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 Objectivity has been replaced by subjectivity in our culture.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).