The NXR Podcast - December 22, 2021


THEOLOGY APPLIED - How Public Schools Are Turning Children Against Their Parents

Topics
education Christian education vs. secular neutrality in education classical education critique classical education developmental stages
Hosted by
Joel Webbon Harrison Smith Antonio Griffith Dale Partridge Wewsley Todd Calvin Robinson
Mentioned
Doug Wilson Ben Merkel Darwinism Dorothy Sayers Richard Baxter Jerry Falwell Thomas Watson Jesus Christ John Owen Greyfires Greyfire Dimble Lewis David Merry
THEOLOGY APPLIED - Biblical Patriarchy： How Complementarianism Falls Short Of Scripture THEOLOGY APPLIED - DO NOT COMPLY! - Democrats’ Playbook For Persecuting Christians

Episode Stats


Length

45 minutes

Words per minute

174.11

Word count

7,895

Sentence count

371

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

22

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Ben Merkel is the President of New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. He is the son-in-law of Pastor Doug Wilson, who founded the school with a mission statement: "All of Christ for all of life."

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00 Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webin with Right Response Ministries, and you're listening to another
00:00:04 episode of Theology Applied. This week, we have a special treat for you. What we're doing here
00:00:09 at the end of the year is we're taking a few of our favorite episodes that we've ever recorded
00:00:13 with Theology Applied, and we're airing them for all of you who have missed them and for some of
00:00:19 you who maybe watched this episode in the past but wouldn't mind a refresher. So this episode,
00:00:24 one of my personal favorites, is with Ben Merkel. Ben Merkel is the president of New St. Andrews
00:00:30 College in Moscow, Idaho. And the title of this episode is How Public Schools Are Turning Children
00:00:38 Against Their Parents. How Public Schools Are Turning Children Against Their Parents. If you
00:00:44 want to be aware of what's going on in public schools and why it is absolutely vital that
00:00:49 Christians provide for their children a distinctly Christian education. This is the episode for you.
00:00:57 Real quick, before we get started, if you would prayerfully consider supporting Right Response
00:01:02 Ministries, we would be incredibly grateful. You can do so by giving a gift of any amount
00:01:07 at rightresponseministries.com slash donate. If you're not able to support this ministry
00:01:13 financially at this time, you can still support us in a great regard by simply subscribing to our
00:01:20 YouTube channel, clicking the bell, and of course, sharing our content with all your friends and
00:01:25 family. We need your help, and we pray that you would consider supporting us in this endeavor.
00:01:32 Applying God's Word to every aspect of life. This is Theology Applied.
00:01:38 Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webin with Right Response Ministries.
00:01:46 This is another episode of Theology Applied, where our whole goal in this podcast is to help Christians not only salute the inerrancy of the Word of God,
00:01:56 not just recognizing and acknowledging God's authority through His Word, but the sufficiency of God's Word.
00:02:02 realizing that that all of the scripture needs to be applied to all of life and so it's very
00:02:10 fitting our guest for today we have Dr. Ben Merkel who is the son-in-law of Doug Wilson and
00:02:17 the whole saying kind of mission statement that they've had there in Moscow where they live with
00:02:21 the church and with the school and all these different things is all of Christ for all of
00:02:26 life we want to take the whole Christ and his authority executed through the agency of the
00:02:32 Word, so all of Christ, all of the Bible, all of His Word, and apply it to all of life,
00:02:36 not just, you know, Jesus, Lord of my heart, not just applying the Scripture to church
00:02:41 and the home and parenting, but politics and media and entertainment and vocation.
00:02:49 And today, our episode is education.
00:02:51 So we're going to be looking at what the Bible says about education, the importance, the
00:02:57 significance, but then also getting really practical and how to apply a Christian worldview
00:03:04 and the sufficiency of scripture in the way that we educate. And so we have Dr. Ben Merkel. He is
00:03:12 the president of New St. Andrews College. And I'm going to let him take a moment right here from the
00:03:17 outset and introduce anything else, Ben, that you might want to share about yourself.
00:03:22 No, that's a great introduction. It's a pleasure to be here. Enjoy your ministry and your church and look forward to our conversation here.
00:03:31 Great. All right. Thanks for coming on. So first thing that I want to ask a little bit personal, but just people getting to know you some for you.
00:03:39 When and how did you first get interested in being an educator? What got you excited about education?
00:03:45 Well, you know, it was kind of a multi-step process. So it started during my undergraduate. I was at the University of Idaho, and I was taking a lot of chemistry classes, but I didn't really like chemistry.
00:03:59 And it was during my time at the U of I that I really felt like I had a heart for going into ministry of some sort. And virtually every pastor I knew was a teacher.
00:04:09 and so I got a secondary education degree in chemistry thinking that that was the way you've
00:04:16 got yourself ready to be a pastor. I know I did not really ask for any advisor counsel or anything
00:04:21 it just seemed like that's what pastors did. I started as soon as I graduated I came on staff
00:04:28 with the local church here doing evangelistic work to the University of Idaho leading Bible
