Creation

3 Connections Between Faith and Learning

June 8, 2017 by Ben

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, more than 60 percent of homeschoolers choose to teach their children at home because they want to “provide religious instruction.” That was true for my parents when they decided to homeschool me, and it is true for my family as my wife and I now homeschool our children. Secular public education is not an option for us. We want to provide our kids with a Christian education that makes the connection between faith and learning in our homeschool.

Secular Disconnect

If you ask most Christian parents whether they use secular lessons in their homeschool, they typically say, “No way!” But that’s assuming that secular means denying God’s existence. Actually, secularism claims that religion is a private matter and as such shouldn’t influence considerations regarding public life. So we have public officials who say, “I’m a Christian, but I don’t let that affect my decision-making.”

When we take a secular-based teaching of math, science, or English into our homeschool and place religious education around it, we present education and faith as unrelated. We’re still giving our children a secular education by acknowledging a disconnect between faith and learning.

Worldview Connection

The connection between faith and homeschooling comes from a strong biblical worldview. The basis of any worldview is a big narrative that answers crucial life questions such as “Who am I?” and “Where did I come from?”

The Bible gives us the narrative of Creation, Fall, Redemption. Understanding this story and its implications for homeschooling enables us to connect faith and learning. Let’s look at how each part of this narrative connects faith and learning.

1. Creation Connection

God created humans in His own image and blessed them with stewardship over all the rest of His other creation. These truths from the creation account enable us to make the first and foundational connection to learning. We learn because God blessed us with His image and gave us a job. Our learning reflects God’s glory and it is a powerful tool for fulfilling His command to exercise rule over creation.

2. Fallen Disruption

When Adam sinned, his heart became fallen. It loves wrongly and so thinks wrongly. The account of the fall points to a second, deeper connection between faith and learning. As we learn, we must be vigilant of wrong thoughts based on wrong loves. That doesn’t frighten us from education. Instead we should use the Bible as a corrective lens in all that we’re learning so that we can evaluate the ideas within any subject and reject the false ones.

3. Redemption Connection

God’s plan for redemption is as sweeping as the fall. It can straighten out all of those twisted thoughts we encounter in science, literature, and history. As believers, we’re obligated to bring every thought into obedience to Christ. This is the final, deepest connection between our faith and learning. When we evaluate an erroneous idea in a subject, we cannot simply identify it as false and move on. We must press it back toward God’s creational design.

Let’s take math and see how a biblical worldview enables us to connect faith and learning. Notice how each step makes a deeper connection.

Creation: Since we’re made in God’s image, we can use math as a powerful tool. So we use it to rule over God’s creation and serve others to bring Him glory.
Fall: God’s lordship over all creation disproves secularists’ claim that “math is neutral.”
Redemption: Math must be governed by the Christian ethic laid out in Scripture. It should only be used to love my neighbor and never used to do my neighbor harm.

You and I know the account of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. But how are we doing bringing these big-story implications for learning to our children’s homeschooling? Take time to determine if your homeschooling is presenting faith and learning as unconnected or if it is reaching the kind of connection that a biblical worldview demands. At BJU Press, we’re committed to providing resources and curriculum that assist homeschool families in creating those connections between faith and learning. Each post below provides an in-depth look at the three connections—Creation, Fall, and Redemption.

History Begins at Creation

September 13, 2016 by Ben

I’m a few weeks into teaching Heritage Studies 2 to my oldest daughter. One day as we started our history lesson after family worship, my daughter exclaimed, “I learned this in Bible class!” (That’s because our second-grade American history textbook began with creation.) She was surprised to be learning something in history class that she learned from the Bible.

As a parent, I was pleased that my daughter recognized our study of American history started with a historical account from the Bible because my wife and I have committed to give our children a biblical worldview education so that they will view each subject by faith. When we study history, faith demands we begin the study with creation, understand humanity in light of creation, and see civilization through creation.

By Faith Begin History with Creation

When I took world history in high school and college, the textbooks began with civilization in ancient Mesopotamia. My Christian teachers dismissed evolutionary “prehistory,” but they never replaced these myths with the account of the beginning of human events in the Garden of Eden. When we as parents start to teach “history” without the creation account, we treat it as a secularist would, as something other than an account of how the world actually began. I want my children to approach all subjects by faith. That means taking creation seriously in their history course.

