The Lost Purpose of Learning

THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING David Vanderpoel, Ph.D.

THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING David Vanderpoel, PhD Headmaster, Trinity Christian School of Fairfax

© 2015 by David Vanderpoel All rights reserved. Published 2015.

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover: Old Books by Moyan Brenn Trinity Christian School 11204 Braddock Road Fairfax, VA 22030 For additional information, please visit our website: www.tcsfairfax.org

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THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING WHY was I born?

Why did you bring me out from the womb? Job 10:18

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hy do we teach our children? For what reason and to what end do we seek their instruction? What are we preparing them to accomplish? For what high purpose did God create them? These questions are endowed with compelling gravity. They possess a weightiness that was felt by Job when, in the midst of overwhelming calamity, he cried to God and asked, “Why was I born?” His question still resonates today.

It is a query that shadows our thoughts, visits us in our daily tasks, and challenges our idle moments. Fresh voices speak it anew in every generation. Abraham Heschel, a leading Jewish theologian and philosopher of the twentieth century, phrased it this way: “I want to know how to answer the one question that seems to encompass everything I face: What am I here for?”1 It is an ultimate question, universally asked and variously answered. As we grapple with its significance, each of us becomes a tenured philosopher. It is a calling we cannot escape and is well described

by Francis Schaeffer as “the only unavoidable occupation.”2 Ultimate questions are ingrained in our very nature. We can no more ignore them than we can resist breathing. They emanate from within each of us as we experience life in all of its wonder and pathos. “The most practical and important thing about a man,” writes G. K. Chesterton, “is still his view of the universe.”3 In what kind of universe do we live? Does it have any purpose and, if so, what is it? What is our place in it? From

Heschel, “Questions Man Asks,” Wisdom of Heschel, 4.

Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 279-280.

3 Chesterton, Heretics, 5.

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where did I come? What is life’s meaning? How do I define right and wrong? What happens when I die? Questions such as these, says Ravi Zacharias, “are the fulcrum points of our existence.”4 More than idle speculation, these fundamental inquiries evoke responses that inevitably frame, shape, and direct our understanding of reality, as well as our approach to life and education.

Every place of learning confronts these questions. They are addressed, both explicitly and implicitly, in all schools. In so doing, a particular view of reality is always assumed in order to undergird and frame such questions and their answers. They cannot exist apart from a contextual shadow. Every teaching and learning approach, whether in the home or outside, in a public or private system, secular or religious, frames questions and answers on the basis of some worldview or faith commitment. They are never addressed in a neutral system, devoid of presuppositions about life and reality. As Richard Baer says, “Education never takes place in a moral and philosophical vacuum. If the larger questions about human beings and their destiny are not being asked and answered within a predominantly Judeo-Christian framework, they will be addressed with another philosophical or religious framework—but hardly one that is neutral.”5 Douglas Wilson, writing in The Case for Classical Christian Education, concurs: “Education is fundamentally religious. Consequently, there is no question about whether a morality will be imposed in that education, but rather which morality will be imposed.”6 There is no view from nowhere.

All of us view the world through what Charles Taylor calls “inescapable frameworks” that shape our understanding of everything.7 “A Christian framework,” says David Naugle, “posits that God is there, that he is not silent, and that we humans are his image and likeness. A naturalistic framework denies that God is there and Duin, “Interview with Ravi Zacharias.”

Baer, “They Are Teaching Religion in Public Schools,” 12.

6 Wilson, Case for Classical Christian Education, 26.

7 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 3.

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says that silence is all there is and that we humans are advanced primates and nothing more.”8 Will we approach our children’s education by “thinking in Christian categories,”9 or will we capitulate to a naturalistic framework? The question is as old as history.

The first-century Roman philosopher Lucretius opted for a naturalistic framework: “The basic principle that we shall assume as our starting point is that nothing has ever been created by divine power.”10 Moses posited a very different starting point 1,400 years earlier: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” 11 More recently, the film critic Roger Ebert rejected biblical theism with the stated conviction that a self-revealing God does not exist: “Let me rule out at once any God who has personally spoken to anyone or issued any instructions to men. That some men believe they have been spoken to by God, I am certain. I do not believe Moses came down from the mountain with any tablets he did not go up with.”12 In contrast, Jesus taught that God has indeed spoken to men and women: “And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” 13 The assumptions with which we commence our journey will inevitably determine our destination. As C. S. Lewis phrased it in The Magician’s Nephew, “What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.”14 So, with what presuppositions about life and reality should we frame and undergird the questions and answers to be used in teaching our children?

Naugle, Philosophy, 61.

Eliot, Christianity & Culture, 22.

10 Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 149-150.

11 Genesis 1:1 12 Ebert, “How I Believe in God.” 13 Matthew 22:31,32 14 Lewis, Magician’s Nephew, 123.

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The task of teaching, as G. K. Chesterton forcefully reminds us, is the task of “selection and rejection.”15 “It is not possible to teach everything,” says Richard Edlin, “or to expose students to every possible resource. Accordingly, textbook publishers and teachers carefully select the resources for teaching, and the information that will be taught. These selections are made based upon what the selectors believe to be the most important resources and experiences.”16 All these choices are religious in nature because they either promote or detract from the kingdom of God. What should we choose and what should we reject? How do we justify those choices? With what assumptions should we approach our understanding of education?

