Dashes

The dirty rotten secret of education is that kids love ideas and tend to be a good bit less interested in what adults usually mean by practical stuff. That is one of the causes of stress between them.

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People create or join bureaucracies so they can avoid direct contact with the consequences of their decisions, the moral quandaries life puts us all in, and the pain they cause. At the bottom levels, they can always blame the top. At the top, they can blame the structure - or the bottom - or their helplessness.

But no one is to blame. And that is why no bureaucrat has ever solved a humane problem.

That is why it takes a village, but not one based in Washington.
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Religion makes people take themselves too seriously, which is too bad because it is religion that reveals the humor in life. Of course, the funniest people are the Malvolios - but the happiest people are those who learn to laugh at themselves - which is the fundamental lesson of any sensible religion.

To make excelsior your motto, but to laugh at yourself for doing so, but to keep it as your motto, that is the key to happiness and success.

• acceptance and striving
• good humor and diligence
• light-heartedness and intensity
• formality and forgiveness

Combine these and you have the complete man.

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We are habituated to disregard human relationships. Consider the manner of our transactions or the way we pass each other without greeting or acknowledging each other.

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The Enlightenment is not primarily a set of ideas but of anxieties. Until we resolve these anxieties we will be stuck in the Enlightenment and its consequences. We were not created to live in this Enlightenment world - in this Age of Anxiety.

The premise of the Enlightenment is that every human impulse is good and can be ordered without reference to anything transcendent.

The goal of the Enlightenment is not to have a people and not to have a place. A people and a place limit and embarrass.

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The common herd can clap. Only an orchestra can play a symphony.

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Practical instruction is rooted in right ideas. The problem with too much modern education is the inadequacy of the ideas that animate (or kill) it.

The practical and the theoretical are not different in kind but in degree - they are marks along a continuum. Practice without theory leads to errors based on what works regardless of the overall health of the organism or culture. Practice without theory looks for the easiest solution to the immediate problem. True theory prevents us from embracing errors that work.

Theory without practice makes us irrelevent and drives us into word games. Theory without practice won't be bothered with the limitations of reality. Theory without practice disincarnates the idea.

The solution is the incarnate logos.

True theory is wisdom. True practice is skill.

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Modes of instruction can make us wise or foolish by helping or interfering with the discovery of causes. That is why Socratic and didactic instruction are powerfully effective. Discretion requires the knowledge of causes.

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To master a science is to be able to speak with genuine authority on that science.

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A sound epistemology (theory of knowledge) must respect the role of all our faculties and give them their due proportion and honor. We have faculties. It may be worth asking whether their purpose is to know.

One of the great problems of knowledge is pre-consciousness.

Conference 2005

Ken Myers has agreed to speak again! Now how can anyone not come? Get your affairs in order and be there.

"It is the part of the wise man to order and to judge." When you read Thomas Aquinas you continually find statements like this sprinkled through his writings. They unfold whole worlds to us because he is able to see things from such a high level that he can summarize universal insights in a phrase.

I highlighted this one because of our conference theme: Order. We have a gift here at the CiRCE Institute for coming up with topics no focus group would ever suggest. I'm quite certain that the topic of order is almost as boring to most people as the topic of justice. Maybe more so.

I'm also quite certain that if we don't take it seriously so as to learn how to use it as a foundational category of thought, we will never fulfill the purpose of education. So maybe it's bad marketing, but I hope it's honest service.

The wise man is able to do two things our culture doesn't want done: ordering and judging. Both imply limits, priorities, authority, reality. We need to do them.

The teacher needs to order the desks in her classroom. The writer needs to order his thoughts. The composer needs to order his notes. The craftsman needs to order his tools. The teacher needs to order her lessons. And curriculum. And walls. And thoughts. And voice. And students.

The wise man is the one able to order them rightly - to order them according to his purpose and theirs.

The wiser a man is, the higher the order he is able to attain. That is, he is able to order to higher purposes. Simple wisdom enables a person to order his room. A little more enables him to order his shop. A little more enables him to order his schedule. A little more, his army. A little more, his family. A little more, his country. A little more, his soul.

