Jul 20, 2010
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The first two posts in this series discussed 1) the problems created in Christian education when the Bible is not soundly integrated into the curriculum and 2) Level 1 Bible Integration (BI) at BJU Press. Now on to level 2!
Level 2: Responding with the Bible
2a Serving with the Discipline
Using the academic matter to become more effective in obeying the Creation Mandate and loving your neighbor.
If most readers of this blog are like I was, they will be a little nonplussed—maybe worse—by the moniker “Creation Mandate.” Sounds like those people who want the church to take over the U.S. government and execute all the Democrats.
I doubt you’ll find anyone who actually espouses that position (maybe just some of the Democrats and a few compromising Republicans), and it’s certainly not an accurate depiction of the Bible’s teaching. The Bible is clear about the importance and continuing validity of the Creation Mandate. It’s in the very first chapter of Scripture for all to see!
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen. 1:26-28)
I’ve written about this before. Suffice it to say that 1) the Great Commission does not abrogate or even conflict with the Creation Mandate (or vice versa) and 2) as soon as you start trying to obey the latter you start running into the academic disciplines. And if you add in the simple but sweeping Second Great Commandment—“love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18)—you have an additional major reason to engage in wise dominion.
- In science, you may need to find the best way to manage soil erosion along the Mississippi River. You’d be serving your many neighbors up and down its banks if you came up with even one good idea.
- In language arts, you may write some poetry that helps people deal with the reality of death.
- In math, you may produce some mathematical modeling for weather prediction which saves much people alive.
- In history, you may use the patterns of historical events in a given region to determine when it is prudent to go to war.
2b Worshiping with the Discipline
Using the academic matter to declare God’s glory.
But obeying the Second Great Commandment can never be an end in itself, because there is one mandate that supersedes it: “Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” Every academic discipline is a means for worshiping and glorifying God directly.
- Language arts can glorify God by declaring His greatness and goodness in many forms—journaling, hymn writing, even writing (or just studying!) something like the Chronicles of Narnia.
- In math, a student of the discipline could use the mathematical concept of infinity to declare God’s greatness.
- In history, it’s a delicate matter, but we do have Bible guidelines for tracing God’s providence (I Cor. 15:25-28; Eph. 1:9-10).
- In science, studying the vastness and complexity of interstellar space is even enough to make many non-Christians marvel (Ps. 19). That marveling ought to become worship for the Christian (Ps. 8:3–4).
Level 2, Eschatology, and the Great Commission
There are some real issues of eschatology which I have completely papered over in this section, but for most people it should be enough to read—to really read—God’s original and abiding purpose for mankind on earth in Genesis 1. There’s much more to our lives than obeying the Creation Mandate, but nothing less. For me this is an issue of biblical obedience. It would be as wrong for me to disobey the Creation Mandate as it would to ignore the Great Commission.
Plus, I find that Matthew 28:19-20 can’t bear the weight of the academic disciplines. If the only reason I am here on earth is to evangelize, why bother with any school past the age when I can share the gospel and make a living to support my gospel work? And if the only justification for sitting through Art History class is the potential that I might witness to an art buff sitting next to me on a plane, are my many class-hours staring at details from Fra Angelico really worthwhile? Exactly how many art facts do I need to know to have intelligent discussion with my seatmate?
There’s got to be a better foundation for Christian academic study than providing evangelistic conversation starters.
Jul 16, 2010
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A Personal Narrative
When I entered a Christian school in 1985, the movement it was part of was still young and full of excitement. The generation of teachers, principals, and pastors which began the several Christian schools I eventually attended was dedicated and deeply self-sacrificial. I praise their memory. And many of them are still around 30 years on.
But today, I gather (somewhat unscientifically), the picture is a little different. There are still thousands of Christian workers who are highly motivated, gladly spending all their energies on educating Christian young people, but some jadedness has set in, too.
Many Christian school grads—including a not insignificant percentage of my own small class—show little evidence that they spent 13 years memorizing Bible verses, attending weekly chapels, and using up their parents’ hard-earned money in a safe Christian environment that was supposed to guarantee their future holiness.
