Accreditation | Saint Luke's College of Theology

In summary. Accreditation in the United States would require the College either to submit to secular oversight designed for a fundamentally different kind of institution, or to affirm compressed doctrinal formulas the curriculum is explicitly built to refine. Neither option is compatible with what this College is. In place of third-party accreditation, the College offers direct transparency: every course, and every textbook the College has authored, is published in full and available without charge through the LMS link in the main menu, directly beneath Home. Prospective students, scholars, critics, and peer practitioners are invited to read the material and evaluate the rigor and depth of the teaching for themselves, before enrolling and without obligation. The full reasoning for the College's unaccredited status follows below.

Saint Luke's College of Theology is not accredited by any accrediting agency recognized by the United States Department of Education or the Council for Higher Education Accreditation. The College does not intend to pursue such accreditation. This is not a temporary condition, a phase of institutional development, or a goal the College is working toward. It is a permanent and deliberate feature of the institution's design, and the reasons for it are structural.

There are three categories of accrediting bodies in the United States that could theoretically evaluate a graduate-level theological institution: faith-based accreditors, secular institutional accreditors, and national career-education accreditors. Saint Luke's College of Theology is incompatible with all three, not because the institution falls short of their standards, but because the institution was built to address problems that those standards either perpetuate or cannot comprehend.

The Faith-Based Accreditors

Two accrediting agencies recognized by the U.S. Department of Education specialize in Christian higher education: the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS) and the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE). Both require member institutions to affirm specific doctrinal formulas as a condition of accreditation.

Saint Luke's College of Theology cannot sign either set of requirements. The incompatibility is not incidental. It goes to the heart of why this institution exists.

This College was founded on the conviction that the Church has replaced catechetical understanding with compressed doctrinal formulas, and that this substitution is responsible for generations of believers who, in the words of our institutional philosophy, "believe sincerely but cannot explain what they believe." The faith-based accreditors require institutions to perform precisely this substitution as a condition of membership. They ask the College to sign a formula in place of the substance the formula was meant to summarize. That is the transaction this institution was built to undo.

The specific doctrinal conflicts are as follows:

Scripture

The College affirms that Holy Scripture is "the written message of God delivered through flawed human beings" and that it "is not diminished by the humanity of its authors." The College further affirms that "the events Scripture records happened, the people it names lived, and the story it tells is true." This is a stronger claim than inerrancy, not a weaker one: it asserts that the text holds up even while honestly acknowledging the visible humanity of its instruments. The accreditors require the word "infallible" or the phrase "free from error of any sort." These formulas skip the hard question, how a text delivered through flawed human beings remains true, and replace it with a compressed assertion. The College's hermeneutical framework is designed to engage that hard question directly. Signing a formula that papers over it would contradict the curriculum.

Creation and the Fall

The College holds that Archbishop Ussher's chronology marks the fall, the moment when humanity entered spiritual accountability before God, not the moment of creation itself, and that creation may be as old as honest science determines it to be. This is not a footnote in the College's program. It is woven into the program's treatment of the fall, the human timeline, and the relationship between Scripture and the physical record, a framework that the faith-based accreditors' statements either explicitly contradict or implicitly exclude. TRACS was founded by the Institute for Creation Research and its Biblical Foundations Statement affirms literal primeval chronology. The College's position is a named, deliberate departure from that reading, and it is developed directly in the program's course on Forensic Theology.

It is worth noting that the Institute for Creation Research itself, having founded TRACS, now operates its own degree-granting School of Biblical Apologetics without TRACS accreditation or any other, under a religious exemption, the same structural category under which this College operates. The organization that built the accreditor concluded that the accreditor's framework was not worth the cost to its own institutional integrity. The College has reached the same conclusion, albeit for the opposite theological reason.