That is why we need masters; wise men who know how to order things at a higher level than we do. The duty of the ruler is to order the relationships among those he rules to fulfill the purpose of the society he rules. Every adult is a ruler at some level.

The founding fathers laid out an order for our country. They poured their wisdom into it. Now we need to sustain that order.

God who rules all things with wisdom and justice is a God of order. He is trinitarian - one and many at once.

The mind functions necessarily in an orderly way - though it resists the limits of order. It only learns from the particular to the universal: from grammar to rhetoric. So there is an order to teaching.

Subjects can only be mastered in an orderly way: foundational ideas at the bottom, higher ideas at the top. There is no point learning algebra if you don't know your tables. There is no point studying science if you can't do math.

Learning itself is ordered. The seven liberal arts are the basement: how deeply it is dug determines how high the rest of the structure can go. There is no point thinking we can understand the natural or moral sciences if we cannot use the seven arts creatively. That is why Plato insisted that no man ignorant of geometry should enter his academy.

Even being is ordered. Start with God or you never start at all. You simply move in circles, seeking a coherence that can only include tiny solar systems and never attain true knowledge - and eventually giving up on coherence. Metaphysics determines moral truth. Moral truth determines physical truth.

Everything is ordered, but all is in disarray. That is why we need the wise man. Because only he is able to order and to judge.

I hope you'll come to our conference and grow in wisdom with the rest of us.

What is man?

When we think of man as a being who has a body and a soul and that these can be separated, there are many ramifications and Descartes spelled some of them out. Knowledge of the world outside the mind becomes a serious and unresolved problem. The thinker has no choice but to focus his attention on his own subjective states. The relation between knower and known is broken. And horrible cruelties are defended.

For example, if the body and soul are separable, then the baby in the womb may or may not have a soul. If they are, as I believe, inseparable, then the baby is his embodied soul. Before the soul arrives the baby is not yet a human being. He can be eliminated without moral scruples. But if the soul never arrives because it is what the baby is as opposed to something he will possess, then it is utterly wrong to end the life of that soul.

In short, the abortion industry and its defenders and victims, are operating within an ethical framework derived from a philosophical error about the nature of man. You want practical? Life and death is pretty practical. Get your anthropology straight, because if you misunderstand man all that follows is a mess. And to get your anthrophology right, you must get your metaphysics and theology right. Don't tell me philosophy is not practical. Because the philosophers of the Enlightenment dropped the notion of formal and final cause out of fear of God, multitudes of people have been aborted, executed, tortured, schooled, flattered, drained of meaning, confused, and impoverished. Sometimes extreme and overstated language is just plain accurate.

We need the logos to put us back together.

conference update

I spoke with Bob Ingram and Michael Eatmon yesterday about the conference program. They are the Geneva School leaders who are helping plan the conference. We discussed speakers and the schedule and I came out of it thinking we will probably have the best line-up of speakers we've ever had. Michael Eatmon will be one of them. He's one of the more amazing people I've met - a genius who can teach well, who knows 42 languages or some such ungodly number, and who has more energy than an unleashed atom.

Other speakers include James Daniels, Martin Cothran, and me. We'll be asking others to come back, but I dont want to mention names till they're confirmed. Of course, we'll also have the Paideia Prize recipient, who always has profound wisdom to offer us.

The theme will be Order, because God is a God of order and he took a cosmos that was a formless void and made it into this glorious creation in which we live. He separated what should be separated and He joined together what should be joined together. He brought things into being sequentially and purposefully. He brought into being an orderly and beautiful creation. Then He created human souls in perfect order. He made them to think and love and will in an orderly way. I suspect that nothing could have disordered this human soul if the great temptor had not stepped in and rearranged its perceptions, creating a disorder in the human soul that has spread through the whole cosmos.

This is the ruin that John Milton said education is supposed to repair and that ACCS has named their conference and book after. It is nothing short of a reordering of the soul, an ordering to our purpose as created by God and restored by the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit He purchased for us.

Lose sight of the order of the soul and there is no point trying to teach anything from a Christian perspective. That is the Christian perspective.

