Theology’s Central Role in Classical Education

How do you call a school a “Christian school” if it will not take a stand on who God is and what the gospel is? 

And yet this is precisely what many schools, which have tried to be “classical” and “Christian,” have attempted to pull off. Why? Well, there may be several reasons. I suspect at the top of the list is that temptation that exists for all parachurch entities: namely, to seek the lowest common denominator so as to appeal to the broadest constituency. But beyond that, for all of our talk as Evangelicals about how we are united in “the essentials,” the truth is that we do not all agree about God and the gospel. This is what we theologians call theology proper and soteriology. 

Another reason for the uneasy marriage between the classical and the Christian is that we who live in a post-metaphysical age have been cut off from the tools of attaining the mind’s eye on that which is greatest. How can we then speak of the good, the true, and the beautiful if these are only so in name (nominalism), rather than having a firm grasp on the essence of these metaphysical objects (realism)?

The answer is that we cannot. The modifying adjective “classical” is an empty shell without classical content—and that means philosophy arriving in its full service to theology by dusting away all competitors to classical metaphysics. We could not do that so long as anti-metaphysical theologies reigned in the only churches that could reasonably be expected to recover all those lost tools of learning. This is what occurred in the Reformed tradition of the twentieth century—whether under the left-of-center influence of Barth or under the right-of-center influence of Van Til. In all quarters, reason and nature were out. Classical education was destined to be recovered on the cheap.

But then there is the matter of the soul and the cultivation of virtue after the manner of Christ in particular. What is education, after all? Is it merely job training? Certainly there is a place for trade schools that answer to this purpose. However, this is not what most have taken to be meant by the “well rounded” education. Clearly what everyone has meant by that was the “well rounded” soul that the education supposedly produced. And it is a mistake to think that the only debate was ever about what kind of education was good for the job. In his classic book The Closing of the American Mind (1987) Alan Bloom explained what is behind even this.

“Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person … Always important is the political regime, which needs citizens who are in accord with its fundamental principle. Aristocracies want gentlemen, oligarchies men who respect and pursue money, and democracies lovers of equality. Democratic education, whether it admits it or not, wants and needs to produce men and women who have the tastes, knowledge, and character supportive of a democratic regime … This education has evolved in the last half-century from the education of democratic man to the education of the democratic personality.”1 

Now before you allow your mind to drift to the deeper end of the pool for the implications of that, just recognize that this principle of education founded upon a vision of human nature in society—that can either be more thoughtful or less thoughtful than the present Christian’s vision. Of course these mere forms of earthly government should be a slice of the Christian vision and not the whole. Certainly they should not be bigger. But a Christian higher education that can rise no higher than its secular counterparts has forfeited its Christian character. 

What I want to show here are three relationships that theology has with dimensions of our education:

(i.) Theology and Worldview;

(ii.) Theology and Curriculum;

(iii.) Theology and Vocation.

Theology and Worldview

It is impossible to consider the role of theology “in” anything apart from the concept of worldview. The trouble is that the reclaiming of classical thought in recent years has brought with it a recognition that the “worldview” concept has come down to us (in some ways) in its German idealist form. Anyone familiar with how Kant drove the last nail into the coffin of reason and how Hegel attempted to reground it in a kind of rational-historical evolution, will notice that the word itself—world-view—can be conceived as both a subjective thing and yet an all-encompassing thing. My own view toward the world becomes the camera lens, pointed at whatever I am persuaded is newsworthy. Yet we have the need for some things to loom larger than, and to explain, other things.

At long last, the world had been turned inside out as the Enlightenment ran out of steam. Metaphysics gave way to epistemology. The real world that is mind-independent surrendered its fortress to the mind-dependent, even if culturally-dependent (or power-dependent) projection.

The reason that this seemingly obscure conversation matters is that we have one more pendulum swing on our hands. It is too late to stuff it back in its box. The pendulum has already begun to swing, but we must at least understand where it is going and from whence it derives its force. To use the proverbial expression of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it is now becoming assumed that the word and the concept, “worldview,” can only mean that late Enlightenment brand and its “all or nothing” framework, collapsing all other ideas and all intellectual disciplines into some singular, central dogma. 

