“EVERY THOUGHT CAPTIVE” LEARNING CHRIST IN ALL SPHERES OF LIFE AND THOUGHT
Christian parents’ responsibility to the Lord and to our children, born into his covenant community, is to strive with all the resources available to us to introduce them to this gracious, glorious God, and to form their minds to engage the world as his loving children and loyal subjects. Our goal is that they will realize that they are twice-owned by the triune God-by creation and by redemption— and therefore that they will respond to grace with grateful service, not only in worship on the Lord’s Day but also in their vocations and interactions throughout the week- in home and neighborhood, school and workplace, supermarket and voting booth. We long and labor to see their “every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).
The education of Christians in every subject—philosophy, literature, history, music, sociology, political science, economics, architecture, their own children. engineering, chemistry, physics—belongs in the context of the biblical worldview that traces all things to the sovereign Creator. We see the origins of education in the beginning, as God called Adam and Eve to manage other creatures as faithful stewards. Adam exercised delegated dominion by identifying animals by name, even as God, whose image he bore, had named light and darkness, sky and earth, land and sea. Although our first parents’ reign went wrong when they believed the enemy’s lie, fallen humans still bear God’s image (Gen. 9:6; Jas. 3:9). So we still engage in labor and business, in research and exploration, in civic responsibility and artistic expression-all of which require the tasks of education, namely observing, naming, and interpreting objects and events. Even in a world stained by our sin, Christians have reason to explore every dimension of the reality in which God has embedded our lives as his creatures.
How, then, should Christian parents prepare our children for their role as grateful, faithful stewards of God’s creation, especially in a culture that often ignores God’s glory and defies his norms? That question is addressed in this article. We begin with a series of convictions that, we believe, are grounded in God’s inerrant Word:
1. Parents are responsible to oversee their children’s whole education—both “religious” and otherwise. After delivering the Shema’, Israel’s defining confession, “the Lord is one,” and calling Israel to love this Lord with everything in them, Moses commanded them to inscribe God’s word on their hearts and to teach it diligently, day and night, to their children (Deut. 6:4-7). Moses spoke to an agrarian society in which sons worked beside fathers in fields and daughters worked beside mothers in homes and gardens. As they learned survival skills, children were to hear and see the Lord’s word embedded in their parents’ lives, as we say, “24/7,” at dawn, noon, dusk, and bedtime. Today commuting executives and engineers face logistical challenges in fulfilling such commands, but the obligation to prepare our children both to live and to labor for God’s glory remains. Our children must still learn to perceive their experiences, themselves, and the world in the light of God’s Word and the context of God’s reign. Parents must do what we can to equip our children spiritually and intellectually to participate confidently and productively as disciples of Christ in the growth of his church, the stewardship of the created order, and the well-being of the community.
2. Parents are not alone in their responsibility to nurture their children in God’s wisdom. Although the command to teach children God’s commands from daybreak to bedtime assumes the context of family life, this command is addressed to the whole covenant community: “Hear, O Israel.” Scripture profoundly honors the family unit, but the Bible does not isolate the family from the wider support system of the covenant community. In fact, the Bible affirms that it is to the church, not the family, that King Jesus has entrusted the means of grace—instruction in the Word of God, administration of sacraments, exercise of spiritual discipline. Balancing the complementary roles of church and home in the nurture of covenant children is not easy. It is spiritually perilous for children when parents abdicate their responsibility to the church and its ministries, or to a Christian school (“I take them to church and catechism, and I pay school tuition. If they stray, it’s the minister’s or their teachers’ fault”). But it is also perilous for parents to hold the church, its officers, and their fellow- believers at arm’s length, depriving their children of the shepherding, modeling and mentoring of the body of Christ.