So we'll talk about ordering the soul which is done by ordering the classroom, the lesson, the mind, the tastes, the affections, the body, the wardrobe, the composition (written, drawn, or performed), the social order, the activities of the day, week, year, and life, the materials, the office, the structure of the staff, the curriculum, and everything else that has any role to play in the way we live. Everything is to be ordered to this ultimate purpose of ordering the soul to Christ - of glorifying God and enjoying Him forever.

You can't make too big a deal of order, but you can make too big a deal of lower forms of order. For example, a person can care so much about the order of his office that he neglects the order of his affections and treats a student unkindly for putting something down in the wrong place.

A proposed colloquy question: Is there laughter in heaven?

Got any more? Post them in the forum.

I'll have more on ADD later today if I get a chance.

ADD Part two: What is man? (part one is below and should be read first)

I ended the last entry pointing out how important it is that we get the question about what a human being is right. I began to show how we traded in the idea of an embodied soul for the idea of a soul and a body. Nobody had a more decisive influence on this change than Rene Descartes. Descartes believed there was one "substance" underlying matter and another underlying mind or the soul. The material substance could be explained by mathematical and mechanical laws. It could be studied completely by itself and it could be shown to have the same predictability as a machine. God gave this matter an initial push, but after that it followed its own laws.

God exists outside this world of matter and bodies. The spiritual soul exists within the body. But there is a radical separation of the two. The soul can affect the body, indeed the body cannot move without the soul moving it, but the body is a sharply distinct thing and it has little to no effect on the soul.

It's easy enough to see the roots of deism and the clockwork God of the enlightenment in Descartes' ideas. We need to also make note of his effect on evangelical thought. Ever since the Enlightenment, the west has had a tendency toward strong dualisms: Body separated from spirit, God separated from cosmos, mind separated from feelings, spiritual separated from secular, etc.

This becomes critical when we look at the question of human behavior, and particularly, in this reflection, ADD. The secular world explains human behavior by looking to the material and efficient causes. The classical Christian world has a tendency to explain it by looking to the formal and final causes. Neither explanation is sufficient.

Let me explain. Rejecting God and the notion of purpose, the secular world does not believe that human beings do what they do to know and enjoy God. Most of what we do, we do because external stimuli move us to do it (efficient causes) or because of what we are made of (the material cause). The first option is behaviorism and leads to teaching techniques like programmed instruction, a dangerous temptation in the grammar stage.

The second option has many forms. Freud's theories have been popularized as basically studies in material causality. We lust because we are made of tensions and anxieties that express themselves in lust. We do what we do because of what we are made of. In regard to ADD, the argument from the material cause is that a person has a hard time controlling himself, organizing himself, concentrating, etc. because his brain (the physical organ) is missing or has an exess of certain chemicals. The simplistic solution is to prescribe Ritilin and other risky drugs.

To ascribe ADD solely to efficient causes will lead to stimulus-response approaches to behavior modification. To ascribe it solely to chemical imbalances will lead to medicating the child to control his behavior.

But we can also turn to the formal and final causes. What is the idea or pattern that the child is enacting in his behavior. Where has he seen this pattern enacted before? I don't think children are easily able to behave in a given way without having seen it acted out somewhere. The inner impulse needs a form and rarely if ever does it create one of its own.

On the other hand, what is the child's purpose in his ADD behavior? Those who look strictly to the final cause imply that the child chooses to behave a certain way, that his will is sufficient for the decision, and that therefore we are dealing with sin and that is all there is to it.

I'm not even sure that's wrong. I'm just not sure it's right either. We pious types love to explain things by pointing to sin as an explanation, as though that ends the discussion. It's a little like saying math is the way it is because of numbers.

Here, sadly, is where an awful lot of compassion comes home to die. Different people are inclined to different sins, and those sins are rooted in our physiology. We are not souls and bodies, we are embodied souls. I am inclined to certain sins because of my glands and organs. Other people are inclined to other sins. Some people have virtually perfectly balanced brains and organs, so they find submission and peacefulness pretty easy. They don't like people like me who are bundles of nervous energy who want, more than anything, to sleep. I don't like being that way either, but I have no escape. I have to get to know myself and deal with my weaknesses. Others are genetically good and have genetically good kids. But there's no virtue in that kind of goodness. It tends toward Phariseeism.

