Sound Thinkers on the Necessity of Christian Education
By Dr. Derek Carlsen
Education, in its very nature, is inescapably religious. The only truth that exists, is found in Jesus Christ who said He is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). True education must begin and end with the God of the Bible, thus denying the existence and centrality of Christ in one’s educational endeavors is to fail at the very beginning of the enterprise. The quotes below have not only stood the test of time but in a stunning way manifest how perceptive these men were in pointing out the threats of the thinking in their days. Their battle cry was, for the most part, ignored, and our generation is reaping the consequences of this blindness. May we be challenged by these words and realize how central the education of our children is to the outworking of God’s Kingdom plans and the cause of true liberty and peace.
John Murray (1898-1975)
“Christian Education,” in Collected Writings of John Murray, Vol.1, Banner of Truth, 1976, pgs.367-374.
“Now if the biblical revelation is ultimate for thought, outlook, and practice, we must readily see the implications for education... In a word, education must be Christian... [This] means that the subject matter of the classroom must derive its interpreting principles from the Christian revelation.” (368-369).
“How indispensable to education from the earliest years, even before the child arrives at school age, is the word of Gen.1:1...No question is more urgent than that of whence... Whence the universe in which we live? Correlative is the doctrine of God's providence... [Thus] unless the school fosters the fear of the Lord as the beginning of knowledge and of wisdom, the influence of the home and of the church, even when it is to a high degree exemplary, tends to be negated, and it is common knowledge and experience that in many cases the school has undermined what home and church have sought to establish and develop.” (369).
“Education, apart from any conception of man as to his distinguishing identity, purpose, and destiny, is inconceivable...If education is to be Christian, it must be based upon and conducted in terms of the Christian view of man. If not, it is not Christian, and if not Christian it is alien and opposed to Christian interests...If boys and girls...are in the image of God, if that is their identity, their chief end cannot be anything less than to glorify God and to enjoy him. And education that is destitute of this objective, or has allowed it to suffer eclipse has lost its direction.” (370-371).
“But there may be Christian education in schools and yet the education may not be Christian. And the reason is that the subjects which are the main business of the school curriculum are not taught from the standpoint of the world view derived from the Christian revelation. “Christianity gives us a world view; it enunciates principles which underlie all our thinking if we are Christian; it prescribes the governing conceptions in terms of which we are to interpret reality. Christianity is not something tacked on to our world view; it is itself a world view. And the central features of our Christian faith are conditioned by, and in turn condition, that world view.” (372).
The sum is: “The whole range and content of education must be God-centered; that is, God must be the unifying principle and the interpreting principle of the whole curriculum.” (374).
Charles Hodge (1797-1878)
Systematic Theology, James Clarke and Co., 1960, Vol.3, pgs.352-356.
“As children are bound to honor and obey their parents, so parents have duties no less important in reference to their children.” (352).
The “Bible does require that education should be religiously conducted…(Deut.6:6,7 11:19 Ps.78:5-7 Prov.22:6 Eph.6:4)…These are not ceremonial or obsolete laws. They bind the consciences of men just as much as the command, 'Thou shalt not steal.' If parents themselves conduct the education of their children, these are the principles upon which it must be conducted. If they commit that work to teachers, they are bound, by the law of God, to see that the teachers regard these divine prescriptions...This is an obligation which they cannot escape...Christianity requires that education in all its departments should be conducted religiously.” (354-355).
“If a man is not religious, he is irreligious; if he is not a believer, he is an unbeliever. This is as true of organizations and institutions, as it is of individuals. Byron uttered a profound truth when he put into the mouth of Satan the words ‘He that does not bow to God, has bowed to me.’ If you banish light, you are in darkness. If you banish Christianity from the schools, you thereby render them infidel...This controversy, therefore, is a controversy between Christianity and infidelity; between light and darkness; between Christ and Belial.” (355-356).
Charles Hodge (1797-1878)
Commentary on Ephesians, The Crossway Classic Commentaries, Crossway Books, Wheaton, Illinois, 1994, pg.204.
“Children are not to be allowed to grow up without care or control. They are to be instructed, disciplined, and admonished, so that they are brought to knowledge, self control, and obedience. This whole process of education is to be religious, and not only religious, but Christian. It is bring[ing] them up in the training and instruction of the Lord which is the appointed and the only effectual way of attaining the goal of education. Where this means is neglected or any other substituted for it, the result must be disastrous failure. The moral and religious element of our nature is just as essential and as universal as the intellectual. Religion, therefore, is as necessary to the development of the mind as knowledge. And as Christianity is the only true religion, and God in Christ the only true God, the only possible means of profitable education is the nurture and admonition of the Lord…it is infinite folly for men to assume that they are wiser than God or to attempt to accomplish a goal through any means other than those which he has appointed.” (Comments on Eph.6:4).
