The NXR Podcast - THEOLOGY APPLIED - Christian Education And The Myth Of Neutrality

00:00:00.460 Applying God's Word to every aspect of life. This is Theology Applied.

00:00:11.080 Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webin with Right Response Ministries. This is another episode of Theology

00:00:16.060 Applied, where our whole goal in this podcast is to help Christians not only salute the

00:00:21.900 inerrancy of the Word of God, not just recognizing and acknowledging God's authority through His

00:00:28.020 word, but the sufficiency of God's word, realizing that all of the scripture needs to be applied to

00:00:35.260 all of life. And so it's very fitting. Our guest for today, we have Dr. Ben Merkel, who is the

00:00:43.780 son-in-law of Doug Wilson, and the whole saying, kind of mission statement that they've had there

00:00:47.900 in Moscow where they live with the church and with the school and all these different things is

00:00:51.960 all of Christ for all of life. We want to take the whole Christ and His authority executed through

00:00:59.220 the agency of the Word, so all of Christ, all of the Bible, all of His Word, and apply it to all

00:01:04.460 of life, not just, you know, Jesus, Lord of my heart, not just applying the Scripture to church

00:01:09.920 and the home and parenting, but politics and media and entertainment and vocation. And today,

00:01:17.900 our episode is education. So we're going to be looking at what the Bible says about education,

00:01:24.220 the importance, the significance, but then also getting really practical and how to apply

00:01:30.680 a Christian worldview and the sufficiency of scripture in the way that we educate.

00:01:37.660 And so we have Dr. Ben Merkel. He is the president of New St. Andrews College.

00:01:42.800 And I'm going to let him take a moment right here from the outset and introduce anything else,

00:01:47.620 been that you might want to share about yourself? That's a great introduction. It's a pleasure to

00:01:53.420 be here. Enjoy your ministry and your church and look forward to our conversation here.

00:01:59.740 Great. All right. Thanks for coming on. So first thing that I want to ask, a little bit personal,

00:02:03.780 but just people getting to know you some. For you, when and how did you first get interested

00:02:09.440 in being an educator? What got you excited about education? Well, you know, it was kind of a

00:02:16.520 multi-step process. So it started during my undergraduate. I was at the University of Idaho

00:02:22.260 and I was taking a lot of chemistry classes, but I didn't really like chemistry. And it was

00:02:28.980 during my time at the U of I that I really felt like I had a heart for going into ministry of

00:02:34.000 some sort. And virtually every pastor I knew was a teacher. And so I got a secondary education

00:02:40.920 degree in chemistry thinking that that was the way you got yourself ready to be a pastor. I know

00:02:45.860 I did not really ask for any advisor counsel or anything. It just seemed like that's what pastors

00:02:51.480 did. I started, as soon as I graduated, I came on staff with the local church here doing evangelistic

00:02:58.780 work to the University of Idaho, leading Bible studies, going in and speaking to fraternities

00:03:03.180 and doing that sort of thing. But during that time, New St. Andrews College started, and I was

00:03:10.980 doing pastoral training through our church. Grapefires Hall had just started, and I was the

00:03:14.760 very first Greyfire student. And so I was doing ministerial training and New St. Andrews started

00:03:21.560 and Doug Wilson, my father-in-law, asked me if I would TA a class for him, which I did. And it's

00:03:27.980 kind of a long series of events. But one of the things that I noticed was that the impact that

00:03:36.520 I was having on the students in my classes versus the impact that I was having in my Bible studies

00:03:43.280 on the U of I campus, it was really interesting that it was in the context of education that I

00:03:48.240 was seeing their souls opened up and people were ready to do a deep dive into what they actually

00:03:53.960 thought. And I started to see that I was having a more profound impact in discipling them and

00:04:02.500 mentoring them and whatnot through education than I was just in my normal pastoral work.

00:04:07.280 And so that just got me intrigued. And I threw myself more and more at it and saw

00:04:10.920 it blessed more and more as an outlet where there's something about those years from 18 to

00:04:17.080 22, 23. And that first moment when you've left home and you're out on your own for the first

00:04:24.120 time, there's something really significant that happens there. And it happens in those classes

00:04:28.900 that shapes lives in a really profound way. And I found that that was just something I wanted to be

00:04:33.540 involved in. That's cool. Yeah. So just massive amount of influence at a very, a very pivotal

00:04:39.640 time in people's lives and just realizing it really is significant yep okay so let me go

00:04:46.980 ahead and just get right into it um our topic for today we've titled it christian education

00:04:52.580 and the myth of neutrality christian education and the myth of neutrality so i think a good

00:04:58.260 question for us to start with is uh what is the difference and is there a difference between

00:05:04.120 Christians in education versus a Christian education?