How does sin work in each individual and what should we do about our tendencies toward certain sins? If I don't eat, I fall into the sin of grumpiness. If I eat too much, I fall into the sin of gluttony. If I eat the wrong things, I tend toward nervousness and anxiety. What should I do to overcome my grumpiness? I could strengthen my will and become superhumanly cheerful. I could fast more and pray more intensely. But, as a rule, God regards that as testing Him. Why should He send His Holy Spirit to look after what He sent baked chicken to do.

Eating and sleeping can be acts of great humility - of submission to the One who made us to eat and sleep.

We are stewards of our bodies, in part because these earthen vessels have a profound effect on our souls. If we don't steward our bodies we will be much more inclined to commit specific sins. In my earlier illustration, I may have pulled off my adversaries wig, in part, at least, because I had not had a good breakfast that day.

All four causes need to be duly considered. And we need to recognize both the body and the soul. And we need to recognize that the two are inseparable. Indeed, Christians believe that their separation is what we call death.

And what about ADD? Part one: Causes of human behavior

I'll come back to the question of philosophy later today or maybe later in the week, but right now I am exercised over this question of ADD and ADHD. To understand this issue it is first necessary to understand that before an object exists or any action is performed, the doer or maker has already, consciously or subconsciously, formed in his mind an idea of what that object or action will be. That idea, in turn, was formed because the maker or doer had some purpose that gave rise to the action or object.

For example, to the left of my computer is a paper holder. It is there because somebody came up with the idea of an object that would hold paper so he could type without having to ruin his neck or use one hand to type and one to hold the paper - i.e. so he could type efficiently. The need came first. The need was the purpose.

Thus we say that necessity is the mother of invention. Because the need or purpose arose, the inventor came up with the idea. The object exists because the maker had formed an idea in his mind of what the object would be and he did so because he had a purpose in his mind that gave rise to the idea of the object. Without idea and purpose there would be no object.

But it is rather obvious that purpose and idea are not enough. No matter how hard I think of the idea and no matter how intense my purpose, my mind will not solve the problem until I embody the idea in some material substance. My paper holder is made of plastic.

But I still have a problem. If I find all the most flexible, malleable plastic in the world, it will not, merely by my thinking the idea and being attentive to the purpose, form itself into the object that I need. Something has to act on the plastic to turn it into a paper holder. To simplify, that "thing" was the efficient machine in which the material of the plastic was molded into the form of the idea in my mind because of the purpose in my mind that drove the maker (let's pretend it was me) to make it.

To summarize, the plastic is molded by a machine into the shape of the idea in my mind, and the idea took the shape it did in my mind because of the purpose or need that I experienced.

The paper holder to my left would not be as it is without all four of those influences:

• the purpose in the maker's mind
• the idea in the maker's mind
• the material of the thing itself
• the instrument used by the maker to form the material into the idea

Each of these four things caused the paper holder to be the paper holder that it is.

Everything in the cosmos and everything made or done by man or God shares these four causes. Everything has a purpose, an idea, the material it is made of, and the instrument or means used to make it.

For convenience, thinkers call these four things "the four causes," and they give them very useful names.

• The purpose is called "the final cause"
• The Idea is caused "the formal cause"
• The material is called "the material cause"
• The means or instrument is called "the efficient cause"

Mortimer Adler gives us another angle on the four causes by suggesting four basic questions we can ask every time a person makes something:

• What is it being made for?
• What is it that is being made?
• What is it going to be made of?
• Who is going to make it?

All human behaviour arises from all four of these causes. In other words, everything we do, we do for a purpose, after having formed an idea of what we will do (usually a very sloppy idea and one we are not often conscious of), we use means to get it done, and we do it.

