Modern education is antichristian in nature. “Anti” has the double meaning of “in opposition to” and “in place of.”
How is modern public education antichrist in nature? For that answer, we need to look in the beginning where Satan offered our first parents knowledge (education) apart from God’s spoken revelation.
As you read Genesis 3, notice the context. Adam and Eve are in paradise. There isn’t any brokenness in their logic, emotions, environment, biology or relationships. Yet God sees fit that they still need instruction and revelation from God.
Why would God speak to them when they are not fallen? Because man, even before sin entered into the picture, was never meant to function autonomously without God speaking into their lives and showing them how they are to interact with each other, their environment, and ultimately God Himself.
Here is the bad part.
Satan enters into this paradise and promises our parents an alternative knowledge apart from God’s revelation. Hear Satan’s alternate learning curriculum: “For God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5 NAU).
The promise of autonomy.
No need for revelation! Deceptively, Satan implies: Knowledge exists even outside of God. It is something neutral “out there” we can gain access to apart from God (see Colossians 2:3).
Is not this claim key to modern schooling?
Might we know anything without a fixed source?
Mankind has several ways we know things. Experience, innate ideas, reason, and empirical research are some of the main ways we learn or “know” reality. The problem is when these become ultimate reference points divorced from revelation. Reason becomes rationalism, experience become existentialism and so on. Each of these ways of knowing ultimately leads to skepticism. The history of philosophy is littered with the latest fad of “how we know” turned into an “ism” culminating in skepticism. The cause is due to the inherent limits and finiteness of these forms of knowledge. We further know the users of these types of knowledge are affected by sin, hence skewing the prospect of certainty in acquiring knowledge.
For example, reason tells us it can’t reason everything. How can reason process all the information that exists together? It can’t. Nor can science test all the data in relation to every other piece of data that exists. And since it can’t perform this task, some information will obviously be missing from the tests. The door is now cracked for uncertainty to enter. Certainty in our pursuit of knowledge, uncertainty will always be present when we seek to understand ultimate truth apart from divine revelation. We will never know if we get the right conclusion by ourselves. God therefore must tell us the right conclusion and then we have a basis from which to work out everything else.
In contrast, an autonomous search for knowledge leads to skepticism. When God speaks, we can enjoy certainty in our quest for understanding. How? Certainty only comes when you have access to One who has all knowledge of all things of all times in relation to all other things. Knowledge won’t necessarily be total or comprehensive, but we have certainty.
The serpent’s perspective
Modern public education seeks to perpetuate the lie of the Serpent: “You shall be as gods knowing.” It promises knowledge, certainty about reality (even if it’s dogmatic skepticism). It promises unity to all the diversity. It purports to give the answers in life using all the valid forms of knowledge apart from God’s interpretation of reality.
Might the public school claim about interpreting reality be reconciled with the scriptures’?
Another way to frame the question: Is man basically evil or good?
Do we need God to speak to us — or not? Christians claim all of life, knowledge and reality is be found in how they relate to the glorious Lord Jesus. (See Colossians 1:16.)
Should education’s ultimate goal be temporally or eternally oriented? In short, is education’s goal to lead one to worship the risen Christ or aggrandize oneself as gods via the serpent’s lie in Genesis 3?