00:05:09.400 Yeah, that's a really good point.

00:05:11.060 And I think, you know, I feel really strongly about the necessity of a Christian education,

00:05:15.400 but I think there's a distinction to make there because I think that parents owe their

00:05:21.260 children a Christian education.

00:05:23.320 At the same time, I know that there are people working in a public secular school system

00:05:28.320 who are Christians that are trying to do their best to make an impact where they are.

00:05:32.340 And I don't want to necessarily say that they're in sin for their job, but I do think that parents really need to focus on giving their children a Christian education.

00:05:42.120 And one of the differences between those two, you've set up two things that are kind of opposed to one another or at least could be opposed to one another.

00:05:50.260 And I think that you need to dive into that a little bit and define the difference really between Christian education and then the secular version where Christians might be a part of that, but it's not a it's not a coherent Christian education that's being given over there.

00:06:06.400 um i think that there is a slowly dividing but but something is creating a massive divide between

00:06:15.100 two different takes on what education is whereas there's there's from a christian perspective we

00:06:21.020 have um the obligation to teach our children um to love god with all their heart soul and mind

00:06:27.040 to pass this faith on to them and to teach them to see the world in the light of scripture

00:06:32.080 You in unpacking our church's mission statement, that's a good description of this idea that we want to root our children in the word and then teach them that that word is a foundation on which they can stand and see or maybe a lens through which they can see the whole world.

00:06:49.800 And that's a very deep discipleship that happens. And when you're doing that kind of work, you're tending to work on the big picture questions, the sort of why am I here? What is life about? What is beauty? What is goodness?

00:07:06.740 you're you're wrestling with questions that have to do with the transcendent standard that we live

00:07:12.120 under so we have a god whose character has shaped this whole world and when you're in that kind of

00:07:17.940 education you're you're understanding you're looking to god's character you're unpacking that

00:07:22.500 you're understanding what his character is like and then you're taking that down into this world

00:07:27.880 and you're starting to see this world in light of that transcendent standard and so then that

00:07:32.800 sets you up for arguments where you are trying to deduce the laws of logic that God has revealed

00:07:43.520 to us via his word, but also through his law written on our heart, natural revelation. It's

00:07:49.940 this law that we see from him that we then interpret the rest of the world in. And we can

00:07:55.500 have lots of arguments where, you know, I have this standard, how is that consistently applied

00:08:01.160 in all of these different areas that's one way of thinking about education that's not at all what

00:08:07.980 any of our current schools are doing our current schools are far more oriented towards imparting

00:08:14.820 very basic vocational skills so you're trying to teach people how to use excel how to use

00:08:22.400 how to code how to write whatever you're teaching them very specific vocational skills and to the

00:08:30.360 extent that there's anything larger worldview about it it's a lot of indoctrination in a very

00:08:35.320 god-hating kind of um philosophy but it doesn't look to any sort of transcendent standard um

00:08:42.600 you'll see things like um uh well have you noticed that like over the last say two years

00:08:50.140 how many conversations have you seen between two people who um have very different perspectives

00:08:58.940 come from two very different worlds and have two ideologies that are very opposed them and yet they

00:09:04.880 were able to have a very clear and calm and rational conversation where they recognize yes

00:09:11.920 none so that doesn't exist anymore because we don't teach people that anymore what you see is

00:09:17.800 the venting of emotion you see the attempt to manipulate the system in which in in a way where

00:09:23.000 i can be the one who's the victim you're trying to trump each other with those kinds of sort of

00:09:28.600 childish maneuvers and basically a lot of screaming and obscenity that's all of our public discourse

00:09:34.560 now because we've lost our ability to have this other kind of conversation um so so when you i

00:09:42.820 think that you could have somebody who's teaching you a vocational skill and i obviously you need

00:09:47.340 to learn vocational skills you don't need to have you know if somebody's teaching you how to um

00:09:51.820 drive a truck um and they're showing you how to shift gears you know they could be muslim or they

00:09:58.300 could be jewish or they could be trinitarian and it still is okay like there's some basic