The reason we were created and redeemed must frame every aspect of a student’s education. This means that the primary purpose of education is not to enable our students to go to the best college.17 It is not to earn a good income. It is not to prepare them for a productive career or to teach them a trade. Our first priority is not to create good citizens, nor to surpass other countries in our mastery of math and science. It is not to preserve our system of government or way of life. It is not to help our students socialize and adjust to this world. Most certainly, it is not for the purpose of encouraging a never-ending search for truth.

The ultimate purpose of education is far nobler than any of these things.18 The purpose of education is to transform our students by the renewing of their minds after the image of him who created them.19 It is “bringing into conscious subjection to God what has been redeemed in and through Christ.”20 It is nothing Chesterton, Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton, vol. 1, 324.

Edlin, Cause of Christian Education, 9.

17 The idea of cataloguing what education is not was suggested by John W. Robbins in his foreword to A Christian Philosophy of Education, by Gordon Clark.

18 Robbins, foreword to Christian Philosophy of Education, viii.

19 Ephesians 4:23, 24; Colossians 3:10 20 Bellevue Christian School, “Doctrines and Principles.”

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less than preparing them to stand in the presence of God, to hear “every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying, ‘To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’” 21

WHAT do we want our children to learn?

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Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” John 18:38

very worldview has an integrating principle. For the Christian, God’s existence and nature are “the independent source and the transcendent standard for everything.”22 They constitute the basic premise upon which everything else in the universe is built. The prophet Isaiah tells us that everything “comes from the Lord Almighty, wonderful in counsel and magnificent in wisdom.” 23 All of creation functions as an integral unity because the one God created it all. The Psalmist declares, “We will not hide these truths from our children; we will tell the next generation about the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might, and the wonders he has done.” 24 “Nothing can be understood apart from God,” says John Piper, “and all understandings of all things that leave him out are superficial understandings, since they leave out the most important reality in the universe.”25 Well over 3,000 years ago Moses spoke these words: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and Revelation 5:11-13 Naugle, Worldview, 260.

23 Isaiah 28:29 24 Psalm 78:4 25 John Piper, A God-Entranced Vision of All Things: The Legacy of Jonathan Edwards (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2004), 24, quoted in Philip Ryken, Christian Worldview, 40.

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shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” 26 No area of life or endeavor is exempt from this all-encompassing command. It applies no less to the arena of education than it does to every other aspect of life. In the beginning, God’s spoken word created and fashioned reality; moment by moment the Incarnate Word sustains and upholds that reality; and throughout our pilgrimage the written word faithfully frames and directs our understanding of that reality. Therefore, the starting point and foundational content for all education is God’s word.

“The Bible is the true story of the world,” says Albert Wolters, “the grand historical narrative of an earth and a people formed in creation, deformed by human rebellion and reformed by God’s redemptive work in Jesus Christ. It is the story of God’s redeeming love for his wayward creation, the story that will culminate in the restoration of the entire creation under the gracious rule of God.”27 The Bible gives us an all-encompassing view of reality by telling us about the one true God who has a comprehensive understanding of himself and everything that he has made.

The Bible is “the means of the reinstatement of man into the original revelational atmosphere in which man was created.”28 This means that the Creator, not the creature, gives the ultimate interpretation of his creation with regard to its nature and purpose. James Orr says, “He who with his whole heart believes in Jesus as the Son of God is thereby committed to much else besides. He is committed to a view of God, to a view of man, to a view of sin, to a view of Redemption, to a view of the purpose of God in creation and history, to a view of human destiny, found only in Christianity.”29 “Every fact in nature,” writes Deuteronomy 6:5-9 Wolters, “What Needs To Be Added to Creation Regained,” 10.

28 Van Til, “Antitheses in Education,” 127.

29 Orr, Christian View of God and the World, 4.

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George MacDonald, “is a revelation of God and each fact is there such as it is because God is such as He is.”30 The believer in Jesus Christ is committed to seeing the same reality that Christ proclaims.

That reality is rooted in “the sovereignty of the triune God over the whole cosmos, in all its spheres and kingdoms, visible and invisible.”31 Standing in awe of the Creator of heaven and earth “is the beginning of wisdom” and to know the Holy One brings “insight.” 32 It is the Lord who “gives wisdom: from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.” 33 All learning is predicated on thinking God’s thoughts after him across the breadth of all curricula. It is the practice of seeing all of reality as God sees it, as God describes it, and as God defines it. Learning is the process of coming to agreement with God. All knowledge, says Jonathan Edwards, ultimately lies in “the agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God.”34 We depend on God “to speak to us and tell us the meaning and purpose of our existence.”35 We can know God because he has revealed himself to us. God’s self-disclosure begins with his spoken word, creating all things “visible and invisible” 36 out of nothing so that all of creation declares “the glory of God” as it “proclaims his handiwork.” 37 It is conveyed by the Holy Spirit through the written word of holy scripture by framing and informing our understanding of God’s character, purposes, and works.38 It culminates with the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, who

MacDonald, Creation in Christ, 145.

