Van Til on Christian Education

I recently read a book of essays titled, Foundations of Christian Education, by Louis Berkhof and Cornelius VanTil. VanTil's essays required mental effort because he incorporates philosophical terms and abstract ideas with which I am not intimately familiar - such as "theories of reality" and "absolute personality." Initially, I didn't even understand his definition of education ("Education is implication into God's interpretation.") without reviewing the etymology of the word implicare - to enfold, intertwine.

Here are some of his comments which I DID understand from his essay titled, Antitheses in Education, in which he highlights the opposing views regarding philosophy (reasons & methods), curriculum (content), and the child.

Philosophy:

"Non-Christians believe that the universe has created God. They have a finite god. Christians believe that God has created the universe. They have a finite universe. Non-Christians therefore are not concerned with bringing the child face to face with God. They want to bring the child face to face with the universe."

"We see that the antithesis touches every phase of education. To try to enforce the idea at one point and to ignore it at others is to waste your energy and your money. ...all the differences in educational theory are reducible to a single issue, the question of a personal God. ...The different conceptions of God that underlie the two educational theories cover every point on the whole front and cover them before and behind, without and within."

"Every good soldier should know the tactics of the enemy...perhaps some of the methods used by the enemy maybe transformed and used by us. But transformed they must always be. If a glass has contained carbolic acid you do not merely pour it out in order then to give your child a drink of water. How much more impossible will it be to take a non-Christian spiritual content and pour it out of its form in order to use the latter for the pouring out of a definite Christian-theistic content? The connection between form and matter is too much like that of skin and flesh to allow for easy removal of the one without taking something of the other."

Curriculum:

"It is a satanic falsehood to say that a fact is a fact for everybody alike...our contention is that there are no facts but theistic facts, while the contention of our enemy is that facts are facts whether God exists or does not exist. The ground for the necessity of Christian schools lies in this very thing, that no fact can be known unless it be known in its relationship to God."

"...it is easier to bring out the more specifically human and the more specifically Christian interpretation of reality when teaching history than when teaching nature. ...We are all familiar with the mad rush for the study of nature at the expense of the classics and the humanities a number of years ago...this tendency was indicative of an emphasis upon man's environment at the expense of man himself."

"We will always place man at the center of the curriculum. God has made man's environment subject to man instead of man subject to his environment. It follows that history can never be relegated to the background. ...We must add that man as the Christian must stand at the center of the curriculum. Hence sacred history, which focuses on the program of redemption, is at the center of all the teaching of history."

Child:

"Our opponents hold that strictly speaking authority and freedom are mutually exclusive; however, real authority is nothing but the placing of the absolute personality of God before the finite personality of man. It is this that makes the position of the teacher so infinitely difficult and at the same time so infinitely valuable. On the basis of our opponents the position of the teacher is utterly hopeless. He knows that he knows nothing and that in spite of this fact he must teach. He knows that without authority he cannot teach and that there are no authorities to which he can appeal. He has to place the child before an infinite series of possibilities and pretend to be able to say something about the most advisable attitude to take with respect to those possibilities, and at the same time he has to admit that he knows nothing at all about those possibilities. And the result for the child is that he is not furnished with an atmosphere in which he can live and grow. In contrast, the Christian teacher knows himself, knows the subject and knows the child. He has the full assurance of the absolute fruitfulness of his work. He labors in the dawn of everlasting results."