Preview: Course on Christian Education | The Academy

The Christian Obligation to Educate Children

Hello, so I'm here to speak to you today about the necessity of a Christian education. The necessity of giving your kids a distinctively Christian education. So, there's two pieces to that. I'm saying that you have an obligation to make sure that you give your kids an education, and then, on top of that, that your kids get an education that is distinctively Christian.

So, let's dive in here. First of all, in the ancient Greek culture, there was a concept called the Paideia. That was the Greek word for it, the Paideia. And the Paideia referred to the complete enculturation of a young Greek man into understanding his heritage.

His heritage, that is, what belonged to him as a young Greek man, the cultural heritage that he received. His culture, his code of ethics and honor, his sense of what it was for something to be beautiful, his sense of art, of poetry, of literature, his understanding of how one ought to think and behave, his understanding of philosophy, the story of where he came from, his history, and the rights of his people.

This idea of what it was to be noble and what it was that his culture would elevate. The responsibilities that he had to his community growing up in this community, as well as a sense that this was something worth living for and even something worth dying for to protect and elevate this life.

The Paideia, it was an education, but it was more than just what we think of as an education. Like I said, it's more closer to a complete and total enculturation. It's more than education, it's more like enculturation.

And it trained up, this whole concept of the Paideia was important in the Greek culture because what it did was it trained up and prepared the next generation of Greek leaders to be able to pass on the inheritance where they understood the Greek culture to be.

Paul’s Use of Paideia in Ephesians 6

I say all that because Paul is quite interesting. In Ephesians 6, Paul uses this concept of Paideia and says that there is a biblical or a Christian equivalent to this, that Christians are commanded to pass on to the next generation.

Ephesians 6, Paul says this,. And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training. And that word there for training is Paideia. Bring them up in the Paideia and admonition of the Lord, Ephesians 6.

So Paul commands Christian, particularly Christian fathers, to ensure that their children are raised up in this Paideia, this complete enculturation of Christianity. Not a Greek enculturation, not a Greek Paideia, but a distinctively Christian Paideia.

And one thing to underline here, that this is a command to fathers. I think men need to understand that men, as fathers, you have a commandment in Scripture that you are to make sure that your children are being raised up in the complete Paideia of God.

And I think Paul understood the Paideia that he was charging fathers to pass on to their children. I think he understood it as the complement to the charge that children are to honor their parents. So if you look at Ephesians 6, it starts off in verse 1, Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

And then it quotes the commandment, Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with you, and you may live long on the earth. Then the very next verse is,.

And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. So this command to fathers to bring up their children in this Paideia is the complement to the children's obligation to honor their parents.

You're supposed to obey your parents, honor your parents, and they're supposed to be ensuring that you receive this complete and total enculturation. So do you expect your children to honor you, to obey you?

Deuteronomy 6 and the Passing on of God’s Word

Then you need to give them the Paideia of God, the complete enculturation, into his word and into the world that he created. When God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses, if you look in Deuteronomy, he gives the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5, but then in Deuteronomy 6, he talks about how this is going to be actually passed on to the next generation.

I'll start at verse 4. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. The famous Shema, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Notice a couple of things here. First, there's an obligation to parents to do this. Parents, you're supposed to be making sure that you're having these kinds of conversations with your children, that they're being raised in this world where they see everything through the word of God.

Verse 7, he says, you shall teach them, the them there is the law, the words of the law, you shall teach them diligently to your children. So this is something that's not supposed to be just a passive, make sure that they have this memorized, but you're supposed to diligently instill this word into their hearts.

Diligently teach them. The other thing that we should notice is that the primary tool of the education of our children is the word of God. That the thing that we're supposed to be teaching them is the word of God.

We're supposed to have them immersed in Scripture. If you look at 2 Timothy 3 .16, all Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.

That instruction in righteousness, once again, it's the paideia. It's this enculturation into righteousness. All of Scripture is the tool, this is the textbook that we use for the complete enculturation of our children.

Scripture as the Textbook for a Biblical Worldview

And the third thing I think to notice from this text in Deuteronomy 6 is the scope of this education. So we're to work from the text of Scripture, but it's clear that you're supposed to use Scripture to look at the world around you.

That you are to talk about it at all times, whether you're standing, whether you're sitting, whether you're lying down. Whatever it is that you're doing, this is supposed to be relevant to it, it's supposed to apply in some way.

And when you look at the world around you, you're supposed to tie Scripture right here for your eyes, so that you see the world through Scripture. And you're supposed to have it on your hands, so that whatever you put your hand to, you understand that there's a verse that applies to this.

That means that though this is the text, the scope of this education is everywhere. It's the world. We're supposed to see the whole world through Scripture. So we're supposed to talk about science, we're supposed to talk about music, we're supposed to talk about literature.

All of these things, we're supposed to talk about it, and we're supposed to talk about it informed by a biblical view. A Scripture that is sitting over our eyes, giving us this biblical worldview. When you walk, when you sit, when you eat, there's no place where you don't have God's Word as front lens to your eyes.

You don't just look at the verses, you look at the whole world through these verses. And that's the education we're supposed to be passing on to our children. This distinctively Christian education that I'm describing here, this complete enculturation into the Word of God, and seeing the world through the Word of God, has been, throughout church history, one of the primary ways of ensuring that the Gospel is passed on to the next generation.

Now obviously we don't want to just enculturate them, we want to evangelize them, we preach the Gospel to them. But this enculturation has been one of the most powerful ways of making sure that evangelism happens.

The modern phenomena of Christians largely falling away from the faith is not how it normally played out for the church in history. And I think it coincides, the way it is now, coincides with the rise of the modern American secular public school system.

Where we have ceased putting our hands to this kind of enculturation that it's describing, and we've handed our children over to a secular institution to give them a godless education. So we cannot be surprised when our kids come back thoroughly secularized by the public school system.

So we need to revive a vibrant, robust, evangelical, Scripture-soaked, Gospel-loving paideia for our children. I think this is something that we're commanded to be providing them.