Marks of Christian Education

A consultation of scholars discussing Christian educational distinctives recently located the glory of the Christian campus not in compulsory chapel, classes opened with prayer, spiritual overcomments on secular textbooks, but in faculty and student dedication to the whole truth. Secularism stands to gain more from suppression and fragmentation of truth than Christianity. Ignorance of some facts and revolt against other facts explains the isolation of education in general from the Christian world-and-life view. Scripture covets a universal knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Tim. 3:7), and Jesus Christ is himself the Truth (John 14:6). To lose a devotion to the whole truth, therefore, is to forsake the God of Truth.

Although Christianity has nothing to fear from non-Christian theories, it loses cultural relevance when it refuses to explore contemporary false alternatives to their depths. In evangelism, the preacher may well ignore objections to belief undisturbing to his hearers; the Holy Spirit can convict by a single shaft of truth and regenerate the penitent sinner. But Christian apologetics can hardly rely on this method for preserving and reinforcing truth. Nor can Christian education use this approach in the classroom if it wishes to engage seriously in the twentieth century battle for the minds of men.

One sign of reviving vigor in Christian education is the probing of evangelical academic distinctives by some small church-related colleges. In a convocation address at Trinity Christian College, a new Christian Reformed institution in Worth, Illinois, Dr. Calvin Seerveld, professor of philosophy, offered observations that CHRISTIANITY TODAY believes merit approbation from educators on other evangelical campuses:

A college [said Dr. Seerveld] is not an advanced high school; the whole sphere, structure, and attack is different. The college is a center for scientific studies: searching investigation which aims at depth and precision, the concentrated attempts to grapple with a problem, whether it be chemical, literary, or whatever, grapple with it until you have analyzed it, related it to other knowledge and come up with a simple, hard won contribution of your own. College is the beginning of serious, exacting investigation which assumes both dedicated determination and this, that the elementary matters of the subject at hand already have been learned. Old and New Testament studies at college do not repeat Bible stories and rehearse catechism but assume such knowledge and build enriching theological research upon it. Historiographical studies at college do not drum on dates, data, and anecdotes, but assume some grasp of chronology and retention of events so that the probing interpretation and critical relation of key men and historical movements can be begun. College study depends upon the completion of high school work and does not, cannot prolong it and stay college.

We too are so-called ‘liberal arts minded’ in that of the several basic kinds of studies required here no one of them is permitted a preponderance over the others; belles-lettres, biology, Greek, history, all are considered equally important, integral factors of a liberally rounded college education. Despite the runaway success of Russian technology, for example, we will not join the widespread attempts to out Russian the Russians by overbalancing the curriculum with mathematics, physics and technological studies; such a pragmatic maneuver might get a man on the moon but it is still narrow-minded, il-liberal education.… But we are not ‘liberal arts minded’ into thinking that study of language, chemistry, literature, philosophy—the liberal arts, will liberate one from ignorance, prejudices, and a humdrum mentality, as the credo goes; we do not believe that application to the famous trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful will set man free, create a higher type of individual able to change society and relieve the world of its ills.

Rather, we study everything because man does live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, and since God has spoken and speaks here, there, everywhere in the world and its development, his sustained creation, it is man’s privilege, it is God’s command to those who are qualified, to search through all the areas of creation and all the varied aspects of human activity—nothing of God’s playground is off limits—it is our task to seek out everywhere the wonders of God Almighty’s work and enjoy the discoveries with childlike surprise day in and day out forever.… All the arts and sciences and theoretical studies of creation disclose the handiwork of our Triune God when the languages of these varied and complex fields are heard and seen by biblically honed ears and eyes; thus, in the time-consuming job of learning these special languages of God’s creation and of training the eyes and ears, unless the professor and student get to see the handiwork of God, unless professor and student grow in the fear and adoration of the Triune God, realizing more intimately that Jehovah covenant God does hold all things in his hand, that all things were created by Jesus Christ and for Jesus Christ, that it is indeed the Holy Spirit who leads into all Truth, unless professor and student grow in this scintillating awareness, grow in grace, the diligent pursuit of knowledge and wisdom is in vain no matter what gets done; whether we learn to speak with the brilliant tongues of orators and angels and throw a satellite halfway to heaven, it is still a meaningless, Towering Babel and clanging cymbals, it is empty, vanity.…

