The Authority of Holy Scripture: Commitments for Christian Higher Education in the Evangelical Tradition
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
—Deuteronomy 6:4–9
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. For by me your days will be multiplied, and years will be added to your life.
—Proverbs 9:10–11
And he [Jesus] said to him. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
—Matthew 22:37–39
The universities need a sound and thorough reformation. I must say so no matter who takes offence. Everything that the papacy has instituted or ordered is directed solely towards the multiplication of sin and error.... Nothing could be more wicked, or serve the devil better, than unreformed universities.... But I would not advise anyone to send his son to a place where the Holy Scriptures do not come first. Every institution where the Word of God is not taught regularly must fail.... I greatly fear that the universities are wide-open gates leading to hell, as they are not diligent in training and impressing the Holy Scripture on the young students.
—Martin Luther, An Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality, 1520
Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of our- selves.... [It] is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he have previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. For such is our innate pride we always seem to ourselves just, and upright, and wise, and holy, until we are convinced, by clear evidence, of our injustice, vile- ness, folly, and impurity. Convinced, however, we are not, if we look to ourselves only, and not to the Lord also—He being the only standard by the application of which this conviction can be produced.
—John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1559
Introduction
The Protestant Reformers Martin Luther (1483–1546), John Calvin (1509–1564), and their evangelical colleagues taught that Holy Scripture should play a determinative role in any form of education, whether Christian or otherwise.[1] As advocates of sola Scriptura, Luther and Calvin firmly believed the Bible to be inspired by the Holy Spirit and to reveal divine, fully trustworthy doctrine and teachings about who God is, who we are, and what the world is. Scripture, the central focus of which is Christ, constitutes a norma normans (“the determining norm”). It rules over all human opinions, church traditions, church doctrines, creeds, and academic disciplines (“science,” or natural philosophy; liberal arts). Infallible Scripture is not “normed” or shaped by any of them. Put another way, the Bible reveals reality from God’s perspective. Infallible Scripture is to interpret infallible Scripture.[2]
The Reformers also believed the Bible’s teaching that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Moreover, they agreed that Jesus’s commands to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” and to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matt. 22:37–39) constitute the basis of Christian education. In the next centuries, the founders of Lutheran, Anglican, and Calvinist schools—whether in Germany, Switzerland, England, France, the United Provinces (the Netherlands), Scandinavia, the American colonies, or elsewhere—often emphasized aspects of the Reformers’ thinking about education.
Today we live in a cultural age far removed from that of the Reformers. “Postmodernist” academicians tell us that “knowledge” differs according to the respective communities from which it issues. They deny the validity of any metanarrative that purports to give the ultimate meaning of life or history. For them, the one truth we can affirm with certitude is that truth does not exist. They ignore the inherent self-defeating contradiction ruining this premise. While claiming texts are open to endless and thus multiple interpretations, they often want their readings of particular texts to be deemed the acceptable ones.[3] Other academicians stipulate that “the methodological postulate of naturalism” must be the governing principle guiding the pursuit of “objective knowledge.” Only if this atheistic postulate is assumed, they say, will knowledge possibly qualify as “scientific.” A teacher who dares cite a “religious” authority such as the Bible as a warrant to justify an argument is deemed “parochial,” “sectarian,” or “tribal.” The teacher’s scholarship should be dismissed out of court as “biased,” “nonobjective,” and “nonscientific.” Plain and simple, it is bogus scholarship.
Upon first blush, these two pervasive “secular” ways of approaching research seem to shut the door firmly to academia for Christians who aspire to engage in peer-reviewed scholarship. Is not a Christian who affirms the final infallible authority of the Bible confronted by an inevitable clash between the truth claims of Christianity and the “givens” of secularism? Is it realistic to envision that a person can flourish as a Christian educator in the public sphere of secular education in which “right practice” teaching assumes a naturalistic framework? Or are Christian educators destined to teach in schools outside “mainstream” academic life? And if a Christian chooses to teach outside “mainstream” academic life (a very worthy vocation in itself), in what ways can he or she act as salt and light in the secular academy? Should aspirations to teach in a secular school simply be abandoned?
These questions haunt discussions about the role of Christians especially in public education. They are not imaginary concerns. I have had the privilege of teaching as a visiting professor of history at three secular universities, two in Europe and one in the United States. At a secular university, a good faculty friend once confided to me that he was not going to admit two students into a doctoral program in history. The reason: they were “religious” (his apparent code word for Christians). The professor was a charming, superb scholar. He was also a convinced atheist. He sincerely believed that the religious convictions of the two applicants rendered them incapable of doing academically acceptable scholarship. From his perspective, the students would be irredeemably biased and as a result incapable of pursuing “serious,” “objective” scholarship. He appeared unaware that his own atheistic presuppositions might prevent him from mustering a “scientific” open mindedness when weighing “evidence” lending credence to miraculous events.
