The Cross and Classical Education

While the idea of the antithesis makes a Christian education possible, it is really the fact of the cross that makes a classical education meaningful. The content of a classical education is not a Christian phenomenon. It is something that has existed in some form since the 5^th century BC. The Greeks had classical educations in terms of the content that they studied. The Romans and Egyptians had classical educations in the same sense. What makes the content of a classical education meaningful in our lives is the cross.

One of the most important and interesting issues hit dead on by our approach to history and literature is the extent to which we show the complete and total folly of pagan antiquity. We call it a total and complete folly because the civilizations of pagan antiquity like Egypt, Greece, and to some extent Rome, were the only civilizations where it is possible to see a developed worldview completely void of God’s revelation. Peter Leithart says, “Reading Greek and Roman literature … highlights the difference between a world formed by polytheism and a world that worships the One Living God” (Leithart, 20). The best that the world can come up with without Christ and without God is presented for our amusement and instruction in these ancient civilizations. What do we find?

Ultimately we find chaos. Hesiod, the Greek poet of the seventh century before Christ describes the creation of the world in his work, Theogeny, by beginning with the principle of chaos. “Chaos was first of all” sings Hesiod (Hes. Theog.,116). Out of chaos came all the attempts at rationalization that the Greeks could muster. The Sumerians had a similar experience. When we look at the parallel flood narrative of The Epic of Gilgamesh we find that rather than an appeal to justice for sin committed by man, the reason for destroying the world by flood among the Sumerian gods is that “the uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible by reason of the babel” (108). We find that everything that comes after is ultimately to be understood in terms of chaos. When the storm blows up on the sea and washes the boats of men away, it must be the result of Poseidon who was angry with someone for something. When the lightning crashes in the night, Zeus must be angry with someone for something. One of the legends preceding the Troy narratives tells that when encamped at Aulis, Agamemnon and his fleet were not allowed to leave. The goddess Artemis desired revenge on Agamemnon because he had hunted in a forest sacred to her and killed a sacred deer. The penalty was the death of his first-born daughter, Iphigenia. How and where Artemis had made the restriction of hunting clear is not expressed and one looks in vain for that kind of revelation in ancient literature. No one really knows what the gods expected or how to gain their favor. They have not revealed their will to anyone.

Beyond this is the character and actions of the gods and goddesses in ancient literature. The gods are not gods in the sense that we think of them. They are not all-powerful beings who can do whatever they want. They are bound in certain areas. For instance, even Zeus cannot transgress the decree of Fate when the wall of the Achaians is penetrated by the Trojans (cf. Hom. Il. xiv.52 – 4). Nor is Zeus free to change the fate of Patroclus in the Iliad (cf. Hom. Il., xvi.250-52). The gods bicker and fight among each other (cf. Hom. Il. xx.54-5), they deceive each other (cf. Hom. Il. xiv.159 – 360), they are petty and arbitrary. There is no sense of justice among them. One day they may say one thing, and the next it is forgotten. Achilles puts the pagan worldview most bluntly when he declares:

Such is the way the gods spun life for unfortunate mortals,

that we live in unhappiness, but the gods themselves have no sorrows.

There are two urns that stand on the door-sill of Zeus. They are unlike

for the gifts they bestow: an urn of evils, an urn of blessings.

If Zeus who delights in thunder mingles these and bestows them

on man, he shifts, and moves now in evil, again in good fortune.

But when Zeus bestows from the urn of sorrows, he makes a failure

of man, and the evil hunger drives him over the shining

earth, and he wanders respected neither of gods nor mortals.

Il. xxiv.525-33

There is never goodness alone from the pagan worldview, only evil or, at best, evil mixed with blessings. This is the worldview of the ancient world. This shows us just a little of what Christ came to change on the cross.

The cross is a marker in history. From that point forward, in time and space, the pagan cultures were no longer held in bondage to Satan and paganism. John expresses this function of the cross in the book of Revelation when he speaks of Satan being bound “so that he should deceive the nations no more” (Rev. 20:3). The cross makes it so that the God of Scripture can no longer be ignored by human history. When Paul is speaking before the philosophers in Athens he tells them that they have been living in “times of ignorance” that God has “overlooked” but “now commands all men everywhere to repent” because of the cross (Acts. 17:30).

Ignorance and superstition must give way to worship of the true God. This is also Paul’s point in Athens. It is as he sees the Greek monuments of worship that he is compelled to address them concerning their paganism and ignorance. He does not deny their religiosity or sincerity in what they conceive to be objects of worship, he merely tells them they are seriously mistaken about the nature of the universe and their place in it. He redirects their pagan conceptions of god and begins to set them aright. “God, who made the world and everything in it … does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is he worshipped with men’s hands…. And he has made from one blood every nation of men … so that they should seek the Lord” (Acts. 17:25-27).

