116. Education and Christian Faith

Prophet, Priest, King, and Education

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Education

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 4

Track: ?

Dictation Name: RR306B4

Date:

In the 1950s when I began to speak on Christian education, there were times when a minister or a layman stood up in an audience to denounce me for deflecting Christians from the gospel. That sort of thing is rare now, although occasionally I’m taken to task by someone for my emphasis on Christian schools. As a matter of fact, of late, the kind of approach I meet is somewhat different, especially in recent months I find that people talk to me dripping with love as a Christian brother to set me straight on things. I had a letter not too long ago from one of these dear brothers in Ohio telling me the horrible things about the Christian schools of Ohio that I should know and I should not lower myself to associate with them. In the course of his letter, he made some astounding statements about the truth of the Canal/Winchester Case and the fact that David Gibbs was a Totalitarian—did you know that? I sent a copy of my answer to him, which was a call for repentance [Laughter] to your offices.

More recently in one of my journeys I encountered one of these dear Christian brothers who lives not too far from this area who told me very gently and with a voice dripping with love that it was time that men like Roy Thompson and I did some thinking and realized how we were leading godly people astray, teaching them to break the law, to go to jail. And this certainly was not preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ, he said. And he went on to say it was a fearful burden we were assuming to lead people so badly astray and he went on to assure me, don’t you know that the State of Ohio is ready to let every Christian school teach the Bible? How can you counsel anyone to break the law?

Now of course, what I said in return was whose law is being broken? [Audience ‘Amen!’] Who is Lord—Christ, or the State of Ohio? Now I said, Jesus is Christ according to scripture. The word ‘Christos’ literally means ‘anointed.’ To be anointed is to be king, to be lord. The very word ‘lord’ (curios in the Greek) means ‘absolute owner and god.’ And the Lord insists on control of His property, of all His property. This means that not only this house belongs to God, but I do. He owns me, lock, stock and barrel—every atom of my being. It means that the school belongs to Him. And if the school is in rebellion against Him, as Roy Thompson told you, it is a sin to have your child there. It means that medicine belongs to Him.

I drove my wife 300 miles recently because we don’t know (possibly there is one, but we haven’t learned of him yet) of a Christian doctor in our area. We’re only two years in our present location. I didn’t want her in the hands of an abortionist, a murderer, a man who’s anti-God. The Lord insists on absolute control of His property and I don’t know of any area that is outside His government. Biology, botany, physics, chemistry, mathematics, they’re all aspects of His creation, ways of understanding His handiwork. There is no way of escaping God’s fences, the limits of His property, because they exist as far as creation, to the outermost limits of the universe and throughout all of heaven. As a result, what we have begun is indeed only a beginning. Through education, through the Christian school we are declaring that the Word of the Lord applies to every area of life. So we begin with the subjects and then we go out and we say to the Christian, to the State, you have a duty to obey Jesus Christ. We say this to medicine. We say it to the arts and sciences. And if there is anything in your town or community or in our country that isn’t Christian it has no business operating.

God’s claims are total. “All things were made by Him and without Him….” there was nothing. In the beginning, nothing but God. All things came into being by His sovereign Word and nothing can be understood apart from that Word. So you begin with that Word to understand any subject.

The curriculum of the schools right on through college is the liberal arts curriculum. That’s the traditional name. last year those of you who were present at the conference will recall, I touched on the meaning of the liberal arts curriculum. Liberal arts means the art of being a free man. We heard in the previous hour from Mr. Reminger, the definition of a free man that the humanists give. The free man is a man who views the world and every subject and every area of life apart from God, without the supernatural. How can we view any subject in the curriculum or any area of life that way? We are then Humanists. For us, the art of a free man is taught in scripture. ‘If the Son make you free, then are ye free indeed.” No other way.

But Humanism has another program. No in Alabama last week, Mrs. Louden was a bit disappointed that I didn’t go into the contrast between humanistic and a Christian education. So let me do it briefly now.

Humanistic education tells us first of all that all problems are social problems, not theological. And with this, we disagree. All subjects are theological because God is creator of all things and Christ is Lord over all things.

Then second, Humanism tells us that all social problems are solvable by man. Man is savior. And therefore you study the subject as lord so that you might have the answers for every area of life as lord. This we cannot believe as Christians. Nor can we allow the child to feel, whether it is chemistry or any other subject, that that can be known apart from the Word of God. Nothing has meaning apart from Him.

Then third, the Humanist holds that the school or education is the panacea for all social problems. This is why I titled one of my books, The Messianic Character of American Education. Humanistic education is messianic, it is Salvationist, and the schools are the ‘salvation army’ of the Humanists. They mean business. They’re dedicated. Theirs is a program of salvation, and you cannot adopt their perspective in any subject without promoting a rival doctrine of salvation.

Then fourth, the Humanist schools openly declare that the goal of education is not knowledge nor information, but self-realization. Again, think back on what Mr. Reminger was telling you. The Humanist Manifesto, speaking of the happiness of man, the fulfillment of man, the self-realization of man. This is the purpose—not the glory of God, not our calling in Him.

