Out of the Question Podcast: Uncovering the Question Behind the Question

Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your host is Andrea Swarts, a teacher and mentor and founder of the Chalcedon Teacher training Institute.

Thanks for joining me today for part one of a series that I’m doing on classical education. Classical education has become somewhat of a buzzword. With all the COVID things that happened and all the perversion that’s being promulgated in schools, people are deciding, I got to get my children out of that environment. T hat’s a good thing. However, it’s also a concept that I’ll do the same thing that they were doing in school at home, just minus all the stuff I don’t like, and from there, my children will be educated. Now, they might be educated, but the question is, to what end are they educated? S ince this podcast goes out to Christians, the first thing I’d like to say is why you should be interested. Well, first of all, if you’re embarking on homeschooling or you are in the midst of homeschooling and you have a classical bent to how you think you should go, I have with me today someone who can help flesh out all the particulars. If you no longer have children who you have to educate, chances are you have grandchildren, you have neighbors, you have people within your community, your congregations at church.

And having this understanding and this orientation will be very helpful in terms of producing the desired result. I have Cathey Brown with me today. Cathey, thanks for joining me.

Glad to be here.

Okay. I ran into Cathey, I don’t know, five or six years ago now, and found out that we had a similar affinity for the work of R.J. Rushdoony. And if there’s anybody that I know, I’m not talking about the scholars that we’ve read and had commentaries, the woman loves to read. And then she goes way beyond my comfort zone. She not only reads all the footnotes in books that she reads, she often buys the book that’s referenced and reads that and then finds the biography on a book like candy to a child. It’s like, Oh, look what all I have to do. So as a result of that, oftentimes in my classes, which I conduct every week with other women, Cathey is my first Lieutenant or whatever you say, because I know that if there’s an area that somebody has a question on, Cathey more than likely has read about it and more than likely has an opinion about it. So, Cathey, just Just in terms of why, besides my introduction about you, what makes you someone at this point who can speak with authority on the subject of classical education?

It’s not so much authority as it is interest. When we’re believers, there are different skills, different gifts, different drives that God has put within all of us. I will lingly became a universal student a couple of decades ago, not only just through the schooling system and graduating, but I just couldn’t put down books. It never seemed to be a struggle for me. I could have got off and tried to do whatever I wanted on that for my own purposes and ends. But life is not all about just sitting around and enjoying your own books for your own reasons or whatnot. What are you supposed to do with that? I early on in my 20s, I decided with this ability to read advanced things, to process, to keep things into mind, I’m going to be a repository. I’m going to be a walking reference librarian in Christian literature, in some of the old school theology and a lot of the Puritan stuff and a lot of the doctrine stuff that your average Joe, your average layman isn’t really going to get into depth on, but they still are going to need help here and there. They’re going to need some answers.

They’re going to need pointed to, Okay, if this is what you’re thinking about, if these are the things that are in your mind or that are coming along, you might want to pick up this book over here. This is going to help you. B ased off of what you’ve read before, how you’ve studied before, this is going to be presented in a way that it’s going to make sense and it’s going to be really, really, really helpful. It’s not an authority so much as it is a natural affinity, a God given affinity.

The subject for this series is classical education. The first part, part one, we’re going to talk about ic a Dominion perspective. But before we actually get to the meat of that, what would you consider the general public’s view on classical education? And what would you consider the average Christian’s view on classical education?

Honestly, there’s not too much of a difference between the two as the temperature sits right now. Because we are so inundated with public school, with public education, classical education seems very old school, very further beyond academically than we’ve ever had in our day and time. And it’s great if you want to go back 100, 200, 300 years and teach the way that they used to. But golly, that just seems awfully studious for us. Good for you. I’m glad that there are people out there that do it, but I could never keep up with that. I already struggled as much through public schooling as anyone should ever have to do to go beyond that academically. That’s ridiculous. U nfortunately, I think Christians even look at it that way. We as Christians tend to like tradition a little bit more. We tend to like having roots and things. We’ve got the best selling book of all time. It’s our number one handbook. W e do like learning to a certain extent. W e’ve latched on a little bit to the idea of, Oh, yeah, that would be nice. W e just then rest at this sentiment of, Oh, that would be a nice way to teach.

Okay, I’m not going to be the one to do it. But that would be really, really, really nice if more people did that.

You get advertisements, come to our day school. It’s a classical Christian school, or curriculums and there are a variety of them that come from various publishers, that this is a classical curriculum. It seems to me that part of the problem is so many of the people who have embraced the idea of homeschooling were schooled in state schools in the first place. So they may suffer from they don’t know what they don’t know.

They don’t know what they don’t know, but they’re also just trying to find something that’s better. If you’ve been to public school, then you’ve walked away from public school with a distaste in your mouth for public school. Either that or you’ve become an educator within the public school system. You really don’t produce more than just those types of people. You either absolutely hated public school or you became a teacher in the public school system because you loved it. Unfortunately, that means that people reaching out trying to find homeschooling or trying to look at different private school alternatives, they don’t know anything but the distaste. They know that this is wrong. They know the public school system is wrong, but they don’t really know how to determine what’s right? What should education look like, what should we be doing. So along comes this classical idea, Oh, this is tradition based. It’s been around for a long time and it used to be successful because we used to be smarter back in olden days. So maybe this is the answer.

It’s funny that you say that because there was a period about 15 or 20 years ago where I got a hold of some old books, some old novels, and in it there were constant allusions to Greek mythology. And it’s like, I don’t really know about that. Okay, whatever. Okay, whatever. And then the person would break into French or the person would break into Latin. And again, I couldn’t read it. But there was no attempt to explain it because I guess the assumption of the authors was that you’re supposed to know this. And we hear that our forefathers were classically educated. And so Patrick Henry, George Washington, people want that for their children, but they don’t really know what it means even to explore the liberal arts. A lot of people hear liberal and it’s like, oh, no, I definitely don’t want that. Or liberal arts, it’s what you do if you don’t do anything specific. Talk a little bit about that.

When we talk about classical education, when we talk about liberal arts, these are in classical, seven main subject areas. We’re talking about rhetoric, we’re talking about grammar, logic, astronomy.

Math.

Geometry, and music. Now, how’s that for a lineup? That sounds very, very fanciful. It’s a very posh East Coast Ivy League somebody with money has sent their kids to learn all these things, right? It seems advanced. It’s so far above us because we weren’t trained in that. Is it truly advanced?

Interesting. You point out in some of our previous discussions that classical education has a rich 2,500 year history. It’s customarily given its genesis at the time of Plato and Aristotle. It matured during the Middle Ages. Then as I mentioned, it was the predominant form of education for America’s founders. But what’s missing from that definition is what is a sound, robust, challenging description of education? And you pointed out what’s missing from that? What should be included that hasn’t been?

And that’s the problem is that all of these things are set up with no reference to God, with no reference to biblical foundations. So this model is a model of what the world says knowledge is, what the world says education is, and what we should all know? Well, that’s a religious statement. What we should know is a religious statement. Our education is part of our culture and our culture is religion externalized. Every time we teach, every time we train, every time we say, this is the knowledge you need to know, we’re making a statement of this is what a human should be. This is how a human should be regulated. This is what should be part of your life, should be valued in your life. This is what is important in the world.

You make the point that the average person might have a very different definition of the purpose of education than what the Bible would indicate is the purpose of an education. Talk a little bit about that. I go with.

Two benchmarks for Christians and for the Bible. What is education? What do we need to be keeping in mind? The first is Proverbs 22 6. We all know Proverbs 22 6, Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he’s old, he won’t depart from it. Well, that training, that is education. That’s one of the strongest statements of education that we have in the Bible. General statements. Obviously, we’re told, learn these commands, teach these commands, teach them to your children. But this is a general concept of education for life, of education for the whole of the world, of education for the point of Dominion. When he’s old, he won’t depart from it. Okay, that means that you’ve created another soldier for the sake of Christ, another Dominion warrior going out amongst the world, proclaiming God and his kingdom come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Well, we skip over that, unfortunately, a lot of times. Train up a child. What’s the subject of that sentence? You’re a grammarian, you love grammar. What is the subject of train up a child?