The cross points us to God just as the Law points us to Christ. The cross invades our understanding of ourselves and our understanding of the world around us. It forces us to confront our most treasured presuppositions and demands that we justify them by the cross. The cross makes possible classical education because it demands that all history, all facts, all knowledge be seen through the giver and maker of all things. In the ancient world, education was a method of getting ahead, learning a skill that would provide work. In the shadow of the cross education, classical education, is instruction in the proper worship of the living God of creation.

Nostalgia Stinks

I was a victim of nostalgia Sunday evening. I was raised in a slightly more innocent time regarding televisiol (which is to say the writers of TV and film wanted to say things but were prevented at that time, so they used more innuendo than I remember) and remember the TV show Knight Rider with David Hasselhoff. Well, somebody decided to recreate that episode of Americana and emotionally ensnare many people like myself. I saw commercials for the show and thought, "Wow, I wonder what new techniques they will use to make it even better." Boy was I a sucker!
In the first few moments of the show, a female FBI agent (who becomes crucial to the show a little later on) is seen leaving an overnight encounter with another woman (the lesbianism does not become crucial to the plot in any way) and the new driver of KITT (the car) is seen waking up to multiple female partners in his bed (also not incredibly crucial to the plot of the show). Why was this necessary? It wasn't. Why was it done? Because it can be.
I won't even get started on how we can't come up with our own shows anymore, we have to rob from the seventies, eightes, and even some fo the nineties to cme up with deent sitcoms or television dramas. Sure we pump it up with effects and sex and violence, but that doesn't make it any better.
Nostalgia is an emotion that ties us to a past event. It is stronger than mere memory. I think it is memory with excessive good feelings. All this is very technical, I know. I think we are getting to the point where nostalgia is under regular attack by advetisers and media groups. They want us to feel the way we felt when we were 14 or 21 so we will take this vacation or buy this toy for our kids. It has worked on me to some extent. I buy transformers for my kids even though they aren't as well made as when I got the (there are even some of mine from childhood stilla round and they still outlast the new ones). And, of course, I wasted time Sunday evening watching the new and improved Knight Rider.
We have to fight against this kind of attack and it is hard. I think I'll pick up a Chesterton book next Sunday evening instead.

Antithesis and Christian Education

We live in a compromising world. The once-popular notion of black and white distinctions between things is very out of place in our society. The idea that something can be objectively right or wrong, good or bad is laughed at in the media and by our authorities. Objectivity has been replaced by subjectivity in our culture. The final point of authority has been placed within the individual subjective knower rather than the omnipresent objective knower because this culture has denied that there can be an omnipresent objective knower.
This change is recent in the overall course of history. It came about in the middle of the 19^th century. It was the grandchild of Enlightenment thinking and especially that of the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant had answered the competing theories of skepticism and those of the existence of innate ideas with a dualism between the world we can know and that which we cannot. He called one the world of the noumenal. It is realm which exists in our mind. It is divided into categories of thought that capture raw sense impressions from the outside world and translate them into intelligible ideas. The other world, the one outside of us is the world of the phenomenal. It is the world of the thing-in-itself and can never be known with certainty by the mind. Its existence is unverifiable because we only know it through the intelligible ideas that our mind reconstructs through the categories in our mind. So Kant divided our world into a subjective realm of knowledge and an objective realm which can only be understood through the use of our subjective mental faculties. Our only contact with what really exists is an utterly chaotic world of brute facts that our mind must bring together into coherence.
We have never really moved beyond Kant. James Jordan has written, “The modern view is … that the universe is really ultimately chaotic. Whatever order and meaning there is in the world has been imposed by human beings, and by no one else.” This is in radical opposition to the Biblical view which states bluntly that God is the source of knowledge and understanding and that He has revealed this directly to man (Prov. 2:6). Psalm 119 asks “give me understanding, that I may know Your testimonies” (Ps. 119:125). Job 32:8 remarks that there “is a spirit in man, and the breath of the Almighty gives them understanding.” Where does knowledge come from? The Scriptures are clear. Knowledge comes from God and it can be certain.
This presupposition that knowledge can be known certainly and that it comes from a objective source stands totally at odds with the modern culture. This is the antithesis of Christianity and it has very real consequences for Christian education.
For one thing, if we understand the antithesis we will recognize immediately that there is no neutral ground between the believer and the unbeliever. Every fact, every process, every piece of data is either Christian or Pagan. Our basic presuppositions cause us to view things either through a biblical worldview or a pagan unbiblical worldview. There really is no other alternative. This affects the way we read history books. It affects the way we view art. It affects the way we listen to music. It also affects the way we teach.
Teaching is an activity of passing information from one knower to another. With the biblical antithesis in place we can understand that objective knowledge exists and can be passed from one knower to another. Without that antithesis we have no certainty of true knowledge. This means that a teacher could instruct her students that 2+2=4 and a student could legitimately say “Not today.” We understand that 2+2 always equals 4 because God created the universe that way. How could a teacher grade a test if 2+2 sometimes equaled four and sometimes didn’t? How could a parent punish for disobedience if sometimes it wasn’t wrong to behave that way? A clear understanding of the biblical antithesis gives us stability and consistency in our worldview that allows for teaching to occur at all levels.
The funny thing is that the unbelieving world has no consistent reason to expect teaching to work. Education is a religious activity because its source and material is the creation of a divine being. The laws of logic, the natural laws of science, and the physical world are all created of God and known truly by Him. It is through a consistently Christian worldview that we may know the works of God (Prov. 1:7).
This is the reason we seek to integrate the Christian worldview into our educational process so much. We understand that it is impossible to seek to educate children neutrally. We will either educate them in the “knowledge of God” (Prov. 2:5) or we will educate them in the vanity of unbelief. It is our prayer that you understand this as well and stand with us in the desire to educate children to love God and His ways to bring “every though captive to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