But as Christians, what is our purpose? God created Adam and set him on earth and gave him a task. He gave him a calling that had a three-fold focus: to be priest, prophet and king unto the Lord and under the Lord. The first Adam failed. So the second or last Adam came, as Very God of Very God and very man of very man—truly God and truly man. And as the head of the new humanity, became priest, prophet and King faithfully unto the Father. And in Him we are priests, prophets and kings.

What does this mean, practically? It means that as priests, we dedicate every area of life and thought to Christ our Lord. So that we bring every subject, every aspect of our life, our homes, our children, our calling, our church and every kind of study we are engaged in and dedicate it to the Lord. You have a priestly calling as teachers. Instruction was the function of the Levites. It is still a Levitical calling. Thus, we cannot approach the subject as though it was neutral. There is not a neutral fact in all of creation because every fact, as I told some of you in the workshop yesterday, is a God-created fact. It has a given interpretation, a God-given interpretation. It can only be truly known in terms of the Lord and His Word. Thus, our priestly calling is to dedicate every area of life and thought, every subject, every institution, every vocation, every person to Christ our Lord.

Then we are called in Christ to be prophets. What is the work of a prophet? A prophet is one who speaks for God. And so we declare the Word of the Lord, God’s purpose in terms of every area of life and thought. We interpret mathematics in terms of it. It is an instrument to be used for the glory of God.

I pointed out yesterday how mathematics is an area where man says there is no pre-established universe. We make our own universe. And someone in the class pointed out how the professor at the university had said mathematics is fiction. For us it is an aspect of the God-created order of the universe.

And the same is true of chemistry. We find God’s order everywhere. Dr. Walter Lammerts, one of the founders of the Creation Research Society which is made up of scientists, most of them research scientists who believe in six-day Creationism and their journal is simply research papers by creationists, has won, I believe, eleven international prizes in genetics. And he said it was very easy because he began with a firm, literal believe in Genesis 1. And he said as a result, I wasn’t wasting my time trying to accomplish things that I knew were impossible. And he said the Evolutionary scientists didn’t believe that each thing was made after its kind and he was trying to do things endlessly that were impossible.

Those of you who teach science will find that the Creation Research Society’s journal is excellent resource material, and they have reprinted some of their articles in two volumes which I think are exceptionally enjoyable reading.

One article, if I may digress for a moment, which I like especially. It amused me. Of course, they have the Carbon 14 dating method, so these two men took and analyzed some of the trees around a major airport in terms of that dating method. The trees had been planted about eight years before and were being replaced. The trees tested out at about 2,500 years old and older. [Laughter} Why? Well of course they had absorbed a considerable amount of carbon from the jet landings and take-offs. And as they pointed out, the Uniformitarian method makes no allowances for anything like that.

Now to return to the subject, as priests we dedicate every area of life and thought to our Lord. As prophets, we declare the Word of the Lord to every area. And we develop the implications thereof and we apply that to our subjects. So that the Christian part of the curriculum is not Bible, it’s chemistry, mathematics, physics, geometry, algebra, geography—everything. Priest, prophet and king; we are as kings under Christ, to exercise dominion, to rule every area of life and thought in His name.

When I was a student at Berkley, one of the ways I made money to put myself through was grading examination paper. I think I’ve graded more papers than some of you will in your lifetime because I would grade as many as four and five thousand students in a semester. It was a hard way to earn a living and at finals time, I was up all night two or three nights during those closing ten days. But I graded among other departments, the papers for the linguistic courses. And I was thrilled when I sat in class one day and I heard the professor of linguistics speak about linguistics and to say that there was a peculiar group of people who were the leaders—the world leaders in linguistics and there wasn’t a university anywhere to equal them—and the very strange thing about these people was that they believed in the Bible, literally, from cover-to-cover. Their name, he said, is the Wycliffe Bible Translators and their material in linguistics is without equal. Well, that was the happiest moment in my university career, and I thought to myself proudly, here, in one area we Christians are number one!

Well, I think we can now say in another area—schools—we are number one. [Audience ‘Amen!’] And what it means to be kings in Christ is to be able to go on then and say in one area after another, we’re number one because this is what God requires of us. We are to be kings unto our Lord.

I was delighted, let me add, when I was at the Pensacola College’s Summer Institute this summer teaching, to learn of their school of nursing. And I told Dr. Graff that I hoped they would go on soon to start a medical school. [Audience ‘Amen.’] Because we Christians need to go out into the area of medicine now and to be number one there and then number one in one area after another. And you know one of the things that’s going to produce that? Your schools; your schools.

I told some of you yesterday that at one university of 15-17,000 (I’ve forgotten the exact number of students), a professor bitterly claimed that there weren’t a half a dozen students who were fit to teach, whose minds were not blown either by narcotics or the public schools. [Laughter] Now that’s a good evaluation coming from their own ranks!

What’s happening? I know one major university that a few years ago was quietly going through and trying to eliminate Christians, Bible-believing Christians, from graduate school applications. Why? They were a nuisance. They were arguing with the professors. They believed things that made the university feel ashamed to think that somebody was actually working for a master’s or a doctorate who believed that nonsense. I asked one person (not a Christian), why this quiet and unannounced change of position? And this person laughed and said, well, those Christian students won’t try to burn the university down! And that was no joke! They had had their graduate students lead in the violence.