It’s an implied you. You train up the child.

It’s missing in there. U nfortunately, we have a tendency because we’re lazy. We are. We’re all lazy. That’s part of indwelling within us is that we don’t want to do more than we absolutely have to do the minimum to get away with it. I train up. How about I just instead give it a little bit of consideration, make the best educational decision, and let someone else do the training? I did my part. I got the best system. I got the best focus area. I’ll follow up. I’ll ask questions at the end of the day, but I’m not going to take that whole training onto myself. But that’s the subject. That’s what it was assigned to, Biblicaly. So parents have to be a lot more involved than just which school or even which learning system? Am I going to be classical? Am I going to be Charlotte Mason? What am I going to do? That’s not enough. That’s not training up. That’s a single time decision. Beyond that, how do we choose the way he should go? How often do we spend considering that?

Right. Oftentimes when people come to me, we’re thinking of homeschooling, talk to me about it. I talk to them about it and they say, Okay, what should we do? What curriculum should we get? I go, I don’t know what curriculum you should get. They go, Why am I talking to you? I was told that you knew what you were talking about. And what I say to them is, What do you want to accomplish? What’s your goal? And they’re like, That my kids can get a good job, that we don’t get in trouble with a true end officer, that they’re not behind the other kids in school. And so they really have no mission statement. And I suggest a mission statement like, what’s your mission? Pointing them to the fact that we already have a lot of help there in the Bible and in our catechisms, which were specifically meant to help people orient themselves to the task of training up a child.

That’s how I like to define the way he could go. The way a child should go, Westminster number one, the chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. Okay, if that’s our chief end, then that’s the way we should go. So that’s what our training should be, training towards how to glorify God and how to enjoy him forever. But yeah, that’s a very blanket, very top level mission statement. And yet, if we pull that in and start looking at everything through that view, through that perspective, that really changes how we view education. That really changes what we consider schooling and learning and childhood learning specifically to be.

So you look at that definition that you might get off Wikipedia on classical education, and then you have to ask yourself, Okay, so does that reflect the two benchmarks that you mentioned? Glorifying God and enjoying him, meaning receiving his blessings because you glorified him by doing what he says. But does that mean classical education can’t be Christian or that it can’t be used for Christian ends? You’ve told me, Well, I wish there was a simple answer for that, but there isn’t one. W hat’s your deeper dive answer?

Our deeper dive is that everything is a tool, and the goodness of the tool depends on how you use it. We need to look at how our education and our knowledge presuppositions have been shaped by our perspective, our idea of what we need to be learning, what we need to be knowing. That means we have to jump into epistemology. We have to start from scratch. Starting from scratch, when we’re talking about knowledge, means how do we know what we know? Most people don’t ask that question.

They think that that’s just for the academics of the world.

No, any ology is so far advanced and beyond. Why should I have to know the definition for that?

Like you said, everybody has an epistemology, everybody has a theology. They may not look at it that way. And that’s why when you look at education and you say, Well, that has nothing to do with religion. It has everything to do with religion. It has everything to do with what’s your ultimate concern. And if there’s anything that parents of young children are usually involved in, in some way, shape, or form, is education. Where am I going to send them to school? Where do your kids go to school? Some people move to an area so that they can go to the good school. Other people spend most of their time at homeschool conventions in the hall where they can buy curriculum. But they go in looking for… It would be like saying, What’s the best car for my family? Well, if I have 10 children and two adults, a four seater isn’t going to cut it. I’m going to have to find find a van that will accommodate them. By the same token, if it’s just me and my husband and we’re empty nesters, I don’t need a 15 passenger van. So the answer to the question, what’s the right car for you?

Requires a number of other questions to get down to that. But as you have talked to me in the past about a lot of the view of people and right and wrong and ethics and morality come from a faulty view of the condition of man. Is man good most of the time and sometimes he slips, or is man utterly depraved?

That’s going to affect how much faith you put in your ability to think and how much faith you put in your ability to understand. Whether you think your mind is unscathed by the influence of indwelling sin. This really comes into play. This is going to seem scholastic. This is going to seem overly educational for the average person, but we’re going to go on a little bit of a history and theology lesson here because it’s relevant and we’re going to do it in a way that’s easy to understand. You’ll see how it applies here. We’re talking about how we know what we know and what is knowledge and how do we begin to then pass along knowledge. We’re going to go back to Thomas Aquinas. Most Christians will at least recognize that name. There are some even non Christians that recognize it as a little asterisk point or a one sentence line in a history text somewhere that they came across and never bothered to. Thomas Aquinas, 1225 to 1274, we’re talking Catholic Church at the time, there is no protestant Church. So this is within the Catholic Church, wrote Summa Theologica, his big Magnum Opus.

It’s a systematized theology and it’s supposed to be a compendium of all the teachings of the Church. So it’s supposed to be everything that we teach, all of the doctrine that we know. Our whole source of knowledge is supposed to be located within this. But it’s got a problem. It rests on a defective theory of knowledge, the relationship that exists between our faith, what we believe, and our reason, our mind’s ability to think through things on its own. Prior to Thomas Aquinas, the Church held on to an Augustinian view of knowledge. Here’s your Latin coming out since we’re talking about classical education anyway. Credo ut intelligam, believe that you may understand. What comes first? Belief. Faith is required then to understand things, to add knowledge to things. Augustine, we’re going to quote Augustine from his confessions. Lovely. The mind needs to be enlightened by light outside of itself so that it can participate in truth because it itself, the mind itself, is not the nature of truth. You light my lamp, oh Lord. What does that tell us about our knowledge and our understanding and our mind? It doesn’t exist naturally.

It’s derivative.

It is. It comes from something outside of our self. Now, let’s go back to that tricky Aquinas. Why did we bring up Aquinas and then jump straight into Augustine? Let’s compare what it had been to what Aquinas shifted everything to. In his own words, horrible as they may seem, but divinely inspired scripture is not pertinent to the philosophical disciplines which have been devised according to human reason. Therefore, it’s advantageous that over and beyond the philosophical disciplines, there should be another science that is divinely inspired. I respond, It was necessary for human salvation over and beyond the philosophical disciplines devised by human reason that there should also be a doctrine conformable to divine revelation. Hence, the theology associated with the sacred doctrine differs from in kind from the theology that’s positive as a part of philosophy.

Just so it’s clear, theology and philosophy were separated. They’re two separate things.

But that’s what he is implying there. Prior to this, we had faith so that we could have knowledge. Now Aquinas is stepping in and going, No, there are two completely separate systems of knowledge. There’s the sacred things of God that are divinely inspired and they lead to our salvation. That’s great. That’s nice for our faith. But there’s all of these other sciences over here that are philosophical that come out of the mind of man that are useful here and that don’t touch the things of God, don’t come anywhere close to sacred or having any an influence from the Bible.

Let’s flesh this out a little bit. If you’re going to see the implications of his statement, then his view of the fall was just very compartmentalized. Man didn’t fall in his totality, and that’s why he needs revelation from God to know what is and what isn’t. Just part of man fell, and that man is capable of coming to correct conclusions based on his reason and his intellect.

Man’s mind is not depraved according to Aquinas. This is very important because those dates, you remember those dates we talked about, 1225 to 1274? What happens in the next 800 years of Western history? Since Aquinas sat down and said, No, there’s a separate series of reason and logic and natural mind power, thinking power that you’re able to do on your own, apart from God, that is isn’t fallen, that isn’t affected by sin. I wonder how we ended up getting to the Enlightenment with natural reason. I wonder how we ended up getting to Darwinianism. I wonder how we ended up getting to postmodern atheism because the system was set up based upon this idea that God’s knowledge is fine and great. Learn them all off on its own over here. But there’s a whole realm of knowledge that God doesn’t touch that has nothing to do with God.

So you’re talking about Augustine, and he wrote the city of God and contrasted it with the city of man. I don’t think that Aquinas would have liked that differentiation.

