A Case for Christian Education in the 21st Century

In AD 782, the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne invited Alcuin of York to come to the Carolingian court at Aachen to teach him, his sons, and the clerics and scholars of the realm.

The still relatively young Alcuin, from the backwaters of Northern England but with a reputation as a brilliant scholar, taught the Emperor and his family a course of theology structured around what is now known as the classical liberal arts. Charlemagne’s goal was to shed learned light on what we now call the Dark Ages of Late Antiquity and the early medieval period.

He understood that education was crucial to preserving and growing a healthy society, central to human flourishing, and helpful to the development of virtue. Alcuin and Charlemagne also both knew that learning had always been held in high esteem in the Christian tradition. They knew the Latin infinitive verb educere carries the idea of being led out of yourself and your natural state of ignorance.

Certainly, Scripture warns that knowledge puffs up and that intellectual arrogance is among the worst human traits. At times, the apostles were mocked as ignorant and unlearned men — which they took as a compliment. At the same time, no one can deny the brilliance and wisdom of men like Paul, Apollos, Moses, Joseph, and Daniel, who demonstrate a deep understanding of their cultural context.

This was acquired knowledge. Moses was learned in “all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22), Daniel had mastered an aggressive foreign culture where he was essentially a hostage, and Paul could casually cite the pagan philosophers of his Mediterranean Graeco-Roman world (Acts 17:28), while Apollos was exceptional in his rhetorical power in handling Scripture — a kind of Christian Cicero.

God uses all kinds of people. The mind can be used wonderfully in the service of God and man, as well as for selfishness and evil. Stupid evil is awful; intelligent evil is terrifying. Mindless “crime of passion” murder is one thing; technologically advanced industrial death camps are another.

But learning never just “happens” — it takes hard work and time, and that is costly for humans. “Studying,” one of my colleagues likes to say, “is what we do to interrupt forgetting.” It is forgetting that is cheap and easy. Learning is hard and pricey. And exhausting!

Nonetheless, nearly everyone seems to value education, and we spend a lot of our hard-earned money on it, from kindergarten classes to Ph.D.s.

But in the 21st century, many thoughtful people who are otherwise pro-schooling have been turning against education as currently practiced, especially college. Contemporary education, in most contexts and at almost all levels, seems perversely to aim at creating confusion over clarity, to focus on subjectivity and feelings over reality, and to cultivate an uncharitable suspicion toward all truth claims — without recognizing that incredulity is itself a claim to a kind of technique of superior knowledge.

Many college graduates have been programmed to categorically deny truth as truth, or edge as close to that as they dare. They major in non-disciplines of dubious value. They often find themselves unemployable, in debt, and angry. Their professors are largely to blame.

It is therefore unsurprising that people with advanced degrees and high-level professional expertise — the “intelligentsia” — often make statements like “no one can know truth,” and “you have your truth, I have mine.” That these people are taken seriously at all as intellectuals shows the breadth of education’s effects on the American populace.

I believe this is deliberate, and it has resulted in the most utterly foolish generation we have seen in a very long time. It is not an exaggeration to say that we are watching Romans 1 unfurl in front of our eyes, as those who profess wisdom are shown to be foolish.

Perhaps we misunderstand the second half of Paul’s chapter when we see the extensive list of increasingly depraved activities only as what leads to punishment from God. It might be more accurate to say that those negatively cascading depravities are the punishment of those who have already suppressed the truth of God.

Education forms the soul. Mal-education forms souls badly. If you believe, as the Bible teaches, that humans are already malformed by their sinful nature, then education that deforms the soul further is like poisoning a sick person.

Education — good education, grounded in the realities of God’s world and the truths that He has taught us — is a part of the antidote under God’s common grace that can restrain sin and even help the soul regrow toward its proper form. It prunes and trims, and sometimes cuts and hacks, those aspects of our fallenness that are grounded in lies as opposed to truth. And when practiced well according to biblical principles about human fallenness, it fertilizes and irrigates and grows the soul toward Christ. But only if Christ is both the foundation and the goal. Jesus is wisdom personified and enfleshed (Prov. 8).

So when you have an educational system that is built on a faulty psychology and a faulty anthropology and a faulty view of truth, you are necessarily going to still be forming souls, but you will only be further malforming souls already born bent by sin. Students will actually increase their bent toward sin but with a fancier vocabulary, all the while thinking that they’re educated, intelligent, knowledgeable, and wise. The human capacity for self-deception appears infinite. Luther said we are incurvatus ad se — curved inward to ourselves.

