BJU Statement of Christian Education
Christian Education at Bob Jones University
by Dr. Ron Horton
Our concept of Christian education grows out of our identity. Our sense of who we are determines what we do and why we do it. Let us take these subjects in order.
Who we are
We have, of course, a Christian religious identity. This identity gives us a supernaturalist view of the world. We believe that naturalism is a way of viewing the world, but not the way—that scientific materialism is a greatly limited and false way to see ourselves and the universe. We therefore have no difficulty in accepting the miracles of Scripture and the supernatural inspiration of the original writings of Scripture. We hold to the power of God to create a world and to re-create a human soul in salvation—that He has done the one and continues to do the other. Hence our anti-secularism.
We have a historical Protestant identity. Our defining beliefs are the shared core of the great historical creedal statements of Protestant Christianity. If one were to superimpose the Augsburg and Westminster Confessions, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Anglicanism, the Twenty-Five Articles of Methodism, and the Baptist London Confessions of 1644 and 1689, the overlap would be roughly distilled in what we formally affirm in our daily Chapel service. Hence our historical essentialism. (Protestant is used here in a broad sense and inclusive of Baptists, though the stricter sort of Baptists would reject this classification. Bob Jones University is a nondenominational institution, though Independent Baptists make up by far the greater number of students and faculty.)
We have an American evangelical identity. We continue in the spirit of the Great Awakening of Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield and subsequent revival movements, which laid an evangelical base for American Protestantism and exalted the preaching of the Gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Christ as the church's primary duty in the world.
We are not liturgical or sacramentalist in our approach to worship. Though something of the dignity of traditional Protestantism remains in the formal order of our Sunday morning service, the selection of the music, and the recitation of the University creed, it is tempered by an evangelical concern for the spiritual state of the persons present and an invitation to those with spiritual needs to come forward for counseling at the end of the service. The evangelist founder had a quaint way of expressing this paradoxical coupling of dignity and fervency. He said that in founding such a university as this, he was "putting a red carpet on the sawdust trail," referring to the sawdust that kept down the dust of the aisles in his tent campaigns. We are very much in the populist tradition of American evangelicalism. Hence, our fervent evangelism.
We have an American Fundamentalist identity. We are not in agreement with sweeping changes occurring in American Evangelicalism. We are the heirs of an interdenominational movement of American conservative evangelicals, who published a set of doctrinal statements in the early twentieth century in a series of pamphlets titled The Fundamentals. These statements expounded doctrinal essentials rather than denominational distinctives. They defined the theological common ground of Protestant orthodoxy, raising a bulwark against the tide of modernism in the denominational churches and seminaries. Specifically they stood against the twin threats of Darwinian scientism and historical biblical criticism, which they rightly saw as directed at the heart of their faith. They drew battle lines and committed themselves to an aggressive separatist theological stance. Hence, our anti-ecumenicism.
We have an American Fundamentalist practical identity. Our common-sense realism encourages a balanced approach in peripheral theological matters that have divided orthodox Protestantism as well as a down-to-earth approach to the Christian life. Certain features of our Puritan heritage and of European pietism in general have given an introverted, mystical character to some Evangelicalism. Oddly coupled with this subjective "deeper life" inwardness is the emotional exuberance of Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on the experiential validation of truth. These intuitional tendencies, too easily disregardful of doctrine, have merged in leftward evangelicalism with an intellectualism anxious to establish rational bases for faith and eager for the respect of liberal scholarship. Intuitionism and intellectualism have not been characteristic of historic American Fundamentalism, nor are they part of our defining identity. For our founder, Dr. Bob Jones Sr., success in the Christian life was largely a matter of obedience and good sense. Hence, our anti-rationalism and anti-charismaticism.
We have a liberal arts educational identity. After the turn of the last century, evangelicals began to found liberal arts colleges to provide a breadth of education comparable to what was available in secular institutions. They wanted a broader education for their young people than the Bible colleges could provide. Especially, they wanted an educational environment for their children where their faith would not come under attack. The denominational liberal arts colleges had relaxed their founding beliefs and were embracing modernism. Our University charter reflects these concerns.
The general nature and object of the corporation shall be to conduct an institution of learning for the general education of youth in the essentials of culture and in the arts and sciences, giving special emphasis to the Christian religion and the ethics revealed in the Holy Scriptures. . . .