Kuyper, “Calvinism and Politics,” 79.

32 Proverbs 9:10 33 Proverbs 2:6 34 Jonathan Edwards, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, vol. 6 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Wallace E. Anderson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 341-42, quoted in Litfin, Conceiving the Christian College, 91.

35 Philip Ryken, Christian Worldview, 50.

36 Colossians 1:16 37 Psalm 19:1 38 2 Timothy 3:16, 17 30 31

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is the “radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” 39 “The ultimate questions are fairly simple,” says Gene Fant.

“Do we trust human discovery or do we trust God’s selfrevelation? Do humans get to determine right and wrong, and reality, or does God?”40 A mind that is not filled with God’s word will be filled with creaturely speculations. No mind is vacant.

Something always occupies the premises. The porches that wrap around our minds are crowded with ideas, sights, and sounds.

They come as an unceasing stream of would-be lodgers seeking rooms. The things we admit into our mind’s vestibule—what we see, hear, listen to, and read—are soon scurrying throughout the whole house. As they become permanent boarders in our desires and affections, they inevitably shape the things we think about.

They form our habits, feed our resolve, and guide our actions.

Thus, the fields of our children’s minds are always under cultivation. They never lie fallow. Seed is always being sown. Whether intentionally or inadvertently, crops are growing. Attention and neglect are equally productive parents. Both yield a harvest. The fruit, however, is not the same. Wheat and tares constantly vie for footing in the soil of our children’s minds. Which one will drive the deepest root? The Psalmist prays, “Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things; and give me life in your ways.” 41 If we want God to be deeply rooted in our children’s thoughts, then we must saturate their lives with God’s word and demonstrate its relevance to everything they think, say, and do in all the activities of their lives. The goal of this process is that they may love the Lord their God with all their hearts, souls, and minds, while loving his image-bearers as they love themselves.42 All knowledge is to be used to that end.

Abraham Heschel observes that the “Hebrews learned in order to Hebrews 1:3 Fant, The Liberal Arts, 70.

41 Psalm 119:37 42 Matthew 22:37 39 40

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revere, whereas the Greeks learned in order to comprehend, and modern people learned in order to use.”43 The Bible tells us that we are to learn from Christ and find rest for our souls.44 “The end of learning,” wrote John Milton in the seventeenth century, “is to repair the ruin of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, imitate Him, to be like Him.”45 We want our children to know more than human versions of reality. We want them to know the only true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent in order that they may understand the universe, visible and invisible, as it really exists. We want them to know the true nature of the curse brought upon us all by the disobedience of our first parents. We want them to be filled with wonder and amazement at the love of God in the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus Christ. We want our children to listen to their Creator as he describes and defines the work of his hands. We want them to hear his explanation of purpose and destiny for his creation and his creatures. We want them to grasp their unique place and high calling in the created order and in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.

We want our children to understand that all finite facts are created facts, revelatory of their Creator and rationally coherent and intelligible to creatures made in the image of God. If our children are to lead and shape the culture around them, they must learn to speak God’s truth about reality. To speak the truth credibly, they must not only know it thoroughly but also possess the desire and discipline to live it consistently by taking every thought captive to obey Christ.46 Our children “are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God.”47

Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983), 34, quoted in Naugle, Philosophy, 30.

44 Matthew 11:29 45 Milton, Tractate on Education.

46 2 Corinthians 10:5 47 Tozer, That Incredible Christian, 46.

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WHO is Jesus?

“Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?” Mark 4:31 “Who are you, Lord?” Acts 9:5

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he twentieth-century Swiss theologian Karl Barth expressed the indispensable relationship of Christ to all of reality when he said, “What a person thinks about Christ determines what he ultimately thinks about everything else.”48 We begin with Christ because “in him all things hold together.” 49 He is the unifying principle of all things. He is the cohesive thread that runs through everything, revealing an intentionally purposeful cosmos “created through him and for him.” 50 The Father has placed Jesus at the center of everything because God’s unshakeable purpose in time and eternity is to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ and “to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things in earth.” 51 The exaltation of Jesus Christ shapes everything God does. All of God’s works of creation, providence, and redemption are framed so “that in everything he [Christ] might be preeminent.” 52 All things exist for the purpose of magnifying the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Bible presents us with a profoundly exalted view of our Lord.

He is set before us as “the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” 53 He is held forth to the Colossians as “the image of the invisible God.” 54 The title that adorns his robe and his thigh is “King of kings and Lord of lords.” 55 He is extolled as “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.” 56 The Father

Karl Barth, paraphrased by Duncan, “The Divinity of Christ.”

