V\ S c ^ V e r
Christian Education
in Today’s World
by Dr. Jack MacArthur
A c c o r d in g to the grace of God which was: given to me as a wise master-builder, I lay the foundation, and another is building upon, but let each man be careful how he builds upon it, for no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (I Cor. 3:10, 11). Graduates from the Biola schools have had the unique privilege of attending a Christian institution of higher learning. This is a rare oppor tunity beyond one’s ability to appreciate fully. This is something inimitable to our culture, something to be prized highly, because it is rapidly being lost. In a recent book entitled, “ The Crisis of Western Education,” written by a Catholic historian of Harvard University, Christopher Dawson, this author reminds us that the heart of Western civilization is its Christian culture; that the Western heart is not beating at the center of things where it belongs, but is fluttering on the fringes; that Western civilization is sick with a bad case of secularism. One of the most serious symp toms which may well finish off the patient in the end is the loss of moral order. “ The Western world,” says Dawson, “has become so deeply secularized that it no longer recognizes any com mon system of spiritual values, while its philosophers have tended to isolate the moral concept from its cul tural context, and have attempted to create an abstract, subjective system of pure ethics. “ If this were all, we should be forced to conclude that modern Western society does not possess a civilization but only a technological order resting on a moral vacuum.” “ But such,” continues Dawson, “ is not the whole case. Christian culture still has a tenacious vitality, but it must be made available to the minds and hearts of the young. This means that in Western universities and colleges, secular and religious alike, a strenuous effort must be directed to the study of Christian his tory, Christian theology and Christian tradition.” It has been the privilege of Biola graduates to attend a Christian school in the clearest possible definition of the word Christian. As Calvin Seerveld says, “ A church- related college is not necessarily a Christian college. Many private American colleges today are church-relat ed simply because some devoted clergymen started them in the 19th century, and the historical relation has been maintained because the church, like a distant rich uncle,
puts up the desperately-needed money in the spring of the year—providing that the Bible department hasn’t gotten too far out of line, and any student immorality has been kept out of the headlines. Moreover, if a church has betrayed its centuries-old Christian confessions, the fact that the college is ‘church-related’ means little.” Obviously, and in the light of recent trends and court actions, Christian education has become increas ingly, if not exclusively, the responsibility of positively identified Christian institutions. It is our contention that there is an urgent need to uphold the integrity of liberal art courses competently taught, and at the same time maintain the dignity, the authority, the infallibility and the depth of the revealed Word of God. This is the synthesis that constitutes an education that is gloriously adequate and truly Chris tian, and this is precisely what the Biola schools have accomplished magnificently. Man’s hopeless future desperately demands an edu cational effort that is basically Christian. About 40 years ago, Albert Sweitzer said, “ It is clear now to everyone that the suicide of civilization is in progress.” What becomes fascinating is that at the time Sweit zer wrote these words, this fact was certainly not clear to very many. What is amazing is that a lonely man, living not in the industrial heart of Europe, but on the edge o f the African jungle, should make such a state ment. It is now the general feeling everywhere that we are preparing for the most ghastly war in human history, a highly-mechanized, technical, scientific war where slaughter, death and devastation will be so wholesale that even to contemplate it staggers our imagination. It does appear from a purely humanistic point of view that we are getting into the vortex of possible extinc tion. In his book, “ The Predicament of Modern Man,” Dr. Trueblood says, “The awful truth is that our wisdom about ends no longer matches our ingenuity about means. And this situation, if it continues, may be suffi cient to destroy us, because, just at the moment of his tory, when the technical conditions for the oneness of the globe have finally appeared, we are woefully lacking in the moral conditions that are required if this situa tion is to be a blessing. . . . Because of a lack of moral direction, what might have been a blessing becomes a
16
THE KING'S BUSINESS
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter