All right, so last week we talked about Christian education. We got into some of the principal parts and principles of Christian education. And we're gonna try to round out our discussion here. He goes on for like, I mean, he goes on for like ever on Christian education. It's gonna be like the next, five or six chapters that he talks about Christian education. So I don't think we're going to go through all that material, but we are going to go ahead and continue our discussion here today as we begin to talk about the implementation of a few more principles with regard to education. So He asks the question, Voss asks the question, what is involved in truly Christian religious education? So remember, he has made a distinction between narrow Christian education, or speaking of Christian education narrowly, which is with regard to religious education, okay, like what we're doing here, what we're doing out there in the Sunday school classes, all right, particularly distinctly Christian contents being taught. And then general Christian education, which is the general studies from a Christian perspective, so math, history, sociology, et cetera, being all taught from a, distinctly and particularly Christian perspective, right? So narrowly with regard to the content of the faith, and then generally with regard to content with regard to general information and education. So we might say, we might carefully and advisedly make the distinction between Christian education with regard to special revelation, right? God's Word. And then Christian education with regard to general revelation, which is the created order as a whole. We don't want to compartmentalize those things, okay, so as to isolate them from one another. Nevertheless, it is good to make that distinction. So he asks here, what is involved in religious or Christian education in that narrow sense? And he says here, truly, Christian religious education must be conducted by parents and teachers who are themselves Christian believers. You know, like, okay. No duh, right? I mean it's kind of like an obvious point, right? And yet, is it? Is it an obvious point? I think that it is. becoming increasingly, and I think certainly it was in Voss's day, but in a different context. In Voss's day, he's writing in the 60s and 70s and such, and so he's looking at the mainline church, the mainline Presbyterian church, the mainline Methodist church, et cetera, and he's looking at the way in which unbelief has infiltrated the ranks mainline Christianity in America, and that's kind of what he's, you know, pointing at. But I think that what at one time was the problem of mainline Christianity or mainline Protestant Christianity in America has now become the problem of mainstream evangelicalism today. Okay, so broadly considered evangelicalism, we're talking about, you know, just all those who consider themselves at least theologically and socially conservative, okay? Among evangelicalism today, I think that once again we are finding the rise of the prominence of pragmatism once more, okay? You know what pragmatism is, right? Pragmatism is that philosophy of education, that philosophy of life, which says that what really matters is what is practical, okay? Pragmatism, all right? That which accelerates our goals, okay? In other words, what accomplishes what we want to accomplish? How do we get from point A to point B in the most efficient and the most quick manner? That's pragmatism. And so I think that continues to be a problem, and that will be a problem wherever we go until the Lord returns. And I think that this is applicable today in the broadly evangelical world. So he goes on and he explains then that we are not to, in religious education, and now once again we're talking about narrowly conceived Sunday school education done by the ministry of the church, about special revelation, about the things of God. What we're talking about here is that we cannot cut corners, we cannot do what is efficient by putting in place teachers to instruct the church of God on religious education who are not believers or who are questionably believers or who are in fact immature and untrained believers. So that it's very important here that Christian education be done by those who are believers and believers who are firmly grounded within the faith. And then he goes on here and he says, truly, and once again we may think this is kind of obvious, but truly Christian religious education must also be orthodox. Not necessarily orthodox Presbyterian, OPC, but orthodox. In other words, straight teaching, right teaching. It must come from the truth of God's Word as taught by the Orthodox, the confessionally sound churches throughout the history of the church. So he says, as much that is called Christian religious education today is far from Orthodox, being filled with modern heresies such as evolution, modern views which deny the real inspiration and authority of the Bible, etc. So once again, what he is there putting his finger upon is this very important fact that in his day, modernism, it's another word for liberalism, modernism was running rampant through the churches, and so denied were things like the historical creation of Adam, in place of an evolutionary theory of humankind and its