In reality Christianity always held itself out as something like a worldview. The medieval maxim was that “Theology is the queen of all sciences, and philosophy is her handmaiden.” If it helps, imagine a “solar system of ideas” in which God functions like the sun does in our solar system. Not only is He the source of light, but also the center of gravity. All else derives its being from Him, and nothing else can explain itself without reference to Him. So, with that picture firmly fixed in our minds, let’s just notice two main differences that should be observed between this theocentric way of looking at things and the nineteenth century Historical Worldview Thinking.2

First, unlike candidates such as Reason or the Revolution or Evolution or Social Progress—unlike those things being the “center of gravity,” God really is all-determinative in terms of causation and explanation. Second, that “all things are from him and through him and to him,” as Paul said, does not imply the “all or nothing” fallacy that one must “get Him right” before they can get anything else right.

For one thing, we might ask: How right? None of us has God completely right. More than that, by God’s general revelation (cf. Ps. 19:1; Rom. 1:20), there are common notions that the mind of man cannot get away from.3 And these common notions are exactly what allow different proximate starting points and different methods for different fields of study to yield valid and sound knowledge whether one is a Christian or not, whether or not one who is a Christian is conscious of how our ultimate principles make that knowledge possible. And yet, it all does go together and it is still important to see how. 

So to review: To speak of a Christian worldview is different from the modern Historical Worldview Thinking on these two important counts. Its most foundational (or central) reality really must be so, and it is not “all or nothing” with one’s starting point in this or that conversation, this or that area of research. To equate any “Christian worldview talk” to this idealist manner of thinking is unwarranted. Please hear me well that I am not married to the word itself. If someone has a suitable alternative, I am all ears.

One such candidate offered has been the word “wisdom.” And we like using the word wisdom in classical circles, don’t we? As we should! However, this is a potentially broad word. It may be one’s wisdom to draw several proper inferences about culture from the biblical picture of man, for example, but if all one did was label that “wisdom” as opposed to some “Christian” set of reasoning, then we may be unintelligible to our hearers. Perhaps someone may use the words “Christian vision” or else “Christian way of thinking.” But the first would seem liable to all of the same criticisms, and the second is clunky.

What all is being gained in these makeovers? While we are at it, perhaps it might be better to ask: What all is being lost? And is it at all possible that some who are driving the question may actually be motivated by “losing” what they may regard as a mere appendage to Christian truth. I am playing ignorant here.

In fact, I am convinced that some who are questioning the “Christian worldview” concept are actually looking forward to neutrality with respect to philosophical foundations and ethical (and political) conclusions. In short, there are relativists in the house—cultural appeasers. 

We scratch our heads over why our institutions drift leftward. We may appeal to Conquest’s Laws, applying to classical Christian schools and networks what we have already learned to be true in politics. That is surely legitimate; but is there a simpler entry-point here?

Well, there are usually many causes to such drift, but to start with just one bit of “low-lying fruit” let us simply ask this: Do you have a curriculum of neutrality? And if your system is neutral as to content—especially its central content—then that institution will disintegrate and follow the cultural winds in due time.

It is therefore important to keep an eye on those engaged in theological retrieval. Those who are most entrenched in the seminary academic scene are more likely to want to entirely ditch the language of “worldview” on the ground that it is opposed to common notions. Some of them may indeed be ignorantly parroting what they have heard without giving it a second thought. Yet those who are driving that trend understand well enough that when worldview is defined by classical metaphysics, then all sciences and arts must return to the course charted for them throughout their Western upbringing.

