My Mea Culpa on Public and Homeschool

I intentionally provoke discomfort on occasion, not for the sake of discomfort, but to turn otherwise heated issues, like education, into warm-hearted dialogues.

That was the purpose behind my recent series on schooling. I wanted to provide valid points for and against each form of schooling, and in the process, collect opinions in a casual sort of way.

As might be expected, various folks were a bit offended on either side of the issue. This is unsurprising--the issue is particularly sensitive as we view the way in which we raise our children as a reflection of our parenting.

For those of you who were offended, I offer my sincere apologies. It tried very hard to keep the issue in the abstract, but on a matter such as this, it can obviously feel very personal.

I would assure you that I will seek to avoid stirring the pot again in view of any sloppiness that occurred here, but I would rather assure you of the opposite.

I believe one of the worst insults we can pay one another, and to our culture in general, is to say that people are necessarily set in their views. If we adopt such intellectual fatalism, then we shall cease to speak with one another.

We converse because we are pliable, especially as it pertains to how we apply our worldviews. For Christians in particular, we adopt the cry of "semper reformanda"--we are always reforming in accordance with the fixed, but never exhausted, truth of God's Word.

Tying up the previous discussion, I believe the fundamental postulates can be asserted, and agreed upon, with regard to how we school our children:

1) God's Word does not speak specifically concerning how we school our children. As such, it is a matter of Christian freedom (Gal. 5). We must be careful not to consciously and unconsciously bind the conscience of another on a matter of freedom (Col. 2), elsewise we do violence to their conscience and to the faith of Jesus Christ, generally speaking.

2) As this matter is not specifically laid out in Scripture, Christians must rely upon the two sources of God given wisdom and growth given them: God's Word and God's Spirit. We take the broad principles of Scriptures, pray that they would inform our conscience, and take stock of the world and circumstances and try to act accordingly. As our wisdom is fallible, we will inevitably struggle in this regard, but our comfort can always be found in the freedom we have in Christ.

3) The primary prerogative for education is delegated by God to parents (Deut. 6) and the Church (Matt. 28). Whatever decisions are made regarding schooling, they never abdicate the responsibility of parents and the Church. Children will acquire a worldview, and it must be the faith once for all delivered to the saints, passed through the hands of parents and the Church (as Timothy was formed by his mother, grandmother, and the apostle, Paul).

4) Even as parents mature in wisdom, they will inevitably fail at various points. We are sinners seeking to raise sinners, by grace through faith in Christ, in accordance with His Word and to His glory. And even as parents rely upon the grace by which they stand, they will inevitably falter, and in their failures rely upon that grace as well. We must remember that our authority is delegated by God. He is the Father and Shepherd of our souls, and He is all-powerful, loving, patient, and gentle. We are called to model His character to our children, and like children flee to the comfort of such a God when burdened by this great and precious responsibility of tending Christ's little ones.

Coping With Guilt

I enjoyed talking with a fellow minister today who also happened to be a Vietnam vet. He has barely talked about his experiences in the decades since, and initially felt incredible guilt over what he had to do over there. "I don't know what I would have done without Christ," he told me.

He clings to Galatians 2:20, "I am crucified with Christ..."

Not a day goes by that he doesn't think about Nam.

This is all strangely consoling to me. I was not a helicopter gunner, but I was a chaplain, always preparing for my death or that of my soldiers. And when I think of Dave or Dana Lyon, I am filled with guilt. I waited for Dave to take the initiative to reach out to me after our first encounter. I never reached back to him. I never reached out to his wife, though I likely crossed paths with her quite a bit. In both cases, my empty, extroverted "Let's definitely keep in touch" was nothing but words of wind, an assurance of touch without a hand.

And the soldier who loved his wife and the Lord and dreamed great dreams was snatched from the world--never to see 31, celebrate a fifth anniversary, or hold his giggling boy in his arms.

I cling to Colossians 3:1-4, "My life is hidden with Christ in God..."

We must all deal with guilt in this broken world of broken hearts. Some of it will be misplaced, but much of will be the result of true, objective guilt. We bear the ugliness of the world upon our hearts. The blood of the soldier and the cries of the widow testify against mankind, much like the blood of Abel, which cried to God from the ground.

The blood of Jesus speaks a better word than the blood of Abel, for it speaks in favor of the sinner who has found refuge in Christ. Our Savior cried the widow's cry at the grave of Lazarus, he bled the soldier's blood. But He did all this--He bore the very worst of our sin and suffering in His own body--that we might cry and bleed with purpose and hope.

