Interesting Articles

Scot McKnight –  “The Gospel for iGens” – “Sometimes I think we forget that no where in the pages of the New Testament do we find what many of us heard when we were gospeled: God loves us, we are sinners, God still loves us and sent his Son to die for our sins, and if we receive God’s plan we will spend eternity with him and be empowered by grace for a new life now. I believe every line in that gospel to be true, but no one said it quite that way in the New Testament.”  (This article is very helpful for Christian teachers, as we struggle to communicate the gospel to the next generation.)

“Muslims Next Door” – An interview with Naeem Fazal

Why We Need Christian Colleges

Dr. Steve Henderson – “Investing in Their Faith: How your teen’s college choice can impact their future” - some depressing studies show that tons of Christian kids fall away at college.

Covenantal Education

Paul House provides a succint summary of Deuteronomy’s priniciples for covenantal education.  It is both inspiring, as well as humbling, as I consider my role as a teacher and a parent:

“Third, Yahweh commands the people to internalize the covenant and teach their children to do the same (6:6-9).  Each new member of the holy community must be taught God’s ways.  Faith does not occur automatically.  It must be understood and owned (6:6), so each parent must teach his or her children, just as Moses has been teaching them.  Instruction must be purposefule, even to the point of becoming public (6:9).  The idea is to ‘impress, or inscribe’ truth on the heart, not simply to suggest it.  Such careful teaching will help avoid forgetting Yahweh in prosperity (6:10-12), in new settings (6:13-19) or when new generations emerge, uncertain of what the old revelation means (6:20-25).  Only scrupulous intergenerational teaching can keep exclusive love of Yahweh alive in a polytheistic culture” (Paul R. House, Old Testament Theology, 178).

Lutheran Sanctification

Two bits from my reading diet caught my eye:

“Nevertheless we still experience sin and death within us, wrestle with them and fight against them.  You may tie a hog ever so well, but you cannot prevent it from grunting.  Thus is is with the sins in our flesh,” (Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, vol. 1, 247).

“Precisely because the totality of the gift, the new being [the one justified by faith] knows that there is nothing to do to gain heaven.  Thus the Christian is called to the tasks of daily life in this world, for the time being.  Students, for instance, are sometimes very pious and idealistic about ‘doing something,’ and so get caught up in this or that movement ‘for good.’  It never seems to dawn on them that perhaps for the time being, at least, their calling is simply to be a good student!  It is not particularly in acts of piety that we are sanctified, but in our call to live and act as Christians” (Gerald O. Forde, ”The Lutheran View” in Christian Spirituality:  Five Views of Sanctification, ed. Donald L. Alexander, 31).

Adoption Theology

The Orthodox Study Bible repeatedly emphasizes the theology of adoption in its explanatory notes.  This is laudable, since Protestants generally neglect this important way to understand our own salvation. 

 

We know several adoptees personally, and it is good to meditate on the fact that we are all adopted sons and daughters of the King.  In this regard, the Study Bible’s notes to Luke 3:23-38 (the geneology of Joseph and of Jesus) are particuarly moving: “Jesus was born to bring all mankind into adoption by the Father, and thus He affirms that a lineage of adoption is as binding and receives the same inheritance as a lineage of blood (Gal 4:4-7).”

 

(A good essay on this is C.N. Wilborn, “Adoption:  A Historical Perspective with Evangelical Implications” in Sanctification: Growing in Grace, eds. Joseph A. Pipa, Jr. & J. Andrew Wortman, 2001.  Wilborn quotes Robert Smith Candlish:  “The more I think of it, the more I am disposed to regret that the subject of adoption, or sonship of believers, has been so little made account of in our Reformation theology.  It seems to me to be the appropriate crown of Calvinism…”) 

The Liberating Effect of Classical Education

“Even if all one has gained from a classical education were to be forgotten in later life, anyone trained, at least for a time, to view the world as the Greeks and Romans saw it may learn to ask pregnant questions.  And even if the ancient answers be rejected, the student—of whatever—will know what they are, and approach his own world with freshened vision, one no longer blinkered by ideology and the reigning fashion.  He would have a liberal, because liberating, education indeed.  No longer would he be be imprisoned exclusively within the velvet walls of his own world’s preoccupations and fetishes.  No longer would he be just and only a child of his own time,” (Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnasssus:  A New Apologia for Greek & Latin, 22).