00:04:33 studies, going in and speaking to fraternities and doing that sort of thing. Um, but during that
00:04:38 time, um, new St. Andrews college started and I was doing pastoral training through our church.
00:04:45 Greyfires hall had just started. I was the very first Greyfire student. And, uh, so I was doing,
00:04:50 uh, ministerial training and new St. Andrews started and Doug Wilson, my father-in-law asked
00:04:55 me if I would TA a class for him, which I, I did. And, uh, it's kind of a long series of events,
00:05:02 But one of the things that I noticed was that the impact that I was having on the students in my classes versus the impact that I was having in my Bible studies on the U of I campus, it was really interesting that it was in the context of education that I was seeing their souls opened up and people were ready to do a deep dive into what they actually thought.
00:05:26 and I started to see that I was having a more profound impact on um in discipling them and
00:05:34 mentoring them and whatnot through education than I was just in my normal pastoral work
00:05:39 and so that just got me intrigued and I threw myself more and more at it and saw
00:05:42 it blessed more and more as an outlet where there's something about those years from 18 to
00:05:49 22 23 and that first moment when you've left home and you're out on your own for the first time
00:05:56 there's something really significant that happens there and it happens in those classes that shapes
00:06:02 lives in a really profound way and i found that that was just something i wanted to be involved
00:06:05 in that's cool yeah so just massive amount of influence at a very a very uh pivotal time in
00:06:12 people's lives and just realizing it really is significant yep okay so let me go ahead and just
00:06:19 get right into it um our topic for today we've titled it christian education and the myth of
00:06:25 neutrality christian education and the myth of neutrality so i think a good question for us to
00:06:31 start with is uh what is the difference and is there a difference between christians in education
00:06:38 versus a Christian education. 0.97
00:06:41 Yeah, that's a really good point. 0.98
00:06:43 And I think, you know, I feel really strongly
00:06:44 about the necessity of a Christian education,
00:06:47 but I think there's a distinction to make there
00:06:49 because I think that parents owe their children
00:06:53 a Christian education.
00:06:55 At the same time, I know that there are people
00:06:57 working in a public secular school system
00:07:00 or Christians that are trying to do their best
00:07:02 to make an impact where they are.
00:07:04 And I don't want to necessarily say
00:07:07 that they're in sin for their job, but I do think that parents really need to focus on giving their
00:07:11 children a Christian education. And one of the differences between those two, you've set up two
00:07:17 things that are kind of opposed to one another or at least could be opposed to one another. And I
00:07:22 think that you need to dive into that a little bit and define the difference really between
00:07:27 Christian education and then the secular version where Christians might be a part of that, but it's
00:07:34 not a um it's not a coherent christian education that's being given over there um i think that
00:07:41 there's a slowly dividing but but something is creating a massive divide between two different
00:07:47 takes on what education is whereas there's there's from a christian perspective we have
00:07:53 the obligation to teach our children um to love god with all their heart soul and mind to pass
00:07:59 this faith onto them and to teach them to see the world in the light of scripture.
00:08:05 In unpacking our church's mission statement, that's a good description of this idea that
00:08:11 we want to root our children in the word and then teach them that that word is a foundation
00:08:16 on which they can stand and see, or maybe a lens through which they can see the whole
00:08:21 world.
00:08:22 And that's a very deep discipleship that happens.
00:08:26 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? You're wrestling with questions that have to do with the transcendent standard that we live under.
00:08:44 So we have a God whose character has shaped this whole world.
00:08:49 And when you're in that kind of education, you're understanding – you're looking to God's character.
00:08:53 You're unpacking that.
00:08:54 You're understanding what his character is like.
00:08:56 And then you're taking that down into this world and you're starting to see this world in light of that transcendent standard.
00:09:03 And so then that sets you up for arguments where you are trying to deduce the laws of logic that God has revealed to us via his word but also through his law written on our heart, natural revelation.
00:09:21 It's this law that we see from him that we then interpret the rest of the world in.
00:09:27 And we can have lots of arguments where, you know, I have this standard.
00:09:31 How is that consistently applied in all of these different areas?
00:09:35 That's one way of thinking about education.
00:09:38 That's not at all what any of our current schools are doing.
00:09:42 Our current schools are far more oriented towards imparting very basic vocational skills.
00:09:49 So you're trying to teach people how to use Excel, how to use, how to code, how to write, whatever.
00:09:57 You're teaching them very specific vocational skills.
00:10:01 And to the extent that there's anything larger worldview about it, it's a lot of indoctrination in a very God-hating kind of philosophy.
00:10:10 But it doesn't look to any sort of transcendent standard.