00:10:04.060 fundamental skills but you lose all of that other larger um um perspective and when you reduce

00:10:11.520 education to just those skills well you lose the ability to have any of these kinds of conversations

00:10:19.300 and so one of the things i've been trying to point people out point out to people is that we think

00:10:23.620 that um education is just about vocational skills like you go to school so you can get a job if you

00:10:28.680 don't get that kind of degree you won't be able to get a job i want to point out that when you

00:10:33.760 when you sure when you get a vocational degree you can get a job but when you raise an entire

00:10:39.460 generation that has no education but they only have vocational skills you can't have an you can't

00:10:45.780 even have an economy so so we we're currently living in a world where everything is shut down

00:10:51.120 we're burning our towns right we we um all common sense is gone and we're destroying looting and

00:10:58.240 pillaging all of it we might all have vocational skills but we don't have any education and when

00:11:04.380 you ignore the education and jump to the vocational skill you do get that job in a very

00:11:12.040 short-sighted way but you lose your entire economy just a little while after that and i think that's

00:11:18.100 the tension that we need to see yeah i think that's really good if i had a dollar for every

00:11:22.680 single time i heard leaders even in the church say hey we're going to have a conversation about

00:11:28.600 some kind of controversial topic like race but it's never actually a conversation what they mean

00:11:33.320 by that is we're going to have an echo chamber that that everybody here already holds the same

00:11:38.620 view and it's you're right it's it's kind of it's just this power play and i think you know we're

00:11:44.000 reacting i think our culture is reacting to well the the oligarchy or those people who were in

00:11:49.520 positions of power um they always got to be right and now we're and now all we've really done those

00:11:55.080 we've just shifted the narrative so now there's a new position of power namely the victim the person

00:12:00.500 who is powerless by your powerlessness you now have power but but neither one considers what's

00:12:07.320 most important which is regardless of of of the position of power or or power that comes by being

00:12:13.200 powerless. What really matters is, but who's right? What's truth? What is, and, but there is

00:12:19.580 everything, there is no objective truth anymore because we've rejected God's standard. We've

00:12:24.360 rejected the standard of truth. So yeah, I, I completely agree. Talk to us a little bit about,

00:12:29.640 cause I've heard you, heard you speak on this before and I think it's super helpful. I think

00:12:33.960 a lot of Christians, part of the reason why they feel like, oh, I don't have to homeschool my kids

00:12:37.440 or I, our kids don't have to receive a Christian, you know, education. We can send them to public

00:12:43.340 school or, or, or any, any kind of alternative. I think part of the thinking there is, um, in terms

00:12:50.600 of they still kind of are holding on to what, what I would consider. I know you would also

00:12:55.220 the myth of neutrality. They think that they think that, um, that there actually exists some

00:13:01.820 realm where you can be taught, right? So you kind of alluded to this a little bit about like being

00:13:06.460 a truck driver and there just being some very practical skills that can be taught by the

00:13:10.940 Muslim or an atheist or a Christian.

00:13:14.040 But when it comes to math and English and literature and science, I know you would disagree

00:13:20.420 in those subjects, but there still seem to be a lot of Christian parents that think that

00:13:24.480 neutrality actually exists, where they can send their kids, outsource education, and

00:13:30.200 they can be taught by someone something that is not Christian, but it's also not opposed

00:13:34.860 to Christ.

00:13:36.040 um what where does that come from and is is neutrality in education is that a myth am i

00:13:41.580 right about that no i i i completely agree with you and i would even push it and say even to a

00:13:46.020 certain extent that the truck driver and the plumber need to have a christian view of their

00:13:50.440 discipline and i think that there's something uh unique and distinctive about approaching these

00:13:55.380 things from a christian perspective but there it has to do with um um there there there always has

00:14:01.560 to be a why you you always have to have um you have to ultimately be able to explain the why

00:14:08.640 why does two plus two equal four why and and there and within the christian worldview you're

00:14:15.160 you're able to put that on the bedrock foundation of who god is and the world that he has made now

00:14:20.980 we believe in um because i'm a christian and because i read my bible one of the things the

00:14:25.580 bible tells me is that god's law is written on the heart of all men and that god's attributes

00:14:31.020 can be perceived, even by the unregenerate, through natural revelation. So I believe that

00:14:38.320 there is a natural law and a law of God written on the heart of those who are outside of Christ,

00:14:43.060 and therefore there are things that I can learn from them, that they understand this world in

00:14:49.840 real and true ways, but that only makes sense ultimately because the God of the Bible is true.