When we ask the question of ADD, we are asking a whole collection of questions about human behavior. If we are going to understand any human behavior we must understand ALL FOUR of the causes of that behavior. If I, for example, lose my temper and I want to understand why, I need to ask:

• What was my goal in losing my temper?
• How did I express myself when I lost my temper? Another way to put this is, what was the pattern I followed when I lost my temper?
• What did I use to express my loss of temper (fist, mouth, etc.)
• Who am I? This is a huge and vital question, as I hope to show you in just a moment.

Unfortunately, none of these questions are all that easy to answer. None are simple. But for the sake of illustration, I am going to suggest some very simple answers to illustrate the point:

• My goal in losing my temper was to hurt my adversary for a wrong done - vengeance
• I expressed myself by yanking his wig off his head
• I used by body, especially my hand, to express my loss of temper
• I am - ouch. This question is tough. Let me put it this way: I am an embodied soul, created in the image of God. I am clay with the breath of God giving it life or soul.

As I said, this last point is vital. If I fail to accurately understand what a human is, I cannot understand his behavior. Until the late middle ages it was generally the understanding of western thinkers that man was an embodied soul. Late in the middle ages that idea started to break down. With Descartes, it was broken. No longer did western thinkers see man as an embodied soul. Now he was a being with a soul and a body. Verbally, that sounds like a small difference. In reality it is vast. Sort of like the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.

Should Christians Think About Philosophy?

Never. They should especially never think about thinking about it by telling people not to think about it.

Just kidding.

I suppose it depends on a few things:

1. What Christians are we talking about?
2. Why are they thinking about thinking about it?
3. Whether it is possible not to.
4. whether philosophy is part of the all things that are ours and that will be brought together in Christ at the summing up of all things.
5. Whether the Christian should be doing something else.

If Christ's dominion is to extend to philosophy, it would seem that Christians are the ones who are to achieve that dominion. Another way to put it (because that way can be badly misunderstood and resented) is to say that if Christians have philosophical ideas, which they do by necessity, they need to bring them into subjection to Christ.

The modern philosopher has to object to the foregoing. Philosophy, he is likely to insist, to be philosophy, must function autonomously. To speak of subjecting it to religion is to limit its reach and to turn it into something other than philosophy.

But like a true philosopher I have to go now because my wife just entered the room to tell me it is time. More tomorrow, I hope.

What about philosophy?

Two excesses must be avoided when we do philosophy: 1. thinking we can do philosophy without considering, including, or acknowledging God, and 2. thinking that including God makes our presuppositions right or makes the enterprise unduly simplistic. God - knowledge of and enjoyment of God - is the end of philosophy, as He is the end of all things.

Classical and Christian?

In the 25th Screwtape Letter, C.S. Lewis quotes Screwtape telling his nephew Wormwood that "what we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call 'Christianity And." You know--Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform. If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference. Substitute for the faith itself some Fashion with a Christian colouring."

No doubt if he were writing today Lewis would change some of the hyphenations. Now we would have Christianity and Home Schooling, Christianity and Republicanism, Christianity and Family Values, Christianity and Classical Education.

I have been in the classical Christian movement for over a decade, and before that I was, like so many who have read Lewis and Schaeffer, a Christian who favored classical learning without knowing there was a theory that explained me. But if there is one thing I don't want, it is to be called a Classical Christian. At least, not if by that what is being said is that I am a Christian who adds to his Christianity classical ideas. If classical Christian is simply a qualifying adjective stating that I am a Christian who regards the communion of saints going back to the apostles and fathers of the church as my guide, then I am a classical Christian. If it means I want to have a Christian side of my life and a classical side, I am not interested.

I am a Christian. My goal is to be only a Christian. If the Christian faith teaches me to read classical literature, then I want to read it. If it tells me not to, then I don't want to read it. That is why I wrote yesterday's blog. Consider this a post-preface.

I believe that the Christian faith does teach us to read the ancient pagans. Not all of us, by any means. Many of us ought not to. But some of us, and certainly those of us who are educators, need to read them. You can't understand poetry if you don't know Homer. You can't understand epistemology if you don't know Aristotle. Or ethics. You can't understand civics if you don't know Greek and Roman history and the writings of Plato, Thucydides, and Cicero. You can't understand education if you don't engage the ideas explored in Plato's dialogues.