In this study, our principal goal is to identify what role Scripture played in the Reformers’ thinking regarding education. In the first segment is offered a working definition of an education that is Christian. In the second segment, we will consider the Protestant Reformers’ belief that Scripture should play a determinative role in education, whether in religious or public schools. As Protestant heirs of the Reformers, we might well benefit from learning how they related Scripture’s authority to education. Their thinking might seem somewhat foreign to us. After all, the Reformers lived in an age that was religiously, socially, and politically quite different from our own. We will limit our study to Martin Luther’s view of education.[4] In the third and final segment, we will focus our attention on our own secular era. This essay suggests that Luther’s understanding of the role Scripture should play in education is surprisingly pertinent for us in today’s secular world.
What Is Christian Education?
At the outset, we should first define what we mean by an education that is Christian.[5] Our definition is biblically based and bounded. Scripture teaches that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10– 11). Scripture also teaches that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength (Deut. 6:5). Jesus Christ, our ultimate teacher, reiterated the Great Commandment that we are to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, and minds and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matt. 22:37–39). All our thoughts are to be “captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). We are engaged in education that is notably Christian when we teach in a manner faithful to these scriptural teachings.
Ministers are engaged in Christian education when they faithfully expound the Scripture. Mothers and fathers are providing Christian education when they raise their little ones in the nurture and admonition of the Lord through Bible reading, the teaching of catechisms, attendance at church ordinances, and other means. Teachers from primary schools to universities or colleges are engaged in Christian education when they teach in accord with Jesus’s Great Commandment (even if the content of their work may not be specifically “Christian”). Education that is Christian, then, can take place in many varied contexts and venues and in many different manners. It can encourage formal as well as informal learning.
In the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18–20), Jesus also gave the command that teaching should accompany and directly promote disciple making:
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go there- fore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.
In Ephesians 4:11–12, Paul specifically included “shepherds [pastors] and teachers” in the church as those set aside to “equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.”
In the early Christian church, the apostles went forth and engaged in teaching followers of “the Way” (Acts 9:2). At Antioch, the disciples were first called Christians. They benefitted from teaching for a year (Acts 11:26). Paul urged Timothy not only to guard the deposit of faith but also to pass on the doctrine to “faithful men, who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2). The early Christians “delivered” the teaching (or tradition: the thing delivered) of Jesus and the apostles through preaching and other forms of oral Christian witness. Likewise, early believers drew up expositions of Christian teachings: the Didache, rules of faith (e.g., Tertullian’s rule), liturgies and creeds (e.g., the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Definition), apologies for the Christian faith (e.g., the apologies of Justin Martyr), lives of the saints (e.g., Athanasius’s life of Anthony), personal histories (e.g., Augustine’s Confessions), correspondence, histories (e.g., Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History), commentaries, and other theological works. A “great tradition” of Christian thinking emerged.[6]
The Protestant Reformers possessed a superb understanding of an education that is biblically grounded. They had assiduously studied the Scriptures. They had also carefully reflected on Patristic literature, that is, the writings of the early church fathers.[7] These writings often resourced their theological reflections. But as appreciative as they were of the church fathers’ work, they concluded that the early church fathers as well as many medieval commentators sometimes erred in their understanding of Scripture.
Professor Jaroslav Pelikan, a distinguished church historian, has described the Reformers’ attempt to read Scripture as it was intended as nothing less than a “Copernican” revolution in hermeneutics. The Re- formers insisted that the truthfulness of Scripture consisted of the literal, grammatical-historical sense of the text. Professor Pelikan explains:
In Reformation exegesis the terms “grammatical sense” and “literal sense” sometimes appeared to be virtually interchangeable, especially when it was disengaging itself from medieval allegorical exegesis or associating itself with the increased emphasis on the literal sense practiced by Nicholas of Lyra and his Postilla.[8]
In emphasizing the literal, historical meaning of Scripture, the Reformers generally rejected the quest of medieval exegetes to discover a fourfold meaning in scriptural texts (i.e., the historical, moral, allegorical, and anagogical senses). Professor Gerald Bruns proposes that Luther hoped to launch a hermeneutical revolution to discern a pure theology: “In a stroke Luther wiped the Sacred Page clean as if to begin the history of interpretation over again, and this time to get it right.”[9]
In his study of Luther’s view of church history, historian John Headley likewise reiterates Luther’s motivation for rethinking hermeneutics; it was the recovery of a “pure,” biblically based theology:
In his aim to restore pure theology, Luther demanded a return to the divine words as first principles in order that human words might be tested by them. He discovers the reverse to have previously been the case; with their glosses, the fathers have made the Scriptures more obscure than their own writings by a process of elucidating the known by the unknown. Luther announces his thorough dissatisfaction with the fathers and states that they must be judged by the authority of Scripture. He recognizes the authority of no saint or pope unless it is fortified by Scripture.... One does not attain the truth by conjuring many diverse sayings of the fathers and presuming the scriptural meaning from them; rather, by having rendered the intelligence from Scripture through the collation of itself alone, one judges the fathers and accepts what conforms with Scripture.... As Luther’s principle of authority in matters of faith, sola scriptura asserted first the clarity and sufficiency of Scripture in revealing its own meaning, and secondly it signified that the content or meaning of Scripture stood as judge to all other authorities and could accept none which opposed Scripture.[10]
Luther indicated that “Scripture is the womb from which are born theological truth and the Church.” In the Smalcald Articles (1537), Luther clearly expressed his belief that Christian doctrine should be based on Scripture and not on the writings of the fathers:
It will not do to formulate articles of faith on the basis of the holy Fathers’ works or words. Otherwise, their food, clothes, houses, etc., would also have to be articles of faith—as has been done with relics. This means that the Word of God—and no one else, not even an angel should establish articles of faith [Gal. 1:8].