00:14:56.100 And and what you find is that everything always leans and moves towards consistency over time.

00:15:08.780 There are there are inconsistencies you can have in your life that over time will work themselves out and will reconcile themselves into a consistency.

00:15:19.480 You know, I'm looking at today's news of Jerry Falwell and what was what's going on there.

00:15:28.620 And you have all these crazy things that are coming out.

00:15:31.820 And one of the things you find is that you can hold on to things that are contradictions, that are that are hypocrisies for a little bit of time.

00:15:38.780 But there is this, you know, my father in law would describe it as like somebody who's trying to sit on a beach ball underneath the surface of the water.

00:15:46.020 You know, you can hold it down there for a time, but sooner or later, you know, it shoots up over here.

00:15:51.460 And the Christian's job is to poke their arms.

00:15:53.540 What do you got there?

00:15:54.200 What do you got there?

00:15:55.120 Right.

00:15:55.560 Yeah.

00:15:56.440 And so so I think an education, you know, even the public school system, you could go back 50 years and you could go to a public school.

00:16:08.280 And somebody with my convictions would say that's a bad idea.

00:16:11.740 You need something that's explicitly Christian.

00:16:13.740 But somebody who was at a public school 50 years ago could be excused for saying, you know, you say that, but this seems pretty good.

00:16:21.060 And I would say, no, no, it needs to be explicitly on God's word because and and sooner or later, this inconsistency will come out.

00:16:30.460 Right. So over the last 50 years, what we've seen is that public education getting worse and worse.

00:16:35.440 And you'll have even parents now like I see this when I'm talking to parents about sending their kids off to college.

00:16:40.700 They'll say, I'll say, look, you know, the secular college is God hating and blah, blah, blah.

00:16:45.740 And they'll say, yeah, I hear you say that.

00:16:47.940 But I remember when I went to college and it was God hating, but there was also a lot of really good about it.

00:16:53.140 And it was actually where I became a Christian and on and on.

00:16:56.060 And and and what they don't realize is that that was 20 years ago.

00:17:01.160 The college campus of today is so different.

00:17:04.500 but the college campus of today was is consistent with that college campus of 20 years ago it's one

00:17:12.100 long trajectory that over time it's going to become more and more consistent with itself

00:17:17.340 and so um there are plenty of areas where i don't have a problem dipping my foot in that water

00:17:26.940 because i know it's i know that um this book is inconsistent with god's word but there's some

00:17:33.160 stuff in here that's really useful but i want to be really careful and conscious of the fact that

00:17:38.840 over time that inconsistency is going to come out and it is going to destroy it and i think that we

00:17:44.700 are really really short-sighted when we think that particularly with where the schools are now

00:17:50.420 that we can hand our children over to that and not have that have a catastrophic effect on their

00:17:58.720 lives. I completely agree. I think of music. I think we're just hardwired because we're made

00:18:04.220 in the image of God because of natural law, natural revelation. Human beings cannot sit

00:18:09.940 well with dissonance, right? We want to resolve the note. You got to do one or the other. And

00:18:15.840 because of the doctrine of total depravity, because the heart of man, apart from regeneration,

00:18:19.900 as you referenced, is opposed to God, not just neutral, but Romans 8 says hostile towards God.

00:18:25.980 it does not submit to his law nor can it because of that that disposition in the heart of man being

00:18:31.980 opposed to God and because of being so in terms of total depravity there's an opposition towards God

00:18:37.980 so that's not a viable option we cannot submit to his law but because of the imago Dei we also

00:18:44.140 can't really sit with inconsistency or dissonance we want to resolve but the resolution is always

00:18:49.500 going to work away from God apart from new hearts so we're so we're going to have to resolve we

00:18:55.440 can't live in this inconsistency we're going to have to pick one or the other but because the heart

00:18:59.560 of man apart from regeneration is opposed to the things of god because they're spiritually discerned

00:19:04.900 and because he's hostile towards god he's at enmity with god because of all those things

00:19:09.500 there's just going to be this natural apart from a christian education apart from a christian

00:19:14.540 worldview and and really ultimately apart from regenerate hearts it's really not if it's just

00:19:19.680 when it's a matter of time there's going to be this constant downstream towards not order

00:19:25.340 and God, but chaos. And I, and I think of that, I think of Darwinism. I think Doug said this,