The Unintended Results of Religious Revival

“I fear, wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible, in the nature of things, for any revival of true religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride and anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away. Is there no way to prevent this—this continual decay of pure religion? We ought not to prevent people from being diligent and frugal; we must exhort all Christians to gain all they can, and to save all they can; that is, in effect, to grow rich.”

These words were written by the founder of Methodism, John Wesley in the eighteenth century. They have been applied by the German Sociologist Max Weber to help explain the rise of modern capitalism in Western Europe. However, as I read these words, something much deeper caught my attention. While Wesley’s main point is precisely what Weber pointed out, the deeper meaning that can be drawn from the application of Wesley’s thesis bothered me because we have seen it before and I fear, we may see it again.

According to Wesley, religious revivals have unexpected results. In Wesley’s case, the unexpected results were riches and worldliness. We may well take his point and make application to our own situation as Christian families and educators. Religious revival brought about a tremendous increase in diligence and frugality in the men and women who experienced the revival in their lives. This was exactly what Wesley wanted to see and he was quite please with these results. However, this degree of diligence and frugality had also produced a situation of those men and women becoming extremely wealthy. This great increase in wealth was producing a rise in worldliness, which was not something Wesley was happy about. His concern was how to cultivate the diligence and frugality without bringing about the worldliness. It seems we may have the same problem.

We are in the process of attempting a revival of education according to classical methods. This will, if we are successful, bring about an increased diligence in our students and an increase in knowledge. Are there any unexpected results we might expect from this process? It should be obvious to us that an increase in knowledge could just as easily bring about a very different, but equally dangerous, worldliness than Wesley experienced. The last thing we desire and intend by our increase in knowledge is another Enlightenment of the sort that happened in the eighteenth century. That Enlightenment, though characterized by many godly men, took on a character of worldliness and secularism that we do not desire. Is there any way to prevent this? Must we travel the same path that Wesley traveled? Has his fear been borne out in history?

First, Wesley’s fear has most definitely been borne out by the forces of history. Christians today are among the most affluent people in the world, and also among the worldliest. We prance about in materialism and superficialism and care naught for the increase of the Gospel. I do not think that we are doomed to Wesley’s pessimism. The task and the tools are education. As we are diligent about our finances (which may lead us into temptation) we must be ever more diligent about our education (which may lead us both to and away from temptation). Our education is for an increase in knowledge, but it is of a particular kind. We educate for an increase in the knowledge of God. We must be ever on guard against worldliness of any kind. Knowledge may puff up, so we must ever be humble to accept correction. If we are not, we may soon face Wesley’s situation and find that the work was destroyed from underneath.

