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Dr. Greene - Articles
More About Public Education
Last month's digression on the topic of public school needs at least a little more discussion. Hence the topic for this month.
Let us say again that Christians should be concerned about the government school system and, as much as they are able, involved in it. We should be thankful for those who are active in this way, and for Christians who feel they can teach in the secular school in good conscience. We can thank God for their witness, even though it is severely curtailed by the school's attempt to separate education from religion. But for the children of Christians there are at least two reasons why they should not be in public school if there is any possible alternative.
Warren Nord of the University of North Carolina in his book, Religion and American Education sums up the first reason. He speaks early in the book of three assumptions that have become part of the public consciousness. The first is that it is possible to separate the secular from the sacred and to understand most of life from the secular standpoint. The second is that the secular way is religiously neutral. He quotes Justice Robert Jackson as saying in 1947 that public education "is organized on the premise that secular education can be isolated from all religious teaching so that the school can inculcate all needed temporal knowledge and also maintain a strict and lofty neutrality as to religion." The third is that secular thinking is reasonable, but religion depends on irrational faith. Offering religious faith is indoctrination and not education.
Reed’s response is that "in the last few decades many secular scholars have argued that modern science is anything but the epitome of disinterested reason and objectivity; rather, it reflects ideology, power relationships, even faith-commitments. Such 'post-modern' thought typically denies science any special standing as the arbiter of truth...
Now, if the sacred and the secular cannot be disentangled...then the conventional wisdom of modern American education is profoundly mistaken." (p. 6-7)
The second reason follows from this first one. The Bible says that the creation, which is thought of today as the secular world, is full of the glory of the Lord (Isaiah 6:3). Psalm 8:1 says, "O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Thy name in all the earth, Who hast displayed Thy splendor above the heavens." Romans 1:20, speaking of God, says, "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse..." What has been made, is, of course, what the secularists call the ordinary world around us. Its purpose is to reveal God to us. Near the end of the book of Job, after God had talked to Job for what we call four chapters, and about nothing but the marvels of creation, Job said to God, "I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear; but now my eye sees Thee: therefore I retract, and I repent in dust and ashes." (Job 42:5-6)
The reality is that it is impossible to separate the secular and the sacred. The world was made the way it is, and it is sustained instant by instant in that way by the Word of God (John 1:1-3, Hebrews 1:3). It was made and is maintained this way for the specific purpose of revealing God to us. It is, so to speak, booby-trapped with His glory. It is a means by which God shows Himself to us and through which we can respond to Him. Because of our sinfulness, we don’t see it this way, but once we have come to know God through Jesus Christ, we begin to realize that creation is indeed, full of His glory.
Why do we have this problem? As Christians we think about God when we read the Bible, engage in prayer, and go to church. But the daily world we live in seems to us to be just that—a world unfolded to us by science. God has blessed us through science, and we should be thankful for it. Christians should be involved in scientific studies. But if science is thought of as the source of the truth about the world, it becomes a dangerous idol. It is only half the truth, and it is incapable of pointing us to God as the truth. We tend to think of it as the source of truth because that is the view of our society, and the social view is hard to shake off. We have almost all grown up in a public school system which denies that God is the truth, and we have unconsciously come to think that way ourselves in what are called the secular aspects of life.
But the church is called to witness to the reality that God is the truth. Our witness is bigger than the way of a person's salvation. The Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 is founded on Jesus’ statement that "All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. God therefore..." We are called to insist that facts are not neutral. They point to the Godhood of God. They mean something, and they call on us for a response of awe, love, praise, and service toward God. Submitting our children to twelve years of an education that denies God, is a poor way to prepare them to fulfill the calling of the church in the generation to come.
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