All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. The Prince of the Preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, once said, I would have everybody able to read and write and cipher. Indeed, I don't think that a man can know too much. But mark you, the knowing of these things is not education. There are millions of your reading and writing and ciphering folk who are as ignorant as neighbor Norton's calf. Those ignorant masses of whom Spurgeon spoke were not those who failed to finish their lessons. Instead, they were those who did finish, or rather those who naively thought that lessons were the sorts of things that could be finished. They were those who believed that the mere accumulation of knowledge was adequate, that the simple attainment of understanding was sufficient. They were those whose hubris kept them from the ever upward leading path of wisdom. And thus they were perhaps remarkably gifted or highly skilled or well-informed or even brilliantly insightful. But they were not educated. True education, the peculiar sort of education that Spurgeon had in mind, does not have a terminus, a polar extreme, a finish line, an outcome. Instead, it is a deposit, an endowment, a promise, even a small taste. of the future. It is a thoroughly integrated sort of education rooted in eternal biblical verities, certain that sufficiency might be found in no other source or resource. That is the root of the Christian philosophy of education, a philosophy that once provoked an unprecedented flowering in Western civilization and might well do so again. Of course, to say such things, to make such assertions is today both politically incorrect and evangelically incorrect. as Trey Gauche, as Gudemel's Psalter, Shakespeare's English, or Knox's trumpet blasts. And the reason is simple enough. According to Cornelius Vantel, it is because the principles by which believers live are squarely opposed to the principles by which unbelievers live. This is as true in the field of education, he said, as it is in the church. Accordingly, we speak of antitheses in education. And these antitheses cover the whole educational field. Antitheses. It is precisely because of these antitheses that we have become so terribly conflicted in our society today. Over the most basic of issues, what some might call the culture war is really the clashing, the jangling of antitheses. As Guinness has said, under the conditions of unrelenting modernity, the cultural authority of American beliefs, ideals, and traditions is dissolving. Tradition is softening into a selective nostalgia for the past, and a transcendent faith is melting into a suburban-esque sentiment that is vulnerable to the changing fashions of the therapeutic revolution. Thus, with the gravitas of their cultural authority collapsing inward like The critical mass of an exploding star. Parts of the American society are beginning to flare out with the dazzling but empty brilliance of a great culture in a critical phase. The result is a grand loss of confidence and dynamism. As a result of much leveling, even more unraveling, and no little reveling in both, American beliefs, ideals, and traditions are fast becoming a lost continent to us. Publishing mogul and erstwhile presidential candidate Steve Forbes says that we are gripped by an aching angst, the social equivalent of postpartum blues. Historian Simon Schama believes that we are afflicted with a deep and systemic sickness. Speech writing whiz Peggy Noonan simply says the Vox has popped. According to Henry Kissinger, we are in the midst of a spiritual void. George Will says we're suffering from a kind of slow motion barbarization from within. Daniel Patrick Moynihan says that we're gripped by sheer pandemonium. William Bennett argues that we are witnessing the devaluing of America. Zbigniew Brzezinski asserts that we are out of control. while James Q. Wilson says simply that we have lost our moral sense. Gertrude Himmelfarb argues that this prevailing demoralization has set in precisely because we have succeeded in demoralizing social policy, divorcing it from any moral criteria, requirements, or even expectations. There are, she says, no more sure standards. And what's interesting about all of this is that we all know what is wrong with our society. And just about everyone does. There's hardly a soul who is not only too familiar with the deleterious effects of our current cultural quandary, a booming economy wed to a busting morality. Indeed, for the most part, we can all agree on the sundry woes that plague our families, our communities, and our institutional structures. We all know what has caused our malaise. We can all quote a litany of statistics documenting rising crime rates, declining educational standards, the awful prevalence of violence and drugs and sex and corruption and alienation and death and disaster. Where we differ is not so much on the problems, but on the solutions. We're in harmony when it comes to public abuses. It