Truth in Action

“Truth in action–that is wisdom, that is the Right and the Good” (John Milton Gregory, The Seven Laws of Teaching, ch. 5).

Too often, we educators simply focus on downloading information from our brains to our students’ brains.  The students then download said information onto a test, after which the information is sent to the students’ recycle bin, and the miracle of education is complete!  But, from a Christian perspective, the ultimate goal of education is to learn wisdom (Proverbs, ch. 1).  And, as John Milton Gregory writes above, wisdom is not just intellectual head-knowledge.  Wisdom is applied truth.  If Christian education doesn’t impact a student’s life, then we may question whether it is really Christian education.  Truth in action …

Is Christianity Good for the World?

You don’t want to miss this debate between Christopher Hitchens and Douglas Wilson.  Both men are articulate and witty.  The gloves come off!

Humble Sin In An Election Year

“For both the skeptic and the Christian, the neglect of indwelling evil stems from the same source:  the very sin overlooked.  One of Satan’s strategies is to draw our attention to evils outside of us so that sin can have its grand work unhindered where it does the most damage.  Sin is like a mastermind that gets its job done without attracting attention to itself.  It is most successful when attention is not on itself.  Sin could almost be considered humble, were it not for its corrupting abuse of virtue.

Training vs. Education

“A classical education is different in kind to the training of a technician, where the trained man demonstrates his training with a testable skill.  This, we may say, is training in the narrow sense, not an education—and many people today, without admittiting it, prefer training to education, and they must have their heart’s desire … A firm knowledge of the classical languages, history, and culture will not of itself create virtue.  It cannot shine a light into corners we have elected to keep dark, nor into those that cannot be illumined.  But this knowledge can form the mind and light a path to understanding.  For it is noble to rediscover and attend to the voices of the past.  We ignore them to our peril and to the peril of all those whom we would presume to teach.  Without a finely tuned and oft-nourished sense of the past, both near and distant, we have no culture” (Tracy Lee Simmons, Climbing Parnassus:  A New Apologia for Greek & Latin, 17.)

Ancient Wisdom for Modern Teachers

In a treatise extolling the virtues of virginity and celibacy, the church father Gregory of Nyssa enunciated a principle which applies to all areas of life, especially teaching:  “Any theory divorced from living examples, however admirably it may be dressed out, is like the unbreathing statue, with its show of a blooming complexion impressed in tints and colours; but the man who acts as well as teaches, as the Gospel tells us, he is the man who is truly living, and has the bloom of beauty, and is efficient and stirring,” (On Virginity, chap. 23).

Peace Like a River

My wife and I just finished reading Leif Enger’s Peace Like a River.  It’s a beautiful book.  The best thing about Enger is that he’s a Christian writer who actually writes well.  The novel is Christian without being preachy.  It’s full of underhanded Biblical allusions and symbolism.  Be sure to read it when it’s cold in order to get the full atmosphere of Minnesota and N. Dakota in the winter! 

Enger has a new novel out, but I haven’t got to it yet:  So Brave, Young and Handsome.  Looks good!

Delight in Your Children

Andrée Seu, writing in World, stresses the importance of delighting in our children.  We are made in the image of God and, as parents, we need to reflect His image rightly.  If we only reflect the justice, law, and wrath of God, then we are lying to our children.  We sometimes forget that God delights in his children (Ps. 18:19).  We should do the same. 

Pseudo-Scholarship & Opportunities to Evangelize

Darrell Bock has good observations and advice on how to deal with the all the media hype about the “latest-greatest Jesus”.  The bottom line is that all the interest in works like The Da Vinci Code and the tomb of James, “the brother of Jesus” present a wonderful opportunity to evangelize.  The problem is that most Christians don’t know enough history to combat the silliness of Hollywood or the one-sided scholarship of much Jesus research.  Tolle lege–take up those church history books and read!  The fields are ripe for a harvest!