origins. Denial of the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, denial of the miracles of Jesus as real historical fact and events that occurred. So these things are kind of creeping into the church or were actually deep-seated within the church at Vassa's day. But You know, oftentimes we think, well, you know, if you're an evangelical church, okay, this, just to take an example of one easy topic for us to wrap our minds around, perhaps, but if we are an evangelical church, evangelical churches deny evolution, they deny Darwinism, and so, you know, we can feel pretty safe in evangelical churches today. I mean, Voss, you know, hit the panic button probably appropriately back then, but today, We don't need to hit that panic button anymore, because after all, we've kind of made a clear distinction. You've got the mainline churches over here, and here you've got the good evangelicals, okay? And evangelicalism. And nothing like evolution or Darwinism would ever creep into these good, Bible-believing conservative churches. Or would it? In fact, it has, okay? I'm not naming any names or anything, but I can name at least one off the top of my head, and if I sat down and thought about it some more, some others as well. Large, prominent, evangelical, and supposedly Reformed church that does indeed, that is open. I'll put it as charitably and easily and lightheartedly as I can. to Darwinianism, and it's being taught in that church by officers of that church. So this is not an irrelevant thing. This is a current issue. Darwinism and evolutionism is not going away. and in fact it is starting to make inroads within evangelicalism as well. People are starting to be open to tolerate this theistic evolution, you know. Well we believe, we're not atheistic evolutionists, we're theistic evolutionists. So instead of the atheistic evolutionism which says that all this, the evolution of man happened by chance, The theistic evolutionists would say, no, no, no, it was all under the hand of God. But nevertheless, what they have in common is a denial of the teaching of Scripture, which is that Adam and Eve are the first human beings created within the created order. And if you take that away, then you actually undermine the understanding and the teaching of the gospel in the New Testament as well. Okay? And we can't go into those particulars, but here just simply to say that the issue of teaching Christian religious education from a Orthodox perspective is not to be taken for granted. It's always something that has to be militantly grabbed and contended for, right? We are to contend for that faith once for all that has been delivered to the saints, right, says Jude. So we need to constantly be on our guard about these things. And once again, that's what we're, Voss here is making very clear. Now, he's going to go in and talk about general education, general Christian education. So now we're moving from the distinctive and particular sphere of the church and its ministry with regard to special revelation, and now we're talking about general revelation and Christian education with regard to general revelation, general education with regard to things like mathematics and history and science and literature, etc., etc. And once again Voss is clear that here too we need to make sure that our teachers are indeed believers, that they are Christians. But he also goes on to say this, the textbooks that are used should be written by believing Christians. So he goes on, he says this very important thing. It is not enough that direct contradictions of the Bible be excluded. In other words, it's not enough for us to reject evolutionism or Darwinism. That's not enough. Or it's not enough for us to contradict and to deny false doctrine. to exclude advocacy of the theory of human evolution will accomplish little unless the truth of divine creation and providence be put in its place." So in other words, it's not good enough for us to say, you know, Darwin was wrong and go ahead and come up with all of these scientific creationist evidence against Darwinism if we leave it there and we don't put in its place what actually did happen, right? to begin to teach the doctrine of God creating ex nihilo, out of nothing, and teaching the very important doctrine that God not only created all things out of nothing, but He upholds all things by the power of His Word so that providentially everything that comes to pass comes to pass by the power and the providence of Almighty God, right? So, It's not good enough for us just to deny false doctrine in its place. We need to instill within covenant children the importance of understanding the truth which stands over against the error. He says this, he goes on and says this, is in view, that most school subjects can be taught from a neutral point of view, the notion that God has nothing important to do with most of life and knowledge. So that's, see, if you have a Christian school, okay, which is Christian in name, and maybe it sprinkles some Bible verses on top of its curriculum, or maybe it has a chapel service or something like that, but it doesn't, as it were, integrate the biblical worldview within the curriculum, then you're really not dealing with a very Christian approach to education, right? It