00:10:13 Um, you'll see things like, um, uh, well, have you noticed that like over the last say two years, how many conversations have you seen between two people who, um, have very different perspectives come from two very different worlds and have two ideologies that are very opposed them.
00:10:36 And yet they were able to have a very clear and calm and rational conversation where they
00:10:42 recognize, yes, none.
00:10:45 So that doesn't exist anymore because we don't teach people that anymore.
00:10:49 What you see is the venting of emotion.
00:10:50 You see the attempt to manipulate the system in which in a way where I can be the one who's
00:10:56 the victim.
00:10:56 You're trying to trump each other with those kinds of sort of childish maneuvers and basically
00:11:02 a lot of screaming and obscenity.
00:11:04 that's all of our public discourse now because we've lost our ability to have this other kind
00:11:09 of conversation um so so when you i i think that you could have somebody who's teaching you a
00:11:17 vocational skill and i obviously you need to learn vocational skills you don't need to have
00:11:21 you know if somebody's teaching you how to um drive a truck um and they're showing you how to
00:11:27 shift gears you know they could be muslim or they could be jewish or they could be trinitarian
00:11:32 in and it still is okay. Like there, there's some basic fundamental skills, but you lose all of that 0.98
00:11:38 other larger perspective. And when you reduce education to just those skills, well, you lose
00:11:47 the ability to have any of these kinds of conversations. And so one of the things I've
00:11:52 been trying to point people out, point out to people is that we think that education is just
00:11:57 about vocational skills. Like you go to school so you can get a job. If you don't get that kind
00:12:01 degree you won't be able to get a job i want to point out that when you when you sure when you
00:12:07 get a vocational degree you can get a job but when you raise an entire generation that has no
00:12:13 education but they only have vocational skills you can't have an you can't even have an economy
00:12:18 so we we're currently living in a world where everything is shut down we're burning our towns
00:12:24 right we we um all common sense is gone and we're destroying looting and pillaging all of it
00:12:31 we might all have vocational skills but we don't have any education and when you ignore the
00:12:37 education and jump to the vocational skill you do get that job in a very short-sighted way
00:12:45 but you lose your entire economy just a little while after that and i think that's the tension
00:12:50 that we need to see yeah I think that's really good if I had a dollar for every single time I
00:12:55 heard leaders even in the church say hey we're going to have a conversation about some kind of
00:13:01 controversial topic like race but it's never actually a conversation what they mean by that
00:13:05 is we're going to have an echo chamber that that everybody here already holds the same view
00:13:10 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
00:13:16 reacting, I think our culture is reacting to, well, the, the oligarchy or those people who
00:13:21 were in positions of power, um, they always got to be right. And now we're, and now all we've
00:13:26 really done those, we've just shifted the narrative. So now there's a new position of
00:13:30 power, namely the victim, the person who is powerless by your powerlessness, you now have
00:13:35 power, but, but neither one considers what's most important, which is regardless of, of,
00:13:41 the position of power or power that comes by being powerless, what really matters is, but who's
00:13:48 right? What's truth? But there is no objective truth anymore because we've rejected God's
00:13:55 standard. We've rejected the standard of truth. So yeah, I completely agree. Talk to us a little
00:14:01 bit about, because I've heard you speak on this before, and I think it's super helpful. I think
00:14:05 a lot of Christians, part of the reason why they feel like, oh, I don't have to homeschool my kids
00:14:09 or I, our kids don't have to receive a Christian, you know, education. We can send them to public
00:14:15 school or, or, or any, any kind of alternative. I think part of the thinking there is, um, in terms
00:14:22 of they still kind of are holding on to what, what I would consider. I know you would also
00:14:27 the myth of neutrality. They think that they think that, um, that there actually exists some
00:14:33 realm where you can be taught, right? So you kind of alluded to this a little bit about like being
00:14:38 a truck driver and they're just being some very practical skills that can be taught by the Muslim
00:14:43 or an atheist or a Christian. But when it comes to math and English and literature and science, 0.51
00:14:50 I know you would disagree in those subjects, but there still seem to be a lot of Christian
00:14:55 parents that think that neutrality actually exists where they can send their kids, outsource
00:15:01 education, and they can be taught by someone something that is not Christian, but it's also
00:15:06 not opposed to Christ. Where does that come from? And is neutrality in education, is that a myth?
00:15:13 Am I right about that? No, I completely agree with you. And I would even push it and say,
00:15:17 even to a certain extent, the truck driver and the plumber need to have a Christian view
00:15:21 of their discipline. And I think that there's something unique and distinctive about approaching
00:15:27 these things from a Christian perspective. But it has to do with, there always has to be a why.
00:15:34 You always have to have – you have to ultimately be able to explain the why.
00:15:40 Why does two plus two equal four?
00:15:43 Why – and within the Christian worldview, you're able to put that on the bedrock foundation of who God is and the world that he has made.
