Developing a Course of Christian Education Adequate for Our Day – Part 1

Christians have struggled since the rise of Biblical criticism in the nineteenth century to have a course of Christian education which both conveys the Christian gospel to the young and adequately addresses the world in which people live today. If both the growth of knowledge and the speed of change are accelerating, the basic problem of teaching ancient faith and showing that it addresses the core of life and then how one engages world in a godly way has not changed over the course of the modern, and now hypermodern, world.

Vishal Mangalwadi, an author and social reformer long associated with the L’Abri Fellowship believes that the challenge of a distinctively Christian education has not been adequately addressed. After starting a ministry for the rural poor in India, he now is leading a global movement to make the church the center of education in today’s world and take education back from the state. Mangalwadi spoke at the recent L’Abri conference in Rochester, Minnesota in several presentations.

The integration of faith and learning has been a mantra for Christian education for some time. Simply adding Bible courses and chapel to an otherwise secular curriculum is understood to be not enough. Yet anti-intellectualism remains strong among American Evangelicals. In one presentation, Mangalwadi asked why.

The heart of gospel is God’s holiness, and human sin and redemption. This must be at the core of education. Mangalwadi noted that at Asbury University, people are “repenting of their sins, praying, worshipping, seeking cleansing.” He said it is an “Isaiah 6 experience, when Isaiah was confronted the holiness of God.” It convicted him of “sin and uncleanness in his life.” He cried out to God, and an angel touched his lips with a burning coal, cleansing him. Isaiah then responds to God’s call to be his ambassador to the world.

Repentance is not the natural human response to having committed sin, Mangalwadi said. It was not the response of the world before the great flood, nor was it the habit of the ancient Greeks, who, he said, in many respects had a quite violent culture. The rationalism of Plato and Aristotle was not what most deeply affected them. Renaissance humanism, while to some degree a challenge to Christianity, understood Greek rationalist philosophy through Christian eyes, and helped launch European civilization to global dominance.

He noted that the major Reformers were humanist scholars. An important “break” with Renaissance humanism, however, concerned the emphasis it put on “original sin and its consequences.” The Reformation sought a change of heart. It continued to use the trivium and quadrivium, but it took as its canon the books of the Bible, “not the great books of western literature.” This is because the “gospel is the power of God for salvation from our sin,” and therefore catechism became the basis of education. In Germany during the Reformation, children were educated by pastors. They learned the Bible in the morning, and for a fee learned the trivium and quadrivium in the afternoon at the pastor’s home. He noted that while homeschooling is illegal today in Germany, it “was the first school that made Germany an educated nation.”

Mangalwadi observed that in modern Holland, even until fifty years ago, children learned the Heidelberg Catechism in school. This “shaped the soul of the whole nation.” Worldview in the West, Mangalwadi claimed, “was not shaped by the classics … worldview was shaped by the Word of God, as summarized in catechism.” The Bible “is a canon, that teaches you the fear of God … that is the beginning of wisdom,” he said. It speaks, for instance, of God being “the fear of Isaac.” This fear is “the fountain of life,” Mangalwadi said. The objective of being a holy nation is to be a blessing to the whole world, by spreading the knowledge of God.

He then referred to Isaiah 11, which says that when the Righteous Branch is given the “spirit of wisdom, knowledge, understanding, the spirit of counsel and strength,” then under his reign, “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the God as the waters cover the sea.” Thus, “the purpose of revival is reformation.” It means accepting God’s knowledge of the sinfulness of oneself and the world.

He then asked why anti-intellectualism became dominant in American Evangelicalism – why the life of the mind became suspect. He cited the dominance of Scottish Common Sense philosophy introduced by Thomas Paine at the time of the American Revolution. Paine claimed that God speaks by reason alone, not by revelation. With rationalism such as this, Thomas Jefferson, on Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion, altered the original wording of the Declaration of Independence from appealing to “sacred and undeniable” truths to “self-evident” ones. But the claim of human equality in particular, Mangalwadi said, is not obvious – indeed evolutionary biology would deny it. The equality of souls before God is basic Christian doctrine, and Mangalwadi pointed out that the equality of persons was made popular in eighteenth century America by evangelist George Whitefield.

American Protestantism and its educational institutions easily adopted Common Sense philosophy, appealing to Romans chapter 1 (which speaks of God’s reality and power) and chapter 2 (which speaks of natural law). But human equality is not evident from general revelation, but from the Scriptural teaching of the unity of mankind in Adam and individual responsibility toward God. Nor does the doctrine of the Trinity appeal to human reason but is known by revelation. Unitarianism was thus an early, important consequence of rationalism in nineteenth century America.

Mangalwadi then referred to D.L. Moody, an important leader of the Third Great Awakening. Moody had no college degree. His simple exhortation to faith and repentance resulted in an Evangelicalism that eschewed the intellect. It accepted secular education through high school, but proposed Bible colleges as a proper course after that. This then resulted in a defeatist Evangelicalism, Mangalwadi believes, accepting common sense as self-evidently true, and restricting itself to personal faith and piety. It rejected the life of the mind as dangerous. Appealing to Sola Scriptura, it was thought that any truth outside the Bible as unnecessary or a threat. But at the Reformation, education was based on catechism, while incorporating classical learning. This “created the soul of Protestant nations,” he maintained. To this day, nations with a Protestant heritage remain the least corrupt nations, he said.

Anti-intellectualism was defended from the first epistle to the Corinthians, which says that the wisdom of the world is foolishness to God. But Mangalwadi noted that in the second chapter of that epistle Paul said that “we do spread wisdom.” (I Cor. 2:6) He observed that while a recent president of Harvard has declared that Harvard seeks excellence, it does not aspire to truth in any area. By contrast, Mangalwadi observed that Paul identified the church as “the pillar and foundation of truth.” (I Tim. 3:15) It is the church’s responsibility to bear witness to the truth it has received from Christ.

Today, Mangalwadi said, the challenge to American Christians is not the philosophy of common sense, but the postmodern philosophy of narrative. The gospel is presented as a story for people to consider. He observed that there are only two uses of “story” in the Bible. One is Potiphar’s wife’s false accusation of Joseph to her husband. The other occurs when the authorities gave money to the guards of Jesus’ tomb and told them to say that Jesus’ disciples stole his body. If the gospel is only a story, it is not “truth to which everyone must conform.” The church is concerned with “filling the earth with wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel” of God.

As noted above, to do this, Mangalwadi believes that the church must be the center of education. That will be the topic of a subsequent article.

It can be viewed here.