Let us lay our burden of guilt, the misplaced and the real, upon Jesus, who nailed our trespasses to the cross. And let us find in Him our freedom to live, both in this life and the next.

I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal. 2:20)

Three Ways to Cultivate Community--Summer Edition

Even as more snow blankets the Washington, DC area this morning, the opportunity to exploit the summertime sun for community-building is just around the corner.

Let's be frank--communities often don't have a real sense of community anymore, especially in large, metropolitan areas like the DC region. Often times, one parent if not both parents in a household are competing with ten or more hours of traffic a week to work a job that keeps well over your standard forty hours a week.

It's even worse for single parents, who are often working more than one job to keep them afloat. Whenever parents do arrive home, they try to soak up a little bit of that precious time they have remaining with their children, or they retreat to a mindless stress-reliever, like television or the internet.

What such lifestyles don't typically allow is much time for family, community, exercise, or recreation. Though little time is left for these things, that does not mean that we should not encourage them. In areas such as ours, families break up all the time. The lack of community causes loneliness and isolation, especially in hard seasons of life. Exercise will of course help prevent the heart attack at forty five for the sedentary, cubicle-bound workaholic. Recreation...well...all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

And let's not forget, for lack of a better term, "spirituality" as a necessary component of life. As work dominates the narrative of individual and family lives, it takes all focus off the deep, existential questions that are at the core of human existence. On the surface, this lack of focus on the existential is a source of comfort and pride--"I don't have time for such questions!" Beneath the surface, however, it only agitates the problem of one's meaning and purpose in life. Work is a pretty petty veneer for finding value in life. This create a sense of existential angst.

So it is our job--yours and mine--to work to cultivate community and reforge the bonds of friendship and affection--despite these obstacles--that are sorely lacking in our culture. As such projects seem too ambitious and overwhelming from the outset, here are three easy ways to start his "community cultivation" project:

1) Arrange weekly neighborhood barbecues before you invite anyone over.

We often get caught in the dating game--no, not romantic nights out, but the game of figuring out a date on the calendar that will work for different parties to get together. Often, the agreed upon date ends up somewhere between three months later and never. It's much easier to plan the backyard barbecue and invite people. If no one can make, keep inviting until you find someone who can.

Worried about the cost of a weekly barbecue? Even if you cover all the costs, a meal that focuses on hot dogs, chips, and soda should still keep you around the $20 mark. Still too much? If someone accepts the invite, he/she will likely ask if you need anything. Ask him/her to bring a bag of chips.

2) Prioritize those who are least like you for invitations and attention.

James speaks to this issue in Scripture. He speaks of a religion that is pure and faultless as being characterized by looking after widows and orphans in their distress and keep unpolluted by the world. He then condemns favoritism, which is antithetical to the Gospel. Indeed, Jesus tells us in Matthew 25 that as we treat the poor (not just materially poor), so we treat Him. The beauty of Jesus' work in this regard is that He traded the riches of eternal glory and made Himself poor for our sake, becoming to death, even death on a cursed cross (Gal. 3, 4; Phil. 2).

On a practical level, we tend to associate most naturally with those who are most like us. For my wife and I, it would be fellow twice-over Yuppies (young, urban professionals and young, urban parents). By reaching out to older parents and their kids, single parents, and international families in our neighborhood, we are showing our neighbors that our deck is open to all. And because we are not picking "winners" and "losers" amongst the neighbors, our home will hopefully become known as a place where the sinner-sufferer can find unconditional love and words of peace and hope.

3) As you learn about those in community, use that knowledge to serve them.

Do you have a single mother in your neighborhood who is at her wits end and just needs a break? Invite her children over to play with your own. Is the wife down the street struggling unsuccessfully to carry all of her groceries in from the car? Go out and help her. Is the husband next door have a rough go of it with his job? Invite him over a drink and/or cigar to just hang out. And few people will refuse you the opportunity to not only pray for them in your own time, but to pray with them in the moment.

Notice that I didn't put "share the Gospel" or "invite them to church" anywhere on this list. Those should certainly be intermediate goals (with the ultimate goal being to glorify God), but we are not sharing the Gospel into the wind, nor are we inviting robots to church. We are sharing the Gospel with specific people with specific struggles, needs, and joys. There is a place in every puzzle-person for the Gospel, but that place does not always take the same shape. In the same way, I am not inviting Fred to church because I want more people at my church. I am inviting Fred because he is unsuccessfully looking to his job for meaning, and I believe that he can only find true meaning in the cross and living in Christ.

