thomas kidd Archives - Kuyperian Commentary

On August 6, 2013 By Thomas Kidd In Books Like

Do Christian Kids Need Christian Education?

There’s nothing like having school-age children to get you thinking about education. Yes, I went to college for eleven straight years (from B.A. to Ph.D.), and yes, I have taught at the college level for eleven years, too. But I had never thought so much about education — specifically, what kind of education is best for kids in Christian families — until the last few years, as we have been homeschooling our children. (We are part of a Classical Conversations homeschooling community.)

I recently reviewed David Dockery’s book Faith and Learning: A Handbook for Christian Higher Education for The Gospel Coalition. Although this excellent book is focused primarily on collegiate education, it helped me reflect on broader issues in Christian education generally. In the review I asked,

How badly do Christians need Christian education? And what exactly does Christian education entail? The answers are not always obvious. Even among evangelicals, there is no consensus about whether to put children in Christian schools, or at what level. If parents send their children to a Christian school, it is most likely to be at the collegiate level. Students often make key decisions about their faith in college, an unparalleled time of intellectual formation. Many figure that the extra expense of a private Christian college is worth it. Still, factors such as financial resources and children’s personalities weigh in the decision, made for the most part without official pressure from churches (excepting some Anabaptist and Reformed traditions).

With all due deference to people’s judgments about their own children, and to their financial circumstances, I wonder whether churches should prod Christians more directly to consider Christian education, even when public schools are not openly hostile to the faith. (Doing so would require churches to help make Christian schooling more feasible in cost and accessibility, and to make sure that the Christian schools they sponsor or recommend are truly worthy options. Just because a school is called Christian does not make it a good school.)

As I noted in the Dockery review, some very thoughtful writers have argued that Christian education is essential:

Prophetic voices throughout the past century as varied as J. Gresham Machen, Christopher Dawson, Douglas Wilson, and Anthony Esolen have insisted that placing children in state-backed, secular schools at any level is unlikely to produce Christian adults capable of proper thinking. Even if secular education is not overtly anti-Christian, these critics say, it tends to produce people who are vocationally trained rather than seriously educated. As Dawson provocatively wrote in 1961, state schools seek to create functionaries for bureaucratic and industrial systems; they form “worker ants in an insect society.” If these prophets are right, then some formal Christian education is extremely important for training intellectually adroit Christians.

Some Christians will argue that withdrawing Christian children from public schools also withdraws their Christian witness. And I know a number of Christian families who have given serious thought to educating their kids, and for a variety of reasons have settled on public school. But I suspect that many other Christian families have simply given little thought to the question. This may especially be the case in places like Waco, Texas, my current home, where parents can pretty reasonably assume that Christian students at public schools will not be harassed for their faith, at least not by teachers. But still, do the values of public education, even in towns relatively friendly to faith, accord with those of Christian education? (The question of the quality of public education is, of course, a related concern. And please note that I am a product of public schools from 1st grade through my M.A. degree.)

Public education, and private secular education, is floundering to identify any purpose these days, other than perhaps “math and science” training, and the ever-popular “critical thinking skills.” (Excellent standardized test scores and successful football teams are also good.) The modern public school system was originally intended to form citizens for democratic citizenship; perhaps that purpose lingers in some public schools today. But Christians should be wary even of education for democratic citizenship, which can easily shade into nationalism and cloud a child’s understanding that her ultimate citizenship is in the city of God.

What we know for sure, of course, is that whatever combination of public, private, or home education a child receives, the parents’ influence on a child’s mind is preeminent. But I still think that evangelicals and other Christians need to think hard about what education for their children should accomplish. This deliberation should occur as early as possible. Two great books with which to start thinking are Christopher Dawson’s The Crisis of Western Education and Anthony Esolen’s satirical Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, a book I reviewed at Patheos.

Representatives of the state will tell us that public education is the only normal option, and that only public schools provide the proper “socialization” of children. But Christian parents know better than to automatically defer to the wishes of the state for their children.