One more word about theology as the “central content” from a worldview perspective. It has been fashionable for homeschoolers and other advocates of classical education to say that the classical way teaches students how to think rather than what to think. Well, I beg to differ. Indeed it does recover the lost tools of learning, and cultivates self-directed learners. However, the idea that even this is content-neutral is itself a judgment of content. I will leave aside the question as to whether the three elements of the trivium may be conceived as stages of development, or as three constant pathways. To instill logic and rhetoric, or even grammar, apart from a hierarchical content is—to pick up our solar system metaphor—to pluck the sun from that center. Both the center of gravity and the source of light would be lost. Students would perhaps gain efficiency in facts memorized, forms of reasoning more easily perceived, and skills of persuasion honed; and for all of that, they would remain disintegrated souls, vulnerable to any number of alternative narratives which have no proper center. They would remain utterly ignorant of what is most real and why that is the case.

Theology and Curriculum

Does the view that one has about the nature of God affect how they read history, how they might compose a poem (or a sermon), or how they approach the empirical data in the science lab? It makes all the difference in the world. I mentioned theological retrieval (or ressourcement), that is, the project of going back to the sources, and for many, reading books in our English for the first time that were previously buried in forgotten Latin. 

The gatekeepers of the present Reformed inheritance have not in fact inherited the Reformation in its totality. And they are getting quite nervous about the younger generation figuring that out. You see, the rise of classical education (not to speak of the ubiquity of information on the internet) has created a scenario in which there are countless young men who know Latin well enough to translate and who have discovered that nearly ninety-nine percent of the works written on pre-modern European soil remain untranslated.

Some of these works may be neither here nor there. Others regard matters of philosophy and politics, and many of those were written by our Reformed forefathers. We might take a wild guess at which subjects have almost universally not been translated into English over the past hundred years. Before that time, they did not need to be, as the learned class knew Latin. Once most people could not, the Reformed churches also happened to have fallen under the captivity of Gnosticism with respect to nature and Pietism with respect to ethics.

To come right to the point, one cannot expect to remove the lid on the Latin Pandora’s Box with respect to the classical doctrine of God and not have the classical view of Christian politics also get out. It turns out that the entire Western tradition and Reformed reflection were at one on the latter as well as the former. An objective, metaphysical view of God tends to beget something of the same in politics. What follows from this is an active civic participation where God’s design of the sword (Rom. 13:1-7) is good because of what it says about God (Gen. 9:5-6).

One of the Thomistic definitions of theology was “the science of God and all else in relation to God.” This was considered true in such a way that all of the lesser disciplines will produce arts designed to further man’s chief end. Thus this science and wisdom is from God, lived out through God, and brings glory back to God (Rom. 11:36) through every other discipline.

But this isn’t just an argument from authority. In his book The Idea of a Christian College, Arthur Holmes speaks of the unique role of the Christian liberal arts college as not merely “an interaction of faith and learning” but more specifically an “integration of faith and learning.”4 What do we mean exactly? We mean that the purpose here is not a four-year cloister, or a Christian “safe space” to dabble in these subjects free from all the evils and errors on the secular campus. We mean to produce a “creative and active” lifelong habit of being able to relate all of the disciples to that ultimate discipline of the wisdom that comes from God.

This calls for balance. All of the subjects can be “theological” without in any way detracting from the specificity of the methods and scope of their fields of study. This has long been a big fear in modern educational theory. Religion is dogma, and dogma can’t be questioned. So religious schools were deemed to be the enemies of academic freedom and rational inquiry. Imagine how much such people would think that a theologically-driven religious school would crowd out the other subjects. But when Isaac Newton said that the task of the scientist was to “think God’s thoughts after Him,” did this hinder his creative or investigative genius? Of course not.

Or James Clerk Maxwell, who unveiled the relationships between optics, magnetism, and electricity, and yet on the door of his classroom was posted that passage from Psalm 111:2, “Great are the works of the Lord, studied by all who delight in them.” In one letter during his early studies, Maxwell wrote,

“Christianity—that is, the religion of the Bible—is the only scheme or form of belief which disavows any possessions on such a tenure. Here alone all is free. You may fly to the ends of the world and find no God but the Author of Salvation. You may search the Scriptures and not find a text to stop you in your explorations.”5

