The Gospel and Education

[Resource Manager]

 

The Gospel and Education

 

“No! not another pamphlet on education! “That could well be the reaction of readers who are professionally involved in it, and their feelings would be fully appreciated: the subject has recently been smothered in verbiage and many teachers want to get on with the job and spend less time talking or reading about it. With all the talk, however, little attention has been paid to the rather special question of the bearing of the Gospel on education and this is something that concerns not only teachers but parents and their children and all who are exercised by the practical implications of Christian discipleship in the modern world.

 

Some may be inclined to deny that the two are connected at all. Certainly the good news is not about education, in the usual sense of the words, but about personal salvation. It is the good news of the kingdom of God and it brings to those who trust in the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ the hope of everlasting life on earth when he shall return as judge and king. Its impact on education must, therefore, be indirect but the problems raised are none the less serious and complex. They often arise from the apparent conflict between the high standards demanded of the Christian believer in all he undertakes and his confident expecta­tion of an end to all human systems and institutions. No easy solution of these problems will be offered in these pages but a brief attempt will be made to sort out some of their tangled strands.

 

The first Christians were mostly simple folk

 

It is evident that the original Gospel required of its hearers no high level of worldly learning: few of the educated with their veiled religious and political interests allowed themselves to be attracted to Jesus (John 7:48; 3:12), whilst “the common people heard him gladly” (Mark 12:37), if often for the wrong reasons and with imperfect understanding. The apostles’ preaching met with similar results so that Paul expected his readers at Corinth to agree with him that “not many wise men alter the flesh ... are called”. (1 Cor 1:26)

 

In the records of the life of Jesus and in the New Testament generally there is a total absence of educational terms such as school, college, university or course, examination and career. The explanation lies partly in the fact that the Master’s childhood and youth are passed over in almost complete silence and partly in the family-centred nature of traditional Jewish education. From the earliest times it had been the parents’ responsibility to instruct and discipline their children. This duty was constantly insisted on in the Law and in Proverbs (e.g. Deut 4:10; 11:19; Prov 22:6), as also the need to explain the religious feasts in their historical setting.” Secular schools of the kind we know scarcely existed in Palestine then. By the first century of our era the synagogue had become the chief teaching centre where the basic learning skills were acquired in a religious context through the study of the Old Testament writings. That Jesus may well have received such synagogue in­struction as “he grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man” (Luke 2:52) is suggested by the one incident in his childhood that the Gospels do record his lingering in the temple at the age of twelve to hear and question the doctors of the Law, when Joseph and Mary had already left Jerusalem on their homeward journey (Luke 2:42-49). Doubtless it was not his ability to read that later caused such surprise—”How knoweth this man letters, having never learned” (John 7:15) — but rather his exceptional tone of authority, for here was a preacher who had not even pursued advanced education in the rabbinical schools. But at every stage in his formation it was his divine education that really mattered, whether under his mother’s tender care or as a carpenter’s apprentice or in the hidden years of preparation for his ministry. It was his Father’s teaching and his prayerful meditation upon it that enabled him to say: “I speak that which I have seen with my Father” (John 8:38) and “the Father loveth the son and showeth him all things that himself doeth” (John 5:20)

 

We look in vain during his ministry for incidents or teaching that seem directly relevant to the controversial world of modern education. His love of children is manifest, his delight in their teachability (Matthew 18:3), his interest in their games (Matt 11:16), as also their unques­tioning response to his strong but gentle authority (Matt 19:14), but the very uniqueness of this greatest of all teachers suggests a world remote from the problems of modern parents and teachers. His earliest disciples were of an unacademic type, skilled in the essential crafts of rural life but still recognizable as “unlearned and ignorant men” (Acts 4:13) lacking the marks of rabbinical training, even after three and a half years of their Master’s patient influence. Their simplicity did not, of course, imply complete ignorance: fishermen could count and at least two of the disciples must have been far from illiterate — Matthew, the ex-tax-gatherer, and Judas, their treasurer, who became the traitor.

