A Strategy for Christian Education

Americans have long been education-conscious, and in recent years this consciousness has grown until education now occupies a central place in national life. A President who began his career as a school teacher is making education a primary concern of his administration. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, the 1963 Higher Education Facilities Act, the Anti-Poverty Act of 1964, and the recently passed School Aid Act all involve the federal government in education far more widely than ever before. Dissent from concern for schools and youth is methodological rather than principial. No one—the Christian least of all—is against better education.

If education is a national concern, it is even more a Christian one. To a unique extent, Christianity is a teaching religion. Its founder was called “Teacher”; the twelve to whom he entrusted his mission were pupils, and he commissioned them to go into the world and make pupils of all nations, teaching them to do all he had taught. In America, just as abroad, the Church is the alma mater of education. But the mother has been overshadowed by the child. If we liken the kinds of education in our democracy to mountain ranges, the High Sierra are the public schools and state-supported colleges, dwarfing the Catskills of the private schools and colleges. Yet the latter are no mean feature of the educational landscape—not in a day when one out of every seven children is enrolled in a parochial or independent school.

What of evangelical attitudes toward education in a time when Congress has passed one multi-million-dollar education act after another? Are evangelical Christian schools and colleges, numerically but a fractional part of the minority of parochial and independent education, to remain bound to the status quo in a kind of paralyzed awe at the bigness of government involvement and at the vast sums being accumulated by top-ranking private institutions? For them to do so may spell decline if not ultimate extinction. On the other hand, if Christian education really faces its position vis-a-vis the colossus of government-supported public education and the necessity of greatly increasing its support from private sources, and if it goes forward with fidelity to its biblical distinctives, it may face its future with hope.

Consider, then, some matters about which Christian educators must do some hard thinking. Like its predecessor, the 1963 Higher Education Facilities Act, the 1965 School Aid Act reaches out a helping hand to religious schools of all kinds. By an ingenious compromise, this legislation opens the door for private education—parochial schools, parent-controlled Christian day schools, and other religious and private schools—indirectly to receive some government help. To be sure, the aid is not to be given to schools themselves but to pupils and teachers through such things as provision of textbooks and apparatus, radio and TV programs, supplementary educational centers, visiting-teacher programs, and shared time. Nevertheless, the door to use of federal funds for religious and non-public education has been propped open.

The Washington Post spoke of “this mingling of public and private education as a softening of the lines that ideally ought to separate church and state.” But the “softening” is actually a breach, insignificant though it seem, in the wall of separation of church and state. It may be that the breach was inevitable and that, after years of tension about the use of tax funds for religious schools, something had to give. The extent to which church-state separation has been penetrated will be determined by Supreme Court decisions that are bound to come. Whether the constitutionality of the new School Aid Act or of the Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963 will be determined first is immaterial, although the latter may have priority, because of the case being pressed by the Horace Mann League against four Maryland colleges.

Amid these tensions, the position of the Christian school and college sometimes borders on the schizophrenic. Too many Christian colleges have accepted government subsidy in one way or another—e.g., for dormitories, for research projects, for surplus materials—to make their avowal of fidelity to church-state separation entirely convincing. There are, to be sure, some few Christian institutions that for the sake of principle have consistently refused all manner of government subsidy. But let us have no illusions about the record of most evangelical schools and colleges in this respect.

This being the case, what is the Christian school and college to do in this time of rising educational costs? In a time when $10,000 salaries for public school teachers and $15,000 salaries for college professors are no longer a rarity, when the cost of a college education is beginning to approach $3,000 annually and may in a decade reach $4,000, when all kinds of teaching aids from language laboratories to complicated scientific apparatus are required, when academic pressures have pushed back into the last years of the first-rate secondary school the freshman year of college through the Advanced Placement program and graduate school techniques have been moved back into the upper classes of college, some Christian institutions are not just in second or third place in the academic race; they are in danger of being lapped by their publicly supported competitors. To be sure, many an evangelical school or college claims to be on a par with its public counterpart and bases this claim on accreditation, which some Christian institutions naively consider the promised land but which is only a preliminary step toward academic excellence.