On the other hand, most Christians have long held a very high view of study, learning, and education, and have from the beginning appreciated the complex relationship between wisdom and knowledge.

One of the first great thinkers on the subject is the brilliant North African Augustine, the most influential of the early theologians in the post-apostolic age. He understood that the goal of the teacher did not end with the teacher — it was to remake the soul of the student so they became learners on their own: “Teach that students may become their own teacher. Let us feed our pupils with the right food so that time will come when they will be able to provide their own food.”

Augustine also believed true learning is based on love and curiosity, not fear or force, and that learning is always a beginning, never an end: “Let our searching be such that we can be sure of finding, and let our finding be such that we may go on searching.”

The medieval theologian and University of Paris professor Thomas Aquinas also thought deeply about the nature and purpose of learning in the fallen state of man. He believed that curiosity is natural in mankind, but is now deformed by sin, and that true knowledge is always grounded in accurate belief. “To one who has faith,” Aquinas said, “no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible.”

Aquinas knew that real learning leads to clarity about reality, for “the study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.” And in his mind, study must be driven by the magic of wonder instead of the drive of compulsion or material gain: “Wonder is the desire of knowledge.” In other words, you should study medicine not to get rich, but to revel in the magnificent design of the human body as a compass which points to the Creator. Then you can heal them, filled with a deep kind of gratitude.

In the same era, Hugh of Saint Victor, one of our greatest Christian thinkers and the author of Didascalicon de studio legendi, “On the Study of Reading,” knew that all knowledge is interrelated and interdependent, that in God’s world nothing is unimportant, and that no discipline really stood alone: “Learn everything. Later you will see that nothing is superfluous.”

Even so, Hugh did see a need for understanding human finitude. Echoing Ecclesiastes 12:12, he said, “There are those who wish to read everything. Do not try to do this. Let it alone. The number of books is infinite, and you cannot follow infinity … For where there is no end, there can be no rest; where there is no rest, there can be no peace; and where there is no peace, God cannot dwell.”

The ideas of Augustine, Aquinas, and Hugh were guiding lights when the medieval (and explicitly Christian) invention of the university — universitas magistrorum et scholariuma, a guild of scholars and students — began, and has now grown into a powerful social force that is still with us today, albeit greatly changed.

During the 16th and 17th centuries, the organically related movements of the cultural Renaissance and the theological Reformation brought a renewed interest in education and learning. Both Luther and Calvin understood that the Reformation of the church depended upon individuals reading the Scriptures for themselves, and this in turn necessitated a generally educated and literate populace. The medieval church had developed great power over an ignorant populace. Luther thus made schools an absolute priority, and Calvin started the Genevan Academy, which has since grown into the University of Geneva.

One primary goal of the university was to train teachers for primary and secondary schools, which were classically oriented in the liberal arts — teaching grammar, logic, and rhetoric (the Trivium or language-based learning), then arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (the Quadrivium or quantitative learning), followed by philosophy and finally theology.

Near the end of the English Renaissance, the English Puritan poet and political polemicist John Milton wrote a little book titled “Of Education” (published 1644, and a book every Christian should read), where in just a few pages he outlines what he calls “a compleat and generous Education” as “that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices both private and publick of Peace and War.”

In other words, for a Christian, a great education trains you in everything, because the Christian life has no boundaries or borders. Being a Christian is a totalizing experience. Biblical Christianity decimates any kind of compartmentalization of thought and life. There is nothing that your faith does not touch, change, and eventually rule over absolutely, whether it be bricklaying or book writing.

Milton sees this totalizing vision of Christian education that is focused on the Scriptures as the ultimate interpretive guide for all knowing. He sees the building of virtues as the goal, and the specific areas of study as tools to that end, ultimately “infusing into their young brests such an ingenuous and noble ardor, as would not fail to make many of them renowned and matchless men.”

Now that is an endorsement for Christian education!

Alcuin and the court of Charlemagne attempted to reverse what is now called the Dark Ages, after the collapse of the once highly sophisticated Roman Empire and the Christian culture that followed it. In some ways they were successful, as there was deep learning during the Middle Ages to be sure, and many great achievements.

I would argue that the biblical truths about God, man, the Fall, and wisdom are the most effective, and more importantly the most Christian, foundation for education in the 21st century. And it is these very truths which guide every aspect of learning and teaching and doing intellectual work for both professors and students at The Master’s University.

That is beyond price.

Dr. Grant Horner is a senior professor in the Department of Arts and Letters at The Master’s University, and Senior Alcuin Fellow in the Society for Classical Learning.

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