As I get opportunity to interact with a host of schools these days, I am impressed at how much trouble we can get in when we adhere to traditional Christian teaching and morality. I don’t want that to be the case for Evangel Classical School and our community. (Sadly, that was not the case in recent months at Kings.) I wish to be crystal clear, for the record: We love the Bible, we are training the Raggants to submit to it, and we embrace what we are convinced to be the clear and traditional teachings about marriage and human sexuality. God’s intended plan for marriage is to be between one man and one woman for life. Sexual activity outside of marriage is sinful, and when Christians engage in such behavior we act like unbelievers and it betrays our status as new creations in Christ. God created male and female (Genesis 1:27); this is not socially constructed, and it is not fluid.
I realize that’s a doozy of a first paragraph, and not what you’re accustomed to reading from me, but I assure you, it’s because I love ECS, our community, our mission, and our opportunity to shape young minds and form tomorrow’s culture-shapers. If that is going to happen, we cannot compromise where God has been clear, though many in the pale of the Church are doing that very thing today.
And sometimes it causes me to wonder.
What would the Church fathers argue to be “of first importance” if they were drafting a creed today?
To be sure, these are morally-confusing times, and Christians are doing little to introduce clarity to the confusion. It comes as little surprise that – in the spirit of Romans 1 – even professing Christians are inventing new ways to muddy the waters of Orthodoxy. We have a whole new list of lines between the false and the true today.
In its ongoing effort to suppress the truth in unrighteousness, our culture is spending the spiritual capital our fathers left us like entitled teenagers with a besetting addiction and old money…and the Church is not far behind. We’ve invented our own morality, traded in our freedom for shackles, and crafted diabolical knots for the consciences of our neighbors.
And where has that gotten us?
We murder our infants in the womb and call it “freedom.”
We normalize what God abominates and call it “love.”
We jettison the culture of our parents and call it “education.”
But I return to my original question. If the Church fathers were drawing lines in the sand today, would they insist on Sola Fide? The inerrancy of Scripture? Would they articulate afresh that a marriage is between a man and a woman? I wonder.
At ECS, our aim is to equip “another generation [to] carry and advance Christ-honoring culture.” This necessarily includes spending time studying the Bible, the Great Books of the West, and equipping students to think logically and speak clearly and winsomely. Along the way, we see some recurring lessons.
First, we see that the key to human flourishing is obedience to God’s commands. For instance, take my comments above on marriage. When we love and encourage marriage between one man and one woman for life, which is God’s intended arrangement, we find ourselves in strangely rare company…and our kids flourish in security and think that this sort of thing (i.e., a husband and a wife together in happy matrimony) is normal. Of course we live in a Genesis 3 world, and we’ve all been affected by divorce (including many in our own ECS community and the Sarr family tree), but I’ve never met a person who argued that divorce was consistent with God’s obvious design.
Or consider human sexuality. Two men can claim to enjoy romantic love for each other, but that’s not a sign of God’s blessing, and it is not fruitful as the marriage bed is intended to be.
Or what about politics? When we study history and the Bible, we can see what happens when Church and State blur their jurisdictional lines and try to do each other’s jobs. (Take the power struggle between Thomas Becket and Henry II. Juxtapose this with the the prophet Samuel and King Saul. What do you see?)
Through our study, our students see what happens when men dismiss what God has said and follow their own wisdom. God gives us just the sort of freedom, love, and education that we demand.
I realize that it’s becoming increasingly offensive to draw lines like the ones I’ve drawn here, but as many among us try to deny or redefine what God has said, we wish to be faithful to God’s Word and enjoy the variety of fruitfulness that comes of that faithfulness. Nor can we deny the results that we can see historically when men prefer their own wisdom to that of the Maker of Heaven and Earth.
The trendy thing in our culture today would be to label ECS as anti-gay (as happened with Kings) because we love biblical and traditional marriage, for instance. Not only is this lazy and inflammatory, it doesn’t go far enough. We believe that homosexuality is sinful. We also believe that pride is sinful. And adultery and gluttony, too. The list of things we’re against can fall safely under one big umbrella: sin. We want to be anti-sin…though we’re a community of sinners trying to kill that sin and live in fellowship with God and with one another.
Instead of thinking of our anti’s, it may be more helpful to think in terms of our pro’s: We are pro-obedience to God’s commands, pro-personal holiness, pro-relational harmony, pro-loving our neighbors sacrificially, and lots more! Beyond this, every day at ECS is more like a work party than it is like what I grew up thinking of when someone said “school.” So we are pro-partying.
We want our kids to be trained to love what God has said, to submit to it (even when they don’t feel like it) and then to be wildly blessed and happy as God rewards the faithfulness He effects in them. We want for them to be able to discern truth from error, see through the lies of the enemy, and to stand strong in their biblical convictions to love and honor Christ in their choices. Amazing blessings await the faithful, and we fiercely fight for this on behalf of every Raggant.
May God give us the conviction of the Church fathers to know where to draw lines with grace and wisdom, and the courage to remain on His side of those lines.
Risus est bellum.
—Mr. Sarr