says, hey, look, you know what? We need to reject all this bad stuff, but hey, science? Well, that's kind of a neutral endeavor, right? We can go about our business learning science, and we really don't need to integrate a biblical theology of science. Or we could go on and teach our numbers, we could teach mathematics without also instilling within our covenant children that mathematics is a product of God's creative power, right? And a reflection of his glorious eternal nature, okay? Somebody had mentioned last week when we were talking about a book by Verne Poitras, and Verne Poitras wrote a book called Redeeming Mathematics. He also wrote a book called Redeeming Science and another one called Redeeming Sociology, and he's got the series of books, right, where he wants to try to show the way in which the biblical worldview integrates with a full-orbed understanding of these different subjects and these different areas of life. And so he's doing, I think, precisely what it is that Voss here is advocating, that we cannot at any point render any subject as remaining neutral in such a way that that subject can be approached from either a Christian or a non-Christian perspective, it doesn't matter. Now from the perspective of practicality, an unbeliever can teach the principles of Euclidean geometry. Did I say that right? Is that even a thing? It's been so long since I've been taking any math classes. An unbeliever can teach those principles and can teach it very clearly to a person, but an unbeliever cannot teach geometry properly from the perspective of God and from a Christian worldview, right? So that if, let's say, you have a student who learns from an unbeliever the principles of geometry, and says, you know, walks away, and well, you know, practically speaking, that child can reproduce that information, no problems, because it was communicated very clearly to the student. Wonderful, but if the student doesn't walk away from that subject, giving glory to God for the things that he has made, then we have failed that student with regard to instructing them in a consistently Christian manner, right? I do know of Christian schools that, you know, they do a really good job in terms of teaching the children the Bible. They do a good job of moralizing the children, so to speak. But then they use public school textbooks, you see. And I just, you know, that to me says, okay, there's, you know, that's a problem. as if the textbook, coming from a secular perspective, is okay. I mean, can we supplement that textbook from a public school with a Christian worldview? Yes, we can, and we better do that in order to remain faithful in Christian education. But we can't just use that textbook without critical engagement. Because if we do, ideas will slip in, right? Because nothing is being done from a neutral perspective. Everything is coming from either a perspective that gives glory to God or from a perspective that denies and hates God, right? So you're going, even in the basic principles of mathematics, you can imagine that there is going to be some sort or some type of unbiblical, anti-Christian perspective that is going to work its way within that curriculum. And so we need to be sure that we engage critically with these things. So it's not to say that you can't use a public school textbook as if using a public school textbook is a sin and faithlessness in and of itself, but what it is saying that if you use a public school textbook, You need to go in understanding and realizing that that textbook is going to be written from an anti-theistic perspective, an anti-Christian perspective, and we need to be aware of that so we can critically engage in that textbook and instruct the child in what is biblical there and what is not biblical there, and replace unbiblical concepts with biblical concepts. Okay, that takes us to the end of lesson 29. I'm gonna stop here and pause for a moment and go ahead and take any questions that you might have. We don't have the microphone to pass around set up, so I'll just try to repeat anything that you might have to say, comments, thoughts, questions, and I'll repeat it in this microphone so we have it on the recording. Okay, anything at all? Yeah, go ahead, Rose. Sure. Yes, sure. Yeah. Worldview, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure. Sure, sure. Yeah, right. Yeah, I think it's more than that. I think it's the integration of ideas, right? So I would commend to you Dr. Poitras' book, Redeeming Mathematics. I think that in that he'll give all sorts of wonderful practical advice for how it is that Christians are to think Christianly about mathematics. So that when you're homeschooling, it's more than just, you know, okay, go through these problems, two times two is four, four times four is 16, did I get that right? Okay, that's good. I'm a liberal arts guy, my math is just, you know. So if you're going through those, that's a part of it, right, is doing drills to make sure that they're getting it right. But that's only part of it, right? That's only part of the education. A full-orb Christian education is to also instill within the child how he or she is to think about the math that they're doing, right? From a distinctly Christian perspective. As, just for an example, math