This unrelenting Christian religious focus of every theoretical study here does not make education a pious powder box affair of moralism and ill-timed devotionals. So-and-So will not say everytime sodium chloride dissolves in water, ‘You see, it was providential.’ Miss And-So-Forth will not say, ‘All right, today we are going to cut up Christian frogs.’ At the same time, never forget that simple classroom biology is always subtly couched in a God-fearing perspective or dominated by some such godless religious view as the positivistic macro-evolutionary dogma.… The problem is complex, yes, but the direction is clear: out of every college classroom study in this building, biology, chemistry, mathematics, philosophy, history, psychology, theology, literature, German, Latin, and if we taught Chinese you would hear it in Chinese, comes the quietly moving, almost unobtrusive, subconscious but strong, pulsating song, ‘This is our Father’s world … we are here for Jesus’ sake … come, Holy Spirit, with all your quickening powers.…’

Here also is a singular intramural communication and rapport among the different branches of study, because each faculty member is jealous for his own discipline yet fascinated by the other fields around him, thankful for their enriching complementation and correction, happy that he does not bear the brunt of having to say it all, secure in the realization that all of his colleagues, in their own ways, are trying to project the same total picture at which he is working. This invigorating, concerted study of the faculty which works its way down to the students too is not just an esprit de corps on campus, not even just plain communion of the saints, but is the full-fledged, peculiarly Reformational reality of the Christian community in collegiate action. A Christian college is only as big as a mustard seed but it is a live fragment of the civitas Dei, and that will be the secret of whatever impact it makes as a Reformed Christian center of scientific studies upon its surroundings.

The wise men who first conceived the curriculum decided to make explicit what lay implicit in its peculiarly Reformational nature. They made philosophy and history requirements of freshmen and sophomore studies along with biblical theology, composition, and American literature. Maybe you wonder why?…

All this painstaking historical and philosophical study of centuries of world events, ideas, men, and movements, is done here not for its own cultural sake but to make unmistakably clear the basic religious struggle in the world to find meaning and the terrible meaninglessness of all directions outside Christ-centered endeavors. A sense of tradition, a sense of the biblical Christian tradition is what we are after, so that as a people we do not get lost like squatters in secular America, do not flirt with the perpetually accommodating Romanist line, or succumb to the touchy pietistic Christian approach, but on the solid ground of Reformational Christianity, with a host of witnesses—Augustine, Luther, Holbein, Calvin, Bourgeois, Bach, Kuyper—we go out to attack and reform as a united body and build as a testimony to the Lord on earth a peculiarly powerful, contemporary, apocalyptic culture. All this searching and struggling investigation within a scandalously open dedication to Jesus Christ is meant to leave those so trained impassioned for the concrete glory of God and unafraid, because they have been instilled with the fear of the Lord and given respect for a heritage of great price.…

For what has the faculty called you together? In Greek it is called paideia: disciplining, breeding, formation, unfolding, chastisement, nurture, paideia. Each professor wants to see the student find paideia in his classroom, but he cannot give it to him. A habit of disciplined thought, a hammered out decorum of Christian warmth, a chastised character, a competence to lead and follow intelligently, a perspective, paideia: for a student to get that takes time, and he has got to catch it himself.… The Holy Spirit who broods around the corners and classrooms knows all of our shortcomings. After several weeks of faithful work, after a hard beaten semester or even a year on our part, maybe He will blow gently and a new look at things will come upon one here and one there, unawares, a vision of what we actually are doing, and there will be a rush of joy and determination in the hard work, a sudden thankful gladness that you are busy about your Father’s business! That is paideia kuriou, the fear of the Lord, and it is that for which the faculty has called you together. If you fail to get paideia, if you fail to get educated, if you fail to become a genuine Christian student, we teachers fail too. A teacher is nothing without a student. You have got us there. We are in this affair together.

EDUCATION, DEMOCRACY, AND GOD: WHERE ARE THE SCHOOLS HEADED?

American education is at the crossroads. It is nothing short of disastrous when the traditional policy of separation between Church and State is so interpreted that education becomes the special concern of the State and religion the concern only of the Church, and that education and religion therefore are kept in rigid isolation from each other. Such a road leads to education which is godless, and which, in principle if not in intention, sooner or later approximates the atheistic education of communism. Through its irreligion, such public education may prove to be an unwitting method of conditioning the minds of American youth to be receptive to the doctrines of communism. Such an outcome, of course, is the very opposite of the national purpose, for it ill befits a state whose motto is “This Nation under God.”

