Many
Christians believe and teach a form of factual neutrality where some subjects,
for example, science, geography, politics, mathematics, can and should be
taught without any regard to religion since “facts speak for themselves.” This
is most evident in education where a self-conscious sacred-secular divide is
maintained and supported by Christians. Ninety percent of Christian parents
send their children to government schools. Since these parents believe that
math is math and history is history, the religious stuff can be made up at
church.
One
hour of Sunday school and an hour at Youth Meeting each week and maybe a
mission trip in the summer can’t make up for five days a week, six hours each
day, 10 months of the year, 12+ years of a government-developed curriculum that
is humanistic to the core. The humanists understand the importance of education
in creating worldview shifts and control, so why don’t Christians? Charles
Francis Potter, who founded the First Humanist Society of New York in 1929 and
signed the first Humanist Manifesto in 1933, made no secret of
the purpose of the American public schools:
Education is thus a most
powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of
Humanism What can the theistic Sunday-school, meeting for an hour once a week,
and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day
program of humanistic teaching?1\
R. J.
Rushdoony pointed out the Humanist design for education in his books Intellectual
Schizophrenia (1961) and The Messianic Character of American
Education (1963). According to Rushdoony, modern government education
“is erosive and destructive of all culture except the monolithic state, which
is then the ostensible creator and patron of culture. When it speaks of the
whole child, it speaks of a passive creature who is to be molded by the statist
education for the concept of the good life radically divorced from God and from
transcendental standards.”2Rushdoony was not the first to understand the
goal of statist education. Robert L. Dabney (1820–1898) saw it more than 100
years ago:
[T]he Jeffersonian doctrine of
the absolute severance and independence of church and state, of the entire
secularity of the State, and the absolutely equal rights, before the law, of
religious truth and error, of paganism, atheism, and Christianity, has also
established itself in all the States; and still the politicians, for
electioneering ends, propagate this State education everywhere. By this curious
circuit “Christian America” has gotten herself upon this thoroughly pagan
ground; forcing the education of responsible, moral, and immortal beings, of
which religion must ever be the essence, into the hands of a gigantic human
agency, which resolves that it cannot and will not be religious at all. Surely,
some great religious body will arise in America to lift its Christian protest
against this monstrous result!3
What
would America be like today if the Church of Jesus Christ had heeded Dabney’s
warnings and some “great religious body” had arisen to make the break from an
educational system that was designed to be the indoctrination center for the
State and its messianic motives? The usual Christian response is to reform the
public schools, to get more parents involved, sue to get a moment of silence,
prayers at sporting events and commencement exercises, release programs, and
legislation to teach the Bible as literature as they’ve done in some states.4 There will be pressure groups in some
cities to teach the Koran. Then there’s the question of how the Bible will be
taught. Will the Old Testament be taught as myth? For example, NBC News
anchor Chuck Todd has said
that “Trump voters ‘want to be lied to’ since they believe in ‘fairy tales’ —
like Noah’s Ark.”
Will
someone teaching on the Olivet Discourse point out that Jesus was mistaken
about His coming?
Some
years ago, I received an email from a woman who asked me if I could direct her
to some information that refutes Gnosticism. She wrote that a friend of hers
“claims to be on an extraordinarily intense spiritual ‘pilgrimage’ of ‘really
pressing in to know God intimately’—but this guy has in effect divorced himself
from the material world and from all relationships (including his wife and 10
children) which he views as a hindrance to his spiritual growth.”
Gnostics
claim to have special knowledge (gnosis is the Greek word for
“knowledge”) on how to live the Christian life that is not revealed to
“ordinary Christians.” God’s revelation in Scripture is not good enough or
sufficient to give direction on how to live the Christian life. Of course, this
refutes what the Bible says when it states that Scripture is “adequate” and
equips the Christian “for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:17). She went on to say
that this friend, a farmer, “was putting up hay recently and needed to get it
in as they were expecting rain. Before he finished, he remembered that he
had scheduled a Bible study, so he left his hay in order to keep the
‘spiritual’ duty. The rain came and the hay was lost, but he felt
justified that he had chosen the higher calling.”
