How Much Can Christians Learn from Non-Christians?

00:00:00.000 | Here's today's question.

00:00:05.840 | Dear Pastor John, I am a female student at a secular university.

00:00:10.600 | I am normally pretty joyful in my relationship with God and in day-to-day living.

00:00:14.880 | However, the wickedness of my surroundings continues to grieve me.

00:00:19.520 | Today in the lecture, I could barely keep from crying as we discussed a novel so full

00:00:24.120 | of depravity I decided to just read the spark notes of the book instead of read the book

00:00:29.200 | itself.

00:00:30.480 | But even the summary is hard to read.

00:00:32.560 | My heart is so weighed down and broken.

00:00:34.760 | I feel that I am the only one who even senses the evil around me.

00:00:39.480 | And I mourn that I am in a setting that is forcing me into a knowledge that seems premature.

00:00:45.680 | I don't understand their pragmatic justifications.

00:00:49.180 | Every poem, short story, and novel we have covered is filled with sex, rape, grotesque,

00:00:54.240 | and graphic depictions of murder, infant side, slavery, and cursing.

00:00:59.560 | It makes me so weary.

00:01:01.480 | And they call those things morally ambiguous.

00:01:05.880 | What can I do?

00:01:06.920 | What should I do?

00:01:08.160 | Pastor John, what would you say to this female college student?

00:01:12.040 | Wow, there's so many different angles that we could come at this.

00:01:18.440 | I mean, I could camp on that word morally ambiguous and say, "Are you kidding me?

00:01:23.260 | Just have one of their children raped and see if they call it morally ambiguous."

00:01:26.480 | That's a lot of baloney.

00:01:27.700 | But I'm not going to come at it that way.

00:01:30.600 | This may be a good occasion to give a few thoughts about my understanding of the way

00:01:37.000 | Christians should seek to be educated.

00:01:39.720 | That's the direction I'm going to go.

00:01:41.440 | And just apologize ahead of time if that's not what she needs most.

00:01:47.040 | But it just felt like I should do this.

00:01:49.840 | So when I say, "How should a Christian be educated?"

00:01:53.480 | I mean, how should our character be formed from the time we're little to the time we're

00:01:58.920 | 80?

00:01:59.920 | How should our character be formed?

00:02:02.400 | How should our worldview be shaped?

00:02:05.160 | Who should shape it?

00:02:06.160 | How should it be shaped?

00:02:07.160 | The way we view everything?

00:02:08.940 | And third, how should our skill, how should we be equipped with the necessary skills for

00:02:14.880 | the particular calling that we have?

00:02:16.880 | Those three things are what I mean by education.

00:02:19.700 | So we start with the conviction.

00:02:21.160 | I start with the conviction that human beings don't come into the world like birds and squirrels

00:02:27.860 | with incredible instincts built into their DNA that enable them to fly and hunt and jump.

00:02:33.840 | I watch the squirrel outside my window jump from limb to limb.

00:02:37.120 | I say, "That's just absolutely incredible that he can do that and know exactly where

00:02:42.160 | to land, even though the limb that he's jumping from is going to give way under his feet and

00:02:46.440 | he has to know how hard to push off."

00:02:48.480 | Calculating the give way and the...

00:02:51.520 | You can see I'm just amazed every day.

00:02:54.000 | So human beings come into the world with virtually zero education, except maybe the sucking reflex,

00:03:02.680 | right?

00:03:03.680 | Amazing, absolutely amazing.

00:03:05.240 | But we poor human beings have to learn almost everything through what others show us or

00:03:10.600 | by trial and error.

00:03:12.220 | So almost everything we need to know we get by learning, by education.

00:03:17.160 | It's educated into us by someone or some experience that we have.

00:03:21.920 | The Bible charges parents first and foremost with this job of educating little bitty human

00:03:30.240 | beings who don't know anything and would perish if you left them alone.

00:03:33.880 | And these words, this is Deuteronomy 6, "These words that I command you today shall be on

00:03:40.120 | your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your children."

00:03:44.440 | That's one of the most important instructions in the Bible.

00:03:47.600 | Or Ephesians 6, "Fathers, bring up your children in the discipline and the instruction of the

00:03:54.600 | Lord."

00:03:55.600 | Don't leave them to find things out by themselves.

00:03:58.760 | This is just lunatic to treat children as though they shouldn't be instructed in the

00:04:03.920 | way of the Lord.

00:04:06.160 | Then, besides parents, the Bible says that there are sages or wise men, wise women from

00:04:13.920 | whom we can gain much wisdom and knowledge.

00:04:16.360 | It's another dimension of education.

00:04:18.720 | The teaching of the wise is a fountain of life, Proverbs 13.

00:04:22.000 | The lips of the wise spread knowledge, Proverbs 15, 7.

00:04:27.960 | And then the New Testament says that God has ordained that there be teachers in the church

00:04:33.240 | and they help us grow in knowledge and understanding.

00:04:37.160 | Hebrews 5, "By this time you ought to be teachers."

00:04:41.360 | Or 1 Corinthians 12, "God has appointed in the church teachers."

00:04:46.160 | So from the time we are children, we're to keep on learning, keep on growing in the knowledge

00:04:52.440 | and understanding of the Lord, 2 Peter 3.18.

00:04:56.560 | And education, therefore, is not just a phase of life like, "Oh, I have to go to school

00:05:01.480 | for 12 years or 16 years or whatever."

00:05:05.480 | It's part of life to the very end.

00:05:07.920 | Now, till now, all I've said is that the Bible points towards the shaping of our character

00:05:15.160 | and the learning of our worldview and the gaining of our skills from fellow believers,

00:05:20.320 | parents and wise people and teachers.