A.A. Hodge (1823-1886)
“Religion in the Public Schools,” The New Princeton Review 3, 1, 1887.
“It is absolutely impossible to separate religious ideas from the great mass of human knowledge...where these are not positively implied they are virtually denied.”
“Education involves the training of the whole man and of all the faculties, of conscience and of the affections, as well as of the intellect...A purely non-theistic treatment of [English]...would not merely falsify the truth of the subject, but would necessarily make it an instrument of conveying positively antitheistic and antichristian ideas. All history is a product of divine Providence, and is instinct with the divine ends and order... It is self-evident that a non-theistic or a non-christian treatment of...history would be utterly superficial and misrepresenting. It cannot be questioned that morals rest on a religious basis, and that a non-theistic ethics is equivalent to a positively antitheistic one. The same is no less true of science in all its departments...If God is not therein recognized he is denied, and a non-theistic science has always been and will always be a positively atheistic and materialistic one.”
“Wm. T. Harris well says...‘whosoever teaches another view of the world... teaches a doctrine subversive of faith... and also subversive of man's life in all that makes it worth living.’”
These “infinite evils...cannot be corrected by the supplementary agencies of the Christian home, the Sabbath-school, or the church...Poison and its antidote together never constitute nutritious food. And it is simply madness to attempt the universal distribution of poison on the ground that other parties are endeavoring to furnish a partial distribution of an imperfect antidote.”
A.A. Hodge (1823-1886)
Evangelical Theology, Banner of Truth, 1976, [1890], pgs.242-245.
“The atheistic doctrine is gaining currency, even among professed Christians and even among some bewildered Christian ministers, that an education provided by the common government for the children of diverse religious parties should be entirely emptied of all religious character...It is capable of exact demonstration that if every party in the State has the right of excluding from the public schools whatever he does not believe to be true, then he that believes most must give way to him that believes least…It is self-evident that on this scheme, if it is consistently and persistently carried out in all parts of the country, the United States system of national popular education will be the most efficient and wide instrument for the propagation of atheism which the world has ever seen.” (242-243).
“The claim of impartiality between positions as directly contradictory as that of Jews, Mohammedans, and Christians, and especially as that of theists and of atheists, is evidently absurd. And no less is the claim absurd and impossible that a system of education can be indifferent on these fundamental subjects. There is no possible branch of human knowledge which is not purely formal, like abstract logic or mathematics, which can be known or taught in a spirit of entire indifference between theism and atheism. Every department... must be in reality one or the other: if it be not positively and confessedly theistic, it must be really and in full effect atheistic. The physical as well as the moral universe must be conceived either in a theistic or an atheistic light...Teleology [that everything has a purpose and is ordered to definite ends] must be acknowledged everywhere or be denied everywhere. Philosophy, ethics, jurisprudence, political and social science, can be conceived of and treated only from a theistic or from an atheistic point of view. The proposal to treat them from a neutral point of view is ignorant and absurd.” (243).
“It is certain that throughout the entire range of the higher education a position of entire indifferentism is an absolute impossibility—that along the entire line the relation of man and of the universe to the ever-present God, the supreme Lord of the conscience and heart, the non-affirmation of the truth, is entirely equivalent to the affirmation at every point of its opposite.” (243-244).
“The prevalent superstition that men can be educated for good citizenship, or for any other use under heaven, without religion, is as unscientific and unphilosophical as it is irreligious.” (244).
“It is no answer to say that the deficiency of the national system of education in this regard will be adequately supplied by the activities of the Christian churches. No court would admit in excuse for the diffusion of poison the plea that the poisoner knew of another agent actively employed in diffusing an antidote...atheism taught in the school cannot be counteracted by theism taught in the Church. Theism and atheism cannot coalesce to make anything. All truth in all spheres is organically one and vitally inseparable. It is impossible for different agencies independently to discuss and inculcate the religious and the purely naturalistic sides of truth.” (244-245).
“I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ's reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social, nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen.” (245).
Robert L. Dabney (1820-1898)
“State Free Schools” and “Secularized Education” in Discussions Vol.4, Ross House Books and Sprinkle Publications, 1979 [1897], pgs.215-244 and 225-247.