Follow @ThomasSKidd

Originally posted at Patheos<>google реклама на

On July 30, 2013 By Thomas Kidd In Theology Like

Bible Wars and the Origins of the Term “Inerrancy”

Over at The Gospel Coalition, Andrew Wilson recently wrote a piece called “Why I Don’t Hate the Word ‘Inerrancy’.” He explains that

when asked the street-level question, “Does the Bible contain mistakes?” I always answer, “When interpreted properly, no.” That first clause is important; after all, an awful lot of people in history have thought that the Bible says the earth is at the center of the universe, flat, and built on pillars. There is also a plethora of texts whose literal meaning cannot be their original meaning—ranging from the obviously poetic (“your breasts are clumps of dates”) to the obviously symbolic (“then I saw a beast coming out of the sea”) and the obviously hyperbolic (“cut your eye out and throw it away”)—as well as a group of other texts whose literal meaning may or may not be their original meaning…

I agree with Wilson that while facile interpretations of inerrancy can back us into some unfortunate corners, it is still a good word to use. To regular evangelicals, it connotes that which is true: the Scriptures are the fully inspired, authoritative Word of God. But I think there’s an additional reason to not use inerrancy as a bludgeon, and that is the relatively recent advent of the term’s use. Indeed, the history of the word “inerrant” is a fascinating case study in the history of language. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the words “inerrant” and “inerrancy” did not come into common use in English until the 19th century. Until the 1880s, their use in religious writing almost always concerned the authority of the pope (“inerrant” was employed by critics of the pope to describe his power).

This pattern abruptly changed in the 1880s, when higher critics of the Bible began to assail the doctrine of “inerrancy,” a term which higher critics themselves popularized. For instance, A.A. Hodge and B.B. Warfield’s seminal 1881 article “Inspiration” did not use the word “inerrant.” (It used “inspired or “inspiration” some 94 times, and “errorless” or “without error” 11 times.) The key figure in the inerrancy debate was Charles Augustus Briggs, a Presbyterian pastor and seminarian who was ultimately tried and convicted by the Presbyterian Church for his heterodox views of Scripture. The provocative Briggs argued that the theory that the Bible is inerrant was “the ghost of modern evangelicalism to frighten children.” The Briggs trial was one of the opening shots in what became the great Fundamentalist/Modernist controversy of the early 20th century.

The problem with Briggs – and much of the inerrantist backlash against critics like him – is that he insisted on interpreting Scripture through a very narrow lens: the lens of the late nineteenth century scientific mindset. Thus, he wrote, “we are obliged to admit that there are scientific errors in the Bible, errors of astronomy, of geology, of zoology, of botany, and of anthropology.” The Bible, to Briggs, had to be judged by contemporary scientific trends. Some fundamentalists went right along with this game, saying that the Bible would be vindicated – on the exclusive grounds of the modernist scientific worldview.

We’re on safer territory – and orthodox territory – when we affirm that the Bible, every verse of it, is true in all that it claims. We, of course, may not always completely understand what it is claiming, because we do not fathom all of God’s ways, nor is it always entirely clear, as Wilson says above, whether to interpret a passage literally, poetically, symbolically, or hyperbolically. We all struggle, moreover, to remove our blinders of time and culture when reading the Scripture. This is one of the reasons church history is so important. As I once wrote with reference to Rob Bell, “when anyone claims to discover a new biblical truth, one that almost no stalwarts of the faith have believed for 2000 years, it’s a good bet they’re wrong.”

But our caveats regarding interpretation should focus on our limitations as fallen readers of Scripture, not on the supposed imperfections of Scripture itself. As the Westminster Confession of Faith puts it, “The authority of the Holy Scripture, for which it ought to be believed, and obeyed, dependeth not upon the testimony of any man, or church; but wholly upon God (who is truth itself) the author thereof: and therefore it is to be received, because it is the Word of God.”

Originally Posted at The Anxious Bench<>online games mobi