Self Education: The Way to High Culture | Doug Wilson

good morning it's good to be with you even if it is at a great distance i want to speak about self-education the way to high culture the christian faith is a religion of world conquest and no not that kind of world conquest if we do not believe this then every form of cultural engagement is simply going to be a form of slow surrender it is the way of compromise in other words if you don't believe that the gospel is going to triumph over the world and you engage with the world then that means the world is going to be in the process of triumphing over you uh you can always tell the kind of person who's involved in this sort of thing because they're always wrestling with the contours of something or other and if you don't believe in the triumph of the gospel and you don't want to surrender if you don't want to capitulate to the ways of the world then the only safe thing to do is to go the way of the neo amish but there is another approach there are people who engage with the world in order to capitulate to the world there are people who avoid capitulating to the world by building a compound out in the woods where they can live live for jesus out there live for jesus out there without coming into contact with the world but there's another approach ephesians 6 4 says this and ye fathers provoke not your children to wrath but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the lord i want to take a moment to review what we mean by the pidea of god the word pidea is the word that we get well it's sometimes difficult to understand whether nurture comes from paedea or admonition comes from padeo because either either one would be good but generally admonition is the rendering of padea now a number of you may have heard me on this topic before on the pidea of god and so i'm going to and so i want to take a few moments just to review lightly touch on it but i want to do this so that we can go a little bit further up and further in because how can we supply how can we provide the padea of god when none of us have received the padea of god and that's the that's what we're going to be driving toward this issue of self-education so paul tells christian fathers to bring their children up in the nurture and admonition of the lord and one of the terms that he uses here is padea which the which for the ancients was a loaded term shoe table and glass are common nouns padea is freighted with meaning an abstract noun that was a big hellenistic deal if you haunt bookstores occasionally you will you'll run across a quirky history of something like salt or a history of the table fork and the fun is the novelty of you know who would write a who would write a history of the table fork but in my library i own a three-volume treatment of the word paideia and the author was in deadly earnest and this work devoting three volumes to the word paideia was not a symptom of scholarly mental problems but rather it was a so it was it was rather a sober and helpful study of a word that held for the ancients the same kind of meaning the same kind of freight that a word like democracy would for us so if you encountered someone who wrote a three volume history of table salt or a three volume history of the shoelace or three volume history of boots uh you would think that th this uh this is a fellow who needs to get out of his basement and ask a girl out go do something go do something right but if someone writes a three volume history of democracy you think oh well that that's a subject that could uh you probably wouldn't exhaust in three volumes the word padea is that kind of word it's uh the word padea is an all-encompassing word it's a big deal so my understanding of pidea in this sense and this is the sense that i believe paul is using here in ephesians 6 would be summed up in the word enculturation it's summed up in the word enculturation but enculturation presupposes a culture the idea refers to the insinuation of christian kids into a christian culture the incorporation of our children into a mere christendom now in paul's day this is the striking thing and paul's day that presupposed culture did not exist so he's writing to a gentile city the city of ephesus a great cosmopolitan center in the in the roman empire and there there was no believing culture anywhere in sight there was nothing like that so in paul's day this presupposed culture did not exist and so the parents of ephesus were being instructed by implication to create one so if pidea means enculturation into a culture and the chris and the christian parents in ephesus were told to provide that for their kids then they not only had to provide the enculturation into a christian culture for their kids but they also had to provide the christian culture to enculturate their kids into but how do you do that how do you do that how do you do that when you're trying to pass on the kind of education that you never received everything comes down to the word ought to died act the word autodidact sometimes frequently is used disparagingly disparagingly but this is something we're all called to those of us who are involved in the recovery of classical christian education are called in some measure to be autodidacs an autodidact is someone who is self-taught an autodyed act is someone who is self-educated you can't pass on what you don't have and this means that you have to get it in order to pass it on you have to you have to obtain it yourself before you can pass it on to others now in 9 out of 10 cases probably more like 99 out of 100 cases this means self-education self-education which is the route back to high culture now it can seem when you're in the middle of it you're it can seem when you're in the thick of it that you're not going back to any kind of culture still less high culture i recall when we decided that we were going to start teaching latin in the third grade to the students at logos school our problem was we wanted to teach latin and we didn't have anybody who knew latin dorothy sayers in her essay says latin will do greek will do is is sometimes easier to find someone who knows greek in christian circles because they picked it up in seminary but we we opted for latin and our problem was that we didn't have any teachers who knew latin so i went back to school i went back to the university of idaho to take latin classes and i was teaching latin classes to the third graders oftentimes just a week or two ahead of the kids so i was learning it and teaching it at the same time that's the that's the challenge that we have now for the ephesian parents they didn't have any kind of believing culture at all the closest they had to it would be what they could see among the jews so the jews had a believing culture that was centered around the word of god in its old covenant form but the ephesians were in the first