Five issues seem to have become entrained together by the intense convection of this dispute.
1. Whether there should be criteria for membership or leadership in a particular organization besides that they be registered students in good standing of the University. (My alma mater actually forbids student organizations to have such criteria in their by-laws with respect to membership, but not leadership if I remember correctly.)
2. Whether Christian organizations on a campus should be permitted to discuss controversial aspects of Christianity and teach with authority on the matter.
3. Since universities in the UK are generally publicly funded, there is some concern that the by-laws of the Christian Unions violate non-discrimination laws of some sort.
4. Some Christians seem incensed about the Doctrinal Statement that must be affirmed upon membership:
( Courtesy of the University of York Christian Union ).
There is one God in three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
God is sovereign in creation, revelation, redemption and final judgement.
The Bible, as originally given, is the inspired and infallible Word of God. It is the supreme authority in all matters of belief and behaviour.
Since the fall, the whole of humankind is sinful and guilty, so that everyone is subject to God's wrath and condemnation.
The Lord Jesus Christ, God's incarnate Son, is fully God; he was born of a virgin; his humanity is real and sinless; he died on the cross, was raised bodily from death and is now reigning over heaven and earth.
Sinful human beings are redeemed from the guilt, penalty and power of sin only through the sacrificial death once and for all time of their representative and substitute, Jesus Christ, the only mediator between them and God.
Those who believe in Christ are pardoned all their sins and accepted in God's sight only because of the righteousness of Christ credited to them; this justification is God's act of undeserved mercy, received solely by trust in him and not by their own efforts.
The Holy Spirit alone makes the work of Christ effective to individual sinners, enabling them to turn to God from their sin and to trust in Jesus Christ.
The Holy Spirit lives in all those he has regenerated. He makes them increasingly Christlike in character and behaviour and gives them power for their witness in the world.
The one holy universal church is the Body of Christ, to which all true believers belong.
The Lord Jesus Christ will return in person, to judge everyone, to execute God's just condemnation on those who have not repented and to receive the redeemed to eternal glory.
The main stumbling block (my own, too) is the assertion of the infallibility of Scripture, which is a novelty introduced by the Westminster Confession of Faith. There also might be objections to Word being capitalized in the same clause, but I note that though the Articles of Religion assert Jesus Christ to be the Word of God (lit. the Word of the Father), the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral assert that the Holy Scriptures are (apparently adopting another Westminster novelty). Thus, I would agree that the Scriptures are the Word of God, provided that this is meant in some different and lower sense than Jesus Christ being the Word of God. Otherwise, the statement appears to agree with the Articles and the catholic Creeds.
5. Campus Muslim organizations are discriminatory, too. Some have asked why they get a free pass from the SUs.
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Having recently been graduated from a university with student organizations occupying political positions in a spectrum from revolutionary Catholic monarchism to revolutionary international socialism and religious organizations just as varied, I will be the first to say that a campus with a wide diversity of ideas and opinions is far more educational and fun than one in which uniformity of thought is encouraged. Once you decide that universities ought to be fair marketplaces of ideas, which is the cornerstone of academic freedom, delisting student organizations with unpopular positions is no more justified than firing professors with unpopular research. At my present institution, a controversial professor with tenure was sacked sneakily. That sneaky trick has hamstrung the institution's work in his field to the present day. But perhaps you can endure a Holocaust denier in the Political Science Department (you would hope there would be grounds for removal for misconduct in such a case), but you could not endure a student organization that promoted Holocaust denial. Well then, bring back in loco parentis . You only can make a distinction between student and professorial liberty on grounds of order or parental supervision.
But the major problem seems to arise from the public funding issue. Should the UK Government be involved with funding organizations that hold to a Cliffs' Notes version of the Westminster Confession of Faith and have discriminatory leadership requirements. In the United States, the answer would be simple. No public funding for the Christian organizations of any kind, no funding for the Muslim organizations either. In the United Kingdom, the situation becomes far more complicated, since the government funds educational foundations of the non-Established Churches (funding Catholic Schools in Scotlnd, for instance). For a Student Union to claim that the Christian Union cannot be supported on account of non-discrimination legislation is suspect in England and farcical in Scotland, where the Kirk is Established and the Catholic schools are regulated in such a way to ensure their Romanity. The Student Unions would be far better off waiting for the more obvious constitutional issues of the church-state conflict before going off on their own.
MadPriest's ire really seems to be focused on the opposition of the CUs to homosexual intimacy (see "I would like to marry gay people."). I share with him the sentiment but not the ire. Punishing or slandering someone solely or principally on account of their objections to homosexual intimacy is merely reciprocation. Mix that with the lust for mastery and you become the Empire ( qua idea) in the present age. The situation would be much different if the CUs were going seeking to replace the SUs so that organizations would be funded only if they subscribed to the Cliffs' notes version of the Westminster Confession.
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