As Christian educators, it is important for us to reflect on these difficult questions from a theological and biblical perspective. In this case, what we think about humans will dictate to a large extent how we educate them. One of the advantages of the Christian intellectual tradition is that it offers a portrait of what it means to be human that is amenable with many of the insights of various perspectives. In fact, rightly understood, Christianity functions as the foundational framework in which these insights make the most sense when they are true. As C.S. Lewis wrote, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” In this case, Christianity equips us to view humans as Homo sapiens, spiritual beings, individual selves, and members of society seeking justice, even if they are not reducible to just one of these definitions.

In this blog, I want to share some ideas for how teachers can educate their students with a Christian worldview in a secular age. Part of what it means to live in a secular age is that our students our growing up within a marketplace of competing worldviews, rather than on a service line with a single product. If our students are going to think Christianly, then, they must not only be taught Christian ideas. They must learn how to carefully scrutinize ideas from differing worldviews with the aim to discern the truth. The starting point for this task, I want to suggest in this blog, is possessing a robust doctrine of revelation.

Grounded in God’s Self-Revelation

The foundation for all of theology is the doctrine of revelation. This is the idea that our knowledge of God is possible only because God first revealed himself to us. Without revelation, there is no theology. In the modern era, people tried to relocate the source of theology from God’s self-revelation to other places. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), for example, grounded theology in morality. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) pointed to an inner sense of absolute dependence. These approaches, as well as other attempts in history and psychology, led only to anthropocentric substitutes for a robust God-centered approach. For theology to avoid being reduced to anthropology, the discipline must be grounded in God’s self-revelation.

Theologians typically divide revelation into two types: general and special. The source of general revelation is the natural world and the source of special revelation is holy scripture. In the case of general revelation, as humans reflect on the sheer majesty and order of creation, they cannot help themselves but intuit there is a numinous force behind it all. John Calvin (1509-1564) famously called this intuition the sensus divinitatis, that is, the “sense of the divine.” He writes,

There is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has planted in all men a certain understanding of divine majesty.

John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), ed. John McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, Book I, Chapter 3, Section 1

Calvin believed that God hard-wired into human beings an awareness of the supernatural, a reality beyond what lies immanently before us. Admittedly, those of us living in the 21st century might question Calvin’s assumption that all humans possess this awareness of God. After all, with self-professed atheists alive among us, it seems that the modern era has undergone some form of immanentization, “the process by which meaning, significance, and fullness are sought within an enclosed, self-sufficient, naturalistic universe without any reference to transcendence” (James K.A. Smith, How (Not) to be Secular (Eerdmans, 2014), p. 141). In other words, it seems that an enclosure has been erected, making it possible for some people to lack, or minimally suppress, any natural awareness of God’s existence.

Whether our world today is fully buffered from an awareness of transcendence or not, as Christian parents and educators, there are practical ways we can proactively cultivate the sensus divinitatis in our students. We can shape their religious imaginations through telling them Bible stories and have them respond with narration. We can integrate their minds, hearts, and souls with beauty through worshipping in song together in community. And we can teach them to pray with reverence and sincerity by setting a strong example of habitual prayer in the home and at school.

The Grace Common to All

In the reformed tradition, general revelation about God connects to an even broader concept: common grace. This is the idea that although humanity is fallen, God did not abandon us completely. If he did, the goodness we see around us would not even be possible. Instead, in response to the Fall, God bestowed upon the world a grace that would prevent it from going off the tracks completely and immediately. This grace is common to all peoples, cultures, and civilizations. It is the reason goodness, justice, truth, or beauty is possible in a post-Eden world in the first place. 

It is precisely the doctrine of common grace which permits Christian, classical educators to mine non-Christian sources for objective truth. According to this doctrine, it is possible for people groups outside of God’s chosen people to encounter real knowledge, that is, truth, about the world. Rather than shun this understanding, Christians should view it as a gracious gift of God.