as being reflective of the created order that God has made, right? God didn't make mass chaos, right? It's not random It's order. That's right. Mathematics points up order within the universe. And order itself also reflects something of God. And we could also talk about the Trinity. The Trinity is three in one. How do we understand differences numerically? How does God define numerics by even his own being as being one in many at the same time? Now I'm just, all I'm doing here now is just adding more confusion to the discussion because I'm just kind of giving you questions without answers, but I would once again, you know, commend, I mean, here I'm not very adequate because I'm not familiar with what is out there in terms of Christian curriculum, but it's integrative, so it's more than just, You know, praying, you know, over it is good. I mean, that's important. That's a Christian thing to do that should be done. That's part of your role of ministering to your child in a homeschooling context. But it's more than that as well. It's also integrating ideas, right? Because math, I took a, so this is really nerdy, I understand. When I was in college, I took a, I think it was a philosophy of mathematics course. And I thought that that would be really fun to go into and just kind of blow through and laugh at, because philosophy, math, what do the two have anything in common? And I was blown away by the class, because I realized that the class was conceptual in its nature. It wasn't figuring out calculus drills and how to solve problems. It was more about, how do you think about mathematics? and principles of regularity and continuity and consistency and things like that. And I, you know, that struck me because I realized while math is so much more than what schools bill it as being, right, in the public school setting, under the guise and under the philosophy of pragmatism. What you're simply doing is drilling the stuff into the kid's head, you know. That's what we're doing, just drilling, you know, how to solve a problem. It's a very pragmatic approach rather than being full-orbed. and integrative, so that by the time the child gets into college, he or she is taking classes on philosophy of mathematics and starting to understand, wow, there's a lot more behind mathematics than simply solving problems. I mean, there's a whole philosophy. I mean, the early mathematicians were philosophers, right? Because their thinking conceptually, not pragmatically, but conceptually about the subject matter. And I think that as Christians, it behooves us, I think, to instruct our children in the conceptual aspects of mathematics as well. So that's a really long, you know, blubbering kind of answer to your short but very good question. So do you want to follow up? Yeah. Yeah, Redeeming Mathematics by Vern Poitras, P-O-Y-T-H-R-E-S-S. If you send me an email, if anybody sends me an email, if they're interested in the book, I'll go ahead and send you a link to where you can get the book, yeah. Yeah, it's more on the conceptual side. So in other words, it's a book teaching Christians how to think Christianly about mathematics. So it's not a curriculum. It's not like you're going to have problems to solve in there, but what you will have is... See, Poitras, very interesting, because Dr. Poitras has his PhD in mathematics. And then he got another doctorate in theology on top of that. I mean, you know, he's one of these, you know, big, you know, brain kind of people that just blows you out of the water. But he's a minister, first and foremost. He's a PCA minister. He teaches at Westminster Seminary, so he teaches theology. And what he's hoping to do in that book is to be able to encourage Christians to think biblically and Christianly about mathematics. And so in that sense, it's a really good primer for teachers of mathematics to teach teachers how to teach mathematics in a Christian fashion. Does that make sense? Okay, good, good. Yeah, really, yeah, Kathy. I have, yeah. Mm-hmm, I have, yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. and they do lots of memory work and they don't, they're not just bad things that they have to memorize and without thinking about them and having their own, they're not programmed in other words. They're taught in the Christian worldview. Yeah, if I could just repeat your comment for the sake of the recording. The question was about Charlotte Mason and her approach to education. Yeah, I don't know a whole lot, Eve knows a lot more than I would on that, but just to say, that there are any number of approaches to education in terms of methodology which are practically fine. So for instance, last week we talked about the Trivium and classical Christian education and such. And classical Christian, classical education, leaving the Christian now for a moment, classical education is not distinctly Christian. I mean, it's pagan actually. It goes back to Greek. Yeah, Greek and Roman ways of doing things. Classical education is a fine method of going about doing education, but we have to make a distinction between method and worldview, or method and ideology. You could take the classical approach to education and you could use it for Christian purposes, you could use it for non-Christian purposes. You