quotation. Here are those: the title of his paper defending his view is entitled "Certainty vs. Confidence (hereafter CVC). He chose the title, and he had all the editing time necessary to show that certainty equals confidence. But he deliberately opposes "certainty" and "confidence." He follows up the title by saying that "humans must function epistemologically with something less than a state of certainty.(CVC 5)." He further states that "certainty (is) a false idol." Subsequently he refers to holders of certainty as "Luciferian." Just exactly how this adds up to collegiality escapes me. But it clearly adds up to a view that is other than certainty. In his commentary on Carson's lectures, Mills goes to length to critique Carson's use of the term "certainty." To hold as does AVP Milliman that there are "no two sides to the issue" or as President Brown avers that "MIlls view and yours (this writer ) are the same" seems entirely erroneous.
One should note that professors Cragoe and Hoffeditz circulated papers to the department demonstrating that certainty is conveyed in the Scriptures. Cragoe's paper includes footnotes that are longer than the text of his paper. In the paper he provides multiple occurrences of the concept of certainty in the Bible. He obviously took seriously the matter of establishing the certainty view. Similarly Hoffeditz provides abundant Scriptural documentation for the certainty view: e.g., he states the Koine Greek rules relative to "emphatic negation subjunctive." That structure is the strongest way to show elimination of doubt. Such a construction lies behind Matt. 24:25: "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away." Jesus is making an absolutely certain assertion: "my words will never ever pass away." And similarly certainty is conveyed by the same Greek construction in John 10:28, Romans 4:8, and Hebrews 13:5.
Both papers remain unrefuted. So it is not that evidence has not been provided to the ABNOC party.
And one wonders how the ABNOCers reply to the significance of eternity argument. If a bird could use his beak to rub off a single grain from one of the blocks of the Great Pyramid and deposit it in the Mediterranean Sea once a year, it would take him the five thousand years we have of continuously written human history (Egyptians till now) to even make a slight chip in the corner of one of those 2.3 million blocks weighting 2 tons apiece. By the time the bird had abraded one block he would have not made a sizeable dent in the pyramid's face. And when he had finally finished with all 2.3 million blocks the first nano-second of eternity has expired. You do not threaten people with the greatest consequence in the world, damnation, without making certain to them the terms of entrance and avoidance. Such a God would be unjust, arbitrary, not to be worshipped. But our God has made the terms certain.
Evidence to show that all of this is having an effect on the Cedarville workplace is demonstrated objectively by the Christianity Today work surveys done in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. The office of institutional research commented upon the surveys for 2003, 2004, and 2005 thus: "In summary: there has been a serious and sustained decline in employee satisfaction at Cedarville University for the last three years.This decline should receive priority attention from the managers and supervisors on campus." The survey for 2006 only showed further decline. This appears to be an objective and telling assessment of the conditions on campus. Indeed, all the years show overall decline.
Some have thought their retirement years should be filled with the upward trend of the Dixon years going forward. When one sees page after page of the graphic bar representation of the decline, the feeling of sadness is inevitable. Being in poor health, I am not a person who looks for controversy and more challenges to a very tenuous mortality. But this is not a small matter. The certainty vs. ABNOC view affects every doctrine including inspiration, creation, redemption, future things, etc. It seems clear that the historic Cedarville ( the Biblical Cedarville), may become the postmodernist Cedarville of humanistic thought. The camel has his nose in the tent door. Postmodernism is not at all present in every activity of the school, but the cardinal doctrine of uncertainty will be present for the first time in the school's history. Though some will insist that there are "no two sides" of the subject, the ABNOC view is now enshrined in the Truth and Certainty statement which rejects "certainty" to opt for "assurance." So Matthew 24:25 now reads "the Lord's words will never pass away, maybe."
Since the trustee board is self-perpetuating, the remedies available to the Missouri Synod Lutherans, and the Southern Baptists are not available to us. One can only pray that individual trustees realize the magnitude of the problem and restore the historic Biblical stance. I would not want on Judgement Day to be a trustee who consigned the problem to the sanctuary of tacit neglect.
If ever there was an age when there is evidence to support the Christian view of certainty, it should be our own when the facts of physical nature and their design are known in a way that was entirely outside the reach of previous generations. For example, the then President of the National Academy of Sciences, Bruce Alberts, stated the complexity of a human cell this way:
"The entire cell can be viewed as a factory that contains an elaborate network of interlocking assembly lines, each of which is composed of a set of large protein machines" (Cell, 92. 291 ff.). And the engines which function in those assembly lines run at 100% efficiency. Your car's motor is closer to 30%. Designer better than Detroit's?
Previous generations had no clue that such elaborate minute machinery was functioning in every cell of their bodies. Factories do not arise from spontaneous activity. They are designed and fabricated. That calls for a divine designer and maker.
Similarly the head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins, asserts in his book The Language of God: If all nucleotides of the human genome in each cell (the famous A,C,G, T constituents) were written down in standard type, on a sheet of standard size paper, the stack of paper would reach the 555' of the Washington Monument.
The feat of such miniaturization is entirely outside the scope of human capability, and calls for a designer and fabricator.
The Anthropic Principle people point out the astonishingly complex fine tuning of the physical forces at work in the perpetuation of earth as we know it:, e.g., the balance of the four physical constants (electricity and magnetism, gravity, and the soft and hard atomic forces) is of such delicacy that if it is out of proportion by one part in ten thousand, the universe as we know it would collapse. And there are dozens of such figures inhering in the physical makeup of the universe (Leslie, Universes).
So when Christian parents send their students off to college, they can properly expect that a Christian institution would bolster, no undermine those students' faith. And the warrant to such bolstering is supported by both Scripture and the facts of the physical world.
A God who does not provide certainty in the most consequential act of life (heaven or hell) is not to be worshipped as a just god, but as an unfair, unjust authoritarian. The amazing fine tuning of the universe, and the astonishing facts of cell complexity reinforce the certainty of creation and the Creator. Humans are "wihout excuse" (Rom. 1:20) God is vindicated. Students who learn this can proceed with certain, solid underpinnings.
R.E. Bartholomew, '57, faculty emeritus