Samford University defended its stance on the matter in a letter sent to students and shared with faculty and staff. Vice President of Student Affairs Philip Kimrey noted that “the university has a responsibility to formally partner with ministry organizations that share our beliefs.”

A campus minister at Samford University turned away Presbyterian Church (USA) and Episcopal Church college chaplains that asked to be included in a recent campus ministry fair because the two denominations have stances supporting same-sex marriage, according to the founder of SAFE Samford, an LGBTQ rights group.
Brit Blalock, who founded SAFE Samford in 2011 (Students, Alumni and Faculty for Equality), said that Madison Vaughn, ministry coordinator for the Ukirk campus ministry representing the Presbyterian Church (USA), had tried to reserve a table at the Church & Ministry Expo event held on Aug. 31 on campus.
Blalock said that the Presbyterian Church (USA) and Episcopal Church college chaplains had taken part in previous ministry fairs at Samford with no problems.
“It’s always been come one, come all,” said Blalock, a 2008 graduate of Samford University.
Vaughn was told she would not be given display space at the event and later contacted the Rev. Emily Collette, a chaplain at Trinity Commons, a similar campus ministry organization affiliated with the U.S. Episcopal Church. Collette had reserved a table at the event and agreed to share space with Vaughn, said Blalock, who spoke to Vaughn.
After Vaughn shared plans to attend the event on social media, Collette received a call from Samford University Campus Pastor Bobby Gatlin “uninviting” her to the event, Blalock said.
“He was explicit in saying that the reason was her denomination’s affirmative stance on LGBTQ people and did not mention any policies she was in violation of,” Blalock said.
The Rev. Joe Genau, pastor of Edgewood Presbyterian Church in Homewood and supervising pastor of Ukirk Campus Ministry, confirmed that Ukirk was not allowed at the event.
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Wycliffe called indulgences one of the “Luciferian seductions of the church” and a “fiction of the Prince of Darkness,” and called upon Christians to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ…and teach the people that they should trust in Christ alone, and in his law, and in his members…”

