when we get to it. So, I'm calling this the counter-revolution of a Christian school. And obviously you see that pit against this right away. The counter-revolution of a Christian school. And again, the pietist on our shoulder beckons for our attention again at this point. But we're going to ignore him. Well, we're not going to ignore him, but we're going to refute him in order to create a school. One author in 1963, Harry Blamires, who by the way was a student of C.S. Lewis at Oxford, wrote a book called The Christian Mind, and he summarized it in this way, quote, there is no longer a Christian mind. The modern Christian has succumbed to secularization. He accepts religion, its morality, its worship, its spiritual culture, but he rejects the religious view of life. the view which sets all earthly issues within the context of the eternal, the view which relates all human problems, social, political, cultural, to the doctrinal foundations of the Christian faith, the view which sees all things here below in terms of God's supremacy and Earth's transitoriness in terms of heaven and hell." Now if we saw the biblical mandate for what it is, that's that first session. And if we saw the revolution for what it is, that's the second session. And we would not feel as offended as we may by this penetrating statement by Bluedorn in his book, Teaching the Trivium, where he says, quote, the schools have become orphanages full of children who have been educationally abandoned by their own parents. Children are no longer in the hearts of their parents, end quote. But we have to have this perspective before we can take that in in a way that's constructive instead of destructive or divisive, in a way that's productive. So that's what we're aiming at here. So we're going to look at three things. I had a fourth section, but I'm not going to look at that so much. Really, we're going to ask the question, what makes an education Christian? Secondly, we're going to look at the idea that Christianity as a whole is already a counter-revolution. So obviously, Christian education within that is going to be a counter-revolution. And then thirdly, I'm going to talk about something called the Moses generation as opposed to the Joshua generation. And we're going to say that the Moses generation can't really be helped here. That's what I don't mean by that. I don't mean that they can't be treated as Christian and fed and pastored and even serve and be Christians in a full spirit-led sense. But there is a critical amount of slavery that they have ingested into their veins and we're not going to focus as a church as much of our investment as we will in our children because they simply will not hear it. Now, to the degree that anybody, any disciple responds and comes to life, we're going to pour into that motion. There's just a general rule applied and we're just recognizing the pie chart reality here, that children are a captive audience in a way that their parents are not. In other words, we're going to be as shrewd as serpents and gentle as doves here. We're going to be as shrewd In responding to Jesus' command to be a shrewd of serpents, we're going to be shrewder than the Marxist. See, the Marxist understands this about the next generation. Christians have not. We are. Here's the big idea. It's a big, big idea, so bear with me. I'll repeat it. But it's a syllogism, so check out the syllogism. And the syllogism comes from the first two sessions on the first two premises. So listen. If the Christian educational mandate is to not conform, but to be transformed, that's the first premise. If that's the Christian educational mandate, Romans 12 to apply to your children. And if the Marxist revolution is the chief conforming antithesis to this mandate, in other words, don't be conformed to this world, what's the chief way you can be conformed to this world, given hours of the day in our lives right now, Well, it's the Marxist Revolution. So let me repeat those two premises. If the Christian educational mandate is to not conform but to be transformed, and if the Marxist Revolution is the chief conforming antithesis to this mandate, then it follows that this positive and negative element are both essential for the Christian school. In other words, to do the mandate in resistance to this revolution. So you see all that come together. What makes an education Christian in the first place? Well, if we're going to take first things first, we have to start with this. There is no such thing as neutrality. In a God-created universe, there is no neutral thing. There is no thing that does not speak about God. It either speaks about God accurately, or it lies about God. Its teacher, its tour guide, will either lie about what that thing says about God, or he will tell the truth about what that thing says about God. Jesus said, you are either for me or against me. And He even said about the two that you can't put a new patch of a garment on an old garment because they will tear apart from each other. And he was there referring to the system of the Old Covenant versus the system of the New Covenant. But the principle of the parable is simply that syncretism is a fool's errand. It's not only offensive to God, it's actually not logically tenable anyway. It doesn't work. The two foreign fabrics will tear apart sooner or later. This is really a revelation for a lot of people when it comes to the