In the “Preface to the Glosses,” before his commentary on the Psalms, Luther explained his thinking further: “In the Scriptures, therefore, no allegory, tropology, or anagogy is valid, unless the same truth is expressly stated historically elsewhere. Otherwise, Scripture would become a mockery. But one must indeed take in an allegorical sense only what is elsewhere stated historically.”[11]
According to Luther, the misguided readings of Scripture proffered by the church fathers and medieval writers stemmed in part from their deficient knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. Greek had been largely lost in Western Europe for seven hundred years, except in small corners of England, in Avignon, and in Islamic Spain. In 1394–1395, Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1355–1415), a scholar from Byzantium, came to the West seeking aid to fend off the Turks and Mongols (in 1453, Constantinople did fall to the Turks). Chrysoloras taught Greek in Florence, Italy, from 1397 to 1400.[12] Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1374–1444), a contemporary Italian historian, commented, “Then first came a knowledge of Greek, which had not been in use among us for seven hundred years. Chrysoloras of Byzantium, a man of noble birth and well versed in Greek letters, brought Greek learning to us.”[13] Luther rejoiced about the emergence of a “sacred philology” to help students better understand Scripture. Most of the Reformers became Christian humanists who used the tools of philology in reading the Hebrew and Greek texts of Holy Scripture.[14] Erasmus’s Greek text of the New Testament (1516) became the basis for a number of vernacular translations of the Bible. In fact, Luther used it for his famous translation of the Bible into German.
Martin Luther was especially critical of the allegorical understanding of Scripture:
I finally sensed that to my own great detriment I had followed an empty shadow and neglected the heart and core of the Scriptures.... I do not try to find [allegories] unless they in some way enhance the historical meaning that is comprehended from the simple story itself. There they are like flowers strewn about, but they prove nothing.[15]
Luther also wrote:
It was very difficult for me to break away from my habitual zeal for allegory, and yet I was aware that allegories were empty speculations and the froth, so to say, of the Holy Scriptures. It is the historical sense alone that supplies the true and sound doctrine. Let those who want to make use of allegories base them on the historical account itself. The historical account is like logic in that it teaches what is certainly true; the allegory, on the other hand, is like rhetoric in that it ought to illustrate the historical account but has no value at all for giving proof.[16]
Nonetheless, Luther did affirm that there was a spiritual sense of Scripture, but it was always related to or rooted in the letter, or the historical sense.[17] He pointed out that on some occasions Scripture needed to be interpreted not word-for-word but sense-to-sense. He recognized the existence of several allegorically based scriptural passages.[18] Moreover, interpreters needed to depend on the Spirit’s aid to avoid reading in a way that fostered the “killing letter” approach.[19]
Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), one of Luther’s close associates, also criticized the church fathers for their misunderstanding of Scripture:
On the other hand, some writers in some matters and others in different ones have been rather diligent and, as is only human, they often pour forth rashly both foolish and false opinions, which had they been admonished, they undoubtedly would have had to correct.... At times they even held some false opinions. Wherefore not all of the writings of the fathers are to be approved without discrimination; and often they fight among themselves. Nor is it a rare thing that someone even differs with himself. Consequently, the final decision ought to rest with apostolic Scripture.[20]
Melanchthon particularly scored Origen, a well-known advocate of the allegorical interpretation of the Bible, for on occasion badly misunderstanding Scripture:
But he has mingled with his writings false and absurd opinions, some of which even his own age derided. He imagines that there have been more worlds before this world. He thinks there will be an end to the punishments of the devils and of the damned. Such teachings as these even his own age repudiated.[21]
For Luther, Melanchthon, and their evangelical colleagues, Holy Scripture, properly interpreted, should reside at the center of Christian education.