00:15:52 Now, we believe in – because I'm a Christian and because I read my Bible, one of the things the Bible tells me is that God's law is written on the heart of all men and that God's attributes can be perceived even by the unregenerate through natural revelation.
00:16:08 So I believe that there is a natural law and a law of God written on the heart of those who are outside of Christ, and therefore there are things that I can learn from them that they understand this world in real and true ways.
00:16:23 But that only makes sense ultimately because the God of the Bible is true.
00:16:28 And what you find is that everything always leans and moves towards consistency over time.
00:16:41 There are inconsistencies that you can have in your life that over time will work themselves out and will reconcile themselves into a consistency.
00:16:51 You know, I'm looking at today's news of Jerry Falwell and what was what's going on there.
00:17:00 And you have all these crazy things that are coming out.
00:17:03 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.
00:17:10 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.
00:17:18 You know, you can hold it down there for a time, but sooner or later, you know, it shoots up over here. 1.00
00:17:23 And the Christian's job is to poke their arms. 1.00
00:17:25 What do you got there? 1.00
00:17:26 What do you got there?
00:17:27 Right.
00:17:27 Yeah.
00:17:28 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.
00:17:40 And somebody with my convictions would say, that's a bad idea. 1.00
00:17:43 You need something that's explicitly Christian. 0.96
00:17:45 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.
00:17:53 And I would say, no, no, it needs to be explicitly on God's word.
00:17:57 And sooner or later, this inconsistency will come out.
00:18:02 So over the last 50 years, what we've seen is that public education getting worse and worse.
00:18:07 And you'll have even parents now, like I see this when I'm talking to parents about sending their kids off to college.
00:18:12 They'll say, I'll say, look, you know, the secular college is God hating and blah, blah, blah.
00:18:17 And they'll say, yeah, I hear you say that.
00:18:19 But I remember when I went to college and it was God hating, but there was also a lot of really good about it.
00:18:25 And it was actually where I became a Christian and on and on.
00:18:28 And and and what they don't realize is that that was 20 years ago.
00:18:33 The college campus of today is so different.
00:18:36 But the college campus of today was is consistent with that college campus of 20 years ago.
00:18:43 It's one long trajectory that over time it's going to become more and more consistent with itself.
00:18:49 And so there are plenty of areas where I don't have a problem dipping my foot in that water because I know it's I know that this book is inconsistent with God's word, but there's some stuff in here that's really useful.
00:19:06 But I want to be really careful and conscious of the fact that over time that inconsistency is going to come out and it is going to destroy it.
00:19:15 And I think that we are really, really short sighted when we think that particularly with where the schools are now, that we can hand our children over to that and not have that have a catastrophic effect on their lives.
00:19:31 I completely agree. I think of music, you know, I think we're just hardwired because we're made in the image of God because of natural law, natural revelation. We can't, human beings cannot sit well with dissonance, right? We want to resolve the note. You got to do one or the other. And because of the doctrine of total depravity, because the heart of man, apart from regeneration, as you referenced, is opposed to God, not just neutral, but Romans 8 says hostile towards God.
00:19:58 It does not submit to his law, nor can it because of that disposition in the heart of
00:20:03 man being opposed to God and because of being, so in terms of total depravity, there's an
00:20:08 opposition towards God.
00:20:10 So that's not a viable option. 0.99
00:20:11 We cannot submit to his law, but because of the Imago Dei, we also can't really sit with
00:20:17 inconsistency or dissonance.
00:20:19 We want to resolve, but the resolution is always going to work away from God apart from
00:20:24 new hearts.
00:20:25 So we're going to have to resolve.
00:20:27 We can't live in this inconsistency. We're going to have to pick one or the other.
00:20:30 But because the heart of man, apart from regeneration, is opposed to the things of God,
00:20:35 because they're spiritually discerned and because he's hostile towards God, he's at enmity with God. 0.71
00:20:40 Because of all those things, there's just going to be this natural, apart from a Christian education,
00:20:45 apart from a Christian worldview, and really ultimately apart from regenerate hearts. 0.83
00:20:50 It's really not if, it's just when. It's a matter of time.
00:20:53 There's going to be this constant downstream towards not order, but chaos. And I think of that, I think of Darwinism. I think Doug said this, but I think of Darwinism being taught for decades in the public school system. And now all of a sudden, it's like, all right, we want revolution. We want to change things and we want to make them better.
00:21:13 And what's the immediate default strategy among young people coming out of public school systems, taught Darwinism?
00:21:21 The strategy is, well, let's burn it all down.
00:21:24 But that doesn't fix anything.
00:21:25 But it does for the Darwinian because if you just do chaos, well, what comes out of chaos?
00:21:31 According to Darwinism, according to evolution, order.
00:21:34 Whereas the Christian worldview would say, if you want to fix things, you can't burn it.