But that’s the problem, and this is the crux. What we have is dueling perspectives on knowledge, which means dueling perspectives on learning and education. Augustine said, There’s the fallen mind and there’s the redeemed mind. There’s the city of God. There’s the city of man. There is before regeneration and there is after regeneration. There is a knowledge based off of ignorance based off of sin, and there’s one based off of faith. There’s an antagonism there. That’s the basis of the Augustinian knowledge system. The antagonism between the fallen mind and the regenerate, the redeemed mind. Aquinas does not do that. To Aquinas, the difference is, Oh, no, no, no. Things of God that can stay over there. But there’s now this whole separate area that God doesn’t touch. Which of those two views encourages man to view his mind as unaffected by sin? You’re going to teach differently. You’re going to understand things differently if you think, Oh, no, my mind is unaffected by sin. My emotions can be, my willpower can be. Sometimes my moral compass is a little wonky. But if I sit down and logically consider things, I will always arrive at the right thing because my logic, my reasoning, my rational nature is not affected by sin.

You’re going to teach differently if you say that versus the biblical model of total depravity all of us has fallen, including our minds.

Right. Let me just interject something here. Most people might not know that Thomas Aquinas was trying to reconcile the Christian faith with Aristotle and the Greek philosophers. He somehow perpetuated the idea that there is a realm in life that’s neutral. This neutral part of life would be it’s neither right nor wrong. The best thing to do is to try to stay neutral because then we’ll get true knowledge out of it instead of having the bias that the Bible is right or the bias that, let’s say, evolution is right. So we call it a myth of neutrality. Do you think a lot of people embark on teaching their children under the banner of home education and they embrace the myth of neutrality?

Well, I think they’ve been indoctrinated into it. This is the problem with history building up and culture building up and shaping the minds of everyone to come. I think we haven’t bothered to notice or consider just how thoroughly this myth of neutrality is our natural starting point. Oh, well, sure. There’s knowledge out there that isn’t affected by the Bible. Challenge accepted. Show me that area because I can sit there. If you are biblical, if you are Christian, you should be able to say God created it all. God rules and reigns over it all. Ergo, it all has an obedience that it renders to God. It all has a purpose under God’s created system. God providentially rules over it all for his purposes and his will. Where is neutral going to pop up in the whole God ruling and reigning over everything? There’s no room for it. So if you declare neutral, you’re essentially saying, no, God’s wrong. He doesn’t rule over this. We’re going to pull this away from him. Well, then you’re not being neutral. You’re being anti God. That’s not neutral.

Okay. So I want you to comment on something recently, and I won’t mention the commentator who I was listening to, but she made the point as she’s trying to identify this idea that transgenderism isn’t good for kids. And a lot of these people will say, Wait till somebody’s 18, and then they can make their own decision. As if at 18, if you do something that’s in violation of God’s law, somehow that’s better than somebody doing it at 14. But she says there’s the age old problem. Can you separate the art from the artist? S he said, Of course you can. A s I was talking back to a screen that couldn’t hear me, I’m going, Of course you can’t. You can’t separate what a person does and produces from their world and life view because their presuppositions are going to come out. Without saying that if you embark on on a classical education, you’re producing atheists and people who will remain in rebellion against God, what’s the problem with not putting a biblical template over the study of civilizations and people that God gave us to be bad examples, not good examples, bad example.

Problem is what’s your core? What’s your center? And what’s your template that you’re laying over? This is the issue I have. This is the crux of the issue I have with everything classical. It starts from a system devised by those who did not have God, those who did not have the gospel, those who did not have revelation, those who did not have faith according to their ability to understand the mind of man. I understand we’ve held that up, we’ve moved it forward, and now we’ve come along and tried to lay a biblical template over that. But the Bible is already its own center and core. Why are we allowing the secular, the city of man, the classical, the Plato and the Aristotle system to stay as the center, the core, the starting point, and then we just Jesus it up everywhere else. Put a little bit of Bible here. There’s a difference in this perspective, and this is what we need to grasp upon. I’m not saying don’t learn the classics. I think it’s absolutely important to learn these subjects in classical education. What I have a problem with is the system of classical education that says this is the education, this is what knowledge is.

This is the center point. You can put your Jesus stickers on me all you want, but I am still the core. I am still the defining. I am still the city of man. I am still the mind is not fallen and there are so many biblical discrepancies to that that says no, that’s a lie, that’s false, that you can’t just apply a Bible sticker to the side of it. You can’t just come in and say, oh, well, yeah, Jesus once said this one thing. You have to destroy the basics, the center of this and restore a biblical center from which to view the classical system.

I’ll give you a personal example here. For a short time, I was teaching at a classical school. They needed someone to teach and I was teaching ancient history. I never really got to Greece when we were going to start doing it because they found another teacher. I might have been fired once I started teaching about Greece. But anyway, I talked to some of the graduates who had gone through the class the year before or two years before, and I asked them, So what do you think about Plato? Oh, he was cool. He was really cool. The Republic was really good. And then, oh, Plato’s cave. He didn’t have Christ. He didn’t have the gospel. I know he wasn’t right on things, but he was such a cool guy. So he had no awareness. And obviously, they didn’t teach that Paul’s Epistle are oftentimes refuting the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. But they thought it was really cool. This kid and his contemporaries at the school thought they were really knowledgeable because they had read all the works of Homer and stuff like that.

And that’s what the… Having a Dominion perspective on this, that’s why it’s important, because that’s what we’re trying to get to. We operate off of two conditions here, by what standard and for what ends? By what standard is something good or cool or neat or worthy of our adoration, of our loyalty, are worthy of letting into our inner sanctum to affect our minds, to shape our thoughts. Is plateau really worthy? That’s not to say that we can’t study, but how do we judge success or good when it comes to education? We could talk about all of the little academic excellence and rigorous and vigorous, but what we’re dealing with then is, Oh, look, it’s harder scholasticism than most people go through. That just sounds like bragging rights to me. Oh, I love having read this. Okay, so I’ve got a Goodreads profile. I’ve got thousands of books on there. I went through 278 books last year. So what? By what standard? For what end? Are we supposed to just have a reading resume out there? What is Plato doing in your everyday life? What he’s supposed to be doing in your everyday life? Is he taking up a place in your everyday life that should belong to Almighty God?

That’s what we want when we’re trying to establish a Dominion perspective on education. We’re trying to reset the boundary lines of what we say is a successful or a good or a worthwhile education. Because these things are successful and good and worthwhile according to worldy ends by worldy standards. But our standards aren’t those of the city of man. Our ends are not supposed to be the same as those of the city of ends. When we go through and we try to syncretize, when Aquinas tried to say, Oh, well, I love my Christianity, but I don’t want to let go of my philosophers. Can’t I love them both equally and keep them separately? No, because they both claim a Dominion. They both make religious statements that are contrary to each other. I can enjoy reading Plato and Aristotle, and occasionally I find things enjoyable in there, but they’re not allowed to hold my heart. They’re not allowed to hold my affections. They’re not allowed to hold my faith and my trust. I’m not allowed to build my life and world view off of them. They’re not inerrant and they don’t glorify God.

I can imagine, Cathey, somebody who listens to this and said, Okay, I came here for good advice. Instead of being energized by what you’re saying, they’re like, Did we make the wrong decision to homeschool? Because I don’t have the depth of understanding that this woman has. Do you need to have years and years and years of training in philosophy and ancient civilizations in order to effectively transmit a biblical world and life view?

Proverbs 22:6, what is that hidden subject? You train up a child in the way he should go. Yeah, that’s a command. That’s a duty onto us. But there’s also an aspect of a promise in there. Did God put that on us as parents? Did God put that on you because you wouldn’t be capable? Did God give you a commandment that you wouldn’t be able to fulfill? No. God’s in control of all of that. Do you need to know all of that stuff before going in? Absolutely not. Are you stuck where you’re at going in, going, I can’t. I don’t know how to. Well, are you a believer? Are you earnestly trying to understand? Are you earnestly learning about God? Are you earnestly trying to apply a biblical life and worldview? Are you praying over the education of your kids? That right there is a better qualification and a better means of success in education than a 1,000 university degrees in antiquities.