George Housman Thomas’ illustration, “Wycliffe on His Sick-Bed Assailed By the Friars at Oxford,” is a striking depiction of one of the many trials endured by the noble English priest and reformer, and a testimony to his courage in the face of stringent opposition. The illustration depicts an encounter from 1378, when Wycliffe was suffering from a severe illness, perhaps the aftereffects of a stroke. Supposing Wycliffe to be near death, the begging friars and four Oxford eminents came to his bedchamber and pleaded with him to retract the fulminations he had published against the mendicants–that is, itinerant friars and preachers who relied on alms for their living. After the friars made their statement, a servant raised Wycliffe in bed so he could respond. It is this moment that is depicted in Thomas’ work. The mendicants linger about the room, not with looks of compassion, but rather countenances of contempt. One corpulent friar sets his back to Wycliffe, even as he turns his head and glares at the reformer with bulging eyes. Wycliffe appears gaunt and sickly–eyes hollow, hair matted. Within reach at his bedside is a thick book, likely meant to represent the Scriptures. Steadied in bed by his servant, he raises his hand and replies, “I shall not die, but live to declare the evil deeds of the friars,” before driving his detractors from the room. Thomas’ illustration is imaginative, but emblematic of the battles faced by Wycliffe as he sought the purification of Christ’s church from the licentiousness and bombast that had come to characterize it.[1]
Remarkably, though Wycliffe died a century before Martin Luther’s birth, he anticipated multiple of the doctrines that would eventually characterize mature Protestantism. This reality finds modest recognition in Wycliffe’s honorifics, “Evangelical Doctor” and “Morning Star of the Reformation.” But Wycliffe was more direct in his proto-Protestant convictions than is usually recognized. His opposition to the begging friars was founded upon a Gospel rooted in Scripture, and shorn of the ceremonialism and muddled soteriology of the Roman church.
When Wycliffe was born in Yorkshire around 1330, no complete English Bible yet existed. In fact, the church magisterium was hostile to vernacular translations of the Scriptures. When Wycliffe matriculated at Oxford around 1345, he followed in the wake of such distinguished Oxford affiliates as John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, and Thomas Bradwardine. He was accordingly tutored in scholastic philosophy.
Wycliffe established himself in the field of law—both civil and canon. It was in the legal arena that various controversies of the age presented themselves, specifically with regard to the prerogatives of sovereigns and subjects over against the church magisterium. Wycliffe was committed to resisting the unwelcome intrusions of the pope and the mendicants in English affairs. The term “mendicants” comes from the Latin mendicans, “begging”, and is interchangeable with “friars”, taken from the Latin frater, “brother.” The mendicants that Wycliffe encountered predominantly belonged to two new orders founded in the early 1200s around the time of the Fourth Lateran Council: the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Much distinguished these new friars from older Western monastics, not least of all their status as itinerant preachers, traveling throughout Christendom and relying upon alms as they did so, rather than doing their ministry and earning their keep in stable monastic communities. Whilst the founders of these orders, such as St. Francis of Assisi and St. Dominic, were doubtless sincere reformers in their own way, they usefully served the ends of the papacy, since their calls to itinerancy afforded opportunities to impose piety and belief upon the laity.[2] By Wycliffe’s day, this facet of the mendicant life had only increased, and their once well-intentioned ascetic poverty had morphed into a leeching mendicancy which exploited both the purses and the souls of Christians across Europe. Wycliffe’s understandable mistrust of these foreign influences grew as he came to see Scripture as the supreme authority over Christian faith and practice. He found no authorization for these offices or their practices in the Bible.[3]
The Black Death reached England in June 1348, and over the following 18 months killed approximately half of the English population. The student body at Oxford, where Wycliffe was likely studying at the time, was decimated. Wycliffe was deeply affected by this catastrophe and came to see it as a judgment sent by God upon a wayward church, at whose head were debauched clergy and mendicants who exploited the people under their care.[4]
Wycliffe remained an affiliate of the university in various capacities after the plague subsided. His dispute with the mendicants began in earnest in 1360. The begging friars had established themselves in various cities across England (including Oxford) by the middle of the 13th century, taking their solemn vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. The original Rule of St. Francis read, “Those brothers whom the Lord favors with the gift of working should do so faithfully and devotedly, so that idleness, the enemy of the soul, is excluded yet the spirit of holy prayer and devotion, which all other temporal things should serve, is not extinguished.” Suffice to say, this ideal had not been maintained: the orders had succumbed to moral corruption and idleness.[5]
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God in Himself can be known only by Himself. He is different from us, not as an archangel is different from us – by some finite distance of hierarchical complexity. No, He is infinitely removed from us when it comes to what He is. He is what He is. This distance is also called the transcendence of God. What may be known of God by creatures, and what can be understood by analogy is the immanence of God. His transcendence is the infinite gap between Creator and creature, in essence and nature. “He had a name written that no one knew except Himself.” (Revelation 19:12)

When God declares “I AM THAT I AM”, He is explaining to us, as best as human language can communicate, what He is.
Philosophy, and specifically that branch of philosophy known as metaphysics, studies the nature of reality. It breaks things down into their component parts, hoping to reach the final essence that makes up the substance of things – be they atoms, protons and electrons, quarks, or according to one branch of science, strings of energy. Similarly, metaphysics classifies things by relating them to things more general or specific: genus and species. A dining-room chair is a species of chairs, which is a species of seating apparatus, which is a species of devices, and so on. Eventually we reach an abstract, general genus of “created objects” or “things”. Philosophy does this kind of exercise to know what things are.
God is not a species of some more general category, “godlike beings”. Nor are there species of God: sub-gods, demigods, emanations of God. God cannot be abstracted or specialised into something else. He is what He is. Similarly, God cannot be broken down or divided up into more basic elements that will explain the nature or substance of God. As we have seen, God is simple, and not composed. Metaphysics can do its work on the created order. But when it comes to God, it will eventually bend back on itself into circularity. What is God? God is what God is. I AM THAT I AM.
God is not being deliberately evasive or coy, nor is He obfuscating, when He calls Himself I AM THAT I AM. God cannot explain what He is with reference to something He has made.
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