Biblical Education: The Responsibility of Every Christian
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Second, the command is not given to a government or village of people. It is given to the parents of the children. A study of the Bible does not release the parents from this responsibility. It will be the parents who will give account to God for what they have done with the children committed to their trust by a Holy God!
Christian Education
God will hold the parents responsible for their receiving an education that leaves God out. For many years, the parents in the home taught the children. Later, parents felt that someone with more education should do the teaching, so they paid tuition for private schools or educated their children in schools sponsored and run by churches. Private or parochial schools provided God-centered education that was watched over by the parents of the students.
The Pilgrims left England to get away from religious persecution and made their home in Holland. They soon found that they had to leave Holland, where they had been given religious freedom but not the right to educate their children themselves. They knew that their children would lose their faith if they were educated in the schools of Holland.
They sailed to America, endured the hardships of life in a new country, and suffered greatly to guarantee a Christian education for their children. Many of the institutions of learning in America began as God-centered educational institutions. The first institutions of higher learning in America were founded as Christian schools; some to train missionaries and pastors.
Soon, however, a need became evident for schools to train the children of those who did not have enough money to afford the private or parochial schools. These were funded either by townships, or counties, or by churches. Today, we see the end result of that program. Several educational institutions have provided all the tools necessary for a parent to provide a good education right in the home.
For others, the answer may be seeking the help of a Christian school. Many fine learning institutions provide a Christ-centered education with good academics. About this time, certain kings began to foster education.
Responsibility
In the period of the Schoolmen ninth century to the end of the fourteenth century there came a rediscovery of Greek philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle. And with the rise of Scholasticism and the concurrent development toward the end of the twelfth century of the universities-Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and somewhat later Cambridge-Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. The Reformation brought a new day for education. Two of its principles-the full authority of Scripture and the priesthood of the believer-served as a catalyst for developments that changed the face of education.
The former principle made education mandatory, so all might read the Word of God a motivation akin to that of ancient Hebrew education ; the latter shifted the responsibility for education from the priestly hierarchy to the people. Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, and other leading Reformers were scholars of the first rank and saw the strategic importance of Christian education.
Luther had a medieval rather than a humanistic in the Renaissance sense education. His concept of correlating the curriculum with the Scriptures points to the effort to integrate biblical faith and learning which has become a major concern for evangelical educators in our times.
We, as Christians, have spent much energy finding flaws in public education, public policy, cultural decay, and religious degeneration. Enough of this. The Role of the Bible in Christian Education. FLOYD V. and second, because a healthy faith does not thrive in which has a responsibility to its God, to it-.
The effects of the Reformation upon education reached beyond Germany to Switzerland, Scandinavia, England, and other lands. From Geneva, Calvin's powerful influence led to a burgeoning of Christian schools in France, the Netherlands, and Scotland. In England the Christian humanism of men like Grocyn, Linacre, Erasmus, Colet, and Ascham had profoundly affected education there, and when England and its schools and universities became Protestant this influence continued.
In seventeenth-century England, the Reformed faith affected education through Puritanism. Thus for him the Bible was the supreme authority and norm for all knowledge. There are elements in the teaching of Comenius that relate to the present-day emphasis in Christian educational philosophy upon the unity of all truth in God. With the founding of the colonies in the seventeenth century, the impetus given education by the Reformation came to America.
Here the influence of Calvin through the Puritans in New England and through the Dutch colonists was strong, though not exclusive e. Up to the end of the eighteenth century, all schools and colleges in America with the exception of the University of Pennsylvania, which though nonsectarian was not hostile to Christianity had roots in evangelical Christianity, and the same was true for most of them until the beginning of public education in the nineteenth century.
Broadly speaking, it may be said that almost the whole of education in the Western world from the first until the nineteenth century was in one way or another Christian. But with the rise of rationalism and the French Enlightenment at the close of the eighteenth century, a shift toward secularism began.
In America the roots of democracy were not only Calvinistic but Deistic, as in such leaders as Franklin and Jefferson. Here the principle of separation of church and state, laid down in the First Amendment to the Constitution, has gradually led to the exclusion of religious training and practices from public education through various decisions of the Supreme Court. Whether the wall of separation between church and state will in all respects remain intact is questionable, as in a time of rising costs pressures mount for federal aid to private especially Roman Catholic education.
In England and Scotland, however, and in other countries where there is an established church, some Christian teaching continues in state schools. Yet the winds of secularism are blowing there also. Among evangelicals in the United States, Christian elementary, secondary, and higher education has had a remarkable resurgence, particularly since about During this time, existing institutions have been strengthened and many new ones founded.
Christian Education
Christian liberal arts colleges, theological seminaries, and both parent-controlled and parish-controlled day schools elementary as well as secondary have multiplied. Noteworthy has been the development of Bible institutes and Bible colleges, about two hundred being founded since the s of these, many have begun during the last five decades. These Christian institutions constitute nothing less than a new educational genre and represent one of America's distinctive contributions to Christian education.