century of of christendom the first century of the christian faith growing and expanding and they didn't have any models to copy but in our day that culture that we're called upon to build that culture existed once upon a time that culture did exist and is now a magnificent ruin with stones of varying size scattered about how do we referring now to the name of the accs conference which is repairing the ruins how do we rebuild the ruins and that incidentally that um that name repairing the ruins comes from a phrase of john milton's in an essay he did on education that the duty of the educators to repair the ruins that was the ruins that were created by our first parents adam and eve so why do we flatter ourselves as though we have the right to shrug and give up why do we abandon hope regarding the building of a mere christendom when our only argument is that it has been done before what kind of sense does that make if people if the ephesian christians had fewer resources than we have uh and they did it if the uh if the christians of the roman empire were in love with christ enough to plant churches everywhere in such a way as to eventually result in a christian culture then why do we think that that is out of our reach somehow henry van tilt once said that culture uh is the ex is it is a religion externalized culture is religion externalized so if you successfully plant the christian faith where you have centers of worship where people are worshiping in churches all over there will be the development there will be the externalization of that faith and that externalization is going to be a culture and it's going to be faithful or faithless depending on how faithful or faithless the churches are since this is our assumed task then this is the question how are we how are we supposed to accomplish something something like that initially it might sound a bit crazy more than a little bit crazy in to our modern secular age but when i uh but when i'm done i i trust that they will think that i'm barking mad it's not just a little outlandish it's way outlandish how do we call things that are not as though they are romans 4 17 or isaiah 46 9-10 only god can create ex nihilo but we are commanded to create after him imitatively only god can create from absolute nothing but we are created we are commanded to create after him imitatively the biblical way this is done is through the word okay through the word and it's through imitation god creates from absolute zero absolute nothing and then he tells us to create an imitation of him and when we create an imitation of him we are creating with pre-existing materials we don't bring anything into being but we arrange the materials that we inherit and we arrange them in such a way as to bring something new into the world god brings something absolutely new into existence we bring something new into the world through arrangement so god god does it by divine fiat we do it through arrangement and rearrangement so the biblical way that this is done the way that we get to imitate god in this way is through the word in and through the word all things were created and that is the way that all things are to be recreated also that is the way everything is to be rebuilt the word must come first so i would charge you as classical christian educators to be people who are absolutely devoted to the bible man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of god and i don't mean devoted to the bible in some abstract sense where it has the place of highest honor on your highest shelf but you never take it down i'm talking about being in the word daily regularly in an ongoing way be men and women of the word this is not just a good pious thing to do it's not just a good thing to do for those who want to go to heaven when they die it's also an essential thing to do if you want to build a successful classical christian school you've got to be men and women of the word now words do not simply come after the fact describing things as they exist raw and in their own right it's not like you have these things appear and then you name them or label them after the fact words do far more than simply attach labels it is not uh it is not simply a descriptive slave of the way things are no the word is also prescriptive you speak the word the authoritative word goes out and a new world comes to be you speak the word and a new world comes to be the world of the future is taking shape around us and it is the word that causes it to be it is the word that causes it to come to be what it is the word brings new life for god who commanded light to shine out of darkness hath shined in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of god in the face of jesus christ we have this treasure in earth and vessels that the excellency of the power may be of god and not of us that's second corinthians 4 6 and 7. and as the word does what it does our imitative words follow after doing the little follow-up things that they are capable of doing like creating new civilizations now but before we get to the new civilization you have to be aware that you're speaking the word reading the word letting the word reconstruct you before you are asking the word to use you to reconstruct the world around you or to build the school or to provide an education for your kids so in a very in a very real sense you are not self-educated strictly speaking you're not self-educating the auto didact mode is something that you you're doing it without reference to the school you graduated from or how you were educated when you were a child this is the instrumentality the setup that god is using to recreate you as you are then engaged in providing a uh an oper an education for your children there are many areas where this has an application and obviously i believe that the central one has to do with preaching that's another subject for another time but it's related to the topic before us along with preaching teaching and education are right up there uh we are wordsmiths we work with words we build with words we are teachers we work with words which means that we are builders of worlds teachers are builders of worlds in your context in your classical christian school in your classical christian homeschool what does what does this mean let's bring this down to a practical level it means two cr two key ingredients books and imagination books and imagination let's consider each of them in turn if you want to become self-educated if you want to be an autoduct you're going to need books and you're going to need an imagination so let's consider each of them earlier i mentioned stones of various sizes scattered stones in the ruins most of them are shaped like books they are how we can make out the formation of the ruins we can tell where the city needs to be rebuilt we can say we can we come along these ruins we can tell where the