Creedal Formulas

TRACS requires conformity to the historic creeds. ABHE requires annual signature of a specific six-point doctrinal statement. The College's Statement of Faith does not reference any creed, and this is deliberate. The College's curriculum is built on the premise that catechesis, the systematic formation of believers in the substance and structure of the faith, predates the creeds by centuries. The Didache was written before the New Testament was complete. The Catechetical School of Alexandria operated before the Council of Nicaea convened. Requiring conformity to the creeds as a precondition of institutional identity inverts the historical relationship between catechesis and creedal formulation. The creeds are downstream of catechesis, not upstream of it. The College exists to restore the upstream discipline.

Denominational Identity

TRACS requires that the institution identify as part of the evangelical Protestant tradition. The College welcomes students from across the breadth of Christian tradition and positions itself as pre-denominational by design. The MCC curriculum teaches that the faith gets considerably roomier when one understands that Jesus is YHWH rather than treating Christianity as one franchise competing with others. Adopting a denominational label would narrow the very thing the program is built to open.

The Secular Institutional Accreditors

The regional accreditor with jurisdiction over Florida institutions is the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC). SACSCOC imposes no doctrinal requirements and evaluates institutional quality on secular academic criteria. The College has no doctrinal objection to SACSCOC. The objection is structural.

SACSCOC's standards are designed for conventional colleges and universities. They require institutional research infrastructure, library holdings, shared governance structures, general education breadth, and administrative staffing appropriate to a multi-program institution. Saint Luke's College of Theology offers a single credential, a 24-credit master's degree that costs less than two thousand dollars. The administrative apparatus required by SACSCOC would cost more to maintain than the College's entire tuition revenue. The accreditor's infrastructure expectations presuppose an institution of a kind that this College was deliberately designed not to be.

The National Career-Education Accreditors

The MCC is a first professional degree: the first degree signifying completion of the minimum academic requirements for practice of a profession. It produces practitioners, not scholars. In that sense it is career education. However, the national career-education accreditors recognized by the U.S. Department of Education, such as the Accrediting Commission of Career Schools and Colleges (ACCSC), limit their scope to occupations they have the competence to evaluate. The practice of Christian catechesis is not an occupation any secular accrediting body can assess. No secular peer reviewer can determine whether the program's treatment of salvation as jurisdictional transfer adequately forms a catechist, or whether Structural Christianity and Comparative Models properly prepare a practitioner to engage the world without retreating into a fortress or apologizing for being in the room. The catechist role is intelligible only within the broad structure of the Church, and no accreditor outside that structure has the vocabulary, the competence, or the standing to evaluate it.

What This Means

Saint Luke's College of Theology exists in a gap in the American accreditation system. The faith-based accreditors treat compressed doctrinal formulas as the price of admission; this institution was built because those formulas replaced the catechetical substance they were meant to summarize. The secular accreditors either require institutional infrastructure designed for a different kind of school or lack the competence to evaluate a profession that exists entirely within the life of the Church. There is no accrediting body in the United States whose scope, doctrinal framework, and institutional expectations are simultaneously compatible with what this College is and what it does.

This is not a failure of the institution. It is a structural feature of an accreditation system that was not designed for a lean, single-program college restoring a profession that predates the system by two millennia. The religious exemption under which the College operates, Florida Statute §1005.06(1)(f), exists in law precisely for institutions that serve religious purposes outside the frameworks that secular and sectarian accreditors impose.

Students considering enrollment should understand that the College's unaccredited status means that credits and degrees earned here are not eligible for federal Title IV financial aid, including Pell Grants and federal student loans. Credits may not transfer to other institutions. The degree is designed to prepare students for the practice of catechesis, not for secular professional licensure. These disclosures are made plainly and without reservation. They are also made elsewhere on this site, in the Consumer Disclosure and Institutional Disclosures sections, in full compliance with Florida Statute §1005.04.

The profession of catechesis was practiced, taught, and transmitted for four centuries before the first medieval European university was founded. It produced the theology of Augustine, the catechetical schools of Alexandria and Antioch, and the formation traditions that built the early Church. It did so without accreditation, without institutional review boards, and without anyone's permission. This College intends to restore that profession on the same terms: by producing graduates who can do the work, and letting the work speak for itself.