The governing assumptions of this opening statement are two. The first is that all truth is God's truth and therefore that the pursuit of knowledge can be conducted in a way that honors the God of all truth. The second is that an acquaintance with a broad range of standard subject matters, including the most enduring of human intellectual and artistic achievements, makes the Christian more richly developed as a human being and therefore more attractive and valuable in the service of God. Adverse to these values is the postmodern counterculture. Hence, our committed cultural traditionalism.
What we do because of who we are
These identities have raised a concern among people like us about the direction of public education. This direction is pervasively hostile to conservative Christian belief. It has borne fruit in the failing moral standards and general disorder in the public schools. The grip of secular educational authorities on the content and purpose of state-run education has prompted Christians to educate their own young people in the lower grades and also in colleges and universities committed to their beliefs. Their purpose is not just the negative one of sheltering the students from spiritually destructive influences but also and more basically the positive one of forming their characters and lives after the example of Christ.
This concern sets us apart from the concerns of secular education, which tends to associate personal maturity with the disposition to question received ideas and to deny the possibility of certainty in the great questions of life. Our educational purpose is to nurture belief, not unbelief. The belief we desire to instill is not a naive untested credulity toward the truths of our faith but settled convictions justified by knowledge and experience as well as by the authority of Scripture. The contents of this belief are those age-old, simple but profound truths that have been the mainstay of Christians through the ages. The fountainhead of these convictions is an experiential knowledge of God from personal faith in the Savior. We may turn now to the biblical basis of our position.
Why we do what we do
Our concept of our educational mission is not new. It is rooted in the divine plan of human redemption that overarches Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. This connection of education with biblical redemption has, in fact, been well recognized in the past. The seventeenth-century Puritan poet and controversialist John Milton stated it as follows in his treatise Of Education.
The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love Him, to imitate Him, to be like Him, as we may the nearest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. (John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes [New York: Odyssey, 1957], p. 631.)
The Reformers held a view of education that put spiritual and moral development to the fore, tying it to the purpose of God to recreate in the believer the person He had in mind from the first before the corruption of His creation by original sin. They believed that a biblically centered, reverently guided student experience in the liberal arts was valuable, indeed little short of necessary, for the perfecting of Christian youth in the will of God. We are their descendants in this regard.
Accordingly we draw from Scripture our sense of what we must do in our ministry to our students. We share responsibility with the Christian home and church in the general purpose of Christian education: the directing of the process of human development toward God's objective for man, godliness of character and action. To develop our students in the image of God, we must teach them to know God and to imitate Him in His character and in His works.
This commitment embraces all we do in our educational endeavor. Knowledge of the written revelation of God, the Bible, remains at the center. The disciplinary studies radiate from this center as studies of God's works. Biblical truth is not confined to the required courses in the Bible but is diffused throughout the curriculum.
Yet to know God implies more than just knowledge about God. The knowledge of God that is unique to Christian education is a personal knowledge that begins with repentance of sin and faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and develops through obedience to and communion with God. To know God is to be born into the family of God and to live in fellowship with Him. With this knowledge as the starting point of Christian education, the student's attention is directed outward to the full range of natural facts and human experience, and formulations of that experience in history and philosophy and literature and art—all as reflective of the work of God intersecting with the work of man. The student develops a worldview coherent with the work of God in his life.
The work of God in the life of our students is a process of their imitating God in their character and service. It is our business as participants with God to urge them onward in this process and to provide an environment structured toward this purpose. As in secular education, the environment of Christian education is artificially selective, including elements favorable to its purpose and suppressing those unfavorable to it. We do not apologize for the prescriptiveness of the educational experience here.
It is our business also as educators to provide opportunities of ministry to the students, so it feels natural to them to live out their beliefs in service to God and to others. And so it is that hundreds of students have weekend ministries of various sorts, not only in the immediate area but also in surrounding states as well. We keep before all our students their responsibility to God in this matter and to a spiritually needy world.
Clearly our educational effort at Bob Jones University is a highly focused, energetic, disciplined endeavor. Because of our status as a private institution, we can operate without many of the constraints of a publicly funded institution and design policies suited to our goals without governmental interference. Students come who want what we have to give them and leave convinced that they are the better for it. We who serve here do so with great satisfaction, surrounded by human evidence that our efforts are wonderfully blessed of God.