![]() While professional studies prepare the student to make a living, the liberal arts prepare the student for living. A true educational experience must be about more than the transferal of information. While some may argue that a liberal arts education is irrelevant, a distraction from more important studies that drive earning potential, Christian educators rightly argue to the contrary. A Christian liberal arts education provides the tools needed to answer that challenge. All along Christians have struggled with how to reconcile their faith with what the world calls knowledge. In the nearly two thousand years since Jesus’ day, those changes and challenges have accelerated. Jesus’ contemporaries were bombarded by secular thinking and challenges to the faith of their fathers. The Greeks, however, changed the way the world thought about the world. ![]() Various world powers had come, gone and had long since been forgotten. In the centuries between Moses and Jesus the world took many steps forward. Yet, Jesus chose to say that we are to love the Lord “with all mind.” God’s people are to love the Lord with their entire being, including the mind. Moses wrote, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Interestingly he summarized the content of the Law by expounding upon Moses’ intent. Jesus drew these words from the Law itself. When the Pharisees challenged Jesus on the meaning of the Law, Jesus responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). It would seem that few understand the true value of a well-rounded Christian education. Some act as though my profession represents a quaint reminder of by-gone eras, an intellectual Mayberry forever trapped in the “good ol’ days.” Others assume that my vocation entails little more than rehashing tired Sunday School lessons with a healthy dose of mental steroids. We may be denounced, despised and cast out of the Synagogues of our brethren.When people learn that I am a professor at a Christian college their responses are varied. Shall we be excluded from the fellowship of our brethren in other lands, because we dare not depart from the charter of our faith? Shall we be branded with the stigma of reproach, because we cannot consent to corrupt the Word of God to suit the intuitions of an infidel philosophy? Shall our names be cast out as evil, and the finger of scorn pointed at us, because we utterly refuse to break our communion with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, with Moses, David and Isaiah, with Apostles, Prophets and Martyrs, with all the noble army of confessors who have gone to glory from slave-holding countries and from a slaveholding Church, without ever having dreamed that they were living in mortal sin, by conniving at slavery in the midst of them? If so, we shall take consolation in the cheering consciousness that the Master has accepted us. We stand upon the foundation of the Prophets and Apostles, Jesus Christ Himself being the Chief cornerstone. " We stand exactly where the Church of God has always stood – from Abraham to Moses, from Moses to Christ, from Christ to the Reformers, and from the Reformers to ourselves. And who are we, that in our modern wisdom presume to set aside the Word of God, and scorn the example of the divine Redeemer, and spurn the preaching and the conduct of the apostles, and invent for ourselves a "higher law" than those holy Scriptures which are given to us as "a light to our feet and a lamp to our paths," in the darkness of a sinful and a polluted world? Who are we that virtually blot out the language of the sacred record, and dictate to the majesty of heaven what he shall regard as sin and reward as duty? Who are we that are ready to trample on the doctrine of the Bible, and tear to shreds the Constitution of our country, and even plunge the land into the untold horrors of civil war, and yet boldly pray to the God of Israel to bless our very acts of rebellion against his own sovereign authority? Woe to our Union when the blind become the leaders of the blind! Woe to the man who dares to "strive against his Maker!" - Henry Hopkins, from his pamphlet The Bible View of Slavery. Paul was inspired, and knew the will of the Lord Jesus Christ, and was only intent on obeying it. ![]()
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