Our Covenantal Responsibilities in Education

I have heard many times that while the Bible may imply that Christian parents are to make sure our children are “raised as Christians,” it does not mandate the form of education. Of course, we might ask: What all is meant by form?

If we only mean that God’s word does not mandate what kind of building, or even specifics of pedagogy or curriculum, or how much of which method—monologue versus dialogue, memorization of facts versus a written report—and so on, well then, certainly, this is not a very controversial qualification. But to say that there is no specifically Christian educational mandate for the covenant community of God is simply not true.

This will be divided under three heads:

(i.) The Unity of Covenantal Responsibilities;

(ii.) The Educational Responsibilities of Parents;

(iii.) The Educational Responsibilities of the Church.

I will appeal to two basic texts. One is from the Old Testament, in Deuteronomy 6:6-9; the other from the New Testament, in Matthew 28:19-20. The first will spell out God’s expectations for the parents of His people in Israel, and the second will extend that same duty to the church as an institution, or as a community. Yet, in order to to see the genetic relationship between those two texts, one first has to grasp the covenantal unity of the Scriptures.

The Unity of Covenantal Responsibilities

It is good to know that the Old and New Testaments form one story of God, and preach one gospel, commending to us one Christ. That is a kind of first step out of the flat and fractured modern Evangelical view toward the Bible. A second step comes in discovering a more articulate framework that we Reformed people call “covenant theology.”

One theologian has called a covenant “a bond in blood sovereignly administered.”1 It is a serious thing to God. It is serious not only because of the glory of God at stake in keeping His own promises, but also in that glory that is displayed by the human parties keeping our end. That He does so perfectly and that we do not, does not alter the fact that glory is at stake in both.

Without getting into the details, where there has always been some amount of debate among Reformed theologians, we can at least say this: When God places His people in Christ, He joins us to what we call the covenant of grace. Throughout Paul’s letters, he talks about how God’s promises to Abraham were really the substance of “the gospel” (Gal. 3:8), that we “are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise” (Gal. 3:29), and that what we are brought into is nothing less than “the commonwealth of Israel” (Eph. 2:12). So there is a unity to the Bible, fundamentally, because there is a unified plan of God—one covenantal plant, if you will, set down from left to right, whose roots are planted in the Old and flower blossoms in the New.

To speak then of a “covenant responsibility” is to recall that this covenant has conditions. It has obligations or duties. Now there is a misunderstanding about the covenant of grace that mirrors a popular misunderstanding that Evangelicals have about grace in general. “Jesus does it all in salvation. It’s all by grace—therefore there isn’t anything in the way of obligations.”

When someone comes to Reformed theology, they learn many things that go against this growth-stunting grain. For example, we learn about the three uses of the law, and about the difference between justification (by faith alone) and sanctification (which requires effort), and many other such distinctions which grow us out of the shallow lands of “easy believism.” However, we might still be surprised to learn that in the covenant of grace—unconditional grace won for us by Christ alone for eternal life—yet, conditions follow in this life.

So God said things to Abraham like: 

“walk before me, and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly” (Gen. 17:1-2), 

“As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations … and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you” (Gen. 17:9, 11).

Outward signs, forward faithfulness. It is not enough to establish that there is a unity to the covenant of grace, from Old to New; but it must also be seen that unconditional grace to save us does not erase conditions for how things work in this world. So the idea of covenant obligations is as biblical and historic as any idea could be.

Children are central to that—“For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself” (Acts 2:39). So what does this have to do with the education of those children? Well that brings us to our two main texts.

The Educational Responsibilities of Parents

The fundamental text here is Deuteronomy 6:6-9.

“And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”

I will make four quick observations about this passage.

First, it starts in the heart of the parents: “these words that I command you today shall be on your heart” (Deut. 6:6). Who then is addressed by God’s commands through Moses? It is not some amorphous nation-state, or some other abstract WE, but rather it is addressed to those fathers of Israel, and, yes, those mothers who would likely do much of the formative work. The New Testament reaffirms that chain of command: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph. 6:4). The parents are both primal audience and administrators. It is exactly this that is to always be on the heart of the parents. This responsibility must not be delegated to any other. In fact, in cannot ever be, as the parents will still give an account before God.

