The Lost Purpose of Learning

THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING

David Vanderpoel, Ph.D.

THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING

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 permis- sion. All rights reserved.

Frontispiece: Hand Study with Bible by Albrecht Dürer

Trinity Christian School 11204 Braddock Road Fairfax, VA 22030

For additional information, please visit our website: www.tcsfairfax.org 1

THE LOST PURPOSE OF LEARNING

WHY was I born?

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

hy do we teach our children? For what reason and to what end do we seek their instruction? What are we Wpreparing them to accomplish? For what high purpose did God create them? These questions are endowed with com- pelling 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

1 Heschel, “Questions Man Asks,” Wisdom of Heschel, 4. 2 Schaeffer, He Is There and He Is Not Silent, 279-280. 3 Chesterton, Heretics, 5. 2 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 “ines- capable 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

4 Duin, “Interview with Ravi Zacharias.” 5 Baer, “They Are Teaching Religion in Public Schools,” 12. 6 Wilson, Case for Classical Christian Education, 26. 7 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 3. 3 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 capitu- late 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?

8 Naugle, Philosophy, 61. 9 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. 4

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 selec- tors 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

15 Chesterton, Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton, vol. 1, 324. 16 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.” 5 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?

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 Esource 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

21 Revelation 5:11-13 22 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. 6 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 redeem- ing 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 comprehen- sive 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

26 Deuteronomy 6:5-9 27 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. 7

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 predi- cated 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

30 MacDonald, Creation in Christ, 145. 31 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 8 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 self- revelation? 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 cultiva- tion. 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

39 Hebrews 1:3 40 Fant, The Liberal Arts, 70. 41 Psalm 119:37 42 Matthew 22:37 9 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 ver- sions 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 disobedi- ence 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 intelli- gible 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

43 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. 10

WHO is Jesus?

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

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 T 48 determines what he ultimately thinks about everything else.” 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 purpose- ful cosmos “created through him and for him.” 50 The Father has placed Jesus at the center of everything because God’s unshake- able 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

48 Karl Barth, paraphrased by Duncan, “The Divinity of Christ.” 49 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 11 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

57 Philippians 2:9, 10 58 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 12 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 counter- claimed 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

66 Wolters, “No Longer Queen,” 72. 67 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 13

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

hat words best describe our moment in the flow of history? In the present, wedged between the all-too- Wquickly 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 ever- present 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

72 Ecclesiastes 1:9, 10 73 Ephesians 6:12 14 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 explana- tions 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 encap- sulates a tale of thanklessness, swollen pride, and willful blindness. It is the story, repeated in every generation, of people turning

74 Philip Ryken, Christian Worldview, 66. 75 Ibid. 76 1 Corinthians 2:14 77 Jeremiah 2:12, 13 15 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 chap- ter 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- twenti eth 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 elemen- tal 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

78 Romans 1:21 79 Van Til, “The Dilemma of Education,” 34. 80 Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God,” 145. 81 Colossians 2:8 16 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 acknowl- edging 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 par- adoxically 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

82 2 Corinthians 10:5 83 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. 17

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

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, every- O 87 thing is allowed.” 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 func- tion. 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

87 Steinman, “Everything Is Permitted.” 88 Genesis 3:1 89 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise, quoted in Hampson, The Enlightenment , 195. 90 Henley, “Invictus,” 33. 18 want to act as God. And so does everyone else. Thus, the prob- lem: 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 play- wright 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 disor- dered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”97 We live in an unceasing maelstrom of swir