The Reformation Era and Christian Education
When we parachute into the Reformation era of the sixteenth century, we enter cultural territory that may feel quite foreign and strange. [22] Nonetheless, Martin Luther, the great Protestant Reformer, does afford us certain reminders and insights about education that are pertinent for us in our secular age.
In the Reformers’ day, a spirit of “pluralism” and “ecumenism” was in scant supply. Roman Catholics often identified the word religion solely with Roman Catholicism. For example, Roman Catholics summarily dismissed the religion of French Calvinists, or Huguenots, as la Religion Prétendue Réformée, or the “so-called Reformed religion.” On occasion, religious animosities provoked political-religious wars. In 1531, the Reformer Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), serving as a chaplain, died in the field of battle during the Second Kappel War between the Protestant and Roman Catholic cantons of Switzerland. After 1560, eight or nine political-religious civil wars broke out between Roman Catholics and Huguenots and devastated France. Huguenot hopes that France would become a Calvinist kingdom were crushed. In 1598, King Henry IV promulgated the Edict of Nantes, which did give Huguenots a measure of religious toleration.
For many Europeans (a significant exception being the Anabaptists), church and state were inextricably united. The religion of the king or queen or prince was often considered the religion of the kingdom or principality. To challenge the teachings of the church in power in one’s region could be deemed an attack on the royalty or the state and therefore politically seditious. King François I of France felt free to impose Roman Catholicism on all his French subjects. He persecuted the early followers of John Calvin. In 1542, Pope Paul II felt no scruples in founding the Congregation of the Inquisition, whose members sought to extirpate heretical beliefs. Calvinists were once again favorite targets.
Like Roman Catholics, the magisterial Reformers Luther, Calvin, and their colleagues also believed that church and state should not be separated.[23] Luther sought the aid of evangelical German princes in establishing and reforming schools.[24] He benefited especially from Elector Frederick the Wise, who protected not only him but also the fledgling evangelical movement.
Indeed, the Reformers and their followers were initially called “evangelicals.” In 1529, the expression Protestant was used for the first time to denote evangelical German princes who “protested” the Second Diet of Speyer. This diet had ruled against the spread of Reformation teaching in the Holy Roman Empire.
The Reformers preached justification by faith alone (sola fide) as taught solely in the infallible Word of God, Holy Scripture (sola Scriptura).[25] Luther singled out justification by faith alone as the doctrine on which the church rose or fell. The Reformers were convinced that the contemporary Roman Catholic Church’s doctrinal teachings and her educational institutions stood in need of serious “reformation.” The Reformers’ powerful complaint: Roman Catholics failed to place the gospel and Holy Scripture at the center of their educational curriculum. Said Luther, “The universities need a sound and thorough reformation.... [N]othing could be more wicked, or serve the devil better, than unreformed universities.”[26] Indeed, Luther lamented the state of education in his day:
Oh, we handle these poor young people who are committed to us for training and instruction in the wrong way! We do not see this pitiful evil, how today the young people of Christendom languish and perish miserably in our midst for want of the gospel, in which we ought to be giving them constant instruction and training.[27]
In his Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality as the Amelioration of the State of Christendom (1520), Luther squarely blamed the papacy for the poor condition of Christian education:
Everything that the papacy has instituted or ordered is directed solely towards the multiplication of sin and error.... What else are the universities unless they are utterly changed from what they have been hitherto.... What are they but places where loose living is practiced, where little is taught of the Holy Scriptures and the Christian faith, and where only the blind, heathen teacher Aristotle rules far more than Christ?