city needs to be rebuilt again let us stop by the river the leaves of the trees are for healing and so let us build by the river in this respect we have a great advantage over the christian parents at ephesus they had never seen or heard of the christianization of a sophisticated and urbane pagan civilization they had never heard of anything like that ever happening before and the reason they'd never heard of it is that it did not it had not happened before that kind of overthrow had never happened in the history of the world but from our advantage from our vantage point it has happened before the thing has been done you can read about it in books they had the assignment but no examples we have the same assignment and one grand example remember never argue for the impossibility of a task from the fact that others with fewer resources have done it before that's not a good argument you can't say we can't do it because other people accomplished it with fewer resources than we would than we have so books distance learning is not a new thing we've always had we've always had distance learning that is what books are augustine was sitting in his study in north africa feeling a certain way about the pairs that he had stolen as a youth he put those feelings down on paper and many centuries later i extracted those same feelings from different paper with intervening translations wars empires reformations all doing their part now the distance the the communication that we're accomplishing here over the distance between uh idaho and brazil that distance is a great distance but it's it's no greater than the distance between carthage and north idaho god has given us the tools that we can use to communicate over distance now it can be a problem distance learning can be a hazard there are there are pitfalls with people who do nothing but watch youtube videos that's that's a problem but we've always had bookworms we've always had people who spent too much time in the library we've got to be balanced about these things but one of the ways we're balanced is by not rejecting the tools god has given us distance learning is not a new thing this is one of the most exciting things in the world i mean how is this even possible but this exciting thing is not beyond the contaminating grasp of dullards remember oe classical and christian educators that jesus taught with authority and not like the scribes scribes are those who shuffle around learnedly and to borrow a phrase from yates coughing in ink scribes are those who tear out pages from the classics wad them up into elephant pills in order to choke the children scribes are the musty smell of death you get in a used bookstore with a mildew problem scribes are the wrecking ball of a marred culture which is nothing at all like the fancy dress ball of a merry culture scribes take the milk of education which is to be the life of the children and boil them in it the old testament law says not to boil a kid in its mother's milk you are not to take that which god gave the the baby goat as an instrument of life that's the milk and turn that instrument of life into an instrument of death this is clearly clearly a symbolic law because god's not trying to save the life of the baby goat it's it's perfectly all right to kill the baby goat uh and have the baby goat for dinner it's perfectly all right to do that you just may not boil it in its mother's milk you you may not be guilty of that symbolic sacrilege and education is to be the mother's milk that your children receive education is their milk so don't take that milk and boil them in it now please don't mistake me i'm not at war with learning or with great learning or with vast learning and i'm not against uh you recovering a great deal of knowledge in your pursuit of knowledge as you as you read you need to budget for books you need to buy books you need to buy good books and you need to devour them you need to savor them you need to take your time you need to blow through them you need to do a bunch of things with books i'm not backing away from a recovery of discipline i'm not i do not advocate a floating moonbeam approach to classical christian education what i'm saying is simply this there are nazi school moms and the grad grinders on the one hand and those who on the other hand would change all of our classical disciplines into a national free verse tournament attended exclusively by thousands of junior high girls uh c.s lewis once made a joke about he was not a joke he was recounting what a crusty old professor said to him about how students today have spent too much time on the parthenon when they ought to have spent more time on the operative they needed more time on grammatical study and less time on classical history appreciation so there's there's a balance to be had here we want true discipline we want the subjects to be hard but we want the students and the teachers who are pursuing this hard study to be merry so the grad grinders the school moms the nazi school moms want the kids to choke down a bowl of driveway gravel while the latter urged them to try to get down a bowl a bowl of cotton balls soaked in maple syrup so why not the pate pidea of god why not intelligent and focused discipline that knows where it's going and why this leads to the second point we must have hard work we must have discipline we must have pedagogical order we must have books but it must all be anointed with imagination it must all be anointed with imagination you have to you have to have the kids engaged with the books you've got to engage the books you've got to do the heavy lifting and the hard work of going through the books but you've got to you've got to engage with imagination you you ca you can't just choke it down so this brings us back to romans 4 17 god is the one who calls things that are not as though they are but when god calls it that way what does abraham what does abraham do he believes and in the bible when we believe we speak that's in psalm 116 verse 10 second corinthians 4 13 speaking with faith means speaking with true imagination and napoleon was right at least on this point when he said that imagination rules the world imagination rules the world we have to understand that in a specifically christian sense but to deny it is to deny any application of that is to depart from what i believe the bible teaches what is it that overcomes the world what is it that overcomes the world is it not our faith first john 5 4 but faith does not just overthrow worlds it replaces those worlds with another world we do not want we do not want to just cast out a devil and then wait for seven worst devils to return and so true imagination speaks with real authority but before uh but before you can speak with learned imagination to your children you have to let the books speak to you with learned imagination so don't don't just