This Sounds Familiar

“Of all the foolish things that parents say about their children, there is none worse than the common saying, ‘My son has a good heart at the bottom.  He is not what he ought to be; but he has fallen into bad hands.  Public schools are bad places.  The tutors neglect the boys.  Yet he has a good heart at the bottom.”  The truth, unhappily, is diametrically the other way.  The first cause of all sin lies in the natural corruption of the boy’s own heart, and not in the school.”

J.C. Ryle – Holiness

Dumbledore is Gay

There are plenty of reasons to yawn about Harry Potter books, besides the silly stuff about magic, as a recent article shows. 
 

Academic Mission Opportunity

I came across an exciting mission opportunity for academics. This organization sends Christian teachers into other countries, finding positions for them in secular universities. A quote on their home-page says it all:

“The university is a clear-cut fulcrum with which to move the world. Change the university and you change the world,” declared Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council.

Ruskin on Books

 In Sesame and Lilies, Ruskin argues that books constitute a “living aristocracy” into which anyone can enter, by “labour” and “merit” and by nothing else.  We can enjoy the company of saints, kings, nobles, and men far above our pathetic intelligence, simply by making the effort to read.   

A book should challenge us: “Very ready we are to say of a book, ‘How good this is—that’s exactly how I think!’  But the right feeling is, ‘How strange that is!  I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, some day,’” (18). 

 

The good things in books, the wisdom of the ages, is like gold—we need to dig for it, painfully (18-19). 

 

True education teaches us to speak correctly, to name the world properly: “The entire difference between education and non-education (as regards the merely intellectual part of it), consists in this accuracy.  A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages,–may not be able to speak any but his own,–may have read very few books.  But whatever language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces, he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the peerage of words; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, at a glance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry, their intermarriages, distant relationships, and the extent to which they were admitted, and offices they held, among the national noblesse of words at any time, and in any country.  But an uneducated person may know, my memory, many languages, and talk them all, and yet truly know not a word of any,–not a word even of his own,” (20-21).

 

Prayer of Jabez–Old School

There are some moments of comfort teaching high-schoolers at large Christian school.  I recently mentioned the Prayer of Jabez book as an example of something or other … and no one knew what I was talking about.  The good news is that Christian fads are a vapor and pass away quickly.  The bad news is that there’s always a new purpose-driven fad to take its place.  Oh well, we’ll keep teaching the classics and wait for each mist to dissipate in its turn.

Convicting Words for Any Teacher

“The goal of reading is the application, in our lives, of what we read. Not to learn it by heart, but to take it to heart. Not to practice using your tongues, but to be able to receive the tongues of fire and to live the mysteries of God. If one studies a great deal in order to acquire knowledge and to teach others, without living the things he teaches, he does no more than fill his head with hot air. At most he will manage to ascend to the moon using machines. The goal of the Christian is to rise to God without machines.”

     -Elder Paisios the Athonite

HT: Mind in the Heart

Thinking is Messy

Sometimes I wonder if the pain of the intellectual life is worth it.  But, then I was comforted by the words of one of our great thinkers: “Thinking is messy, repetitious, silly, obtuse, subject to explosions that shatter the crucible and leave darkness behind.  Then comes another flash, a new path is seen, trod, lost, broken off, and blazed anew.  It leaves the thinker dizzy as well as doubtful: he does not know what he thinks until he has thought it, or better, until he has written and riddled it with persistence akin to obsession” (Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America, 433-34).

Money Talks

Although I wouldn’t want anyone to rush out to buy Alan Ryan’s Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education (his writing style is quite difficult to follow), plowing through his little book does provide insight into the liberal mind, both past and present.  The little bits of educational history are especially interesting to those of us who question the status quo:  

“Much else that we take for granted in the structure of schools came about around the time of World War I.  It was the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that established the assumption that high school and college courses would come in ‘course units’ worth so many credits, and that such units would reflect at secondary level the work done in a period a day for a five-day week.  Paradoxically enough, the high school pattern was set not because of a national determination to rationalize the organization of schools but because in 1905 Andrew Carnegie had set up a fund to provide pensions for retired college professors.  Deciding what constituted a ‘real’ college focused the foundation’s mind on entrance requirements, and thus on a ‘real’ high school curriculum.  Essentially, the foundation decided that real colleges required fourteen courses in English, history, mathematics, and science for admission, and schools found it easy to organize themselves around such a structure” (pg. 107).

