Maintaining a Plausibility Structure for the New Cognitive Minority (Part Three)
CARL E. ZYLSTRA
(Part Three)
At least in the North American context, an alternative system of Christian educational schooling probably would be tolerated pretty well if it were not for one thing. “Sexual bigotry”, as it is often termed. “Homophobia”. “Cisgenderism”, “Transphobia”. Those are the accusations. In other words, what seemingly cannot be tolerated in the current intellectual milieu is any traditional Christian belief that binary sexuality as protected by marriage is a created norm to which all people, whether Christian or not, really ought to conform.
So when educators establish schools that, among other things, firmly inculcate a view of sexuality at odds with that of the dominant cultural consensus, well that raises the cultural alarms. Certainly any thought of using the common purse of tax dollars for support of such schools should be swept off the table. And challenges to continuing accreditation, athletic eligibility, tax deductible status, admissions standards, and hiring rights for such schools all are placed in the middle of the table.
In such a hostile environment wouldn’t it then make sense for biblically confessional schools to simply trim their sails a bit rather than continue to buck a view of sexuality with which the rest of culture has pretty much made its peace? Is maintaining a traditional biblical view sexuality such a big deal that it is worth being run off the educational playground of today’s Western culture?
Well, maybe going soft on this one issue would not be such a big deal – except for one thing. Namely, current arguments over the definition of human sexuality are, at their core, debates over the central issue of human identity that lies at the foundation of all true self-understanding. And nurturing such self-understanding clearly is – or at least ought to be – at the heart of Christian education.
The key question, then, facing Christian education is whether it will educate students to follow the biblical injunction to conform themselves to the image of God that he created in them. Or will Christian education join the growing mainstream of education that appears committed to nurturing students through a process wherein they are enabled to affirm an identity that they themselves have developed through their own individual self-effort and conforming only to their own internal desires.
And so it seems to me that it is exactly here that we arrive at the key issue facing Christian education today. In the matter of human sexuality, both culturally (1) and pedagogically, we have reached the core dividing line of antithesis between the cognitive minority (nurtured by schools established on a biblical foundation) and the dominant cognitive majority (fostered by educational institutions in which creation of one’s own self is the ultimate value).
After all, beginning in Genesis 1.27 the core of human identity as reflecting the image of God is expressed most fundamentally in the male female marriage relationship. So too in his most famous (but not only) excoriation of violations of that relationship, the Apostle Paul reprises Genesis 1 as he opens his letter to Roman Christians living in Pagan Central of his day. He reminds them that conforming to that fundamental creational structure of human sexuality is at the heart of expressing the core purpose of humanity, namely, to reflect the image of the God who created all things.
Now it is understandable that Christian educational institutions find it very tempting simply to fold on this issue of human sexuality. After all, what will it hurt if we have a few teachers, professors, or staff members whose lives don’t quite measure up to traditional sexual standards? And if our goal is to nurture children, why would we want to create tension and stress in their lives over their understanding of their own sexual self-identity? Why not then recognize that everyone has different ideas about human sexuality and that our little schools certainly aren’t going to settle those issues – so why not just create a welcoming diverse, equitable and inclusive environment for all who would want to participate in our learning community?
The problem is that to conform to the dominant culture on this issue would require biblically convictional educational institutions to abandon the very reason they exist in the first place -- to nurture an alternative plausibility structure for the rising generation of the now cognitively minority Christian community.
After all, does not everyone in the current cultural conflicts concur that the most fundamental role of education is to nurture the next generation to be able to flourish in living out their identity. The only real point at debate is whether living out that identity is self-created by the student or designed for them by a loving creator God.
Make no mistake. This is no simply a matter of helping students “find their identity.” Nor is it a matter of discovering or even choosing their own sexual identity. Indeed, the dominant world view today insists that education be structured to assist students in creating their own self-image. But that very thought, at least in biblically Christian thought turns out to be, quite literally diabolical. According to biblical thought, the principle of asserting the right to create your own self-image was first articulated by the serpent itself in the Garden of Eden. In the Christian narrative, it is the very devil himself who convinced the human race not to live out of the identity that God had made for them but rather to “be like God” and create their own identity.
The central educational task, therefore, at least from a biblical point of view, is to enable the emerging generation to understand that their fulfillment lies in conforming to the image of the God who created them. And that includes living out the sexuality identity that the creation account in Genesis declares is at the core of human flourishing.
It is all too often overlooked that the biblical statement of the creation of humanity (“in the image of God he created them”) is followed immediately by an appositive statement regarding binary human sexuality (“male and female he created them”). It certainly ought not to be missed that in Hebrew literary structure (and English too for that matter) an appositive is meant to restate and further define the statement which it follows. And while innumerable dissertations and treatises have been written seeking to describe exactly what this Imago Dei really is, it should never be overlooked that the only definition of the “image of God” given explicitly in the biblical text is a reference to the binary sexuality of male and female.
Similarly the creation account in Genesis 2 describes a flourishing creation in the original Edenic paradise. And it concludes with a sexually explicit recap of the role played by a flourishing binary human sexuality within marriage as a foundation for that flourishing development of the entire creation.
And is that not exactly why Christian education exists – to enable students to take their divinely assigned place in nurturing such flourishing of all creation? Simply put, true education exists to enable students to learn to be flourishing developers of a flourishing creation. And if so, then Christian educators and administrators can never compromise on the explicitly biblically described foundation for such flourishing – binary human sexuality protected by and expressed in the marriage relationship.
I have posited in these recent essays that the purpose of specifically Christian education is to sustain a plausibility structure for the community of those who will seek to live biblically as a cognitive minority in a culture dominated by those who have little time for – and increasingly vigorous antipathy toward – such biblically based ways of thinking.
As a prior series of essays pointed out (2), both in global and historical terms, the dominance of Christian thought in Western culture has always been an anomaly. Certainly neither Old or New Testament believers became a cognitive majority in the world in which they lived. What Western Christians then are experiencing, as argued in these blog posts, is simply a return to historical norms.
Clearly Christian education has a significant role to play in sustaining the new cognitive minority community. And in doing so, the mission of convictionally Christian education is to develop and maintain a plausibility structure of alternative biblically based thought. However, it seems clear, at least to me, that in doing so, Christian educators really can never allow any compromise on the core principle of biblically defined human sexuality, no matter how tempting that may be.
And that’s not – or at least should not be -- because of outdated prudishness. Instead the critical issue of human sexuality in the Christian educational process comes about because this really is the core dividing issue between today’s cognitive majority and Christianity’s newly found status as a cognitive minority in Western thought.
Christian education has always had at its core the nurture of students in understanding their identity as carriers of the image of God. Indeed such self-understanding lies at the foundation of human flourishing. Just because convictionally biblical Christians are (once more) a cognitive minority is no reason to now abandon those biblically described structures of human sexuality designed to protect and express that that image.
To do so would be to do nothing less than besmirch the honor of the very One who imprinted that image on the students we serve. Perhaps even worse, from an educational point of view, we will be robbing those students of the core privilege of their identity -- to reflect the glory of the One who created them to enjoy and carry His own image forever.
(1) Cf also Carl R. Trueman’s insights in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self as referenced in the earlier essays of this series
(2) Cf my earlier series of posts on this site that describe the cultural shift from, in Stephen Smith’s terms, “The Tiber to the Potomac” and especially the role that the battle over sexuality played out in that history. See Christian Education as a Cognitive Minority (Part 3)
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Carl Zylstra serves as the Vice Chair of the IACE Board of Directors. He is the past president of Dordt University.