seemingly isolated subject matter of the academic subjects. We forget that we were brought up on the plantation and we only define the subjects as isolated from each other because we were told to do so. 19th century theologian R.L. Dabney was more helpful here. He said this, quote, in a writing called On Secular Education. He wrote, the instructor has to teach history Cosmogony, psychology, that's just an old-fashioned word for cosmology, just the whole universe, psychology, ethics, the laws of nations. How can he do it without saying anything favorable or unfavorable about the beliefs of evangelical Christians, Catholics, Socinians, Deists, Pantheists, Materialists, or fetish worshipers, who all claim equal rights under American institutions? His teaching will indeed be the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted." So where do we go wrong here? Well, the most basic way we do this is to assume about our Christian education what we tend to about our Christians. We consult George Barna. In other words, we accept the packaging at face value. Now part of this is the very same pragmatism at work in church methodology as a whole. We fool ourselves and think this is not what we're doing since the education of our own children is so near and dear to us. But the first question out of the gates is always, what works? We tend to be as pragmatist in our first principles as Dewey himself. We want to put flesh on it. We want to do it fast. We're excited. We want to homeschool. We want to do this kind of school. We want to get these books. And, of course, we have to sell our ethical choices to those nearest to us in order to get the ball rolling. The trouble with this is that the substance of education is fundamentally invisible in reality. In other words, the first thing we do in Christian education is to mistake the form, to put flesh on it, for the thing itself. And so begins the nasty war between public school, private school, or homeschool. And I have a lot of bad things to say about public school within the Marxist revolution, but don't blame the wrong things and praise the wrong things. A quick perusal of those titles will show that none of the above is necessarily Christian schooling. Each can fail to arrange the objects presented to the child's mind in a way or in the way that God has revealed. The overwhelmingly decisive factor, really the only primary factor that should be considered is worldview. And why is that? Well, because of everything we've seen so far. It's because education is worldview communication. It is nothing else. Everything else surrounding it, supporting it, coming from it, must consolidate every portion of every mind under the fullest fountainhead of the right worldview, or else the whole concept of education has been misunderstood and the mandate will have gone unheeded. So, for example, homeschooling is a powerful tool. It may be the best formal tool around, but it's not education itself. To treat the superiority of homeschooling over most Christian schools, over public schools, as if it were the substance of what education is, will turn it into superstition and miss the mark of education altogether. Accordingly, the recent revival in classical education has to be taken with a grain of salt. The classical form is the correct form only insofar as the core of classical content, in other words, objective theology. And there are theologies that are more objective about objective theology than other theologies. Only insofar as that is functioning as the blazing, all-informing center, lighting up all the other subjects, is it education. One good working distinction between classical and Christian education that retains the value of both words is this one by the Bluedorns in their book Teaching the Trivium. They say, quote, We choose to limit our meaning of classical to include only of what is of good form and lasting value. That's their definition of classical, what is of good form and lasting value, and which conforms to within a biblical standard in a biblical worldview. That's how they're defining Christian. I like that definition. But consequently, the correct form, in terms of methodology, is the classical framework of the trivium. Grammar, logic, rhetoric. You see that over here? I'm going to match up the form with the substance. And you see here, now, if all you have is classical, you have a form. But if the main, if step one of the form is grammar, in other words, content absorbed in the child's mind, and you don't have the content, then your form is a contradiction to your form. Because the very root of the form is the substance, the grammar. And if you teach a grammar that contradicts the form, your form won't last. in the child's mind or the life of that institution. Here, here's what I have on the chart. I've got this drop, this water drop, hitting this rippling effect, and what you see here is the real essence of what these are. Grammar, dialectic, or sometimes just called logic for shorthand, and rhetoric. In other words, the child, at a certain age, absorbs facts. He memorizes things. And then at the next stage, say 10 through 14, he synthesizes it. He puts it together. And then thirdly, and when I say that, it's put together for him in a very imperialistic fashion. In other words, the teacher is actually claiming, these things aren't true, this is how these true things go together, that's true