00:19:30.960 but I think of Darwinism being taught for decades in the public school system. And now all of a

00:19:35.880 sudden it's like, all right, we, we want, we want revolution. We want to change things and we want

00:19:41.360 to make them better. And what's the immediate default strategy among young people coming out

00:19:46.320 of public school systems taught Darwinism. The, the, the strategy is, well, let's burn it all

00:19:51.560 down it's like but that doesn't fix anything but it does for the darwinian because because if you

00:19:56.820 just do chaos well what comes out of chaos according to darwinism according to evolution

00:20:01.080 order whereas the christian worldview would say if you want to fix things you can't burn it you

00:20:05.920 can't go to chaos because chaos produces nothing we believe in in god who is a god of order and

00:20:13.820 and so even that it's like we maybe don't draw the connections but my point is i think you know

00:20:20.420 the the riots and and burning down cities and defunding police um you look at that and you

00:20:27.160 think oh like this is this is silly but it's actually not it it actually is i think the

00:20:33.760 culture trying to resolve the dissonance it's picking a lane it's it's not i think that's

00:20:39.740 really true consistency yeah i i um so actually i just did our last um on friday we have a weekly

00:20:45.780 Disputatio, and I gave our first Disputatio talk, and I based a lot about a quote from

00:20:51.340 Lewis in That Hideous Strength, and he makes this observation that I think is really profound,

00:20:57.080 where he says, I think it's his character Dimble who says this, he says that he's just kind of

00:21:03.000 pontificating to his wife, and he says, have you noticed that the world is always sharpening and

00:21:08.640 coming to a point? The world is always getting narrower and pointier, and there is something

00:21:14.380 about um as we grow up it seems like every day god takes the world that we lived in yesterday

00:21:22.260 and he puts it in front of us today and he divides it in half and he says pick which one you want

00:21:28.140 you know and and and we we need to pick faithfulness and then and then he does that

00:21:33.280 again tomorrow yeah and and it's funny because there are um there are friends that you had

00:21:40.620 10 years ago that you could not fellowship with now because God matured you and he's growing you

00:21:48.660 more and more faithful. And for you to grow up is for you to choose the half that God wants you to

00:21:55.460 choose. And, and it's not to say that, um, 20 years ago you were disobedient for being where

00:22:02.660 you were, but God keeps wanting you to grow up and he keeps making you right choices. And I,

00:22:08.100 My observation to the students was just pointing out like how over history, you know, you look at you look at King David, godly, righteous, righteous man.

00:22:17.280 And we know he stumbled with Bathsheba and everything.

00:22:19.660 But even if you were to go before that, and we were, if I was to take King David and put him on the stage, you know, right now, we would be looking at a man who is a complete barbarian, who has a multitude of wives, one of whom he won by, with a necklace of Philistine foreskins.

00:22:39.780 It wouldn't fly now.

00:22:41.300 Like, we need to grow up.

00:22:42.940 We need to mature from that.

00:22:45.340 And every year, God is going to ask you to get sharper.

00:22:48.880 And I say this because I think that 20, 30, 40 years ago, Christian education felt like a principle that certain men were was they were advocating this principle because of things, you know, peculiar convictions that they had, whatever.

00:23:08.060 But it seemed like it was an option and you could go, you know, in any number of different directions.

00:23:13.900 we're seeing where we are now we see that the peculiar convictions that these guys had

00:23:19.820 were actually not that peculiar but were actually some really really incisive foresight who saw

00:23:28.260 the way this thing was going who understood the ground that we needed to seize now and that that

00:23:33.880 option is no longer much of an option and the world is divided in half and you need to pick

00:23:38.440 which one. And whichever one you pick, one's going to endure and preserve. The other one's

00:23:44.380 going to fall off. And so I think we have to be really decisive right now.

00:23:49.480 That's so helpful. I mean, that's helpful for our listeners, but that was really helpful for me. I

00:23:53.600 feel like you just kind of made sense of the last 10 years of my life when you gave that illustration

00:23:57.820 of like, it's like every day. I've never put it into that kind of language. That was just very

00:24:03.560 helpful for me. Every day, it's like the Lord, he takes the world you were living in the day before

00:24:07.580 and he divides it in half and says, pick one.

00:24:10.700 And the way you related that even to friendships, right?

00:24:14.160 Because I think that is just the experience of anyone who's actively

00:24:18.880 and faithfully following Jesus.