“Said Daniel Webster...‘In what age, by what sect, where, when, by whom, has religious truth been excluded from the education of youth? Nowhere never. Everywhere, and at all times, it has been and is regarded as essential. It is of the essence, the vitality of useful instruction.’” (219).
“We propose now...that tuition in Christianity is essential to all education which is worth the name...we mean in the fullest sense that Christianity must be a present element of all the training at all times, or else it is not true and valuable education…The human spirit is a monad, a single, unit, spiritual substance, having facilities and susceptibilities for different modifications, but no parts. Hence, when it is educated it is educated as a unit...it is impossible to separate the ethical and intellectual functions...knowledge is really valuable only as it is in order to right actions...The nature of responsibility is such that there can be no neutrality...‘He that is not with his God is against him.’ He who does not positively comply with the ever-present obligation does ipso facto violate it, and contract positive sinfulness. Hence as there cannot be in any soul a non-Christian state which is not anti-Christian, it follows that any training which attempts to be non-Christian is therefore anti-Christian. God is the rightful, supreme master and owner of all reasonable creatures, and their nearest and highest duties are to him. Hence to train a soul away from him is a robbery of God, which he cannot justify in any person or agency whatsoever.” (220-221).
“There can be, therefore, no true education without moral culture, and no true moral culture without Christianity.” (222).
“Education is the nurture and development of the whole man for his proper end. The end must be conceived aright in order to understand the process.” (230).
Is “a really secularized education either possible or admissible?...No people of any age, religion, or civilization, before ours, has ever thought so...Pagan, Papist, Mohammedan, Greek, Protestant, have all hitherto rejected any other education than one grounded in religion, as absurd and wicked.” (230-231).
“True education is, in a sense, a spiritual process, the nurture of a soul...Every line of true knowledge must find its completeness in its convergency to God, even as every beam of daylight leads the eye to the sun. If religion be excluded from our study, every process of thought will be arrested before it reaches its proper goal...What if an unbeliever claims to be merely teaching some purely secular course, without any such maiming of his subjects or prejudicing of Christianity? If his teaching is more than a temporary dealing with some corner of education, the fact will be found to be that it is tacitly anti-Christian; overt assaults are not made, but there is a studied avoidance which is in effect hostile. There can be no neutral position between two extremes, where there is no middle ground, but ‘a great gulf fixed.’... On what moral basis shall the teacher who wholly suppresses all appeal to religion rest that authority which he must exercise in the schoolroom?... The training which does not base duty on Christianity is, for us, practically immoral.” (232-236).
The Christian creed of responsibility: “According to this obligation to God covers all of every man’s being and actions. Even if the act be correct in outward form, which is done without any reference to his will, he will judge it a shortcoming. ‘The plowing of the wicked is sin’ [Prov.21:4]…Our Savior has declared that there is no moral neutrality...The comparison of these truths will make it perfectly plain that a non-Christian training is literally an anti-Christian training.” (238).
The State has no right to oppose the theological beliefs of Christians, but they do oppose these beliefs when they educate souls as they do, “because a non-Christian training is an anti-Christian training.” (238).
“Since all truths converge towards God, he who is not to name God...can only construct a truncated figure...And no person nor organism has a right to seem to say to a responsible, immortal soul, ‘In this large and intelligent and even ethical segment of your doings you are entitled to be godless.’” (239-240).
“In fact the Church does not and cannot repair the mischief which her more powerful, rich, and ubiquitous rival, the secularized State, is doing in thus giving, under the guise of a non-Christian, an anti-Christian training.” (241).
The “direction of the education of children...[is] properly a domestic and parental function...[God] looks to parents, in whom the family is founded, as the responsible agents of this result...He has also in the fifth Commandment connected the child proximately...with the parents, which, of course, confers on them the adequate and the prior authority...It thus appears that naturally the parent’s authority over their children could not have come by deputation from either State or visible Church...[But] the dispensation of Divine Providence in the course of nature shows where the power and duty of educating are deposited...No parent can fail to resent, with a righteous indignation, the intrusion of any authority between his conscience and convictions and the soul of his child. If the father conscientiously believes that his own creed is true and righteous and obligatory before God, then he must intuitively regard the intrusion of any other power between him and his minor child, to cause the rejection of that creed, as a usurpation...If this usurpation is made by the visible church, it is felt to be in the direction of popery, if by the magistrate, in the direction of despotism.” (243-244).