By Faith Understand Humanity in Light of Creation

Secularists try to find ways to define humans. They sometimes call us tool-using-creatures or symbol-using-creatures. Without the creation account, we have a poor basis for understanding human beings. How can our children properly study a subject that records and interprets human events yet doesn’t define our humanity? Our history textbook taught my daughter that we’re all created in God’s image and that God gives us two important directions: fill and rule the earth. While the Fall (also covered in our textbook) twisted us, our identity is still rooted in the one in whose image we are made and the directions He gave us in the beginning. Creation is foundational to understanding that humans and humanity are the central focus of historical study.

By Faith See Civilization Through Creation

In general, secularists claim that humans started to congregate and plant crops, which in turn led to civilization. They claim civilization allowed for occupational specializations, such as priests who invented gods. In contrast, the creation account tells us that God ordered humans to “exercise dominion” over the earth. In the first generation, people began cultivating crops (Cain) and practicing husbandry (Abel). Even when murderous Cain began founding cities, he did so because of God’s call to rule over the world. Civilization didn’t beget God, instead God’s direction to man gave rise to civilization.

As my daughter continues to study American history, these foundational concepts are central to her understanding of the events and people we will learn about. My wife and I want our daughter to view history through the lens of faith. That’s why we want a history text that begins with creation.

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The Moral of the Story: How Not to Read the Old Testament

June 16, 2016 by Kevin

Have you ever gotten lost in the middle of reading the Old Testament? Getting lost is easy because the Old Testament is long, the culture is foreign, and your recollection of the history may be fuzzy. From childhood, most of us have been taught to approach Scripture looking for morals to apply to our lives today. (Or maybe we just fall into this approach naturally.) But the Old Testament just doesn’t seem to provide what we’re looking for—unless we’re willing to stretch or twist the text out of context.

What’s the solution?

First, our approach to Scripture needs to change.
Second, we need to focus on the structure of the larger story of Scripture.

A God-Directed Approach to Scripture

Teaching children a foundation of biblical facts is important, and guiding them to make practical application should be an end goal. But the driving focus must be God-directed, not self-directed. Otherwise, children may learn all the morals for how to behave without recognizing the point—a right relationship with their Creator. For example, the point of the David and Goliath narrative isn’t to teach children to find courage in themselves. The point is to trust God because “the battle is the Lord’s” (1 Samuel 17:47).

Children need to be taught from a young age to look for what God reveals in His Word about Himself. And from those truths they can learn to look for what God has revealed to humans about having a relationship with Him. If we don’t teach children to approach the Bible this way, they may miss the Person at the center of it all; they may miss the all-powerful, self-existent God overflowing with love—the one all creation points to (Psalm 19:1).

The Creation, Fall, Redemption Structure

Children need to learn to understand individual Bible stories according to the larger context of what the Bible is all about. The BJU Press textbook The Story of the Old Testament teaches young teens to approach Scripture theologically. That means that they understand the Bible to be the true story of what God is doing to glorify Himself by redeeming His fallen creation (Creation, Fall, Redemption). Why is this important?

The Bible isn’t a random collection of stories or moral platitudes like the Qur’an or the sayings of Confucius. Biblical morality must be grounded in the reality of the larger story of this world. And that story tells your children how to have a relationship with their Creator. No other moral system teaches what the Bible does; every other religion is false, no matter how laudable its morals, because the larger story of the world told in those other religions is false.

Even the truth of our need to trust God (another moral that can be drawn from the account of David and Goliath) doesn’t make sense unless children understand that David’s trust in the Lord rested on the covenant God had made with Israel when redeeming them out of Egypt. Similarly, the New Covenant cross work of Christ teaches us and our children to trust in God. Every story, every moral has to be seen in the larger context of the Creation, Fall, Redemption story line.

When you read the Old Testament and teach it to your children, remember that the morals that you want to teach only make sense when grounded in the overarching story (Creation, Fall, Redemption) that reveals who God is. Right behavior ought to be grounded in right beliefs (Titus 2:11–12).

The Creation Blessing

May 3, 2016 by Ben

Often when I leave for work, I say goodbye to my wife and children by offering good wishes. Have you ever thought about the common phrase “have a nice day”? Grammatically, it’s an imperative or command like “be good!” The way it looks on paper it could be followed up with “or else” as in “have a nice day or else . . .” But no one ever says it that way. We say it more like “may you have a nice day.” We’re actually blessing one another in the form of a command.

Divine Blessing

In Genesis 1:28 we read about a blessing given in the form of a command. After creating humans male and female in His own image, God blessed them. The wording of this blessing is a command; so we often refer to it as the Creation Mandate.

Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Divine Command

Unlike our good wishes, God’s blessing carries the weight of a command. We shouldn’t resist His blessing from Genesis 1:28 and expect things to go well for us. For example, in Genesis 11 Noah’s descendants rejected God’s command and all gathered in one place to build the tower of Babel. As a result of their sin, God confused their language and sent the people throughout the world.

