These Trustworthy Sayings are worth reading:
Dr Everett Piper, President
Oklahoma Wesleyan University
May 18, 2016
Oklahoma Wesleyan University
May 18, 2016
The question has come up repeatedly in recent
days asking how Christian colleges—specifically, those aligned with the
Wesleyan tradition—should respond to the government’s new Title IX mandates
concerning transgender accommodations, gay “marriage”, and the broader LGBT
agenda. More directly, many Christian college leaders (presidents, faculty,
board members, etc.) presently argue that John Wesley’s call to love requires
the Christian community to be more inclusive and conversational (rather than
exclusive and confrontational) in the face of the present cultural shifts
sweeping across the land. As the leader of a Wesleyan university, I offer the
following points of response for your consideration:
(1) Yes, Wesleyans elevate love as evidence of
God’s grace in our lives.
Loving God and loving our neighbor, however, demands that
we hate sin. Sin is anathema to love and love is anathema to sin. Wesley
teaches over and over again that the walk of holiness: the obedient,
“methodical” path of sanctification, is one that condemns sin at every turn.
There is no place in Wesley’s teaching to have a “conversation” about sin. The
message of holiness demands that we confess it, not sit around and discuss it.
(2) Wesley never watered down Scriptural
authority and certainly never questioned the Bible’s clear definition of right
and wrong, good and evil.
“Oh give me that book! At any price, give me the book of
God! I have it: Here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be a man of one book.”
(3) Wesley was VERY clear about what he called
“singularity,” i.e. the exclusive and non-negotiable truths of the Gospel.
In fact, he made it so clear that he said “singularity” was
the difference between heaven and hell: “You must be singular or be damned. The
way to hell has nothing singular in it. The way to heaven has singularity all
over it. You must be singular or be damned.”
(4) Yes, Wesley did say, “In the essentials
unity… in all else charity…” and in doing so he clearly made the “essentials”
the priority of the formula.
In calling for “charity” he never intended to diminish the
First Thing: the mandate to be unified around the authority of the Word. In
fact, Wesley repeatedly preached that anyone who denied “the essentials” was
guilty of compromising the unity of the Church and was, therefore, guilty of
being “almost Christian.”
(5) The entire Wesleyan movement was one where
Wesley challenged the Church of England’s acceptance of sin.
He was essentially saying, “You have orthodoxy but you
don’t have orthopraxy. You are not practicing what you preach.” Wesley was
condemning the hypocrisy of separating belief from behavior. He was calling for
obedience! Methodical, habitual, disciplined holiness. He confronted sin. He
didn’t have a conversation about it. He would be appalled to learn that we are
now debating the acceptability of the act of sodomy within the Body of Christ.
He would quickly cite the words of St. Paul: “It is shameful to even talk about
what the evil do in secret” (Ephesians 5:12). Wesley would be first to say that
our sinful inclinations do not and should not define us. He would condemn the
dumbing down of the human being to nothing but the sum total of what we are
inclined to do sexually.
Our identity is found in Christ, not in our proclivities
and passions. Holiness, by definition, means that we rise above such
inclinations in obedience to God rather than capitulating to one’s base
appetites and instincts. Wesley would shout from the pulpit, “You are the imago
dei, my land, not the imago dog! Now, by God’s grace, act like it!”
(6) Christian colleges will only succeed if we
have the courage to stand firm.
We must run into the storm and not away from it. We must
wave the banner of the Truth of Christ and the Truth of Scripture with the
confidence that if we win – great that’s God’s grace – but if we lose, it
doesn’t matter because the battle is the Lord’s and we are willing to go down
fighting. How can we do anything less?
Selling our soul for the sake of
government approval dishonors our mission, our message, and our very reason to
exist. It dishonors our founders who gave us their treasure and their trust. It
dishonors our students. It dishonors our God. If we become nothing but pale
copies of the secular academy, then why in the world would anyone want to buy
what we are selling?
Anything short of a unified stand for the essentials of our
faith – for Orthodoxy, for Biblical authority, for the inerrancy and
infallibility of the Word – will doom the Christian college to the ash heap of
history. Compromise will be our demise and, consequently, we will be “thrown
out and trampled underfoot” by a culture that laughs at our irrelevancy. We are
supposed to preserve culture, not take part in its rot. We are supposed to
shine a light on evil, not have a conversation about it. We are supposed to
confront sin, not capitulate to it.
May God help us if we have really come to
the point where any Christian college’s board, president and/or faculty
actually thinks that our salvation comes from negotiating a compromise with a
world that hates our Lord and His Gospel.
There is no “middle way” with Christ. He is the only way.
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