00:24:21.020 And that's certainly been my experience.

00:24:22.520 There are people who right now, it's like, yeah, I mean,

00:24:26.720 we don't have the relationship that we once had.

00:24:29.880 And it's like, what happened?

00:24:30.760 Because five years ago, it's like we saw eye to eye on everything.

00:24:33.700 But the reality is we saw eye to eye on everything because in that state,

00:24:37.020 That degree of maturity that I was at five years ago, I just didn't see as much.

00:24:43.880 So it's like if you're only seeing 10 things, well, it's a lot easier that just the laws of average to see 10 things the same way with somebody else.

00:24:52.960 It's a lot more likely than to see 100 things the same way as somebody else.

00:24:57.280 And so it's just as we continue following Jesus and he begins to reveal to us from his word, well, really both in special revelation from his word, but also in general revelation by what's around us and making sense of his world, according to his rules for his world, again and again, we're just seeing more.

00:25:14.740 And the more and more we see, the less and less likelihood that we're going to share all that in common with everybody else.

00:25:21.960 And so as we pursue Christ, it's like our relationships get fewer but deeper.

00:25:27.120 Would you agree with that?

00:25:29.020 Oh, yeah, absolutely.

00:25:30.460 Well, it's like Jesus says, to whom much is given, much is required.

00:25:34.340 And what happens is every day you get just a little more inheritance from him.

00:25:38.940 With that inheritance, it demands more of you.

00:25:42.860 But the thing is, you know, well, if I continue on with that talk,

00:25:48.180 One of the things I noted was if you take that analogy and you run with it a little bit too long, it starts to feel like it starts to feel like, well, it feels very negative because it feels like are you like sitting on a shipwrecked boat and like every day half of the boat like breaks off and falls away and sinks?

00:26:07.120 And so you've got to keep so. So by the end of your life, you're going to be just on this little one plank that's left or something that sounds negative.

00:26:14.820 But what Jesus tells us is that, you know, he gives us that analogy of the one, the disciple who chooses Christ over brother or sister or wife or family or wealth.

00:26:31.120 So you choose Christ over each of these things.

00:26:35.220 He says that you will receive a hundred times that back and eternal life.

00:26:41.420 And so what you find is that God is stripping things away from you.

00:26:47.100 But as he strips things away from you, you find that something a hundred times bigger emerges with eternal life plunked on top of that.

00:26:56.280 And so it's not you getting narrower.

00:26:58.580 it's actually it's the miracle of the gospel that when you when you let go of something

00:27:05.060 you find that he gives you that thing back multiplied by a hundred and that's just the

00:27:10.560 way jesus loves to work right like it's always you want to go to the front line go to the back

00:27:14.660 line you want to be at the top go to the bottom you want to be the master go be the servant

00:27:18.000 you want to have all of these things well then let go of all these things and you get them all

00:27:23.700 back multiplied by 100 and that's just the way the gospel works and so you do get massively richer

00:27:29.660 you get so much richer by doing that spiritually possibly physically possibly not but you you

00:27:37.000 definitely get so much richer uh spiritually through all of that wow that i i feel kind of

00:27:43.000 surprised that edified me i didn't know our conversation would go that direction but that

00:27:47.260 was so good for i hope it's good for our listeners maybe it's just me maybe that's just something

00:27:51.200 God's been doing in my heart recently, but that was really, really encouraging for me to hear.

00:27:55.780 Let's shift gears now as we kind of wrap up. Maybe if we could just get five more minutes

00:28:00.600 of your time, but could you talk a little bit about, we talked about Christian education. We've

00:28:06.160 talked about a Christian worldview, but I know that you're involved in classical education and

00:28:12.720 even for myself. So my sister is a teacher at Cambridge here in San Diego, and I know they've

00:28:19.280 taken some cues from um from the uh the k-12 school that you guys have there in moscow but

00:28:25.120 uh new saint andrews correct me if i'm wrong but that's also a it's not just a christian

00:28:28.880 university a christian college but it's classical uh what what is that what is a classical education

00:28:34.420 and why is that important yeah so the classical classical christian education was um it kind of

00:28:41.880 exploded here started in 1981 with logos school and then it kind of took off across the whole u.s

00:28:49.020 and now the world. You have a lot of ACCS schools, SCL schools, and then it's jumped over into the

00:28:55.520 homeschooling world, classical conversations, and a number of homeschoolers use curriculum in one

00:28:59.940 stripe or another that uses classical. So that was originally a K-12 movement. And then New

00:29:05.180 St. Andrews College was started as a college that tends to pull primarily from kids who come out of

00:29:10.000 that classical education. And there is, well, there's a whole lot to say about what is classical,

00:29:16.140 But let me let me give you my really quick summary. I described earlier that contrast between looking at education as being designed to impart a particular vocational skill versus education, looking to understand who God is, who this world is in light of him.

