Christian

The Fall

When the Fall occurred, sin entered the world corrupting the imago Dei, but not destroying it. The biblical teaching on humanity and the human nature is summed up well by John Hammett’s categories: humans are created beings, humans are created in the image of God, humans are created as male and female, humans are created to work, humans are created for community, and humans are not as we were once created – humans are fallen (Akin 2007, 341-42). The Fall of man perverted the image of God in man in such a way that it “perverted the image of man” causing “man to now use the earth and its resources for selfish gain” (Hoekema 1986, 85). In relation to the cultural achievement of humans, the goal in a post-Fallen world is to magnify self instead of seeking to magnify God. It is pertinent to explore the effects the Fall has had upon education.

The Effects of the Fall on Education

In Christian education it is imperative to recognize the believer as a learner having a dual nature in that he is made in the image of God, but is a fallen creature. Human beings do have a nature to sin, and this nature to sin was not God’s original plan before the Fall of man. In part this means that the Fall subverts a person’s ability to understand the world fully apart from God’s regenerating grace (Pearcey 2004, 45). In other words, the Fall did affect and corrupt a person’s ability to think and reason, but does not make this human ability obsolete. The Fall has had, and continues to have, a significant impact on all of the processes involved in cognition and epistemology.

How does sin impact the teaching process? In regards to our minds, sin corrupts the entire educational process: the ability to teach, learn and garner knowledge. “Between the idea and the reality / Falls the Shadow” (Eliot). The image of God was not annihilated but perverted so that human beings now function wrongly towards God, towards others, and towards nature, but all human beings are image-bearers of God even in their unbelieving state, meaning that unbelievers are capable of making contributions to fields of knowledge. The implications for Christian education are that human beings are able to think and act imperfectly in a fallen world. The image of God practically shows up in the following areas of life: moral aspects, spiritual aspects, mental aspects, relational aspects, physical aspects, and dignity aspects (Grudem 1994, 445-49). Every Christian educator should remember these five points in relation to the student:

1. The Bible treats individuals as holistic units (Gen 2:7; John 5:28-29; 1 Thess 4:16- 17; 1 Cor 15:51-54).

2. If persons are to be fully human, they must be controlled by their minds rather than by their animal appetites and propensities.

3. The Christian educator should recognize and respect the individuality, uniqueness, and personal worth of each person.

4. There are biblical implications for the methodology and knowledge claims of our disciplines.

5. Since the Fall, the problems of the human race have not changed between the forces of good and evil. (Knight 1998, 195-97)

Importance for Connecting with the Cultural Issues Places for Agreement

• Everyone agrees that things are not the way they should be or that things could be better in terms of how humans interact with each other, with the natural world, and even understand themselves. The world is brimming with people with talent and ideas about how to improve the lot of man in the current cosmos.

• Death is a universal tragedy that reminds us of the finiteness of existence.

• We recognize in natural tragedies that Creation is groaning and running down -- tsunamis, hurricanes, viruses, etc. all remind us that there is brokenness in the world that runs very deep.

Challenges

• The greatest distinction between the Christian view and contemporary culture in relation to the Fall centers around where the problem is. Everyone is aware that people are broken. We are all Humpty Dumpty. But why? Culturally, going back to at least Rousseau, the assumption among those who have created the intellectual world in which we live is that society is to blame. “It is society and the relations and conditions that society embodies that decisively shape and . . . decisively corrupt individuals” (Trueman 2020, 115). Or, as T.S. Eliot poetically puts it in his Choruses from ‘The Rock’: “They constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good” (1934). If the brokenness I recognize inside me is a result of society’s structure, then creating/ restructuring/revolutionizing the proper social system is absolutely necessary and explains much of the political trends of the last 100 years. The Christian view, while recognizing that society’s can be structured better or worse, sees the primary problem as one of sin inside us. We have to be changed before we can change society. Jesus gives us this example clearly in how he rejects the contemporary Jewish view that the major problem the Jews had was the Romans, rather He taught, lived, and died, recognizing that it was the Devil and Sin, which leads to death, that are our greatest problems (see Mark 2:1-11 and 8:31-33 among others).