Secondly, there is the essence of it. The whole passage is rooted in a confession of God as the one LORD, and that which Jesus called the Greatest Commandment, which includes, “with all your mind” (Mat. 22:37). Now if all of God’s people owe their whole mind to God, how exactly does that work if the formative years of shaping the mind are given to someone else—in fact, even to God’s enemies? How would that be the whole of our minds to God? It couldn’t be.

Third, there is the end of this duty. The words right before tell us that it is,

“that you may do them in the land to which you are going over, to possess it, that you may fear the LORD your God, you and your son and your son’s son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be long” (vv. 1-2).

So what is the design or end? The answer is fourfold: To fear the Lord, to keep His commandments, to take the land, and that for the long haul. You see the same end echoed a few chapters later (Ch. 11):

“You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth” (Deut. 11:19-21).

God wanted Israel to treat (i.) adherence to the law and (ii.) passing on the whole Word to their children to be inseparable. Since the one would cause their flourishing in the land, so would the other. Hence God’s people have always been called to educate in order to propagate and spread abroad as a people; and they are to think about education in that way. To put it in the language that goes all the way back to the beginning of the Bible, education is central to dominion and is inseparable from it.

Fourth, there is the form of it. Commentators will often say that this language of “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (v. 7)—that this is the Hebrew use of merism, that is, a poetic device where two contrasting ideas are communicating totality. So here that would be a totality of place and time. In other words, “everywhere you go” and “all the time.” That is true, as far as it goes. The trouble is that we can often universalize a thing right out of existence. So, the first application is to intentionally use travel time, meal time, bed time, and yes, even holiday time and leisure time, to talk about these most important truths.

However, if we limit the mandate to a conversational intentionality, the opposite error is that we never go deep and wide into a curriculum, into their actual most constant, rigorous training. So, it is true that specifics on the teaching material and methods are not here. It is not an inflexible one-size-fits-all prescription. On the other hand, it would be a mockery of the principle that is here to farm out the main part of the educational day to God’s enemies:

“A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Lk. 6:40).

Your soul and your life on this earth cannot rise any higher than your intellectual intake. As Voddie Baucham put it very well, “If you send your children to Caesar, don’t be surprised when they come back Romans.” So that’s to the parents.

The Educational Responsibilities of the Church

The Great Commission passage (Matthew 28:19-20) has been neglected as an educational mandate among modern Evangelicals. The reasons for this had much to do with a reductionistic view toward the mission of the church in general, and evangelism in particular. Discipleship—and particularly character formation rooted in learning—was largely dismissed and even vilified.

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Notice that this is first and foremost a command to the church as the church. The church is many things, but one of the things it is is a community of learning. The word disciple (μαθητής) means “learner” or “student,”2 which is why the Latin discipulus (m), discipula (f) means the same. Here it is the verb form. It is an imperative. The command is to spend the rest of our lives training what Paul describes to the Colossians as “presenting every man τέλειος” (1:28)—that is “complete” or “perfect.” The ESV’s “mature” comes across as too soft for the Apostle’s meaning. This is elite fighter training.

“But,” it may be asked, “isn’t this specifically for spiritual training?” Well, the Mosaic formula “these words that I command you” (Deut. 6:6) always rest in the wider context of the longer formula, “all these words that the LORD had commanded him” (Ex. 19:7). So “Be careful to obey all these words that I command you” (Deut. 12:28). Likewise in the Great Commission, what is the scope of the mandate? He said, “teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Mat. 28:20). This is a whole life educational program we are calling people to in discipleship.

If someone says, Where does the Bible demand that we teach history according to God’s dealing with man? Psalm 78 is a whole chapter telling the church to do so. What about science? The Psalmist answers again: “Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them” (Ps. 111:2) or “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (Ps. 139:14).