Luther bluntly counseled,
I would not advise anyone to send his son to a place where the Holy Scriptures do not come first. Every institution where the Word of God is not taught regularly must fail.... I greatly fear that the universities, unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to hell.[28]
Luther, however, also thought that evangelical laypersons stood in serious need of biblically based instruction. In 1524, Luther issued an educational manifesto: “To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany, That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools.” Luther, who espoused a two-kingdom theory of society, indicated that both religious and public schools should emphasize teaching based on Holy Scripture. In 1537, he wrote,
First of all you need to know that the Holy Scripture is the kind of book that makes the wisdom of all other books into foolishness, since none of them teaches about eternal life except this alone. Therefore, you should take no hope from your own reason and understanding. With them you will not reach eternal life. On the contrary, by such presumptions you and others will plunge from heaven into the abyss of hell as Lucifer did. Instead, kneel down in your little room and pray to God with true humility and sincerity that God through the dear Son might give you the Holy Spirit who will enlighten and direct you and give you understanding.[29]
Luther cautioned that other authorities were inferior to the authority of Scripture: “For the councils, church fathers, or we, even with our highest and best achievement, cannot match what God has done in the Holy Scripture.”[30]
Luther was convinced that new evangelical converts desperately needed biblical teaching to help them change the basic way they thought about living—a change of their worldview, if you will. And so it was that Luther and other Reformers tasked themselves with preaching sermons, drafting catechisms and books, and establishing schools that could pro- mote a near total overhaul of contemporary education. They intended that this educational overhaul should be based on the teachings of Holy Scripture. Luther observed,
Above all, the foremost reading for everybody both in the universities and in the schools, should be Holy Scripture and for the younger boys, the Gospels. And would to God that every town had a girls’ school as well, where the girls would be taught the gospel for an hour every day either in German or in Latin.[31]
Historian Robert Kolb has well described the remarkable impact of Luther’s game-changing program to transform German religious life, including education: “Luther’s reorientation of the foundations of religious life, placing God’s Word and biblical teaching at its center or as its foundation, exercised a transforming impact on both public teaching and individual lives, on the understanding of the liturgy and other rituals on the office of the pastor.”[32]
In this educational reform, Luther recommended that at least some evangelicals should learn the biblical languages for the purpose of preserving the gospel. He had himself pursued the serious study of Hebrew. He rejoiced over the recent recovery of the knowledge of Greek in the West. This knowledge permitted Christians to have a more accurate understanding of the gospel than they could access from consulting Jerome’s Latin Vulgate:
Formerly no one knew why God had the languages revived, but now for the first time we see that it was done for the sake of the gospel, which he intended to bring to light and use in exposing and destroying the kingdom of Antichrist.... In proportion then as we value the gospel, let us zealously hold to the languages.... And let us be sure of this: we will not long preserve the gospel without the languages.[33]
In 1524, Elector John the Steadfast asked Luther for a “visitation,” owing to the troubling behavior of some of Luther’s followers:
May God hear our complaint, but there are too many enthusiasts, and these are causing us plenty of trouble up here. But in my opinion there would be no better way of quieting things down than for you to take some time to travel from one town to another in this principality and to see for yourself (as Paul did), what kinds of preachers are serving the faithful in the towns.[34]
During his various “Saxon visitations” (ca. 1528), Luther became deeply troubled that many evangelical Christians were exploiting their “freedom” in the gospel. They did not pay sufficient heed to the Christian faith in the way they lived their daily lives. They appeared to have lost a sense of the need to participate in the sacraments. To address these matters, which Luther associated with a failure to understand repentance and which reflected an inclination toward “antinomianism,” Luther endorsed Melanchthon’s Instructions for the Visitors of Parish Priests. Luther also wrote “Sermons on the Catechism” (1528) and drafted a Small Catechism and Large Catechism (1529). He hoped these materials in tandem could help pastors to shepherd their people so they might understand better the relationship between law and gospel and other aspects of the Christian faith. He was convinced that the Devil and his minions were strenuously at work attempting to keep Christians from meditating on the Word of God, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the creeds, and catechisms, from attending the sacraments, and from repenting of their sins and praying in faith.
Martin Luther wanted Christians, especially young people, to memorize the Ten Commandments, the “Chief Articles of our Faith,” and “the Lord’s Prayer,” or “our Father which Christ Taught.”[35] For Luther, education that was Christian centered on teaching a biblically based faith to Christians. He chided pastors who he said were too lazy and contented with comfortable lifestyles to teach common people the rudiments of the faith. Some clerics, Luther indicated, thought it was beneath their dignity to teach such basic beliefs. By contrast, Luther confessed that he personally had never outgrown the need to repeat the Lord’s Prayer each day. Luther especially loved meditating on the Psalms, which he held summarized the Christian faith.
Luther believed fathers should be key Christian educators in their homes. Fathers should teach their children the catechism. After all, it encompassed the basics of the Christian faith. Luther asserted that unruly German youth had apparently not received proper catechetical instruction. Nor had they been taught to honor their fathers and mothers. For Luther, teachers in schools were substitutes for parents in instructing the young in the Christian faith.
Luther recommended that schools should teach other subjects besides the Bible, especially the liberal arts and languages. Luther specifically praised the study of history because it could provide readers with moral lessons. He wished he had been taught more of the liberal arts and poetry. He praised the Romans of antiquity for the education they gave to young people in the liberal arts. This instruction helped prepare the young Romans for community service in the government.
Luther, along with other Reformers, appreciated the fact that Saint Augustine in his work On Education had commended “spoiling the Egyptians,” that is, carefully exploiting pagan educational creations like the liberal arts and the rules of rhetoric.[36] Pagan insights could be harnessed to serve Christian understanding and ministry. Did not preachers need to study rhetoric, even though the discipline had pagan origins?[37] At the same time, Luther was very careful to vet secular writings that he thought subverted biblical authority.
