What Is Christian Education?

The Medieval University

Is there such thing as "Christian education" and, if so, is it any different from education as such, i.e., is it a meaningful designation? That is the question at the heart of a controversy that has erupted in my beloved denomination, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In the current issue of Ordained Servant, the denominational publication for church officers, editor Greg Reynolds leads off an issue devoted to natural law with an article by Dr. David "Two Kingdoms" VanDrunen, "Natural Law in Reformed Theology: Historical Reflections and Biblical Suggestions," and follows up with Dr. David Noe's application of that position in "Is There Such a Thing as Christian Education?" His answer is no, not in any substantive way.

My pastor at Trinity Church in Huntington, Long Island, Benjamin Miller, responded on his blog, Relocating to Elfland, with "In Short, Yes." In addition to citing Machen and Van Til (always a good idea in an OPC internal debate), he writes:

What is completely absent from this analysis is a biblically holistic understanding of education. One could, I suppose, reduce “education” to mere data input. One could perhaps even call such data input “the acquisition of knowledge.” What one could not do is derive such an educational model from the anthropology presented in scripture. Man, in biblical terms, is never simply a receptacle for data; he is called to bear the image of God in understanding, discernment, and wisdom; and the formative processes of God’s covenant with His people, especially when they are still young, are all directed at the inculcation not simply of information but of everything meant by wisdom. (As an aside, it is remarkable that Dr. Noe, a classicist, fails even to mention Christian interaction with the classical trivium in terms of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.) Data neither exists in the raw, nor is it ever learned in the raw; it is always discovered and mastered within an interpretive framework (a “worldview,” to deploy the overused term). The same may be said of the development of various skills: all are learned within an interpretive and teleological context, within the context of a worldview.

Nelson Kloosterman most recently of Worldview Resources International responded on his blog, Cosmic Eye, with "But then is there such a thing as a Christian college?" He writes:

Here we have it: common grace used precisely to “neutralize” the antithesis! There is no such thing as Christian education because of . . . common grace. That whirring sound you’re hearing? It’s Abraham Kuyper spinning in his grave. The premier modern expositor of “common grace” and the heroic champion of distinctively Christian activities, organizations, and institutions.

Noe can deny that there is such thing as Christian education in any meaningful sense only because of his strikingly technical presentation of what education is. He considers what is involved in riding a bike, even to the point of winning the Tour de France. It looks the same for the Christian as for the non-Christian. Only the motivation is different.

But is all learning a matter of technique, like cycling? He turns to philosophy, which is reasonable given that he is an assistant professor of classics at Calvin College. Surely Christian philosophy, unlike the pagan search for wisdom, would have a distinctly Christian character. But again the substance disappears upon analysis. He finds that "Christian philosophy" is nothing but "philosophy done well (producing both sound and valid arguments that tell us something meaningful about the world)." (It is interesting that he considers philosophy to be a kind of production, a τέχνη.)

For Noe, philosophy is Christian only "when done by Christians with specific goals and dispositions motivating them." Thus, when we say "Christian education," we are speaking simply about who is delivering the education; we are "saying nothing distinguishable either about the process or the result of that process." As a consequence, when he is teaching Greek to his students, whether what he is doing is "Christian education" depends on the strength and purity of his motivations at the time. What we call Christian education is by this standard all about the psychology of the teacher. "[T]he fact that I am a Christian would make no observable difference in either process or result when it comes to educating students in Plato. If so, why give the adjective 'Christian' to education? Remember that discussing motivations is mostly saying something about persons, not about the task itself in either process or result."

But consider the medieval philosophers who thought and wrote in a distinctly Christian world but in the awareness of and in dialogue with the classical pagan and Islamic worlds. While they would not have referred to the universities of their day as "Christian" but simply as universities, they would surely have spoken of European education as specifically Christian in contradistinction to what one would receive in the Muslim world (where there was considerable wisdom to be found at the time) or in classical antiquity. Augustine and Aquinas didn't just serve up the Greeks straight from the freezer. They understood and profited, but also corrected and supplemented. In today's secular and at times pagan and hostile educational establishment, it is just as suitable to offer and name what biblically faithful and thus counter-cultural Christians call "Christian education."
 
Of course, what does it mean that Europe at the time was a "Christian world" but that the Scriptures were accepted as authoritative (though at times misunderstood and often disobeyed), and people viewed the world in broadly biblical terms. There was universal agreement regarding the Creator, the Redeemer, the Church, the chain of being, and the summum bonum. They thought and lived from within a biblically informed, i.e., "Christian," cosmology (a word I prefer over "worldview").
 
On that understanding, one does not even have to be a Christian to teach or develop Christian philosophy. I fully agree with Dr. Noe when he points out that, "Presumably a very bright non-Christian reasoning consistently, diligently and with complete access to the basic data of special revelation, can more often reach sound and valid conclusions than the most devout yet dim-witted believer on the topic of our Lord’s incarnation." But notice that the example requires the bright non-Christian to be thinking exclusively within a Christian theological framework.
 
The same is true of art, a subject that Noe also addresses. You cannot tell from looking at a painting whether the artist is spiritually regenerate or a professing Christian at all. But you can tell, to one degree or another, whether it is composed from within a Christian cosmology. And that does not have to involve explicitly biblical themes. By this standard, any work that testifies to the order of the universe, the holiness of God, and the hope of the gospel, for example, is "Christian," regardless of the spiritual status or church affiliation of the artist.

In the Christian understanding, education properly speaking--education as the Creator intended it for his image-bearers--is Christian education. That is, at the very least, it is instruction about the world that recognizes the full amplitude of God's created universe, its source, its sustainer and sovereign director, its physical and moral order, its redeemer, and its proper end. Wisdom, even Plato's, is necessarily partial when divorced from that understanding. There is much wisdom in Plato, and it is important to understand Plato as he understood himself. You don't need to be a Christian to do that. Indeed, non-Christians have been the most helpful to me in understanding his thought. But you cannot fully understand him without bringing in the larger truth-context of which he was, by virtue of his pagan darkness, necessarily unaware.

And is this not what people expect to get at a Christian school or college (such as Prof. Noe's Calvin College) when they shell out big bucks for a Christian education in preference to a publicly subsidized secular education? They want students to be trained in the habit of thinking in biblical categories with the ability to judge the thoughts and deeds of the world from within a biblical cosmology. That's considerably more than the technical mastery of Greek grammar and the logical analysis of Socratic arguments.