• Because of the shift towards ‘psychological man’ in a therapeutic world, modern man generally seeks to resolve internal discord through therapy and counseling. Modern culture tends to encourage people to turn to the couch before the confessional. And counseling can be used by God to help bring order to the interior discord people feel as fragmented beings in a fragmenting world. Yet when it is misused, it can sometimes lead individuals to “look inside yourself and find out all the answers to your problems.” The Fall certainly leads to brokenness in our psychology, but the pieces can only get put back together and function properly when they are pointing in the right direction (Christ) and fueled by the right source (Holy Spirit) (Lewis 1952, 163).

• Our Christian view of the Fall informs and shapes our understanding of homosexuality, transgenderism, ethics, abortion, euthanasia, environmental stewardship, politics, the death penalty, etc. We believe good things have been broken.

Redemption

The plan of redemption unfolds throughout the Scriptures and centralizes in the person and work of Christ. Redemption is achieved through God’s plan of salvation through the person and work of Jesus Christ. The term redemption literally means to “buy back” or “to buy free.” There are universal applications to God’s redemptive activity in Christ, and one of the spheres of redemption affects knowledge, which is directly related to education. Graeme Goldsworthy notes how important this redemptive activity is to epistemology when he states, “The process of redemption involves the restoration of the right way of thinking because the human mind is as much the object of regeneration as is the body or the soul” (Goldsworthy 2002, 173).

Redemption is connected to creation and the Fall because there is a sense in which “all educational pursuits should be characterized by, and lead to, a sense and experience of wholeness” (Graham 2003, 25) which is the restoration of the original vision for humanity before the Fall. Nancy Pearcey sums the concept of redemption in relation to the cultural mandate in a fallen world well when she states, “The term redemption does not just refer to a one-time conversion event, it means entering a lifelong quest to devote our skills and talents to building things that are beautiful and useful, while fighting the forces of evil and sin that oppress and distort the creation” (Pearcey 2004, 49). Furthermore, “Each child should understand that God has given him or her special gifts to make a contribution to humanity’s task of reversing the effects of the Fall and extending the Lordship of Christ in the world” (Pearcey 2004, 129). All school curricula, indeed all learning activities, should be a pursuit towards wholeness and unity. In a fully Christian school, Donovan Graham states, “Fractured, piecemeal knowledge and experience would be anti-normative” (Graham 2003, 25). In relation to redemption, the doctrines of soteriology (study of salvation) and sanctification are necessary to explore in relation to learning.

Doctrine of Salvation: Justification and Sanctification

Salvation is the deliverance from death, sin, and Satan through the shed blood of Jesus Christ by belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior of one’s life (John 3:16). It involves the defeat of the king of this world, Satan, and the restoration of the true King, Jesus Christ. He earns this title through His taking the sin of His people onto Him, taking it to death, and then raising Himself to new life. The centrality of the Christian story of redemption must be the linchpin of truly Christian education. We should see other stories that involve similar deaths and resurrections as in some way mimicking or preparing the way for the Christ story where myth becomes fact. Not only must every teacher claim a relationship with Christ in His Kingdom, but the ultimate goal of our school is to make disciples who are effective servants of Christ and His Kingdom while living “intelligently in the service of God and man” (Regents Mission Statement).

Sanctification, like salvation more broadly, is primarily and initially a work of God Himself. Once we have been stirred, we can then participate in the work of growing in holiness, which is the work of the Christian life. This is the work of repairing the damage sin has wrought in our lives and bringing every area of our lives under the lordship of King Christ. In regards to education, sanctification is described well by the Apostle Paul: “For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:4-5). Our students will be faced with all kinds of arguments and evidence brought against them to destroy and deny their faith, to corrupt their morals, and dishonor their Lord. Christian education must give students the knowledge both of information, but also the skills to know how to respond to sophisticated arguments with their own.

