Machen was the kind of prescient prophet who saw and interpreted the times. He was a time reader whose tea leaves consisted of cultural analysis steeped in a tasty and unadulterated biblical vision. It’s one thing to call things as we see them, but it’s another to look ahead and see where they are going. He observed in “Education, Christianity, and the State,”
“I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the Gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the Earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.”
The 20th-century Princetonian argued that there was an evangelistic zeal that pushed the claims of Jesus to the public sphere but then pushed the pagan sphere to our homes through the means of our children.
But the Christian ideal is to prepare and send out. It is not to allow secular voices to transmit them to their newly minted human voicepieces.
Covenant children require Christian education because our zeal needs to be matched outside and inside our homes. We train within to push our gardens without. We do not bring sterile materialism into our homes through the indoctrination of our offspring.
This form of inconsistency pushes our children to be the very ones to whom we will direct our evangelism later on. They will eventually find themselves antagonizing their fathers’ message. But there is a better way. Listen to Machen.