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The Apostle Paul’s attitude to culture

 

Superior to all the twelve in education was the man Jesus chose after his resurrection to be the apostle to the Gentiles. This was a witness of a different stamp, endowed with an acute intelligence, born and bred a Roman citizen in the university city of Tarsus, exposed in his earliest years to its sophisticated atmosphere, learned in contemporary literature and able to quote freely, as occasion required from Greek and Cretan poets (Acts 17:28, Titus 1:12), with his education crowned by the high privilege of sitting “at the feel of Gamaliel”, one of the greatest rabbis, “to he taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers” (Acts 22:3). The very fact that such a cultured person could be called to such high office is a sufficient answer to those who would exclude secular educa­tion from the Christian life. Not that Paul ever suggests that education like his was a necessary qualification for Christian discipleship. Occasionally he is driven to refer to it by the envy of critics and he even indulges for the sake of argument in what he at once confesses to be “speaking foolishly in this confidence of boasting” (2 Cor 11:17) but all his secular and sectarian equipment was esteemed to be unworthy of trust, once he had been “apprehended of Christ Jesus” (Phi 3:12). He did not, of course, cease to be an educated man when he put on his spiritual armour: only a man shaped as he had been was fitted to advance the Gospel “by the foolish­ness of preaching” (1Cor 1:19) “to the uttermost parts of the earth” (Acts 1:8) but he had no illusions about his culture’s final worth: it was in Christ Jesus alone that were “hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge”; he it was who was made unto men “wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption” (1Cor 1:30).

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A wide range of converts

 

With such a wide range of educational attainment among the apostles it is not surprising that their converts came from an equally varied background. Some were evidently trained men and women, like Luke, the doctor, who probably cared for Paul in his journeys, Lydia, a capable business-woman, and Philemon, a prosperous and intelligent man of property. Others were educated enough to act as secretaries. Their varying degrees of education, like all their human qualities, served to illustrate the all-embracing grace of God, which can save all repentant sinners, be their brow high or low. Something of the range involved may be hinted at in the blessing, with which the Apocalypse begins, on him that read and those who heard him read “the words of this prophecy” (Revelation 1:3) though the fact that many had to content them­selves with listening may simply reflect the small number of copies then available; but for educated and illiterate alike it was in the Gospel that true wisdom was to be found.

 

In this first dawn of Christianity it is probable that the lively expectation of Christ’s return made believers less concerned than now about the benefits secular education might confer, though human nature, of course, is always the same. He was coming to “stain the pride of all glory” (Isaiah 23:9) to put an end to all social and political endeavour by the inauguration of his millennial kingdom and to bless the redeemed with perfect understanding of all things. Here were enduring privileges with which human culture and material prosperity could not compare. With this deliverance in view, slaves in the church were to accept their condition and live as Christ’s freedmen within it (1Cor 7:22). Pride in knowledge had no place: the chief thing a man who thought he knew anything needed to know was that he knew nothing yet as he ought to know (1Cor 8:2). So imminent was the divine intervention believed by some to be that in an excess of misguided zeal they gave up their jobs and had to be reproved for being parasitic busybodies (2 Thess 3:6-11).

 

That was nineteen centuries ago and Christ has not yet come back. Yet still the Christian must cherish the same hope. Basic to his whole view of life is the conviction that here he has “no continuing city” but he “seeks one to come” (Heb 10:37) that he is not to be “conformed to this world” but to be “transformed by the renewing of his mind” (Romans 12:2), that God’s “kingdom and his righteousness” (Matt 6:33) must be the first goal of all his desire; and, un­shaken by the lapse of so much time and the evident failure of dogmatic forecasts of the date of Christ’s return, which Jesus himself said no man knew (Mark 13:32, Acts 1:7), he is assured that “he who shall come, will come” (Heb 13:14). Nevertheless it is scarcely to be expected that a responsible and morally sensitive believer should display in the twentieth century quite so otherworldly a detachment as seemed fitting in the first. If the Master had counselled physical escape from society and its problems, Christians could have for­gotten all about education and lived as hermits, but instead he insisted that they must continue in the world without being “of the world”. (John 17:15). Tension is implicit in such a situation.