My good principal from my high school years was planning, last I knew, to write an Ed.D. dissertation on what the movement can do to keep those kids from dropping off the face of the church, but drop they have. Their Facebook pages tell the story.
Many schools have shut down; others are shrinking. Rumors of the movement’s death may be greatly exaggerated, but there are certainly signs of ill health.
There’s no silver bullet for the problems among Christian schools, because no human can regenerate another one. But I love this little phrase from Jonathan Edwards: “[God’s] grace is not to be limited, nor means to be neglected.” God can save the Christian school movement, and there are things we can do about it as His agents.
Means to the End
One of the main things we can do is make sure that Christian schools are truly Christian. That is, we can put the hard mental work into teaching all disciplines from a truly Christian perspective. The nomenclature in the biz is “Bible Integration.”
Integrating the Bible doesn’t mean taking what is perceived to be a secular subject and adding some Bible verses. When that happens, our poor students often end up memorizing Bible statements that have little truly to do with what they’re studying (and what verse do you choose for dodge-ball instruction in PE—perhaps the one about God “hurling a storm” against Jonah’s ship?).
No, Bible Integration starts from the other side; it starts with God’s divine Word. Bible Integration means finding out what the Bible really has to say about why we should study our world—and then working out the implications for the various academic disciplines.
Levels of Bible Integration
Some years ago, a few educator-theologians at my employer, BJU Press, developed a tri-level schema by which we can evaluate the Bible Integration in our textbooks. The purpose of the schema is not to encourage teachers to spend all their time at the highest level; that would be impossible and undesirable. But, as with Bloom’s taxonomy, teachers who never lead their students away from the lowest levels are doing their students a disservice. They are not showing them how to “think Christianly.” They are also guilty of what Francis Schaeffer called the “Two-Story View,” dividing life into upper (spiritual) and lower (earthly) stories which have little to do with one another.
The levels are a way of gauging how well we are obeying God’s never-abrogated command to fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it (Gen. 1:26-28). As soon as you start trying to obey that command, you run into the domains of culture and the academic disciplines. Are we prepared to say that God doesn’t care how we subdue, or that He doesn’t have any structures set up in creation which should guide our dominion? If Math and History—and Linguistics and Sociology and Geology and even the much-maligned field of Entomology—are just means to the end of making a living, not of obeying the God of the universe, they’re only worth what they pay.
Level 0—No Bible Integration.
The first level of Bible Integration is not a level, but Level 0 is all too common among Christian educators. It relegates the Bible to devotionals, prayer requests, and non-academic counseling. There are no clear connections between Bible statements and the academic matter at hand. The Bible is sealed in a separate tupperware and stacked ceremonially on top of the math, history, English, and science containers. The main difference between a school with no Bible Integration and the much larger and dirtier publicly-funded school down the street is the existence of Bible class.
Bible class, chapel, devotionals, and personal counseling are good things which have an important place in a Christian school helping parents train the whole person (I write Bible textbooks, so of course I believe this!). But surely we can do better than staple Bible verses onto a public school. Adding Bible class is not enough, nor is stressing character. There’s got to be more to a truly Christian view of education. The Bible has got to make a substantive difference in math class, or math class is not worth having.
Stay tuned for Level 1!
May 15, 2010
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Most major translations agree that man is to have dominion “over all the earth.”
Genesis 1:26 (NIV) Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
ESV—”over all the earth”
RSV—”over all the earth”
NASB—”over all the earth”
KJV—”over all the earth”
NET—”over all the earth”
HCSB—”all the earth”
NKJV—”over all the earth”
LXX—πάσης τῆς γῆς
But three major translations have another rendering:
The TNIV renders the same Hebrew phrase (וּבְכָל־הָאָרֶץ) with “all the wild animals,” while the NLT has “all the wild animals on the earth.” The NRSV is different by one word: “over all the wild animals of the earth.”
A note in the TNIV explains that, in the committee’s judgment, this is the “probable reading of the original Hebrew text (see Syriac),” while the Masoretic Text has “the earth.”