Colossians 1:17 50 Colossians 1:16 51 Ephesians 1:10 52 Colossians 1:18 53 Revelation 22:13 54 Colossians 1:15 55 Revelation 19:16 56 Hebrews 1:3 48 49

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has bestowed on him the “name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” 57 John tells us that Christ is the maker of all things.58 Paul says, “By him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities— all things were created through him and for him.” 59 The writer to the Hebrews informs us that Christ “upholds the universe by the word of his power.” 60 Paul declares that “he is before all things and in him all things hold together.” 61 Thus, with one voice, the scriptures assert that the world is a created reality, made and maintained by Jesus Christ. The meaning of all things, including the proper understanding of reality, is therefore dependent upon him. The disciples acclaim Jesus as the One who knows “all things.” 62 In him “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” 63 He is “the truth.” 64 No true or lasting meaning can be attached to anything apart from Christ, the creator, sustainer, and redeemer of all things. He enables every breath we draw and every thought we experience. He gives life and light to our children.

Addressing first-century believers in Asia Minor, the Apostle Peter says, “But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” 65 Our children were created and redeemed to proclaim the excellencies of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is the task for which

Philippians 2:9, 10 John 1:3 59 Colossians 1:16 60 Hebrews 1:3 61 Colossians 1:17 62 John 16:30 63 Colossians 2:3 64 John 14:6 65 1 Peter 2:9 57 58

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they are being prepared; this is the purpose of their education.

For Christians to think that education can somehow be framed or pursued without regard for God’s all-embracing purpose in Christ is not just inconsistent, it is incoherent. Albert Wolters underscores this point when he writes, “To suggest that there is any kind of knowing or thinking, let alone a particularly reliable or prestigious one, which is somehow exempt from the pervasive call to serve God in Christ, and which in fact deliberately seeks to be free of all religious commitment, is nothing short of biblical nonsense.”66 The only way to see the world as it was meant to be seen is through Jesus Christ, whom God has made “the head over all things.” 67 “All things” truly means all things. As C. S. Lewis reminds us, “There is no neutral ground in the universe; every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan.”68 Therefore, “If all the universe and everything in it exist by the design of an infinite, personal God, to make his manifold glory known and loved, then to treat any subject without reference to God’s glory is not scholarship but insurrection.”69 We must seek, therefore, by God’s grace, to instill in our children a desire to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ in every area of their lives so that all that they think, say, and do adorns the gospel that they profess.70 We must strive to fashion a culture, to form and shape a mindset that understands the absolute centrality of Jesus Christ to all reality. All of us must ultimately give our own answer to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” 71

Wolters, “No Longer Queen,” 72.

Ephesians 1:22 68 Leland Ryken and Marjorie Lamp Mead, Through the Wardrobe, 165.

69 Piper, Think: The Life of the Mind, 21.

70 Romans 12:1, 2 71 Matthew 16:15 66 67

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WHAT time is it?

And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world— he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Revelation 12:9

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hat words best describe our moment in the flow of history? In the present, wedged between the all-tooquickly forgotten past and the yet-to-be-experienced future, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, what time is it?

The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that it is the same time at all times: “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which it is said, ‘See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us.” 72 Despite our vaunted scientific “advancements” and everpresent technology, we face the same fundamental questions as people in every other time and place: Whom will we serve?

Whose explanation of reality will we subscribe to and follow? The more things change, the more they remain the same. We all live after the Fall, with the continuing aftermath of its effects, and with much of the creation in rebellion against its rightful King.

Our children’s education shapes them while they are strangers and pilgrims on an earth that groans and travails under the curse of sin.

They are learning in the midst of a cosmic conflict: “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” 73 Their time is much the same as every other age since the banishment of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

It is a fallen time. The world is not as it should be. It is marred by sin. We have all failed to exercise a righteous stewardship over Ecclesiastes 1:9, 10 Ephesians 6:12

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the works of God’s hands. We and our children fail to think and feel about God, his world, and ourselves as we were meant to. “Sin,” writes Philip Ryken, “divides our hearts and distorts our desires so that we do not love what God invites us to love.

Every sin flows from some failure in our affections. Sin also corrupts our minds so that now we are unable to think God’s thoughts after him.”74 As a result, sin causes us to substantially “misunderstand, misconstrue, misinterpret, and misvalue”75 ourselves, and what is around us: God, his world, and our neighbors. The Apostle Paul put it this way: “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” 76 As with previous generations, our own choices are well described in the pages of scripture. Like multitudes before us, we have chosen to serve ourselves and to accept human-made explanations of reality rather than the word of our Creator. We have enthroned our fallen reason and misguided feelings as the ultimate sources of authority. Making ourselves the measure of all things has inevitably led to the rejection of supernatural revelation as a transcendent rule. As a result, the Bible becomes just another outmoded viewpoint to be consigned to the ash heap of history.

The prophet Jeremiah witnessed much the same thing in the sixth century before Christ. He watched in astonishment as his own people turned away from the living God and embraced false views of reality: “Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, declares the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.” 77 Here, in a single verse, Jeremiah gives us the whole history of the human race. It encapsulates a tale of thanklessness, swollen pride, and willful blindness.

It is the story, repeated in every generation, of people turning Philip Ryken, Christian Worldview, 66.