could have an atheistic school that uses classical education to teach a new generation of atheists if you wanted to, and you would do so probably quite efficiently. Yeah, yeah. No, I'm not talking about her. I'm talking about classical education here particularly. I don't know anything. I don't know much about Charlotte Mason's approach, but just saying that approaches are different than worldviews and what we're advocating here is to take the Christian worldview and integrate it within your methodology, whatever your methodology of education may be. That's up for grabs. The Bible doesn't give us a method of doing Christian education. What the Bible does is gives us a way of thinking about education, right? And it's the responsibility of Christians and Christian parents particularly, right, excuse me, to integrate the Christian worldview into the methodology, whatever that methodology may be. So here in the West, classical forms of education have been very prominent and useful. I would imagine that in the Far East, as an example, methods of education are going to be quite different, other than however it may be that classical forms of education may have integrated into the East. But apart from any type of influence from the West, Eastern education African education, South American education, is going to look different than what it does here in America methodologically. But if you're a Christian living in the Far East, and you're a Christian living in Africa or in South America, it is the Christian's responsibility to whatever methodology you're using to integrate within that methodology a consistent regular Christian world and life view, biblical worldview. Yeah, Eve. with so many points of view, and you want to give them that foundation. That there's a reason for all this, the numbers, the science, the math. There's so many different programs, so many different people out there saying that we have to listen to their voice and really analyze what are they teaching us. You just can't go, I'm just gonna take it all in. That won't work, yeah. Yeah, that's right. Right. Yeah, and just to repeat your comment, Eve, because it's really good, how important it is to instill a Christian worldview in a child, whether they're in public school, home school, or Christian school, because once they leave the nest, so to speak, they go off to college, and all these different other perspectives are thrown at them, and they need to discern. And I think that probably the word discernment is a good word because that's what we're doing in Christian education is we're ministering to our children in order to instill within them and to develop within them the God-given gift of discernment. That's what we're trying to do. This is a Christian way to think about this. See, I mean, look, to be a little bit maybe provocative, if you If we don't train our children to think Christianly about things like math, they're not going to think Christianly about about history, or if we don't get them to think Christianly about science, they're not going to think Christianly about the shows that they watch on TV, right? I mean, it's all integrative, right? You're trying to disciple the child to think in a holistically Christian manner about all of life. right, from mathematics to history to science to, you know, whatever the subject matter may be. So that's, I mean, that's pretty key. That's important, I think, an important principle. Because if you abstract the Christian worldview, then something else is going to take its place, right? See, here's another example. We ought not to think—this is maybe an exercise of word of caution here. We ought not to think that just because something is old, it's good. Our culture has an opposite perspective on that. Our culture usually thinks if something's new, it's good. Us Christians who are conservative, we tend to think, okay, if it's old, it's good, right? Because we're conservative, right? We're trying to conserve the past. And not necessarily, okay? So for instance, I know that one of the core texts in Christian curriculum, in Christian classical curriculum, is Aesop's Fables, okay? A classic, all right? Every kid should have to read Aesop's Fables growing up. But Aesop's fables also need to be criticized from a Christian worldview. Because while there are many, you know, trite kind of sayings that may harmonize some with a biblical perspective on, let's say, wisdom, like in Proverbs or something like that, there may be some commonality, some overlap that we go, oh yeah, we've got to remember, it's a pagan text. It's a pagan text. We need to understand that. So we can't just say, okay, now children, you need to be very careful reading Darwin, but hey, turn off your brain when it comes to Aesop's fables. Not at all. Part of Christian general education is to instruct our children to think Christianly about everything. So whether we're talking about math or science or Darwin or Aesop's fables or whatever other classic texts we may be reading, including, by the way, Jane Austen, the famous Pride and Prejudice and all these other 19th century quaint British novels and all this other stuff. We need to engage those from a Christian perspective as well too, just because it was written in the 19th