Exactly. Oftentimes when I have these conversations where people have successfully pulled their children out from the tyrannical authority of the state and they say, tell us what we should do. I was like, Wow, you can’t be without a tyrant for a minute. Why should I tell you what you should do? Now, I can advise you in terms of things to explore because not everybody needs a classical education. I always suggest that the first thing you do is really learn biblical law because those are the lenses that you will have to put on to interpret is this good or is this bad? Let’s take the topic of the day transgenderism. Let’s take should homosexuals be allowed to adopt children? I mean, someone who understands biblical law doesn’t spend too much time on those debates because the Bible clearly identifies what those activities are. So I think that classical education may be excellent with this understanding that we have to put the Word of God over it, but it’s not the only option So how would you advise someone who says, I didn’t have a very good education. I’m a public school graduate. Am I in over my head?

Should I try to do… And we’ll talk about curriculums in the third section of this, but where do I find good material? Should that be the first question that they try to answer?

Well, that’s the obvious place that most people start going looking. Okay, can I do homeschooling practically? What am I going to need? I’m going to need books. Where do I find the books? And some of that is, Okay, there’s books out there. If you go looking, you actually find there’s a lot of books out there. So you go from not knowing that homeschooling was an option and not considering it as an option to now it’s an option to now, Oh, my goodness. Now I have too many options and someone just needs to point me which way to go. Mercy, people. Have mercy for yourselves. Have a little bit of grace for yourselves. Are you doing it according to a prompting from God? Are you doing it trying to be faithful to that train of a child? Do you think God is going to leave you out there and going to make you absolutely fruitless unless you get this absolute one right curriculum series that happens to be on sale at this one place right now? No. What did we do? I sound really smart here, and I’m homeschooling on my own. I tossed two different curriculums that we were working on eight weeks into the school year this last year, one with only five or six weeks left.

But I’m seeing they’re going, This has no value. Why are we keeping on doing this? We don’t have to do that. We’re still going to… There’s no one right answer, and you’re not going to get it all right the first time because there is no all right as far as, These are the subjects, and this is the curriculum, and this is the approach that I have to do. What you have to do is train up a child in the way he should go. What you have to do is to keep in mind to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. God, then in his merciful providence, in his goodness towards us, will guide it towards his ends. If you put the endeavor out there, if you try, if you go looking, if you keep vigilant and keep an eye on, then it will work out how he intends it to. Don’t put anything beyond that on your shoulder.

Another thing I would say and why I will continue to maintain, you need to know the word of God so that you can look at historical accounts and say, This is an example of X, Y, Z. This is where the person was right. This is where the person was wrong. This is where he did or did or did not line up with God’s word. But I think a lot of people, especially especially as they get into this classical stuff, think that they can’t disagree with Plato because who am I? Plato was this genius. He was a sinner who elevated his own perspective over the word of God. You can’t convince me that with all the Hebrew people being captured and everything else that the Greeks, the Egyptians, all these various civilizations got to hear the word of God through God’s people. We know that in Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar essentially converted. You can’t give the praise to God that comes if he didn’t get it. God changes people. But if we don’t think we can say, This is like, for example, today, we have a ruling elite. Plato was fine with a ruling elite.

Most of us are.

Right. We have this view of degradation and subordination of women. Plato was all for that. And yet somehow or other, Plato, Aristotle, and we’re not supposed to say, No, they were wrong. They weren’t right. They were wrong.

That’s where we’re learning how to reengage with a tradition. Classical education is about a long standing tradition of these are the subjects. This is what you teach. This is what’s worth knowing. No, we’re going to be wise as serpents and innocent as lobs. Okay, yeah, we’ll engage some with that. We’ll engage to see, oh, here’s a center. Here’s how this goes against the Bible. We’ll sit back and go, yeah, wow, that homer. He wrote a whole lot of actually morally crap stories in a time when he didn’t have a typewriter. So how much of his life was wasted writing long and etching into tablets longhand about the sexual escapades of imaginary gods? Is that a life well lived? There’s the tradition with the homer is still alive and kicking. Homer is still influencing the pagan world. The city of man around us, but we as the city of God are shining forth and going, That’s not a life well lived. That’s a life wasted. But you know what is a life well lived? A life that spends time focusing on God’s word, trying to learn more of God, trying to be his kingdom come, his will be done on Earth as it is in heaven.

That’s a good life. That’s a life that’s not afraid to pick up home and go, ew, this is gross. People have found this good? Well, people are idiots. They’re surprised, moving on.

It becomes very worthwhile to understand the thesis of Homer, the thesis of Plato so that when people present that point of view, you could give a biblical response. But to bathe in it, to swim in it, at this same school I was referencing, one day I just went in and decided to ask the class to write out the Ten Commandments. One person’s answer was, Be kind to animals. He thought that was part of the Ten Commandments. Only two out of the 14 got all of them correctly written out, except they didn’t have the flushed out ones on commandment two or Commandment Three about why and everything like that. And yet they could pass tests on Plato. So I didn’t ask you on here to bum people out. Oh, no, I’ve invested in a classical curriculum. We must finish it. Like you, there were many times where I had invested in something that I thought was good. And instead of saying it was totally worthless, it wasn’t good for us. And there are used curriculum places and you can sell them. Or if they’re really bad, you can throw them out and realize you’re doing somebody a service by not having them be the subject curriculum that people use.

But we always have to evaluate. We can’t baptize everything we do is wonderful. As you point out, oftentimes the slogan of the Reformation was Semper Reformanda, always reforming. So when we figure out we haven’t done it right, okay, do something else.

Let’s take this classical education, and there’s some good to be found here. There are some jewels to be found in some of the classical system, so don’t throw away all of your books. But let’s spend some time finding how to use them for God’s purposes and ends. Let’s find some time learning how to view them according to biblical standards and what our role is in how we’re supposed to engage with them for Dominion here on Earth.

Let me add, for those who really do feel called to pursue this method of education, there’s nothing wrong with learning with your children. I submit, having homeschooled for as long as I did and now continuing to teach in classes homeschool students, is that the teacher always learns way more than the student. That doesn’t mean that the student doesn’t learn. When all is said and done, it becomes important that what we do in the education of our children and ourselves is to the glory of God. Asking yourself the question, does it glorify God? Does it cause me to enjoy Him? In other words, receive His blessings. Then you can take a deep breath and realize that nothing in the Bible says that at the time you stand before the Lord, He’s going to want your resume, he’s going to want how many degrees you have, and He wants to know all the books you read. Not that those things might not have value, but that’s not the ultimate value. Yes. Thank you, Cathey. Next time, we’re going to talk about classical schools, particularly. I hope that we’ve encouraged people by opening their eyes to what they have gotten themselves into and then how to evaluate whether or not this course of action and how they’re doing it actually glorifies God.

Thanks for.

Listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit Chalcedon.edu

Welcome to Out of the Question, a podcast that looks behind some common questions and uncovers the question behind the question while providing real solutions for biblical world and life view. Your co host are Andrea Swarts, a teacher and mentor, and Pastor Charles Roberts.

Today, during this episode of the Out of the Question podcast, my co host, Charles Roberts and I, will be discussing a bit of history, a bit of current events, and the need for sobriety in dealing with the issues of our time. Are inquisitions a thing of the past? Now, for most people, knowledge of the inquisition will come from textbooks, Wikipedia, or possibly the history channel. But we must remember that history is written by the victors. And as we are all very aware of today, comes with it an approved narrative based on presuppositions and quite frankly, religious views. So, Charles, I’ll let you explain what the, quote, common facts are about the inquisition and how we understand it today, and how we might really benefit from another look?

I think for certain segments of our listening audience, there might be two things that come immediately to mind when the term inquisition is mentioned. One might be, as I think you just mentioned, something you might have seen on the history channel when it actually still did history, with Dominican monks in their attire holding a crucifix and some poor soul stretched out on the rack with their bones snapping, being exhorted to repent of their heresies. The other image for maybe us older crowd would be the famous Monty Python skit where they show up, Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition at the last minute thing.