Contemplating the study of history is a good place to show this as well. It is not simply that you cannot remove the personal angle from the writing of history. It is that if you remove God as the First and Final Cause of history, then history itself becomes either cyclical or meaningless. The focus descends to material analysis alone and to all manner of cynical explanations that then begin to erode ethics. How so? A God who both “removes kings and sets up kings” (Dan. 2:21) and calls us to “do justice” (Mic. 6:8) instills in us the reality that providence and fighting for justice go together. By contrast, a process of nothing but material conflict gives you neither meaning nor justice. That famous saying of Lewis comes to mind here—“Aim at heaven, and you get earth thrown in; aim for earth, and you get neither.”6

If we ask what the purpose is in learning Greek or Latin, we will be told that they bring us directly to the minds of the Great Tradition. But then it may be asked why we should read Homer or Cicero, or even Christian authors like Athanasius or Dante. There should be no confusion as to the benefits of the Greek philosophers. As more than one modern has said, All philosophy ever since has been but a footnote to Plato.7 That is an overstatement, but another author has put it better in saying, “in metaphysics, morals, and politics they started the game, in whose tracks, since their day onwards, the world of intellect has been afoot.”8

There is an obsession that multiculturalism and pluralism breed. We are told that we must “de-colonize” the canon. What does that mean? It means that everyone must be given a voice. But this is sheer nonsense, and it is also cheating. In fact, to replace “The Great Books” with the voice of every color the wind, so to speak, is only to replace a conscious and honest realism with an unconscious and dishonest one. In fact, the classical metaphysical vision alone can answer the questions as to “who” gets to call the Great Books “great.” It is not only a WHO but a WHAT. Mere mortals will be making this selection in either case, so this is very much a red herring. By replacing “great” books with “diverse” books, the educational pluralists are in fact presupposing that diversity is what is great. But they have not done away with the claim to greatness. To respond frankly, we must re-colonize the canon. From a pragmatic point of view, life is short and we can only read so much. We already know that. But it is truly a waste to pretend that the bored soul who gave us Frindle poses as good a set of questions as the ones asked by Socrates.

Again, we can use the example of Plato’s dialogues to show how philosophy is that “servant” to theology. If we return to our solar system model one more time, think of philosophy as that force of gravity back to the “sun of theology.” It asks the questions that the lower disciplines are not equipped to ask. This is no strike against the lower sciences, but it is an insight into why such studies could never have existed in the first place, with their distinct methods, if all that they involved were material brains pointing themselves at equally reducible material blobs. In fact, method is metaphysical. It is not only epistemological—how we know—but is “made up of” that which is fundamentally immaterial and traceable finally to the Divine Reason.

The Bible speaks of the Christian mind not merely as theological, but as Christological—it assumes that heaven’s norms have been incarnated in a Person into whom we are grafted. Paul flatly says, “We have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16). It would exceed our topic to unpack all that this means, but at the very least it is meant to be cultivated over the course of our lives (cf. Rom. 12:2); and we ought to take seriously those other words of Paul that it is “Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:2-3). You cannot simply put that on autopilot for four years. You cannot segregate your discipleship to Christ from your scholarship, with its structure of various studies. Without the mind of Christ, one will never have tools of discernment that rise even a few inches off the ground. The very nature of discriminating rationale is immaterial. Reason cannot exist but as a slave in the modern system of thought, which is little more than the thinking of machines, if not of beasts. The way in which the curriculum chooses whether or not to be a hierarchy, and what subject will bring unity to the diversity of others—this will make or break whether the system will be properly human, in addition to being properly Christian.

Theology and Vocation

We lament that great moral actors are nowhere to be found on the stage of culture, but then we retreat from the very institutions that are charged to write the script. When we do send them even to Christian college or to seminary, whether we like it or not, we are sending them either to factories of heresy or progressivism, or else those few with very capable scholars when it comes to this or that narrow department of biblical, historical, or systematic theology, but who haven’t the slightest education in Christian apologetics or ethics. The most conservative circles in the church have abandoned those fields long ago. So when it comes to a well-rounded moral education, one must choose between the progressive or the pietist. 