limit yourself to those uh to concordances and dictionaries although you should read those too you should be be ransacking ransacking those as well you should let learned christian scholars whether it's you know men like c.s lewis or gk chesterton uh let them speak to you with learned imagination so imagination that is has got the foundation of scholarship and learning underneath it speaks with true authority authority that lasts what are your materials what are your materials if you want to be an autodidact if you want to be self-educated what are your materials well books books and more books purchase them with imagination and faith you need grist for your mill the books are your grain your mind is the mill and your imagination bakes the bread let me go over that again the books provide the grain your mind is the mill that grinds the grain and your imagination bakes the bread don't just give kids flour don't just give don't just give them flour you want to give them bread your students should eat the bread so make sure it's fresh and make sure that there's plenty of honey butter build a civilization in front of your students and do it while waving your hands in the air let your cheeks get hot use the glorious examples we have and we have many of them use the glorious examples we have not to mention the tragedies and disasters talk about roland talk about alfred tell them what happened at lepanto and malta tell them how many times god's people have been beleaguered and surrounded how many times we have been just a huddled camp of refugee saints just like we are now and tell them how god delivered us tell them that he has done it hundreds of times and yet we still have trouble believing that he will do it next time our hearts grow thick a fly buzzes in the window and we stare malevolently at yet another book that has covers too far apart but the problem is not there in the material but here in the heart of unbelief shake yourself free of apathy and sloth but lift up your heads your redemption draws nigh there is a way of approaching this task that is energizing there is a way of approaching it that is going to drain you drain you dry and kill you dead you can give yourself to books in the pursuit of knowledge in a way that is just you eating the driveway gravel where you're you're being your own grad grind instructor but that's because you're getting the you're getting the grain you're grinding the grain you have the flour but somehow it never makes it to bread at the dinner table so lift up your heads there's a there's a better way of doing this the fact that we need to go over this so many times is the first argument for it if we had it if we have had it excuse me if we had had a christian education it wouldn't take so many times for us to grasp the concept the and if your kids get a classical christian education it's not going to take as many times for them to grasp what we're talking about we're the first generation so that's that's why it that's why it's such a trouble for us the secular state and its various projects will collapse when christians stop supporting it their cathedral of secularism only stands because we are willing to be the flying buttresses but that is not our assigned role one one last thing that i'd like to bring into this and it's a personal uh note i want i want to encourage you to think about how we can make this gigantic task personal get to know the people who are talking about these things get to know get to know authors the the long dead authors but get to know the people who are involved in the recovery of classical christian education um and the fact that you you're interacting with this material at a conference with many other christian educators is the kind of thing i'm talking about you want to get to know one another if the apostle paul were at this at this conference of yours do you know where he would be he wouldn't be uh sitting out here listening to me he'd be over in the vendor uh he'd be over with the vendors without his name tag hovering over the book tables uh second timothy 4 13 the cloak that i left at troas with carpus when thou comest bring with thee and the books but especially the parchments the apostle paul loved his books the apostle paul needed his books the apostle paul asked for his books whatever you do timothy don't forget the parchments whatever you do don't forget the parchments forget the food forget the winter cloak but don't forget the parchments and any book that paul bought from your worthy vendors and took home to read would be read with faith hope and love with a baptized and sanctified imagination he says in romans 12 1-2 i beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of god that you present your bodies a living sacrifice holy and acceptable unto god which is your reasonable service and be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of god now when you sit down uh in a in a chair with a book and it's a you know you've been you're doing way more reading than you've ever done in your life before and you're sitting down with yet another yet one more one more book realize that the chair that you're sitting in is an altar paul says i beseech your brethren by the mercies of god present your bodies a living sacrifice if you present your body as a living sacrifice then the act of reading a book that you need to read you ask your students to read it so you better right when you sit down in a chair to read the book the chair you're sitting in is an altar the act of reading is a sacrifice and it's a sweet smelling sacrifice that ascends up to god it's a sweet smelling sacrifice that he receives so you present your body's living sacrifice you give yourself over to the task of learning to the task of reading but remember it's not just just it's not just reading as though you're choking it down you're you're grinding the grain you're baking the bread and you're bringing the bread to the table so i i wish i had a better imagination so i could describe it for you but i don't and i'm by and large done but it doesn't really matter ultimately it doesn't really matter when you're done building it you're going to recognize what you've built when you're done building it you're going to know what it looks like when you're done baking the bread you're going to know what it tastes like when you're done baking the bread you're going to know what it smells like and so will your students

Channel: Canon Press

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Keywords: education, self education, culture, doug wilson, douglas wilson, canon press, self ed, learning, books, teach yourself, pastor doug wilson, Christian education, educate, school, homeschool, pastor, preacher, high culture, how to teach yourself, teach, home school

Id: RzOsFlzEUf4

Length: 32min 12sec (1932 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 31 2021