 

Very quickly indeed after the close of the apostolic age the difficulties of the Christian’s calling were all too clearly revealed and the compromise which is inescapable in our condition became the accepted norm. With Constantine’s “conversion” Christianity ceased to be a persecuted minority religion, the church became more and more identified with the slate, the hope of Christ’s return began to fade and preoccupation with the here and now replaced the longing for the divine kingdom that Christ would bring: in Augustine’s phrase the church was seen as being already the “Civitas Dei”, the city of God. Increasingly, the church’s function was thought to be the consecration of the secular, and scholarly minds devoted great natural gifts to the service of the church in the study of the Scriptures and the elucidation, definition and systematisation of doctrine. In this process the purity of the faith was gradually impaired by accommodation to contemporary thought-patterns.

 

Ironically there followed long periods in the Dark and Middle Ages when the church and its monasteries were the chief reposit­ories and purveyors of education in the world. Even in the early stages of the Renaissance and Reformation academic study and scientific enquiry proceeded hand in hand with religious reform, their divergent aims only fully revealing themselves as the seven­teenth century saw the scientific revolution begin to chart its inde­pendent course. It was still for a long time, however, religious communities who founded and maintained in many lands the schools that were the fore-runners of state education and their predominant aim was that men should he equipped to read the saving words of Scripture. There are many alive in Britain today, whose fathers and grandfathers received little formal education, reading the Bible and little else, hut whose outlook could more properly he called cultured than that of many of the products of the process that the 1870 Forster Act set in train.

 

It is against this background of many centuries of the inter­twining of the secular and the religious that the modern believer has to make his decisions about education for himself and his children. He cannot behave as in a vacuum. He cannot unmake history or act as if it had net happened. He may deplore the way that education has developed and be cynical about its results but the fact is irreversible. In most of the countries where these words are likely to be read education is compulsory up to the middle or late ‘teens and is voluntarily extended into the twenties by an increasing proportion of young people, whilst recurrent periods of formal retraining are forecast for many workers in our techno­logical society throughout their working lives.

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All our gifts are from God

 

How the Gospel affects the individual’s decision about educa­tion and career depends in part on the age at which it finds him but there is one general consideration whose relevance is inde­pendent of age. It is the need to avoid the fallacy of talking about our mental powers and varied gifts as if they were evil in themselves, alien from God and fit only to be neglected and despised. “What hast thou that thou didst not receive?” (1 Cor 4:7). We are as God made us, or at least, allowed us to be born. His redemption concerns the whole man. All our physical strength, our intellectual, aesthetic and emotional qualities are not ours to boast of but can be consecrated to God’s service and submitted to His will. What determines the rightness or wrongness of their full development is our motive. If it is self-glory or selfish advancement, the Gospel will require a complete change of front: “No flesh should glory in God’s presence” (1 Cor 1:29), but if our aim is the better service of the Master and of our fellow-men, surely it is inconceivable that God would wish us to stunt the growth or blunt the edge of our intelligence or deaden our sensitiveness. “Do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31) is an injunction that covers a Christ­ian’s education as much as every other department of his life. This still leaves unanswered the detailed questions of what kind of education a man should pursue and how far. These questions arc in fact answered with secular as well as spiritual goals in view, for the spiritual man lives in the real world: but the positive moral principle of the right and wholesome use of all God’s gifts must never be obscured.

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The Gospel finds us at different stages in our education

 

To one the Gospel comes in mature years, when his formal education is already ended. He cannot uneducate himself or forget all he ever knew. Nor does the Gospel require him to try: on the contrary, his attitude to learning will be purified, his appetite for truth sharpened, his worldly knowledge censored by divine wisdom and all his human resources focused on a higher target than he ever knew before.

