What is Christian Education?

Essay by Tom Thistleton, Board Member and Founder of Mars Hill Academy
The purpose of this essay is to present a Biblical defense of distinctively Christian education over and against the decidedly secular character of most education today. Specifically, it endeavors to demonstrate to the reader that a Christian school (or a home school) is the ideal place for this Biblical approach to occur.

The underlying assumption of this essay is that Christianity is true and that all truth is God's truth. As Christian theologian and philosopher Francis Schaeffer has said:

True spirituality covers all of reality. There are things the Bible tells us as absolutes which are sinful -- which do not conform to the character of God. But aside from these the Lordship of Christ covers all of life and all of life equally. In this sense there is nothing concerning reality that is not spiritual.

Related to this, it seems to me, is the fact that many Christians do not mean what I mean when I say Christianity is true or Truth. They are Christians and they believe in, let us say, the truth of creation, the truth of the virgin birth, the truth of Christ's miracles, Christ's substitution death, and His coming again. But they stop there with these and other individual truths.

When I say Christianity is true I mean it is true to total reality -- the total of what is, beginning with the central reality, the objective existence of the personal-infinite God. Christianity is not just a series of truths but TRUTH -- Truth about all of reality.