00:29:33.700 Classical is basically reflecting back on what is the classical tradition, a long tradition that went throughout, really derived from the early church and through the medieval era into the 16th, 17th century.

00:29:49.060 There was a process of education that classical education, as it began here in 1981, was an attempt to recover some of the elements of that tradition.

00:30:00.240 And the goal is to, instead of going straight to vocational skill, but it's instead trying to actually train the mind itself at a more fundamental level.

00:30:11.620 So to use an illustration from, if you remember, like in the 1980s, when you were getting your computer, you could get your tower.

00:30:22.060 But then, you know, as kids, we always wanted like the graphics card or the speaker or the, you know, some sort of impressive screen or whatever.

00:30:32.500 But you could have all of these accessories, but if your actual processor couldn't support it, it was dumb.

00:30:39.320 You needed a powerful processor to run everything else. Think of classical education as aimed at that processor itself. So it's looking at what now in the workforce is now referred to as the soft skills.

00:30:52.500 it's the skills that are a little bit closer to the heart the mind the soul and it has to do with

00:30:58.320 your ability to do critical thinking your ability to communicate with clarity to be able to speak

00:31:04.840 and to write to be able to get up and argue and not be flustered to be able to be given a huge

00:31:11.600 stack of assignments to go home and know how to on your own figure out how to work through this

00:31:18.760 and logically, you know, break it down, work through it all, come away with a coherent

00:31:23.740 understanding of it, be able to interact with others on that subject.

00:31:28.300 It's not any one of the professional skills, but it's these soft skills that it's interesting

00:31:33.420 in the workforce.

00:31:34.220 Now, you get a lot of kids that come with their vocational skills, but they don't have

00:31:37.620 common sense.

00:31:38.640 They don't know how to write.

00:31:39.500 They don't know how to speak.

00:31:40.520 They could code, but they don't know how to make eye contact.

00:31:42.820 So it's the stuff that's a little bit closer to home in the mind of the person, but then it's connecting that to their understanding of who Christ is and who they are in Christ, so that they see the world through the lens of Scripture.

00:32:01.160 That's really what classical Christian education is doing, and it has to do with focusing on the ancient arts of logic, grammar, rhetoric, and putting the mind together.

00:32:12.260 It tends to privilege the great works of the Western tradition because these tend to be the works that bring out that kind, those kinds of intellectual skills and as well as give them a sense of their Christian tradition and the inheritance that they have in Christ.

00:32:32.180 that's what the k-12 movement is doing and it's produced i think a really um incredible product

00:32:41.120 when held up in juxtaposition against most other educations and i do think it's interesting because

00:32:48.340 when i talk to christians and i say okay as a christian for a moment let's speak critically

00:32:53.420 about what's going on in the world of education and if i'm speaking the world i'm speaking usually

00:32:57.420 in the world of higher education most christians their sole um category for critiquing colleges

00:33:04.900 from a christian perspective has to do with um poking holes in the financial system um people

00:33:12.600 going into debt people um blowing all kinds of money on a ridiculous you know campus experience

00:33:19.700 and whatnot and there is so much to be said to critique colleges on the financial end it's just

00:33:24.960 a complete waste of money but our critique needs to go a lot deeper than just the financial thing

00:33:31.420 we need to actually understand what is a uniquely and distinctively christian education look like

00:33:36.420 at the college level that's the piece that i don't think we're we're um i don't think we have

00:33:41.940 which classical education actually has helped us to recover that's really yeah that's really

00:33:47.040 helpful would it be fair to say it like um because isn't there a piece in classical education that

00:33:52.220 kind of follows the development of a child and when they're so it would it be fair to say that

00:33:57.840 like grammar it's kind of like the first third in that k through 12 the first third is like grammar

00:34:02.440 and we're just we're just memorizing and just we're putting all this information in and then

00:34:08.320 logic so now it's not the what but it's the why and how and the how like how to use all this kind

00:34:13.540 of stuff and then and then so it's like grammar logic and then rhetoric and how to and now it's

00:34:19.520 how to persuade, how to disagree without needing a safe space, you know, or being triggered.