Unbelievers can share in God’s blessing by following the Creation Mandate. In fact, many do. In BJU Press science and math textbooks, we highlight how scientists and mathematicians use their knowledge of God’s world to “have dominion.” They use their skill to care for the creation and use the creation for others’ benefit. Many of those professionals following the Creation Mandate are experiencing the common grace of God’s creation blessing in their lives.

Divine Reach

Because I’m human, the blessings I speak are little more than well-wishing. I may say, “I hope you have a nice day.” But while I’m at work, I have little immediate control over what happens at home, and some days my wife feels overwhelmed. In contrast, God’s blessing on the first man and woman had power behind it to confer that blessing on all of humanity.

God’s power is infinite, so His action in Genesis 1:28 reaches through time and space to all people. Not even the Fall overthrew His blessing to fill the earth and exercise dominion. The long line of impressive civilizations throughout history with all their remarkable achievements, technological advancements, and beautiful artwork evidences God’s power and kindness to humanity expressed in His first words to mankind.

As parents, we have a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate God’s blessing. We get to teach our children how to follow God’s blessing to care for the world. Since our teaching is influenced by the textbooks we use, it’s important to choose a homeschool curriculum that reinforces the truth of God’s creation blessing.

Putting on Your Worldview Glasses

February 4, 2016 by Kevin

The Need for a Biblical Worldview

We have always lived in a fallen world, but it seems to be going from bad to worse (2 Timothy 3:13). The issues are snowballing; rebellion against God rages like an avalanche overtaking any chance of escape (Psalm 2:1–3). Will the rebellion of this world swallow up or smother your own children?

Truth claims and moral values that were once clear to many Christian parents are now being questioned by their professing Christian children. Some of the classmates I grew up with—who still profess Christ—have fallen into the traps that seem to be everywhere: justifying their indulgence in immorality, downplaying compromise with evolution, or gravitating toward the edges of orthodox Christianity.

As godly parents, you watch your young people growing up and see that they’re about to depart from home. You’re rightly motivated to equip your children to respond with biblical wisdom to the cultural upheaval: gay marriage, the murder of babies for profit, “safe zones” for the entitled on college campuses, and frequent mass shootings. The cultural situation is grim.¹

The biblical worldview team at BJU Press is motivated to provide the tools you need to equip your young people to face the chaotic world in which they live and to stand firm. That’s why we wrote Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption—to protect Christ’s little ones who truly belong to Him by providing them with biblical worldview glasses.

Biblical Worldview: Creation, Fall, Redemption

This one book brings together the biblical worldview approach that is integrated into all of BJU Press’s curriculum. First, it helps students understand what a biblical worldview is and its significance to all of life. Second, it helps students to specifically understand the biblical worldview of Creation, Fall, and Redemption. Third, it guides an application of this worldview to multiple social institutions and disciplines (marriage and the family, government, science, history, and culture and the arts).

In the process, it introduces students to apologetic methods and guides them to discern and refute false worldviews. Particular attention is given to motivating students to contribute positively to the social institutions and disciplines—to rebuild them according to a biblical worldview.

Four distinctives summarize our approach to teaching a biblical worldview:

Focus on a biblical worldview: The goal is to focus students on a constructive presentation of Creation, Fall, Redemption rather than to overwhelm them with information about a multiplicity of false worldviews. False worldviews will be evaluated, but always in the context of reinforcing the true biblical worldview.
Bible-first perspective: The starting point, the ultimate authority source, is God’s Word. It’s the standard by which all evidence and claims must be evaluated, and not vice versa.
Emphasis on evaluation and positive response: Students should be challenged not only to evaluate ideas intellectually but also to apply the biblical worldview as they become salt and light in the culture.
Content that is both accessible and compelling: This textbook was purposefully written in a style that’s more enjoyable to read and draws from several conservative Bible translations. Rather than introducing students to an encyclopedic overview of abstract philosophical concepts, our approach to worldview studies is designed to be engaging by being set in the context of the unfolding story of the world.

The Student Text is complemented by these additional resources: Teacher’s Edition, a Student Activities Manual and Student Activities Answer Key, and Tests and Tests Answer Key.

Take a look inside the book to learn more.

1. Ken Ham, “The Chasm Is Widening: Are You on God’s Side?” Answers in Genesis (website), April 29, 2013; D.C. Innes, “The Fight for Religious Liberty,” World (website), January 26, 2015.