Ibid.

76 1 Corinthians 2:14 77 Jeremiah 2:12, 13 74 75

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away from their Creator, “the fountain of living waters,” and trying to replace him with “broken cisterns that can hold no water.” Refusing the truth of God’s revelation, they substitute their own illusory schemes only to find themselves empty and ultimately deceived.

The Apostle Paul says exactly the same thing in the opening chapter of his epistle to the Romans: “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.” 78 We find ourselves as creatures made by God, bearing his image, yet looking for satisfaction anywhere and everywhere except in him.

The same pattern prevails today. “Modern man has his own substitute for historic Christianity,” writes Cornelius Van Til. “He, not God, determines the goal of his life. He must be his own standard of right and wrong. He must provide his own motivation.”79 Though approaches may vary, every fallen age tries to expunge God from its consciousness. Such attempts in the past have proven no more effective than Adam and Eve’s seeking to hide from God in the garden. Though historically futile, lack of success has not discouraged repeated efforts in our own day to marginalize God. In his 1983 Templeton Address, the Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn characterized our times by saying: “If I were called upon to identify briefly the principal trait of the entire twentieth century… I would be unable to find anything more precise and pithy than to repeat once again: Men have forgotten God.”80 The Apostle Paul warns us not to be taken “captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” 81 He tells us to “demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the

Romans 1:21 Van Til, “The Dilemma of Education,” 34.

80 Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God,” 145.

81 Colossians 2:8 78 79

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knowledge of God.” 82 To pretend that reality is different from what God declares it to be, and to live accordingly, is not an exercise in healthy critical thinking. It is, as Gene Edward Veith reminds us with refreshing clarity, an exercise in idolatry: “Constructing one’s own meanings and one’s own gods rather than acknowledging the one living God is called idolatry. Idolatry is the rejection of truth and an attempt to replace God with a false version of reality.”83 This is both blind and foolish because God “does not simply have a point of view; he has the complete view.”84 Because the effects of the Fall extend to every part of our being, fallen human reasoning seeks to emancipate itself from God’s revelation and establish its own suzerainty. In denying God, we paradoxically claim omniscience for ourselves. “Despite the obvious lessons of human history and human nature, it is assumed that if people are simply unshackled from phobias, ignorance, and poverty, then they will make wise, selfless choices that are for the good of all and will lead inevitably to the improvement of the world in which we live.”85 The Bible, however, instructs us that understanding reality does not start with ourselves and what we think is right. It starts with God and what he has revealed to us in Jesus Christ through his word. If we are to understand reality, we must take the Bible seriously as the “articulated touchstone” for every aspect of life. As Mark Noll states, “The light of Christ illuminates the laboratory, his speech is the fount of communication, he makes possible the study of humans in all their interactions, he is the source of all life, he provides the wherewithal for every achievement of human civilization, he is the telos of all that is beautiful. He is, among his many other titles, the Christ of the Academic Road.”86 2 Corinthians 10:5 Veith, Postmodern Times, 63 84 Philip Ryken, Christian Worldview, 43.

85 Edlin, Cause of Christian Education, 36.

86 Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, 22.

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WHERE are we?

Woe is me! For I am lost; For I am a man of unclean lips, And I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips. Isaiah 6:5

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ur children’s education takes place east of Eden where, in Jim Steinman’s lyrics from the 1981 Meat Loaf album Dead Ringer, “Everything is permitted, everything is allowed.”87 Such thoughts are the continuing echo of a conversation that took place in a garden long ago. It was then that the seeds of doubt regarding transcendent authority were sown by a serpent who asked, with decidedly malicious intent, “Did God actually say…?” 88 The thrust of the question remains unchanged to this day: Is there any binding authority outside of ourselves to which we are accountable? It is a question that speaks to each area of our lives, to the institutional foundations of every society, and to the fundamental values of all cultures.

Like the first parents of our race, each of us is enticed by the idea of being the final arbiter, both for ourselves and for others, of what is right and wrong, true and false, good and evil. Our society wants to determine, by itself, its own code of conduct. In Rousseau-like fashion it asserts, “Whatever I feel to be right is right. Whatever I feel to be wrong is wrong.”89 Many of our neighbors recognize no authority that does not emanate from themselves. They have unbounded faith in their own reason to furnish the bar for what constitutes reality, and the unbridled confidence to proffer their own viewpoint as the blueprint for how the world should function. The poet’s defiant words have become their own: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”90 Too often, we Steinman, “Everything Is Permitted.”

Genesis 3:1 89 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise, quoted in Hampson, The Enlightenment , 195.

90 Henley, “Invictus,” 33.

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want to act as God. And so does everyone else. Thus, the problem: among seven billion viewpoints, whose will prevail? Whose viewpoint should prevail? On what basis is that to be determined?

In the early nineteenth century, Daniel Webster ruefully observed: “A mass of men equals a mass of opinions.”91 The Roman playwright Terence penned the same lament in the second century before Christ: “So many men, so many opinions; his own a law to each.”92 A thousand years earlier, the author of the book of Judges recorded a similar complaint: “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” 93 Times may change, but human nature remains remarkably constant. Our own experience of an acutely acrimonious age confirms the human desire to structure life according to individual sentiment.