Let it be plainly said that the evangelical community by and large has much to learn about support of its educational institutions. The Achilles’ heel of many a Christian day school, to cite one aspect of the problem, is the inordinately rapid turnover of faculty, an inevitability in view of minimal salaries. Because of inadequate support from a constituency that values evangelical Christian education so lightly as to keep it on a starvation diet, a disturbing number of Christian institutions merely subsist. A reformation in evangelical education is overdue—a reformation not of doctrine but of support.

The Christian educator stands between the Scylla of martyrdom for refusal of public aid and the Charybdis of acceptance of such aid. Little wonder if, faced with the plain fact of the lawful distribution of public funds for education, he seeks for his school and pupils their share. To do otherwise might mean sacrificing the quality of Christian schooling for what, under the realities of education in America, may become a doctrinaire position, unless the Supreme Court declares unconstitutional recently legislated support of private religious schools and colleges.

One of the scandals of evangelicalism is the second-rate quality of many a school bearing this name. Even a cursory glance through a recently published directory of Christian higher institutions shows many an evangelical school that offers little but the rudiments of an acceptable education. Quality is not a matter of lavish facilities. It depends on good teaching, continuity of faculty and administrative service, adequate living conditions, and essential equipment, especially of the library. Evangelicalism has not always supplied its schools with these necessities. Recognizing that they live, as all men do, in an imperfect society, many evangelical educators will reason that to withhold from their institutions and pupils public benefits legally available is to deprive them of indispensable assistance. Yet the acceptance of such funds must not short-circuit private support, lest the Christian school ultimately find itself dominated by the state.

On the other hand, if Christian educators believe that for principle’s sake they cannot under any circumstances accept government aid, then they are duty-bound to find ways greatly to increase support from their constituencies and also to tap new sources of aid.

Turn now to a subject to which evangelicals give comparatively little attention—the public school. That there is tension between many evangelicals and public education is undeniable. In some communities evangelicals have responded by beginning their own Christian day schools or by developing within their denominational framework Protestant parochial schools. Other Christian parents want for their children the experience of public education, where they are in daily contact with children of all faiths or none. Such parents believe that, through training at home and in church, supplemented later perhaps by a Christian college, their children can be adequately grounded in the faith. But what evangelicals cannot do is to dismiss public education as beyond the pale of Christian concern. If for no other reason than that some of their tax dollars go into public education, evangelicals have their share of responsibility for the public schools. But above material considerations is the spiritual need of American youth in public education. If evangelicals believe what they profess, how in the name of Christian compassion can they be unconcerned about youth in the public schools?

“But,” someone says, “with restrictions resulting from recent Supreme Court decisions, how can there be any real evangelical involvement in public education?” The answer lies in two directions: the teacher and the curriculum. No teacher speaks out of a religious and ideological vacuum. Every teacher has some commitment, whether religious or secular. It is all very well to theorize about objectivity and neutrality in teaching. To a degree, these are essential in public education. But in the deeper sense there is really no such thing as complete objectivity or absolute neutrality. What a person is cannot be prevented from showing through his teaching.

Christian teachers ought to consider public school teaching a vocation to which God may call them. On accepting such a call, they ought to be meticulous about observing state-prescribed restrictions against religious indoctrination. Here they have a Christian duty to obey the powers that be and to set an example for teachers with naturalistic presuppositions. Yet the devoted Christian teacher will deal with his pupils in Christian love and will have in his classroom feeling tones reflecting his commitment. Moreover, outside the classroom he has liberty to propagate his faith. He may work in a youth group at his church and bear witness to his beliefs. What he stands for in the community is no secret to his pupils.

But what of the place of Scripture in public education? As CHRISTIANITY TODAY pointed out in its editorial of June 19 on the Becker amendment, the following statement from Mr. Justice Clark’s majority opinion in Abington v. Schempp actually opens the door for the teaching of the Bible in the public school classroom: “One’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion.… It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible [italics ours] or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistent with the First Amendment.” Recently this option has been discussed in the national press. Granted that evangelical Christians do not consider the mere reading and study of the Bible as being everything they desire, nevertheless through such study thousands of pupils who have never seriously read the Book of books and who might never do so will be brought into personal confrontation with it.

In this pluralistic society, neither evangelicals nor any other Christian group can demand that the Bible be read and studied from their particular point of view. But they can agree on a study of the Book as literature, provided that this study is not conditioned by particular theories of the origin or composition of Scripture.