The doctrine of sanctification also reminds us that none of us here are completed projects. Sin exists in all of us. Grace also exists in all of us, including the pagans and non-Christians that we read and study. While in God’s common grace non-Christians are capable of both good teaching and learning, since they are capable of applying God’s principles to their lives without knowing it, a Christian school seeks to hire professing Christians who connect their own learning and teaching to the process of sanctification God is working out in their lives and encourage their students to bring every thought captive to the redeeming power of Christ.

Importance for Connecting with the Cultural Issues Places for Agreement

• This is not the best of all possible worlds in the sense of being perfect. We do not currently live in heaven or pre-Fall Eden. We live in a world governed by entropy, where things wear down, where people get sick and die, where institutions that should protect the vulnerable do not, and where chaos is always lurking to destroy what we have laboriously built. Ourselves, our families, our schools, our local communities, our governments, our nation can and probably should be better than we are.

• This creates a longing to be “saved,” whether by someone else or by our own efforts. We all desire to be seen by others as “good people” who “do the right thing,” and this comes from our unique sense of history moving towards a destination and intuitively recognizing our role in helping this process along.

Challenges

• As with the Fall, the divide on the issue of Redemption comes down to where do we look for the needed change. And the answers are the exact opposite of each other, and the last category. Whereas the culture sees the cause for brokenness as almost exclusively residing in external things: systems of oppression; societal structures; and outdated, irrelevant, and life-denying moral rules, they tend to see the hope for redemption as being almost exclusively internal to the individual. They have all the resources they need inside them to “be the change” the world needs. “Man is born free but is everywhere in chains” (Rousseau 1762) is a pithy way of explaining how our natural good state gets corrupted/enslaved by society, so if we can just get back to the “original” place, we’ll be healthier and able to do the necessary things that society is preventing us from doing.

• On the other hand, Christianity says that salvation can only come from outside of ourselves. God alone can save us. Our own best efforts lead to nothing but destruction and futile failure. God Himself must enter history, take the punishment of sin, and then put death itself to death by triumphing over the decay and entropy of the grave.

• This creates problems for the secular culture because, if true, it places demands on us as individuals. We must do something as a result of this rescue. God might want something from us in response to His salvation -- He might feel as though this rescue gives Him the right to ‘order us around’ and ‘tell us what to do’ (Exodus 20). Of course, this is exactly what Christ, the new lawgiver, does. We are to take up our cross and follow Him (Luke 9:23); His followers are told to “go and sin no more” (John 8:11), among others.

• Our Christian beliefs inform and shape our views on marriage, grace, justice, ethics, sexual/gender orientation and behavior, psychology, politics, etc.

Consummation

The final category in the biblical metanarrative is consummation, which refers to “the return of Jesus Christ, the arrival of the new heaven and the new earth, the dawning of resurrection, the glory of perfection, and the beauty of holiness” (Carson 2008, 64). In the world of education, it is easy for teachers and students to be overly preoccupied with the present, whether in terms of content, grades, or college admissions. However, Christian education is ultimately kingdom education, and the Christian message reminds believers of a glorified future.

In essence, for the Christian, the doctrine of eschatology (study of end times) is about the already-but-not-yet (Ladd 1993; Schreiner 2008), a reality in the individual life of the believer and the corporate life of the believer being identified in Christ. It is about living a realized presence of being wholly justified before God in Christ and looking forward to a future glorification that awaits believers in Christ (Rom 8:30 and 1 Pet 1:13). In understanding education achieved with the kingdom of God in mind, it is important to understand the fact that “the kingdom is already here, inaugurated by Christ, but is not yet fully come” (Mohler, 2011, albertmohler.com). This means we both expect our children to live as Christians in the world and that they will fall short of the standard, as will all the teachers, administrators, and parents connected with the school.

Christian education should always point to the future hope of eternal life for, in all subjects, “[f]or now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor. 13:12). Consummation motivates a Christian educator and student to continue to seek to acknowledge the truths God has placed in the world in order to redeem the culture for Christ. This desire for culture-making is a byproduct of the already-but-not-yet aspects of the Christian faith.