Melanchthon, Luther’s colleague, became known as “the Praeceptor (or Teacher) of Germany.” He famously developed principles for interpreting Scripture. He also encouraged a wise use of the liberal arts and humanities in creating an educational curriculum for schools. But like Luther, Melanchthon believed Scripture should remain at the center of education. In his oration “On the Merit of Studying Theology” (1537), Melanchthon wrote,
Therefore, let me come to the point. Just as Paul says: “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ” [Rom. 1:16], so it is proper for all the faithful to be disposed in such a way that they love the word of God with all their heart, acknowledge that it is the highest of all God’s favors, and respect with great piety its ministry, that is, the public office of teaching, bestow honor upon it, assist it for the sake of its calling, and defend and adorn it. This must be the chief concern of all the faith.[38]
In this light, Melanchthon urged princes to establish schools where students could be biblically well trained for pastoral ministry. In the following centuries, Protestants often built schools dedicated to the preparation of ministers of the gospel.
A Reformation Perspective on Contemporary Education
Today, we live in a much different educational environment than the world of the Protestant Reformers. Christian academics who engage in scholarly research and writing can sometimes face a quandary. They may feel pressure to punch the ticket of using naturalistic assumptions of the academy to gain accreditation as authentic scholars.[39] In 2012, historian Brad S. Gregory of Notre Dame University bemoaned the hegemonic hold of naturalistic secularism on the pursuit of knowledge in the West:
Regardless of the academic discipline, knowledge in the Western world today is considered secular by definition. Its assumptions, methods, content, and truth claims are and can only be secular, framed not only by the logical demand of rational coherence, but also by the methodological postulate of naturalism and its epistemological correlate, evidentiary empiricism. Knowledge must be based on evidence, it must make sense, and (aside from purely conceptual abstractions) it can neither assume nor conclude that anything which putatively transcends the universe is real, else it ceases to count as knowledge.[40]
Even if Professor Gregory’s pessimistic diagnosis is overwrought, it does capture a certain academic reality. A scholar in the academy who cites supernatural explanatory “causes” or “agencies” in his or her work will often be sharply criticized or discounted. Professor George Marsden’s The Soul of the American University (1994) and The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1998) chronicle well the historical factors that helped create the present secular state of affairs in academia.[41] In The Dying of the Light (1998), James Burtchaell recounts the stories of a number of Protestant and Roman Catholic schools that were once church related. Seeking the approval of the secular academy, they distanced themselves or broke ties from the Christian churches that had given them birth. Burtchaell writes, “But the greatest outside authority to which all these colleges in our study now defer is that of the academy itself.”[42] He discussed the mind-set of the professors teaching at these schools: “But Christian scholars, to be at home in this kind of academy, need not actually forswear their faith. All they must do is agree to criticize the church by the norms of the academy, and to judge the gospel by the culture. And most of them have burnt that incense when bidden.”[43]
In today’s secular academic world, Martin Luther’s Reformation perspective that the Bible should reside at the center of education may strike us as desirable but quaint and quite impractical. The pressure to play by all the rules of academia (including its naturalistic assumptions) to garner scholarly acceptance is immense. Moreover, landmark Supreme Court decisions regarding education post-1948 have appeared to build even higher the “wall of separation” between church and state. These decisions seem to discourage if not forbid personal religious convictions from informing instruction in public schools.
Do the perspectives of the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther on the Bible’s role in education, then, have any pertinent value for us in our secular age? The answer to this question, I believe, is a resounding yes. First, Luther strongly reminds us that the Bible as a special written revelation from God reveals to us what is “really real” about God, our salvation, and our world. Scripture affords us with nothing less than God-ordained divine “wisdom.” As believers, we may sometimes forget just how imperative it is that the Bible should reside at the center of Christian education, whether in our churches, in our Christian schools, in our homes, or in our personal lives. Once again, the Bible affords us with the knowledge of God, that is, “true knowledge” from God’s point of view. And that knowledge is the one that ultimately counts for us in living and, for that matter, in dying. It reveals the way the game is really played, not the way some of our secular friends bravely hope and speculate that it is played.
Second, Luther reiterates for us how important catechetical instruction is for our children. The Reformer John Calvin very wisely seconded Luther on this subject. To the “Reader” of his 1545 catechism, Calvin wrote,
It has ever been the practice of the Church, and one carefully attended to, to see that children should be duly instructed in the Christian religion. That this might be done more conveniently, not only were schools opened in old time, and individuals enjoined properly to teach their families, but it was a received public custom and practice, to question children in the churches on each of the heads, which should be common and well known to all Christians. To secure this being done in order, there was written out a formula, which was called a Catechism or Institute.... What we now bring forward, therefore, is nothing else than the use of things which from ancient times were observed by Christians, and the true worshippers of God, and which never were laid aside until the Church was wholly corrupted.[44]
Third, by his example, Luther encourages us to engage in serious Bible study, using the best tools available as we seek to grow spiritually in our faith. Luther also commended meditating on Scripture (Psalm 1)—especially on the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Beatitudes.