Because the church has devalued these masters of their arts, the American church has tended toward ignorance of their fields and imitation of the Freudian, Cartesian, Empiricist, and Romantic heresies of today. The ancient world takes us out of our narrow modernist minds.

My Nicaraguan friend, Greg Millsaps, asked for a place to respond to this blog. Greg, and anybody else interested: visit our forum. This link should take you there: http://www.activeboard.com/forum.spark?forumID=24914&subForumID=39188

Actually Greg is not Nicaraguan but a missionary in Nicaragua. Good to hear from you Greg!

Responding to the pagan mind

The ancient, classical pagan mind is much closer to the Christian mind than the modern mind is. The contemporary Christian mind is much closer to the modern mind than it cares to admit - or is able to imagine, much less recognize.

This is no simple black and white dispute. There is not one pure "pagan mind" opposed to one pure "Christian mind," at least not in the world we inhabit. Our Christian minds grow into the Christian mind. They don't get there by reading a book on worldview and agreeing with what it says. They grow through contemplation of Christian truth, obedience to Christ's commands, and acts of love and worship. In short, when it comes to our thinking, acting, and feeling, we are Christian only by degree.

Similarly, pagans have many different views of the cosmos, ethics, God, and human nature, and many of those views approach or even agree with the Christian worldview. There is an ideal Christian mind, toward which Christians are obliged to move. We are to be transformed by the renewing of the mind, until we have the mind of Christ. It is questionable whether there is any comparable ideal pagan mind. But there is also not, in actual earthly experience, a mind characterized by pure non-Christian thinking. There is no ideal anti-Christian mind - no mind that totally disagrees.

As a result, pagans sometimes get things right. And, and this is critical to understand, Christians sometimes get things wrong. And the more Christians conform to the mind of the age in which they live, the more they get wrong. And Christians in America are not characterized by substantial differences in their thought patterns from non-Christians. We have different ideas about some things, though even here we can pretend there are black and white differences that don't exist. Abortion and gay marriage, for example, are opposed by a very large number of people who make no claim to be Christians. Meanwhile, we need to care more for the poor than we did in the 20th century.

In short, being Christian doesn't make us right about everything and being pagan or non-Christian doesn't make somebody wrong about everything.

Which is rather obvious when it is stated that way, but when we talk about education there is still a tendency for evangelical Christians to want to make a super sized black line between Christian and non-Christian thought. For example, we get our text books only from Christian publishing companies, while not asking whether the idea of a text book is in fact a Christian idea or whether Christian publishing companies are just imitating "the world."

To make matters seem still more complicated, when we compare the gospel of the New Testament with ancient pagan learning, we find that the gospel does not negate the pagan impulses; it purifies and fulfills them. The Greco-Roman pagan sought after three things: glory, honor, and immortality. Paul writes to the Romans and, rather then condemning them for this quest, he tells them that if they "seek for glory and honor and immortality" God will render to them eternal life. In II Thessalonians 1:12 Paul explains why he prays for the Thessalonians: "In order that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you." What a precious truth, what a great and glorious idea, that the greatest Name of names, that the most precious Love of loves, that the second person of the Holy and unapproachable trinity, can be glorified in us.

But he doesn't stop there. He goes on to say, "and you in Him." We speak of glorifying God, and indeed that is our chief end and highest call. But sometimes we are too pious to recognize that God also is working to glorify us. And that glorification happens in Him, where everything wonderful happens, where all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are found, where we have been chosen, where (and only where) we are blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms, where we have redemption, and forgiveness, and where He brought about the working of His almighty power by resurrecting Christ from the dead and resurrecting us IN HIM! It is in Him that we are sealed by his Holy Spirit, where we receive our inheritance, and where all things will be summed up. And it is in Him that Paul tells us that God intends to glorify us. No wonder he sang of grace and its achievements.

