On Prof. Ratcliff's Arrest

Today I accidentally saw a news clip from Wheaton, IL, where I spent many happy years of my life.  Apparently, Wheaton College's Price-LeBar Professor of Christian Education, Donald Ratcliff, has been arrested and charged with two counts of aggravated child pornography.  Wheaton College issued a very terse (in my opinion, too terse) statement on the matter, noting that they have begun the process for determining administrative leave for Prof. Ratcliff.  I do not know Prof. Ratcliff, but as Wheaton College is my alma mater, I am quite disappointed although given the increased cases of sexual impropriety rising from unexpected circles in recent decades, I wasn't too surprised.  The surprise was not so much that a Wheaton College professor was "caught in the act" (although that is surprising, in and of itself) but that he was a Christian education professor specializing in children's spiritual experiences and development.

Although Prof. Ratcliff is innocent until proven guilty, my hunch is that the chances of an acquittal, pending any legal mistakes made by the prosecution, is unlikely; possession of child pornography is not very difficult to prove in the court of law, and my guess is that if the source of the pornographic pictures or videos came from the Internet, the police simply needed to trace the IP address to his computer.  Nonetheless, what I'm discussing in this post will assume a situation where it has been demonstrated that he has, beyond a reasonable shadow of doubt, possessed child pornography.

Of course, it will be absolutely untenable for Prof. Ratcliff to hold onto his professorship.  He has, after all, signed Wheaton College's Covenant that rightly prohibits faculty (staff, and students) from engaging in such activities.  Again, if it is demonstrated that he did indeed possess child pornography, he has violated a contract he has signed and therefore must be dismissed from the faculty. But what we need to consider here is the Christian response.  I offer only one reflection, and it's based on Wheaton College's motto: For Christ and His Kingdom.

In a way, "For Christ and His Kingdom" is a strange motto for a Protestant evangelical Christian college insofar as it is a strangely positivistic motto, indeed one that does not take into account the doctrine of human fallibility.  Of course, Wheaton is not alone.  The Ivy Leagues down the East Coast all have positivistic mottos, from "Truth" (Harvard) to Princeton's "Under God's power, she flourishes."  This is, however, unsurprising.  Western philosophy, undoubtedly influenced by 18th century Enlightenment, has always had a positivistic slant.  The idea is that humanity possesses the wherewithal to ensure human progress.  The muscular Christianity of the 19th century has uncritically taken up that baton and applied it to the Christian faith.  The prevailing notion is that God has endowed humanity with all she needs to effect God's will.  Thus Wheaton College, which is founded in 1860, reflects the 19th century muscular Christianity that is enshrined in its motto.  This muscular Christianity, it should be noted, is not the same as that of modern times (we refer to that as the prosperity gospel.)  The muscular Christianity of the 19th century emphasized Christian missions and social justice.  This baton was taken up by the liberal strands of Christianity in the early 20th century and remains there today even though some evangelicals are doing excellent work in social justice issues in recent years.

This positivism has its place, but it has a tendency to let us forget how pervasive sin is.  We forget that sin is not simply just a matter of personal action, but is fundamentally a dis-ordering of creation.  No human is outside the realm of this sin.  We all participate in this disordering and we all are disordered as a result of it.  Sin is this vicious cycle of social, physical, and moral disordering.  Of course, the other tenet of Christian faith is that Christ's death on the cross has freed us from this vicious cycle of disordering.  No longer are we forced to disorder and be disordered; we are free to allow ourselves to be reordered around Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, and are free to participate in the Spirit's reordering work.  But old habits die hard.  However much we are free to participate in a reordered worldview, we always dip back to our disorderedness.  After all, we are born disordered creatures, and we live among disordered people.  So the Church needs to be a people who, despite their disorder, are constituted by God and are committed to their constituted-ness.  This means that the Church abides by an ethic that is re-orderly because salvation is a re-ordering of creation.

