Our Rabboni

By Joel Swanson
F&R Writer

[Ok, so perhaps it's a little odd to have an engineering major at a liberal arts school write an article about elementary education. Tough. The Bagpipe editors were desparate. Anyhow, back to education.]

Ancient Hebrew education taught that the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 9:10). The Hebrews taught the heart first and then the mind, recognizing that to teach academics without impressing students with the fear of the Lord will yield fools, not students. Scripture is clear that parents hold responsibility for teaching their children to love the Lord (Deut 6:4-7). Christ must be at the center of education, for without Him and the redemption He accomplished, there would be no basis for knowledge (Col 2:3), no transformation of hearts and minds, and no cause to worship and serve Him. In other words, Christian education must be from Him, through Him, and to Him; He is our Rabboni or Teacher.

Christ is the source of all wisdom and knowledge, the foundation for our epistemology and the proper starting point for our education. Our knowledge has in Christ a resting place upon which it may stand. Christ the incarnate Word has graciously given the written Word to his people, as their basis for knowledge of faith and life. Non-believers often have incredible insight into the world, but they lack a sufficient basis for their knowledge. This is similar to a child hitting his father while his father is holding his arms; the very knowledge they use to claim independence from God is really a gift from God to them.

Christian education is through Christ because He has transformed our hearts and minds. My parent’s homeschooled me and my siblings, and they emphasized to us the fact that since our life is through Christ, we ought to naturally live lives of gratitude to Him, with our hearts and minds transformed by His grace. Many times when my mom would read out loud to us we’d come across something that didn’t sound right to us, and she would ask us what Scripture said about the issue. This was training us to read everything according to the light of Scripture (Ps 36:9).

They taught us with a unit study organized by character traits and based on using good books and literature rather than textbooks. The unit study was one where instead of having the traditional academic subjects the things we studied were grouped by character traits such as attentiveness, obedience, stewardship, co-operation, orderliness, etc. In the attentiveness unit we would study topics such as the five senses, the orchestra, indians, frontiersmen, birds–all things that reinforced the character trait. The net effect of this was that everthing we studied was academic knowledge we were learning, and also reinforced a truth about how God would have us live. This unified the subjects and gave my elementary school education a more interdisciplinary emphasis than a traditional textbook approach would. Using character traits as themes also constantly highlighted the fact that we all fall short of the standard of holiness the Lord set before us. It’s only in more recent years that I’ve really begun to understand a little of how incredible in the light of my failures the gospel is; the fact that the Lord Jesus is resurrected and living and I am alive in Him, holy and pure.

Finally, all things are to Christ; so we find that our education compells us both to worship and serve our living Head. I’ve found it fascinating that even non-Christians have recognized that learning drives us to worship. Morris Kline stated in his book, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty that the work of 16th, 17th, and 18tn century mathematicians was “an act of devotion which would reveal the glory and grandeur of His handiwork….Man could not perceive the divine plan as clearly as God understood it, but man could with humility and modesty seek at least to approach the mind of God and so understand God’s world.”[34,35] As with all of life, the fruits of our academic labors ought to compel us to worship the One who gives us understanding, the Lord Christ. Christ is the source of our knowledge, the transformer of our hearts and minds, and the object of our worship and service. We find in Him our fountain of life, for if we went one instant without Him we would be lost in utter hopelessness. I am reminded of a sermon by Geerhardus Vos titled, “Rabboni”, in which Vos
describes Mary Magdelene standing at the tomb, weeping because Jesus, the one who freed her from demons and her sins, was gone. She talked with Jesus
but didn’t recognize him, until, “‘Jesus saith unto her, “Mary.” She turneth and saith unto him, “Rabboni.”‘ It happened all in a moment, and by a simple word, and yet in this one moment Mary’s world was changed for her. She had in that instant made the transition from hopelessness because Jesus was absent, to fullness of joy because Christ was there.” [Vos, Grace and Glory, pg 78] May we find fullness of joy in our academic pursuits as well as we see Christ at the center of our education.