 

To another the call of the Gospel comes in his student days. Rarely will it he felt to require the abandonment of a course already begun, though a change of specialism may sometimes reduce the potential conflict with Christian ideals. One can, of course, imagine a young person feeling that the pursuit of ad­vanced studies is incompatible with a hearty response to the call of Jesus, and the sacrifice of a promising career could show a laudable idealism. That the question could ever arise in that form is probably an index of the extent to which higher education, by a strange paradox, is now more narrowly associated in young people’s minds with getting on in the world than it was in far less affluent days, when poor students and their parents saw it as worthwhile in itself, quite apart from any material profit that might accrue. To be truly meaningful, such a surrender of career for the Gospel’s sake would demand a consistent follow-through of a kind that the realities of life in our present world would make very hard to maintain. To opt out of the system entirely and devote one’s life as the Twelve did to the preaching of the Word and the fellowship of the tightly-knit Christian com­munity is one thing - and in practice very few come near to doing that. To remain in the system but doing a lowly, humdrum, repetitive chore that fails to stretch one’s brain or satisfy one’s heart is another, likely to make the sensitive believer a victim of frustrations, whose effect upon his physical and spiritual health will quite undo the good of his first self-abnegation.

 

With most people nowadays the approach to discipleship is not sudden but gradual, and decisions about it and education are often being made together: indeed, quite often, the easier and less important decision seems to provide the physical and psycho­logical conditions in which the greater, spiritual choice can be made with a more untrammelled integrity: once away from the believing home, the student can feel more certain that it is the voice of Jesus and not his parents’ that he is yielding to. It does not always work this way but, when it does not, one can never be sure that conversion would have resulted from staying at home.

 

While children are still under the parental roof, believing parents are bound to influence both decisions, whether they try to or not, and sensible ones will dread to use the wrong kind of pressure in either. Without clear thinking all round, our children can find the subject of their education and career confused by unhelpful emotions, even by a sense of guilt. How long their formal education should last depends not on guesses about the nearness of Christ’s return or, usually, on moral judgments, but on a host of factors — their temperament and intelligence, their interest in study and the nature of the career in view. The word “usually” could safely have been omitted from the last sentence, had it been written before the Second World War, but recent tend­encies in colleges throughout the world demand the sober admis­sion that the moral climate there could conceivably worsen to the point where thoughtful parents would decide to keep their sons and daughters out. At the moment these much-publicised developments affect only a minority of students and their mentors but are in danger of bringing whole institutions into disrepute. It would be quite unrealistic to deny that new anxieties have arisen on this account but some anxiety was always there—the fear that young people’s faith would wither in the cold blasts of academic scepticism. That fear sometimes proved well grounded; on the other hand, exposure to such blasts often strengthened the tender shoot more firmly than hot house conservation would have done; and the same is probably true of the new causes of anxiety. It has to be borne in mind that an intelligent young person, denied educational opportunity through his parents’ too protective care, could later lose faith completely as a result of sullen resentment or through sheer lack of armament to meet attacks upon it. Temptations and scepticism are not restricted to the college campus; they just make better news there, bad news alone being good news for the mass communication media.

 

From the economic point of view a parent’s decision about his child’s education is easier than it was but the educational pros and cons are less clear cut. Far less financial sacrifice is involved than used to be the case but the greater accessibility of advanced education increases the number of possible applicants about whose suitability for it there must be some doubt. In earlier days it was only the exceptional working-class child who reached the university and for that very reason he was likely to he lined for the experience; and considerable sacrifice was accepted by religious parents, at least, who were not consciously concerned with social climbing or chiefly with economic prosperity. Now the huge expansion in the number of places has lowered intel­lectual standards, encouraged many entrants who must later be rejected and reduced both the students’ appreciation of the privilege and their standing in the public estimation; whilst the motivation is more blatantly (more honestly some would claim) self-interested than it used to be. In this changed climate believing parents may well hesitate about the right course to adopt; the fundamental questions, however, should have been considered and met much earlier in their children’s lives than this.