Fourth, Luther enjoins us that we search the Scriptures to look for Christ, our Lord and Savior, who is the central focus of the Word of God.
Fifth, Luther, who on occasion cited approvingly the writings of pagan authors, intimates that we do not need to refrain from engaging the best scholarship our secular world offers. We can rejoice in the genuine insights and accomplishments of non-Christians owing to common grace—especially those accomplishments that do not conflict with biblical teaching. This approach permits us to remain in academia but to do so as biblically wise participants.[45]
Sixth and finally, Luther calls on us to remember that the goal of Christian education is to obey Jesus’s Great Commandment: we are to love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls, and minds and our neighbors as ourselves.
In a word, the Reformer Martin Luther’s insights regarding an education that is biblically centered and bounded can be of great benefit for us. Through his writings, Martin Luther beckons, encourages, urges, and perhaps even pleads with us to live as biblically wise Christians who serve as salt and light in our gospel-starved world. May God help us to do so.
[1] For biographies of Martin Luther, see Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New York: Doubleday, 1992); Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Louisville: Abingdon, 2013); Herman Selderhuis, Martin Luther: A Spiritual Biography (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017). For biographies of John Calvin, see Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography, trans. M. Wallace McDonald (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000); Herman J. Selderhuis, John Calvin: A Pilgrim’s Life, trans. Albert Gootjes (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009); John Calvin, John Calvin: Writings on Pastoral Piety, ed. Elsie Anne McKee, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 2001).
[2] For Luther’s perspectives on biblical authority, see Mark D. Thompson, A Sure Ground on Which to Stand: The Relation of Authority and Interpretive Method in Luther’s Approach to Scripture (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006); Robert Kolb, “The Bible in the Reformation and Protestant Orthodoxy,” in The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans: 2016), 89–114. See also Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966).
[3] Cambridge historian Richard Evans observes, “Postmodernists seemed to want to have their cake and eat it. Behind postmodernism’s claim, symbolized in its heavy use of jargon and specialized language, to be scientific, there is in the end a desire to prioritize a particular way of reading texts that runs completely counter to its own postulate of the essential arbitrariness and openness of textuality.” In Defense of History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 203.
[4] See Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
[5] For a superb introduction to Christian education, see David S. Dockery, “Faith and Learning: Foundational Convictions,” in Faith and Learning: A Handbook for Christian Higher Education, ed. David S. Dockery (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2012), 3–26.
[6] See David S. Dockery and Timothy George, The Great Tradition of Christian Thinking: A Student’s Guide, Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012).
[7] Luther especially appreciated the Nicene Creed, describing the council that produced it as “the most sacred of all councils.” Martin Luther, “Leipzig Disputation,” in Luther’s Works, vol. 31, Career of the Reformer I, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957), 318. He also found instructive the writings of Augustine, Hilary of Poitiers, Cyril of Alexandria, and others. Luther had access to the Wittenberg University Library, which in time contained many writings of both Western and Eastern church fathers. Luther read extensively in these volumes.
[8] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Reformation of the Bible, The Bible of the Reformation, with Valerie R. Hotchkiss and David Price (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 31.
[9] Quoted in Pelikan, Reformation of the Bible, 29.
[10] John M. Headley, Luther’s View of Church History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 83–84. Luther viewed himself as upholding an Augustinian view of biblical infallibility. For Augustine’s concept of biblical authority, see A. D. R. Polman, The Word of God according to Saint Augustine (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1955). For the church fathers’ view of biblical authority, see Charles E. Hill, “‘The Truth above All Demonstration’: Scripture in the Patristic Period to Augustine,” in Carson, Enduring Authority, 43–88.
[11] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, vol. 10, Lectures on the Psalms
[12] James Hankins, “Greek Studies in Italy: From Petrarch to Bruni,” in Petrarca e il Mondo, vol. 1, Greco Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi, Reggio Calabria, 26–30 Novembre 2001, ed. Michele Feo, Vincenzo Fera, Paola Megna, and Antonio Rollo, Quaderni Petrarcheschi 12–13 (Firenze: Le Lettere, 2007), 329–39, http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:8301600.
[13] N. G. Wilson, From Byzantium to Italy: Greek Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 2nd ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 9–25.
[14] See Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Anthony Grafton, Defender of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
[15] Cited in Robert Kolb, Martin Luther and the Enduring Word of God: The Wittenberg School and Its Scripture-Centered Proclamation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2016), 160.
[16] Kolb, Luther and the Enduring Word of God, 160–61.
[17] Historian Scott Manetsch writes, “All of these Reformation-era commentators were in agreement, however, that the spiritual sense of the text must in some way be governed by the letter, lest Scripture become (as Bucer put it) little more than a wax nose that could be tweaked this way and that. Protestant exegetes agreed that allegorical or spiritual readings of Scripture were not to be used to establish points of doctrine; their value lay in elucidating or illustrating Christian truth.” Reformation Commentary on Scripture: New Testament, vol. 9a, I Corinthians (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2017), lvi.
