Eugene’s Response

March 24, 2009 by Eugene Clingman.

Greetings to all of you who have been following this discussion! Christian has kept me up to date somewhat verbally, but finally I had opportunity to read (or rather have read to me while I drove the car) your correspondence. Good input, and a topic worthy of energetic thought and action.

I would like to make a few comments here and also give each of you a preliminary invitation (time & date to be announced) to a theological discussion at our home in the next couple or so weeks.

I will attempt to respond in order from the oldest to the most recent comments in the two email trails I was forwarded by Christian.

David says, “I disagree that it is a sin to send your children to public school.” – I will defer a detailed response to this until the theological discussion where I invite all who come to bring their biblically based (verses, biblical examples, biblical patterns) to discuss the theology/worldview (worldview comes out of our theology) that prompts you to hold the position you do.

In the same paragraph David also comments about the responsibility of parents in educating their kids. This responsibility does not “require homeschooling” – Agreed! However it does require that they school them Christianly. Fathers are to bring their children up in the fear and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6). This N.T. passage contains the same principle God commanded His people in Deut. 6 of the O.T., but Deut. goes into more detail. Deut. tells us that from the time we get up to the time we go to bed we are to be raising our kids Christianly, and all the time in between, including when we are walking in the way. There is no time we are not to be inculcating in our kids the Christian worldview; “walking in the way” would exclude a ride to school on the yellow bus where young Christian children spend hours each week learning from the pagan (those who reject Christ) kids around them.

David commented that some government school parents are irresponsible and some homeschool parents are irresponsible. But this reality has no bearing on whether government schooling Christian kids is right or wrong.

David commented that he thinks sending Christian kids to government schools “is very risky”. He reasons cogently that sending kids to government school is like asking adults to spend 30 hours a week in strip clubs in order to give a Christian witness. He seems to say this action would be sin unless this was “done with good strategy, accountability, lots of prayer support…” I agree that those things are needed for adults to go into a risky environment where they will face people their own age. But this is not the case for children in the GS (government schools). They do not face other kids their own age (primarily) they face a system, curriculum, and teachers (not all) who oppose the knowledge of God at worst maliciously and blatantly and in its most benign form as simply ignoring the God in whose hand the life the child is held, He who is Lord over science for He is Creator, Lord over history for He is sovereign over the nations, Lord over mathematics for He is the Creator of logic and order, etc. The child not only faces extreme pressure to conform to everyone around them, but immense, though subtle at times, pressure from the teacher whose word is commonly held (they system and curriculum teach this idea) as more important than the parent’s.

To exclude God from the education of one’s child or to teach them by default or implication that God is somehow not central to all of life and living is indeed sin.

David says, “I also think that for a Christian family who Jesus tells to put their kids in public school, it would be a sin to homeschool.” Where does Jesus speak? Is it not first and primarily in the Word of God? Since the Bible teaches against giving our children into the hands of pagan educators as it does in precept, history, and command, will Jesus speak out of the air, or in the heart something different? He will not! He does not contradict Himself in what He has revealed from Genesis to Revelation by impressions, voices, or leadings. The question is a matter of bringing ones suppositions about the voices and impressions they are hearing and which they call the voice of God into conformity to the Word and knowledge of God in the Bible (2 Cor. 10:5).

Regarding James 4:17 which I believe Karen aptly quoted, there is also such a thing as “sins done in ignorance” (Hebrews 9:7) which Jesus graciously covers with His atonement, but which nonetheless is sin and which God is working in us to sanctify us day by day to conformity to Jesus (who by the way was never trained for a single hour in a Greek school/gymnasium).

David’s example of the foster child situation - He asks, “How many of you with a teenage daughter in the house would take in a foster teenage boy 3 years older than that girl?…also had a 6-year-old son (David) in the house?” He also tells us of the multiplied risks involved and how foolish it looked to other Christians. Well, I would submit that such a situation would indeed need discernment and the Lord’s leading. But nowhere in Scripture is a family prevented from ministering to an orphan because riskes are involved. Indeed, we are encouraged to minister to orphans, and it is assumed risks will be involved in doing so; we are called to lay our lives down for Christ and His cause. However, we are instructed from the beginning of the Bible to the end to “come out from among them and be separate” which sending vulnerable and impressionable children into GS is certainly not.

Please see my blog for my recent response to a pastor on the subject of government schooling of Christian children: www.blog.GranolaDelights.com.

I am grateful for the opportunity to be included in this discussion. I have clearly not commented on everything that could be commented. And the responses from Amy and Karen I thought were excellent. And Christian, well, I by God’s grace, am the proud father of Christian who I believe is justified in his passion and advocacy against GS.

I hope we may meet together and bring the Bible to bare on these things in a “theological discussion” which we will schedule in the near future. Does the Bible sustain the right of a parent to place their child under a pagan and god-hating education system such as we have in America? Or does God require, yes, require Christian parents to take every precaution to educate their children Christianly? Yes, to prepare them so that they in turn can go out as soldiers, mature, full of faith and Christian understanding of the world around them, fit to effect the world for Jesus?

With love and appreciation for each of you,
Eugene Clingman

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