There are, however, aspects of Christian education other than those having to do with school and college. Some of these, such as the relation of Christian education to the home and to the local church, have already been touched upon in the discussion of education in OT times and in the first-century church. Nothing that has happened in the long history of education has excused Christian parents from their primary responsibility, grounded in Scripture, for Christian training in their homes.
Yet it must be said that in a day of pervasive secularism when homes are invaded by television and the mass media, their effectiveness as essential agents of Christian nurture is being eroded.
Not even the development of strong evangelical schools and colleges or the renewal of the Sunday school or church school as it is sometimes called can make up for parental defection from their educational responsibility. In the historical development of Christian education the Sunday school is a comparative newcomer. Until about , Sunday schools in the United States were attended mostly by children of the poor, and centered, along with Christian teaching, on dispelling illiteracy. After that date, the Sunday school became an educational arm of the evangelical Protestant churches. The length of the sessions was shortened, teaching was voluntary rather than paid, and pupils represented all social backgrounds and ages.
The aim became more exclusively that of conversion and Bible teaching, and Sunday schools served as feeders for the churches. Subsequent developments, such as the establishment of Uniform Lessons, the shift to separate denominational and independent curricula, the relation of the movement to the International Council of Religious Education , which became part of the National Council of Christian Churches in the USA, need not be detailed here.
The Christian Philosophy of Education
It is, however, important to note that during the past five decades tensions respecting the Sunday schools have developed between evangelicals and more liberal Protestants. These led to the establishment in of the evangelically oriented National Sunday School Association and have led also to the development of certain independent and theologically conservative curricula.
Through the years, Sunday schools have grown until their pupils in the United States have totalled annually well up in the tens of millions, yet growth has not been without fluctuations. From to there was a decline, followed by a definite recovery which went on until about , when a loss of enrollment in the American Sunday school set in. This has chiefly affected the Sunday schools of larger, mainline denominations and has reached drastic proportions. Ironically these denominations have invested millions of dollars in new Sunday school curricula, but the downward trend has not been reversed.
Independent evangelical publishers have also been active in publishing new curricula generally more biblical and Gospel-centered than the mainline denominational materials. For the Sunday schools of conservative evangelical churches-either those affiliated with larger denominations or with smaller bodies and independent churches-the enrollment situation is different. Here, while in some areas there has been decline, in others there has been marked growth. On the whole, the evangelical Sunday school has been holding its own and even showing a slight gain.
Nevertheless, it is evident that in the period of revolutionary social changes during the latter part of the twentieth century the Sunday school is in serious trouble. This is true on the British as well as the American scene, so much so that the yearbooks of some of the major denominations no longer carry statistics on Sunday school work. The Church of Scotland , where the work has been strong in the past, has seen Sunday school numbers decline from close to half-a-million in to less than half that figure in For many years, students of Christian education have recognized such problems of the Protestant Sunday school as the inadequacy of the weekly teaching period of an hour or less as compared with the time spent on secular education, the difficulties of teacher recruitment and preparation, the frequent ineffectiveness of teaching, the lack of adult Christian education in the churches, and the general failure of the Sunday school to communicate a coherent knowledge of the Bible and the elements of Christian truth.
The dramatic slippage of the Sunday school in numbers and influence has led some to question the continuing usefulness of this form of Christian education, which in the past has contributed so much to the church and society. In a time of radical change in attitudes of youth that often carries with it a reaction against organized religion, churches are venturing into new ways of ministering to young people.
It is a command from the God of the universe. These are organically related, the kerygma providing dynamic motivation for the didachem and being itself a form of teaching. Many of the institutions of learning in America began as God-centered educational institutions. Academic subjects—whether in the humanities or in the natural sciences, whether general or strictly vocational—are studied not as ends in themselves but as means of improving the student as a servant of God. In His ministry, teaching occupied a place second only to His work of redemption. This is followed by the commandment to teach this to the next generation.
These include coffee houses, social action groups that work among the underprivileged, and contemporary music as a means of communicating with youth. The triennial conventions of the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship at Urbana, Illinois 17, students attended the convention , Explo-'72, at which 85, youth met at Dallas, Texas, under the sponsorship of Campus Crusade for Christ, and the Jesus Movement despite its vagaries show that young people today respond to the evangelical presentation of Christ with a remarkable openness and readiness.
Who is responsible for the education of my children? - Bible Broadcasting Network
This must be met by more effective Christian nurture through new forms of Christian education together with renewal and revision of older forms such as the Sunday school. An aspect of education relating to the Bible concerns the American public school, from which formal worship devotional Bible reading and prayer have been excluded by judicial decision. Yet the same decision that did this approved the study of the Bible as literature in public schools.
Accordingly Christian groups are promoting such Bible study on the ground that, while it can be neither doctrinal nor sectarian, the reading and study of portions of Scripture as great literature are not futile. The Word of God does not return to Him void, and when it is studied even under secular restrictions its spiritual power cannot be bound.
The centrality of the Bible. Whatever methods are employed in Christian education, it remains indissolubly united with the Bible.