Education is a hot topic around the country this year. It’s no longer about testing and accountability, but about curriculum itself. Although there’s an additional level of complication with the disagreement over why different groups have different outcomes. We no longer know, if we ever did, what to measure or how to measure it. Should we engineer outcomes so that all groups are the same? And how do we test for that, if we test at all?
One of the root causes of the problem is that there’s a big disagreement on what the point of education actually is. It started fairly simply, with two principal points of view: acquiring information or learning how to think. For a long time, the prevailing opinion was that children could learn to think logically and to communicate clearly, independent of the value of the information they were actually working with. The classic book on the subject, if you’re interested, is E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy. Hirsch shows that you cannot think or communicate unless you have adequate raw material to work with. Of course this was a reaction to the limited value of simply stuffing children’s heads with facts. As usual, what was needed was not either/or, but both/and.
But then the argument got heated up, with arguments over the curriculum itself, with the classics of Western Civilization being demoted in favor of cultural diversity. Since then, demotion became disapproval, and is now demonization. In many places, the purpose of education seems to be to replace Western Civilization with something else altogether, and “dead white males,” particularly straight ones, being the enemy. What is the line between indoctrination and education? In the first, facts – independently verifiable data – don’t carry much weight. Acquiring facts - which used to be a goal - has been replaced with acquiring the right opinions. Indoctrination is about ideology, and ideology uses emotion to control people who haven’t been taught to think, or who have gotten out of the habit.
A similar reaction against knowledge-based religion took place last century among Christians. Multiple polls have shown that although many Americans believe in God, they don’t know who God is. One survey of 1,037 adults found that 30% described themselves as “spiritual” but not interested in attending church. “I can go on a 40 mile bike ride and get as much from it as I can from going to church,” Stephen Kelley of Brooksville, Fla., a onetime Roman Catholic, told USA Today. “Nature to me is what God is all about. It’s a renewal.” About 54% of respondents said they are religious, but 45% of those said they are more likely to follow their own instincts than denominational teachings. “People are saying, ‘I have faith, I believe in God, but I don’t believe in church,” Joan Brown Campbell of the National Council of Churches said. That can lead to ignoring traditional religious beliefs. For example, 79% said they believe God will decide who goes to heaven or hell, but 44% said that atheists, if they are good people, will enter heaven. Many churches now hold “pride” events for what is called the LGBTQ community, forgetting that pride is one of the seven deadly sins. Recently, a Lutheran church in Minnesota recited something called “The Sparkle Creed,” structured like the Apostles’ Creed but denying its content at every point.
Do-it-yourself religion isn't the issue in the more conservative denominations. When I was a new Christian, the Evangelical Free Church was still heavy into Bible study and rote memorization, and what people had to be warned about more often than not was that knowing the Bible was no substitute for following Christ. Somehow a lot of the people who knew the Bible best seemed to take it to head rather than to heart. But Mark Noll in The Closing of the Evangelical Mind warns that even as church membership in evangelical churches soars, the emphasis has switched from knowing the Bible to having a personal relationship with Jesus. Whether it’s a cause or an effect of the dilution of Bible teaching is anyone’s guess, but more and more the emphasis seems to be on feeling rather than thinking, on warm fuzzies and mountain-top experiences than sound doctrine. But just like in the education debate, what’s needed isn’t either/or but both/and. And Christianity has a real intellectual content -including facts - and requiring effort and discernment.
Just like your car needs both a steering wheel and a gas tank (among other things), so your faith needs both head knowledge and heart commitment. Love for Jesus fills your tank, gets you going and keeps you moving, but your head tells you where to go and keeps you from running over cliffs or into swamps.
There’s a popular saying among pastors, “They won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” It’s true. It’s Biblical. It is, in fact, a one-sentence summary of 1 Cor 13:1-3:
“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.”