00:21:37 You can't go to chaos because chaos produces nothing.
00:21:41 We believe in God, who is a God of order. And so even that, it's like, we maybe don't draw the connections. But my point is, I think, you know, the riots and burning down cities and defunding police, you look at that and you think, oh, like, this is, this is silly. But it's actually not. It actually is, I think, the culture trying to resolve the dissonance.
00:22:08 It's it's picking a lane. It's it's I think that's really true. Consistency.
00:22:12 I am. So actually, I just did our last on Friday.
00:22:17 We have a weekly dispute audio and I gave our first dispute audio talk.
00:22:20 And I based a lot of that quote from Lewis in that hideous strength.
00:22:26 And he makes this observation that I think is really profound, where he says I think it's his character, Dimble, who says this.
00:22:32 He says that he's just kind of pontificating to his wife.
00:22:36 And he says, have you noticed that the world is always sharpening and coming to a point?
00:22:41 The world is always getting narrower and pointier.
00:22:45 And there is something about as we grow up, it seems like every day God takes the world that we lived in yesterday and he puts it in front of us today and he divides it in half.
00:22:58 And he says, pick which one you want, you know, and we need to pick faithfulness.
00:23:03 And then, and then he does that again tomorrow. And, and it's funny because there are, um, there are friends that you had 10 years ago that you could not fellowship with now because God matured you and he's growing you more and more faithful.
00:23:21 And for you to grow up is for you to choose the half that God wants you to choose.
00:23:28 And it's not to say that 20 years ago you were disobedient for being where you were.
00:23:35 But God keeps wanting you to grow up and he keeps making you right choices.
00:23:39 And my observation to the students, which is pointing out like how over history, you know, you look at you look at King David, godly, righteous, righteous man. 0.63
00:23:49 And we know he stumbled with Bathsheba and everything. 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 was a complete barbarian, who has a multitude of wives, one of whom he won by with a necklace of Philistine foreskins.
00:24:10 um it wouldn't fly now like we need to grow up we need to we need to mature from that and every
00:24:18 year god is going to ask you to get sharper and and i say this because i think that 20 30 40 years
00:24:26 ago christian education felt like a principle that certain men were was they were advocating
00:24:34 this principle because of things you know peculiar convictions that they had whatever
00:24:39 But it seemed like it was an option and you could go in any number of different directions.
00:24:46 Where we are now, we see that the peculiar convictions that these guys had were actually not that peculiar but were actually some really, really incisive foresight who saw the way this thing was going, who understood the ground that we needed to seize now and that that option is no longer much of an option.
00:25:07 And the world is divided in half, and you need to pick which one.
00:25:11 And whichever one you pick, one's going to endure and preserve.
00:25:16 The other one's going to fall off.
00:25:18 And so I think we have to be really decisive right now.
00:25:21 That's so helpful.
00:25:22 I mean, that's helpful for our listeners, but that was really helpful for me.
00:25:25 I feel like you just kind of made sense of the last 10 years of my life when you gave that illustration of like it's like every day.
00:25:32 I've never put it into that kind of language.
00:25:34 That was just very helpful for me.
00:25:36 every day. It's like the Lord, he takes the world you were living in the day before and he divides
00:25:40 it in half and says, pick one. And the way you related that even to friendships, right? They're
00:25:46 like there, cause I, that's, I think that is just the experience of anyone who's actively
00:25:50 and faithfully following Jesus. And that's certainly been my experience that there are
00:25:54 people who right now it's like, yeah, I mean, we just, we don't have the relationship that we
00:26:01 once had. And it's like, what happened? Cause five years ago, it's like we saw eye to eye on
00:26:05 everything. But the reality is we saw eye to eye on everything because in that state, that degree
00:26:10 of maturity that I was at five years ago, I just didn't see as much. So it's like, if you're only
00:26:16 seeing 10 things, well, it's a lot easier that just the laws of average to see 10 things the
00:26:23 same way with somebody else, it's a lot more likely than to see a hundred things the same way
00:26:28 as somebody else. And so it's just, as we continue following Jesus and he begins to reveal to us from
00:26:33 his word, both, well, really both in special revelation for his word, but also in general
00:26:38 revelation by what's around us and making sense of his world, according to his rules
00:26:43 for his world, um, again and again, again, we're just seeing more.
00:26:46 And the more and more we see the less and less likelihood, um, that we're going to share
00:26:51 all that in common with everybody else.
00:26:53 And so it's, as we pursue Christ, it's, it's like our relationships get fewer, but deeper.
00:26:58 Would you agree with that?
00:27:01 Oh yeah, absolutely.
00:27:01 Well, it's like Jesus says, to whom much is given, much is required.
00:27:06 And what happens is every day you get just a little more inheritance from him.
00:27:10 But that inheritance, it demands more of you.
00:27:14 But the thing is, if I continue on with that talk, 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 – well, it feels very negative.