Some, however, may say that such use of the Bible in public education is not worth the time it takes. As Rolfe Lanier Hunt of the Department of Church and Public School Relations of the NCC has asked, “Will learning the facts about a play by Shakespeare assure a love of literature of drama? Will memorizing the Ten Commandments assure behavior obedient to them?” In either case, the answer is a qualified negative, with the qualification bulking largest for the Ten Commandments or any other portion of Scripture. Scripture is not Shakespeare. To read and learn Shakespeare may or may not create love for this great writer. But Shakespeare cannot change the human heart. Scripture is of a different order; it is the inspired Word of God. Perhaps the time has come for evangelicals to realize that their explanations and helps in understanding Scripture are not indispensable. Perhaps they should learn to rely on the promise of Isaiah 55, “My word … shall not return unto me void.” Perhaps they should be in the forefront of those advocating the exposure of youth to the Bible through literary study. Courses of this kind will also help dispel the all too prevalent biblical illiteracy. And, in a number of communities, notably in Indiana and in Texas, they are now being given in public schools.

There is much unfinished business on the docket of Christian education. The time is overdue for group thinking about Christian involvement in the broader aspects of American education. Now is the time for evangelical educators, representing elementary and secondary schools, liberal arts and Bible colleges, Bible institutes and seminaries, to meet for open-minded discussion of a strategy for Christian education. Such a strategy would relate to such things as the response of Christian education to federal aid in the light of church-state relations, the position of evangelicals respecting public schools, and the imperative need of arousing Christians to the necessity of greater and more sacrificial support of their schools and colleges. It would enlist the best thinking of the evangelical community. Those who represent the theological convictions out of which education in America grew must give up their parochialism and face together the responsibility for the larger witness to which God is calling them. Let there be no mistake about it: the day when any part of Christian education can “go it alone” without seeking counsel from the whole of Christian education is past.

Atheism Isn’T What It Used To Be

People who still believe that God is and that he is the Father of Jesus Christ are making a special study of modern atheism. Various Protestant scholars have given atheism special attention, and the need for such research was highlighted when Pope Paul VI announced on April 8 the creation of a new secretariat with a mandate to study atheism. Unlike the larger secretariat headed by Cardinal Bea that seeks dialogue with Protestants, Jews, and non-Christians—with whom Roman Catholics assumedly know how to talk—this new secretariat will not seek dialogue with atheists but will study atheism itself. It is felt that current atheism is so different from older forms that it must be probed and analyzed if Roman Catholics are to speak effectively to atheists about God. The Pope assigned one of the Catholic Church’s most competent men, Franziskus Cardinal Koenig of Austria, to head the project.

Atheism is not so simple as many think. If it were no more than the assertion, “There is no God,” it would be the same in every generation. But atheism has come a long way since a psalmist of Israel wrote those words.

In the course of history the denial of God has taken many forms. Philosophers have long tried to show that the existence of God is a rational impossibility. Modern existentialists argue that if God existed he would by his very existence be not God but some finite thing. Moralists have at times urged that the existence of evil is proof that God does not exist, for God, by definition good, would not allow evil. And there is also the ever-present confessor of theism who nonetheless lives as though God did not exist.

The man of the latter half of the twentieth century exhibits a new kind of atheism, a kind that cannot be met directly by arguments or by pleas for logical or religious consistency. This man does not argue about God’s existence. God may or may not be a reality; it makes no difference. If it turns out that there is a God after all, he will be quite different from the traditional one. The God who is the Father of Jesus Christ is widely ignored. Even if he exists, he is thought to be of no earthly use to man. A God who dwells in heaven is by that very fact considered to be of no help in this atomic age to a modern, secular technological society dwelling in high-rise apartments in cities that sprawl for scores of miles. Such a God has lost relevance.

In this modern brand of atheism, religion itself is thought to need no God. But if after all it should need him, the future may present us with a God who will befit the kind of world we now live in. Voices are proclaiming that the word “God” is really meaningless. Any meaning that it might have has, we are told, been put into it. Today we must put new content into the word, or even devise a new term for “God.” And it is asserted with the greatest confidence that the antiquated dogmas and fourth-century creeds will not do for the future.

