Concerning education, one correspondent wrote saying that, regardless of the location or method of education, the most important thing is curriculum. She’d probably say she is assuming the primacy of character when she speaks of curriculum, but we must never assume any father, mother, or educator puts character first. In fact, just the opposite: everyone is obsessed with curriculum despite the fact that character trumps curriculum every time. Particularly the father’s character, and even if he never opens a book with his child (which would be a crying shame).
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Pastors should remind professors that they are paid to profess.” quote=”Pastors should remind professors that they are paid to profess.”]With education as all other parts of life, character is supreme. Good books about preaching never stop making this point. Professors too need to be reminded of this truth. Pastors should remind professors that they are paid to profess, and their first duty as a Christian is to profess their faith in Jesus Christ and the glory of God in all His creation. This duty of theirs is no less binding at a secular college and public university than a private Christian college. They are under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, after all.
Watch the charade inside the Beltway right now that has turned our nation’s legislative and judicial branches into the laughingstock of the world. Politicians preen themselves publicly over their high moral character when anyone half-awake knows they have none. (Obvious to Muslims, at least.)
Like our president, our justices, senators, congressmen, and congresswomen are thieves and liars. Watch them pretend shock over drunk college boys treating women as meat. Watch them compound their hypocrisy by denying the moral agency of women who hang out with drunk college boys. But who can blame them? They learned the curriculum well fifty years ago when their teachers taught them:
never blame the victim; and
woman is always the victim
So now we are a nation that claims to be enlightened in our respect for women while we deny women any moral agency.
When I read and watch D.C. from the White House circus down to the utter degradation of those New York Times and Washington Post scribblers, what’s most obvious is our complete absence of character. And nothing has contributed to that absence as much as the obsession with curriculum which has owned every form of education for many decades, now.
Seminaries now train our pastors, so this obsession owns the church. Preachers aren’t pastors. They don’t feed and protect their sheep. They dispense Sunday morning lectures focussed on the mind, never the heart. Curriculum, not character. They abuse God’s Word in the service of flattering their sheep over their growth in knowledge, condemning those sheep to a lifetime of justification without sanctification. Grace without holiness.
No wonder those sitting under such lectures go out and lead and teach in Christian private schools and homeschools that do the same. Mind without heart. Curriculum without character.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Fatherhood is character, and nothing less.” quote=”Fatherhood is character, and nothing less.”]In Daddy Tried, I say over and over again that fatherhood is character, and nothing less. Without character, there is no fatherhood. Or better, fatherhood never rises above character. Sons are acorns that never fall far from the tree, and that tree is character.
Give me your heart, my son, and let your eyes delight in my ways. (Proverbs 23:26)
One other point and I’ll stop. This woman correspondent talks about the scandal of homeschooling parents who refuse to teach their children the glory of God’s creation. Some might view this failure as a matter of curriculum, but it’s actually a failure of character. If any educator (from the father on a walk with his sons and daughters to a mother reading her child a book to a prof lecturing his students) fails to profess the glory of God, it’s because he himself doesn’t know the glory of God; or worse, he has no love for God’s glory he exudes everywhere all the time to everyone.
After all, if the heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork, so do atoms and differential equations and poems and international economies and markets.
