J. Gresham Machen was a stalwart defender of the orthodox Christian faith, but he also knew how to defend the ramifications of a Christian worldview. It was not just doctrine and high theology—the Christian faith, being true, had to be relevant in how we live our lives when we are away from the sanctuary. And one of the principal areas of our lives away from the sanctuary would be in the realm of education.
Living out a Christian worldview is the task of every Christian. And this means that education is the task of teaching children how to live out a Christian worldview. And if children don’t learn, then adults won’t know.
Machen was one who genuinely understood the nature of the corruptions that were facing the church of his time. He was also highly educated and intelligent, which means that he was a rare specimen indeed. He was enough of an oddity to be put in a glass case in a museum. He was a champion of loving orthodoxy, and of orthodox loving. The way he held them together should be a model for all of us. He understood that orthodoxy of necessity involves the whole man—heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Putting Knowledge Into Practice
The greatest commandment in Scripture is found in Deuteronomy 6. That passage contains the great Shema—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord.” That is immediately followed by the commandment that Jesus identified as the greatest of all the commandments. But if we zoom out just a bit further, we see that this passage that contains the Shema, and the greatest commandment, is a passage that is about the education of children. The parents of Israel were called to instruct their children in the law, when they sat in the living room, when they were sitting at an intersection, when they laid down in bed, and when they got up for breakfast.
Now when the Lord Jesus referred to this command, He added something to it. Deuteronomy said to love God with heart, soul, and might, and Jesus used an extra word. He said that we were to love the Lord our God with all our minds (Matt. 22:37), which means we have to use our brains. This does not appear to be optional, which means that if we have any brains, we should certainly be loving God with them.
But this creates a problem. Trouble and confusion enter almost right away. Knowledge puffs up, the apostle Paul taught us, while love builds up (1 Cor. 8:1). This has led some to falsely oppose knowledge and love, as though we had to choose between them the same way we have to choose between going right and going left. But the problem with this should be evident immediately. If someone says that love is to be preferred over knowledge, the first question we ask ought to be “do you know this?” The relationship between knowledge and love is not the same as the relationship between wickedness and righteousness.
But as someone acquires some measure of knowledge, if they are also growing in love at the same time, this means that they will have to take certain measures to keep from being puffed up. The way to do this is to only take on knowledge if there is a will to apply it, if there is a desire to put it into practice. Doing this is hard work, which is what puts a lot of people off, but it is also a practice that will at some point bring you into hard conflict with others who are not putting the same knowledge into practice. They won’t want to deal with you, the way Machen’s generation didn’t want to deal with him.
Government Education as the Road to Serfdom
The plain meaning of this passage in Deuteronomy (not to mention Ephesians 6:1–4 in the New Testament) is that the children of Christians (covenant children in my view) must receive a Christian education. Precisely because there is no neutrality in life, there can be no neutrality in education. The pretense of neutrality is precisely that . . . a pretense. Like R.L. Dabney and A.A. Hodge before him, Machen saw right through that pretense. Liberty is a gift of God, and it is a gift that depends for its existence on a right understanding of the gospel.
This is why Machen, a man jealous for liberty, said this:
A monopolistic system of education controlled by the State is far more efficient in crushing our liberty than the cruder weapons of fire and sword.[1]
1. J. J. Gresham Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State (Unicoi, TN: Trinity Foundation, 2004), 15.
And . . .
A public education that is not faced by such competition of private schools is one of the deadliest enemies to liberty that has ever been devised.[2]
2. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 106–07.
He naturally saw the battle over education to be an all-or-nothing affair.
If you give the bureaucrats the children, you might just as well give them everything else.[3]
3. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 98.
One of the common objections to this line of thought is to protest, “Surely two and two make four whether or not you believe Jesus rose from the dead. Religious commitments have nothing to do with the truth or falsity of a problem in math.” But the consistent Christian response is that they have everything to do with it. How can two and two make four if pantheism is true, and everything is one? How can two and two make four if all truth claims are disguised hegemonic power plays, intended to reinforce white supremacy? Despite claims to the contrary, worldview claims do not all wind up at four.
A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearing of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth, even in the sphere of mathematics, seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life—those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school.[4]
4. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 15.
Unbelievers can get the right answer by common grace, but the right answers can also be avoided. And when they do get the right answer, they can give no adequate account of how that happened. And Machen saw this reality, long before the grim results started showing up in our test scores.
Machen understood that egalitarianism was the great flattener of achievement, and that secularism was necessarily egalitarian. It does not lift up the disadvantaged, but rather gets everyone down to the same level from the other direction—suppressing the talented.
If all the children in the United States have equal opportunities, no child will have an opportunity that is worth very much.[5]
5. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 15.
The challenge in his day was the same as it is in ours—although our danger is much more pronounced. Christian parents support the public system by means of dedicating their children to it. Not surprisingly, many of these children are lost to the world, while the churches they grew up in are busy with mission activity all over the world.
I can see little consistency in a type of Christian activity which preaches the gospel on the street corners and at the ends of the earth, but neglects the children of the covenant by abandoning them to a cold and unbelieving secularism.[6]
6. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 82.
Not only does a Christian worldview transform the experience of education for the pupil, but it also does the same thing for the teacher. The Christian teacher is set free to love God by loving his subject in the presence of eager students, whom he also loves.
Not teachers who have studied the methodology of teaching, but teachers who are on fire with a love of the subjects that they are going to teach are the real torch-bearers of intellectual advance.[7]
7. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 15.
Christians Must Build Christian Schools
The stakes are not low. Machen does not hesitate to use words like slavery and lawlessness. The melancholic reality is that men like Machen—on this subject at least—were Cassandra-like in their prophecies. The more their words came true, the harder it was for anybody to recognize that they had been speaking the blunt truth all along.
Amid this welter of lawlessness, public and private, in the face of this slavery which is not the enemy of lawlessness but its twin sister, where shall we find a nursery of decency and freedom and gentleness and honesty and bravery and peace? I have no hesitation in saying that we can find such a nursery in the Christian schools.[8]
8. Machen, Education, Christianity, and the State, 142.
Yes. The Christian school is the nursery of all that is decent. Not because we are advancing anything like the “cold clatter of morality,” but rather because Christ is the foundation of everything. As I have read somewhere, it is Christ over all.