00:27:30 Cause it feels like, um, are you like sitting on a, uh, a shipwrecked boat and like every
00:27:36 day half of the boat like breaks off and falls away and sinks, you know?
00:27:39 And so you've got to keep, so, so by the end of your life, you're going to be just on this
00:27:43 little one plank that's left or something that sounds negative.
00:27:46 But what Jesus tells us is that, um, you know, he, he gives us that analogy of, um, the one,
00:27:54 the disciple who chooses Christ over, um, brother or sister or wife or family or wealth, or so you,
00:28:04 you choose Christ over each of these things. He says that you will receive a hundred times that
00:28:11 back and eternal life. And so what's, what you find is, is that, that God is stripping things
00:28:17 away from you, but as he strips things away from you, you find that something a hundred times
00:28:23 bigger emerges and that, and with eternal life plunked on top of that. And so it's not you
00:28:29 getting narrower. It's actually, it's the miracle of the gospel that when you, when you let go of
00:28:36 something, you find that he gives you that thing back multiplied by a hundred. And that's just the
00:28:42 way Jesus loves to work, right? Like it's always, you want to go to the front of the line, go to the
00:28:46 back line. You want to be at the top, go to the bottom. You want to be the master, go be the
00:28:49 servant you want to have all of these things well then let go of all these things and you get them
00:28:55 all back multiplied by a hundred and that's just the way the gospel works and so you do get massively
00:29:01 richer you get so much richer by doing that spiritually possibly physically possibly not but
00:29:08 you you definitely get so much richer uh spiritually through all of that wow that i i feel kind of
00:29:15 surprised that edified me i didn't know our conversation would go that direction but that
00:29:19 was so good for, I hope it's good for our listeners. Maybe it's just me. Maybe that's
00:29:22 just something God's been doing in my heart recently, but that was really, really encouraging
00:29:26 for me to hear. Um, let's shift gears now, uh, as we kind of wrap up, maybe if we could just get
00:29:31 five more minutes, um, of your time, but could you talk a little bit about, um, we've talked
00:29:36 about Christian education. We've talked about a Christian worldview, but, um, I know that, um,
00:29:41 you're involved in classical education and, uh, even for myself. So my, my sister is a teacher
00:29:47 at Cambridge here in San Diego, and I know they've taken some cues from the K-12 school
00:29:55 that you guys have there in Moscow. But New St. Andrews, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's also
00:29:59 it's not just a Christian university, a Christian college, but it's classical. What is that? What
00:30:05 is a classical education, and why is that important? Yeah, so the classical Christian 0.95
00:30:11 education was um it kind of exploded here started in 1981 with logos school and then it kind of
00:30:19 took off across the whole u.s and now the world um you have a lot of accs schools scl schools and
00:30:25 then it's uh jumped over into the homeschooling world classical conversations and a number of
00:30:30 homeschoolers use curriculum in one stripe or another that uses classical so that was originally
00:30:34 a k-12 movement and then new st andrews college was started as a college that tends to pull
00:30:40 primarily from kids who come out of that classical education and there is um well there's a whole lot
00:30:46 to say about what is classical um but let me let me give you my really quick summary um i described
00:30:53 earlier that um contrast between looking at education as being designed to impart a particular
00:30:59 vocational skill versus education looking to understand who god is who this world is in light
00:31:05 him. Classical is basically reflecting back on what is the classical tradition, a long tradition
00:31:12 that went throughout, really derived from the early church and through the medieval era into
00:31:19 the 16th, 17th century. There was a process of education that classical education, as it began
00:31:25 here in 1981, was an attempt to recover some of the elements of that tradition. And the goal is to,
00:31:33 instead of going straight to vocational skill, but it's instead trying to actually train the mind
00:31:39 itself at a more fundamental level. So to use an illustration from if you remember,
00:31:47 like in the 1980s, when you were getting your computer, you would you could get your your your
00:31:53 tower. But then, you know, as kids, we always wanted like the graphics card or the speaker or
00:31:59 you know some sort of impressive screen or whatever but you could have all these accessories
00:32:06 but if your actual processor couldn't support it it was dumb you needed a powerful processor to
00:32:14 to run everything else think of classical education as aimed at that processor itself
00:32:19 so it's looking at what now in the workforce is now referred to as the soft skills it's the skills
00:32:25 that are a little bit closer to the heart, the mind, the soul, and it has to do with
00:32:30 your ability to do critical thinking, your ability to communicate with clarity, to be
00:32:36 able to speak and to write, to be able to get up and argue and not be flustered, to
00:32:41 be able to be given a huge stack of assignments to go home and know how to, on your own, figure
00:32:49 out how to work through this and logically break it down, work through it all, come away
00:32:55 with a coherent understanding of it be able to interact with others on that subject it's not
00:33:00 any one of the professional skills but it's these soft skills that um it's interesting in the
00:33:05 workforce now you get a lot of kids that come with their vocational skills but they don't have
00:33:09 common sense they don't know how to write they don't know how to speak they could code but they
00:33:13 don't know how to make eye contact it's it's um right so it's the stuff that's a little bit closer
00:33:18 to home in the mind of the person, but then it's connecting that to their understanding
00:33:26 of who Christ is and who they are in Christ, so that they see the world through the lens
00:33:32 of Scripture.
00:33:33 That's really what classical Christian education is doing, and it has to do with focusing
00:33:37 on the ancient arts of logic, grammar, rhetoric, and putting the mind together.
00:33:44 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.
00:34:04 that's what the k-12 movement is doing and it's produced i think a really um incredible product
00:34:13 when held up in juxtaposition against most other educations and i do think it's interesting because
00:34:20 when i talk to christians and i say okay as a christian for a moment let's speak critically
00:34:25 about what's going on in the world of education and if i'm speaking the world i'm speaking usually
00:34:29 in the world of higher education. Most Christians, their sole category for critiquing colleges from 0.96
00:34:37 a Christian perspective has to do with poking holes in the financial system, people going into 0.79
00:34:45 debt, people blowing all kinds of money on a ridiculous, you know, campus experience and 0.82
00:34:51 whatnot. And there is so much to be said to critique colleges on the financial end. It's
00:34:56 It's just a complete waste of money.
00:34:59 But our critique needs to go a lot deeper than just the financial thing.
00:35:03 We need to actually understand what is a uniquely and distinctively Christian education look like at the college level.
00:35:09 That's the piece I don't think we're we're I don't think we have which classical education actually has helped us to recover.
00:35:17 That's really. Yeah, that's really helpful.
00:35:19 Would it be fair to say it like, because isn't there a piece in classical education that kind of follows the development of a child and when they're, so would it be fair to say that like grammar, it's kind of like the first third in that K through 12, the first third is like grammar and we're just, we're just memorizing and just we're putting all this information in and then logic.
00:35:40 So now it's not the what, but it's the why and how, and the how, like how to use all this kind of stuff. And then, and then, so it's like grammar, logic, and then rhetoric and how to, and now it's how to persuade, how, how to, how to disagree without needing a safe space, you know, or being triggered.
00:35:59 So is that fair to say grammar? Is that the right order, I guess? Because you mentioned those three things. But is it grammar, logic, and rhetoric? And does that actually follow the development of a person? I've heard that before. Is that true?
00:36:12 I think that's a really important part. So I mentioned this started here in 1981. There was a essay written by Dorothy Sayers, I think it was in the in the 1940s, that she called the lost tools of learning. And she she structured what you just described as a kind of experimental thing where she said, look, let's take this medieval system and break it down like this.
00:36:35 wouldn't this be a really interesting thing to try? My father-in-law being the kind of rare bird
00:36:42 that would say, well, let's do that. Let's try. He began Logos School and structured it along those
00:36:50 lines and doing exactly that, taking advantage of the natural proclivities of kids who are,
00:36:56 you know, eight years old to memorize the precocious nature of your junior hire who wants
00:37:02 to argue teaching them the actual laws of argument the weird sudden insecurities that afflict your
00:37:09 high school student that they suddenly become so concerned with how they come across and how other
00:37:15 people think of them that that actually is what rhetoric is about and that teaching them here the
00:37:21 here's the art of rhetoric and the art of persuasion and here's how you control how you
00:37:26 come across that it takes advantage of the natural development of the student. I'm, as a father of
00:37:34 five kids, I have three that are now here at NSA and two that are at Logos School, that very first
00:37:39 classical Christian school. And it's just been so fun watching their developmental stages coincide
00:37:46 with this curriculum, making them just come alive. It's just a blast. That's really cool. Well,
00:37:51 thanks, Ben, so much. This has been really helpful for me personally. I hope it's helpful
00:37:56 for our listeners um for those who are listening to this episode or will be listening once we air
00:38:02 it and they want to find you and follow you keep up with some of the things you're doing learn some
00:38:06 more from you um how can they find you how can they follow you well definitely check out the
00:38:12 new st andrew's web page as well as the nsa uh facebook page those are the best places to see
00:38:17 what we're up to uh i think you were about to segue to our our after hours conversation and
00:38:24 Those that will be about some things that showed up on our NSA Facebook page.
00:38:28 OK, great. So real quick.
00:38:31 So we have some bonus questions just to kind of begin to spark the appetite of our listeners.
00:38:36 These are for our responders, our club members.
00:38:39 If you're not a responder yet, please become a responder.
00:38:42 We're building a bonus reel of a lot of great kind of behind the scenes questions being answered by our guest on this podcast, Theology Applied.
00:38:51 So here are the two questions I'm going to be asking Ben for our after hours conversation.
