There was a time in the history of the parent-controlled Christian School movement (which was seen as a Christian cause meriting sacrificial support!) when ministers annually preached, usually in August, a “Christian School sermon.” This was in congregations which took seriously the Church Order of Dordt (the law in such denominations as the Christian Reformed Church, the Protestant Reformed Churches, the Netherlands Reformed Congregations, etc.).

In the Christian Reformed Church this rule now reads:

The consistory shall diligently encourage the members of the congregation to establish and maintain good Christian schools and shall urge parents to have their children instructed in these schools according to the demands of the covenant (Art. 71, Church Order of the Christian Reformed Church).

The Christian School sermon was an awesome thing in some churches. In the church of my youth this sermon was never identified as a “school sermon” by even so much as a suggestion in the announced “theme” (sermons were not on topics but on “themes” because they were not expositions of an idea chosen by the preacher but “sermons” on biblical texts). The reference to school came as an application, a hortatory deduction from the text in question.

But it carne with power. It lined up the faithful against the faint-hearted and disobedient. It compelled decision, and that in a day when unemployment was high and money was scarce. That was a day when the word sacrifice was not reserved for special kinds of people under very special circumstances. To lay on the people added costs for Christian education was serious business.

Apparently our spiritual fathers thought Christian day school education was not a luxury but a necessity. Why?

The seventy-first article of the Christian Reformed Church Order says that it is one of “the demands of the covenant. ”

Covenant is a precious term for our people of Reformed persuasion, and its value is not diminished by the lack of attention it suffers in our anti–doctrinal age. When the chips are down, when the crisis is sharpest and the pain almost unbearable, many of us still find in the biblical teaching of covenant mercy their greatest comfort.

As we enter a new school year we might well reconsider what this means for all who feel that Christian education is a divine calling and therefore a solemn obligation .

The best way to do that might be to recall the time-honored Form for the Baptism of Infants found in the Christian Reformed Psalter Hymnal (pp. 123-125) . We will appeal to just two things in that formulary to indicate the high character of Christ-centered, covenantal Christian education.

     

The first is found in this sentence:

For when we are baptized into the Name o f the Father,  God the Father witnesses and seals unto us that He makes an eternal covenant of grace with us and adopts us for His children and heirs, and therefore will provide us with every good thing and avert all evil or tum it to our profit. This both distinguishes us and encourages us!

It distinguishes us from all who are not in vital relationship with God. It distinguishes us from all who do not recognize Him as the One from Whom, through Whom and to Whom are all things. It sets us free from all man-centered understanding or interpretation of history, science, the arts, culture. We see and teach these things Christianly, in the light of the sacred Scriptures, from a different perspective, with a different sense of calling and responsibility, because we believe that we are the beneficiaries of that incredibly wonderful sovereign grace which binds us to God in everlasting covenant.

This also encourages us because God’s covenant with us is eternal. Calling it “eternal” refers not so much to the fact that it was decided or arranged in eternity (it was established with Abraham) but to the truth of God’s absolutely reliable integrity. God breaks no covenants! And if it costs Him the suffering and death of His Son by way of Jesus’ birth into our world, He pays the price so that we may be adopted legally as His own children and heirs. And if this requires divine governance over all things (Fit that idea on for size!), He is willing to take the trouble to do it, providing us with every good thing, averting all evil or turning it to our profit.

Consistently with this kind of faith, consistories may indeed “diligently encourage the members of the congregation to establish and maintain good Christian schools.”

The second excerpt from the Form for the Baptism of Infants reads as follows:

Whereas in all covenants there are contained two parts, therefore are we by God, through baptism, admonished of and obliged unto new obedience, namely, that we cleave to this one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; that we trust in Him, and love Him with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength; that we forsake the world, crucify our old nature, and walk in a godly life.

This is a magnificent statement of covenantal evangelicalism!

Let it be said no more that covenantal religion and education ignore the necessity of conversion. Every Christian parent and every Christian school teacher among us ought to print this sentence in large letters and stick it on a most conspicuous place so that its message is unavoidable and unforgettable!

Covenant does not mean easy-going religion, non-experiential religion, uncommitted religion, undedicated, unconsecrated religion.

In the home, in the church and in the school, consistently and urgently, this demand of the “second part” of the Covenant of Grace must be sounded!

Since God’s covenant is at once promise and demand , endowment and obligation, Christian education is blessedly serious.

I say blessedly serious because anything less would make this task either impossible or uninteresting. If we must do what covenant with Jehovah God demands on our own we might as well give up. And if all we are doing in education is to instruct and train children and young people, for whatever good reason, for its own sake, one can hardly assume this vocation with much hope for personal gratification and joy.

People are desperately worried about the state of education in our nation in our time. Especially our larger cities are finding it next to impossible to educate even in the narrower sense of the word in conditions of parental unconcern, and financial, cultural and moral deprivation. Horror stories appear in many local newspapers regularly describing dropout rates, inability of high school graduates (!) to read or write or calculate with anything like a satisfactory degree of competence.

What is the solution? More money for teachers, better facilities, especially in computer science, more “enrichment projects” (after all, the children of the poor should have almost every benefit enjoyed by the children of the rich)?

There is a better answer.

It is the answer of the Reformed Christian school. That answer sees the value of education not first of all as a matter of advantage for the individual as he/she makes way through this life. It sees education as a covenantal response to God, Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier (the One who made us, saved us from our sins, and blesses us with every good thing through His Spirit).

This is a response worthy of every effort for our parents, our teachers, our students. It gives our young people the highest, most stimulating, most demanding and most satisfying motivation.

If the question in education for God’s people is a matter of covenantal fidelity, responsibility, obedience, then the struggle is worthwhile. If we are training recruits for service in God’s Kingdom, now and forever, then the weariness, the frustrations and the disappointments (real education is almost unbearably hard work, especially for the teacher!) are not useless. If the issue for all believers is always “covenant keeping vs. covenant breaking,” then we had better keep remind ing ourselves of the eternal consequences involved.

This is old stuff, to be sure. It isn’t hard to find people of whom one might expect better things who have long rejected such talk as old-fashioned, outmoded, obsolete. Who needs to talk about covenant when he could be absorbed in such problems as world poverty, war, social justice, pornography, divorce, and so on.

Let me remind you of something. I re–read Sietze Buning’s Style and Class (Middleburg Press, Orange City, Iowa) just this morning. In the Glossary the author says the following under the heading Kuyper, Abraham:

Founder of the Free University of Amsterdam in 1880. Prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 until 1905 . Queen Wilhelmina’s first Prime Minister. Developed the theory of “sphere sovereignty,” that God is to be acknowledged as sovereign not only in the Church but in every sphere of human activity. Implicit in this theory is the distinction between Christ’s Church and Christ’s Kingdom: the Church preaches the Gospel and administers the sacraments, but the Kingdom brings society progressively under the sovereignty of God. Preoccupied with the need for social change, Kuyper stressed the parent-controlled Christian school as the best instrument for effecting such change . .. (p. 125). 

“Covenant children” in Reformed , covenantal Christian schools—on every level—need to hear that!