What is the end result of all this going to be? Why some of the best men of science and some of the best engineers, the best scholars in a few years are going to be your graduates. And if you think this doesn’t scare them, you’re assuming they’re not intelligent and they don’t see what’s happening. They are frightened by the picture of the future that looms with the growth of the Christian schools. They may talk about you being inferior, but they know better.

It is important for every subject in your school to be approached in terms of the Lord as creator and in terms of the teacher as a priest, prophet and king committing that area to Christ and speaking from that area in the name of the Lord. Otherwise, it will pass on humanistic education and humanistic faith.

I wonder if you have been aware of the fact that so many of the leaders of Africa today where we are having a new kind of barbarianism, are not cannibals out of the jungle (although a few of them have practiced cannibalism), they’re university graduates. The majority of the leaders of the new Africa who are leading in this new barbarianism have degrees from Oxford and Cambridge and a lot of American universities. This is why they’re so dangerous. If the leaders of the new Africa were some uneducated cannibal out of the jungle, the problems wouldn’t be as severe. It’s because they bring the knowledge and the education and the power that goes with it out of the Humanism of our day to bear on those countries that they are so deadly.

And of course, our problem is that we have the same kind of barbarism, the new barbarianism, in our state capitals and in Washington and in Moscow, London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid and elsewhere. Sometimes it masquerades under the name of Christ. But it is still barbarianism and Humanism leads to barbarianism. And of course, this is what is overwhelming us today. Our cities are becoming jungles more dangerous than those of Africa because of the products of Humanism and humanistic education.

Now David Gibbs spoke about the difference between preference and conviction. Let’s use another word for conviction: necessity. Necessity is laid upon me, declares the apostle. Woe is me if I preach not the gospel. Now, I submit every subject that has any place in the Christian curriculum should have a sense of the same kind of godly necessity. It is a means of declaring that God is God, that Christ is the Lord and that every area must be brought into captivity to Him. Without that sense of necessity, we cannot prevail in the days ahead. But we are told that when we stand fast upon Christ as the Rock, when we move in terms of that sense of necessity being laid upon us, when we as Christ’s Church, His Kingdom, His property are so grounded, the gates of hell cannot prevail against us.

That word prevail, in the Greek, has the meaning of hold out. It means that we’re not the defenders—they are! We are the army on the march! [Audience ‘Amen!’] And it is our duty therefore in every subject to recognize that we are creating an army on the march. We are creating the leadership for the battle. We do it out of a sense of necessity because we are the ones who are going to prevail. We are going to break the barriers of the enemy because Jesus is Lord.

This means then, that we have to have a sense of priorities. A good many years ago, at the beginning of the 50s, I heard a very fine elderly pastor preach to about 1500 pastors at a conference, a sermon which I’m afraid very few heeded, but it moved me profoundly. The title of it was “Majoring in Minors.” And what he did was to say that most ministers today were majoring in minors, in trifles and occupying themselves endlessly in the pulpit and out of the pulpit with trifles and that that was comparable to putting away the dishes before you leave the house when the house is on fire. And he summoned them to major in majors, to know they were in a battle and to fight as good soldiers of Jesus Christ.

As a result, when we as Christian educators teach our children, we must major in majors. We must recognize that we have a battle and you haven’t seen anything yet. If in any state or in any area the enemy for a moment has pulled back, it’s only to regroup for a major attack. But in the face of that attack, we must have this confidence: if God be for us, who can be against us? And so it is imperative for us then to be clearly unequivocally and without compromise for the Lord.

I began by telling you of this dear, dear brother who felt that Roy Thompson and I were leading all of you astray and making jailbirds, or potential jailbirds out of you people. When I spoke to him about whose law, how about the Law of the Lord? How about obedience to Christ rather than to the State? And he said, well if you want to look at it that way, I suppose you can. But when you can preach the gospel in the school and use the Bible and there isn’t a state in the country that’s barring you from that, why bother?

I’ll conclude with my words to him. I told him that he was selling fire insurance, not preaching Jesus Christ the Lord. And I submit that we are called to do more than to preach just fire insurance, [Audience ‘Amen!’] that we are called to proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord or prophet, priest and King and we are called and required and necessity is laid upon us to be His priests, prophets and kings wherever we are.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, we thank Thee for the joy that is ours in Jesus Christ and for the victory that is ours in Him. We thank Thee that nothing can separate us from His love, neither life nor death, nor powers nor principalities, nor this state nor any other state for Thou hast called us, Thou hast empowered us with Thy Spirit and Thou hast declared that the very gates of Hell cannot stand up against us when we move in Thy Spirit and in Thy Word. Make us ever bold in this faith, zealous in Thy service, faithful to Thy Word and joyful in Thy service, knowing that we are priests, prophets and kings of the Most High God. Our God, we thank Thee, in Jesus’ name, amen. [Audience ‘Amen!’]