I’m stunned after reading “Stand to Reason” at the following link.  Read it and see how it hits you.  http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2014/10/gordon-college-will-lose-accreditation-over-behavioral-standards.html

Gordon College is among the top Christian colleges in America and the only nondenominational Christian college in New England.  Here’s what I understand about their accreditation:  they will lose it if they don’t change their sexual behavior standards within 18 months to allow homosexual practice among students.

“Accreditation is the recognition that an institution maintains standards requisite for its graduates to gain admission to other reputable institutions of higher learning or to achieve credentials for professional practice.  The goal of accreditation is to ensure that education provided by institutions of higher education meets acceptable levels of quality.”

But Gordon College is threatened with losing that because the college’s traditional inclusion of homosexual practice as a forbidden activity “runs afoul of the [New England Association of Schools and Colleges’] standards for accreditation”—despite the fact that the college prohibits all sexual practice outside of marriage.  Understand they’re not banning homosexuals, just homosexual practice as well as sexual practice between opposite-sex students unless they’re married.

“Stand to Reason” believes the college will lose any appeal, because the college lost earlier this year in a somewhat similar situation.  The college argued then for the “right of faith-based institutions to set and adhere to standards which derive from our shared framework of faith.”  As our blog-writer explains,  “That controversy ended with the termination of their city contract to maintain Salem’s historical Old Town Hall and their student teachers being removed from public schools.”

Is Gordon College discriminating against homosexuals?  “Stand to Reason” makes a convincing argument that they are not.  “Setting standards for sexual behavior is not the same as discrimination against people because of their sexual orientation—it’s not discrimination against single people because of their heterosexual orientation, and it’s not discrimination against gay people because of their homosexual orientation.”  The college is permitted to set sexual behavior standards for those attracted to the opposite sex.  Why not for those attracted to the same sex?  Especially when their standards derive from their framework of faith–in other words, who they are religiously as an educational institution.

I guess I shouldn’t be stunned.  Anyone these days is branded “homophobic” (fearful of homosexuals) if they don’t affirm everything  homosexual people stand for.  States all over the country seem eager to jump on the same-sex-marriage bandwagon.  So why should I be stunned when a college accrediting association requires a college to affirm homosexual practice?

The argument for seems to rest on “this is the way I was born.  It’s my nature.  I’m naturally attracted to people of my own sex.”  Even some professed Christians surrender to that argument.  But of all people, Christians should understand that “natural” is fallen.  We were all, argues the apostle Paul, “dead in the trespasses and sins in which [we] once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience–among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind” (Ephesians 2:1-3).

Most opposite-sex-attracted men, born with a natural desire for sexual relationships with women, have to fight temptation to remain sexually pure until marriage–and have to fight that temptation even after marriage.  Imagine a guy who “sleeps around” defending his behavior before God:  “This is how you made me!”  “Nature” is no defense, because human nature is corrupt.

The root problem here is that society has become anti-God, anti-Christ and anti-Scripture.  The only “God” allowed is the God who watches over us, does “nice” things to us, and stands on alert to help us when we cry out to him in trouble.  The holy God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ has no place among us–certainly not one who interferes with our sex life.

Opposite-sex and same-sex humans both need what Paul wrote of the Ephesians:  We need God, who is rich in mercy and loves us greatly even when we were dead in our sins, to make us alive together with Christ and raise us up with him and seat us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:4-6).  This is an act of God’s grace that comes to us through our faith in Christ when we admit our “deadness” apart from him (Ephesians 2:8,9).

Unless we bow to the authority and holiness of God and the gift of transforming grace he offers us in Jesus Christ, our downward moral slide will continue, and those who do bow and believe will find themselves running “afoul” of whatever the evil-one-ruled world wants.