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Negative attitudes

 

Perhaps the basic fact all Christian parents must early accept is the unpalatable truth that their children are not believers in the full sense of the word and that some of them may never be. Attitudes, therefore, which a parent may rightly feel necessary for himself, involving, perhaps, sacrifice or the neglect of worldly opportunities, can hardly be imposed on young people by proxy. Leaving on one side the legal difficulties, a father who kept his child from school on the grounds that the educational system was the source of all evil, would not he morally justified in so acting, if only because a child is not a responsible believer. To deprive him of the elements of learning which are now indis­pensable for the most menial tasks would not show true devotion to the child’s spiritual welfare and would almost certainly produce the opposite result from what was intended. In addition, an extra social and economic burden would he created for someone other than the parent eventually to bear. The apostle’s word “If any man provide not for his own, he is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8) could properly be extended to cover the case of a man who deprived his offspring of the education necessary for earning his living and supporting a family. That may be an extreme and improbable — but not entirely fictitious — case; precisely for that reason it clarifies the principle. In fact, if one desired to deliver children from wrong influences, it could be argued that a ban on education in the most impressionable years of early childhood would be more effective than in their late teens, by which time inner reserves should have been built up. It would be unwise and cruel at either stage.

 

It must never be forgotten that every child is a person in his own right. A Christian parent must have in view the child’s bal­anced development. None of the normal avenues for growth should be blacked arbitrarily. Rather, the whole atmosphere of family life can be unobtrusively conditioned so as to encourage wise spiritual decisions as the child matures, with the hope that he will make a genuine, voluntary adherence to the highest moral standards.

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Parents’ choice

 

Very early comes the question as to how and when money should be spent on children. It can safely be asserted that to buy an education outride the state system for snobbish reasons is hardly the kind of choice a believer would be expected to make; it cannot, however, be assumed that every fee-paying parent is actuated by that kind of motive. If, after considering special circumstances affecting a child’s development, a parent prefers to buy his child what he esteems a better or more suitable educa­tion than the one he could get free, he is not necessarily less worthy than if he spent his money on himself or lavished it on toys or clothes or holidays for the family.

 

At every stage (he believer is confronted with the same prob­lems as unbelievers, plus some others, but his faith should make them easier of solution. Faith, presumably, will rule out at once, except in dire emergencies, any decision to cut short a child’s education for selfish reasons — so that more money is brought into the household sooner. On the other hand, it will prevent a parent from pushing an unsuitable child further along the path of study simply for the satisfaction of family pride.

 

It is sometimes argued that the boy who leaves school to get a job as soon as the law permits can devote himself more whole-heartedly to religious matters than his brother who does not begin to earn until his early twenties. There are many good reasons why some boys should start earning early, but this is not one of them. The student can, if he wishes, transfer to Bible study the habit of concentration which his secular studies require. Though not the man of leisure, his brother in a full-time job may think him to be, he certainly has good opportunity to learn now to apply his own inner discipline to the use of his time. If he is wise, he will not delay all service in the Master till he has passed his exams and settled his career, for his opportunity for service may not last as long as that. If he is really a student and not just narrowly pursuing his own professional betterment, he will love reading and thinking, and should be better able than his fellows to express himself clearly and simply. The wage-earning youth will often start with less of a natural bent for study; he may he physically tired at the end of the day; he will have shorter holidays; he will often find that because of economic pressures he has to attend night-school a number of evenings each week. missing thereby mid-week religious activities; and. though he may be far removed from the bohemian extravagance of some student groups and from the influence of articulate scepticism, he could nevertheless be in daily contact with respectable materialism or trade union coercion or hardened worldly cynicism or crude vulgarity, whose encouragement to the spiritual life is not markedly greater than that of academics.