is concerning public uses that we part the company. We're agreed on what we disapprove. We are at odds on what we approve. We can all acknowledge the social evils. It is on the social ideals that we trip over one another. We have a solid consensus on what constitutes madness. It's sanity that sunders any hope of cooperation. We're agreed on what's wrong. We just can't reconcile what is right. We all know what is bad. It is on what is good that we differ. It is not wickedness that we much dispute, but righteousness. It's not our society's difficulties that divide us. It is our society's aims. Thus, the solutions are the problems, not the problems. They highlight for us, the great antitheses that have sundered our world. According to Louis Burkoff, to come to terms with that reality is the first and most fundamental step towards substantive Christian education. It is only when such antitheses have come into clear focus that we may be able to differentiate the machinations of Satan and the purposes of God. So here's where we come off the rails in terms of Christian education. We look at Christian education as some sort of an alternative to a collapsing world system. We see Christian education as a means of dealing with the problems of the world rather than a bold, dynamic, unflinching assertion of the solutions. Likewise, Van Til has argued that any serious study of the history of our conflicted culture reveals the plans and purposes of Satan in contradistinction to the good providence of God. Of course, To do that kind of serious study, to note such contradistinctions, is the very thing that we don't like. Such precision makes us nervous. Definition is discomforting. Antitheses are unnerving. They're so black and white. So definite, lines are drawn, real-life litmus test with real-life litmus paper is used. We prefer weasel words, fuzzy notions, squishy ideas, broad generalities. which is according to Burkoff and Ventile just what Satan was hoping for. Indeed according to Burkoff the great satanic conspiracy is to work us somehow into a frenzy of believing that the world was neither black nor white, but mostly gray. We are most often tempted to think that Satan's great demonic plan has been, is now, and always will be to wreak havoc on goodness and truth and purity, wherever they may be found, to possess individuals with destructive passions and to defile all honor, valor, and ethical seamlessness. We think of the devil as an insidious destroyer. In fact, though, I believe Berkhoff is much closer to the truth, much closer to the mark. He says Satan does not so much want to tear down godly conventions and mores as to build up his own malevolent ones. He's always nurtured Babel-like aspirations to build a new world order. Dasher in a new age. He's always striving to make a name for himself and fill the world with his glory. In other words, it isn't that he wants to be a fiend so much as he wants to be like the Most High. Otto Blumhart, the pioneer Lutheran missionary to Africa, in the late 17th century wrote, the devil's conceit is merely that he might supplant God's providential rule with his own. He's driven by jealousy, not envy. Hence, his grand urge is to misworship. But that is but the engendering of fine traditions and magnificent achievements and beneficent inclinations, yet all apart from the glorious endowments of God's revealed order. Satan is a deposit, he said, not unlike those that human experience attests, entranced by the false beauties, the false majesties, and the false virtues of independence from the Almighty. from the time of the temptation in the garden to the present. The great satanic conspiracy has always been first and foremost to offer some sane, attractive, and wholesome counterfeit to the kingdom of God. Satan is not dead set on getting us all to drink blood from roiling cauldrons and debauched occultic rites. Rather he is determined to distract us from the high call of the gospel with some interesting and enticing, some marvelous alternative. He modestly aspires to convert men to the nice news as opposed to the good news. As Oswald Chambers has said, Satan's great aim is to deflect us from the center He will allow us to be devoted to the death, to any cause, any enterprise, to anything but the authoritative, sovereign word of the living God. Whatever is pleasant is thoroughly within His game. Satan hopes to realize his ambition, not merely by plunging individuals into bottomless pools of concupiscence, but gaining sway over the deepest affections and the highest aspirations of this poor fallen world. Thus he masquerades as an angel of light and even His demonic minions appear as messengers of righteousness. Again, as Oswald Chambers asserted, this is his most cunning travesty, to counterfeit the Holy Spirit, to make man upright and individual, but seemingly self-governing with no apparent need of God or the adequacy of his word. in the process of implementing this credible and proficient