The application of the biblical narrative culminating in consummation is significant because it reminds parents, teachers, and students that seeking ultimate fulfillment in this life is futile. Only through obedience to Christ can we bring glory to God in this fallen world.

Importance for Connecting with the Cultural Issues Places of Agreement

• History is moving in a direction. We have been told for a while that there are “right” and “wrong” sides to it. This implies a guiding hand or principle that is moving history towards some culminating point. Even a materialist like Marx had his heaven, he just called it the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and placed it at the end of the historical dialectic of economic development.

• Everyone knows the importance of hope. Hope is a belief that the future can and will be better than the present. This is common to Christians and non-Christains.

Challenges

• In a sense, the great intellectual and narratival challenges of our day can be simply understood as a struggle between our species’ beginning and end. Is what ultimately shapes us The Origin of the Species or “The Destiny of the Species”? Is it more important what is pushing us forward, our animal-nature and brokenness, or is it what is pulling us inexorably forward, the work of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit that is remaking us into perfected images of God? Is it our origin or our destiny that is most important in shaping our perspective on how we think about the value we place on earthly pursuits? The postmodern turn has called into question all metanarratives but its own, and as such even the Christian narrative of Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation is under attack. This is hugely important for our understanding of what it means to be human.

• Our Christian beliefs regarding consummation inform and shape our views on history, grace, justice, ethics, student behavior, psychology, the role of politics in the life of the believer, etc.

Formation of Virtue — The Good Conservation of Truth — The True Method — The Beautiful

Being a Christian school means that every teacher and staff member is committed to Christian discipleship, both for themselves as well as in mentoring their students, regardless of subject area. There are no ‘neutral’ subjects that are somehow outside the lordship of Christ. The Christian worldview is a holistic view of the world -- everything is different because of the revelation of Christ.

But in addition to finding our primary identity in our commitment to Christ, Regents is also a classical school. Being a classical school involves much more than simply a teaching method, however. It means that there is a body of truth that has been handed down to us that we believe is vital to pass down to the next generation. We have a particular view of the past. Rather than viewing the past as a hindrance to personal growth and self expression in our new age, we understand the past to be formative for the future. The past is a source of wisdom that has the power to shape us into faithful people. In other words, the Great Works, thoughts, and writings of the past provide us with a structure in which we must find our place. We see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

Does that mean the past is without error? Of course not. The men and women before us were limited in their perspective, mortal, frail, and often profoundly wrong on important matters. All the consequences of the Fall discussed above applied to them as well. When we discover such errors in our study of the past they ought to be appropriately acknowledged and corrected, but only after careful consideration. We must beware the attitude that simply being a modern person somehow makes us more intelligent than people in past ages. Before we can move forward in adapting within our tradition, we must first understand it.

Distinctively, Regents is classical in three key ways:

1. Intentional instruction towards virtue and skill throughout our program;

2. Receiving and passing on the intellectual and cultural traditions of Western Culture, Art, History, and Philosophy; and

3. In the method of teaching from and through the Trivium of Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric.

These are all, in the present day, fundamentally conservative ideas. While much of contemporary education is dominated by the belief that “the world [is] so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual,” as a Classical school and community we “regard the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus see human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it,” (Trueman 2020, 39). The necessity of and desire to be conformed by and in harmony with the True, Good, and Beautiful is a hallmark of the uniquely classical vision of our school.

Importance for Connecting with the Cultural Trends

• All four of the core negative cultural trends noted previously are at work in the world of education. You might even be able to say that they have come to prominence in the world in large part because of their success in academia.

• Modern education has fully bought into and supported the erosion of morality and truth. With the individual child’s felt sense of happiness now at the center of the educational universe, the idea that education exists to mold or shape one into a useful member of society has gone out the window. Instead, schools become places we attend to perform at (rather than be formed by) and which are used as stepping stones to further personal aspirations. While this obviously inverts the significance of the institution itself (it’s gone from molding to launching pad), it’s rooted in the loss of transcendent morality and truth.

