Nevin Lectures, 2015

Noted Catholic patristic scholar, Robert Louis Wilken, delivered the second annual Nevin Lectures at Beeson Divinity School's Hodges Chapel last Friday and Saturday, February 20-21, 2015.

Wilken, the Emeritus William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Virginia, traced the influence of the writings Tertullian, Lactantius, and other church fathers on the development of ideas of religious liberty.

According to Theopolis President Peter J. Leithart, the Nevin Lectures are an exercise in "receptive ecumenism." The lectures provide a forum when Christians can listen carefully and charitably to believers from other traditions, and engage them in fraternal debate.

Receptive ecumenism, Leithart said, is "rooted in our acknowledgement we don’t know or possess everything we need in our own branch of the church. Every Christian tradition is distorted insofar as it lacks the gifts that other traditions have."

Wilken showed how medieval theologians, Reformation-era advocates of toleration, and the American Founders cited the same patristic passages to argue that religion cannot be coerced. He described his astonishment when he discovered one of the key texts underlined in Thomas Jefferson's personal copy of Tertullian.

Questions and discussion turned again and again to contemporary issues in religious liberty, and the difficulty of working out questions of religious liberty in a secular context.

Beeson Dean Timothy George welcomed attendees on Friday evening, and at the end of Prof. Wilken's lectures, medieval specialist, Rev. Dr. Timothy LeCroy of Christ our King Presbyterian Church in Columbia, Missouri, offered an appreciative response.

About fifty people were in attendance from a half dozen states and one foreign country.

"There were few dissenters on this topic," Leithart observed. "Here is an area where Catholics and Protestants have a lot in common today." Still, he added, the Lectures were a successful exercise in ecumenism.

"The Nevin Lectures give Christians in every tradition an opportunity to fall in love with the presence of God in the people, practices, and structures of other Christian traditions."