In order to appreciate the necessity for Christian education we must be aware of two things. First and foremost what God has to say upon this important matter, and secondly what constitutes the nature of the modern State and its concept of education. Then we must enquire briefly into some of the reasons why there are so few Christian Schools in this country and conclude with an exhortation to do our duty before God in the light of His revealed will in the Scriptures.
Firstly, the question we must answer and decide upon is whether or not education is to be viewed as a take it or leave it option to be decided by us as we see fit. Are we to look upon Christian education merely as a nice cozy alternative, but as not absolutely essential? Most Christians behave as if it were a matter of indifference, interesting, yes, but not necessarily binding upon them.
Well, what does our Lord and King have to say upon this crucial issue? Far from being a take it or leave it option, it is presented to us as a command as declared in Psalm 78: “For He established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed a law in Israel, which He commanded our fathers, that they should make them known to their children.” This commandment to teach our children has both a positive and a negative aspect. We are positively instructed by the Apostle Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians, that the “Nurture and admonition” we give our children must be “In the Lord.” In other words, the education we provide for our children should be thoroughly God-centered. Conversely, it is thus forbidden us to educate our children outside of a Biblical frameworK of thought.
Moreover, not only are we commanded to provide a God-centered education, but it must be carried out with diligence. Our children must be taught to see that the Word of God is relevant to every aspect of their lives; that it should be, and indeed must be, the regulating and governing principle in and over man both individually and socially. Furthermore, not only are our children to receive a diligent instruction in all the ramifications of Biblical Faith, but it must be carried out with a frequency that admits of no interruption. For thus saith the Lord: “And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thine heart. And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and thou shalt write them upon the posts of thine house, and on thy gates” (Deut. 6:6–9).
Then we are presented with the negative side of this commandment through the prophet Jeremiah: “Thus saith the Lord, learn not the ‘way of the heathen” (10:2). Well, what is the way of the heathen? The way of the heathen begins by accepting Satan’s lie in Genesis 3:5: “Hath God said?” Does God really mean what He said—if He said it at all? Instead of listening to God, why not be your own God [sic) determining for yourself what makes for good and evil, right and wrong, truth and error? Therefore do your own thing, make your own law and be your own god. Thus the way of the heathen is the way of original sin. It is the way that ignores the person of God and the way that considers God’s Word as being irrelevant to life.
The way of the heathen in the context of education comes across as passive and active anti-Christianity. State schools today are by their very nature passively hostile to God, insofar as they ignore His person and the claims of His Word. From the moment a child enters the Infants right through to University, the Word of God has no place or relevance, in real terms, in the learning process of the student. This is immensely damaging in the child’s formative years as it becomes apparent in the child’s mind, unconsciously at least, that there are major areas of life to which the Word of God is of little or no relevance, which is the subliminal message of statist education. Thus the Bible comes to be looked upon as being no more than a devotional manual for church use. Consequently the child’s world and life view instead of being a unified whole becomes schizophrenic. The institutional church alone is looked upon as being the world of Christianity, and the home too, perhaps, if the television breaks down, and out of that is the secular world where God’s Word has little relevance.
Not only is the child’s view of life corrupted in this way, but the family suffers too by having its God-given authority over the child and the child}s education seriously undermined. For the child soon learns that his or her parents have little or no control over their education as displayed by their parents’ genuine and well founded concern over what their children are taught in school, and their apparent impotence to do anything to alter what is taught them or not taught them, for six hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks of the year and for fourteen or more years of their lives.
Of course , humanistic education is not content only to be passively hostile, it is also actively so in ways that we are only too familiar with. It is incumbent upon us therefore, to diligently test the fountain-heads of knowledge from which our children are obliged to drink so deeply for so long—to establish if they are either poisoned wells of passive and active antiChristianity or founts of knowledge that passively and actively promote a Christian world and life view. In short, as the Israelites of the New Covenant we are to see to it that we do not pass over our children’s education into the hands of the Philistines.
The way of the heathen is further imposed through peer group pressure—through the example of ungodly children. The child from the Christian home is usually the loner and therefore subject to tremendous pressure to conform to the group. The child soon realizes that most other children live as if God was non-existent and His Word a complete irrelevance. It was the downfall of the Israelites against the direct command of God that they mingled with the heathen and learned their ways, as declared in Ps. 106:34. So much so that during their Babylonian captivity the influence of religious and cultural syncretism caused the ten tribes of Israel to blend with their pagan neighbors to such an extent that they have just vanished as a distinct people and have never been heard of since.