We pour out our hearts and lives to others, sin-sick and suffering like ourselves, because we love them with a God-given love. A love that burns within us and through us because Jesus Christ became poor for sin-sick and suffering so that they might be rich in grace and in the glory to come. Such mercy compels us with love and joy and gratitude. So let us go out and be "community organizers," not as a job but as our privileged calling.

Book Review: Francis Schaeffer by William Edgar

Much of the Christian Church in America embraced the rising tide of Western anti-intellectualism in the 20th century. For some, Jesus was reduced to a mere moral man; For other, he was the buddy who never left your side. In both cases, Jesus looked like a mere projection of human desires, which made Nietzsche's absurd comment, "God is dead," look a lot more plausible.

But as theological liberals beclowned themselves trying to imitate cultural trends and as fundamentalists disgraced themselves in running from the academy and creating a utopian Christian counter-culture, there remained a line of intellectual dissent within the Church.

The sturdier but more marginalized strand of this line extended through J. Gresham Machen and Westminster Theological Seminary. Although Machen was more exegete than theologian, his biblical fidelity and ability to critically analyze cultural trends made him an opposing force. He persuasively argued against liberal compromise and fundamentalist capitulation. Instead, he proposed the "consecration" of culture--exposing the fallacies of non-biblical worldviews and vindicating the true faith.

His work was largely continued through Cornelius Van Til at WTS, who was more a philosopher than a theologian. Unlike evangelical scholars, like Carl Henry, who sought to use classical or evidentialist apologetic methods to appeal to others' reason for acknowledging the truth of Christianity, Van Til proposed a drastically different method: presuppositionalism.

Van Til argued that there is a sharp "antithesis" between the mind that is being transformed by God and the mind that is still at enmity with God (Rom. 8). There is no common point of appeal. Instead, the work of Christian apologetics is to expose the faith assumptions and inconsistencies of every other worldview and appeal to the Scriptures for the only possible coherent understanding of the world.

Briefly one of Machen and Van Til's pupils, Francis Schaeffer became the great popularizer of this line of thinking. Melding presuppositionalism with some of the other methods employed by Henry and others, Schaeffer and his wife founded retreat centers throughout Europe and America where disillusioned young intellectuals could come, enjoy the hospitality of others, and engage is vigorous debates about the merits of Christians against all other worldviews.

Schaeffer's influence came not only with an intellectual standing that rivaled Machen and Van Til, but with a pious evangelical zeal that permeated his gentle debates with prayer and compassion. This powerhouse combination--persuasion, prayer, and piety--were used in the gracious providence of God to convert a young Harvard scholar, William (Bill) Edgar, in Switzerland in the 1960s.

Edgar, now a professor at WTS, subsequently penned an affectionate portrait of Schaeffer, focusing on his piety, int he past couple of years. Knowing then the significance of Schaeffer and where he fits within the larger progression of Christian thought, I would highly commend this short biography to you. Perhaps you have benefited from Schaeffer's teaching or writing in your lifetime, or maybe you're intrigued by apparent weight of Schaeffer's prayefulness and piety--in any case, this book will prove spiritually satisfying.

I will mention to brief critiques--one of Schaeffer and one of Edgar's book. First, Schaeffer became too muddled in political affairs toward the end of his life. Even though he was largely a dissident hippie by nature, he became associated with the rise of the Religious Right. As a result, he tended to conflate Christianity and culture. He was alarmed by the effect that the culture was having on Christianity and the lack of effect that Christianity was having on culture. The answer to this problem is not renewed efforts at transforming culture, but renewed efforts at solidifying the biblical doctrines of the Church. Machen noted that ideas will eventually move tanks. The more the Church focuses on her prerogative of feeding the sheep, the more the sheep will have the energy to move.

Second, while Edgar opens a window upon Schaeffer's inspirational piety, he relies to much on Schaeffer's book, True Spirituality, in writing his account. He basically spends two chapters outlining Schaeffer's thought in that book, which resulted in the reader being removed from Schaeffer's life. While the chapters are still helpful, they could have merely used the book to provide touch points with which to launch into more illuminated examples from Schaeffer's life.

Just a warning: If you read Machen or Schaeffer, you may feel compelled to engage the culture anew with the weight of God's truth and in a spirit of prayer. In an age still dominated by compromise and capitulation, there could be worse things than feeling compelled to consecrate the culture to the glory of God. In fact, if our chief purpose is "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever," then the task of taking every thought captive for Christ should be a joyous one.