A Christian educator must fully embrace a Biblical philosophy of the world, or in other words, hold to a Biblical worldview. What a teacher believes about reality, truth, and values informs their approach to education, including their methodology and pedagogy of classroom learning. To truly teach from a Christian perspective an educator must fully acknowledge what the Bible teaches about Who God is, the nature of man, and man’s relationship to God (metaphysics); what the Bible teaches about truth and man’s ability to know anything (epistemology); and what the Bible teaches about right and wrong and good and evil (axiology).
As part of a Continuing Education assignment for my ACSI Teacher Certification Revewal, I plan to write a series of posts in response to the lessons I am completing. At the heart of Virtus Cottage School is Christian Education from a Biblical Worldview. These posts will, hopefully, shed light on who we are and why we do what we do.
Part I: Who is God and what is His relationship to mankind?
God, the infinite, Almighty Creator, has reached down through real space and time, that He might know and be known by mankind, whom He created in His own image. God, Himself, is timeless, having existed before the “in the beginning” of Genesis 1:1; He is complete, a Triune God, existing always as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; perfect in relationship and communication; and He is limitless, not bound within the confines of time or space or physicality. How does the Highest of Highs, the Holiest of Holies, condescend to γινώσκω (know) humanity? “I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me, even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.” (John 10:14-15). As the Father knows the Son and exists in perfect harmony and relationship, so He intended mankind, His special and unique creation, to enjoy relationship and fellowship with Him, in a personal and intimate way.
Human minds can scarcely comprehend these ideas of everlasting and eternal because they do not share the infinite nature of God, however, the very story of creation itself reveals enough that mankind can understand sufficiently. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” (Genesis 1:1-2). In the beginning, God. If God was responsible for the beginning then He must have existed before the beginning; this idea can be grasped by even a young child. The mystery does not remain a mystery and the infinite becomes tangible; this is what God does; stretches His understanding across the universe to touch the lives of people. And yet, people, rather than responding in awe and wonder to an infinite Creator God who desires a personal relationship with them, are content to exist in their temporal world, immune to the efforts of God to draw them to Himself through all of space and time. The Lord appeared to him from afar, saying, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.” (Jeremiah 31:3) Man remains separated from the Eternal, thinking he exists only in the temporal, not realizing that He too is everlasting from the beginning.
In Genesis chapter 1, when all of creation is complete, God says, “Let us make man in Our image…”. This special creation of man is distinct from the creatures which were created. The Christian philosopher, Francis Schaeffer writes, “The Christian knows that in the flow of history man comes from a different origin. It is not that God has not made both man and the great machine of the universe, but that he has made man different from the rest of the universe. And that which differentiates man from the machine is that his basic relationship is upward rather than downward or horizontal. He is created to relate to God in a way that none of the other created beings are (Genesis in Space and Time).” Having been made in the image of God, man and man alone uniquely shares in the character qualities of God Himself. Attributes such as love and compassion and kindness, which are so perfectly ascribed to God, are imprinted on the human heart by the Maker. Original sin and man’s fall from grace as described in Genesis chapter 3 taints these inherited qualities, but man and man alone is an image-bearer and is made in the likeness of the triune God.
This personal God who molded His “very good” creation after Himself always intended for man to have a personal relationship with Him, to walk and talk with Him, as Adam and Eve did in the Garden. But man, in his first and continual rejection of all things good and Godly, seeks death over life, not realizing that eternity is set in his heart. “He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11