When educators intentionally omit God from the classroom for the alleged purpose of moral neutrality, another organizing principle and telos will necessarily fill the resulting vacuum. Many Christians have naively accepted what they thought was agnosticism in their educational models, but it turns out to be much worse.

Over one hundred years ago, Abraham Kuyper asserted what he believed to be Christian education’s proper telos: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’” He uttered this battle cry, not in a sermon or political speech, but at the dedicatory address of a new Dutch university. Undergirded by strong Calvinist convictions, Kuyper boldly planted the flag of Christ’s dominion in that domain always under siege by the enemy, the Academy. Weust follow in Kuyper’s footsteps and rededicate ourselves to a similar comprehensive educational philosophy, one that re-centers the proper orientation of educating Christians by embracing a Christocentric model of understanding each discipline’s form and content.

Why is Kuyper’s view of education so urgent? The havoc in academia left by secular humanism, postmodernity, Critical Race Theory, evolution, and the sexual revolutions is too great to ignore. Too many of our covenant children have lost their way. We cannot simply equate a Christian education with Christian teachers who avoid immoral topics. Instead, we must engage students at the appropriate levels using biblical lens. An education that honors Christ trains the student to think connect each discipline to its Creator.

As idealistic as it may seem, this orientation is by no means a radical proposition. Rather, thinking Christianly about every academic discipline exemplifies obedience to first-tier biblical commands. Consider Jesus’ restatement of the Great Commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). Through the mind, we are to love the Lord with all of our mental capacity, with “the psychological faculty of understanding, reasoning, thinking, and deciding.”^[1] In sum, we are to love God in all of our intellectual pursuits. In view of Scripture’s teaching, there can be “no square inch” – no realm that excludes this theocentric worldview (Col. 1:15-18).

Furthermore, the New Testament teaches that the Christian life occurs mostly in the mind, which explains Paul’s focus at the climax of Romans (12:2): “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” A constant flesh-fighting, world-renouncing mental regimen must begin early in life and characterize one’s entire educational experience, both in and out of the classroom. Engaging the mind in this way strengthens student’s faith.

The mind’s heightened role in the Christian life explains why our spiritual enemies target educational systems with such ferocity. Once they capture a student’s mind, then they have captured the student’s soul.

Edmund, a central figure in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, illustrates this. On multiple occasions, C.S. Lewis credits Edmund’s school for his flaws. Edmund’s downfall occurs due to his ability to be deceived easily, to lose sight of what is plainly true, and a failure to trust those he loves most.

Lewis most clearly attributes the school’s detrimental impact on Edmund after he becomes a casualty in battle. Upon giving him the magic healing potion, Lucy “found him standing on his feet and not only healed of his wounds but looking better than she had seen him look — oh, for ages;in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face” (italics mine).[2] In this remarkable moment, readers learn that Edmund’s affinity for folly was cultivated at school—a powerful warning against the negative trajectory on which an institution of learning can set a young person.

As with Eve in the Garden of Eden or Edmund in Narnia, Satan continues to twist truth, minimize sin and its consequences, and disrupt faith in God’s goodness. Our ancient foe’s strategy has never changed, only his tools and methods have. Unfortunately, relying on a magic potion to rescue a wayward student is not a proven parenting strategy. Students need to be taught what is true, to view sin for all it is while relentlessly holding onto God’s goodness.

Christ as the Reference Point of Academic Disciplines

How does one, then, reclaim an educational philosophy and practice? Simply this: parents and educators must intentionally reference all disciplines back to their Christian center. In doing so, we must reject false dichotomies between , entertaining a certain reverence for all things that Christ has created. We must further reject Postmodernity’s abandonment of objective truth and compartmentalization of philosophy and theology from more “empirical” fields. Adopting this view requires the parent to homeschool or find teachers that actively seek both to understand, ad then to communicate, how Christ’s fingerprints cover all intellectual activity.

Each discipline reveals the Triune God in a different way. The sciences and mathematics become a study in God’s art of creation with revelation, not unprovable theories, as their point of departure.[3] History becomes an outworking of God’s purposes in time, in which He sent Christ in the “fullness of time.” Literature becomes an imaginative retelling of the human experience in light of the creation-fall-redemption patterns, an art that Christ used frequently to deliver truth through narrative. The art of rhetoric becomes a manner of communicating as Christ himself did – with stories, speeches, revelation, and questions. The fine arts become a means of contemplating, enjoying, and creating objects of “glory and beauty.” The study of languages becomes a means of understanding and appreciating other cultures in the aftermath of the Fall of Babel.

This pursuit inculcates wisdom, rather than mere knowledge. And as the Bible teaches, wisdom begins with “the fear of the Lord” (Prov. 9:10). The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck, who later taught at the university that Kuyper founded, articulated this concept eloquently:

“But what the Scriptures require is a knowledge which has the fear of God as its beginning (Prov. 1:7). When it severs its connections with the principle it may still, under false pretenses, bear the name of knowledge, but it will gradually degenerate into a worldly wisdom which is foolishness with God. Any science, philosophy or knowledge which supposes that it can stand on its own pretentions, and can leave God out of its assumptions, becomes its opposite, and disillusions everyone who builds his expectations on it. [4]

Do any disciplines that are taught in schools include God in their assumptions now?