What “Protestant concedes therefrom that his religious rights were either conferred, or can be rightfully taken away, by civil authority?...The State or Church has no more right to invade the parental sphere than the parent to invade theirs…Did our republican fathers hold that any people have ever the right to subvert the moral order of society ordained by God?...So far is it from being true that the civil authority is entitled to shape a people to suit itself; the opposite is true, the people should shape the civil authority.” (245-246).
Louis Berkhof (1873-1957)
“Being Reformed in our Attitude Toward the Christian School” and “Covenant: The Covenant of Grace and its Significance for Christian Education” in Foundations of Christian Education, edited by Dennis E. Johnson, Presbyterian and Reformed Pub. Co. 1990, pgs. 25-40 and 65-81.
“If our Christian school is to continue in the future, it is absolutely essential that we be thoroughly Reformed in our attitude to that school. This means that we must have a firm grasp of the fundamental principles that are basic to our school system. It means that we must be positively convinced of the necessity of these schools for our children. It means that we must not be half-hearted in praying and giving and working for the maintenance and the improvement of those schools. It means, too, that we must convince the coming generation of the absolute necessity of our Christian schools, and must persuade them to sacrifice and to labor for their continued existence." (25-26).
"If we are truly Reformed, we shall say that the will of God should determine our attitude to the Christian school, and that this will is revealed to us in his general, but above all in his special revelation." (28).
“God has made known to us whom he regards as the responsible educators of the child. He has indicated this in his general revelation in nature in the orders which he has established...God’s special revelation teaches us the same truth with even greater clarity. Negatively, it may be said that the Bible in speaking of the duties of the state never mentions the work of educating the children of the nation...It is a striking fact that even the Old Testament, in which God deals with the nation of Israel more than with the individuals...always refers to or addresses the parents as the responsible educators of the children...In the New Testament...when it speaks of the education of the children, it turns to the parents.” (28-29).
“The Word of God also indicated very explicitly that the education which the parents are duty bound to provide for their children must be fundamentally religious...This finds its explanation in the fact that Scripture...would not consider any education as sound and satisfactory that was not permeated with the spirit of religion.” (29-30).
"The image of God is the most fundamental thing in humanity generally... And that which is most essential in the child cannot be ignored in its education without doing injustice to both the child and its Creator and without turning its education into perversion...The training of the head and of the heart go together, and in both the fundamental fact that the child is the image-bearer of God must be a determining factor. Again, in view of the fact that education is and should be a unitary process, we understand the absolute absurdity of saying that the school is concerned only with the head and should limit itself to secular education, while the home and the church make provision for the heart by adding religious education.” (31-32).
“The Reformed Christian, who believes that the child is the image-bearer of God, naturally proceeds on the assumption that that most fundamental truth may not be ignored in any part of his education, and especially not in his school education... And can Christian parents reasonably expect their children to be imbued with a spirit of true religion if they persist in sending them to a school where for twenty-four hours per week they are taught in a spirit that is fundamentally irreligious, if not positively anti-Christian? The answer can only be a decided negative.” (33).
A "person who is really Reformed, i.e., who makes the will of God the law of his life,.. cannot possibly assume an attitude of hostility to the Christian school without compromising his religious convictions." (33-34).
“If we allow ourselves to be controlled by the will of our God...[we] will consider it a sacred duty to educate our children in the spirit in which we solemnly promised to have them educated...If...we and our children continue to labor for the cause of Christian instruction, we shall have the satisfaction of an approving conscience; we shall confer an inestimable boon upon our children, keeping them from the curse of the divided life and instilling into their hearts and minds ideas and ideals that are truly Christian.” (39-40).
“Now, the children of the covenant are adopted...into the family of the covenant God himself...they are destined to live and move about eternally in the company of just men made perfect...Perfect life in the most intimate communion with all its glories is their eternal home. Can we at all doubt whether this calls for Christian education?” (77).
The “promises of the covenant necessitate Christian education, because they inevitably impose upon our children a heavy responsibility...for God has enriched them with spiritual treasures in order that they should administer this wealth for the honor of his name and for the extension of his kingdom. Are we warranted in assuming that they will naturally be faithful to their trust and will make the best possible use of their God-given possessions?... Surely, we cannot be too careful or too diligent in training our children for their responsible duties in life.” (79-80).
The “covenant of grace naturally calls for Christian education...Christian parents are in duty bound to give their covenant children a specifically Christian education…to train [their] children for their high dignity as members of the household of God, to teach them a due appreciation and the right use of the covenant blessings, and to qualify them for their covenantal responsibilities.” (81).
J. Gresham Machen (1881-1937)
Education, Christianity, and the State, edited by John Robbins, The Trinity Foundation, Jefferson, Maryland, 1987.