As we hope and pray not to be led into temptation, so in like manner we are not to lead our children into places and positions of temptation to doubt the veracity and relevancy of the Word of God. Indeed, “Blessed are those children whose parents cause them not to walk in the counsel of the ungodly, nor to stand in the way of sinners, nor to sit in the seat of the scornful. But are taught to delight in the law of the Lord and to meditate upon it day and night. And they shall be like trees planted by the rivers of water, that bring forth their fruit in their season, their leaf shall not wither, and whatsoever they do shall prosper” (Psalm 1, paraphrase). Surely, it should be every Christian parent’s desire to be commended by God with that commendation that God commended Abraham in Genesis 18:19: “For I know him, that he will command his children and his household after him and they will keep the way of the Lord.”
Secondly. In order for us to appreciate the necessity for Christian education, we must understand the nature of the modern humanistic State. It is a mistake to look upon the modern State as being secular as opposed to religious, for nothing could be further from the truth. The state is intensely religious, being devoted to the worship of the democratic will of autonomous man. We can easily identify the God of this nation by establishing the source of law that governs us. For in whatsoever men place absolute authority—the source of their law, that is their god. Therefore, in our society today law is the product of the will of man as revealed through the State.
The philosophy which has given rise to Marxism, Fascism and Nazism is the same philosophy that motivates all the political parties of any consequence in this country today. It was the German philosopher Hegel who has greatly influenced modern politics this century. His thesis taught that the State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth and that the individual can only realize himself through the State. This pernicious doctrine collides head-on with the first commandment of our God which declares that “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” Nevertheless, the State today is the absolute authority in the land beyond which there is no redress or appeal; an authority that does not recognize any higher law than its own law, and to whom the Holy Law of God is an irrelevance to be passively ignored on the one hand and actively attacked on the other.
It is important to recall that up until 1917 British Lord Chancellors had expressly stated that Christianity was part and parcel of English Common Law. But in 1917 a British House of Lords declared that Christianity was no longer part of the law of England. Commenting on this break with our Christian heritage by the House of Lords, but certainly not commending it, Sir William Holdsworthy, professor of law at the University of Oxford said: “The judges are obliged to admit that government statutes however morally unjust must be obeyed . . . One might have thought the excesses of the Nazi regime would have made our jurists realize the iniquity of such a theory of law.” England’s Attorney General at Nuremberg demanded the death sentence for Germans who obeyed the Nazis, but back in England the same Attorney General (as reported in The Times May 13th 1946) said “Parliament is sovereign, it can make any laws. It could ordain that all blue eyed babies be destroyed at birth.” Professor Holdsworthy goes on to say: “Herod could not teach our modern jurists anything.”
They have since been fanatically true to their word, have they not? For they have now made it a capital offense to be an unwanted baby regardless of the color of the eyes, and we have the tiny corpses of the three million victims of the horrifying holocaust of abortion to prove it. “If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote some thirty years ago as he viewed a Socialist future, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever” (1984).
Every aspect of the permissive Society, a society which the State has engineered, legalized and encouraged, is a declaration of war against our sovereign God and the rule of His Absolute Law. Even at this very moment they are conspiring to repeal what laws are left restricting trade on the Lord’s Day. Also there has just been published a Law Commission Report recommending the repeal of the blasphemy laws. And not forgetting their incessant attack upon the sanctity of marriage by the enactment of legislation making divorce evermore easier and readily available for any reason or no reason.
“Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Christ, saying, Let us break their bands asunder and cast away their cords from us . He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh, the LORD shall have them in derision” Psalm 2.
Professor R. W. Chambers has succinctly stated the issue: “Upon that difference –whether or not we place Divine Law in the last resort above the law of the State—depends the whole future of the world.”
This passive and active hatred of God displayed by the State will inevitably be reflected in the State’s schools. It is simply ridiculous to imagine that the humanistic State will do anything to tolerate or promote Biblical Christianity in its educational establishments, or that the State is somehow neutral on this matter. Education is a preparation for life and in no way will the Hegelian State prepare children to own allegiance to another law and authority higher than its own. Quite the reverse. As the State becomes even more self-consciously anti-Christian this hostility will permeate its educational system. For the State will always educate its children from its own perspective and to its own ends.
Therefore, as the passive denial of God is the fundamental axiom of state education, it will produce the conditioning necessary for slavery; because without God, truth is now what Man says it is! Children are then taught to look to no higher authority, lawgiver, provider or savior than the State. Thus the way of State education is the way of the heathen, which is the way of original sin, and the broad way that leads to hell and destruction and many there be who travel thereon.
But there is another aspect of the deification of the State that makes Christian education a pressing necessity. That is the State’s incessant attack upon the Institution of the Family, undermining the family’s responsibility in the education of children. We could well ask the question, and indeed we must ask the question, what business has the Civil Government in Education in the first place, because the Bible emphatically puts the responsibility for the child’s education squarely with the family?