too. Very imperialistic. And then thirdly, rhetoric, we learn to express that. We don't start with expression as Rousseau did. What will a sinner express? He will express sin. But when he expressed some true things, sure, just like Hitler got his time stable, right? I'm sure Hitler had some friends. And then he used his times table and his friends to kill a bunch of people. Okay? So if you use rhetoric at first and pour that on a sinner, you're going to have a really, really able sinner. Okay? So, one, two, and three. One grammar, that's the water drop falling. That's the stuff. That's the revelation from God. What does that cover? Everything. The heavens declare the glory of God. Everything is a work of His hands. Secondly, dialectic, that's the circle, that's the outline of the drug, how it goes together, that it is what it is and not something else. That all of its parts are exactly the nature that it is, owing to the nature that caused it. And then thirdly, the ripple effect from that. So think of it like this. Form, on the left, one grammar, two dialectic, three rhetoric. On the right, the column is substance. Grammar is, really, logos. Truth, word, absorbed. Dialectic really is Lagos synthesized. And then rhetoric thirdly, Lagos in revolution. Going out. Beating the Marxist. If you don't have all of that in your school, it's hardly a school. Not in the real world in which we live. Shepherds are not guiding it, that's for sure. So, we should notice that it is not enough to include theology in our children's studies, nor even to concentrate a certain amount of the day in it. What is needed is to reclaim all of the other subjects back within theology where they belong. As we've labored to show in all of our classes, none of the other subjects make any objective sense apart from their theological first principles. A non-theologian, in other words, is not competent as a total educator, for education is theology demonstrated by the various humanities and sciences, and it can never be made something else because the intellectually backward, knuckle-dragging secular state says so. As Doug Wilson put it in his book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, quote, because truth is truth, however learned, it is possible to teach students to balance their checkbooks without reference to God, but this is not education. It is merely mental dexterity. So the form has to match the substance all the way through. Christianity is a counter-revolution. What do I mean by that? Well, one dictionary definition of a counter-revolution is, one, a revolution whose aim is the deposition and reversal of a political or social system set up by a previous revolution. Just resistance, intentional resistance against an already existing revolution. As the name suggests, counter-revolution. Two, a movement to oppose revolutionary tendencies and developments. Now, as we've already established, our whole world has been affected by the evil revolution, in other words, overturning of an order, the evil revolution of the archenemy, Satan. This is just Christianity 101, by the way. And though Satan's every move is on a short leash, the short leash of God's sovereignty, that is, nevertheless, his every move is evil and is intended for the personal harm of billions. So yes, Christianity is much more than counter-revolution, but it's not less. There's no part of the Christian worldview or life that is without this counter-revolution, such that if we don't teach our children in a way that is cognizant, aware all the time of this revolution, we are greatly deserving our children, massive understatement, We are lying to our children about the nature of the real world. The first sense in which Christianity is a counter-revolution, I just bring up this first example just to make the point of how normal this ought to already be. The first sense in which Christianity is a counter-revolution is inside the soul of the sinner himself or herself. The sinner is not passive or neutral. We begin with fully engaged offensive strategies against God and fully engaged defensive mechanisms against any penetration of his truth into our minds. Look at this chart over here. I have a person, a sinful soul, whose head is surrounded with anti-Christ, anti-truth defense mechanisms. One of the main purposes of truth is to invade that soul and begin to blast away those defense mechanisms so that God's truth will not have the obstacle of irrational ideas to go through, but to get through those. Therefore, the first counter-offensive of Christian education applies the maximized initial force as early as possible to the youngest minds. They're sinners. These defense mechanisms are going to start to form. The first counter-offensive of Christian education applies the maximized initial force. Remember that first law of Clausewitz and warfare from last week. Maximalized initial force dictates more of the subsequent motions in a war. The maximalized initial force by getting the sinful mind as early as possible under the fire hydrant of God's truth without any part of their forming life and worldview left dry. Bluedorn adds this, he says, quote, our culture is being manipulated to worship the state. Listen to that, our culture. our set of ideas, is being manipulated to worship the state. The state seeks to be omniscient, to know everything about us. The state seeks to be omnipresent, to be everywhere