I have attended a couple of Dr. David Noebel’s Summit Ministries week long conferences here in Australia. This ministry’s aim is to ground Christian students in the Christian worldview before they enter college. That way they will be prepared for the secular/atheistic/leftist propaganda they will be bombarded with at college. A couple of Dr. Noebel’s books I recommend are Understanding the Times and Clergy in the Classroom.

I don’t expect to be able to interact much in this post, but I’m trying to jump in here and there in the different threads.

Although I’m not advocating public schools, my understanding of the 80-90% falling away that we see with many of our Christian young people in America comes once they leave home and go off to secular college, where they are bombarded with both extreme worldliness (while out of the family setting) and extreme secularism.

Again, I’m not arguing a particular position here but rather interacting with your point. I would also question the spiritual depth of many of those who do fall away in terms of being adequately grounded in the Lord. (This, I think, is a point we would all agree with.)

The idea of a school model based on the voucher system originated in the USA first I believe. I don’t think it is that radical. Think of it as privatising the existing public system.

If I’m understanding you correctly, you would do away with a Public Education system that is common to all people in a society? That is certainly one solution to the dilemma, though quite a radical one. Are you actually pushing for this in your country?

You raise a valid question about how to determine what should be illegal in a Christian based society. I can’t remember off the top of my head where the quote originated, but it has been said: Not everything that is a sin should be illegal and not everything that is illegal is a sin.

In answering your question, one needs to first delineate the areas of different God given responsibility between the state and the individual Christian or the church. For example the state is charged with implementing justice (Romans 13), whilst the individual Christian is commanded to forgive. So the state, through its legal system and law courts, is required to punish the law breaker, whilst the individual Christian should forgive those who wrong him. There are different mandates so there are different responsibilities.

I agree there does seem to be some areas that are “blurred” as you say. One way of determining what should be criminalised and what shouldn’t, is to consider what can practically be enforced. For example consider pornography. It is primarily a sin of the mind, but no government can or should criminalise thoughts (although that is exactly what modern humanistic governments attempt to do with anti ‘hate speech’ laws), but they can make pornographic material illegal. Although the secularists would protest and claim that to censor porn is to curb liberty, the opposite is true since unlimited porn means more sexual crime which has a nett effect of reducing the liberty of a society.

Marcus,

In answer to your question, what you have to keep in mind is that there is no such thing as ‘secular’ or ‘neutral’ education. Education is always going to be presented within a worldview context. The problem we have in the west today is that we are basically a post-Christian society. In Australia, as I’m sure is true of most of the western world, our public schools are not ‘neutral’ or ‘secular’, they are teaching the religion of secular/evolutionary humanism. The facts of the world are presented within a naturalistic context/framework. So what to do with public schools given that the west is now so pluralistic? My answer is to abolish the present state run school system and replace it with an education voucher system that gives parents more flexibility to choose schools. In other words, fully privatise the education system.

In several of his messages, I’ve heard Dr. Brown quote from the New England Primer, I think it’s called. That is a good example of how to incorporate Christianity into education I think. I think it’s necessary for a Christian school to teach about evolution and the Koran, to use your example, but only because it is necessary to know what others believe and why we don’t believe that. The bottom line is this – there is no such thing as a neutral education. I hope this goes some way towards answering your question.

What are your views on religion in public schools? Should the Bible be taught? If so, in what style (as fact, or literature, objectively studied as a religious text)? Would you be okay with teaching the Koran? If so, would you want the Koran and the Bible taught in the same way?

1) You stated, “so a Christian based government should never legislate to make church attendance (to give an example) compulsory or have laws against apostasy in the way that Islam does.”

So, where is the line drawn? I’m not even sure where exactly I stand on this issue. But, where is the line drawn between “beliefs” and “outward moral compliance”. Don’t you think it’s kind of blurred? I mean, I obviously know the difference in definition, but the difference in implication.

Maybe I’m confusing myself. Do you care to clarify? Thanks.

Glenn

But you present a false dichotomy here. It’s not a matter of legislating religious beliefs. It’s a matter of legislating for outward moral compliance, not for what people should believe. The concept of non-compulsion in religious belief comes from Jesus’ teaching after all, so a Christian based government should never legislate to make church attendance (to give an example) compulsory or have laws against apostasy in the way that Islam does.

The essay by Rushdoony that I posted above explains much of this.

Let me ask you this, if a nation’s laws are not based on God’s moral standard, then upon what should they be based?

That, Ewan, is the hard place on one side of my dilemma. (The other being a government that legislates religious beliefs as such, something that will probably end up persecuting the true Church, and instituting man-made religion that will hinder authentic faith).

If a country’s constitution was based upon the Koran, it would indeed be an Islamic Theocracy. This is because in Islam there is no separation between church and state (or mosque and state in the case of Islam). Under an Islamic theocracy the religious leaders are also the leaders of the government. Not so under a system of pluralistic democracy where the morality of the state is Christian morality. There is a separation between the church and the state which is a concept derived from the very words of Jesus as I said above.

It appears you have a very broad definition of theocracy. Even Israel in the time of the monarchy was not a true theocracy because the King and the High Priest were not the same person, but the nation was or was supposed to be governed by God’s moral standard. In our democratic system, laws can be based on Judeo-Christian morality without it meaning we have a theocracy. The term “Christian theocracy” is really an oxymoron. The proper term for the view that man’s laws should be based on the Bible is ‘theonomy’ whereas the view that man gets to make up his own rules without reference to any external absolute moral standard is ‘autonomy’.

Let me ask you this, if a nation’s laws are not based on God’s moral standard, then upon what should they be based?