The answer to this question is to be found in the humanistic State’s Hegelian philosophy which dictates that there must be a Minister of State for Education as well as is being suggested now, a Minister of State for the Family. Indeed every aspect of our lives has become, or is in the process of becoming, the responsibility of some department of State. Since the State sees itself as the Divine Idea as it exists on earth, so the Divine State must realize its own divinity by becoming all powerful in and over society. It does this by usurping the responsibilities belonging to the various Institutions of society. For responsibility is, and means, POWER—Power is responsibility. To possess God-given responsibility means that we are invested with authority and possessed of the inherent freedom to exercise authority. It is of crucial importance to clearly understand the meaning of power and the reason for the State’s insatiable lust for it; because if we do not we shall never be able to truly perceive the web of totalitarian tyranny being rightly spun around us today.
The first step in the State’s take-over of our responsibilities is to degrade the concept of responsibility itself. This is done through the tool of the Permissive Society, which not only serves to assert the sovereignty of State law over God’s Law, but it also serves to engender moral irresponsibility in the people by enslaving them to sin and guilt. Morally rotten people are guilty people and the guilt-ridden are easily led and manipulated. Permission to break the Law of God is a false, delusive and destructive freedom given by the State in exchange for that precious God-given liberty, the liberty that distinguishes freemen from slaves. Like unto all false gods the Divine State requires a sacrifice to be made unto it. Upon the altar of the “Public Good” you must offer up your liberty, not all at once, but gradually until all power resides with the State.
When a people abandon faith in God and despise the authority of His Word they inevitably show a marked dislike towards Christian responsibility and freedom, slavishly yearning only for the cradle to grave security of the Welfare State. Instead of viewing all the varied aspects of life as diverse and independent forms of government under the unifying authority and government of the sovereign Word of God, they fall an easy prey to the Divine Idea of the State and the Godless vacuum left in their live~ is soon filled by this new Deity regulating and controlling their lives with a vengeance. Thus when such degraded people hear those oft repeated media words: “The Government” their first thought is the State. For them “The Government” has become the only lawgiver, provider and savior in their lives, and freedom is no longer considered that important. This is the slave mentality A slavery that does not need a ball and chain as Aldous Huxley points out in his book The Brave New World: “A really efficient totalitarian State would be one in which the all powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced because they love their servitude.”
Close upon the heels of this corruption and enslavement of the human mind follows the bribery of State grants, handouts and subsidies. It is through this means that the State buys its way into the responsibilities belonging to the other Institutions of society. Agriculture is a classic example of this policy in action. Farmers, Like others, have been only too eager for grants and subsidies—something for nothing, so it is foolishly thought. But the lack of true faith and the love of money blind people to the real price that they have to pay in return, namely, their true God-given freedom. For along with State money come the consequent regulations and controls to the point that farmers cannot plant a potato or milk a cow without the State’s permission or license. Thus the ownership and responsibility for running a farm is increasingly moving from the individual farmer to the relevant State bureaucracy. The power of responsibility which is the freedom to make authoritative decisions is being taken from the farmer and his liberty drastically curtailed to the point of serfdom. Power is in this way transferred from the people to the State.
Exactly the same method is applied in the take-over of the family’s responsibilities. Take family allowance. Family allowance is a State grant designed to help pay for the upbringing and care of children. The very acceptance of this money is an acknowledgement that the State has a legitimate moral responsibility in this area—whether we want to realize it or not. Can we have any grounds to complain, therefore , when the State thinks it fit that girls be allowed to take deadly contraceptive pills without their parents’ knowledge or consent? Can we really complain when the State wants a commanding say in what our children are taught in school? After all, it has bought its way into the responsibilities of the family and is helping to pay for the children’s upbringing, is it not? This alone is sufficient grounds to justify its interference –it is an interference by right of purchase, in accordance with that proverb which says that “he who pays the money calls the tune” (Prov. 22:7). It is interesting to note that only the mother can draw this welfare money, thus short-circuiting the natural father’s responsibility and authority in the home; which is a pointed way of saying that the State now considers itself as the true father and provider.
How can we claim to be free men and women in Jesus Christ and yet slavishly dependent upon State money, especially when we still have the freedom to refuse it? Such double standards will cause the speedy demise of the family as a separate institution under God by paving the way for its absorption into the State. Therefore it is of immense importance that we as Christian parents start free Christian schools free from State bribes and the inevitable controls. By so doing we claim back from the State our God-given responsibility, authority and freedom to educate our children in a Biblical framework of thought and to an uncompromising Christian world and life view. In this way we can make an important start in providing the alternative Christian society to the ugly and vicious statist one being forced upon us today. Surely, we can only take seriously Christ’s Great Commission: “Go ye therefore and teach all nations . . . teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you.” ONLY when we first start at home and with our own children?!
Finally, in the light of what has been said why are there so few free Christian schools in our country today? Why is it that so many professed Christians are apathetic, indifferent and even hostile to the concept of a distinctive Christian education? Well, the parents of today were the pupils of yesterday who have themselves been submitted to the State’s educational process and have unconsciously imbibed passive anti-Christianity; who have come to believe that somehow the Word of God is irrelevant except within the confines of the church.