alternative world system. Inevitably, much death and destruction will result. Defilement and debauchery are often inevitable when his wretched game is afoot. But note, these evils are not Satan's object. They are simply the second and third order consequences of his cultural coup. The fact is that Satan is not only a liar, he is a master mimic. And he desires to mimic God. And so he creates a marvelous system, an attractive system, a beguiling system, a good system in antithesis to the truth. What he is after is an alternative, any alternative to the truth, the one truth, the essential truth of the gospel. He would have us affirm anything, anything at all, as long as it is not Jesus is Lord, that he is Lord over the totality of life, and that he has spoken authoritatively, definitively, Finally, anything is acceptable to him. Everything is acceptable to him, except the notion that the Lord has established his throne in the heavens and his sovereignty rules over all. For Satan, anything is allowable. Everything is allowable except the idea of the sufficiency of scripture. Except biblical orthodoxy. Thus, even Satan underscores the inescapability of antipathies by his very resistance to the notion of antipathies. There is no neutral ground. Thomas Chalmers, the great Scottish pastor, theologian, educator, reformer, has commented, there is this imbecile habit in man to pay heed to any and all contrarian voices, to satisfy ourselves with some happy alternative to the adequacy of God's holy wreaths. Fact is, the Bible is God's own revelation of wisdom and knowledge and understanding and truth. It's not simply a marvelous collection of quaint sayings, marvelous and inspiring stories and wonderful virtues. It is God's message to man. It is God's instruction. It is God's direction. It is God's guideline. It is His plumb line, His bottom line. Thus, all those who have lived in faith before us, forefathers, fathers, patriarchs, prophets, apostles, preachers, evangelists, martyrs, confessors, ascetics, and every righteous spirit made pure by grace through faith have always looked to the Bible as the standard for life and godliness. They have taken it seriously, studying it, applying it, and obeying it. That is because they have comprehended the reality that antithetical notion that from Genesis to Revelation the Bible is indeed God's authoritative, adequate, sufficient word. And the God's word is the hope for the helpless. It is sad for the sick, balm for the broken, strength for the stricken. It is the cure for all the ills and all the far reaches of this poor fallen world. the academics, politicians, social scientists, judges, and psychologists, and bureaucrats, and various and sundry other experts who have harnessed their disciplines for the modern education juggernaut certainly cannot be faulted for their concern over the needs of children, if indeed their concern is genuine. Where they've gone astray is in taking matter into their own hands. Seeking out their own new and novel cure. for all that ails us. Instead of adhering to the wise and inerrant counsel of the Bible, walking along the well-trod path of the saints, they have done what was right in their own eyes. They have completely ignored and as a consequence violated God's wisdom. According to this credible alternative, this satanic alternative view, There is no notion of absolute right or wrong. There are no clear-cut standards. Morality is relative. And problem solving is entirely subjective. There's a bit of a problem with that, of course. And that is that such notions are entirely out of sync with the fabric of reality. to the law and the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because they have no dawn, Isaiah the prophet says. Here's the bottom line. God spoke the world into existence. He framed reality. with the very breath of his mouth. And so any system of thought, any educational program that attempts to enable people to understand the world at large that is out of sync with the Word of God is, as Romans 1 says, insanity. Anything apart from an affirmation of the absolute sufficiency of the Word of God for all of life and godliness is crazy. It's not just wrong. It's crazy. It's not just off course. It's dangerous. To attempt to solve the perilous problems of modern society without hearing and heeding the clear instructions of the Bible is utter foolishness. That's what Romans chapter 1 verses 18 through 23 asserts. It is an invitation to inadequacy, incompetency, irrelevancy, and impotency. That's why sex education programs ultimately increase the incidence of teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases rather than decrease them. It's because we got crazy people teaching crazy ideas to a bunch of children who have been discipled to be crazy. Such credible satanic alternatives cannot work because they ignore the essence of reality. Ephesians 5, 6. They are fraught with fantasy. Colossians 2, 8. Only the Bible can tell us of things as they