The prince of preachers, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, once wrote in his wonderful John Ploughman’s Talk, “I would have everybody able to read and write and cipher; indeed, I don’t think a man can know too much; but mark you, the knowing of these things is not education; and there are millions of your reading and writing people who are as ignorant as neighbor Norton’s calf.”
Those ignorant masses of whom Spurgeon wrote are not those who failed to finish their lessons. They are instead those who did finish—or rather those who naively thought lessons were the sorts of things that could be finished.
Education does not have a terminus, a polar extreme, a finish line, an outcome. Instead, it is a deposit, an endowment, a promise, a small taste of the future. For many of us, it is sad to say, this uniquely Christian perspective is a foreign worldview—an alien notion, an arcane paradox, an unfathomable mystery. Our minds dulled by the smothering conformity of modern culture have a hard time plumbing the depths or exploring the breadths of the distinctively Christian virtue of hopeful contentment in the face of perpetual tasks. Thus, we tend rush toward what we think will be the termination of this, that or another chapter in our lives. We cannot wait to finish school. Thus, graduation is not a commencement for us, but a conclusion. Afterward, we hurry through our lives and careers: We slog impatiently through our work week, eager for the weekend; we bide our time until vacation and plod on toward retirement—always coming to the end of things until at last things come to an end.
However, within the Christian worldview framework, hopeful contentment in the face of never-ending responsibilities is a virtue that continually breeds in us anticipation for new beginnings, not old resolutions. It is a virtue that provokes us to a fresh confidence in the present, as well as in the days yet to come.
We above all people—we who were brought from death to life, we who were brought from the end of ourselves to the threshold of eternity—ought to understand this. This is, in fact, the very essence of the gospel. The crucifixion is not the termination of Christ’s mediatorial work; rather, it is the conjunction of two beginnings: the incarnation and the resurrection. It is the pivot of civilization demarcating a new creation: “Old things are passed away; behold all things are become new” (
Thus, for example, all talk of education should be a reminder that we have only just begun to learn how to learn. It should be an affirmation that though our magnificent heritage has introduced us to the splendid wonders of literature, art, music, history, science and ideas in the past—we have only just been introduced and that a lifetime adventure in these vast and portentous arenas still awaits us. Indeed, the most valuable lessons that education can convey are invariably the lessons that never end. That is actually at the heart of the Christian philosophy of education.
Educational excellence from a biblical perspective is not so much concerned with the amount of data accumulated in our students’ heads or the achievements cataloged on their transcripts. Rather, it is a way of thinking and acting woven into their lives. Education is as J.R.R. Tolkien often reminded his college students, “a form of repentance.” It is a reminder that we do not yet know all that we ought to know, we have not yet become all that we ought to become, and we have not yet done all that we ought to do. Education is, in other words, the pathway of gospel discipling.
This means that as youth leaders, our job is first and foremost to model humility and repentance at every turn. It is not to get our kids across the finish line. It is to get them through the starting gate.