00:05:24.120 | And that is the main point.

00:05:25.920 | Unbelievers will not be able to teach us the most important things we need to know about

00:05:31.440 | God and about His ways in the world.

00:05:34.400 | Nevertheless, that's not all that the Bible has to say about education.

00:05:38.920 | It tells us that we should have our eyes open and become serious observers of the world.

00:05:45.760 | Go to the ant, consider her ways and be wise, Proverbs 6.

00:05:50.520 | Consider the lilies, consider the birds, Matthew 6.

00:05:53.840 | Study the weather, Matthew 16.

00:05:56.600 | Learn to read, Ephesians 4.

00:05:58.680 | Use your reason.

00:06:00.000 | Come now, let us reason together, Isaiah 1.18.

00:06:03.760 | Be children in your thinking, in your thinking be mature, 1 Corinthians 14.20.

00:06:08.920 | So in general, we could say that there are two kinds of knowledge Christians gain in

00:06:15.120 | school and in lifelong education.

00:06:17.440 | One is knowledge of God and His ways and His world that is distinctively Christian.

00:06:27.200 | And the other is knowledge that overlaps with what unbelievers know.

00:06:33.360 | Two plus two is four.

00:06:35.160 | Grammatical rules, chemical processes, laws of physics, human anatomy, a thousand aspects

00:06:43.160 | of common experience of the world that we share, we overlap with unbelievers.

00:06:48.800 | And to the degree that a body of knowledge can be known by an unbeliever—now here I'm

00:06:56.800 | starting to get to her situation a little bit.

00:06:59.280 | You wonder, where is he going with this?

00:07:02.440 | To the degree that a body of knowledge can be known by an unbeliever, to that degree

00:07:09.040 | can we be educated by an unbeliever?

00:07:12.920 | Keeping in mind, of course, that this body of knowledge will only be fully understood

00:07:17.360 | in its relation to God's, His hand in creation, His hand in providence, His hand in leading

00:07:22.820 | it to its ultimate purposes.

00:07:24.720 | But there's an overlap between knowledge that unbelievers have and knowledge that we

00:07:28.480 | need so that we can be educated in some dimension to the degree that that knowledge is shared.

00:07:36.920 | Now here's the flip side of that point.

00:07:39.720 | To the degree that a body of knowledge—it sounds like she's in a class of literature

00:07:45.000 | maybe, say modern American literature or modern English literature—to the degree that a

00:07:50.760 | body of knowledge is misunderstood and wrongly evaluated by an unbeliever, to that degree

00:07:59.120 | should we avoid being educated by an unbeliever?

00:08:03.480 | In other words, it's a matter of degree here.

00:08:06.720 | To the degree that they're giving bad information and bad evaluation, they're going to be less

00:08:12.680 | useful for the believer, or really for anybody for that matter.

00:08:17.880 | So what this means in the university generally is that in the hard sciences, the overlap

00:08:25.320 | of knowledge between believer and unbeliever is greater.

00:08:29.880 | And in the humanities and social sciences, the overlap is smaller and becomes increasingly

00:08:37.560 | problematical.

00:08:38.560 | In other words, these disciplines reveal almost immediately that value judgments form the

00:08:46.120 | warp and woof of the subject matter.

00:08:50.280 | Value judgments about what is beautiful and ugly in this literature, what's right and

00:08:55.080 | wrong, good and bad, helpful and harmful, just and unjust, loving and unloving.

00:09:00.400 | And to the degree that a teacher sees the subject matter in a way that is contrary to

00:09:07.680 | the Scriptures and contrary to a biblical worldview, to that degree it will be difficult

00:09:14.760 | to get the kind of education in that class that the Lord wants us to get.

00:09:22.360 | So all of that to say to our friend who is so distressed in her university class that

00:09:29.720 | glory is in shame, try to discern ahead of time which teachers and which classes will

00:09:38.240 | distort the body of knowledge that you want to get and distort the value judgments that

00:09:46.240 | you want to form and avoid those classes and teachers by and large.

00:09:53.280 | This might mean changing schools.

00:09:57.640 | It might simply mean being more selective in the courses and teachers you choose.

00:10:02.120 | I'll close by saying I personally am jealous for young people, especially Christian young

00:10:09.920 | people, I am jealous for young people to be exposed to great Christian thinking.

00:10:20.160 | Most students in secular schools don't even get exposed to great Christian thinking, and

00:10:28.000 | to me that's a tragedy.

00:10:30.800 | So I would encourage college-bound young people to make that a priority.

00:10:38.000 | Find a school where you can be exposed to the greatest, the greatest Christian thinking

00:10:46.520 | about the subjects you love.

00:10:48.600 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for the really helpful question.

00:10:52.840 | Keep those coming in to us.

00:10:54.000 | To ask Pastor John a question of your own or for more details on this podcast, go to

00:10:58.680 | our online home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:11:01.720 | Well, Friday we return with a question from Hebrews 1-4 where it says that Jesus became

00:11:10.280 | superior to angels.

00:11:12.480 | Wait, what?

00:11:13.800 | Hasn't Jesus always been superior to angels?

00:11:17.400 | What does the author of Hebrews mean?

00:11:18.920 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:11:20.560 | We'll see you back here on Monday.

00:11:21.880 | Have a great weekend.

00:11:22.840 | [END]

00:11:24.520 | 1. Does Jesus always become superior to angels? (Hebrews 1-4)

00:11:31.200 | 2. Is Jesus always superior to angels? (Hebrews 1-5)

How Much Can Christians Learn from Non-Christians?

Chapters