The basic struggle that most modern Christians have with both of our main passages is they cannot see the “formal school” dimension; but this is actually to look for something artificial and wonder that we have not found it. What exactly is the essential form of a school? Is it a building? Is it the blessing of the U.S. Department of Education? What bells and whistles are we holding up as the criteria that the Great Commission is somehow falling short on?

Now, if we view things from the perspective of the demands of Jesus’ words and then ask, “What all is required to take this most seriously?” then the form is something that follows. We don’t fit real education into a failing form. We imagine the form according to what the thing fundamentally is. The college itself—as an expression of the church—has to decide that it will fulfill the higher aspirations and calling to which God has given, and, in a sense, to lead an institutionalized rebellion against the pseudo-academia of an anti-Christian age.

But the church has always seen itself, if I can borrow the words of Reformed theologian from the last generation, Edmund Clowney, “the colony of heaven”3 in this world. And every serious colonization campaign requires indoctrination in its norms. All this to say that what the Great Commission is really doing is taking what the parents of God’s children were already given to do in Israel in Deuteronomy 6, and it is saying, Now, as a whole church, go and bring in the nations under the same. We are duty-bound to colonize with the Christian classroom. This is the historic position. Martin Luther said that, “The neglect of education will bring the greatest ruin to the gospel.”4

And in his Address on the Education of Children, the New England Puritan Cotton Mather said that,

“the Pastors of every Town are under peculiar obligations to make this a part of their Pastoral Care, That they may have a Good School in their Neighbourhood.”5

What the Great Commission is ultimately driving at is the construction of whole Christians, the building of saints, the training of the whole soul for the whole of this life and beyond. We only struggle with this if and when we have allowed the world to reduce education to the momentary and material, the mere placing of cogs onto the assembly line for a fundamentally Babylonian product.

Practical Application of this Doctrine

Use. 1. Exhortation. How many of our churches are not engaged in this great work in any way? If this is a mandate for the whole church, then it is a mandate for each local church—in one way or another.

Consider that we are at a most perfect time and place in history to open up the kingdom of Christ to the masses by such schools. The world around you has no answers. Our neighbors are as the people of Nineveh, who, we are told, “do not know their right hand from their left” (Jon. 4:11).

The fields are ripe for the harvest! Remember the words of Jesus in Matthew 9, that,

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few;  therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (vv. 37-38).

Is not the teacher such a laborer? I think they are. I said that the Great Commission is often reduced to “mere evangelism,” but the fact of the matter is that Christian schools—even Christian colleges—are also evangelism even in that minimal sense. There’s always a war for the minds going on, even for those who have grown up in Christian homes.

I close with the words of the nineteenth century Reformed theologian, R. L. Dabney:

“The education of children for God is the most important business done on earth. It is the only business for which the earth exists. To it all politics, all war, all literature, all money-making, ought to be subordinated; and every parent especially ought to feel, every hour of the day, that, next to making his own calling and election sure, this is the end for which he is kept alive by God—this is his task on earth. On the right training of the generation now arising, turns not only the individual salvation of each member in it, not only the religious hope of the age which is approaching, but the fate of all future generations in a large degree. Train up him who is now a boy for Christ, and you not only sanctify that soul, but you set on foot the best earthly agencies to redeem the whole broadening stream of human beings who shall proceed from him, down to the time when men cease to marry and give in marriage. Until then, the work of education is never ending.”6

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1. O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ of the Covenants (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1980), 4.

2. The verb mathéteuó (μαθητεύω) means “I make a disciple of,” “train in discipleship” or, in the passive voice, “I am trained, discipled, instructed.”

3. Edmund P. Clowney, The Church (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 13-25.

4. Martin Luther, Letter to Jacob Strauss (1524).

5. Cotton Mather, “The Education of Children: An Address”.

6. R. L. Dabney, “Parental Responsibilities,” Sermon in October, 1870 in Zachary M. Garris, ed., Dabney on Fire, 691-692.