None.

Of those things are accurate, as it turns out, or at least the popular mental understanding of what really was going on with that. I know for me, it was quite an eye opener. I never really did a serious deep dive into it like a lot of other people. I just assumed it was the Roman Catholic Church of the medieval era, getting real nasty with people they didn’t like. But as a matter of fact, as Dr. Rushdoony points out in the two essays that form the basis of our discussion today, it actually was the government, specifically, in this case, Frederick II, who was finding an engine by which he could crush dissent in his realm. And he used this option to destroy people who promoted ideas that neither he nor the Roman Catholic Church cared for. But in terms of the history of it, that’s one of the things that I think should be a wake up call to most people, is that this was not primarily a Church driven persecution of people who just happened to have some fringe beliefs. It was a state driven persecution. And that was the means by which this was taking place.

But then the other thing, and this is what is so most remarkable, I think, in this discussion, is the fact that in the Chalcedon Report number 157, where Dr. Rushdoony titled us the grand inquisitor, he’s talking about the fact that when we wind up in a situation where people are being persecuted and ravaged because they go against the accepted orthodoxy of the day, it almost always is a state driven government that does it. And he wrote this essay in 1978. And it’s just absolutely remarkable, the prescience he had. In the Grand Inquisitor essay, he points out the fact that given the trajectory of humanism, it inevitably leads to a situation where the state not only acts as prosecuting attorney, but judge all in the same place. In a biblical understanding of law and justice, there is a place where people can be tried based on true testimony, and you don’t have everybody involved except the party who’s being tried in opposition to them. And so what we have going on today, and exactly as it mirrors that much older version, is a carbon copy of this very thing where states eventually get to a point where they will not tolerate anything, no dissent on any issue, anything that calls into question the absolute authority of the state.

Right. And we’ve talked in the past that one needs to examine the presuppositions, the things that the historian, whether a professional historian, an amateur historian, you’ve got to find out if you agree with what this person is saying. And like so many other things, we’ve come to the idea that history is neutral, science is neutral, math is neutral. When in actual fact, anybody who hadn’t noticed in the last three years that science and medicine are not exactly neutral, that people will come up with certain ideas based on their preconceived notions. And we saw how a lot of people were taken by surprise that the government got involved in people’s medicine or in people’s decisions between them and their doctor. We heard about this for years. Abortion is a decision between a woman and her doctor. Suddenly, whether or not you had to have a face covering or had to get an injection no longer was between a woman and her doctor. or a man and his doctor. Now the state was imposing. I think it bears remembering that every counterfeit religion, and I’m going to say counterfeit from my point of view, anything that’s not biblically based, it’s not biblical Christianity, falls into the category of the world’s second religion, humanism.

Statism and humanism are very much tied together. We have to realize that there’s an orthodoxy to statism that will identify certain things as blasphemies or heresies. That’s what fuels the inquisition. It isn’t so much that we need people to pick on, so much as we need particular people to pick on who challenge our point of view.

Yes. And it goes back to the very beginning in God’s creation ordinances, where He set up what was to be, and eventually will be by God’s grace and through the triumph of Christ, a godly order in which he and his law are the defining factors for every aspect of life. As we say in these discussions, God’s word is a total word. And the satanic counterfeit, the satanic effort to destroy that, was the promotion of what we call humanism. And that, too, is a total word. There may have been people decades ago who tried to warn others about the encroachment of governmental authority into areas of life where it had not existed before, by saying, You need to be careful here, because once you go down this… Oh, no, no, no, no. This is just one simple thing where the government is trying to help out with whatever it may be. But again, it is a total, absolute, pervasive accountability that one has to have. It may not start out that way in one giant imposition, but this is the direction that statism moves. And this is one of the, I guess we could say, one of the main characteristics of humanism, is that it apes and mirrors God’s total word, but it does so for the service of Satan.

I think your point that it is a slow progression in certain times, that people don’t even realize that they’re being manipulated, they’re being programmed for certain things. And today, with transgenderism and pride and all that, a lot of people act like this came out of left field, like this just started 10 years ago. It didn’t start just 10 years ago. There are seeds that were planted and began to sprout. And there were people, as you pointed out, who said, I think this is a problem. And then there were other people saying, Oh, chill out. It’s not that much of a problem. And one of the things that came to mind today was the whole idea of heterosexuality. Now, you remember when the homosexual movement started to gain ground, that they were being persecuted or whatever, people stopped arguing in terms of faithful marriage or life between a man and a woman with God as the third partner. It became, are you heterosexual or homosexual? Is this child heterosexual or homosexual? My answer was a five year old is really neither one. If you teach the moral basis of how we’re supposed to live under God, then the nature of heterosexuality of homosexuality…

Now, we need to define it in terms of marriage or life between a man and a woman under God. But we gave up that ground, and then that ground started moving. And then it became, couldn’t two people of this persuasion really love each other? And now we’re at a point, and I think this is not just true where I live all over the place. If you question, is that possible? You now go on a hit list. So are we watching all the doxxing and marginalizing people because of their belief? Is this our current inquisition?

I think it absolutely is. But in terms of the progressive nature of moving from point A to point B to where we see things happening now that seemed just astounding to us, in some ways, you can see the signposts along the way that pointed in this direction. Now, in one of the essays that we are referring to here, Dr. Rushdoony refers to a situation with an institution of higher learning that’s literally in my backyard, Bob Jones University, where in the 1980s, their tax exempt status was revoked because they had instituted, really, I think, almost from the beginning of the school when it started, I think in the 1950s, certain social and religious customs relating to student behavior that the government didn’t like. And he referred to that. And it was a Supreme Court case where, and I’m quoting here, the Supreme Court determined that Bob Jones University and that the Internal Revenue Service may deny tax income status to institutions whose policies are, quote, contrary to established public policy. Well, how did it get to the point where an August institution, at least August in these parts of South Carolina, that could wind up in that situation?

Well, consider this. Two weeks ago, my wife and I traveled to about two hours away so I could attend a church related meeting. And it was interstate travel all the way to the Charleston, South Carolina area. At several points along the way, we passed massive billboards promoting transgenderism on these interstate highways here in South Carolina. God loves transgender people. It was that thing. But long before that, and I’m using another local example because I think in many ways it is a meme or a visible icon of a statement of how these things have gotten to this point, but it has deeper roots. At a major intersection in the area where I live in Greenville, South Carolina, on one corner is a very large Baptist Church. There are many conservative Baptists in this area, some denominationally affiliated, some independent. I don’t know anything about this one. I know it’s just a very, very large church. Now, what’s interesting is what is on the opposite corner, and this is a very busy intersection. On the opposite corner is a Hooters restaurant. Now, I can tell you, there would be a time when a company like that would not have even thought about putting a restaurant, either in Greenville, South Carolina, leave alone across the street from a big Baptist Church.

And yet there it is. And I tried to find out before we came on how long it had been there. But I know I’ve been here in this area for six years. It’s been here at least that long, I suspect longer. But my point is that the forces of satanic humanism feel more and more free to do these things, because they recognize that the opposition that might arise is really a paper tiger. And this goes to the heart of the problem of modern evangelicalism, is that there is nothing more than pietism and revivalism at the heart of this way of thinking about being a Christian that leaves itself wide open to murderous attack from people who have a much more severe agenda. And they don’t play by the rules. And if the only rules that the churches and Christians have are the rules given to them by what we call conservative ink, the mainstream conservative type media and talking heads that really are just another version of the left wing, then they’re going to wind up where we are today.

So let’s go back a little bit and talk in terms of Bob Jones University. Homeschooling families will be familiar with Bob Jones because a lot of Christian schools and a lot of homeschoolers will use the curriculum that comes out of Bob Jones University. Here’s the thing. When Bob Jones University was denied tax exempt status, that was something that, of course, should be attacked right then and there. In other words, tax exemption is not a grace given by the government to somebody when that somebody or that institution pleases them. Tax exemption meant keep your hands off of this. You have no place here. People didn’t get that. And so they went to the Supreme Court that should have said this is a private institution that can make up their own rules. Now, for those of you who are familiar with the rules were, and I won’t go into them here, you might agree with them, or you might disagree with them. But when did we get to a point that disagreement, if I don’t like something, I’ve got to get the state on my side to push my agenda instead of… Maybe I would just try to persuade people to see the error of their ways if I thought that their ways were errant.