In On Christian Teaching, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) uses the analogy of Israel plundering the gold of the Egyptians during their exodus to illustrate how Christians can plunder the truth discovered by non-Christian thinkers. Augustine writes,

Similarly all the branches of pagan learning contain not only false and superstitious fantasies…but also studies for liberated minds which are more appropriate to the service of the truth, and some very useful moral instruction, as well as the various truths about monotheism to be found in their writers.

On Christian Teaching (Oxford, 1999), trans. R.P.H. Green, Book II, Ch. 40

Here Augustine reassures us that we are not “secularizing” the faith when we grow in understanding through non-Christian sources. This insight is particularly applicable today with the vast array of emerging disciplines, ranging from positive psychology to neuroscience, but also with more traditional disciplines like biology or history. Rather than viewing these sources with suspicion, we should train our students to analyze them with a biblical worldview, mining for truth that comports to God’s Word.

As our students navigate the complexities of the modern world, complete with its array of religious and secular options, we need to provide them with the skills they need to carefully “plunder the gold and silver.” The most promising way to do so is through training in the liberal arts, the tools of learning. It is not enough to teach them the factual information they need for an upcoming test. Nor is it enough to replace intellectual skills with practical ones. Don’t get me wrong–students need to learn how to make a personal budget and conduct their lives with financial prudence. But if our students are going to be Christians in a secular world, what they truly need is to be equipped intellectually to navigate an age of contested belief.

Belief Leading to Understanding

There is much more that could be said on this topic, but let me close with this. It is common in the academy today to assume that a naturalistic starting point is a neutral one. That is, scholars should assume in their studies that the natural world is all there is and they should therefore conduct their research in light of this guiding principle. But what I want to suggest is that if Christianity is true, then religious belief cannot so easily be set aside. The doctrine of revelation, coupled with the concept of common grace, does not permit us this option. Rather, when men and women come to believe in God’s existence and the gospel of Jesus Christ, their intellectual framework itself goes through a conversion. A naturalistic premise is as dogmatic as a religious one is in our secular age. As parents and educators, then, we must unapologetically raise our students in the spirit of Augustine: “I believe in order to understand.” May our students believe, and through this belief, truly understand the world around them.

Note: For those interested in a deeper dive into religious epistemology and the idea that religious belief can be justified apart from evidential inference, I would direct you to Knowledge and Christian Belief (Eerdmans, 2015) by Alvin Plantinga.

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The greatest liability of education is an undue focus on the intellect. One of the chief concerns teachers have when they plan their lessons is the conveyance of knowledge. This is indeed an important aspect of teaching. But this is not the only aspect of teaching and perhaps actually not the most important, despite the fact that the intellect or mind would seem to be the chief organ we’re concerned with in education. This misunderstanding of our educational aims has the potential to misalign our goals and strategies as educators.

In previous posts, I have shown how a focus on intellectual knowledge has been the chief concern of educational thinkers and policy makers over the past several decades, who boil down the intellect to standards of intellectual achievement measured by standardized testing. Don’t get me wrong, the intellect needs to be trained and it is a lofty goal for educators to train the minds of our young ones.

The point I will make here, though, is that there is so much more to a person than just their intellect, and that it is essential for educators to consider the whole person if we are to properly align our goals and strategies. If the mind is not the only organ of learning, then we do our students a disservice by only training that organ. As we explore what it means to educate the whole person, we will draw upon the wisdom of ancient and modern thinkers as they express the power of habit training.

