Pastor Presents Christian Vision for Education

Tuesday, Oct. 6, 2009 Posted: 1:40:16AM HKT

What, if anything, does the Reformation have to say about education?

To begin with, the 16th century and earlier Protestant reformers were intensely interested in bringing education to the masses amid an age of illiteracy, noted Pastor Linus Chua.

According to the fulltime ministerial student under Pilgrim Covenant Church, the Reformation teaches Christians that they are not to be ‘inactive’ or uninterested in the world or ‘disengaged’ from it, they are to keep the Bible central to their lives, and that there is no such thing as neutrality even in the area of education.

The Reformers saw the need to educate the masses and did everything they could to promote that.

“It is not enough just to recognise a particular need or to be convinced that certain things need to be done or corrected, and then fail to do anything about it,” wrote the member of the Reformed Church. “Instead, we need to take active steps to bring our Christian convictions about life to bear on the issues that confront us.”

The second Reformation lesson for education is that the Bible must be ‘central’ to everything in which Christians are engaged.

“We should aim to make the Bible the foundation and starting point for our lives, and we should train our children from young to have a biblical view of everything in this world,” said Pastor Chua, who is pursuing a Master of Divinity with Whitefield Theological Seminary.

The third lesson is that there is “no such thing as neutrality, particularly in the area of education and learning”.

“The early students at Harvard were exhorted to place Christ as the foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. We too must do the same. We must not be ashamed of our Christian distinctives even in the area of scholarship and schooling,” he said.

Citing Greg Bahnsen, he continued: “Every academic pursuit and every thought must be related to Jesus Christ, for Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. (John 14:6) To avoid Christ in your thought at any point, then, is to be misled, untruthful, and spiritually dead… The Christian is completely different from the world when it comes to intellect and scholarship; he does not follow the neutral methods of unbelief, but by God’s grace he has new commitments, new presuppositions, in his thinking… neutrality is nothing short of immorality. (James 4:4)”

Pastor Chua was writing in an essay he submitted to the CREDO 500 weblog conference – held in commemoration of the John Calvin quincentenary this year – as a contributor.

Launched on September 7, the conference brings together 21 contributors and nine reviewers representing various churches. Pastor Chua’s essay, titled Reformation & Education was posted on September 24.

Other topics covered were Scripture and tradition, the place and necessity of creeds and confessions, signs and wonders, the ‘new perspective’ on Paul, the tradition of counselling and physiology, reclaiming the biblical care of souls in the body of Christ, Francis Schaeffer and the Reformation, recapturing the vision of the centrality of the Gospel, and Christians and the pluralistic society.

The second and last part of the conference started Friday and concludes two days before the actual Reformation Day celebrations on October 30 and 31.

Topics that will be covered in the second part include the spiritual influence and legacy of John Calvin to the modern world, new evangelical Calvinism, biblical consistency of Calvin’s work on election, Turretin’s faithfulness to John Calvin’s doctrine of election, Karl Barth’s doctrine of election, Calvin and the Psalms, the essence of Calvinist worship, Reformed view of music, godly disciplines based on the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin’s view on law and grace, and Calvin’s View on the Cultural Mandate.

CREDO 500 was founded by The Rev Jonah Tang, a pastor under the Masland Church in the Methodist Sarawak Chinese Annual Conference.

The essays are available for viewing and commenting at: http://credo500.blogspot.com/2009/09/credo500.html

Nathanael Ng
nathanael@christianpost.com