Neither of my top two Genesis commentaries (Wenham and Hamilton) even mention this question, but the UBS Translator’s Handbook does include a note:
The Hebrew Masoretic text has “and over all the earth,” which the authors of the Hebrew Old Testament Textual Project (HOTTP) rate as {A}. Another textual variant is “and over all the animals of the earth”; HOTTP believes this may be the original form and therefore suggests placing it in a footnote.
The difference seems pretty important! Either mankind has dominion over the animals or over all the earth. But note that whether this phrase gives man dominion “over all the earth” or not, he still has dominion over all the animals—and, perhaps more importantly, the passage still says man is to “subdue” the earth. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (1:28).
Some Christians are fearful of this verse because of postmillennial or Reconstructionist overreach, but note that the Bible never abrogates this command. Subduing the earth and having dominion over it remain part of our marching orders even as Christians. I find that fact liberating. It means, to get down to the nitty and the quite gritty, that the mulching and digging and beautifying I did last week in my yard wasn’t a waste even if no one notices it. I subdued my little plot of ground. (Except for those nasty stumps! But I have purchased a few subduing mechanisms at Home Depot!)
I think it means even more, however. It means that God built a justification for the domains of human culture and the academic disciplines into His blueprint for humanity. This may sound like overreach on my own part, and I’m still exploring this topic, but here’s what I mean: As soon as you start trying to subdue the earth, to “make something of it” you might say, you run into agronomy, science, engineering. As soon as you subdue the earth into a garden or subdue a river by bridging it, you’re into art and architecture. Such as they are, gardens and bridges and wisely fallowed fields honor God by honoring His design for the world.
That design comes in two forms: God’s special and His general revelation. His special revelation in Scripture tells you to build your bridge for God’s glory and out of love for your neighbor who uses it to commute. His general revelation tells you to construct your garden according to the principles of beauty (color, shape, size, proportion) He built into the world. There are, then, Christian ways to engineer and garden. You will subdue whether you have God in mind or not, but you should subdue for Him (Rom. 11:36; Col. 1:16).
The Fall frustrates our attempts at subduing. The world doesn’t quite work the way it should because it’s groaning under the same weight of sin we are (Rom. 8:22). Only when God puts all things in subjection under Christ’s feet will all bridges and gardens—and every other product of human earth-subduing—give full honor to God (1Cor. 15:20-28). But it’s striking that God never said, “Eh, forget that subduing stuff. There’s more important work to do.”
So Christian engineers and gardeners (to name just a few of the vocations) don’t have to feel like they are wasting their time. They have many other obligations in God’s world (including Matt. 28:19-20!), but in their daily work they’re doing what God said to do.
Dec 26, 2009
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Lewis’ words ground me when major scientific issues arise. I as a voting citizen—and, more importantly, a human charged with wise dominion over the earth—am responsible to evaluate the public arguments as best I can, which is something I do through major (responsible) news sources. But I generally do not have the training or the expertise to make an independent determination on scientific matters, and most other people don’t either. I have to trust some authority.
The debate for us non-experts really boils down to one question: whom do you trust? I would suggest that’s why the controversy over climate change has fallen down predictable political lines, and also why people are so passionate about it. The less they can defend their cause with reasoned arguments (and how many non-specialists really have a handle on the complicated data?), the more partisans ramp up the rhetorical force.*
Abortion is one scientific issue that’s different. Positions don’t always fall down neat political lines, especially among the electorate. Some Democrats enlist in the pro-life cause, some Republicans don’t. The moral issues in this debate are not opaque to all but specialists; they’re on the ultrasound photos for all to see.
——————–
*This doesn’t mean that reasoned arguments are always to be trusted over rhetorical force. Both are appropriate and should work in harmony.
Mar 24, 2009
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Do you find yourself baffled by the Old Testament? You want to apply it to your life, but many passages seem impenetrable and the lessons you hear drawn from others just don’t ring true?