“With All Your Heart, Soul, Mind and Strength”

When we speak about the whole person, what do we mean? Let us consider the human person from a biblical perspective. Human beings are embodied souls. The concept of imago Dei in Genesis 1:26-27 means there is a spark of divinity that resides within each individual person. The embodiment of this divine spark means, however, that we are physical creatures, existing temporally, regulated by the laws of our natural universe. The imago Dei connects us to our creator such that our soul’s greatest desire is to relate to God. The Hebrew Bible expresses this in terms of a law:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deut. 6:5)

This tripartite expression of our personhood considers three organs: heart, soul, and body. This tripartite division, though, is not as cut and dried as we might want. Ancient thinkers as well as Christian theologians have noted the will, conscience, intuition, reason, imagination, emotion and, yes, the intellect as other constituent parts of our being. Grappling with what we are and what we are made of is not a straightforward exercise. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 6:5 in Mark 12:30 and includes an interesting word:

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The mind has now been added to the list. Matthew and Luke condense the list back down to three – soul, mind and strength – combining heart and mind as synonyms for the same organ. The biblical testimony is that we are complex creatures, multifaceted, resonant with our Creator, and fit with diverse organs that operate a wide array of human functions.

In his book You Are What You Love, James K. A. Smith connects our multifaceted nature to learning. He writes:

Every approach to discipleship and Christian formation assumes an implicit model of what human beings are. While these assumption usually remain unarticulated, we nonetheless work with some fundamental (though unstated) assumptions about what sorts of creatures we are—and therefore what sorts of learners we are. If being a disciple is being a learner and follower of Jesus, then a lot hinges on what you think ‘learning’ is. And what you think learning is hinges on what you think human beings are. In other words, your understanding of discipleship will reflect a set of working assumptions about the very nature of human beings, even if you’ve never asked yourself such questions.

Smith, You Are What You Love, 2-3

What Smith enables us to see is that our model of learning and discipleship hinges on our model of human nature. If we fundamentally think of human beings as physical creatures, our model of teaching will be like training. If we fundamentally think of human beings as intellectual, our model for teaching becomes knowledge transfer. Smith challenges the latter of these understandings of human beings, noting that an intellectual model of “assumes that learning (and hence discipleship) is primarily a matter of depositing ideas and beliefs into mind-containers” (3). One might expect Smith to draw upon James for support (“I will show you my faith by my works”), but he actually turns to Paul, quoting his prayer in Philippians 9-11. The key phrase for him is “that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight.” We can note along with Smith that the order is not that knowledge may abound, although the mind is not far behind. Instead it is that love may abound.

There is a very different model of the human person at work here. Instead of the rationalist, intellectualist model that implies, “You are what you think,” Paul’s prayer hints at a very different conviction:

“You are what you love.” | What if, instead of starting from the assumption that human beings are thinking things, we started from the conviction that human beings are first and foremost lovers?”

Smith, You Are What You Love, 7

For Smith, the heart better models the seat of learning and discipleship than the mind. This shift in models for learning means that education is not merely knowledge work, but the cultivation of affections. In order to cultivate the whole person in this fuller understanding of what it means to be a human being, habit training becomes an essential tool for learning.

Common Grace Habits

Training the heart comes by instilling habits. This concept, though, has often raised questions in the minds of Christian parents and educators. We can only love because he first loved us. The work of justification and sanctification comes through the work of the Holy Spirit. Isn’t habit training a circumvention of God’s work in our lives?

Jason has written previously on habit training, connecting the dots between moral virtues as expressed by Plato and Aristotle and the Christian doctrine of common grace. His point was so well made that it deserves rearticulation here. He makes the point that even though human beings are born fallen, depraved and sinful,

“human society would completely fly off the rails if God did not also grant the grace of moral virtue, distributed generally (i.e. in common) to people, regardless of their spiritual condition.”

Jason goes on to distinguish the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which we would say are “imparted by the Holy Spirit as a result of true repentance,” and the cardinal virtues (such as courage, temperance and prudence), which are cultivated by habit or practice. We hear similar refrains from Aristotle and from the wisdom tradition in the Old Testament. In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes, “The virtues (αἱ ἀρεταί) on the other hand we acquire by first having actually practised them (ἐνεργήσαντες).” (Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25; trans. H. Rackham).