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Education as a career

 

Some believers are drawn to education as the field for their life’s secular work: it is important that, if they enter it. it should be for the right reasons. The range of occupations under the blanket heading of education is so great that it is hard to conceive of them all as belonging to the same profession, and believers of completely divergent natural interests and temperament and mental capacity may find rewarding work within this general field. Nobody can expect to be happy in it, however, if he adopts it with confused or unworthy motives. By an irony of circumstance it has sometimes happened recently that being a qualified teacher or simply willing to teach has made it possible foe a mis­sionary worker to earn his living abroad and in his leisure preach the Gospel there; so that education, called by some the enemy of the faith, has in that sense proved its friend. The very nature of the work, however, precludes any close comparison with the case of the Apostle Paul, specially commissioned by Christ to preach the Gospel to the Gentiles and sustaining himself for long periods, when other relief failed, by the humble craft of tent-making, which allowed him, it would appear, to preach and reason from the Scriptures whilst his hands were busy on that task.

 

Short hours and long holidays which will leave one free and energetic to do the work of an evangelist will certainly prove illusory in some departments of the profession and. even if they do not, the result is unlikely to prove wholly worthy or satisfying: no believer who undertakes work of a vocational kind with the intention of giving the bare minimum of service will find his religious ideals satisfied, however well he uses his spare time. This is especially true when the work involves dealing with people and cannot be worthily performed with one eye on the clock. Indeed, any philosophy is false which sees a believer’s life tidily divided between work on the one hand and Gospel activities on the other: the whole man is a disciple all the time, and he may very well find at the last that his witness to his Lord in the daily encounters with colleagues and others and—in the case of teachers—in the influence exerted more or less unconsciously on generation after generation of young minds has been more effective and acceptable than his more specifically religious endeavours.

 

There are, of course, many attractions for the believer in teaching though in recent years they have been somewhat obscured by political and social agitations. Love of little children at one extreme, delight in scholarship at the other, with an almost infinite variety of admixtures in between, can find here a channel for their wholesome expression that is both demanding in nervous, emotional and physical energy and also rewarding as few occupations can be.

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Theories of education

 

A believing teacher will never give fanatical allegiance to any theory of education but will submit all theories to the scrutiny of the Gospel light. In the age-long controversy as to whether the word “education” is derived from Latin educere (to lead out) or from Latin educare (to feed or rear) he will take sides not only on the grounds of etymology, though it should be clear that if the first derivation were right, the result should be “eduction” (like pro­duction, induction, introduction etc.). But any suggestion that the educator is simply concerned to draw out what is already in I he child’s mind can be rejected for more powerful reasons than that: a Christian knows from his Master and from his own experience that what comes out of the heart of man are “evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness. blasphemies” (Matthew 15:19) and that far too soon the “innocent” child reveals the propensities which, unrestrained and untutored and merely drawn out, would produce some rather unattractive fruit. Meditations of this kind will impinge on all sorts of related matters which the believing teacher will have to grapple with but which could not even begin to be sketched in so short an essay as this—­discipline and punishment, freedom and restraint, school prayers and religious instruction, the inculcation of moral standards in an increasingly amoral, if not immoral, society.

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Believers’ corporate attitude to education

 

The Christian community will have its attitude to education well founded if it begins with the conviction that the Faith has no need of protection from man’s intelligence. If the philosopher Broad, was right in his allegation that the British keep their religious convictions insulated from the corrosive effect of their own intelligence, that must not be true of the real disciples among them: they have no need to beg the question by assuming that the effect would be corrosive: nowhere in the Bible are they enjoined to wear blinkers, to fear any scrutiny of the Scriptures or to imagine that the truth of God can best be defended by equating it with their own necessarily limited conception of it. One might say that true faith not only can go hand in hand with a profound conviction of one’s own imperfect understanding but can hardly exist without it. To suggest the contrary is to risk the perilous substitution of trust in one’s own dogmatism for the humble response to the liberating challenge of those divine thoughts which “are higher than” (Is 55:9) our thoughts and whose wisdom is “past Finding out” (Rom11:33). Where Scripture and secular learning seem to give opposing answers to problems, the explanation is sometime—that the latter is merely speculating; but sometimes it is that we have asked Scripture the wrong kind of questions, which it was not designed to answer and the conflict is therefore imaginary and totally unnecessary. In such a situation to reject the divine revela­tion and condemn education and all its works are alike unwise and unprofitable reactions.