History reminds us that our culture is no more conflicted than others before us. Virgil tells us that discord stalked through the ancient Roman world, “delighted with her torn mantle.”94 Marcus Aurelius noted people’s “interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill will, and selfishness.” He attributed them all to “ignorance of what is good or evil.”95 Shakespeare’s play Henry VI reads like our own evening news: “These days are dangerous; virtue is choked with foul ambition, and charity chased hence by rancor’s hand.”96 Summing up what many of us think, the nineteenth-century German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe concluded that “we do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”97 We live in an unceasing maelstrom of swirling words, recycled ideas, and malformed sentiments that shout incessantly for our Attributed to Daniel Webster.

Terence, Phormio, Act 2, Scene 4, line 14.

93 Judges 17:6 94 “et scissa gaudens vadit Discordia palla,” Virgil, Aeneid, VIII.702.

95 Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book 2.1.

96 Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act III, Scene 1.

97 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, cited in Reznek, Delusions and Madness, 47.

91 92

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attention. A creedless chaos marked by confusion and the absence of concord confronts us on every side. Increasingly strident and demanding voices saturate our airwaves, fill our computers, and scream in our headphones. People are consumed with competing and contradictory concerns, “his own a law to each.”98 The onslaught of so much heated opinion is the inescapable ash of a fractured society, rent by profoundly different views of reality and bereft of shared assumptions regarding ourselves and how we should live: “We’ve taken the world apart,” says Chuck Palahniuk, “but we have no idea what to do with the pieces.”99 Los Angeles Times columnist Stephen Randall writes, “Today, opinions are like Big Macs—thrown together hastily, served by the billions and not very good for you.”100 Once again, more is proving to be less. Never has so much advice been given so freely with so little effect as in our own day. Overwhelmed daily by an avalanche of print and social media opinion, we are rapidly losing our grip on any common canon for civil discourse. Societal divisions are regularly fanned and brought to flame by the angry and the agitated, as they direct their ire against every conceivable form of societal convention.

Western culture now views all metanarratives with suspicion and deems exclusive truth claims as intolerant at best and downright sinister at worst. In our postmodern world, personal constructs, self-serving preferences, and a deeply entrenched materialism rise to belligerently oppose any who would espouse the cause of transcendent truth. Any claim that Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life,” or that “no one comes to the Father” except through him101 is inevitably met with charges of arrogance, closed-mindedness, and oppressiveness. Far from being perceived as merely irrelevant, Christianity is seen as being threatening and judgmental.

Today, the once-universal idea of fixed, transcendent truth is denied and derided by the very institutions that were historically tasked Terence, Phormio, Act 2, Scene 4, line 14.

Palahniuk, Choke: A Novel, 111.

100 Randall, “Viewpoint.”

101 John 14:6 98 99

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with teaching this truth to students. Our age has raised its own lofty opinion “against the knowledge of God” 102 by attempting to replace the Creator with the creature as the supreme locus of meaning and authority. Today’s education, in the name of progress, routinely substitutes the ideas of the ever-changing, error-prone, fallen human mind for the eternal word of God. As a result, nihilism and narcissism flower all about us, loudly lamented but commonly embraced.

Isolated and insulated by the fantasy worlds of our own making, we fear being alone with our real selves and demand with the poet that “the lights must never go out, the music must always play.”103 Without mooring or direction, we are culturally and personally adrift.

Is there a purpose to life and, if so, what is it? In the mind of the contemporary Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, there is no reason for our existence: “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.”104 Jean-Paul Sartre, in his aptly named work, Nausea, takes the same position: “there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing.”105 For chemist Peter Atkins, an “exhilarating loneliness” is all that remains: “Gone is progress, gone is the afterlife, gone is the soul, gone is protection through prayer, gone is design, gone is false comfort. All that is left is an exhilarating loneliness and the recognition that through science we can come to an understanding of ourselves and this glorious cosmos.”106 How very different is the assertion of purpose by the Apostle Paul who exults: “For to me to live is Christ” 107 and “the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for 2 Corinthians 10:5 Auden, “September 1, 1939.”

104 Dawkins, River Out of Eden, 133.

105 Sartre, Nausea, 112.

106 Peter W. Atkins, “Science and Religion: Rack or Featherbed: The Uncomfortable Supremacy of Science,” Science Progress 83 (2000), 28-31, quoted in Philip Ryken, Christian Worldview, 50.

107 Philippians 1:21 102 103

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me.” 108 Obviously there is a deep divide between those who assert that life “is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,”109 and those who affirm that “for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” 110 In the midst of our headlong flight from transcendent truth and righteousness, the words of the prophet Isaiah continue to speak: “Woe to them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.” 111

HOW should we proceed?