in our lives. The state seeks to be omnipotent, to control everything in society. The state is the incarnation of the god of humanism. There is only one way to defeat the socialist state, It is not with political machinery and votes. It is not with petitions and protests. It is with godly, parent-controlled education of our children. Why is this? Well, follow Bluedorn's opening statement. It is our culture that is being manipulated to worship the state. It is a worldview transmitted the way that worldviews are always transmitted, to minds, through teaching. It is an intellectual revolution, whatever other tools and whatever other cronies that revolution may have at its disposal. Any serious cultural revolution begins in the classroom. The bulk of our investment ought to be in a classroom or something like a classroom that transmits truth, and we ought to be most excited to do that with the minds that are most in a sense, susceptible and vulnerable to that full blast of truth. If you're a single person and don't have kids yet, and you're not excited about the prospects of investing in lots of kids, lots of truth, you may not be a Christian. Check your spiritual pulse, even if it's not how to do it on your radar screen, if that's lost on you, and if you're scratching your head at why such a thing would be done, check your conversion. The Marxists understood this. It is time the Christian does as well. Sorry, before I get to the Moses generation, let me, one more thing, let's transfer this from the individual to the collective, as Dewey did. Dewey had an individual role in experience, the experience of the child, and he had an end, and his end is social. Well, guess what? We have a social end. That's not our only end, as C.S. Lewis said, the state lasts but for a moment, or the civilization does in mere Christianity, and the individual lasts forever. We believe that. And so we don't flow from the individual to the collective in the same way as a secularist does. But that doesn't mean that we don't have a social end. We're still in covenant with God, with each other. Genesis 9, whether the pagan recognizes that or not, we are still called to, whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all for the glory of God. We're still called to glorify God out there. Going this way, from right to left, from the student to this staircase. You notice this staircase, you know it because we do it all the time, it's from Francis Schaeffer. Several of his books, I think one in particular, The God Who Is There, he drew this out. How worldviews move through the flow of culture and history from the top floor of ultimate philosophical commitments down to the man on the street. And what I've argued in many different places is that postmodernism is not ultimately dead set against modernism. It thinks it is. It starts there. It's willing sheep, French intellectuals, pretentious people with some degree of sophistication about one or two things. with cool-sounding French names, will think that they are revolting against the meta-narrative, the arrogance of the state, against the secular, and so on. They're full of it, and they're not too sharp either. Postmodernism is, to modernism, what Marx said religion was to the upper classes. It is the opiate to the masses. Modernism hasn't died. Go to BSU, and you'll see in their literature departments and a bunch of other things, in other words, anything that could be treated subjectively, postmodernism. But go to their science department. and their economics department and their business department and their math department. And you'll find confident modernists. In other words, people that believe that the real world is there, you can know it, and that real world tells us that Christianity was just an old fairy tale. Modernism hasn't died. You know what's happened to it? Modernism is the worldview of those who light up the gas chambers and inflate the currency and build the tanks and the tasers and the bullets and the bombs. They're still modernists. They hire their postmodernists, in other words their more effeminate men, to run along and go to the church that's run by the ladies and get the men working on other projects and have the pastors and the poets and the authors of stories and things like that infuse an intellectual estrogen into the male mind. to keep us all servile with respect to truth. So I have here the flow of the modern worldview flowing from modern assumptions, to materialism in the higher sciences, down to the next step to secularism in the social sciences, down to lower, where you get to the arts, where post-modernism takes the man on the street, in other words, the sheep who's asleep now, he's got a binky in his mouth, see that? He's got a binky. Love having kids, so many illustrations. Let's see this resistance, this counter-revolution is flowing this way back to each level of the stairs. And we're going to see how this is produced. These lines attack these levels of the stairs. You need Christians to form a philosophical resistance at the top. He's got to take this guy off the top floor and kill him from the top of that mountain and cut off that water supply. But you also need a lot of people in lower level academic resistance in the schools, in all of the other subjects, and in the lower schools. And you also need civic resistance against secularism. So there it's pushing against the globe