Then there is what students do to themselves. Your time in college should be a time of deep intellectual and spiritual growth. Increasingly, the mindset is to settle into the degree that will guarantee a steady paycheck in the end. Consequently the student must forgo paying much attention to exactly those ideas that will shape their souls, and it will even cause them to ignore those studies to which they are most drawn. But who do you think gave you such interests? Might those ideas and those interests have something to do with your purpose in life?

Vocation is more than “job” or employment. Vocation comes from the Latin word “to call” (vocere). And the Christian knows that it is God who ultimately calls. But here again, how can we answer the call of a God we hardly know? 

The Christian God makes sense of having a meaning and purpose in life, and other so-called gods do not, much less does the view treating ourselves like nothing but matter in motion. Just as a biblical worldview makes science intelligible by an orderly cosmos outside of me and a rational soul within me, so it inspires the most meaningful work, as a sovereign God is ordering things for my good (Rom. 8:28) and He prepares “good works” for me to walk in (Eph. 2:10). As His image-bearers, He makes what we do change things, whether the evangelist in Romans 10 who is an instrument in His hands or else whatever our hands find to do, that we may do it with all our might (Ecc. 9:10). Objective vocation implies that this “all else,” this supposedly “mundane” and “secular” is, in a very real sense, sacred, without blurring the distinction between those.

Another New England Puritan, Thomas Shepard, wrote to his son as he was entering college. So much to think about in building a new world to the west. But what does he write? “Remember the end of your life, which is coming back again to God, and fellowship with him.”9

So if theology is from God and of God and back to God, then it is precisely this real world call that must be sketched out and colored by one’s vision of God.  

I will close with the account of Isaiah’s vision of God. It was in the heavenly throne room, and it comes from the sixth chapter of that prophetic book, where you will recall that he has a vision of God. And he says,

“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” (Isa. 6:5)

But then, almost in the next breath, after he was cleansed, “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here I am! Send me’” (v. 8). That’s the call, but it comes out of a transformation of the man—not one that Isaiah could have “career-planned” for, but one in which an entirely other realm exploded all that he was and what he thought he knew.

I remember Michael Allen telling the story in class one time at RTS, about a young man studying at a university. It was the last day of class and students were receiving grades back on some final paper. This particular student received a grade well below what he was expecting and he had had it with this professor and wanted to protest once the class had ended. By then the professor had already been exasperated by his complaints, and his manner of writing which was typical of a gun-slinging young man with a lot of opinions but little time to listen to others. And after the student had countered back, “What do I have to do to get A’s in these classes?” to which the professor snapped back, “Become a deeper person!”  Well, I don’t know what became of that young man, whether he took this to heart. Nor, by the way, am I suggesting that if he would just spend more time listening with his peers, or seeking the counsel of his elders, or reading Plato—that this is, in any sense, comparable to Isaiah being brought up into the throne room of God. 

But I also cannot help but wonder if so much of the directionlessness of college graduates is to be laid at the feet of we Christians who have removed what is highest from that supposedly higher education. As Lewis said in his masterpiece on education, “We produce men without chests—we remove the organ and demand the function.”10  So it is with us. To translate that into my imagery from before, we have removed the sun and expect to be called to this or that one of its orbiting planets. If you are a student without a path, do not be so quick to pay the professional “path-setters” who don’t even believe in a destination. Instead, become a deeper person. You will know soon enough that you have been called once you have first been changed. 

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1. Alan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 26, 27.

2. cf. J. V. Fesko, Reforming Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2019), 97-134.

3. Fesko, Reforming Apologetics, 27-48.

4. Arthur F. Holmes, The Idea of a Christian College (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 6.

5. James Clerk Maxwell, quoted in Lewis Campbell and William Garnet, The Life of James Clerk Maxwell (London: 1882), 178.

6. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996),

7. This is often attributed to Alfred North Whitehead, though his point was a bit more nuanced. He wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.” Process and Reality (New York: Free Press, 1978), 39.

8. R. W. Livingstone, A Defense of Classical Education (Louisville, KY: Memoria Press, 2024), 119.

9. Thomas Shepard quoted in Jeffrey C. Davis & Philip Ryken, ed., Liberal Arts for the Christian Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), 16.

10. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996),