[18] Pelikan, Reformation of the Bible, 31.
[19] Luther, Luther’s Works, 10:5.
[20] Philipp Melanchthon, “The Church and the Authority of the Word, 1539,” Melanchthon: Selected Writings, trans. Charles Hill, ed. Elmer Ellsworth Flack and Lowell J. Satre (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1962), 150.
[21] Melanchthon, “Church and the Authority of the Word,” 150.
[22] For recent studies of the Reformation(s), see Carlos M. N. Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell: 2010); Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Protestant Reformation, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, 25th anniversary ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013). For the role of printing in the spread of the Protestant Reformation, see Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
[23] For Luther’s two-kingdom teaching, see Martin Luther, “Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed” (1523), in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 363–402.
[24] See Martin Luther, An Appeal to the Ruling Class of German Nationality as to the Amelioration of the State of Christendom, in Dillenberger, Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, 470–76.
[25] See Martin Luther, “Preface to the Epistle to the Romans” (1522), in Luther’s Spirituality, trans. and ed. Philip D. W. Krey and Peter D. S. Krey, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 2007), 104–18.
[26] Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility (1520), in Luther’s Works, vol. 44, Christian in Society I, ed. James Atkinson (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 202.
[27] Luther, To the Christian Nobility, 44:206.
[28] Luther, Appeal to the Ruling Class, 476.
[29] Martin Luther, “To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany, That They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools,” in Krey and Krey, Luther’s Spirituality, 122.
[30] Luther, “To the Councilmen,” 120.
[31] Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility, 44:205–6.
[32] Kolb, Luther and the Enduring Word, 41. See Martin Luther, Martin Luther’s Authority of Councils and Churches, ed. C. B. Smyth (London: William Edward Painter, 1847).
[33] Martin Luther, in Luther’s Works, vol. 45, Christian in Society II, ed. Walther I. Brandt (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1962), 359.
[34] Cited from D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Briefwechsel [Letters] (WABr), 3:310/44ff., in Heinrich Bornkamm, Luther in Mid-Career, 1521–1530, trans. E. Theodore Bachmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), 485.
[35] These elements are found in Martin Luther, Luther’s Large Catechism with Study Questions, ed. Rodney L. Rathmann (St. Louis, MO: Concordia, 2010).
[36] See Augustine, On Education, ed. R. P. H. Green (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9, 101–46.
[37] In his Defense of the Liberal Arts, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the chancellor of Florence from 1375 to 1406, provided an influential apology for Christians to appropriate the liberal arts to in turn help advance the cause of the Christian faith. Nonetheless, he never wanted pagan philosophy to usurp his primary loyalties to Christ: “Let the mob of philosophers run after Aristotle or Plato or the pestilent Averroes or any better man if there is one—never mind about the names! I am satisfied with Jesus Christ alone, who while learning flourished in Greece and Italy and while Italy was crushing everything at her pleasure by force of arms, ‘made foolish the wisdom of the world’––foolish, not through the wisdom of the wise nor the power of the strong, but through the foolishness of his preaching and his cross; through fisherman, not philosophers, through men of low estate; and not those in worldly power.” Cited in Werner L. Gundersheimer, The Italian Renaissance (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1965), 17.
[38] Philipp Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, ed. Sachiko Kusukawa, trans. Christine F. Salazar, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 182.
[39] Frank E. Gaebelein, The Pattern of God’s Truth: The Integration of Faith and Learning (Chicago: Moody Press, 1973), 39.
[40] Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 299. Ironically enough, Professor Gregory’s complaint about secularism’s hegemonic control of academia is published by Harvard University Press, a secular press.
[41] George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Marsden, The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
[42] James Tunstead Burtchaell, The Dying of the Light: The Disengagement of Colleges and Universities from Their Christian Churches (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 834.
[43] Burtchaell, Dying of the Light, 850.
[44] John Calvin, “Catechism of the Church of Geneva, Being a Form of Instruction for Children” (1545), in John Calvin: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1975), 248–49.
[45] Frank Gaebelein writes, “It is possible for deeply committed Christians to maintain their Christian world view in an indifferent or hostile atmosphere. But to do so they must be consciously alert to the secular pressures about them and they must be living disciplined Christian lives.” Pattern of God’s Truth, 30.
John D. Woodbridge
Research Professor of Church History and the History of Christian Thought | Trinity Evangelical Divinity School
This essay was originally delivered as a plenary address at the 2023 IACE National Conference.
It was adapted from Christian Higher Education: Faith, Teaching, and Learning in the Evangelical Tradition by David S. Dockery and Christopher W. Morgan, Copyright © 2018, pp. 59–80. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, IL 60187, www.crossway.org.