Save the professors or the students?

Source: Amazing Facts, The Fruit of the Spirit is Patience

The following transcript can be found at 00:27:17.

Now is there a limit to God’s patience? … There is a limit to God’s patience, but God is long suffering. Part of the characteristics of God is his patience. Look at the patience of Jesus with the apostles and the way people talked to him and treated him? Did Jesus ever lose his patience? When did Christ lose his patience? Did he lose his patience? Come on think about it now? … I think sometimes the Lord acts because he sees that what’s happening is destroying others and he needs to act for the salvation of the many. Let me give you a illustration of this and I’ll say this very delicately if I can.

If you’ve got a professor at a Christian university who is teaching heresy that is turning young people off the path of life, but you’re wanting to redeem that professor is that the time to have patience? I don’t think so. You’re not being impatient if you deal very quickly and strictly with that professor.

Here is another analogy. You’re on a jet air plane. You’re crossing the Pacific Ocean. And you hear the flight attendant say for some reason it appears that the captain has lost his mind. He seems disoriented, but we don’t want to hurt his feelings so we’re going to let him keep flying. Are you being impatient if you take him out of the cockpit? And if you suggest to the flight crew, Look, you need to get him out and let the first officer fly or get someone else competent in the cockpit. And they say, Well that would be bad PR for the airline. Do they ever think that way in flight crews? No. They say if he is not mentally clear, if he is disoriented, if he is inebriated, our first interest is not his self-esteem. Our first interest is the passengers on the plane staying or the students at the desk in the classroom.

Pastor Doug Batchelor

14 thoughts on “Save the professors or the students?

  1. Judging by LSU’s actions it would appear that they are more concerned with saving their biology professors and persevering their right to promote whatever they think is truth despite it contradicting their employer, than the hundred’s of students who pass through these classes. They should be appalled that even one student has suffered as a result of their blatant promotion of evolution.

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  2. If you’ve got a professor at a Christian university who is teaching heresy that is turning young people off the path of life, but you’re wanting to redeem that professor is that the time to have patience?

    This message strikes me as very hollow because the threat is that agents of Satan have a platform to teach destructive heresies in Seventh-day Adventist schools and churches but we don’t want to alarm anyone so we’re not going to name names or refer to abstract concepts like the omega, evolution, pantheism and pan-Gnostic Adventist spiritualism.

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  3. That’s because it was part of the Sabbath School lesson about patience. I listened to the whole podcast, and it fit in pretty naturally with the rest of the lesson. Going into detail wasn’t necessary in that venue.

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  4. From Doug Bachelor:
    If you’ve got a professor at a Christian university who is teaching heresy that is turning young people off the path of life, but you’re wanting to redeem that professor is that the time to have patience? I don’t think so. You’re not being impatient if you deal very quickly and strictly with that professor.

    There is a chapter in 3T on “Laodicea” describing Achan’s sin and the fact that the entire camp of the saints is held to blame before God if flagrant sin is circled/defended/ignored by church leadership 3T 265-269.

    3T257 points out why God says “whom I love I rebuke” and this is in response to those who “imagine” that it is “not Christlike” to correct a faculty member, or an entire science department faculty, or an entire university faculty senate, or an entire university board of directors, or an entire Union administration.

    It is always better to take action rather then let the problem fester for decades until it reaches to the highest levels of management within the Union.

    in Christ,

    Bob

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  5. Amen, Pastor Doug, and Amen. I have posted a similar thought elsewhere on this site–although I fear I don’t put things as delicately as you do. I am appalled that these professors can sit in open rebellion, leading the youth down the garden path to destruction and nothing is done about it. I don’t understand the lack of urgency in dealing with this issue. It should have been nipped in the bud when it first surfaced. To care more for the sinners than the victims of their sin is reprehensible. We have been given clear instruction how to handle heresy in the church and this has not been done, either (as I see it) because of spinelessness or collusion; at this point, it is looking more and more to me that the latter is the culprit.

    God grant that this will be dealt with asap, to prevent more loss of souls.