really are. Psalm 19, verses 7 through 11. Only the Bible faces reality squarely, practically, completely, and honestly. Deuteronomy 30, 11 through 14. Thus only the Bible can provide genuine solutions to the problems that plague mankind. Psalm 119, 105. Jesus was forever reminding his disciples of these facts. He made it clear to them that the Bible was to be their ultimate standard, their adequate standard, their sufficient standard for life, for godliness, for faith, for practice, for profession, and for confession. It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for one stroke of a letter of the law to fail. Whoever knows one of these commandments, and so teaches others, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven. But whoever keeps and teaches them shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Again and again, he affirmed the truth that all scripture is God breezed. Useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. The Word of God cannot be broken. All His precepts are sure. They are upheld forever and ever. They are performed in truth and uprightness. All men know this ultimately. Even the diligent and studied humanists and the American educational elite have a veiled memory at least of this truth. Antitheses are inescapable. God's Word is somehow sovereignly impressed upon the hearts of all men, Romans 2, 14 and 15. So they must actively restrain or suppress this truth in order to carry on with their insane novelties. Though they know what is right, they deliberately debase themselves with futile thinking, foolish passions, filthy behavior. They purposely betray reality, exchanging God's Word for lies. They know the ordinances of life. They consciously choose the precepts of death, all in the name of neutrality. They attempt to impose their conjured insanity upon the rest of us, proposing it as the solution to all of our earthly ills. So despite their desperate ravings to the contrary, the only viable, sane alternative to the present insanity of humanism's educative wasteland. It's a forthright suffusion of our hearts and minds to the eternal established and effectual word of truth. The only way that we will be able to develop genuine and dynamic alternatives to the satanic humanistic program of the modern cultural elite is a bold submission to the solitary, supreme, and sufficient Word of Life. For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways. My thoughts are higher than your thoughts. For as the rain and snow, come down from heaven and do not return there without watering the earth and making it bear sprouts, furnishing seeds for the sower and bread to the eater. So shall my word, which goes forth from my mouth always be. It shall not return to me empty without accomplishing what I desire without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it. I have to confess, I always seem to learn things the hard way. My dear and long friend, through the tortured the journey of my life, George Knight, can probably attest to this. I am hard-headed. I have a proclivity for majoring on the minors, minoring on the majors. I have a difficult time recognizing what is actually important, what is genuinely precious, or what ultimately matters in this poor fallen world. So though I would like to claim that my commitment to this kind of vision for education. Indeed, my commitment to education at all, my commitment to the next generation of leaders has arisen not out of some profound virtue or some deep insight or some well-defined strategy. I can't. I must confess that I have arrived at most of my covenantal and educational convictions by default. The kind of default that is attributable solely to the grace and the mercy of God. It was not too terribly long ago that I was an untempered zealot. I wanted to right every wrong and undertake every righteous cause. I committed myself to stand against all manner of injustice. I determined to champion beauty and goodness and truth, the essential elements of Christian civilization wherever they might be threatened. I plunged headlong into social activism, political involvement, and cultural renewal. All still very precious pet projects in my heart. Unfortunately though, I found that I was hardly prepared for such an undertaking. I was woefully ignorant of the vast legacy which I wish to defend. Like so many of the great leaders that I looked up to, I was so poorly educated that I didn't even know what I didn't know. When I compared my grasp of the issues, of the historical precedents that underlay those issues, the theological principles that define those issues, the biblical paradigms that framed those issues, with any of the great men and women of the past who laid the foundations of this great cultural flowering in the first place, I was appalled. The more I studied, the more I read, the more I realized I was a dunderhead. A victim of public education. There was nothing upstairs. Nada. Despite a string of degrees, I realized that I was