In this connection we draw attention to a recent convocation address at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary by Dr. Cyril D. Garrett, professor of Christian Education, on the theme “The Nature of Man—Some Implications for Education.” Said Dr. Garrett:

One of our gravest dangers is that the American public will blindly accept a nonbiblical view of man in education. Christian parents, teachers, and church workers must reject educational statements that would lead the young to believe that they can fulfill their essential being in this present sociological, biological, technological process.… Christianity maintains that man understands himself best when he sees himself in relationship with the eternal Creator-God. Herein lies one of the basic differences between our Christian view of man and the communistic view of man. In the communistic state, there is nothing beyond this present biological, sociological, technological process. Theirs is a one-story universe and proletarian man occupies the highest status. Man, especially corporate man, assumes gigantic proportions. He replaces deity.… Democracy is a great way of life, but it is not all of life. If American man “emancipates himself from God by assuming that democracy is a self-existent and self-sustaining ideology and by defining education to care for “all of life” in this life, he can degenerate as far and as quickly as the communist. The biblical view claims that man cannot treat his educative experiences as ends in themselves. While man is an earthly creature who must learn many facts and skills, he fulfills his highest capacities and abilities best when he is living in proper spiritual relationship with God. Such a view of life that grounds man’s greatest happiness in his proper spiritual relationship with God does not discount the values of this present social-life process. Rather, it capitalizes upon them.… Our day-by-day educative experiences must be related to God’s eternal will, for God has entered our day-by-day experiences in Christ, and given them significance through his eternal plans. A world and life view which teaches our young to interpret their social life processes as ends in themselves will produce a race that sends each man seeking his own in selfish plunder and vicious destruction.

I Believe …

Both the fragmentation of Protestantism and the disunity of Christendom are indeed lamentable. Not everything however that churchmen decry deserves the blanket denunciation of “schism.” Unfortunately “the sin of schism” has become a serviceable stigma for promoting novel notions of church amalgamation and for rebuking “the outsiders.” Protestantism’s sickness today is not only its divided body, but also and perhaps more serious its divided schizophrenic mind. While modernist deviation from revealed doctrine once divided the churches, modernist ecclesiology now pushes their unity on the premise of theological inclusivism. Let our prayers and labors show constant awareness that for Christian unity healing of the mind and of the body go together.

It is time to ensure that current concepts of Church and State, religion and education, do not unthinkingly prepare the soil for planting the seeds of godless communism in the minds of the young. A religiously “neutral” democracy may swiftly compromise the conflict of religious pluralism, but it may also prove only one step removed from an atheistically militant communism.

LET THE STUDENTS OF CHILE GRIP THE REAL ISSUE: THE IMAGE OF GOD

In its winter number, the Columbia University Forum carries a statement by Samuel Shapiro, assistant professor of history at Michigan State University, that sets the Latin American situation in perspective. According to Professor Shapiro, “a poll of several hundred Chilean university students taken last year found that only one out of four favored siding with the West in the cold war; one out of seven favored the Sino-Soviet bloc, and the overwhelming majority were neutralist.”

To be precise—unless our early training in fractions has failed us—the professor’s report indicates that out of every 28 students in Chile, seven choose the free world, four choose communism, and 17 profess to steer a perilous via media under the slogan, “A plague o’ both your houses.” The latter policy would, as we understand it, conveniently leave the door wide open for friendly loans from the United States, and also for delegations of “technicians” from Moscow and perhaps even for Skoda ammunition from Prague.

So in the universities of Santiago and Valparaiso the margin of popularity of freedom over enchainment, of the dignity of man over the knock-at-the-door-at-midnight, is reduced to three-twenty-eighths.

Granted that the economic imbalance in Chile is a lighted fuse. Granted that living conditions among a large segment of the population are deplorable. Granted that reports of luxury living in the United States have made the people restive, and that Communist cells are multiplying among academic groups through the importation of shiploads of literature from Moscow. The fact still remains that today the Chilean is a free man. He is a citizen of the Americas. Harsh as his lot may be, we doubt it would be improved in the regimen of a Chinese commune. For as a free man, the Chilean lives on the side of hope. The future belongs to him, under God. He can sell his birthright if he chooses, but he can only choose once.