and against this hammer and sickle. So all in the different areas of the civic life. And then there needs to be pastoral resistance at the church level. To kick those sheep in the butt and say what you believe, even from the church, is a dream. It isn't real, it's an intentional dream. It's an intentional intellectual estrogen to keep you good and stupid and not caring and treating question marks as if that's the biggest thing in reality. And you're going to die like that. And you're just asking those dumb dragon-like questions that lead to nowhere but your own cleverness for the next 50 years. And that is exactly what the devil has intended to do through the effeminate pastorate, such as it can be called a pastorate. Well, what do I mean by the Moses generation versus the Joshua generation? Well, I mean that in biblical terminology. What do I mean by the Moses generation cannot be helped again? they can't be helped in the same way and with the same attention to detail that has been given to us in relation to our children. So what do I mean by the Moses generation? Well, I mean to draw a distinction between a generation that is being led out into the light after a great time of darkness, and yet because, that's the good news, but because of their servile characters that have been cultivated back on the plantation, The tragic truth is that they will spend the rest of their lives murmuring against the shepherds, murmuring against God's prophets, and itching, and scratching, and griping to return back into captivity. Does that sound familiar about the book of Numbers especially? Well, that is exactly what you see in every historic captivity. The Egyptian captivity. in the Old Testament, the Babylonian captivity when they got back on the land, the Roman captivity in the first couple centuries of the Church and with the Roman Catholic Church, the European captivity and what that did to Christianity and now the American captivity of the Church. These are captivities where the essence of Christianity shifts from God to man, from eternity to time, from theology to anthropology, from the sacred to the secular. where the focus of truth shifts downward, and then the pathologies follow, and we typically look at the symptoms, like when we go, why are we not Roman Catholic? Well, we tell them, hey, we're the priesthood, and you've got the peds, and praying the Mary, and purgatory, and those are symptoms. The disease was the shift from God to man. Humanism. So the Moses generation, from these captivities, it always happens and it always must happen. They experience the first fruits of freedom, yet with the slave mindset still intact. And at the end of the day, there's nothing you can do for them. They will not hear the Gospel all the way through. It doesn't mean they're not saved. It just means that they will not go to the Promised Land. They will not inherit the land. And that's a judgment. they'll never see revival in their lifetimes. That's for the Joshua generation. And yes, that's why I named my first son Joshua, by the way. And there, by the way, there's biblical imagery there that this is the man of law, of duty, of performance, of Mount Sinai. Joshua, Yeshua in the Hebrew, means the Lord of salvation. And Jesus was named that in the Greek, Yeshu. because, Matthew 121, because he will save his people from their sins. Joshua would lead the people into the promised land because the promised land represented salvation of God. not by law, not by human effort. And so what did you see in Deuteronomy? The whole book is a second reading of the law. Deuteros means second, namos means law. It's a repetition of law of Sinai to the reconstituted people. Had to wipe out that generation, reconstitute the people. You guys are going to go in the land. Let me repeat what I said to those bums back there. Now God was not unaware that they were going to fail as well. But he says to them, I'm the Lord your God that took you out of slavery. I did this. I'm going to bring you into the land where I planted these things. You had nothing to do with that. I gave you this material for the houses. You had nothing to do with that. Don't forget the Lord. Teach your children everything in this book. When? When you lie down and when you rise up. Everything. Total Christian worldview. Why? To inherit the land. Break everything that's neutral. Break it. Burn it. Total Christian worldview in all things. Do not compromise in any area of life or you will go back into captivity eventually. Does this sound familiar or is this some crackpot idea I came up with and read it into the Bible? It's kind of the main thing in the Bible. Now, of course, with greater terrain, oh, sorry, let me explain. Here's my pictures. So you've got this sheep here with this broken chain. You've got a ball and chain over here. The light comes, boom, chains go off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth and followed thee, as Charles Wesley said in his hymn. But the problem is, once they've gotten the woman, there's this sheep over here, He's got a screwdon all of a sudden. I don't know why, but when he stood up, it turned out he had a screwdon. He's whining, he's crying, he's got his mouth open, he's got tears coming out, and he's pointing back to slavery. He says, why can't we go back to Egypt, where at least we had food with Hitler, I mean with Pharaoh. We don't do that. And then this light