Churchmen today who stand in this thought-world urge that the religious dimensions of Christianity must be discarded and the Gospel reinterpreted in secular terms. This does not mean what it used to mean—that Christianity must be applied to all of life. The meaning is rather that there is no God up-and-out there, and that the only God there is must be found in the flood tide of human affairs. It means that Christ exists nowhere except in the neighbor with all his needs and sufferings. The God that transcends the world is dead; the only existing one is he who meets me in my neighbor.

The secular atheistic mind of our time greets this denial of a God “out there” with indifference; and as for the God who may be “down here,” he has no dimensions that could either threaten or help us. Thus the modern atheist does not shake a defiant fist at heaven. Neither is he saddened by the loss of God. He thinks that, be there God or no God, nothing is any better or any worse.

The studies that will come from the new Roman Catholic secretariat and from similar Protestant efforts should be useful. For whatever modern man may say, God is still man’s greatest need. So long as man thinks the world is without God in any significant sense, he will find the universe a terrifyingly lonely place to be. For his own existence depends on God’s.

Evangelical Literary Stewardship

“Books are men of higher stature/And the only men that speak aloud for future times to hear,” said Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Lady Geraldine’s Courtship. The words of Moses, Paul, and Jesus would have perished had there been no books. Men have always felt the urge to record words for future generations to read and have carved them on stone, or inked them on papyrus, skin, and paper. Although some bad books have survived, they are outnumbered by good ones. Time winnows the enduring from the transitory.

In recent years the book market has been flooded by reprints of evangelical writings of former generations. Men still listen to the theological and pulpit masters of yesteryear, and such reprints sell consistently. But the timeless Gospel must be expressed in timely terms by men of this day, as Burton Goddard, retiring president of the Evangelical Theological Society, said a few months ago. He commended evangelicals for their excellent record in productive scholarship over the past fifteen years but reminded them that the Christian reading public should not have to subsist on a diet heavily sprinkled with the works of men who have been dead for several centuries.

The output of John Calvin was prodigious despite his delicate health. There is need for his kind of dedication in contemporary evangelical scholarship. Such dedication demands a sense of call, a spirit of perseverance, and a light that burns in the study when all other lights in the house have gone out. It requires diligent planning in the use of time, talents, and knowledge.

Moreover, the productive evangelical scholar needs encouragement once his labors are finished. Granted that Christian publishers cannot survive on continuing deficits, still they must have the theological discernment and the sense of stewardship to print good books that will help turn the tide in the battle for the hearts and minds of men. It is only as evangelicalism produces scholarly works of significant value and enduring strength that it will continue to mature.

Supercity

Bishop John Robinson and his followers might well look to their laurels, for another prophet has risen that could throw them into obscurity. Harvey Cox is a Baptist crying loudly in the modern secular world. He leaves existentialism in his dust and outruns the demy-thologizing Bultmannians, envisioning a new era in human history emerging from the secularization of life.

In his book, The Secular Life, Cox writes about “technopolis.” He maintains that the old tribal society and the later town-culture have vanished. Supercity is at hand—the metropolis of automation, mass communication, mobility, and anonymity. The up-to-date technopolitans are not concerned with the antiquated mysteries of religion. They have no use for the hereafter. For them this world affords sufficient problems without bothering about the Beyond.

Cox is certain that the world has become “defatalized.” God is a meaningless term to secularized minds. The world-task is man’s, not the Lord’s. In fact, we should quit talking about God. Nobody is listening anyhow. “Reconciliation” is still a meaningful word; God is breaking through in secular events and movements. It is up to the Church to “identify” with these events, and thus to become the Lord’s avant-garde at this point in history. We must lift our eyes from the past to the future. Worship at 11:00 A.M. is but a remnant of the farm schedule with a gap between milking hours. Sermons belong to an outdated era when leaders discoursed to those who were forbidden to talk back.

Cox suggests that we consider the primitive Church. What gave it such an impetus into history? The forward look. Today we are looking backward. Those early Christians, he asserts, eagerly anticipated the coming again of the Lord, and this caused them to concentrate earnestly on the future. We modern believers must also forget the past. We must not only renovate our theological language but also restructure our message. Such old ideas as that of God as a Father, or even a Supreme Being, must be discarded. We must talk this-world talk. The secularized society demands a pragmatic advance into the future. And this is no small task. We should eliminate the meaningless word “God.” Nobody knows what it means any more. New expressions for our faith must be invented, new terms acceptable to the new secularistic mind must be used. We must get busy “liberating the captives,” sure in our faith that we will find a new name for God as well as a new religion.