Another
feature of Gnosticism is the belief that there are two separate realms—“one
spiritual, the other material. The spiritual realm, created by God, [is] all
good; the material realm, created by the demiurge, all evil. Man [needs] to be
saved, not from Original Sin, but from enslavement to matter.”5
A
further expression of Gnosticism was expressed by someone who “doesn’t believe
in voting because that is a ‘worldly affair,’ and he wants only to be engaged
in truly spiritual activities.” For the Gnostic, the material world is on a
lower plane. Only “spiritual things” are useful and profitable. A Gnostic-like
belief might forbid marriage while advocating “abstaining from foods” even
though “God has created these things “to be gratefully shared in by those who
believe and know the truth” (1 Tim. 4:3). Godliness for the Gnostic is defined as
a retreat from the world and despising the things of the world.
[The Gnostics] devised a
dualistic cosmology to set against the teachings of the early Christian Church,
which, they claimed, were only common deceptions, unsuited for the wise. The
truth was esoteric. Only the properly initiated could appreciate it. It
belonged to a secret tradition which had come down through certain mystery
schools. The truth was, God could never become man. The Gnostic secret is that
the spirit is trapped in matter, and to free it, the world must be rejected.6
For the
Gnostic, life “must be escaped at any cost.”7 But if there can be no immediate
material escape, then a spiritual escape is a good enough substitute. The
Gnostic escapes from the responsibilities of history. But for the Christian,
history is the realm of decision making, and, therefore, is anti-Gnostic. If we
are not responsible for history, then we are not responsible for decision
making. Even a casual reading of the Bible will show that our faith is to be
lived out in the world so that “fruit”– good works — is manifested for the
world to see and for Christians to judge (Matt. 7:15–23). No restrictions are
placed on where this fruit is to mature.
One of the central issues that
divided gnostics and orthodox Christians in the early Church was their
understanding of the relationship between religion and politics. The Church
Fathers accepted the political worldliness of the Jewish faith, contending that
religion and politics are interconnected and inseparable. The early Puritans
and even Jonathan Edwards, following classical Calvinism, would have been
clearly orthodox in this regard. The world of politics, of human institutions,
was for them an essential locus of God’s redemptive work.8
What is
contemporary Gnosticism like? While it might not manifest itself in ascetic
practices like pole-sitting, it does reveal itself in an institutional escape.
Institutional escape is not in the Protestant tradition, however. Our nation’s
earliest Christian citizens did not view escape, eschatologically, ascetically,
or institutionally, as being biblical. Education, publishing, law, science,
medicine, and politics, to take just some worldview areas, were to be governed
by the Word of God as were ecclesiastical affairs. Modern-day Gnosticism
thrives in a climate of escapism which means a retreat from this world and
responsibility to do anything to change any part of it. If this world means
nothing, then I am not responsible for its evils.
1.
Charles Francis Potter, Humanism: A New Religion (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), 128. Quoted in David A. Noebel, J.F. Baldwin,
and Kevin Bywater, Clergy in the Classroom: The Religion of Secular
Humanism (Manitou Springs, CO: Summit Press, 1995), vi. [↩]
2.
R. J. Rushdoony, Intellectual Schizophrenia: Culture,
Crisis and Education (Vellecito, CA: Ross House Books, [1961] 1998),
10. [↩]
3.
Robert L. Dabney, Discussions of Robert Lewis Dabney:
Secular, ed. C. R. Vaughan, 4 vols. (Harrisonburg, Virginia, Sprinkle
Publications,1994), 4:548. [↩]
4.
David Van Biema, “The Case for teaching the Bible,” Time (March
22, 2007). [↩]
5.
Dusty Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult (New
York: Dorset Press, [1977] 1989), 140–141. [↩]
6.
Sklar, The Nazis and the Occult, 147. [↩]
7.
[1]Philip Lee, Against
the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),
122. [↩]
8.
Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, 123–124. [↩]
