There's a delicious irony in this. When I was a senior at Wheaton 30 years ago, I took a new course offered by Bob Webber titled, "The Making of the Modern Religious Mind" or something like that. He dared to suggest that solid, good theology did not first begin with the 16th-century Reformers. That was the first time I had ever heard any of my teachers or pastors suggest that anything good or doctrinally sound existed during the Middle Ages. Webber suggested that one might benefit by studying pre-Reformation church history in order better to understand how we got to where we were as Evangelicals. That was what launched my entire study of medieval church history. Prior to that I was headed for general history studies, probably sixteenth or nineteenth century. Webber's daring to suggest that it all didn't begin in the 16th-century (of course, we all knew that there was good stuff in the very early centuries but we all equally assumed that the medieval period was total darkness and evil) opened my eyes. I studied medieval theology (intellectual history) and church history without the prejudices I would otherwise have brought to them had I not taken Webber's course. For his course I did not focus on medieval stuff--I wrote my paper on 19th-century Evangelicalism's various roots. I didn't have the tools to begin to study the Middle Ages at that point and I knew it. But he planted a seed of openmindedness that sprouted and grew during graduate school and eventually, 15 years later, made me a Catholic.
It's ironic that, now that a host of evangelicals have lost their fear of Catholicism and are curious about it and studying it, Wheaton feels so threatened that they cannot tolerate a Catholic teaching there. It was only a matter of time before the policy was tested--the momentum for this has been building for thirty years and a lot of it goes back to Webber and a few others who jumped to high-church Anglicanism. Ironically, in the years just before the Episcopal movement started, Webber, always a popular professor because he was always probing, pushing the envelope, asking questions about conventional evangelical wisdom, had gathered a coterie of students and a few faculty around him at the Wheaton Grace Brethren Church. This little congregation had become almost moribund and suddenly, with Webber leading, it became the place to go to church on Sundays for a significant group of students. It was a kind of extreme low-church experiment that lasted for a year or two and faded. On the rebound, after I had graduated, I heard that Webber had become an Episcopalian. Somehow I wasn't entirely surprised. Yet it was a daring move at the time. I remember we had one history major who announced his intention to enter an Episcopal seminary and become an Episcopal priest. He knew a bit about high liturgy and impressed us with his bits of Latin--because to us any form of liturgy whatsoever was totally exotic. We thought he was a bit out of place at Wheaton--he actually intended to become an Episcopal priest? Amazing--you just don't announce that at Wheaton--I mean, is that liturgy stuff really Christian?
Ten years later Episcopalian faculty were a dime a dozen at Wheaton. And for those who have posted stuff here about Episcopaganism, hold your horses. This was before the 1976 ordination of women at Philadelphia. There was still an honorable tradition of liturgical but low-medium church "evangelical" Episcopalianism. That's where this history major came from and because he had those solid bible-believing evangelical credentials which he combined with a love of Anglican liturgy, we couldn't really tell him he didn't belong there, though it seemed exotic to us. At the same time, it made me stop and and rethink my assumptions about liturgy being wrong--that fellow too planted seeds that later led to my becoming a Catholic because his beliefs and ways of thinking pushed me to open my mind, think outside the box.
I'd argue (as an interested outsider to the Wheaton community) that its far more significant that the termination occured in the same year that one of their most prolific professors published a book entitled Is the Reformation Over?.
It seems like every 100 years or so, there are revival movements within particular Protestant branches to "return to the purified roots", such as the Methodist and then the Nazerenes.
There's a delicious irony in this...
You are certainly a good source of information on the question at hand. It does seem to me that exploring history is a threat to Protestantism. I would imagine that the board of directors are aware of this - but they also cannot appear as anti-intellectual, so must present some sort of class structure on Church History or the development of doctrine in Christianity. What really moved me towards Catholicism was seeing the continuity between the Scriptures and the first extant writings that we have outside of Scriptures, such as Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome. A person searching for the truth shouldn't care where it leads them. Otherwise, it is not a search for truth.
It is an exciting time to be Catholic, I think. Intellectually, I see many Protestant pastors exploring their roots - but going further beyond the 16th century - and finding that there is a continuity between the Apostles and the Catholic Church. I think what moves many Protestants is that Rome doesn't require that one drops EVERYTHING they had acquired in their Protestant walk. Scripture reading and such devotions are encouraged, not stiffled. We need these Protestants who are well versed in Greek or Hebrew, who really KNOW the Word of God. Once they see that the Church interprets Scripture through a living Tradition, I think it all begins to make sense.
Regards