One idea I was taught in seminary that has begun to yield some rich results for me is that of biblical theology (BT)—or I could also say worldview. That’s because a rounded BT itself constitutes a worldview (see Wolters
, 9). It answers the questions of why we’re all here and where we’re all going.
One of the most basic ideas of a Christian worldview, and one of the ideas that holds a sound BT together from Eden to New Earth, is that God’s original purpose for mankind was not revoked after the fall. God revealed that design in the programmatic passage of Genesis 1:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
What does BT draw from this passage for a Christian worldview?
- God wanted man to image Him—something that is and isn’t happening in every one of us. It is happening, because all men are created in God’s image whether they believe in the God of that image or not (Gen. 9:6; Jas. 3:9). It isn’t happening to a full degree because only in Christ can we better approximate that image (Col. 3:10; Eph. 4:24).
- God wanted man to have dominion over all animals and over all the earth. That includes domains of culture: economics, politics, art.
- God wanted man to produce many offspring, filling the earth.
- God wanted man to “subdue” the earth, a word most commonly used to refer to enslaving or subjugating.
- God wanted man to have dominion, something only God, the sovereign, can bestow.
Now to my title. Let’s connect this passage to the famous programmatic statement God gave Israel in Exodus 19:4–6:
You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.
Now read this statement in light of Genesis 1 and God’s original purpose for man. God intended Israel to be “priests”; that is, they were supposed to mediate God’s presence to other nations. They were supposed to image God, as Genesis 1 commanded, to the heathen. Israel was (and is) all part of God’s plan, revealed right after the fall, to redeem the world. (A friend of mine wrote his dissertation on this topic.)
When you read the Bible, can you trace threads like these from beginning to end? If not, vast portions of the Old Testament will not make sense to you. You will be tempted to moralize—to command obedience without grace. You will be tempted to spiritualize—to invest insignificant details (like David’s five smooth stones) with spiritual meaning. To understand the OT rightly, you have to keep the whole story in mind.
Feb 16, 2009
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What is the biggest purpose of God, the Father’s business in the world about which we must be about?
It’s the glory of God. God’s glory is the ultimate purpose or end of all creation—and it should be our ultimate end in every act (cf. a book recommended by my pastor which makes this point relentlessly). There are many means God gives us to that end:
- Filling the earth, subduing it, and having dominion are among the first means He gave us (Gen 1:28).
- Becoming more like Christ by knowing God’s Word more deeply is another (Eph 4:11-15).
- Evangelism is another (Mt 28:19-20; Acts 1:8).
- It pains a good Protestant to say it sometimes, but it’s in the Bible: good works is another means of glorifying God (Eph 2:10; and cf. many references in the Pastoral Epistles).
What if we choose one of these means to God’s glory and make it the ultimate end? What if evangelism, for example, becomes the main thing? I’ve heard many say that the only reason God leaves Christians on earth is evangelism.
It cannot be damaging the cause of evangelism—which I have been very actively involved in for many years—to give that view a scriptural correction.
And like all erroneous views, even if they’re only slightly off true north, making evangelism the main reason we’re on earth leads to dangerous results:
- Sound doctrine is comparatively devalued, because doctrinal disagreements distract the church from its evangelistic task. (I’m not denying that distraction is a problem, only that making evangelism the main thing is the solution.)
- Urgency in evangelism turns into manipulation.
- The other purposes of God in creating man (see above) are comparatively devalued. Take the dominion commanded in Genesis 1 and never rescinded: Why bother getting a liberal arts education, becoming a doctor, acquiring a taste for good choral music, or sweeping streets except insofar as those things give you opportunities to witness? And, really, how many witnessing opportunities are you likely to get via cultivating a taste for opera? Can that be the sole reason for acquiring that taste?
- Christian people working “secular” jobs will be at best confused, at worst left feeling like second-class citizens.
- Pastors will feel that it is their duty to preach to the lost instead of the saved, leaving the latter without nourishing spiritual food.
So let’s adopt the motto quoted by an evangelist I appreciate and borrowed from a most perceptive pastor-theologian, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones: “The first object of preaching the Gospel is not to save souls; it is to glorify God.”