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?” Job 38:2

B

ecause our culture lacks consensus on a common purpose for life, it is not surprising that it has failed to achieve any kind of agreement in educational philosophy. We find it difficult to unite behind a common core curriculum because we no longer share a common core of assumptions regarding what should be taught in our schools or the appropriate institution to oversee the delivery of instruction to our children. No educator can make a curriculum that has a center except by importing the center of his own life- and worldviews. Are we teaching the image-bearers of the living God in a purposefully created reality, or are we teaching primates with cell phones in a world of uncreated eternal matter characterized by random, purposeless chance? Entangled in this morass of ideological confusion and deeply set antagonisms, what should a school try to accomplish?

What should an educator seek to achieve?

Galatians 2:20 Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5.

110 Romans 8:28 111 Isaiah 5:20 108 109

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The father of modern educational theory, John Dewey, thought that loosing us from our biblical moorings would lead to unbounded progress. He boldly dismissed nineteen hundred years of Christian thought and civilization as pious fiction: “There is no God and there is no soul. Hence, there are no needs for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, the immutable truth is also dead and buried. There is no room for fixed, natural law or moral absolutes.”112 The overwhelming majority of teachers trained in the United States since the 1950s has been oriented within this philosophical framework.

Many are misguided materialists who think that there is nothing beyond what we can see, touch, and measure. Others have embraced a functional pantheism in which all solutions are to be ultimately found in themselves. It is foolish to think that we can get a true perspective on God’s creation from a teaching system that begins by excluding the Creator’s word and substituting in its place the speculations of his fallen creatures.

Is our thinking and learning to be framed by those who think of humanity as a cosmic accident and describe us as “an accidental collocation of atoms”?113 Or will our context be defined by holy scripture, which declares us to be the created image-bearers of the living God?114 This truth leads the Psalmist to exclaim: “I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” 115 “We have rather lost sight of the idea,” Dorothy Sayers once

John Dewey, “Soul-Searching,” Teacher Magazine, September 1933, 33, cited in Younts, “What to Do About Lying.” Although the original source is no longer available, the Dewey quote is widely available from many sources.

Nevertheless, the 4th, 5th, and 6th points of the original Humanist Manifesto do express the beliefs stated here. John Dewey was a signer and supporter of this Manifesto.

113 Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” 107.

114 Genesis 1:27 115 Psalm 139:14 112

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noted, “that Christianity is supposed to be an interpretation of the universe.”116 It is more than a bromide to get us through the headaches of life. It is more than a truncated formula to escape the fires of perdition. It is an all-encompassing view of reality. And the only reality that exists is God made, God sustained, and God interpreted. God purposed it, designed it, framed it, and furnished it. Abraham Kuyper affirmed this truth when he said, “God looks out across the whole of creation and says ‘There is not a thumb’s breadth of it that is not Mine.’”117 “Scientific experiment may tell us how children learn,” writes Gordon Clark, “but no amount of observation of children will tell us what they ought to learn.”118 Truth about reality will not come from any system that begins by excluding God’s words. Martin Luther warned, “I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not unceasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt.”119 “Sometimes parents think that a secular environment will ‘strengthen’ their children by forcing them to stand up for their own beliefs.

But God’s word does not endorse that viewpoint. It does not say, ‘Give a child twelve years of training in the way he should not go, and he will be made strong by it.’”120 Instead, God tells us, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” 121 No verse of scripture teaches that secular training will “strengthen” our children. As D. James Kennedy said, “You don’t send an eightyear-old out to take on a forty-year-old humanist.”122 If we want our children to live as Christians, they must be taught as Christians.

Sayers, Novelist to Playwright, 158.

Kuyper, A Centennial Reader, 488.

118 Clark, Christian Philosophy of Education, 204.

119 d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation, 190.

120 Grudem, “Biblical Reasons,” 2.

121 Proverbs 22:6 122 Kennedy, “Training Your Children.”

116 117

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The Bible must frame our approach to every viewpoint by giving us a foundation from which to compare and contrast good and evil, right and wrong, wisdom and foolishness. Not all teaching lends itself to edification. That is why the prophet Jeremiah exhorts us to “learn not the way of the nations.” 123 When training and instruction are framed and directed by perceptions that are clearly contrary to God’s word, we are not bringing our children up in “the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” 124 Students do not become stronger Christians by being taught non-Christian thinking, but by being taught Christian thinking. We are to fill our children’s minds with “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.” 125 These are the things we want our children to cherish and think about continually.

What God reveals to us in the Old and New Testaments must provide the context for all learning. If we misunderstand God, we misunderstand everything. Therefore, we must strive to understand the facts of the world, not as independent, unconnected, random events existing in a moral vacuum, but as the dependent, cohesive, and coherent handiwork of our Sovereign Lord.

“A school system founded on the idea that education is a moral and spiritual preparation for all of life, will train children in a manner totally different from a school system which conceives education as a preparation for getting the most money in the shortest time.”126 We must not allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking that education is an essentially neutral activity. There is no such thing. We are engaged in a battle of worldviews. The mind that does not bring every thought captive to Christ will be taken captive by the hollow and deceitful philosophies of this world.