3. The wisdom that our children need centers in the fear of the Lord, and then reaches out to embrace all of life. The educational preparation that equips our students to glorify God in their families, churches, workplaces, and communities entails growth in necessary knowledge and in skills, of course. Beyond data and techniques, however, covenant children and youth need the wisdom that interprets information in light of the God of truth and employs abilities to do his will Israel’s sages rightly observed: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight” (Prov. 9:10; see 1:8). An educational system that focuses only on intellectual, occupational, and civic objectives falls short of God’s mandate for the nurture of our children.
Yet wisdom, biblically defined, is not restricted to a narrowly circumscribed “spiritual” or religious” sphere. King Solomon’s vast learning and wisdom encompassed literature and song, botany and zoology, and insight into human sinfulness distorts human relationships (1 Kings 4:29-34). No wonder the intellectuals of the Ancient Near East flocked to seated resistance to God’s truth and Solomon’s court to hear him address jurisprudence, economics, and other issues! Full-orbed education begins with the fear of the Lord and from that starting point moves out to explore all that he has made, and all that humanity has made of what God has made.
4. No educational enterprise is religiously neutral. Just as Israel’s education was to take the unity, uniqueness, and sovereign authority of the Lord as its starting point and center point, so also the educational systems of Israel’s Ancient Near Eastern neighbors were religiously driven. The experience of Daniel and his faithful friends in Babylonian exile makes this explicit. As a premier education in “the literature and language of the Chaldeans” prepared them for civil service, each was relabeled—their identities redefined (so their captors hoped)—by a name that referred to one of Chaldea’s deities (Dan. 1:3-7). This aspect of the pagan “reeducation project” failed in the case of these four students, who knew their God too well to be attracted by his empty rivals. Nonetheless the incident shows that value-neutral or religion-free education is an illusion.
Our educational decisions for our children must take account of two paradoxical truths revealed in the Bible. On the one hand, human sinfulness distorts human thought so that perception and interpretation are skewed by deep-seated resistance to God’s truth and authority. The regenerating work of God’s Spirit ameliorates this distortion to some extent (but not, completely in this life), so we should expect to see the spiritual antithesis between faith and unbelief exhibited in the studies of Christians and non-Christians. On the other hand, the “common” grace of God enables pagans to glimpse aspects of the truth (Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12).
5. Our children’s education should enable them not only to investigate God’s world, but also to engage confidently and winsomely those who do not see that “this is our Father’s world.” The martyr Stephen extolled God’s favor to Moses, who “was instructed in all the wisdom of the Egyptians” (Acts 7:22). God gave to Daniel and his fellow-exiles “learning and skill in all literature,” so that they excelled their peers in final examinations (Dan. 1:17-20). The apostle Paul demonstrates his wide acquaintance with Hellenistic literature, worldviews, and cultural institutions. In these saints and others, we see the Father’s answer to Jesus’ prayer, “I do not ask that you take [my disciples] out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world” (John 17:15-18).
Likewise, our aim for our children’s education is not to isolate them in a “germ-free” enclave, but to deepen their convictions and fortify their minds to engage the challenges of living for Christ’s glory in a societal marketplace of competing allegiances. As Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah managed to master Chaldean learning without compromising their loyalty to the Lord, so this is our purpose for our children’s education, whatever its venue. We are training our children to be lights among the nations, not only in words of witness but also in conscientious and competent labor (Titus 2:9-10). The education that prepares them for their callings must be a wise blend of protection and “exposure.” Exposure without protection pits fragile seedlings against chill winds in our cultural environment. Protection without exposure—without challenge and practice in discernment (Heb. 5:14) leaves youth vulnerable, without an intellectual-spiritual immune system capable of resisting viruses of unbelief.
Christian parents, conscious of their covenantal responsibilities to the Lord and to their children, make different choices regarding the means by which their children receive education in “general revelation” subjects that prepare them to inhabit and interact with the surrounding society. Whatever the means and venue, our prayers, interaction, and sacrifice of time and funds are directed toward the goal of seeing coming generations worshiping the Lord in faithful churches, living and laboring for his glory in homes and marketplace, and nurturing their children in his ways.
Source: Dr. Dennis E. Johnson