“A monopolistic system of education controlled by the State is far more efficient in crushing our liberty than the cruder weapons of fire and sword. Against this monopoly of education by the State the Christian school brings a salutary protest; it contends for the right of parents to bring up their children in accordance with the dictates of their consciences and not in the manner prescribed by the State.” (68).
“Another line of attack upon liberty has appeared in the advocacy of a Federal department of education. Repeatedly this vicious proposal has been introduced in Congress.” (71).
“Uniformity in education, it seems to me, is one of the worst calamities into which any people can fall...Uniformity of education under one central governmental department would be a very great calamity indeed.” (73-74).
As “a matter of fact the religion of the Christian man embraces the whole of his life...everything that he does he should now do as a child of God...[The] bearing of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life...I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.” (81-82).
A “very ancient principle in the field of education...has been one of the chief enemies of human liberty for several thousand years—the principle, namely, that education is an affair essentially of the State, that education must be standardized for the welfare of the whole people and put under the control of government, that personal idiosyncrasies should be avoided...It is a very ancient thing—this notion that the children belong to the State, that their education must be provided for by the State in a way that makes for the State’s welfare. But that principle, I think you will find if you examine human history, is inimical at every step to liberty.” (87-88).
“I hope therefore...that we may return to the principle of freedom for individual parents in the education of their children in accordance with their conscience...But let us be perfectly clear about one thing—if liberty is not maintained with regard to education, there is no use trying to maintain it in any other sphere. If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might just as well give them everything else…No, we do not want a Federal Department of Education and we do not want, in any form whatever, the slavery that a Federal Department of Education would bring.” (98).
“Uniformity in education under central control it seems to me is the worst fate into which any country can fall…parents have a right to educate children as they please...education is essentially not a matter of the State at all.” (100-102).
We “are dealing with the most important part of human life when we are dealing with education.” (114).
“In the political and social discussions of the day, God’s law has ceased to be regarded as a factor that deserves to be reckoned with at all...[But] of one thing we can be sure—a nation that tramples thus upon the law of God...is headed for destruction.” (140-141).
“What has Christianity to do with education: What is there about Christianity which makes it necessary that there should be Christian schools? Very little, some people say. Christianity, they say, is a life, a temper of soul, not a doctrine or a system of truth; it can provide its sweet aroma, therefore, for any system which secular education may provide; its function is merely to evaluate whatever may be presented to it by the school of thought dominant at any particular time. This view of the Christian religion...is radically false. Christianity is, indeed, a way of life; but it is a way of life founded upon a system of truth. That system of truth is of the most comprehensive kind; it clashes with opposing systems at a thousand points. The Christian life cannot be lived on the basis of anti-Christian thought. Hence the necessity of the Christian school.” (142-143).
“When we contemplate a type of Protestant orthodoxy that is content to take forlorn little shreds of Christian truth and tag them here and there upon a fundamentally anti-Christian or non-Christian education...[this is] humiliating to Protestantism.” (143).
“[R]eal Christianity should have an educational system of its own...Thus and thus only will the darkness of ignorance be dispelled and the light of Christian truth be spread abroad in the land.” (144).
Conclusion
All the above teachers are, in their own right, pillars of the Christian faith. All of them had a profound grasp of the whole system of Christian doctrine, understanding how all the parts related to the overall picture. They were also equally outspoken on the necessity of Christian education. Christian education for them was a fundamental part of the whole and was inseparable from the rest of their teaching. Many today claim to be following in the tradition of these men and yet are totally indifferent toward Christian education in thought, word, and deed—this, I hasten to add, is an impossibility! If you are not shaken from your simplistic understanding of this subject, and now realize the inescapable necessity for Christian education, you have notunderstood the implications of their theology.
The burden of proof, which is impossible to accomplish, rests upon those who continue to deny that Christian education is binding on all Christians. They must refute the above writers and many more, who based their arguments upon the clear testimony of the Bible. Moreover, they will have to write a systematic theology that can consistently exclude Christian education without destroying their projected systematic theology.
The hour is already very late, however, because of God's grace, it is not too late to repent and embrace God’s way. As Charles Hodge said, the Lord's command for Christian education is as binding as His command, “Thou shalt not steal.” If we deny the Christian's obligation to obey our Lord with respect to education, we also deny our obligations to believe the reality of any words from His mouth, including when He said He had been given all authority in heaven and on earth and that we are to disciple the nations, teaching them everything He has commanded (Matthew 28:18-20).