Conservative Witch Hunt Buttressed by Lies at Northwest Nazarene University Claims a Scalp

Dr. Tom Oord, tenured professor of theology, was recently from fired from Northwest Nazarene University. NNU President David Alexander lied by saying "he was being terminated for economic reasons having to do with enrollment declines in the graduate division where Oord taught some of his classes." However, this last year NNU was "enjoying record enrollment and had been issuing press releases celebrating the overall financial health of the institution." Karl Giberson tells us the real reason he was fired:
Oord was the university’s leading scholar, with 20 books on his CV; by most measures he was also the denomination’s leading scholar and one of a tiny number of Nazarene theologians whose reputations reached beyond evangelicalism. Oord had won multiple teaching awards and was wildly popular with students and respected by his colleagues. He had brought over a million dollars of grant money to the university—a remarkable accomplishment for a professor at a small, unsung liberal arts college. Oord, however, was controversial. He strongly supported evolution and had long been a target of creationists in the denomination. He embraced “open theism,” the view that God does not know the future but responds in love—rather than coercive control—to events as they occur, rather than foreordaining everything. Fundamentalist critics called him a heretic and had been vying for his termination for years.
This is typical of a conservative creedal requiring institution, which leads me to say once again that Honest Evangelical Scholarship is a Ruse. There is No Such Thing!

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