09/02/2024
As young Christians, God called Christina and me to serve in a children’s ministry. We volunteered to help. They gave us the preschoolers Sunday school class. We were in entirely over our heads. And three weeks later, due to an upheaval on the staff, Christina and I were in charge of the ministry. We pretty much had a secular view of child-rearing as neither of us came from practicing Christian homes, and we both received our education in the state indoctrination camps. One saving bit of Providence: I took the major psychology intro in college, as I did for all general ed classes, a strange habit of mine, which I cannot explain, except that I am naturally curious and love learning. That psychology class disgusted me. Though still a pagan at the time, the prescribed treatment of human beings to acquire their scientific data horrified me.
I read the Bible through and through for four years before Christ converted my heart. I continued to study under Chuck Smith for three more years. I was fairly Biblically literate. I had read some Francis Schaeffer. Nonetheless, I had little practical ability to mine Scriptures for application to particular subjects. I began seeing the recurring theme of behavioral psychology in our Southern Baptist Sunday School curriculum. I thought, this can’t be right. We’re Bible-believing Christians! So I began to research all the available material I could find on Biblical Christian education. I was sorely disappointed in the books I acquired. They pretty much uniformly agreed that though we are Bible-believing evangelicals, the Bible is essentially silent on the subject of education, so we must be scientific. Science meant adverting to behaviorism. I said, that can’t be right. One of my deeper dives was into a fellow named Professor Lawrence Richards of Wheaton College. His constant resort was a Piaget, a reputedly Christian behaviorist. Still, it was behaviorism, and without real reference to Scripture.
What is wrong with behaviorism as a science? Without exhibiting much intellectual integrity or true understanding of the nature of science, only building on undeclared assumptions, behaviorism claims that mankind evolved over eons, determined by the environment. What we became, we could not alter in any substantial way. Nature hardwires our being. Thus, we can only observe what is. If we observe a Christian society, we may conclude that certain righteous behavior is normal, as perhaps in early permutations of the pseudo-science. But if we observe a tidal wave of sinful behavior moving toward a giant wave crest, we come to every different conclusions.
Psychology as a science, then, holds extremely limited usefulness, far less than most think. It can observe what is and systematically describe human condition as it observes. It cannot formulate what humanity ought to be except upon sinful relative observation or humanistic conjecture, so that what psychologists observe, they take as normal. Aberrant behavior is whatever sinners say is not acceptable. Such is not sound science. As we know, aberrant psychology isn’t what it used to be.
This is an absolutely false religion, now America’s mainstream, even in the institutional church. Hence, our counselors take their credentials from the state. For over twenty years, I polled every knowledgeable secondary Christian academic I met with the question: What is the theoretical basis for their school’s education department—a Bible psychology or a behavioral one? The uniform answer with one conditional exception was behavioral. Professor Walt Lewke and His associate Bob Hanna at Hillsdale College taught a Biblical view alongside the behavioral one required to maintain their credential. I think that dual practice is now gone.
I had remained at a loss for two years, until the Lord brought Marshall Foster, James B. Rose, Rosalie Slater and Vernal Hall into our lives. Later came R. J. Rushdoony and Martin Selbrede with needed theological grounding. The revelation they brought revolutionized our lives and determined our future. What I lacked were the Biblical tools of scholarship that would allow me to mine the Scriptures in a particular subject, in this case education. Documentation of the early American experience by the Christian history movement folks allow me the tools and a method by which I could delve the Scriptures for intelligent information. Not surprisingly, an important plank of this method is interpreting the Providence of God in history to discern successes or failures of thought and practice, and then take that inductive information back to Scripture for refinement or correction. You know tree by its fruit.
Thus for the forty-two years, my self-conscious determination is to bridge the proverbial gap between Biblical theory and practice, save what God requires in the divine disadvantage of faith. My constant observation is that the academic and practicing clergy possesses an abysmal ignorance or worse apathy over application. Therefore the church remains almost entirely stunted in its ability to do the work of the ministry, essentially because the pastors, teachers and prophets no longer themselves know how.
We possess those tools with decades of success at Biblical solutions in family, education, and virtually every subject. My book you kindly endorsed was an introductory example to such thinking. This work has proved itself accessible by the humblest learners, and successful. Yet, for the past twenty years or so, I have remained a voice largely crying in the wilderness. Getting over the hump toward bridging the theory and practice gap is an absolutely necessity if we will ever see restoration. It is within our grasp, but it is the hardest sell I know—in virtually every department of denominational and non-denominational Christianity.
We can never enjoy baseball while we merely learn about it, or watch others play. We must learn to play ourselves. Only then will we be able to teach others.