Strange Maps, etc.

How does your state fare in teaching evolution?  If you scroll down a little at strangemaps you’ll find out.  NC is right in the middle.  Must be all those Northerners movin’ in …

In my teaching, I’ve found the ESV Reverse Interlinear New Testament an invaluable resource.  The fact that it was put together by my Greek teacher at New St. Andrews is an added plus. 

Also, if you’ve ever wondered what makes a theologian great, check out Theologians with Cheerwine.  These were put together by a student of mine, who obviously doesn’t have enough homework!

 

Liberal Education & Silly Education

Some fragments on education …

“At its best, liberal education opens a conversation between ourselves and the immortal dead, gives us voices at our shoulders asking us to think again and try harder–sometimes by asking us not to think but just to look and listen, to try less hard, and to wait for the light to dawn,” (Alan Ryan, Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education, 47).

And, as further proof that we should not try to go back to the 50s, here’s some classes you could take in that “golden era”:

• “Developing School Spirit”
• “My Duties as a Baby-Sitter”
• “Clicking with the Crowd”
• “What Can Be Done about Acne?”
• “Learning to Care for My Bedroom”
• “Making My Room More Attractive” (quoted by Ryan, but taken from Anti-Intellectualism in American Life)

Perhaps this sort of mindless drivel produced the hippies? Who wouldn’t rebel???

Lastly, it’s always good to hear someone super-famous supporting your own team. Jacques Barzun seems to agree with the educational philosophy of my own alma mater, New St. Andrews College:

“For it is the oldest fallacy about schooling to suppose that it can train a man for ‘practical’ life. Inevitably, while the plan of study is being taught, ‘practical life’ has moved on … The corporations employing the largest numbers of engineers and scientific research men are on this matter way ahead of the colleges. One such firm conducted a survey last year to find out where and how its first-rate executives had been prepared. They came from the most unexpected places–including small liberal arts colleges, the teaching profession, the stage, and the Baptist ministry. It was found that the engineering schools–particularly those sensible ones that make no pretense at intellectual cachet–turned out a good average product, but few leaders. The company’s own intsitutes and night courses raised the chance of foremen and district managers–but only up to a point. The survey concluded that what it wanted as material to shape future executives was graduates of liberal arts colleges, trained in history and economics, in philosophy and in good English, and likewise possessed of an intelligent interest in science and technology,” (Teacher in America, 134-35).

Dabney’s Classical Education

R.L. Dabney, regardless of whether you agree with him in matter of the South and slavery, was an omni-competent man, someone who excelled in whatever he put his hands to. While God-given gifts have priority, his classical training certainly seems to have prepared him for his far-reaching intellectual prowess.

His biographer writes: “It is worthy of remark in passing that his studies at this period of his life seem to have covered no great number of topics, but that they were extensive in the classics. Two advantages naturally follow from this: concentration of energies along a few lines enabled him to put more force out along those lines, and accomplish relatively great things in those studies; he was also preserved from falling into the habit of skimming over the surface of things,” (Thomas Cary Johnson, The Life and Letters of Robert Lewis Dabney, 28).

This is further evidence that less is more. Classical education, historically, did not try to cram a plethora of subjects into a student’s head, but rather gave him the tools of learning. Then, he could branch out into any area desired and excel in it. For more on this, see previous posts on Tracy Lee Simons’ provoking book, Climbing Parnassus.

New Word

I’ve coined a word to describe the typical 3rd Quarter slump many of our students fall into: “slackadaisical”.