So when I say we don’t get to the bedrock, if you’re just arguing whether or not a university should be able to do things, you’ve missed the point of what liberty is supposed to be. Another example, I think, that is noteworthy is the whole homeless situation. Every major city in the US is currently in a situation where tents are rising up in strange places. People are defecating on street corners. Any place that has a waterway, a reservoir, or whatever is usually subject to people living there, and who knows what’s happening to the water. Most people who pay their taxes and live or try to live in a way that their hard work rewards them in some way are very frustrated by this. And so instead of having a remedy, a biblical remedy, we have a lot of state and humanistic solutions that apparently only make the problem worse. Well, I read a piece that I think it’s Canada, but it might be Australia, I don’t remember, is considering authorizing assisted suicide for the homeless. Now, of course, nobody would agree with that. But the people who are frustrated about just having more and more homeless, if they are not rooted in a respect for life, a respect for personhood, which we already know they don’t because they’re willing to kill unborn babies.

They’re willing to promote euthanasia, and they’re even willing to promote parents mutilating the bodies of their children. So this whole idea of respecting personhood has waned a long time ago. So people become unprepared on how to even look at it. Some people might say, Well, the homeless, let’s say they want to end their life. Oh, I see. So now life depends on when I say it ends, and we’ve thrown out the idea that you shouldn’t kill, including yourself. The whole underpinnings of an inquisition happened as a result of years and years of desensitizing people to even examine things other than through an approved narrative.

In the case of your reference to the homeless, I wrote a blog piece some years ago while I was pastoring a Church in Arizona called The Cruel Mercy of the State. The mercy of the wicked is cruel, as we’re told in God’s Word. And that’s a prime example, when you get in bed with the state, you’re going to be paying for it sooner or later in some way, shape, or form. And really, the situation with the Bob Jones case that we mentioned earlier, now, I don’t know all the legal history there. I printed out an article that gave a little bit of the basic information. But in terms of the defense that they were making, I suspect that… And I’ll be glad to be corrected if I’m wrong, but I suspect that the people on the Bob Jones side, they have no awareness that their default position should be, You have no jurisdiction over us whatsoever. We are the Church. We are a Christian institution. We are a Christian organization, and we serve only one king, and we seek to exist peacefully in a so called secular society. But I’m not sure they even thought it was more of, Well, now, wait a minute.

You said we could do this. Because I think there were several things that were happening in the progress of that case where it was ruled one way at one point, and then they came back and said, No, we’re going to revoke your status because of X, Y, and Z. And so in each case, it was more, Well, now we’re trying to do what you want, or You said you’d do this. In other words, it’s a tacit, bowing of the knee to the authority of the government. And people are not, again, taught to think biblically. They’re taught to think of a divided retreatist way of thinking, where ultimately, the church’s mission is to fail in history and not to succeed. The arising and the flourishing of inquisitions and inquisitors is something that will continue until God’s people, in particular, come to this awareness of where this comes from, and that it has deep roots, but all of it goes back to tyrannical humanism. Dr. Rushdoony pointed it out time and again, and many of his essays that we were talking earlier about the foundations of social order. I think he gets into it there. But the ultimate outcome of a humanistic worldview is the state.

The state is the highest expression of man’s humanistic aspirations. And so it always ends up in that way. One of the things that he says here, and as I do whenever we talk about these things, I want to quote him directly in the essay on the grand inquisitor, he says this, he says, The grand inquisitor cannot be voted out. He reappears in the new rulers and the new guise. He can only be destroyed by the only wise God, our Savior, whose grace redeems us and whose law is our way of sanctification in his Spirit. So this is something else that Bible believing people should understand, is that you’re not going to get out of this situation by voting this way or that way. It has to start within our own families, within our own hearts, in governing ourselves according to God’s law word. We say this time and time again, but this is the solution. This is God’s way and God’s standard. It’s not an imposition of tyranny from the top down, as the humanistic state does. That’s doomed to failure. God’s way and the biblical pattern is the flourishing and the embracing of God’s law word among individuals and their families, and that radiates out into all of culture and society.

Exactly. So what we have today, by and large, is a church that has no fear of God and wants to become the friend of man. We have things being accepted that 100 years ago wouldn’t have been accepted or acceptable. But you understand, the times have changed. I guess if we have a living constitution, we can have a living Bible that changes according to who’s describing it. I can’t tell you recently how many church sermons are much more, Let’s read the headlines. Now, whatever portion of scripture we’re going to talk about, I’m going to shove the headlines in to the word of God and interpret the Word of God based on the headlines. Well, if you can capitalize on people’s fear of instability in culture and there won’t be enough food and all this stuff, then maybe you can gain traction with that message. But if you think back to all the amount of real estate in the Bible that the Exodus has been given, tyrannical rule, state rule, inquisition, if you didn’t do the things that you were supposed to do, like kill your baby boys and things like that. So it was pretty tyrannical.

Yet God answered the prayers of those who said, Deliver us. But when they got into the wilderness, instead of being grateful for their deliverance, they just remembered the good parts of Egypt. Now, previous, we didn’t see a lot of good parts of Egypt. We saw between Joseph bringing his family over and then the ruler who forgot Joseph’s goodness. Okay, we don’t get a lot of information about that, except we know that things changed. But if people only respond when their life gets difficult, then I guess God is going to have to make their life get difficult. As opposed to, Things are going along okay right now, but take a look at where we’re deviating off the straight and narrow path. Maybe a lot of heartache and a lot of pain can be avoided if we decide that our ultimate fear, our reverence, our I don’t want to cross this guy is to God alone.

That is an excellent point. I think when it comes down to it, this is back of much of what has brought us to this point in terms of Christian reaction to what is happening from the humanistic state is they do fear man more than they fear God. They prefer the state’s eschatology and its long range view of how it wants the future to unfold as opposed to what God’s word says. Now, I realize that’s maybe a bit of a controversial area because we know plenty of people who Christians who have different eschatologies than what the Bible teaches. But the fact is, we see this tendency. One of the problems is that people don’t have a memory that goes back far enough, or even if they theoretically do, they don’t remember how tense and difficult times are brought about by God to winnow out his church and his people and to actually have people declare themselves. I can well remember in the early 60s, when there was a genuine threat of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union versus the United States. People building bomb shelters in their homes. Now, there are many people alive today who remember that, and people who would have remembered it more vividly than I, who were older than me, have all passed on.

You can watch YouTube videos, but it’s hard to replicate in the minds and emotions of people today the genuine fear that existed back then. Of course, I have no awareness of what people were thinking when all the turmoil was going on in Europe in the early and mid-20th centuries. But there were plenty of people running around screaming that Michelin was the Antichrist, that Hitler was the Antichrist, you can figure out the number of the name, and all the rest of it. And that was the reaction. Circle the wagons and wait for the Rapture. But this is not what God’s Word calls us to do. It calls us to occupy. It calls us to take dominion in his name and to stand forward against these things by means, again, of governing ourselves according to his law and planning for the long term.

And so it’s interesting that you bring that up because the whole idea of circling the wagons get as many people at the I think it’s Dennis Peacock I first heard calling it the Rapture Bus Stop, that that’s our job, that there are these two parallel kingdoms, and what we got to do is go in and kidnap or snatch away from the kingdom of darkness, put them into the church. We got to get as many people into the church, and the church is like Noah’s Ark or something like that. What they miss, of course, is that the victory that’s proclaimed in both the Old Testament and the New Testament will say that God has never lost control of his plan. Instead of promoting, the church is supposed to promote our only hope in life and death is Jesus Christ. But along the way, the church has made itself man’s hope. You must come to church. You must be part of a local church. Even if you disagree with bad theology being promoted, your job is to sit there and submit to. As you pointed out, we’ve lost the idea that God holds us personally responsible for what we do.