 

A second sound foundation is the acknowledgement that educa­tion is not something that happens only in schools and colleges and universities: the multitude of influences brought to bear on us in every area of our lives are part of the process and the least educated believers of to-day, including those who speak most critically of it, would seem dangerously sophisticated to a majority of our forbears.

 

Further. Christian love explodes a number of fallacies. One is that imperviousness to secular instruction is a proof of spirituality, another is that, life being the best of all universities, long survival in it suffices of itself to make a man learn all its lessons. Both these notions run counter to New Testament teaching. Any trust in worldly wisdom, whether of the study or of the market-place, is to be deplored: brain and brawn alike are to be submitted in the Christian to that divine discipline which all humble hearts and which simple souls can receive, whatever their intelligence quotient may be. All are invited to seek that “wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy” (James 3:17)

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Education a divisive influence?

 

The effect of education can, unfortunately, be disruptive in family life, separating the educated child from its uneducated parents; they find they have nothing to talk about and finish up by never going to see each other; unintentionally they grow apart. There have been many tragic cases, but few where the family had a strong religious foundation. The true Christian gospel encour­ages such a thoughtful outlook in all its adherents, whether gifted and cultured or not, and such habits of conscientious diligence in the use of God’s gifts, that the education gap alone will rarely prove unbridgeable for believing fathers and sons: both know and appreciate that, though they may put it in different words, what they have in common is by far the most important thing in life.

 

The same is true of the ecclesial family, the church. It would be idle to pretend that there also education may not be a potentially disruptive force: it already was in apostolic times: “knowledge” can “puff up” (1 Cor 8:1) though in the first century it was not just secular knowledge that the apostle found it necessary to reprove but the claim to a superior spiritual insight, a “gnosis” which expressed itself in its own special jargon. Divisive behaviour has been and can be still the work of uneducated members as well as of others, and often manifests itself in the cultivation of a special group idiom and the adoption of an exclusive terminology. Whatever our type, our duty is clear- to endeavour “to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph 4:3) The member who throws his intellectual weight about is a serious threat to harmony and spiritual progress. No sensitive Christian, whose learning has done its proper work of revealing to him how little he knows, could ever be guilty of despising simpler members of the com­munity: his Master’s example should prevent him from parading his accomplishments, talking over their heads intentionally or even thoughtlessly, taking deliberate advantage in discussion of his greater mental agility, or disturbing their faith by the inoppor­tune agitation of questions which without his interference would never trouble them. Equally no really genuine believer, simple in the New Testament meaning of the word, free from that proud humility which is almost more sickening than pride undisguised, will erect barriers to fellowship through envy or resentment of superior attainments in his brethren. The message of some of the simplest preachers of modern times fails to be profitably heard because their fellow-believers decide in advance that it is certain to be over their heads with the result that they do not hear what is said but rather what they imagine is bound to be said. This must be part of the explanation when equally unsophisticated hearers react so differently to the same address, one finding it unnecessarily complicated and another rejoicing in its short words, searching clarity and evident sincerity. Similar preconcep­tions can even lead to a censorship that bears more resemblance to party political strife and the battles between management and labour than to Christian love and devotion to truth. “The heart of man is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9) and no believer can afford to think that this is not true of him: our motives must be rigorously scrutinised in all the attitudes we adopt to every aspect of the Gospel’s work, even in small matters like the use of a preacher’s degree in publicity material, so that we advocate its inclusion or omission solely to promote the salvation of men and women and the edification of the church.

 

Christ died to save repentant sinners. The proper response to his saving love requires self-discipline and restraint from all, whatever the cubic capacity of our brain-box. A community truly devoted to Truth and Love will rejoice in the wide span of the divine grace that can compass so great a range of need. It will take it for granted that some see difficulties where others are aware of none and will humbly try to grow into such a balanced maturity that the simplest faith will be buttressed without the sacrifice of the intellectual integrity of any. “Intellectual” itself will not be used as a smear word, for all v/ill realize that the merely intel­lectual approach to religion has sometimes been the mark of non-intellectuals, more at home with text-slinging and sectarian debate than with the spiritual and moral and devotional aspects of the Gospel.