When educators intentionally omit God from the classroom for the alleged purpose of moral neutrality, another organizing principle and telos will necessarily fill the resulting vacuum. Many Christians have naively accepted what they thought was agnosticism in their educational models, but it turns out to be much worse.

In order to reorient our educational practices, we must reconstruct our philosophical underpinnings. My colleague, Rev. Matt Marino, offers a helpful illustration:

“Imagine a ‘solar system of ideas’ in which God functions like the sun does in our solar system. Not only is He the source of light, but also the center of gravity. All else derives its being from Him, and nothing else can explain itself without reference to Him.”[5]

When the disciplines no longer orbit around God, they fall out of their circuit and lose both their mean and their relation to one another.

Marino’s metaphor also suggests that all disciplines can simultaneously sustain their own orbits while maintaining their collective course around God. He gives gravity, light, and meaning to all arts and disciplines. This model keeps them all centered.

In view of this paradigm, Christian parents must own their children’s education. If we are to obey Deuteronomy 6:4-9, then parents must teach their children to love the Lord and to obey His commands. Parents are responsible to “teach [God’s laws] diligently to your children” and cultivate a domestic culture pervaded by theological conversations (6:7) with ubiquitous reference to the Law (8-9). We make a theological error – one with significant repercussions – when we compartmentalize God’s law or relegate it to Sunday School. We must do the hard work to treat all disciplines, not simply theological ones, in light of Deuteronomy 6.

Objections

Three objections to this proposal come to mind. First is the notion that children must attend public schools to evangelize their classmates. In its immediate context, Christ gave the Great Commission to eleven grown men with whom he invested significant time during His earthly ministry. They were not children. Instead, the child’s vocation is to comprehend the faith (Deut. 6:6-8; Prov. 22:6). One cannot effectively propagate that which he does not understand. Though godly children might be compelling young evangelists (in part because of their simplicity and innocence), the burden of the Great Commission is not yet theirs, any more than it is the average believer to baptize converts. Students need to be equipped prior to being sent out into a dangerous mission field. Let Christian teachers and administrators bear the burden of bringing the gospel into secular schools.

Second, many science-minded people feel that the Bible and science are at odds. I once heard a pastor proclaim, “Genesis 1 has no bearing on the rest of Scripture.” Nonsense. This view increased dramatically in the post-Darwin age; it is not the view of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Robert Boyle, and other Christian scientists who ushered in the Scientific Revolution. To presume that one knows precisely how the earth was formed, mechanically speaking, is simply fallacious. No one was present to document creation except God Himself.

Objective science does not directly contradict the biblical record. All such notions are always theoretical, or the methods are not fool-proof. The tendency to interpret the Bible in view of scientific theories is a post-Enlightenment temptation that leads away from Christ, reflecting a lack of confidence in the God of order.

Finally, some associate Kuyper with radical Christians with some type of theonomic agenda. However, this is not my agenda, and furthermore, recovering a Christocentric view of education does not belong to any single eschatological movement. At its baseline, Christian education is an earnest attempt to be faithful to fundamental passages in Scripture that instruct us how to orient our pursuit of knowledge, particularly in the shadow of the revealed Son of God. In this light, Ryan McIhenny writes, “Christian cultural activity is always done within the context of the completed work of God in and through Christ and the now/not yet completion of his kingdom.”[6] My motivation in writing this article, starting a new college, and devoting my energies to my children is simply this: to be faithful as a father to train my children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Our American system is in disrepair, and we must build new institutions to provide them with what is required of us.

Conclusion

If Christians are to honor the Lord as the creator and source of all true wisdom and knowledge, the starting place for catechizing is as early as possible, and it must extend through the college level. In this way, the answers to the catechism questions “Who made me?” and “Who made all things?” are not theoretical; in fact, the answers to those questions propel me to spend all my days thinking about how and why He made all things, how they glorify Him, and ultimately, why all things remain His today. When such thinking governs our approach to learning, we will begin to see how every square inch belongs to our Savior, fueling generations of exuberant worshippers.

Dr. Ryan Smith, a member of Resurrection Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Matthews, N.C., is the president of New Aberdeen College, a new confessionally Reformed college based near Charlotte.

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^[1] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 323–324.

[2] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Ebook. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010; 125.

[3] The Scientific Revolution was an achievement in Western civilization led by devout Christian men such as Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and Robert Boyle who understood the Creator is one of order. I am indebted to Christopher Watkin in his ill named Biblical Critical Theory for the assertion that only in the Western, monotheistic society could any scientific discoveries exist. With deities who are capricious, unknowable, and disorderly, the Eastern and African peoples had no starting point to make important scientific discoveries. Contemporary Christian thinkers who dismiss Genesis 1 for theories create slippery slopes that eventually result in people not believing that man and woman were made in the image of God, having a divine purpose for the sexuality, or maintaining a biblical hierarchy in church life.

[4] Herman Bavinck, “Man’s Highest Good” in The Wonderful Works of God. Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2019; 4.

[5] Matt Marino, “Theology’s Role in Classical Christian Education.” Conference lecture, Summer Roundtable; June 29, 2024.

[6] Ryan C. McIlhenny, Kingdoms Apart: Engaging the Two Kingdoms Perspective. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2012; xxiii.