Probably the young men and women of the intellectual classes of Chile are being told that we North Americans desire only to exploit their country and to use it as a pawn to protect our own interests. Certainly many of them do not see what is at stake in the future of man as an independent spirit or, to use theological language, as the image of God. They do not see that nations have indeed obtained economic blessings from political liberty but that never once in the history of man has it worked the other way around. The benevolent despot who feeds his wards has not the slightest intention of freeing them.

Tyranny, in other words, has always maintained an interest in freeing the masses from starvation but has yet to follow its good intentions for the human body by freeing the mind and spirit—the characteristics of essential manhood—from the bonds of coercion. A country can buy communism but it cannot sell it. It can vote itself under Marxist rule, but it cannot vote itself out again. The street goes one way and there is no return, not even by backing up.

The political freedom we know today—the right of a general populace to exercise its franchise and to make its own choices—is not a legacy from the French or even from the American revolution. It is the gift of God and the achievement of some God-fearing English puritans who dared to beard King James I and King Charles I in the House of Commons, by taking the nation’s purse into their own hands. It was a slow, risky and dogged battle, absolutely unique in the history of the human race. The freedom these unsung heroes won was based not on essays of Montaigne and Montesquieu, but on John 10:10 and Galatians 5:1.

Who will tell the students of Chile that the issue goes far deeper than American foreign policy? Who will explain to them that as Christians we love them for their own sakes, not for ours, and that because we love them we want to see them reach their stature as God’s free men?

SENTIMENT RISING FOR PARISH DAY SCHOOLS

One detects a growing disposition of Protestant churches in the United States to support the parish day school as the best means of recovering the unity of religious education in a secular environment. This concern is especially apparent in congregations aware that secularism no less than communism is a rival faith.

Mounting interest in the parish day school—every Protestant church is a potential schoolhouse, someone has said—springs from two considerations. One is a feeling that public school policy, by tapering education increasingly to minority pressures, serves the children of humanist and secularist—that is, of the irreligious—more than the community as a whole. So “the few” are able to impose their preferences on a tax-supported institution at the expense of “the many”—who are now increasingly disposed to establish their own schools. The late president of Columbia University, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, said as early as 1934: “The separation of church and state is fundamental in American political order, but so far as religious education is concerned, this principle has been so far departed from as to put the whole force and influence of the tax-supported schools on the side of one element in the community—that which is pagan and believes in no religion whatever.”

The second influence prompting a new look at parish day school possibilities is the Christian obligation to preserve and to transmit Christian truth and culture. As the Rev. J. Hood Snavely of The Woodside Village Church in Woodside, California, points out in a highly readable sermon on “Education—Whose Lordship?,” the tool of transmission is education. In it he pointedly asks: “How long can a society, such as ours, endure that cannot indoctrinate its children in the vitality of a faith that made their fathers strong?” Any educational program that makes no room in its curriculum for the Living God is indifferent, if not hostile, to the Christian premise that Jesus Christ is the truth of God incarnate. In his book God and Education, Dr. H. P. Van Dusen quotes a student in a leading Eastern school as follows: “Personally I fail to understand how you can expect us to become ardent Christians and committed to democracy when the vital postulates on which these faiths are supposed to rest are daily undermined in the classroom.” A single visit to a Russian schoolroom, on the other hand, will remind us that their deletion of God and Christ from the curriculum is an integral part of a philosophic overview of life and the world. What of the Christian world-and-life view in American education?

The American Christian is a taxpayer and has an obligation in respect to public education whether his children are in its classrooms or not. Yet, as Mr. Snavely reminded his California congregation, “Unless we do more than mouth pious phrases … (such as) ‘our historic support of the public school,’ without knowing the history of what historically we supported but is now past history … then we deserve the unhappy results.…” Mr. Snavely doubtless had one eye on the fact, almost forgotten today, that Horace Mann, generally recognized as the founder of our public school system in 1837, went on record: “Our system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible and, in receiving the Bible, it allows it to do what it is allowed to do in no other system, to speak for itself.”

In their support of the parish day school program today, many Protestants feel they are really redressing the failure of the public school to fulfill this goal.

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