Catholic Redeemer, Protestant Trinity
An Ecumenical Experiment in Education
by Jeremy Lott
Many conservative Protestant schools still have faith statements that effectively exclude not only non-Christians but also non-fundamentalist or non-Evangelical Christians. An administrator at Billy Graham’s alma mater, Wheaton College, was asked by sociologist Alan Wolfe what would happen to a faculty member who decided to “swim the Tiber.” According to Wolfe, the administrator indicated that said professor “would be asked if he would not be more comfortable elsewhere.”
Indeed, Wheaton boasts no Roman Catholics on staff and only a handful among its students. Such is the case at most Evangelical colleges and universities. Catholics are prohibited from teaching and are only grudgingly allowed to attend, even while many of the thinkers and writers taught in the courses (e.g., Walker Percy, Flannery O’Connor, G. K. Chesterton, and Evelyn Waugh) are papists.
But then there’s Tom Hamel, the executive director of Redeemer Pacific College (RPC). Redeemer is a Roman Catholic school, but it is overseen by Trinity Western University (TWU), a very Evangelical institution in British Columbia.
The Genesis of Redeemer
After selling his business of 25 years, Hamel, a Roman Catholic, enrolled in Trinity en route to the Franciscan University of Steubenville, where he had been accepted into the theology program. Life at the Fort Langley, British Columbia-based school suited Hamel, who found the classes to be of a “really great academic caliber.” At 40 years of age, Hamel made friends with both students and professors, and by the end of the semester, “I started to kind of fall in love with Trinity Western, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to leave.”
But in early summer 1991 Hamel moved his family to Steubenville anyway—for a day. They thought the Ohio town so miserable that, without ever having set foot on campus, they tossed the ottoman back in the U-Haul and headed home. It just wasn’t a place “where I wanted to bring up my children,” said Hamel. Once back in British Columbia, Hamel returned to Trinity Western and graduated with a B.A. in history (as has his eldest daughter Jen, who recently secured a coveted TWU president’s internship).
At first glance, Trinity Western appears Evangelical, young, conservative, ambitious, and still in the process of losing its fundamentalist baggage. On the one hand, the biblical studies faculty—including such luminaries as historical Jesus scholar Craig Evans and Martin Abegg of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute—is rivaled by only a handful of North American universities, and the nursing program is one of the best in Canada. On the other hand, TWU’s statement of faith, which faculty are expected to sign, still includes the pre-millennial return of Christ as a necessary article of faith. Students must also pledge to forgo drink and tobacco.
But the school isn’t without its exceptions. Though its statement of faith, written from the Evangelical Free Church’s perspective, would theoretically exclude most high-church Protestants, many TWU professors are Anglicans. In practice, educators are allowed to sign the statement “with reservations” as long as the dean of the relevant department allows it.
Trinity President Neil Snider claims that although no Catholic professors have ever been tenured, this is not the result of “any stated policy.” Nonetheless, several Catholic instructors serve in semi-permanent teaching posts.
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