But how is this possible given that the Church is composed of people who can, at best, take baby steps towards re-ordering?  This is where grace comes in.  Grace allows us to acknowledge our disorder and simultaneously gives us the gift of picking ourselves back up and continuing in the life of reordering.  We sin, yes.  But grace does not allow that to be our final word.  We will live on this earth on the quest for perfect fellowship with God, and grace allows us to pursue just that, despite the fact we do fall short occasionally.  This requires, however, that we know how to live among disordered people!  A lack of such an orientation means that we do not know our disorderedness!  Thus, we will retract from disorderly people (or, disorder in general) preferring our own world where we delude ourselves into thinking that we are living in some theological utopia.  But such a theological utopia does not exist!  And when we are reminded of that fact, we search for them, whether it'd be in some individual, or in some place.

Let me put it in very practical terms.  The only reason we don't know how to live with sinful people is because we think we are sinless.  And so, convinced with our own relative perfection, we draw back from sinful people, preferring a bubble where we convince ourselves of our own relative perfection.  But such bubbles are transient, and it is not long before we realize that we do not live or associate among perfect people.  And so, we try to look for examples of such perfection so that we can be reassured that our relative perfection is not a delusion.  When such examples fail to live up to our expectations, we dismiss them like dirty rag cloths and move on to another.  This occurs more often than not, and the news is full of situations where notable Christians who were seen as examples of strong faith were exposed to be sinful people (cf. Ted Haggard, among others).

Of course, Prof. Ratcliff is known by a much smaller audience, but the fact that he was a chaired professor of Christian education will no doubt damage the reputation of Wheaton College as a prim and proper evangelical institution.  Prospective applicants may go, "Oh my goodness, a Christian education professor possessed child pornography?!"  and see the wider institution as a dirty evangelical institution.

What I wish to assert, however, is that such views are motivated by the problem I have identified earlier: that many evangelicals are not good at living in a sinful world.  In other words, they are in their own la-la land where everyone knows "the Romans road" and where sin is something that comes from the South Side.  And so when sin hits close to home, we throw up our arms in surprise and look for another Jesus la-la land we can identify with.  Sure, applicants can apply to other schools because of Wheaton's tarnished reputation, but where else will they find a school where everyone's got their perfection together?

What we evangelicals need to understand is that it's not "For Christ and His Kingdom."  Because only the Holy Spirit can do things truly for Christ and His Kingdom.  We, as disordered people who are redeemed by Christ, can only at best take baby steps towards living for Christ and His Kingdom.  I think we would take seriously what it means to live as redeemed people in this world if we truly see our calling as "for Christ and for His creation."  We need to not only recognize the fact that we live in a broken world, but to be confronted by this brokenness, to stare at brokenness in the face and force ourselves not to withdraw to the proverbial Jesus la-la land where everything is perfect.  NO!  That la-la land does not exist because Jesus is NOT THERE!

What do we do with Prof. Ratcliff?  Yes, he cannot stay at Wheaton College, but he cannot stay because he has violated a contract that he signed with the College.  His dismissal from the College does not mean he is any less a Christian.  We live in a disordered world - we hear of people possessing child pornography all the time.  What we need is to sympathize with his fallenness (note: we're not sympathizing with his sin, but with his sinful state).  At the same time, we must realize that we are no less sinful than he is.  We may not share in Prof. Ratcliff's disorder, but we share in some disorder, don't we?  I do not know which church he attends, but I pray that the church will reach out and comfort his family, and at the same time assure Prof. Ratcliff that he is still loved by God.  The worst thing we can do is to run him out of the church, hoping that he will poison some other church.  This is only a shade away from what Jesus' opponents in the Sanhedrin did.

It is quite fitting that I write this during the season of Lent.  Let us take this time to get out of our Jesus la-la land where Jesus doesn't even live and confront bravely the face of our own sinfulness.  Let us eschew our errant heresy of perfect and own up to the doctrine of total depravity.  But we must not leave it there.  We must not keep looking down at our decrepitude and wallow in it, but look up at the cross and see the dying Savior.  Let us do just that and leave, ready to play our part in re-ordering a disordered world.