Culture at the Crossroads

 

There is one view "that a society has ceased to be Christian when religious practices have been abandoned, when behavior ceases to be regulated by reference to Christian principle.... The other view, which is less readily apprehended, is that a society has not ceased to be Christian until it has become positively something else. It is my contention that we have today a culture which is mainly negative, but which, so far as it is positive, it is still Christian. I do not think it can remain negative ... and I believe that the choice before us is between the formation of a new Christian culture, and the acceptance of a pagan one."

T.S. Eliot, "The Idea of a Christian Society"

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The Foundation of Knowledge

 

I will get my knowledge from afar and ascribe righteousness to my Maker.

 Job 36:3

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.

Proverbs 1:7

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"...The doctrine of God is of fundamental importance. We must first ask what kind of God Christianity believes in.... God is absolute. He is sufficient unto himself ... God does not and cannot change.... We speak of the infinity of God.... We speak of the unity of God....

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"God's knowledge of himself is self contained. It is not dependent upon eternal ideas of truth above him. There are no hidden depths in God's being unknown to him. God's knowledge of himself may therefore be called absolute or self referential.

 

"God's knowledge of the world is, in the nature of the case, not obtained as the result of an investigation of the facts and laws of the world. The facts and laws of the world are what they are because of God's plan with respect to them. Therefore his knowledge of the facts and the laws of the world precede the existence of the world....

 

"God's holy character is back of his expressed requirement of man that he must be perfect as a creature. What God says is right is right because he says it and he says it because it rests on his holy nature....

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"God's sovereignty refers to the fact that there is no other ultimate power besides himself and that his holy plan for the world will prevail over all opposition against it."

 

Cornelius Van Til, "The Defense of the Faith"

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The Purpose of Knowledge

 

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him;  male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:26-27

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"...The orthodox Christian doctrine asserts that man was created in the image of God, which means not only that he was created in knowledge, righteousness, holiness, and dominion, but more broadly, that no aspect of man's life and experience exists apart from the mediation of that image. Man, though fallen, is still inescapably tied, in all his experience, to the reality and the knowledge of his origin. Man was called to exercise his knowledge and dominion over the created universe as vicegerent under God and to His glory."

Rousas John Rushdoony, "Intellectual Schizophrenia"

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Education and the Nature of Man

 

The words of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings; they are given by one Shepherd. My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil.

Ecclesiastes 12:11-14

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"Before we can discuss the nature of education intellectually, we must have come to some understanding of the nature of man ... a creature created by God for fellowship with Himself. [Training, as opposed to education, is in the] realm of means, and the crucial question concerns the ends to be served by these means.... It would further the interests of clarity if we could use the word training to describe the instruction that has to do with means, or instrumental knowledge; reserving the word education for that which has to do with ends, or formative knowledge.

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"Instruction in instrumental knowledge is not education, although it is part of education and useful in its own right. It is needful that men possess such skills as the ability to lay bricks, cut hair, add figures, perform experiments in physics and chemistry, write books and preach sermons. But while the possession of such skills is desirable and important, their exercise is not the distinctive mark of an educated man....

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"There is something wrong with our system of education because there is something wrong with our theory of education, and we won't correct our system until we straighten out our theory. But, this we cannot even begin to do unless we know what is normative. We really do know, as a matter of fact, but we need to be reminded that the norms are Christian imperatives."

Edmund A. Opitz

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The Scope of Education

 

"It is properly the whole man or person that is educated; but the main subject of the work is the spirit. 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. Even man's earthly end is predominantly moral. Now, if dexterity in any art, as in the handling of printer's type, a musket, a burin, a power-loom, were education, its secularization might be both possible and proper. Is not a confusion here the source of most of the argument in defense of that theory?... Dexterity in an art is not education. The latter nurtures a soul, the other only drills a sense-organ or muscle; the one has a mechanical end, the other a moral." 

Robert L. Dabney, "Discussions, Vol. IV, Secular"

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I call therefore a complete and generous education that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously, all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war.

John Milton