But it doesn’t matter how much you care if you aren’t teaching them what they need to know. Or to be more direct about it, it doesn’t matter how much I care if I’m not teaching you what you need to know. The apostle James wrote about this in his letter to the church in Jerusalem: "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness." [Jas 3:1]
The book of Hosea is a book about unfaithfulness. God commands the prophet Hosea to act out a parable, to illustrate God’s relationship with the faithless nation of Israel, by marrying a woman whose reputation was shady, at best. We don’t know for sure whether she was a prostitute for religious reasons, honoring the fertility goddess by offering herself to worshipers at the shrine, or for economic ones. But we do know that she was unfaithful to Hosea, even though he kept going after her, forgiving her, and bringing her home. In this way, God hoped to make it clear to Israel exactly how much pain she caused God by her chronic and incurable faithlessness. As we know, it did not work.
In Chapter 4, God calls the people Israel to account. It’s a classic prophetic form, presented as a lawsuit in four parts, laying out the complaints God has against his people. Today’s text focuses on the first two sections, the lesser charge against the land and the people, along with the evidence condemning them, and then the charge against the leaders, whose fault it is.
Listen to the charges.
"...YHWH has an indictment against the inhabitants of the land. There is no faithfulness or loyalty, and no knowledge of God in the land. Swearing, lying, and murder, and stealing and adultery break out; bloodshed follows bloodshed." [Hos 4:1-2]
Does any of this ring a bell with you? Whenever I read these prophetic books, I feel as though I’m reading yesterday’s newspaper.
In a survey conducted a few years ago by Who’s Who Among American High School Students, 80 percent of high achieving high schoolers admitted to having cheated at least once; half said they did not believe cheating was necessarily wrong. Ninety-five percent of the cheaters said they have never been caught [U.S. News & World Report, 11/22/99]. Since 1960, total crimes have increased by more than 300%. Illegitimate births have increased more than 400%. Teenage suicide has more than tripled.
"Therefore the land mourns, and all who live in it languish; together with the wild animals and the birds of the air, even the fish of the sea are perishing." [Hos 4:3]
As prosperous as the country is, somehow we all know that something is wrong. Solutions range from teaching tolerance to posting the Ten Commandments in our schools. Fingers are pointed, and accusations are hurled.
In Hosea’s day, God identified the culprits. "...Let no one contend, and let none accuse, for with you is my contention, O priest." [Hos 4:4] If the parallels between Hosea’s day and our own hold, and I think they do, the failures of our society reflect the failure of the church to teach the Scriptures and uphold them as sound instruction for daily life.
"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children." [Hos 4:6]
Which one of our candidates recently said that when faced with a major life decision he always asked himself what Jesus would do? That’s a good rule... but too many people have a picture of Jesus that is sentimental rather than accurate. Jesus loves me, this I know... but he also drove the money-changers out of the temple, warned his followers that few would enter the narrow gate, and talked a great deal about the consequences of half-hearted commitment. Jesus was a very tough-minded man who didn’t shrink from confrontation when someone was heading in the wrong direction.
Does Jesus have an opinion on legalizing marijuana? On anti-ballistic missile defense systems? On redistricting? On taxing capital gains? Thinking Biblically about contemporary issues is not easy. One Jewish senator told the press that the fifth commandment, about honoring your father and mother, required him to support a federal program to cover prescription drugs for our elderly. Is that good theology? Do good economics and good theology go together? What does the Bible teach about the issues facing us today, and how do you go about applying it?
As we consecrate our Sunday School teachers, I challenge you to consider the proposition that no solution to our social problems will have any long-term good effect unless it is solidly based on Scripture. We may be rich, we may be entertaining ourselves into a blissful stupor, but we will run ourselves right off of the cliff of history unless we make a radical commitment not only to loving the Living Word, but knowing the written Word.
"They shall eat, but not be satisfied; they shall play the whore, but not multiply; because they have forsaken YHWH to devote themselves to whoredom. Wine and new wine take away the understanding." [Hos 4:10-11]
Because there will be a test. God will hold us accountable.