This primal human desire for glory, rooted in the fact that God made us for honor and that we have lost it, is not negated by the gospel. It is purified, redirected, and fulfilled. I must confess that in my Christian background I never was taught this precious truth in a way that sang to me. It wasn't until I saw the connection between Paul's writings and those of the people to whom he was witnessing, that is to say, the ancient pagans, that I came to understand. I say without shame or embarrasment that reading the pagans has helped me understand the writings of the New Testament.

Why? Because I am a modern Christian. I have all the habits of the modern Christian. I look for what the modern Christian looks for. My mind is much too modern. But Paul was writing to converts from ancient paganism. And the ancient pagan mind is much closer to the Christian mind than the modern, post-enlightenment mind.

But I know that many Christians are uncomfortable with some of what I have written. I understand that. I once threw out all my non-Christian books. It may be that some Christians ought not to read the best of the ancient pagans. But the Christian church as a whole will slide into an anti-intellectual quagmire if they adopt that approach as the generalized expectation or as the implicit requirement for godliness.

Christians and pagans have degrees of agreement. It requires judgment to assess the degrees of agreement. That makes people who want a sharp black and white world very uncomfortable. They fear relativism, which is very different from what I am talking about. And who can blame them, when you consider the stakes. That is why the metaphor of the counterfeit dollar bill is so popular.

Perhaps you know the one I mean. To train a bank teller to identify counterfeit dollars, banks don't have him mess around with counterfeit dollar bills, but only with real ones. The problem is that there is no pure dollar bill of a Christian mind that is uninfluenced by the world we inhabit. One might suggest then that the Bible is the pure dollar bill, and we ought therefore only to read the Bible. The problem with that argument is not the dollar bill, but the untrained senses. I am effected by the world I live in. When I come to the Bible, it is I who comes to the Bible. That's a problem. I have appetites, desires, habits, expectations, presuppositions. These prevent my intake of the scriptures from being perfectly pure.

"But the Bible purifies when I meditate on it." Yes, and it makes us more like it. Yes, and if you ever hear me argue that we should not be constantly in the word and prayer, bury me and tell me I'm no serious Christian. Here is what I have found. I meditate on the Bible and it informs, instructs, and transforms me. Usually slowly; often deeply. It has made me into a person who needs His people, the church. And that church is much more than the local, flawed church I attend on Sundays. It's a church with a long life extending back to and beyond Pentecost. It is an eternal church. And it is a church that, in my experience, has become more comprehensible through the readings of the things they read, studying the world they lived in, understanding the minds they cultivated.

All of that has driven me back to the study of history and literature - two things the Christian mind has always cherished. It is in Christ that all things will be summed up, not just "Christian things" whatever that might mean.

I carry on so long on this issue because I am truly concerned for the well being of the church in America. My concern is that because of its fear of ancient pagan literature which arose from its more reasonable fear of modern secular thought, and which, in my opinion, does not need to be feared by Christians anywhere near as much as modern Christian literature, the evangelical church largely lost its ability to judge things in a mature way. It lost its witness to the 20th century world because it lost its mind - the one with which we are commanded to love God completely. Hebrews 5:14 tells us that "solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil."

I find that evangelical Christians who claim to read only the Bible are those most dependent on their pastors and interpreters and are therefore most inclined to cultic tendencies. How can it be otherwise, since they tend to adopt an unBiblical dualism.

Because of their greatness, because of their antiquity, and because no well-grounded Christain child is at risk of worshipping Zeus, the ancient pagan writers offer a powerful playground for our children and ourselves to practice training their senses (the author is clearly referring to the internal senses identified by Aristotle) to discern good and evil. On the other hand, most modern Christian writing and music undercuts the cultivation of that discernment.

For the sake of Christ's precious bride, read Homer.

Beginning thoughts on integrating the curriculum

A properly integrated curriculum coordinates all the activities of a school, lifts the learning of all its students, and gives purpose and direction to every teacher. These are no small benefits. But how is a curriculum properly intergrated?

I believe it is easy to make mistakes in this area because it is so easy to make mistakes whenever we think about education. But I'm out of time, so I'll try to develop this tomorrow.