We Americans suffer most desperately from lack of proper education. Fault lies at the feet of both our pulpits and our educational institutions. We parents are perhaps most culpable. Parents represent our children’s first environment. We are their first school, first church, first state, and first vocation. We teach them their first words, how to pray, how to obey, and how to be responsible through sharing household duties.
Our Biblical mandates do not end when our children reach “school age”, however. Parents as well as our pulpits bear the mantle to ensure that our children mature intellectually, socially, and morally. This means that we teach our children that all thought is founded upon the presupposition that the Bible is the Word of God and Christ is Creator and King of all the earth. This presupposition impacts everything. Knowing the Bible is the Word of God impacts our every thought and deed. This is true knowledge and it should impact our pulpits, pews, and political arenas. Most importantly, it impacts how we educate our children. Our Monday through Fridayschools must match our Sunday schools!
For well over 100 years, state control of education has played a key role in destroying the Christian foundations of our culture. The state excludes from the curriculum everything which points to the truth of Biblical faith and establishes it's own doctrine of truth. In the name of objective reason, it is hostile to Biblical faith. Instead of Christian morality, a relativistic ethic is taught. Instead of a respect for the landmarks of a Christian society, a contempt for the past is taught. Instead of affirming the sovereignty of God, the educators and intellectuals now affirm the sovereignty of chance.
This Wednesday, Nathan Carr will bring to OCPAC his passion to reverse this trend of more than 100 years. We need to re-establish the roots of Christian education and allow them to grow into the entire matrix of society. To confine Christianity to individual personal piety is to truncate the Word of God. The proclamation of the Gospel is the proclamation of the almighty, sovereign God who stands before us as creator of the cosmos, the creator of mankind, its lawgiver and only Redeemer and King.
Any Gospel that does not encompass God’s authority over all human affairs is not a Biblical Gospel, but a man-made fairy tale which serves no usefulness to anyone.
Scholar and historian Herbert Schlossberg has pointed out that modern education has shrouded academic disciplines within a camouflage of secular mythology. Academia’s folklore has managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the sheep.
By failing to give proper attention to the priorities of education, the church has lost its way.