00:38:57 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.
00:39:05 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.
00:39:19 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?
00:39:30 Doug Wilson is an incredibly faithful man, but he's known by many in the evangelical world as being controversial.
00:39:36 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.
00:39:44 Maybe the Doug, the side of Doug that we common folk don't get to see.
00:39:49 So tune back in with us, become a responder, check out the bonus reel with those two questions.
00:39:54 And thanks again so much, Ben, for coming on the show.
00:39:57 Thanks for having me.
00:39:59 Hi, this is Pastor Joel Webin with Right Response Ministries, wishing you a very Merry Christmas.
00:40:05 This year of our Lord 2021, God has far exceeded all of our wildest expectations.
00:40:12 On our YouTube platform alone, we've reached this year 1.2 million views.
00:40:17 And that's aside from all of our other social media platforms.
00:40:22 And I've been wondering about this.
00:40:24 Why is it that people have found our content and our ministry to be helpful?
00:40:29 The Puritans believed that a minister of the word had not faithfully preached God's word
00:40:34 unless his sermon was composed of at least three parts.
00:40:38 Number one, exegesis of the text.
00:40:41 Number two, doctrine, drawing out and emphasizing specific theology and doctrines within the text.
00:40:50 But number three, read any of the Puritan works from John Owen to Thomas Watson to Richard
00:40:56 Baxter, and you will find at the end of their writings, at the end of their books, and at the
00:41:00 end of their sermon manuscripts, application. Application. It's a text with exegesis. It's
00:41:07 doctrines fleshed out, but then it's those truths applied to every single realm of human life
00:41:15 and nothing less. Our nation is desperate for God's commandments, God's precepts, God's word
00:41:24 to be applied to culture, to be applied to politics, to be applied to economics, to be applied
00:41:32 to the marketplace, to be applied to all these things.
00:41:36 And that's been our flagship show.
00:41:39 As I'm sure you're aware with Right Response Ministries,
00:41:41 the show that most of you tune in for
00:41:43 is called Theology Applied.
00:41:47 When I came up with that idea,
00:41:48 I didn't feel like I was even coming up with an idea.
00:41:51 I thought this was the most basic idea you could ever have.
00:41:55 It feels inauthentic or deceitful to even call it an idea
00:41:59 that makes it sound like it was innovative
00:42:01 or it was some kind of, you know, amazing creation. 0.98
00:42:04 Theology applied, isn't that what Christians have always done? 0.96
00:42:07 Apparently not, not anymore.
00:42:12 Because when we apply the word of God
00:42:14 to areas of human society that don't want God's word,
00:42:19 all of a sudden there's conflict.
00:42:22 When you start applying God's law to the medical field,
00:42:26 when you start applying God's law to how people should vote,
00:42:29 when you start applying God's law to Roe versus Wade,
00:42:33 when you start applying God's law to economics,
00:42:37 to socialism, to all these other things,
00:42:40 then all of a sudden, people are bothered.
00:42:44 You know why people are bothered?
00:42:46 They're bothered when the church becomes a threat.
00:42:50 Jesus was crucified because Jesus was a threat.
00:42:54 He was a threat to the kingdoms of this world.
00:42:57 He was a threat to the wisdom of this age.
00:43:01 He was a threat to principalities and to rulers
00:43:04 and to governing officials.
00:43:06 Jesus was a threat then.
00:43:09 And if we would only preach him,
00:43:11 if we would only preach Christ again today, 0.50
00:43:14 he will be a threat to all his enemies once more.
00:43:18 God is supreme.
00:43:19 He has something to say.
00:43:21 Will we open our mouths?
00:43:23 Will we reflect his image?
00:43:25 Will we reflect his truth?
00:43:28 Will we preach the whole counsel of God?
00:43:32 By God's grace, that's what we've done.
00:43:33 And I believe that's why we've grown.
00:43:35 That's why you like our ministry.
00:43:37 That's why you've been willing to be generous
00:43:39 and support our ministry.
00:43:41 And so we wanna continue.
00:43:43 And we don't wanna just continue in the way that we have.
00:43:46 We wanna expand and multiply our impact, our content,
00:43:51 our reach in every single regard.
00:43:54 but we can't do it without your help.
00:43:57 You've been so encouraging in your comments, your emails.
00:44:00 You've prayed for us, you've cared for us
00:44:03 and you've generously supported us.
00:44:06 But if it's not too much to ask,
00:44:09 I humbly request that you would prayerfully consider
00:44:11 financially supporting us at the end of the year once more
00:44:15 and that you would pray that we would remain faithful.
00:44:20 The last thing I want is for this ministry to grow
00:44:23 but for me to shrink in cowardice. 1.00
00:44:27 I pray that God kills this ministry tomorrow 0.99
00:44:29 if I'm going to be a man who compromises. 0.98
00:44:33 So pray that the ministry grows,
00:44:36 but pray for me personally.
00:44:38 I'm asking you, pray for Joel.
00:44:40 Pray that I would be courageous.
00:44:43 The righteous are as bold as lions.
00:44:46 Pray that I would not shrink back
00:44:48 and that I would continue to apply
00:44:50 the whole counsel of God to the whole of human life. Pray that this ministry would be a threat
00:44:57 and that we would faithfully equip Christians all over the world to likewise be a threat, 1.00
00:45:04 a threat to every principality, every evil power, every wisdom of this age, every lofty opinion, 0.85
00:45:13 every ruler who sets his face against the lordship of Jesus Christ. Merry Christmas.