That’s what self-government means. You have to be aware of where you are. If you are walking through a bog, you have to know that differently than if you’re walking through the sand or you’re walking in water. Because too few people really want to know, Is this truly the worst it’s ever been in human history? Or maybe I should understand more about how the mistakes of the past continue in a cycle where we’re at this crossroads again. I think it’s easier for people to hope that they get elevated out of here, but I don’t think the Bible says it. And I think people fall away from even wanting to pursue it if they think I’m just joining a losing side who will be rescued at some point.

And I have become more aware, and I guess I’ll use the word impressed. I don’t mean that necessarily in a good way, of how much a factor that we’ve talked about before in these podcast and that some of the folks like Mark and Martin have written about the issue of pietism, has been a major factor in the Church finding itself in the position that it’s in now, and in facing modern inquisitions and modern inquisitors. Because again, the default position has been, Well, you just need to make sure that you have Jesus in your heart, that you quit smoking and drinking, you do all these outward sorts of things that show a conformity to a certain type of cultural Christianity, that are really surface types of things. And then the other thing that goes right along with that, and that’s something else I’ve become more aware of. I’m starting to hear more and more people talk about this. It’s a cyclical thing, I guess, and that is the issue of revival. I was discussing this issue with some associates of mine, and one person, I thought this was a superb way of putting this, that revivalism is weaponized pietism.

That is so cogent, because you see, people get the idea, if I can go to this church service where they’re having, quote, revivals down the road, and I get all excited and I ask Jesus back into my heart, or I may get rebaptized, or whatever it may be, and then I go home and read my Bible all the time, that seems to be the sum total of what is the solution to all of our problems. But that model has been around for several hundred years or more. And look where we are. And I was thinking about this, too. Again, this is an area I’d love to be corrected, but just off the top of my head, I was thinking about this. The Second Great awakening, as it was called, in these United States, that was largely the work of Charles Finney and other heretical teachers, produced what one historian called the burned over district of upstate New York, and that whole section of the Northeast, where these revivals were on and constant, over and over and over again. And one of the religious spin offs of that was the production and the rise of what have typically been called cults.

I don’t like that term myself, but aberrant and heterodox religious faiths that deny principled Orthodox doctrine. But I think it’s interesting, too, that in that same stretch of geography, it has also resulted over time in some of the worst examples of state tyranny.

And so that’s why it behooves us to not so much have to go back and study every era of history. But if you look at the Scripture as God’s command word, which it is, then even the parts that you’ll encounter that may seem like, Well, that’s not what we do today, instead of saying, Okay, I guess it doesn’t count anymore. Another reaction is, Why don’t we do that today? How has the church decided that certain things are you must do and other things you mustn’t do? And how do they pick and choose? I had a student of mine point out that in the church that she attends, there’s a potential split about to happen. And one of the main issues is head coverings.

Now.

I realized that head coverings is not something the average churchgoer sees. After I abandoned the faith of my childhood, I grew up Catholic, you always had to go to church with your head covered. When I started going to Protestant churches and they didn’t, I had just assumed it had something to do with that’s what Catholics do. But now Catholics don’t do it either. Then one day I’m reading through 1 Corinthians and it’s right there and it’s like, how do you know if you’re supposed to or not? Well, there are all sorts of interesting reasons that from pulpits they’re told they don’t have to do it. One of them was that that was when the church was in its infancy. This is something that was like the milk of the word. But Paul expected them to get past it so that women would uncover their heads. I guess men would cover their heads because that passage says men don’t, women should. People like, Why is this so important to you? Why did you get… Well, it’s in the word of God. So if I’m going to take out the parts that are repulsive to me, or I just don’t feel like doing, or it would be inconvenient, that’s the slippery slope.

Forget about heterosexual or homosexual and things like that. What we’re looking at is if you don’t take God’s Word seriously and that’s your attitude, that’s your default position, I’m not going to take this seriously, then you’ll never be able to impose a Christian culture. If we don’t have an apologetic that’s cultural and it’s only Jesus in my heart, no wonder that the world appears to be under the controls of the enemies of God. But the reassurance we have is Psalm 2 makes it clear. Many other places make it clear. Not only does God have this under control, God has ordained where we are right now for the specific reason of showing that he’s God and hopefully getting people to the point to realize we are not.

I think some of our friends who take a very different view on especially end times matters and revivalism and such as that, need to hopefully understand that the signs that are all around us are not the signs of the end, or the signs of the end of humanism, but they’re the signs of God’s judgment being poured out on an evil culture. But that’s just another opportunity for God’s people to get motivated and move forward with the agenda that he’s given us. Well, where did that agenda come from? Well, try Matthew 28 in the Great Commission. I think that’s a pretty good agenda. I heard someone recently who is a friend of mine, and he has a different view of end times eschatology things than I do. And I think he meant this in gist, but you know what they say about things that in just? He said something like, Well, I don’t know how you postmillennialists think everything’s going to just keep getting better and better. Ha, look around. And of course, that’s not an accurate characterization of what we, who are post millennial, believe. And it’s certainly not what Scripture teaches. The leading up to the time of the return of Christ, where the world will be largely Christian, before that happens, is a time of judgment leading up to that point, where there may be times of exactly what we’re seeing, where there are grand inquisitors who continue to come forward until God’s people learn the lesson that if you’re going to solve this problem by means of a politics that is divorced from the law, word of God, it’s going to put you in the same place as those who follow that, who have no regard whatsoever for that word.

So I think that we need to be encouraged and encourage each other with the recognition that by God’s grace, we understand these things, and we have an opportunity to pass on this awareness that, yes, there is a cultural mandate. It’s sad that fundamentalist types don’t like that. They think it’s the aberration of Scripture. You’re not going to change things. It’s only going to get worse and worse. But that is a prescription for disaster, prescription for suicide. It represents the failure of a certain type of evangelical culture that has brought us to this point. And I think that one of the advantages, and I’ll even use that term, that we can see in the mellays and the misery and the evil of the current time, is that God is clarifying very accurately who are those who will continue to cling to false ideas about what his word teaches, and those who are seeking a better word, a truth in Scripture that, in fact, is the way out of the darkness and forward into his kingdom.

I would agree with people who are practical or practicing Antinomians. In other words, they throw out the law of God in its particulars and in its general sense. And so they’re absolutely right. You ditch God’s law and there really is no hope, things will get worse and worse. However, if you know that your job, your responsibility, granted to the initial hearers of go therefore and teach all nations that comes to us as well is what are you going to teach the nations? You’re going to teach the nations that it’s all going to get worse and worse and so then God is going to come rescue you? Or you’re going to teach the nations, this is God says about marriage, this is what God says about marriage. This is what God says about economics. This is what God says about child rearing, this is what God says about the death penalty, when it should be given, and no questions asked. This is what he says. What does it mean to have proper testimony in a court of law? What are the effects if someone perjures themselves? Currently, for those who listen years from now or later on, we’re in the midst of a national government being revealed to have perpetuated a lie meant to undo the presidency of someone who won.

Well, if there’s no law of God, if there’s no fear of God, then really it’s just the survival of the fittest. So they proved to be more fit than the people who they were trying to hoodwink. And this goes back to who do you believe in? Do you believe in the state or do you believe in the triune God? Now, Charles, you talked about and you said it in passing but I think this is a major point. Biblically, if there’s an offense, if I accidentally back out of my garage and I kill your cow, okay? I didn’t do it on purpose. I wasn’t trying to kill your cow. But there’s the laws of restitution. So where’s the complaint? It’d be Charles is the plaintiff and Andrea is the defendant. And then God’s law would prescribe the circumstances. Well, as a result of the inquisition, what most people don’t realize, the plaintiff defendant situation changed. It would be no longer Charles has a complaint against Andrea. It’s the state of South Carolina against Andrea. So the state is declaring itself to be the injured party. The state has the resources of taxation, so the prosecutor paid by the state.

The state is the plaintiff paid by the state, and then the judges are paid by the state. And so it really looks like a fixed game, so much so in modern courts, you would be hard pressed to find a judge that would allow you to say, but the Bible says, no, the current inquisition does not tolerate blasphemies and heresies against itself. Therefore, the Bible wouldn’t count in this discussion.

