Clear and Compelling

Let me invite you to consider three excerpts that, taken together, provide a clear and compelling reason for Christian parents to embrace Christian education for their children. That embrace entails sacrifice and perseverance and devotion, but its eternal consequences are worth it.

Regents Academy can partner with parents with many purposes in education, but we partner most fully with those parents who read these passages and conclude:

• that Huxley’s proposal is horrifying, 
• that Van Til’s assertions are inescapable, and 
• that Moses’ words are binding but ultimately freeing. 

Here are the excerpts in order:

Sir Julian Huxley, advocate and founding father of evolutionary humanism:

Education must be concerned with man’s place and role in nature, and its raw material is man himself . . . a lot of cargo will have to be jettisoned [from the historically Christian model of education, in order to commit to evolutionary humanism] . . . man was not created in his present form a few thousand years ago. Mankind is not descended from Adam and Eve. . . . Children are not born with a load of original sin derived from the Fall. . . . There are no Absolutes of truth or virtue, only possibilities of greater knowledge and fuller perfection. . . . How should the new humanism’s evolutionary approach take effect in education?. . . . [It needs to be] comprehensive, in dealing with every aspect of life; it must have a unitary pattern, reflecting the unity of knowledge and the wholeness of experience. It must attempt to give growing minds a coherent picture of nature and man’s role in it, and to help immature personalities towards integration and self-realization.  (from Essays of a Humanist).

Reformed theologian and professor Cornelius Van Til:

Non-Christian education puts the child in a vacuum. The result is that child dies. Christian education alone really nurtures personality, because it alone gives the child air and food. Modern educational philosophy gruesomely insults our God and our Christ. How, then, do you expect to build anything positively Christian or theistic upon a foundation which is the negation of Christianity and theism? (from “Antithesis in Education,” in Foundations of Christian Education).

Deuteronomy 6:4-9:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

Do you find these compelling?