There is no middle ground, no half-way covenant, no enlight Jeremiah 10:2 Ephesians 6:4 125 Philippians 4:8 126 Clark, Christian Philosophy of Education, 204.

123 124

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ened compromise. We walk in the light or we walk in darkness.

John Calvin correctly asserted: “All of life is religion.”127 Nothing in our lives is independent from God. Nothing is neutral. When we minimize the differences between those who fear God and those who do not,128 we deceive ourselves and deprive our children and the present generation of a living contrast that, by God’s grace, will prophetically challenge the empty values and vain philosophies of our time. We provide neither salt nor light to our generation by thinking, living, and teaching the same way it does.

Charles Colson wrote, “In every way that matters, Christianity is an affront to the world; it is countercultural.”129 Each “Christian must be a sign of contradiction in the world.”130 We must emphasize, not minimize, that contradiction. Our desire is that our children will “honor Christ the Lord as holy,” and will be “prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks” for a reason for the hope that is in them.131

WHY does purpose matter?

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, And the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. Proverbs 9:10

T

he book of Proverbs tells us that purpose shapes practice132 and the Psalmist avers that affection drives cognition.133 Christianity claims that the central fact of human history is this: the God who made all things wrapped himself in our hu Bartholomew, Ecclesiastes, 169. Variously attributed to John Calvin.

Psalm 36:1 129 Colson, Against the Night, 152.

130 Jerzy Popieluszko, quoted by Colson, “A Martyr’s Ageless Message.”

131 1 Peter 3:15 132 Proverbs 1:7 133 Psalm 119:97 127 128

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manity and entered his own creation in the person of Jesus Christ.

He did this in order to redeem us from the curse of sin and death that was brought on all of us by the fall of our first parents. This sinless Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and rose from the dead on the third day. He ascended into heaven and lives today, Sovereign Lord over all. If this is true, then Christ “must be the central truth from which all our behavior, relationships, and philosophy flow.”134 It must also be the central truth from which all education flows.

“Education cannot be done,” says Wendell Berry, “by gathering or ‘accessing’ what we now call information—which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.”135 The priority of Christ and his kingdom is repeatedly emphasized in the Sermon on the Mount, where our Lord exhorts us to put first things first: “Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” 136 The founders of Harvard College took that priority to be paramount when they designed their course of instruction. They sought to lead every student to the understanding that all knowledge is centered in Jesus Christ. In 1646, the adopted rules of the college included the following declaration: “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies is to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17.3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”137

Colson, Against the Night, 165.

Berry, “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear.”

136 Matthew 6:31-33 137 Peirce, History of Harvard University, 5.

134 135

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God’s desire is for Jesus Christ to be preeminent in everything.138 This must include the seven hours a day that our children are in school. We want our children to do more than conform to the world, more than mirror the culture around them. We want them to go forth boldly and transform the world, not by meeting the world’s standards for success but by being obedient to him who has called them “out of darkness into his marvelous light.” 139 Only a preparatory education that is centered on Christ will suffice to meet the high calling for which our children were created and redeemed.

Our children are “a heritage from the Lord.” 140 “Their angels” always see the face of their Father who is in heaven.141 By God’s grace they are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession.” 142 Bearers of God’s image, they were created to “declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples.” 143 They have been “crowned with glory and honor” and given “dominion” over the work of God’s hands.144 They are to be called the “blessed” who will inherit “the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” 145 These extraordinary creatures have been entrusted to us that we may “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” 146 As parents, we have been appointed by God to feed his lambs,147 to be the earthly guardians of children who belong, ultimately, to him. They are “the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”148 We are to shepherd them on their way to everlasting

Colossians 1:18 1 Peter 2:9 140 Psalm 127:3 141 Matthew 18:10 142 1 Peter 2:9 143 1 Chronicles 16:24 144 Psalm 8:5, 6 145 Matthew 25:34 146 Ephesians 6:4 147 John 21:16 148 Postman, Conscientious Objections, 160.

138 139

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splendor.149 Such a daunting task is possible only if God grants “you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” 150 We must employ the full panoply of our God-given gifts in order to prepare our children to stand in the presence of God. That is the ultimate purpose of all teaching and learning.

Ephesians 5:27 Ephesians 3:16-19

149 150

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David Vanderpoel, PhD Dr. Vanderpoel has been the Headmaster and CEO of Trinity Christian School since 2005. He holds a BA in history from Wheaton College, an MA in European history from Adelphi University, an MAR in theological studies from Westminster Seminary, and a PhD in the history of early modern Europe from New York University. Before beginning his service at Trinity, he held the position of Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of American Medical Diagnostics Incorporated, and from 1997 to 2001, Dr. Vanderpoel was employed by PricewaterhouseCoopers as the National Human Resources Leader for insurance services. He served in the pastoral ministry from 1984 to 1996 as Senior Pastor of the New Hyde Park Baptist Church in Long Island, New York. Dr. Vanderpoel has been an adjunct faculty member of Adelphi University and Patrick Henry College. The Vanderpoels have three sons, all of whom are graduates of Trinity Christian School and Wheaton College.