A similar refrain echoes in Psalm 111:10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practice it have a good understanding.” Or consider Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The wise and virtuous person acquires good habits through training or practice.

Returning to our theme, it is noteworthy that virtue and wisdom are acquired through a process that is fairly physical in nature. Constant repetition, like a gymnast practicing a routine or a baseball player repeatedly swinging a bat, is the impression these passages leave us with. This is far more effective than a mere appeal to the intellect by way of a lecture.

Christ Our Habitude

Building on Jason’s work regarding the connection between habit training and common grace, I would like to make the case for habit training as likewise essential to our understanding of saving grace. It is a common misunderstanding of the doctrine of justification by faith apart from works to think that human effort has no place in God’s salvific work. One might call upon James to make this point (“I will show you my faith by my works”), but we can find this point made repeatedly in Paul.

In 1 Timothy 4, Paul exhorts Timothy to train disciples in the faith, “being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed.” We might tend to focus on Paul’s injunction in 4:11, “Command and teach these things.” This is quickly followed by Paul telling Timothy to devote himself to “the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.” Here is the appeal to the intellect, right? However, we should examine the advice Paul gives Timothy leading up to this command.

Paul says in 4:7, “train yourself for godliness” equating this to bodily training in 4:8, noting that training in godliness is of greater importance to bodily training. Paul notes that we toil and strive in this pursuit of godliness, secure in the “hope set on the living God, who is the Savior of all people, especially of those who believe.” (4:10). So it is not actually an appeal to the intellect that Paul advises, but that Timothy should command and teach this very physical pursuit of godliness. Timothy himself should be an example in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity, laying out the pathway his disciples should follow in their pursuit of godliness. This is a very active faith.

Paul’s advice to Timothy resonates with what he writes to the Philippians. Here we can clarify the uselessness of works or effort as it relates to merit. Paul writes in Philippians 3:9 that he is “found in him, not having a righteousness of [his] own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith.” Human works are worthless in terms of meriting salvation. God saves based on the work of Christ, which is appropriated through faith, not by works.

However, Paul goes on to describe a faith that is very active. “I press on,” he writes in 3:12, “to make it my own.” Paul is making a habitation in Christ. When a person is justified, they now live “in Christ.” We take on the habits that are consistent with Christ, training out the bad habits and training in the good habits so that our lives become more and more conformed to the image of Christ Jesus.

Christian discipleship according to Paul is a putting on of Christ Jesus. This is what it means to take up our cross daily. We become habituated through regularly reconnecting with the cross of Christ. Habit training as a spiritual exercise enable us to live in Christ, to have Christ as our habitude.

Daily Spiritual Habits

Education is not merely about training the intellect. Our exploration of theological concepts has assisted us in conceptualizing how habit training permeates the entirety of God’s grace in our lives. Education deals with the heart and soul as much as it deals with the mind. To that end I would like to briefly consider a number of daily habits worthy of consideration.

Pray always. That’s a tall order. How many of us faced with the immensity of constant prayer wind up never praying, even though we are intellectually committed to the benefits of prayer. Establishing a daily habit of prayer takes some planning. If you would like to grow in consistency of prayer, attach prayer to an already established habit. If you make coffee for yourself every morning, add prayer to that routine. Maybe brushing your teeth every evening is a solid habit. Build another habit on top of it by spending some time in prayer afterwards.

To form habits, one must be able to accomplish something regularly and consistently. So don’t set yourself a goal of an hour in prayer every day if you haven’t done five minutes consistently. Instead, set a small goal – like five minutes – that you know you can do automatically every time. You are likely to do more, but your small goal means you are more likely to follow through each time.

Gratitude has become a catchphrase in positive psychology these days. Yet Scripture calls us to give thanks regularly. For instance, steadfast prayer is coupled with thanksgiving in Colossians 4:2. In the rush of our daily routines, it can be difficult to pause and reflect on the good God has accomplished in our lives each and every day. Just like prayer, we can add a moment of thanksgiving into our daily routines.