One of the things that Dr. Rushdoony points out in his commentary, which I think for his teachings and lectures and sermons on the Book of Romans, and I’m quoting him almost verbatim here, is that an antinomian society is an unjust society. I think he would also be okay with saying an unrighteous society. And it’s interesting that you brought in that term a few minutes ago, because I had been using it in my preaching through the Book of Romans, because, of course, that was an issue that Paul was dealing with, and that he was being accused of that by the Jews of the day. But as a matter of fact, we are exactly seeing that. It’s not just simply you’ve got a society for… There is no regard for law, anti nomian, but of course, law is unavoidable. The question is whose law is being ignored? And the type of society that we are seeing come to fruition today is a society that promotes the law of the state, as you just referred to, and the case of the displacement of the biblical pattern for what constitutes a just and righteous society in terms of how people interact, whether it be on a one-on-one scale or even a larger scale.

It doesn’t matter if it’s two people or five people, or one village against the other, the principles don’t change. And so, as long as people are wanting to ignore and deny or attack God’s standards of righteousness and justice, they will end up with the kinds of things that we are seeing today. But now, sadly, and I think this is the key point for us, is that Christians, of all people, who claim to believe the Bible from cover to cover, as many do, ignore all of these things. I’ve been reading some books lately by several authors who I’ll just speak in a broad way and say that they are concerned to promote and talk about the importance of America being a Christian nation. And what’s striking to me is that one of the main authors of one of these books, I recently followed this man on social media, and he made a statement that the primary duty of pastors and church leaders is to talk about getting people saved and being personally righteous and holy and not to be budding into politics and social issues. I’m grossly oversimplifying what he said, but that was the gist of it.

I’m sitting here looking at this and I’m thinking, and this guy has a veneer of a reformed perspective on things, but obviously that’s not the case at all. So we have to understand that there is a lot of confusion and bad thinking on the part of some who promote ideas, even in the sectors where we think that we might be getting good advice. And so it’s important that we constantly maintain vigilance in recognizing that there is only one law word that we need to give our allegiance to and be bound by, and that is God’s law. Anything else, to a matter of degree, is going to be leading us into another inquisition.

Exactly. So if you don’t understand, when people say, The Bible is not a science textbook. The Bible is not a legal textbook. The answer is absolutely right. The Bible is not a textbook. It’s not that it doesn’t talk about judicial matters or medical matters. It talks about all of those. But if you’re going to reduce it down to a textbook which says we’re going to tell you what’s important to know as opposed to what has been said. The Bible should never be looked at as a textbook because it’s a command word. It’s not a textbook. When people realize that we’ve been the effect of a legal revolution that says the testimony of two witnesses and a confession is not sufficient to convict someone, that’s biblical. But since television came on the scene, we see all these lawyer shows and police shows, and they’re always going to cut a deal with the bad guy to get the bigger fish. That’s not biblical. But you’ve heard it for so long, or the doctor shows that we could trust all these doctors, who would have thought that a lot of these doctors in the last number of years were trying to save their skin or get bonuses for getting people to do something that may not have been in their best interest?

So the solution isn’t to document all the evils. The solution is to become an expert in biblical law and understanding so that in the day to day encounters with people, you are promoting that. And I’ll give you one really good example. A friend of mine recently experienced a miscarriage. And when she’s at the hospital, she hears the medical people referring to what happened was the products of conception. Now, at this point, she’s low blood pressure, not doing well. And she said, this isn’t a product of conception. This is my baby. Guess what? They started referring to, he or she, it was too early to know, as the baby. In other words, don’t give ground. When somebody says something that isn’t true, come back with the truth. I’m not saying you have to beat him over the head. You need to stand for truth. Maybe you plant a seed. Maybe you bring someone back to, My gosh, I’ve been compromising for so long. I forgot. Yes, this is a baby. So I don’t think we have to take over institutions. I think we have to abandon some that we should let die the death that they deserve and God is bringing.

Create new ones, but remain true to what God’s Word says. And if you don’t know, I probably just mentioned things that we go, Huh, what? Confessions? That doesn’t work. Yeah. If you read the first five books of the Bible, you would understand what Jesus meant when he said, Not one jot or tittle of the law is removed. But of course, you could just say, Jots and tittles, I don’t care what that means. You have to know what he was referring to. And so as long as we’re going to be spoon-fed, as long as we’re going to have pastors who are trying to win people as friends as opposed to fearing God in what it is they say and preach, then we’re going to get more of the same. But I do think there’s hope if the people who get it stop being quiet.

Well, Andrea, I think personally that’s a good note to end on. What you just said for the past five minutes or so has just been spot on. There’s nothing I can add to that that would be an improvement. I think that what you just said was excellent.

Okay, well, thank you. Where to get your education? Well, Dr. Rushdoony ‘s books on biblical law are a staple, but you don’t have to wait until you finish all of them before you make use of some of the other resources. The most recent published resources include two, three volume sets. One is called An Informed Faith, and the second one is called Faith and Action. Charles and I have taken a lot of the subjects of our discussions from those two sets of books. But the interesting part is all of these essays have dates attached to them. And if I covered up the date and maybe took out some references, like if he’s referencing the Soviet Union, you would say, Well, there is no Soviet Union right now. Those things internally might date it. You might think he wrote it last week. Now, did God give him some biblically faithful crystal ball? No, he wasn’t prophetic that way. He was prophetic because he understood the implications of obedience and the implications of disobedience. And I do believe that as you start this journey, it won’t take long before you’re confronted with areas where you have to say, No, that’s not what the Bible says.

Yeah, and if I can just interject, I realize that some people, they may think of this in terms of, Okay, well, this is the stuff that seminary students in the student lounge are going to be debating that has absolutely nothing to do with me or my life. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pen. But friends, this is not anything like that. I started, for the purposes of this discussion, these two essays in Faith in Action, the first one on the grand inquisitor, I got out my pencil, and I just said, Okay, I’m just going to highlight a few things that I can bring into our podcast. Andrea, when I was done, I had underlined everything in the essay. Everything. And you don’t have to be a, quote, Rushdoony fan to come away with realizing that here is a person in his writings based on Scripture, was addressing issues that were in a nascent phase in the 1970s or 60s or 80s, whenever he was doing a lot of this writing, that you read this and you say, This is absolutely incredible. Like you just said, this could be just from yesterday’s headlines, but it’s not just the describing of the problem, it’s also the description of the solution.

And the fundamental issue, just to quote one part of that essay, he says, The modern grand inquisitor is the most powerful oppressor in all history because he has the powers of state in his hand. He holds the knife and the gun, the courts, and the funds. Law is what he declares it to be. That’s the battleground. Those are the battle lines right there. Whose law? God’s law or man’s law? And so instead of being frustrated and discouraged, which maybe some people would say, Wow, they’re just both so upset about. No, it’s quite the opposite. Knowing the remedy helps you with the illness. If all you see is the illness and you say it’s never going to get any better, well, then that’s the reason to be discouraged. But over the past, I would say, Charles, and you have a teaching ministry as well, yours is a pulpit ministry. Mine is definitely not a pulpit Ministry. But seeing people who say, I understand now, Oh, my goodness, this makes so much more sense. T hen once they get past, I wish I had known this sooner, I get to remind them of God’s providence is that God revealed it to them when he chose to do so.

But instead of lamenting how long you haven’t been doing something, be encouraged that you can go out today and do something. I always tell them, If you can’t figure out how to do that in your life, give me a call and we can have a conversation.

Excellent. Yes.

Thank you, Charles. Hopefully people will get a hold of those volumes. They’re available at ChalcedonStore.com and begin the journey of having a hope, a true, genuine hope that allows them to be bold in their pursuits of kingdom work. Out of the Question podcast at gmail. com is how you reach us if you wish to, and we’ll talk to you next time.

Thank you, Andrea. Thanks for listening to Out of the Question. For more information on this and other topics, please visit Chalcedon.edu