    Faith

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  6. Doug Batchelor’s analogy is a bit of a stretch. First of all an airplane is a confined space from which most prefer to exit when it is safely on the ground. To be in an airplane that his piloted by a man who is incompetent would alarm any passenger. However, a student attending LSU has many colleges to choose from. There are several SDA colleges to choose from. There are also many private, public and community colleges, to choose from. There is no confinement to a school as their is in an airplane. Also, to have a teacher or a department of science in one school teaching heresy is also not like an incompetent pilot. Reference your own college experience, were you forced to believe as your college professors or where you challenged to think for yourself?

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  7. Krisztina,

    I don’t think the analogy was intended to be taken to the extent you did. His point is how long do we wait to deal with a situation that is hurting other people? In other words, which is more important protecting the 100 students from one professor or allowing the one professor to continue to potentially harm those students while attempting to convince him of his error. How many students are we willing to risk for the sake of one professor? At some point we have to count the spiritual cost of having these professors employed and in the classroom.

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  8. @Krisztina:

    Krisztina says:
    February 19, 2010 Doug Batchelor’s analogy is a bit of a stretch. First of all an airplane is a confined space from which most prefer to exit when it is safely on the ground. To be in an airplane that his piloted by a man who is incompetent would alarm any passenger. However, a student attending LSU has many colleges to choose from. There are several SDA colleges to choose from. There are also many private, public and community colleges, to choose from. There is no confinement to a school as their is in an airplane. Also, to have a teacher or a department of science in one school teaching heresy is also not like an incompetent pilot. Reference your own college experience, were you forced to believe as your college professors or where you challenged to think for yourself?

    That is exactly the solution Paulsen recommended in that 2004 speech he gave during a Q & A session. It is exactly what the evolutionists had hoped for — “student you may leave if you don’t like it here” in a “because we have taken over this university and now you have to just live with it or leave” kind of way.

    The most inneffective form of leadership can always excuse its actions and ignore its responsibility with “if you don’t like it you can leave” because then their entire measure of success depends soley on “marketing”.

    All they have to do is “attract” more students than have wised-up and walked away to be counted as “successful” and in that way retain their stranglehold on the university of their choice.

    But the “danger” they face is that a public outcry might eventually (after 10 years or so) come to the surface (something like EducateTruth) where people are being made aware of the cancer at hand (Not unlike Ellen White publicizing the problems at Battle Creek before it burned to the ground).

    THEN when that public outcry begins to surface – those administrators truly devoted to a course of “sacrifice all for evolutionism” still have the less than insightful option of demonizing their critics.

    How predictable.

    How “instructive” for the unbiased objective SDA students and parent of students.

    in Christ,
    Bob

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  9. Have we not learned and been warned that “even the brightest lights will go out”? The handwriting is on the wall…are our lamps going to have oil or are we going to be found wanten?

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  10. Krisztina, our professors have to teach according to our belief. How can a new in faith can choose what to and not to believe from a professor who rejected the truth?
    Pastor Doug’s analogy is very clear.

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  11. Pingback: Educate Truth - Evolution vs Creation at La Sierra University

  12. Considering the evidence which suggests that all the science and most of the theologians at LSU are convinced that the Darwinian theory of origins is factual and beyond question; and given the fact that the church officially holds to a literal, six days creation week in a not so long distant past, I think that we need to seriously consider the following alternative solution to this dilemma facing the church:

    A. Start hiring science and theologians who are serious about defending as far as possible the official position of the church, while teaching the theory of evolution simply as the erroneous prevailing explanation for origins.

    B. Abandon the church’s Fundamental Belief # 6 which clearly adheres to the literal story of creation as recorded in Genesis and replace it with a dogma similar to that of the Caholic church.

    C. Make a public declaration that the Seventh-day Adventist Church doesn’t really know whether we are the result of a direct creation by God, or whether we are the result of a long protracted evolution based on natural selection and genetic mutarion, coupled with a declaration that the story of the moral fall is probably a myth and that the Plan of Salvation is merely wishful thinking based on the chimeric hope of eternal life in the future.

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