Many “obscurantist,” “behind-the-times” evangelicals may, of course, be gratified that Professor Cox commends these early disciples of Christ for being avant-garde in their particular moment in history. When the author of The Secular City reminds us that the first Christians looked forward in earnest expectation to the end of the age and the coming again of the Lord, one wonders if he is aware of how many evangelical “obscurantists” today have that same forward look toward the same Event anticipated by the early Church. True, we look back to Calvary and the resurrection of Christ. Yet we also, even in the celebration of Communion, “show the Lord’s death till he come.”

Actually, evangelicals look farther into the future than Professor Cox. They see, beyond supercities and technopolitan goings-on, beyond man’s present confusion and international wranglings and warrings, a world where “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb.” They look to the day when the Name we are asked to forget shall be praised “from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same,” to the time when the Son of Man, who in the past was lifted up on a cross, will return to establish his kingdom.

They look to a “supercity” whose Builder and Ruler is God, where “the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.” In that supercity, freed from the cynicism of human technopolitans, men will do more than mention the Name of God; they will make it sound like a symphony.

Is Honesty Being Left Behind?

A strange illness has overtaken Christianity. Its full influence has not yet been felt, but it is slowly and surely threatening to weaken the mission and ministry of the Church. The illness is best expressed in the old adage that “the end justifies the means.” The Church itself is guilty of employing some dubious practices, while at the same time deploring the decline of morality.

There are those who do not believe the Apostles’ Creed but who still confess its formulas in services of worship. Having discarded its purportedly archaic theological positions, they nevertheless continue to confess what they reject and justify their action by saying that their confession is only a witness to what the Church once believed.

Another illustration of the trend was seen at the recent fourth annual meeting of the Consultation on Church Union in Lexington, Kentucky. As a result of the discussions of the historic episcopate, presbyterian polity, and congregational polity, it was stated, “We are convinced that these positions are not incompatible.” But it is a plain fact that at this point there is a gaping incompatibility, and it is precisely this incompatibility that has been the biggest block to church reunion. Intercommunion has always been a problem at meetings of the World Council of Churches, because the Anglicans do not recognize the ordination of those who have not had the hand of a bishop laid on them. Nor will the Anglicans permit a clergyman without such ordination to preside over their table.

Why say, then, that the “positions are not incompatible”? They are incompatible, and no amount of hopeful thinking will change the fact. Those who hold to the historic episcopate have clearly affirmed over and over again that any reunion of the churches must include episcopacy. And the inclusion of episcopacy, however phrased and however implemented, means inevitably that those holding presbyterian and congregational convictions must be concessive. If the Church cannot be honest when it “honestly faces its divisions,” how can it expect anyone to profit from its example?

Another problem concerns candidates for the ministry who in their ordination vows subscribe to a system of theology they do not believe; it also concerns ministers who now tear down and violate standards to which they have previously committed themselves in ordination, and seminary professors who sign creedal statements or confessions they do not believe and teach in the classroom views that contradict the tenets to which they have promised loyalty.

This kind of stance on moral problems stems from the argument of “tragic moral choice” which is part and parcel of situational ethics. The argument runs that one must choose to break a smaller law in order not to breach a bigger one. Thus it is better to sin by telling a lie than to sin by breaking the overarching law of love. It is better for a minister to violate his ordination vows when to do so is to honor truth as he sees it, than to demit the ministry, or to honor views he no longer accepts.

In personal conduct, the argument runs that it is better to be sexually immoral than to be loveless; indeed, if love is present, premarital intercourse (forbidden in Scripture) is seen in a new light and becomes morally acceptable. A seminary student publication declares that “man is an interdependent being. That man seeks a meaningful relationship on which to base his life.… For the true homosexual this relationship may only [our italics] be found with one of his or her own sex. Would it not be better for society to encourage this relationship, if it is meaningful, rather than to condemn it? It would appear that our society would be less neurotic and more truly Christian, if this were the case.… if his or her own particular form of behavior, sexual or otherwise, does no harm to their own self or to others, it is therefore natural and right for them.… we must learn to be non-judgemental.… We can respect the God within him.… This is the true Christian way.”

The time has come to put a stop to all this. The end never has and never will justify the means.

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