00:34:27.880 So is that fair to say grammar?

00:34:30.400 Is that the right order, I guess?

00:34:31.960 Because you mentioned those three things, but is it grammar, logic, and rhetoric?

00:34:35.300 And does that actually follow the development of a person?

00:34:39.520 I've heard that before.

00:34:40.380 Is that true?

00:34:41.160 I think that's a really important part.

00:34:43.460 So I mentioned this started here in 1981.

00:34:45.920 there was a essay written by Dorothy Sayers I think that was in the in the 1940s that she

00:34:52.460 called the lost tools of learning and she she structured what you just described as a kind of

00:34:59.460 experimental thing where she said look let's take this medieval system and break it down like this

00:35:03.660 wouldn't this be a really interesting thing to try my father-in-law uh being the kind of

00:35:09.800 rare bird that would say, well, let's do that. Let's try. He began Logos School and structured

00:35:17.520 it along those lines and doing exactly that, taking advantage of the natural proclivities of

00:35:23.780 kids who are eight years old to memorize the precocious nature of your junior higher who

00:35:29.820 wants to argue, teaching them the actual laws of argument, the weird, sudden insecurities that

00:35:36.900 afflict your high school student that they suddenly become so concerned with how they come across and

00:35:43.340 how other people think of them that that actually is what rhetoric is about and that teaching them

00:35:49.060 here the here's the art of rhetoric and the art of persuasion and here's how you control how you

00:35:54.760 come across that it takes advantage of the natural development of the student i'm as a father of five

00:36:02.640 kids. I have three that are now here at NSA and two that are at Logos School, that very first

00:36:07.520 classical Christian school. And it's just been so fun watching their developmental stages coincide

00:36:14.540 with this curriculum, making them just come alive. It's just a blast.

00:36:18.740 That's really cool. Well, thanks, Ben, so much. This has been really helpful for me personally.

00:36:23.600 I hope it's helpful for our listeners. For those who are listening to this episode or will be

00:36:29.180 listening once we air it and they want to find you and follow you keep up with some of the things

00:36:33.840 you're doing learn some more from you um how can they find you how can they follow you well definitely

00:36:39.300 check out the new st andrew's web page as well as the nsa uh facebook page those are the best places

00:36:45.120 to see what we're up to uh i think you were about to segue to our our our after hours conversation

00:36:51.780 and those that will be about some things that showed up on our nsa uh facebook page okay great

00:36:58.060 So real quick, so we have some bonus questions just to kind of begin to spark the appetite

00:37:03.960 of our listeners.

00:37:04.860 These are for our responders, our club members.

00:37:07.480 If you're not a responder yet, please become a responder.

00:37:10.120 We're building a bonus reel of a lot of great kind of behind the scenes questions being

00:37:16.560 answered by our guest on this podcast, Theology Applied.

00:37:19.700 So here are the two questions I'm going to be asking Ben for our after hours conversation.

00:37:25.540 So the first one is that I've heard New St. Andrews has been under fire for a particular video advertisement that they aired recently.

00:37:33.800 And so kind of getting a behind the scenes scoop on that and kind of the really just the controversy and the push back and forth between the college there and those and the civil authorities in Moscow.

00:37:47.660 And the second question I'm going to ask him in our bonus reel is, what is kind of a behind-the-scenes look at being the son-in-law of Doug Wilson?

00:37:58.880 Doug Wilson is an incredibly faithful man, but he's known by many in the evangelical world as being controversial.

00:38:04.660 And so I thought it would be really interesting to hear Ben talk about, from a closer-to-home perspective, what it's like to be a part of his family.

00:38:12.480 Maybe the Doug, the side of Doug that we common folk don't get to see.

00:38:17.160 So tune back in with us, become a responder, check out the bonus reel with those two questions.

00:38:22.760 And thanks again so much, Ben, for coming on the show.

00:38:25.220 Thanks for having me.

00:38:26.980 Thanks for tuning in to Right Response Ministries.

00:38:29.460 As a reminder, all of our resources should only be used as a supplement and not a substitute for the local church.

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The NXR Podcast - October 29, 2020

THEOLOGY APPLIED - Christian Education And The Myth Of Neutrality

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