not educated. I was as ignorant as neighbor Norton's calf. I'd been suckered by Satan's credible alternative. What made matters even worse was that I looked around and I really didn't see very many others. President company accepted of course. who are significantly better prepared for the difficult challenges that our culture posed than I was. With no little consternation, I began to ask, where are the John Calvins for our day? Where are the Patrick Henrys? Where are the Augustans? The Nazis? The Kuipers? The grown-than-prinsterers? Where are the Chalmers? Where are the heroes? Where are those who have fully comprehended, fully discerned and underscored the inescapable antitheses between the satanic system of darkness and futility and insanity and the sufficient word of truth? I drew pretty much blank. Hope grew dim. It was only then that I began to comprehend that the most important thing that I could do for the rest of my life was not to undertake one more campaign, fight one more fight, launch one more project as worthwhile as all of those things might actually be. slowly dawned on me that in order to reap the benefits of stalwart leadership, people must make substantive investments in advance. Leadership must be prayed for, planned for, and prepared for. It doesn't just happen. I thought that we could somehow just muster it up. I thought that a few stem winding speeches, throw Alan Keyes in front of a crowd and then correct his doctrine behind the scenes. I thought that that would be sufficient. We could rally the forces and win the day. stand before the throng like William Wallace and say, we shall win! Aye! But I was wrong. I know, I know, that's hardly earth-shattering news. My children can tell you of innumerable instances when I've been wrong, but I'd finally come to the realization that in order to bring about the kind of reconciliation and restoration and yes, even reformation that I so yearned for in our culture, we would have to commit ourselves to the multi-generational agenda of covenantal faithfulness. Just as it had always been, just as it always would be. The scriptures speak of our responsibilities to effectively train up the next generation of leaders. The responsibilities therein rehearsed have been a part of the confession of faith of God's people from the earliest days. Indeed, they constitute a primary application of the First and Great Commandments, Deuteronomy 6, Matthew 22. They constitute a central element in what it means for those who are saved to keep covenant with God. and these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart and you shall teach them diligently unto your children. Alas, I was not arrested by the glorious opportunities presented by the next generation until I had effectively given up on my own. We have a hero complex. Even in the circle of reformed folk, we have a hero complex. We're always waiting for the next guy to ride in on the white Charger and tilt his lance at the bad guys. You see, all of the pins tumble in General Assembly. Then stand forth in the fray and say, we have vanquished. I still try to commit myself to stand against all manner of injustice. Whether we meet with that injustice in the arena of politics or sitting in a booth at Taco Bell with a weeping penitent at our side. I remain determined to champion beauty, goodness, and truth, the essential elements of Christian civilization wherever they might be threatened. But today, I do so with a whole host of similarly motivated co-laborers as we teach young men and women the wonders of math and science, the delights of history and language, the marvels of art and music, all from the perspective and the application of the Christian worldview as derived from God's sufficient scriptures. so that they might joyously walk in God's gracious covenant as faithful disciples of their sovereign. All of the great educative inducements of our legacy have sprung from this conviction. All of the benefits and appointments of this incredibly prosperous society have been birthed from this primal truth. And thus to seek any watered down alternative is madness. We have been for far, far too long mad. As a result of this realization, I now find that hope grows brighter with every passing day. And a new generation of leaders is ready to step across the threshold of the 21st century and just in the nick of time. When we abandon the sufficiency of Scripture in education, we abandon all. Perhaps it is preceded by an abandonment in the pulpits. Perhaps it is preceded by an abandonment in our homes. But mark this, an abandonment with our children at our knees And the schoolhouse of discipleship is the end. Unless we wrench this satanic conspiracy into the light of day and show it for what it is. I once loved the spotlight. Now I yearn to see it shone brightly on my foolishness so that those who come behind will not trip and stumble even as I have. God's word is sufficient. All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good