[Resource Manager]

Preaching in an educated world

 

Any religious body which is content to pitch its appeal at a merely emotional level, using evangelic devices of varying kinds but disdaining reason and rational discussion, is likely to despise education and in the process severely limit the scope of its work and the composition of its audience; and such bodies do exist. Any body which, while lacking the miraculous endowment of the original Christian church, proclaims a Gospel grounded in history and supported by evidence, reasoning from Scripture, contending for the faith, seeking to turn its hearers from fables and from unbelief, must be equipped with an understanding of its own position and of those it ventures to oppose, which is at least suffi­cient for the purposes of a meaningful exchange. A common language is needed and an awareness of other points of view, if preaching is to strike a responsive chord; ignorant, unfair carica­tures of the belief and philosophies of others will win only the disgust they deserve. Genuine, positive, heart-warming preaching from unlearned men will still evince respect and gratitude from a more cultured audience, but embarrassment and revulsion will be the inescapable reaction to ignorance that gives itself airs and attempts the explanation of matters which it is totally incompetent to discuss.

 

Moreover, a religious body of lowly origins, whose members have gone up in the world socially as a result of wholesome family life, puritan thrift and the responsible use of resources, will find itself subjected to serious internal strains and risk a considerable reduction in numbers, if its members begin to find themselves better qualified to speak of their secular studies or their private hobbies than of their religious faith, especially when exactly the opposite used to be the dominant characteristic of their prede­cessors. It has a duty to provide incentives for every member to know at least as much about his religion as about his job: nothing must be done in the planning of its classes or its publications to discourage the application of the same standards of honesty and integrity to all religious discussions as are required of its members by the most rigorous rules of their craft or profession. Too many could trace the beginnings of the shipwreck of their faith to what was at first, perhaps, an unexpressed impression that they must leave at the door of their assembly the balanced judgment, the objective analysis and the unprejudiced investigation that had become second nature to them in their private and professional lives. The health of the whole body and of its individual members requires that such qualities be proved to be compatible with a spirit of reverent worship, with services that speak to the heart as well as to the head and with the humble acknowledgement that there are many problems which the finite human mind can never solve.

[Resource Manager]

Christianity a religion for the whole man

 

It is especially fitting that the harmonious development of the whole man should be encouraged in a Christian community whose foundation doctrine of man is the teaching of both Old and New Testaments that “man is a living being, intrinsically and properly one and individual not compound and separable…the whole man is soul man” (Milton, De Doctrina). Where the pagan notion of an immortal soul inhabiting a prison-house of clay is rejected, all a man’s “natural” gifts are gratefully accepted as his on trust from God, to be dedicated to His service. Rightly appreciated, the Christian Gospel must make a man dread to show pride in his own powers or to neglect them, or to find himself zealously applying his wits to merely making money or furthering his material well-being. He must seek to integrate his education, from whatever source it comes, from senses, parents, teachers, books, experience, under the guidance and control of the Word of God. In an ideal world the Bible, prayer and meditation, the fellowship of the saints and their regular memorial service and other acts of wor­ship would be the sole influences at work in the education of the spiritual man. Even in the far from ideal world that Christians must inhabit, they can draw selectively and prayerfully on the multifarious forces at work around them and aspire with single­ness of heart and a mind not split into compartments to think on ‘whatsoever things are true, honest, just pure, lovely and of good report” (Phi 4:8).

 

In all ages and for all disciples the chief desire is to be made “wise unto salvation through faith that is in Christ Jesus”. This demands of us the honest, conscientious use of strength and heart and soul and mind both in daily work and in religious exercises, so that in each of us the aim of the divine “doctrine, reproof, correction and instruction in righteousness” might at length be achieved through the challenging example of Jesus and his abundant grace, and that each may be found at the last a “man of God ... perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works” (2 Tim 3:15-17).

 

 

H. A. TWELVES

 

GospelAndEducationTwelves.pdf

 

 

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