There are many practices faithful Christians have found meaningful for their lives. Perhaps there’s a practice you feel called to make a regular part of your life. Personal habit training can be a means to a deeper walk with God in Christ.

If you would like to learn more about habit training, download my free eBook A Guide to Implementing Habit Training.

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As we’ve mentioned before (Aristotle and the Growth Mindset), while the great philosopher Aristotle doesn’t discount any of these factors in attaining excellence, he is more inclined to emphasize the importance of education and our personal habits.

Of course, as Christians, we attribute all of these factors to the providence of God and can relativize the importance of them by appealing to a heavenly hope. People may not have an equal shot at excellence in this life, whether in academics, sports, business or the arts, but it doesn’t ultimately matter in comparison with spiritual and eternal realities.

Intellectual and Moral Excellence: Where do they come from?

The situation gets trickier for us Christians when we think of moral virtue. Aristotle and the Greek philosophical tradition had one and the same word for these two ideas: excellence was virtue, and virtue was excellence. According to Aristotle there were two types of excellence:

Excellence [or virtue], then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence in the main owes its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral excellence comes about as a result of habit….

Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25 (trans. W. D. Ross)

Interestingly, Aristotle attributes the origin and development of intellectual excellence to teaching or instruction. While he doesn’t discount the role of heredity in academic attainment, he emphasizes the primary role of the long process of education. Intellectual virtue requires the accumulation of experience and knowledge over time through qualified teachers.

(Incidentally, I wonder what would happen in our schools if we actually took on board the liberal arts tradition’s insistence on the intellectual virtues as a chief goal of education…. We might have an educational renaissance on our hands.)

Moral excellence, on the other hand, Aristotle attributes to our habits or customs, those repeated practices that form in us character qualities or propensities to act in a certain way in a given situation. This idea is revolutionary for putting ball in the human court, as it were, and calling on individuals to reform themselves through building better habits, and parents to set their children up well through moral habituation. As he concludes the section cited above,

It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.

Plato had emphasized, as we might be inclined to, that moral virtue was a result of divine gift:

To illustrate, he tells Protagoras the charming account of a conversation between Hermes and Zeus. While Zeus is putting the finishing touches on his human creation, Hermes asks him if virtue is to be distributed among men like the gifts of the arts, unequally, with only a favored few receiving skills in medicine and in music. But Zeus resists this proposal and commands Hermes to distribute the gift of virtue to all men equally, ‘for cities cannot exist if a few only share in the virtues, as in the arts’ (Jowett 1969).

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility (24)

In a way this makes sense, since basic moral virtues (like fair dealings in business, general truthfulness, courageous action in warfare, hard work and perseverance) are the glue that holds society together. Without a general distribution of these qualities, no city-state could survive for very long. Civilization can only operate in a world where most of the time a good number of people have been divinely blessed with basic moral virtues.

Or course, it’s possible that divine gift and human responsibility are ultimately compatible, rather than opposites. Aristotle might have agreed with Plato and simply contended that divine gift manifested itself in the habit training of the citizenry to form basic levels of moral virtue in most people.

Moral Virtue a Result of Common Grace

When Christian students and teachers interact with Plato or Aristotle on the topic of moral virtue, in my experience, they tend to think primarily in terms of higher order spiritual virtues, like faith, hope and love, or else the absolute versions of these virtues, where all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But Aristotle and Plato had in mind the work-a-day world of the polis or city-state, and while they were certainly not hesitant to criticize the rampant human corruption they saw, they also noticed how often things tended to go right.

In this way, their discussions of moral virtue cohere with the Christian doctrine of common grace. Despite the reality and pervasiveness of human depravity and sin, the doctrine goes, human society would completely fly off the rails if God did not also grant the grace of moral virtue, distributed generally (i.e. in common) to people, regardless of their spiritual condition. This explains why unredeemed human beings, while still corrupt, are not nearly so bad and destructive as they could be.

