The Rise of Theistic Evolutionism – The Salvation of Christianity?
Lydian, I think Jeff Kent is right that church administrators prefer to work quietly, behind the scenes. But there are a couple of other reasons that I think are probably more important.

First, as I noted above, there are effectively two Adventist Churches, and one of them doesn’t have a problem with what is happening at LaSierra. So you may not have an administrator who feels motivated to do anything. But even if the particular administrator is a traditional Adventist believer, his task will be greatly complicated by the fact that many of his constituents and fellow administrators are part of the other Adventist Church.

Second, the church is not organized in a top-down chain of command organizational structure, like the military or a corporation. The church has elements of that, but also very important elements of local control and organization. For example, the local church controls its own membership. If the local church says someone is a member, she’s a member, and no one at the conference, union, or GC can do anything about it.

The colleges are affiliated with the unions, so no one at the GC level can really do much about the colleges. (There are exceptions; I believe that Oakwood, LLU and the Seminary at Andrews may be General Conference institutions, not union, but most Adventist colleges are union colleges.) The colleges are controlled by their boards, and the board chairmen are the union conference presidents. The boards are designed to have a preponderance of church officers, ensuring indirect church control, but it is control at the union level, not at the GC level. The only leverage that Ted Wilson has over colleges is that Adventist schools (in addition to secular accreditation) are all accredited by the Adventist Accrediting Association (AAA), and (I believe) the GC President can exert control over the AAA by appointments to the board. So the only influence that Ted Wilson can exert over LaSierra is the somewhat indirect influence of accreditation through AAA.

A third factor is that in the modern Western world, including America and especially including California, it is very difficult and costly to fire people. And academic tenure adds another level of protection for teachers. So even if the stars align, and you have traditional believers at all the control positions, it will still be very difficult to make changes that involve changes of personnel.

About a year ago, Shane posted an anonymous article that outlined the fact that what has happened at LaSierra is the result and fruition of more than 30 years of planning by a liberal faction of professor who wanted to take LaSierra, if not outside the SDA Church altogether, at least outside the effective control of the church. With Fritz Guy and Lawrence Geraty, they’ve had presidents who were sympathetic to their ideological perspective. (President Wisbey may actually be relatively conservative, compared to those two.)

So, the bottom line is that making real changes to LaSierra is going to be a long, slow process.

The Rise of Theistic Evolutionism – The Salvation of Christianity?
Something important that SDA compromisers with Darwinism ought to acknowledge is that Adventists need Genesis to explain our doctrine of the state of the dead. We need Genesis 2:7 “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Based upon this text, this is our formula for a soul:

Dust of the ground + breath of life = soul

Once the breath of life returns to God who gave it, and the dust returns to the ground, there is no more soul. The soul does not continue on, as a disembodied consciousness, because a necessary constituent of a soul is the “dust of the ground,” i.e., a physical body.

But theistic evolution reverses this biblical formula. According to theistic evolution, a humanoid creature had been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years, and thus had had both a physical body and the breath life for hundreds of thousands of years. At some point when God was satisfied with the progress, he inserted a “soul” or “souls” into these beings and they became human. Under that scenario, the “soul” is clearly something external to both the physical body and the breath of life, so it makes perfect sense that, when the body dies, the soul just goes somewhere else, maybe to heaven, maybe to hell.

So theistic evolution lends itself very naturally to erroneous ideas about the nature of man, the state of the dead, conditional immortality, and the annihilation of the unsaved as opposed to an eternally burning hell. Adventists rely upon Genesis 2:7 to come to a correct understanding of these issues.

The Rise of Theistic Evolutionism – The Salvation of Christianity?
The fact is that Richard Dawkins is right. If you take away a literal Adam and Eve and literal fall into sin, there is no making sense of the Christian religion. Without the foundation of the historicity of Genesis, the entire structure collapses.

Even after one explains that to Christians who would compromise with Darwinism, they still want to compromise; such is the powerful hold that Darwinism has over their minds. And they do not really understand the philosophical foundation of Darwinism, that it is built more upon philosophical naturalism than upon evidence.

Perhaps the saddest part of all is that the compromise will bring them no respect whatsoever in the scientific world whose respect they seem to crave. Theistic evolution, or guided evolution, has no more scientific respectability than creationism. Science insists that evolution was an unguided, totally natural process; natural selection acting upon random DNA replication errors, unguided by God or providence, is what mainstream science believes created the world. If you ever mention God in connection with an origins narrative, you’re just as far off the scientific reservation as if you believe that God created the world in six literal days 6,000 years ago.

So why compromise, and in compromising destroy the foundations of Christianity? There’s no reason to.

La Sierra University gets 3-year AAA Accreditation
@Beatrice: Beatrice, I note that you have posted here a copy of your post at ADvindicate.com.

