Comment on La Sierra University gets 3-year AAA Accreditation by David Read.
Since all of our colleges, at least in the U.S. and probably most of the developed world, have secular accreditation, Adventist accreditation has only one purpose, and that is to ensure that the institution is Adventist, that it is fulfilling its Adventist religious mission.
If La Sierra is Adventist, then I am the pope. La Sierra is in fact anti-Adventist. It is actively working to undermine the Adventist high view of Scripture, the Adventist hermeneutic, the Adventist and biblical view of origins, and the prophetic authority of Ellen White. It teaches a view of origins that undermines biblical faith, and leaves Sabbath observance without a credible biblical rationale. Its liberal theology department is in many ways worse than its Darwinist biology department. It promotes non-Adventist readings of the Genesis narrative, such as that the firmament is a solid metal dome, rather than the expanse of the sky. La Sierra is a cancer on the Adventist Church that needs desperately to be excised before it kills the body. And yet it gets AAA accreditation for three years? Really?
What is AAA good for? Apparently, it is useless bureaucratic fat. Every bureaucracy eventually loses sight of its purpose and becomes a technocratic Nomenklatura that exists, as a practical matter, to perpetuate itself and for no other real reason.
David Read Also Commented
La Sierra University gets 3-year AAA Accreditation
@Holly Pham: No, I don’t think Southern is going down the same path. The recent Spectrum-sponsored conference was NOT on the Southern campus, it was at a hotel in Chattanooga (the Sheraton Read House–which sadly does not belong to my family). Gordon Bietz spoke at the conference, but all reports were that his talk was very positive toward Seventh-day Adventism, and defended it from criticisms of Brian McLaren. Apparently, one liberal history professor at Southern encouraged her students to attend, but it was not a Southern-sponsored event.
La Sierra University gets 3-year AAA Accreditation
@Richard Wright: How else could it be interpreted? Everyone knows that everyone knows about La Sierra and what it has been teaching. At least since 2009, the facts have been very publicly known. And since everyone knows about this, everyone will know that AAA’s endorsement of La Sierra is an endorsement of teaching Darwinism as truth in an Adventist setting. Other colleges will rightly understand AAA’s action for exactly what it is–an endorsement of doctrinal heterodoxy in the Adventist church, and a signal that there will be no attempt to second guess what liberal faculties and administrations decide to do. Apparently, Lisa Beardsley-Hardy has decided that the group Clifford Goldstein called “Seventh-day Darwinians” are just as Adventist, and just as worthy of receiving AAA endorsement for being Adventist, as believers in a six-day creation.
All you people who’ve been chattering about how “if you’re hired by Ford, you shouldn’t be selling Chevys” can now relax. The official Seventh-day Adventist Church at its highest level of government has just made clear that the Seventh-day Adventist Church sells both Fords and Chevys. On some level, we’re supposed to believe that God created the world in six days, but colleges that ridicule that belief are colleges in good standing as Seventh-day Adventist, according to a GC agency whose only task, whose sole raison d’etre, is to certify such good standing.
Recent Comments by David Read
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: I do not agree that science must be naturalistic, but if that is your bottom line, it will not trouble me much where it concerns most day-to-day science–the study of current, repeating phenomena. But a rigid naturalism applied to origins morphs into philosophical atheism. Hence, mainstream origins science is not science but atheistic apologetics. This is what should not be done at an Adventist school, but sadly what has been the rule at La Sierra.
Dr. Paul Cameron and the God of the Gaps
@Pauluc: The Adventist doctrine of creation is that God created the world in six days and rested on the Seventh day and hallowed it. (Gen. 2:2-3; Ex. 20:11) Do you believe that doctrine? It won’t do to say that you accept some vague “Christian doctrine of creation.” The Seventh-day Adventist Church has a very specific mission to call people back to the worship of the creator God, on the day that He hallowed at the creation.
You say you believe that the “core doctrine of Christianity is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ,” but what was Jesus Christ incarnated to do? Wasn’t his mission to redeem fallen humanity, to be the second Adam who succeeded where the first Adam failed? And doesn’t your view of origins make nonsense of a perfect creation, a literal Adam who fell, and the need for redemption because of Adam’s sin? You seem to want to gloss over all the very profound differences you have not only with Seventh-day Adventist dcotrine, but with the most basic reasons that Seventh-day Adventism exists.
The syncretistic hodgepodge religion you’ve created for yourself, combining elements of a biblical world view (the incarnation) and elements of a pagan worldview (a self-created creation) is not Adventism. It is anti-Seventh-day Adventism.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Holly Pham: Holly, I will try, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Pauluc: Since no creationist could land a job as chairman of a biology department at a public university, it seems entirely appropriate that no Darwinist should be given the chairmanship of a biology department of a Seventh-day Adventist college.
The SDA educational system doesn’t exist to expensively duplicate the public university system. It exists to provide a uniquely biblical and Seventh-day Adventist education to interested young people. If mainstream origins science is correct in its assumptions and conclusions about our origins, the entire enterprise of Seventh-day Adventism is an utterly foolish waste of time. So at Adventist institutions, our professors should assume that Darwinistic science is false, and that creationistic science is true (just the reverse of how it is done at public universities), and proceed accordingly.
LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@gene fortner: What I like about your list of topics, Gene, is that it points out that many disciplines are implicated in the necessary change of worldview. It isn’t just biology and geology, although those are the main ones. History, archeology, anthropology and other disciplines should also be approached from a biblical worldview. The biblical worldview should pervade the entire curriculum.