For this reason, it’s probably helpful for us to differentiate between moral excellence and spiritual excellence, just as the medieval tradition did. In borrowing from the classical tradition of philosophy, medievals distinguished between the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, which could only be imparted by the Holy Spirit as a result of true repentance, and the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, temperance (or self control) and courage.

Not only is the doctrine of common grace helpful for answering questions about virtuous non-believers, it can help us in raising and educating the children of believers. In the classical Christian school movement there can tend to be some uneasiness about our ability to train our students in moral virtue as the classical tradition proposed and some modern educators still discuss today. We have a strong sense as Christians that only the Holy Spirit can change hearts and we tremble to tread too presumptuously on his domain.

With the doctrine of common grace in our minds, we can proceed forward boldly with the project of cultivating moral virtues in our children through the power of habit. (By the way I borrow the phrase “the power of habit” from Charles Duhigg’s incredible book, which I can’t recommend highly enough.)

The Power of Habit in Forming Moral Excellence

For Aristotle, habits are the primary determiner of character. I don’t have to quote his famous, “We are what we repeatedly do…. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” (By the way, does anyone ever give a citation for that? Where is it from? What translator?) Everyone already knows it, and hopefully we all have a sense of its power. The power of habit comes in its susceptibility to practice and development, like all other sports, arts or skills. This means that we can grow in moral excellence, and therefore have every reason to foster an Aristotelian growth mindset.

Moral virtues become the qualities of a person through active exercise of them. As Aristotle explains,

Excellences we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Nichomachean Ethics 2:1 or 1103a15-b25 (trans. W. D. Ross)

It’s hard to overstate how important the implications of this insight are for education. A few immediate applications come to mind. Procedures that allow or encourage cheating for the sake of grades are abhorrent because they form the habit of deceptive practices to get ahead in children. Motivators that operate primarily on students’ desire to be better than others or receive awards for achievement may be forming the vices of avarice and pride.

The customs and culture of a school or home are not a neutral factor in a child’s education, if moral excellence is our goal.

Another implication, unpacked by the English philosopher John Locke, is that children should not be taught by memorizing rules for conduct but by habit:

But pray remember, children are not to be taught by rules, which will always be slipping out of their memories. What you think necessary for them to do, settle in them by an indispensable practice as often as the occasion returns; and if it be possible, make occasions. This will beget habits in them, which, being once established, operate of themselves easily and naturally without the assistance of the memory.

Some Thoughts Concerning Education (40)

If you’ve ever experienced the failure of your precepts, whether as parent or teacher, to stick in the minds of children, then you know what Locke is talking about. “I forgot,” is about the most common excuse for misconduct of all. Locke invites us to view moral formation in a different light, by relying on the peaceable coaxing of habits. While difficult, because it requires a proactive presence and gentle encouragement beforehand, rather than the harsher but less labor-intensive scolding afterward, Locke’s path of habit training holds incredible promise.

Perhaps this sort of habit training, then, is part of what Paul was talking about when he commanded parents to “train their children in the discipline and nurture of the Lord.” Then Paul’s encouragement to fathers not to “provoke them to anger” or “exasperate them” could have had in mind the same sort of phenomenon that Locke mentioned just before the passage quoted above: parents heaping up rules and expectations for their children without giving them the practice and training they need, and then harshly punishing them for forgetting to perform them later on (39-40). All too often our attempts at discipline are merely an exercise in unrealistic expectations.

Of course, this isn’t a rejection of discipline and rules for children; the place of legitimate authority and obedience is a primary given of life. But the function of habit in the development of character and moral virtue provides the key backdrop that will prevent us from numerous abuses.

For more on Aristotle’s educational paradigm for today, check out my series on Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues replacing Bloom’s Taxonomy.

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