century doesn't make it wholesome and Christian. And I don't have any objections against children reading Pride and Prejudice, not at all. I think they should read it because it's classical literature. read it from a Christian perspective, right? So it's very different, you see, our approach as a Reformed body, right, from a more fundamentalist approach, right? Fundamentalism says, look, if it ain't Christian, get rid of it. Don't let Jane Austen in in this curriculum, it's not Christian. Or Aesop's Fable, it's not Christian, don't let it into this curriculum, right? That's fundamentalism, right? Reformed Christianity is not afraid of the unbelieving world. Reformed Christianity can say, bring it on, let me read it, I want to know what it's about so that I can criticize it from a Christian worldview perspective, right? So there's a big difference between reformed approach to Christian education and a non-reformed approach to Christian education, which is a whole other topic, a whole other subject for us to bring on. Really good discussion. Let me just try to maybe—I've got five minutes left, and I'm going to try to squeeze an hour's worth of material in five minutes, so let's see what I can do here. Okay, this is a new chapter. I'm skipping a lot of stuff that's repetitive, and I'm going to go on and approach this question. He says, is Christian general education properly the function of the church? And he says no. And here he's talking about parochial schools. So for instance, let me ask you a question. Should South Austin Presbyterian Church, if we had the means and all this other stuff, should South Austin Presbyterian Church start a Christian school? What do you guys think? I'm seeing a lot of people shaking their heads no. Do you agree with Voss or do you have a reason? What do you think? What are your thoughts? Yeah, Eve? Right. Sure. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's right. Right. So what my old school Presbyterian wife is saying here is that the church is supposed to be the church with its distinctive mission of proclaiming the gospel and administering sacraments and covenantal nurture and all that. And so the church, in so much as the church does narrowly special religious education, equips believers right, to be able to take biblical concepts and then apply it to the area of Christian education. But the church itself is not called by God to teach mathematics. Now we are called by God to equip Christians how to think Christianly about mathematics, right? But the church itself is not called to teach 12th grade calculus or whatever, right? Goodness knows you don't want the pastor teaching that because your kid won't learn a thing. So, yeah, I think that's right. I think we have to be very careful, understand the distinction. I do think that the best way to go about Christian education is to have like-minded Christian believers, parents, come together and to form a Christian school. That's the best way, I think, to do it. Now, if you want it reformed, I think that's good. I think that's what it should be. The problem is, with smaller reformed churches, it's harder to get enough Christian parents together to start a Christian school. But that's the best way to go about it, I think, because it's Christians now using the things that they learned on Sunday from the ministry of the church and applying it to the instruction of children Monday through Friday. So it's the application of biblical worldview from the church. So you come from the church gathered and then you go out to use Kuyper's distinction as the church scattered to do the work of what you learned on Sunday. which would include, of course, Christian education as well, because it's the responsibility of every Christian parent to do Christian education, whether that's directly or indirectly through another means. Oh yeah, sure. It's not a facility issue. It's more of an oversight, you know, ministry issue. So yeah, that's right. So it would be fine to do that. But yeah, that's probably the best way for Reformed Christian parents to come together and say, look, you know, we're going to start a school and in our charter, okay, we're going to have a reference to the Westminster standards. This is going to be the standards that we are going to teach our children from, okay, so that no teacher can be hired who will teach anything contrary, for instance, to the Westminster standards. So you can't have a teacher come in there and teach Darwinianism, right. You won't have a teacher come in there and teach Arminianism or what have you. So I think that that's right. So that's the one question he asked. And the last one is, Oh boy, how do you even bring up this one and not spend time on it? Well, we can't spend time on it, so rather than, I'll mention what it is, but rather get into it, we'll wait till next week. And is general education, remember general education, that is from a Christian perspective, you know, generally everything, is general education primarily the function of the state? That's a hot button issue, isn't it? So he's got an interesting answer here. I'm working through the implications of his answer, but I'll give you the answer next week and we'll take it up from there. So why don't we go ahead and close in prayer.