I was sitting in the break room at my work when a co-worker asked me to explain a project I had been working on for the past week. My project was targeting the abstinence standard listed in Biola’s community standards, or what most students refer to as “the contract.” I explained to my co-worker that not having premarital sex is a part of the community standards that all students choose to live under when coming to Biola.

My co-worker was confused. Why would a university put such a restriction on its student body when there have been so many medical advances to prevent unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases?

“There are so many preventative ways,” she said.

Sharing the biblical view of chastity

While prevention is important, it misses the heart of chastity and its Biblical foundations. We have adopted our culture’s value in taking preventative measures but we often fail in our rhetoric to distinguish the difference between strategy and theology.

Since Biola students are to be held accountable by our community, we are to speak honestly and openly about the issues of chastity and sexuality from a theological standpoint. However, I fear that we may be severely lacking in this area as a university.

Like my co-worker, many students have a short-sighted view of what the Biola community standard is stating. While our highly-sexualized culture insists that sexuality and chastity are private issues, the Biola community standard is set to remind the Biola community that the issue of sexual purity is a communal responsibility. And the communal responsibility is not just about preventing sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned pregnancies, but about seeing it as a heart issue and cultivating purity as an act of worship to God.

Need for more dialogue

In the two years since I have transferred here, there has only been one event that I was made aware of discussing relationships and vaguely touching on relationship purity. Yet the questions frequently come up, “How far is too far?” or “Sleeping in the same bed and not having sex isn’t bad, right?” I feel that we are missing key issues when discussing purity — that is, if we actually do talk about it.

Coming from a secular university in the University of California system, panels regarding sexuality were held almost monthly and were given by various clubs. What frightens me is that while at Biola, I have only been aware of one controversial talk on sexuality and that stemmed from one event: DTR Week.

While studying evangelical abstinence messages, I found that many of their messages mirror the rhetorical strategies employed by non-evangelicals. Most messages promote prevention or use fear tactics to the audience — such as fear of STDs, pregnancies, rejection from family, friends and a future spouse — which evangelicals are not immune to doing. The difference is that many prominent evangelical messages use sex to sell abstinence by guaranteeing great sex within marriage.

Acting as a community

So now, waiting to have sex and pleasing God will have tangible benefits. But the argument then becomes a promise of marriage. Therefore the primary motive of pleasing God is not so genuine.

This is where I feel that most people viewing the Biola contract become short-sighted. I fear that we are losing a proper and biblical standard of what it means to be chaste.

“We find ourselves asking what is permissible rather than what is pleasing to God,” said Rick Langer, a professor in the biblical studies department.

We Christians are a community, a people of the incarnation, and yet the physicality of the body scares us from keeping the issue a genuine and communal one.

I hope that as a community situated in one of the most sexualized regions in America, we are setting ourselves apart by remembering the Genesis account, acknowledging what our bodies are made for and choosing to glorify God.

So what script is the Biola community following? Are we going to be a community that lives by a contract, asking how far is too far? Instead of choosing to adopt the idioms of our culture, we can be a community that recognizes the radical nature of the gospel and chooses to lead radical lives by pursuing holiness. However, this can only happen if we, as a Christian community and university, will stand up and speak.