Once educated in this humanistic framework of thought it naturally becomes very difficult to recognize the implicit anti-Christianity in our cultural conditioning. After all, it appears to be normal since everyone is conditioned to think and behave in the same way; a way which is appealing to our fallen human nature. As a society’s culture is the outworking of its basic religious faith, and ifthe faith is placed in the absolute authority of man (humanism) and in the Divine Idea of the State (socialism), then we too as the educational products of that culture will automatically manifest its basic faith in our lives. Therefore we have Christians, as a matter of course, challenging the absolute authority of the Word of God with a “Hath God said” attitude; whether it be on such issues as corporal punishment in school (Prov. 29:15), God’s requirement for dress (Deut. 22:5) or any other commandment of God that does not happen to suit them or that runs counter to the prevailing humanistic culture is dismissed as being “legalistic” or the “cultural” product of its age and not really relevant to our time. This attitude is much like that described by Piers Compton in his book The Broken Cross, in which he says “Those who were familiar with the writings of Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre could detect, in the statements and even casual remarks made by all too many prelates, the equivocations and lack of authority habitual to men who are the products of modern thought.” Never was a truer word spoken by a certain American communist who said that “Revolutions with machine guns are the least important. The revolutions that are really important go on in people’s minds and in the way they think and feel.”
This insiduous and prevailing spirit of humanism has contributed in no small way to the radical yet subtle departure from the Biblical Faith of the Reformers and Puritans by the Evangelical Church of today. We have, as it were, pulled the Faith inside out. Where once what you believed, the doctrines of the Faith, was of paramount importance, today, however, what is central is a person’s religious experience. Thus doctrine has become vague and peripheral and is looked upon as being divisive, cold and hard. This is why so many evangelical churches no longer demand adherence to a Creed or Confession of Faith as the condition of Church membership. These have now become interesting but not quite relevant historical documents.
With the pulpit reduced to being largely non-propositional (i.e. weak and watery on doctrine), it has in proportion become non-confrontational insofar as the duties and sins of the nation and the individual are no longer approached with an authoritative and absolute “Thus saith the LORD!” Such a black and white confrontational approach is considered too “unloving” and through years of studied irrelevance by pulpit and pew alike, has finally given way to a bland greyness, compromise and cowardice in the face of implacable foes and to the vital issues and titanic struggles that confront us today.
This has given rise to what I call the two unwritten laws of evangelicalism. Which are, firstly, Thou shalt not make waves to rock the boat. If the truth is controversial, shut up about it! And secondly, Thou shalt not criticize or offend anyone for anything. Be nice and smarmy at all times with sugared words and sweet smiles. The net result of which is an emasculated, spineless and withered church; a sort of Protestant convent detached from reality in true platonic fashion A church that is more interested in mystic spiritual experiences and dreams of revival than in being the salt and light of the world, and that by its shameful silence has given its tacit approval to the Divine Idea of the State and the appalling implications thereof.
Wisdom instructs us to “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it” (Prov. 22:6). Then why is there so little wisdom manifest amongst Christians today? Surely it is because there is so little of the fear of God in their hearts (Prov. 1:7)? If Christians really feared and loved God they would train their children to go in the way of the Lord, instead of training them to go in the way of the heathen through years of pagan schooling, endless hours watching television, listening to the radio and reading unwholesome literature. I put it to you my reader, which way are your children going? In all-seriousness it is better to arrive at the right answer to this question now than to have the wrong one at the Day of Judgement. “Not everyone that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven” (Mat. 7:21).
It is truly marvelous how Christians can divorce the will of God for them from His revealed will in the Bible. We have Christian parents saying that the Christian education of their children is perhaps not the will of God for them, though it may be for you. In so saying they have personalized and mystified the will of God by removing it from the concrete and objective reality of His revealed will in the Bible by placing it in the religious feelings of the individual self-will. When stripped of pious platitudes this is simply another manifestation of original sin.
I started off by asking the question is Christian education necessary? It is not only necessary it is absolutely essential. Why? Because God says it is! And the consequences of disobedience are grim indeed. Therefore I can only say to you, Christian parent, that you must go forward in the Name of the Father, in the Name of the Son and in the Name of the Holy Ghost and start your Christian school without further delay and great blessings will follow not only to this generation but to those yet to come. I conclude with a paraphrase of those words of Elijah the prophet: “How long halt ye between two opinions? If the Baalistic State be God then serve it by keeping your children in its schools. But if the LORD be God then serve Him and give your children the education that God commands.”
“If ye love me, keep my commandments” (Jn. 14:15).
For further copies write to: G.J. Williams, Cromwell House, 20 Rhyswg Rood, Abercom, Gwent NPI 5HB, U.K.