We believe that a Christian education for our children is required by the Word of God.  We also believe that a Christian education is not a luxury for the wealthy or merely one valid option among many, but instead it is an integral part of training our children up in the fear and admonition of the Lord.  Christian education is a necessity.

In the law, God gives His greatest commandment and He does so in the midst of His requirements for the education of His children (Deut. 6:4-9).  In Psalm 78:5-8 we also see the comprehensiveness of what God requires.  “All of life is under the authority of God’s revealed word and children are to be taught under this comprehensive authority all the time.” 

We may order our lives in accordance with the Word of God or on the basis of the word of man.  These two positions are mutually exclusive.  They can never agree fundamentally on the interpretation of the facts of reality at any point if they are consistent with their presuppositions.  For the Christian and the humanist, therefore, there can be no common ground.  This truth has been understood more by the humanists than it has by the Christians.  It is the mutual exclusiveness of these two positions which makes the provision of a specifically Christian education for our children essential, and the sending of our children to state schools to be educated by humanists a denial of the faith implicitly.  

Despite such plain prohibitions it is common to hear Christian argue in favor of sending their children to non-Christian schools so that they may be salt and light.  A short response would be to point out first that unbelievers are having far more impact on our children than our children are having on them. Secondly, evangelism is not a duty to be undertaken lightly or without training.  Do we send our children to a Mormon vacation bible school?  Do we send them to be missionaries in India without first preparing them?

Others are also willing to settle for so much less than we are called to as we strive to bring every thought captive to Jesus Christ.  These parents point out that some kids survive their experience in a non-Christian school just fine.  True, people survive plane crashes too, but that does not make them a good idea.

The Christian faith is not a condiment to be used to flavor the neutral substance of secular knowledge.  Christ says that anyone who does not gather with Him is scattering.  The attempt to establish secular education is really an attempt to replace one type of religious education with the education of another religion.  Neutrality is a pretense only.  There is no such thing as a neutral education.  Education is a religious endeavor for every student.  It is not a matter of whether a morality will be imposed in education, but which morality will be imposed.

We cannot continue to assume that we can sow one thing in the education of our children and reap another in the lives of these same children when they have grown up.  R. L. Dabney saw clearly when he said that to make one’s education godless, is to make one’s life godless.  This is why the government schools are not a failure, but are an astounding success story.  For educating a people to trust in man rather than the triune God has been their goal all along.

Every culture is merely the religion of a people lived out in their daily life.  Education is a cultural issue and any threat to it is a threat to that culture.  We have only two options:  a culture that reflects the standards of God’s word or one that does not.

It is through the education of our children that our worldview is passed on to future generations and our culture thereby preserved.  Christians, therefore, have a very simple choice: either they educate their children in terms of godly learning and discipline and a Christian worldview, a covenantal, dominion-oriented worldview, and thereby help to build and preserve Christian culture, or they hand over the education of their children to pagans who will educate them in terms of ungodly learning and discipline and a pagan worldview, and thereby help to build a pagan culture which will enslave their children to the world they are called to rule over.

So if we understand that we must give our children a Christian education and if we further see that this cannot be done adequately in the government school system then what are we called to provide?  What is a Christian education?  First let us see what it is not. 

It is not just adding prayer and a bible class.  It is not adding cute bible verses on to the bottom of a math sheet. It is not merely a place where there happen to be a lot of Christians around.

The fact that the Scriptures are at the center of all Christian education does not mean that the students and teacher walk around the classroom two inches above the floor with a strange luminosity surrounding their heads. 

Christian education is not a rationalistic exercise.  And a  student who learns various points of Christian doctrine and who reproduces his understanding successfully on the pages of a test, but who then goes out and lives the same way the students across town at the government school do, represents a failure in Christian education.    

Let us now look more closely at what a Christian education is.  Christian education has often been described not as a clothes line with each of the subjects to be studied hanging on it next to one another, but instead as a wheel with the Scriptures at the center and each of the subjects as a spoke of the wheel coming from that hub which is the Scriptures.  When we define Christian education:

No narrow intellectualism in implied in this definition.  To think God’s thoughts after him, to dedicate the universe to its maker, and to be the vice-regent of the Ruler of all things: this is man’s task.  Man is prophet, priest, and king.  It is this view of education that is involved…. Christian education means that the students are learning how to present their bodies, brains and all, as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God.

For the Christian, the purpose of education is to facilitate maturation in the image of God and thus growth into true manhood and womanhood, so that the child might be able to fulfill his creation mandate in obedience to God’s word.  It follows from this that the kind of education we give our children must be one which is thoroughly grounded in the Christian worldview and which seeks to subject every discipline to the authority of God’s word as it is revealed in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.  Education is thus inescapably a covenant activity; indeed it is a central aspect of man’s covenant duty.  Hence to deny our children such an education is to abandon our responsibilities as the covenant people of God.

As Christian children are given a thoroughly and distinctively Christian education, they will understand the world God placed them in, and they will understand their appointed roll in it.  They will learn to grow in their sanctification, whether intellectual, ethical, or aesthetic.  Moreover, they will also come to understand the futility of what passes for education elsewhere.  This understanding will not make them proud, but rather will fill them with compassion!

Before we can win the children of this world, we have to stop losing our children to that world.  And as we teach them their identity in Christ, they will provide the kind of contrast with our postmodern culture’s lost children that will make evangelism truly potent.  Before we can invite nonbelievers to participate in our believing culture, we have to have one.  And in order to have one, we have to pass the faith on to our children in spirit and in truth.  There are many aspects to this task, but Christian education is right at the center of it.

For a more information on  what we mean by a Christian education, click here to read an article by Artios board member, Abe Goolsby.