Luther on Classical Education

G.R. Evans (Problems of Authority in Reformation Debates, Cambridge UP, 1992) notes that Luther’s reformation break-through was made possible by his training in the medieval trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), which emphasized attention to words. Evans has a great quote from Luther:

“I am persuaded that there can be no sound theology (sincera theologia) without expertise in the arts of language (sine literarum peritia) … I see that there has never been a notable (insignis) opening up of the Word of God, except where languages and letters have sprung up and flowered like so many John the Baptists to prepare the way. I do not wish … young people to be denied the opportunity to study poetry and rhetoric … These studies make them able first to grasp holy things, and then to treat of them skilfully and felicitously. So I pray you … if my request carries any weight, to ensure that your young men practise as industriously as possible in poetry and rhetoric (ut strenue et poetentur et rhetoricentur). As Christ lives, I am often furious that I was not allowed to study poets and orators sometimes at that age … I would have given much for a Homer so I could learn Greek,” (16).

Is it purely coincidence that the great reformers were all formed by some sort of classical education? As Simmons shows in Climbing Parnassus, the emphasis was on learning the classical languages (with Hebrew added into the mix by the northern humanists). These men were armed with the basic tools of exegsis, and did not simply rely on the latest commentaries from formerly orthodox publishing houses. As professor Frank James said once in a lecture at Reformed Theological Seminary, we need more humanist pastors who really know Greek and Hebrew! In the good old days, you had to know Greek and Latin before being accepted to seminary!

More from Parnassus

Tracy Lee Simmons quotes this from Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scott-King’s Modern Europe. The head master of a school and a teacher are talking about the demise of the classics, with the head master hinting that the classics teacher may soon be out of a job if he does not adapt to the modern fad for “useful knowledge”:

“If you approve, head master, I will stay as I am here as long as any boy wants to read the classics. I think it would be very wicked indeed to do anything to fit a boy for the modern world.”

“It’s a short-sighted view, Scott-King.”

“There, head master, with all respect, I differ from you profoundly. I think it the most long-sighted view it is possible to take,” (237).

Climbing Parnassus

I just finished Tracy Lee Simmons’ Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin (ISI Books, 2002). My feelings are mixed. Others have raved about it, but I can’t quite rave, since Simmons is openly a humanist (in the best sense of the word). His work needs to be balanced out by a heavy dose of Augustinianism and classical Protestant thought. Any education, no matter how humanistic its ideals or how rigorous and classical, will run aground on the basic fact of human existence: sin. Classical education needs redemption just as much as modern secularist education. That said, Simmons proves that Dorothy Sayers is not the last word (or the first word!) on classical education. Those involved in the classical Christian movement need to read Simmons, just to regain a little historical consciousness. It’s ironic that those of us touting classics and history are sometimes quite provincial. We need to get back to the education that produced Calvin, Melanchthon, Lewis, Tolkien, and Dabney (not to mention most of the founders of America). If you think your local classical Christian school is doing this, you might want to check out Simmons (though I think the local classical school/homeschool is the best place for our children).

Some samples: “the more ‘useful’ a curriculum, the less valuable it may be for the long-term interests of the learner. That which we get on our own initiative is just as important as that which is taught us in the classroom,” (230).

“Generations of educated men and women, for example, have read and enjoyed Shakespeare without getting him in school. The classroom saw them reading Homer and Horace, counting hexameter feet and agonizing over the force of a Greek particle. They weren’t ‘appreciating’; they were working,” (230).

“Modern literature can be counted on to convey to the student neither discipline nor culture, being but ‘the ephemeral productivity of the hour.’ Anyone not reading on his own the good novels of his day, or those of the day before yesterday, has no business pretending to a humanistic education anyway,” (235).

“Of course we must also declare, directly and without hedging, that a course of study in classics is not vocational. It hasn’t been for two or three hundred years,” (241).

“Humility remains a decent aim for the well-educated mind. Let us not try to do too much … Dissipation of effort can lead to despair; the world outside will catch up with the young soon enough. School ought to be a training ground for the intellect, not a clearinghouse for ’skill’: and if it’s to be the latter, we should admit it … why should we teach anything other than languages, mathematics, and geography before the age of thirteen?” (242).

This will probably make no sense to most readers of these excerpts, just as they flummoxed me at first. However, reading Simmons will help us transcend our modern cul-de-sac, and help us see why such ideas were taken for granted for centuries.