• As increasingly militant secular spaces, it is obvious that they have worked hard to both undermine and overthrow the biblical understanding of the culture, both in terms of destroying its foundations through radical skepticism while also sowing discord through challenging long-accepted understandings of scriptural teaching on just about any topic you can think of. K-12 education has become more about activism than conforming children to social rules and norms of the adult world.

• The changing understanding of the nature of humanity is also a big part of contemporary education. Youth is seen as pure and innocent, with a wisdom of purity with which they can instruct their elders. As a result, many contemporary schools have become places of affirmation rather than education. Each student is expected to express their authentic individuality through how they dress, speak, and act such that each lives authentically their ‘own’ life (Taylor 2007, 475).

Formation of Virtue — The Good

Vir is Latin for “man” and as such virtue defines the qualities that makeup a true human. In connection with our understanding that there is a nature of things (including humans) and order and meaning present in the world, it follows that there are standards of behavior that are proper to human nature -- these are called virtues. Behaviors that are contrary to human nature are called vices. Any education that fails to instruct in and give opportunities for students to practice virtue and avoid vice tends to create “men without chests” where they have head knowledge but haven’t been formed in the virtues. “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful,” (Lewis 1943, 26).

Virtue did not cease to be important with the coming of Christ. In fact, for many Christians the pagan core, or cardinal, virtues (justice, prudence, courage, temperance) were the foundation on which the uniquely Christian virtues (faith, hope, and love) are built. We have to first become as good as the best pagans before we can then become Christian seems to be the idea. We are all being shaped into something slightly different from what we were in the past. We are all either moving closer to Truth, Goodness, and Beauty or away from those things. As a school, we aim to do everything in our power to conform our students to the image of Christ which is true virtue.

The successful application of a learned skill, whether verb agreement, basic addition, or rhetorical devices, is often the first step towards virtue. The modern classical movement is rooted in Dorothy Sayers’ 1947 essay The Lost Tools of Learning. For tools, we could easily understand “skills” because she is referring to intellectual tools that help any student learn something new. Since virtue is a habit of life, learning basic intellectual skills and habits provide the opportunity for learning how to be virtuous more broadly. The confident knowledge of capability based upon honed skills allows a learner to step into any new situation without fear.

Importance for Connecting with the Cultural Trends

• Nietzsche preached the “trans-valuation of values” by which he meant the complete inversion of moral norms whereby what people in the past thought was good is actually bad and vice versa (Trueman 2020, 54-55). Our society, through its wholesale embrace of the goal of psychological happiness, has largely agreed with Nietzsche. Traditional norms and moral expectations, rooted in what are perceived as outdated or irrelevant views of transcendence (whether in God or some other external moral order), are no longer guides to proper behavior but are rather oppressive restrictions on personal behavior and thus excessively encumbering to personal psychological happiness.

• The changing nature of what it means to be a human “self” has also significantly altered what it means to be a “good” human. The shift from duties flowing from community relationships (both familial and more broadly) to an internal “felt” sense of psychological well-being has radically altered each individual’s understanding of their role in the world and thus what is expected of them. People expect to be happy, and anything that interferes with that is seen as both wrong and unnatural. Thus what one thinks of as “being the right thing to do” has far more to do with my own feelings about it (how will I feel doing this or after I do this thing?) than with any objective sense of this is what properly formed good people do in this situation.

• The obvious moral failures of prominent Christian leaders (Ravi Zaccharias being the most prominent recent one) has led many to question whether the Christian faith or Biblical revelation is actually capable of making someone good.

• Declining biblical literacy and sense of authority is very important in this respect -- to some degree we all find ourselves like Eve in the Garden being questioned by the Serpent: “did God really say?” and when we don’t know our Bible well, we may not even know what God has said to do (or not to do) and thus live our moral lives in a vacuum, that is filled with competing loud and attractive ideas for how we should live.