Still more wisdom from Chesterton

Fairy-tales do not give a child his first idea of bogy. What fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy-tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy-tale does is this: it accustoms him by a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors have a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies, that these infinite enemies of man have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear. When I was a child I have stared at the darkness until the whole black bulk of it turned into one negro giant taller than heaven. If there was one star in the sky it only made him a Cyclops. But fairy-tales restored my mental health. For next day I read an authentic account of how a negro giant with one eye, of quite equal dimensions, had been baffled by a little boy like myself (of similar inexperience and even lower social status) by means of a sword, some bad riddles, and a brave heart.
Tremendous Trifles

Wells' Time Machine

I just finished re-reading H.G. Wells' The Time Machine for my modernity class. I love that little book. Many of my students will tell you I have a thing for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic stuff anyway. But my appreciation of Wells' work goes past that. Wells had a talent for packing a lot into such a small little novella.
In case you haven't read it before, here's a short summary. The Time Traveler (Wells gives very few names in this book, mainly titles) is having dinner with several guests and discusses the possibilities of time travel with them. He presents it as though it is simply a matter of fact that we can manipulate the time dimension as easily as we do the other three. No one agrees with him so he brings out his little model time machine and sends it into the future in front of their eyes. Some discussion on the physics of this take place and everyone leaves. Next week they return, with some new faces, and find that the Time Traveler is not around. They begin eating anyway (per instructions, lest we think them rude) and are interrupted by his appearance. He looks very ragged and one guest notices that he has no shoes on. After a few glasses of wine he disappears to get dressed and promises to return and tell them the story. When he returns he begins to tell them that he has been time traveling for eight days and that he left just that morning. He tells them of his initial trip to 802,701 AD and the people he found there. He initially meets some toga-wearing childlike people who have very few cares and even less attention to anything but eating and games. His initial observations lead him to the conclusion that humanity has at last developed a Utopian existence through evolution and the principles of communism. Through a series of adventures and discoveries he learns that this is the exact opposite of the situation. Rather, ages ago, the Eloi (the childlike people) banished the working class underground. There they evolved into the hideous Morlocks. At this stage of existence, the Eloi (who have become ignorant of how their own existence is maintained) are food for the underground Morlocks. These Morlocks also steal the Time Machine, which the Time Traveler has to get back. He eventually does and travels even further, nearly 30 million years, into the future. Here is where the really interesting part of the book takes place. Over a few short burst of time travel, he witnesses the end of the world. When he first arrives, the Earth has ceased to rotate and the Sun has grown larger and is a deep red. Few living things appear on the shore of this future beach (set where once London stood). But what is there is strikingly non-human. He describes huge crab-like creatures that plod along slowly and speaks of great vegetative life. At his final stop even the crab creatures have departed and nothing is left but a green lichen growing on the rocks and some odd soccer ball shaped creature with tentacles in the water. He returns home and the story comes full circle. At the very end, he has gone traveling again and been missing for three years with no word from him.
This story is great! I think it is great because Wells was an unashamed evolutionist and modernist. He accepted the theory of evolution as put forward by Darwin. He was also as consistent with this position as you could hope for. He argues in this little work that we are deluded if we believe the human race to be the final stage of evolution. Darwin, and his supporters, spoke of :Survival of the fittest." In The Time Machine, Wells essentially says that humanity is the least fit to finally survive to the end of history. Rather than intellectual creatures, we see crab-like monstrosities and green slime on rocks.
Wells also exposes several social issues as well. Several times people speak of an ideal communist society in the book. Wells argues that this is a fallacy and can never happen. When we first see the Eloi we get the impression that they have managed to create an ideal existence. Later we see this is only the case until we look under the surface (literally). Wells is telling us that no society can demonstrate pure communism because humanity is inherently greedy. The only way the Eloi could do it was to banish the Morlocks from their sight. The way the Morlocks maintain their system is to consume the Eloi.
There is much to discuss in this book. Dover has an excellent copy or get a better one. It is a quick read and full of these fun issues. It is a great way to teach an introduction to the ideologies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Home: the Heart of the Odyssey

Home and Hearth are the capital themes of the Odyssey. They are the primary motives for Odysseus from beginning to end. He desires to return to his home and to the peace and respite from war that it affords. According to Greek myth, Odysseus did not desire to go to Troy in the first place, but feigned madness to avoid being called upon to sail in his black ships.

The establishment of the ideal life as a home life, rather than a warrior’s life for Odysseus makes a stark contrast with the picture in the Iliad. In this way the two epics form a complete picture of life, depicting a middle way rather than the extremes of war and peace. The object of war is peace, which makes Hektor the real hero of the Iliad. For Odysseus, the war was an invasion into his life, not the pinnacle of it. Therefore, after the war, Odysseus desires nothing so much as to get home and be the kind of husband and father that he wants to be.

This theme also indicates that for Homer, the greatness of civilization depended not only on the warrior but also on the household. A warrior carves a kingdom out. A household makes that kingdom permanent.