came in Deuteronomy, and this sheep, you see a sheep behind there, and boom! And it's turning into him. The front of his body is Joshua with that shepherd's staff, peering into the promised land. But here's a temptation. See, greater terrain comes with greater temptation. We're not unaware of that. So, to close all this out, We are not ultimately called by God to wait for everyone else to affirm our calling. So again, no child left behind. That's a Dewey idea. That's a Great Awakening idea about evangelism. The meaning shifted from what the thing is to the spreading of it. Well, what about Johnny back there? I'm not Johnny's daddy. Look, I love Johnny too, but I will talk to his dad. I'll grab him by the scruff of the neck. The education, as I'm going to pass it on to my child, is not, what about Johnny? I care about Johnny, but that's not what education is. My ability to control the consciences of every parent and make them be parents is not education. Education is worldview transformation. That's what it is. We are not called by God to wait for everyone else to affirm our calling. We must exercise the maximum charity which we have at our disposal, but our ability to produce the outcomes of shepherding is not our motive. The Puritans who came to New England understood that. They understood you just have to start over. When everybody else is insane, you just have to start over. Let me be specific. Our own Moses generation has been taught that theology doesn't matter, and that wherever it is made to matter, the product will be second-rate and irrelevant in culture. In fact, just the opposite is true, as Christians throughout the ages have always known. But one ramification of this general attitude that we've all absorbed is that we're constantly jumping on this or that biblical bandwagon without taking the whole thing as a whole. The whole episode of Thomas Mann's Unitarianism ought to show us that your theology just will be mirrored in the schoolhouse. Why did his philosophy win out against the majority view? When it was started? The answer is simple. The Christianity emerging on the frontiers of the Second Great Awakening had already done the same in their doctrine and practice. The basic reference in religion was not to God, but to society. So it was natural that the school curriculum followed that. This was true in the preaching, and it became true in the classroom. The question is, do we think any different today? I would say no. The hard truth to swallow is this. If we want Christian schools and biblical curriculum so defined by its exaltation of God at the center, God as the efficient cause and the end cause of all things, then that will mean Calvinism, and that means Calvinistic churches forming those schools. We will either have unabashed biblical Christianity being the curriculum, or else we will have the yeast of secular neutrality, and it will not last. either in the minds of our individual children or in the institution itself. Neutrality versus Calvinism. Neutrality versus theology. These are just polar opposites in the sense that the theologically unashamed stays fixed where it is over time. And the opposite is always sliding down its own slippery slope to the ultimate opposite of atheism. So, one more thing, I got that last picture right there. I've got a house. The house is made up of the form of the classical school. Grammar at the foundation, logic in the structure being built up, and then from the roof, missiles being launched, which are our children. Entrepreneurs, statesmen, pastors, artists, teachers, judges. That's how we define rhetoric. We don't define rhetoric as simply debating society tactics. It's worthless. We have in mind missiles. Vocational training follows in that sense because you've already armed them. So last week we mentioned that the parachurch model of culture war doesn't work. Well let's not leave that fact behind when planning the schoolroom. If it's a counter-revolution we're after, then we're going to need an army. And a sustained army is precisely what the parachurch by its very nature can never deliver. It may be an arms dealer, but it cannot treat the whole life of the potential soldier and ensure that his whole being is there on the right side. The nature of the parachurch also elicits the young man to abandon the battlefield where he presently is in his own community. So the stage called rhetoric is so much more than a four-year debating society or preparation for staying Christian in college. No, rhetoric is the answer to the call of God. It is a communication, not merely in a series of isolated debates. It is a finding of one's vocation with all the firepower of the grammar and logic stages. So that's where we start to feel out, between ages 15 and 18, whether this person's ability to shred the Marxist revolution at every stage, root and branch, is calling them to the roots, or the branch, or whatever. As businessmen, as statesmen, as pastors, as artists, as teachers, and judges. and a whole lot of diverse things beyond that. So, between ages 15 and 18, we start to give a theologically defined vocation. Because if all of us are called into a counter-revolution, then whatever we do ought to be doing this, and to the degree that the Church does not launch people in this direction, the Church is failing to create shepherds out of sheep. So, let me leave it at that and open it to questions.