It’s interesting that you say that John Perumal replaced Lee Grismer as department chairman “a long time ago,” but the first news of that change was your own comment at ADvindicate a couple of days ago. There was no public announcement, and no news from any of the usual sources: the Review, ANN, Spectrum, ADvindicate, or Educate Truth. When I was researching my story, there was nothing on La Sierria’s official website to indicate that the chairmanship had changed; the website was not updated to reflect the change in chairmanship until after my article was posted at ADvindicate on October 17. Am I “lazy” if I don’t telephone La Sierra every couple of months and ask if Wisbey has had a change of heart and demoted the hardened Darwinist that he promoted to department chair two years ago?? I cannot help but wonder why this change in departmental leadership was a closely held secret until AFTER my article started making the rounds and being read by Adventist opinion leaders, but some mysteries will likely remain mysterious.

It’s hardly an excuse for wrecking the Adventist faith of those who take upper division biology courses at La Sierra that most students do not take upper division biology courses. But the information that has been provided by LSU students like Louie Bishop is that even a seminar science-faith course intended for a broad non-specialized student audience–specifically the one instituted in response to the 2009 controversy over the teaching of origins–was destructive of Adventist faith; LSU religion teachers, including John Webster who (at that time) was chairman of the religion department, told students that the Adventist hermeneutic was unhelpful, and that the Genesis narrative should not be taken literally as a description of the creation.

If AAA has witnessed a change of direction at La Sierra–and I very much doubt that–then it is up to them to say what they saw, and why they voted the way they did, in connection with their vote to extend Adventist accreditation for a further three years. There is a very public controversy about La Sierra’s blatant undermining of Adventist beliefs, and if AAA is, in the face of that controversy, going to certify that LSU is fulfilling its Adventist mission and upholding its Adventist identity, then AAA must publicly explain its vote, and justify it by outlining the changes that it observed.

You say that I “have not taken the approach Jesus advocated” and I assume that by that you are referring to Matthew 18. That passage does not apply. No one at La Sierra has wronged me personally; I have no personal stake whatsoever in the matter. The issue is that LSU is publicly undermining Seventh-day Adventist beliefs, and the response to that issue needs to be public. The relevant passage is 1 Tim. 5:20: “Those who are sinning rebuke in the presence of all, that the rest also may fear.” Please look at Testimonies, v. 2, pp. 14-16.

It is not my desire or goal to undermine unity in the church, but there can be no unity except on the basis of sound biblical truth. La Sierra has been sowing the seeds of a very profound disunity, as it has for a generation been training Adventist youth at an Adventist institution (AAA approved!) to lightly regard the word of God. It has been telling the Adventist youth entrusted to it that God’s claim to have created the world in six literal days and rested on the Sabbath day (Gen. 2:2-3; Ex. 20:11) is unsustainable nonsense. This can only lead to disunity on the most fundamental level, as one group, raised and educated in the SDA Church, has an entirely different conception of what the Bible teaches and God requires than another group also raised and educated in the church.

Lay people are under an obligation of conscience to see that those who live off the tithe uphold the religious mission of the church. One very highly placed Adventist official has instructed us to “hold them accountable,” and he is right. In the absence of a vigilant laity, the SDA Church will lapse into corruption as did the post-apostolic Christian Church.

LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Paul Giem: Paul I will pray that you are right that there has been a sea change. But it will take more than a (until recently, covert) change in the biology dept. chairmanship to convince me of that.

LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@gene fortner: That’s a good list, Gene, but do not forget Arthur Chadwick (Ph.D, U. of Miami, geology/sedimentology) and Lee Spencer (Ph.D, biology/paleontology, Loma Linda) and Kurt Wise (Ph.D, geology, Harvard) and Marcus Ross (Ph.D, paleontology, U.R.I.).

The first two are Seventh-day Adventists and very strong creationists; the second two are creationists. Kurt Wise is a good friend of Art Chadwick and has come to SDA-sponsored events before.

LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
It will be interesting to see how much power John Perumal will be given, and will exercise, in reshaping the biology department. He should have veto power over new hires, and he should be able to recommend whether contracts for untenured professors are renewed or not, and whether tenure is granted or not. Typically the academic dean or provost has some say over this as well, but the department chair’s power is considerable.

LSU Removes Dr. Lee Grismer as Chairman of the Biology Department
@Paul Giem: Paul, your theory is indeed very reasonable, but I don’t think it is correct. First, I have argued that WASC’s concerns about autonomy were solicited by Randal Wisbey so that he could get bylaw changes that would give him greater autonomy from the church. One key item of evidence that has become public is that in 2011 one of Wisbey’s minions, then LSU board member Lenny Darnell, recorded himself saying that he planned to write WASC and demand that WASC recommend and insist on changes to the board structure that would dilute the power of the church officers on the board:

http://advindicate.com/articles/2793.

Second, the bylaw changes Wisbey wanted were approved by the constituency back in May, so WASC has no grounds to complain about the lack of institutional autonomy, and has indicated that it is pleased with what was done:

http://advindicate.com/articles/2013/10/13/wasc-visiting-team-commends-la-sierra-for-revisions-to-university-governance-practices

My theory as to why this change of department chairmen has been so hush hush is that, 1) Wisbey didn’t want his liberal base to know that he had thrown any sort of bone to AAA; he wanted them thinking he had gotten an unconditional surrender from AAA, and 2) Wisbey doesn’t want the wider SDA Church to know that AAA thought there was anything wrong at La Sierra that needed changing, much less that the chairman of the biology department needed changing.