“What Time It Is” in the Light of Eternity

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Introduction

The late Andrew Breitbart once said that politics was downstream from culture, which was really observant. But there is more. Consistent Christians should want to say that culture is downstream from worship. Man is not fundamentally homo sapiens, but is rather homo adorans, worshiping man. Worship is the most important thing we do in our lives. This is because we—both individually and collectively—become like what we worship. We grow to resemble our gods, and this for both good and ill.

The reason we are governed the way we are is because we have been a nation of idolaters.

The same thing is true of those who worship the true and living God. When we finally see Him we will become like Him, for we shall see Him as He is (1 John 3:2).

A godless secular culture is not worshiping “no gods,” but rather is simply confused about what gods they are worshiping, and is consequently confused about absolutely everything else as well. The fact that they have not named their idols does not mean they do not have them.

One More Step in There

But this worship is not some upper story reality, detached from the rest of our lives. It is upstream, meaning that it affects absolutely everything that is downstream, and by this I mean downstream in history, and that includes your personal history and the history of your school.

Now the diagram would be this: worship > culture > politics. So with your permission, I would like to place another step in there: worship > cultural formation (education) > culture > politics. Now what?

There may have been some of you who have thought to yourselves that you just wanted to labor in the task of classical Christian education without getting embroiled in all this culture war stuff. You love books, and classical music, and orderly classrooms, and you don’t like the saloon brawl vibe of practical politics.

You are an educator, not a culture warrior. I am very sorry, but this is like some writer wanting a quiet little getaway in order to concentrate on his novel, and so he buys a little ocean front cottage in early 1944 . . . on Omaha Beach.

Classical Christian education is the hot center of the conflict of our time. As I have noted over the years, you cannot have a naval war without any ships. You cannot have tank warfare if you do not have any tanks. And you cannot have a culture war if you do not have a culture. And as I consider what it means to maintain a culture, or repair the ruins of a vanishing culture, so that we might attempt to mount some sort of resistance, I then think about who I might call for support . . . and the answer would be the people in this room.

The greatest threat that the progressive left faces is the prospect of Christians going deep in their study of the heritage of the West, the traditions of the West, the legacy of the West. You can join with us in this task of Protestant ressourcement (reh-soor-suh-MAHN), or Protestant retrieval, without being a bigot. But you cannot join with us in this endeavor without being accused of being one. And so it is necessary that you must absolutely not care if you are accused of being one.

Classical educators ought to be the first to acknowledge that what we are dealing with here in the 21^st century is a seismic sort of thing. And in response, we are educating, if we are doing our job properly, at the tectonic plates level. Simplistic right wing “talking points” are just reactionary, not reformational, and so if they pay attention to schooling at all, they are not dealing with the tectonic plates. Their concerns have to do with where we plant the bushes, and how we mow the lawn. They are thinking about curb appeal while we are thinking about proofing our homes against earthquakes.

So there are two temptations to deal with. The first is to pretend that what I have been saying here simply ain’t so. In the long run, this will actually turn out to be a form of treachery, of going over to the other side, over to the progressive left. If you are constantly policing your own education efforts so that the left won’t accuse you of wrongthink, that means they have already captured you. You might as well go over to their side right now and get it over with.

Please know that there are a number of people in the classical Christian school movement who are already vulnerable in this way. The number is not small, and the chances are good that you have already encountered some of their arguments. “Why is ACCS so combative? The answer is that we are in combat.

The largest evangelical Presbyterian church in America, the PCA, is embroiled in the fight. They are a Reformed evangelical denomination, and they have a left wing. The Southern Baptists, a huge evangelical denomination, is also in the fight, and they have a left wing. God bless them both as they fight the progressive drift. Thank God for how rapidly the ACCS has grown, and it really is glorious. But what makes us think that we could have a movement grow to this size without having a left wing? Yeah, we’ve got one, and the thing they share with all the others is that they want us to be winsome. But I think that if we are going to be winsome, we ought to win some.

But the second temptation is to treat the classroom as a simplistic right wing propaganda center. Now stay with me. The devil has been weaving lies for centuries, and please trust me on this—he is good at it. To quote Christopher Dawson, “The Christian church lives in the light of eternity, and can afford to be patient.” But the reactionary right is just as impatient as the revolutionary left is. And because they are impatient this way, it is not possible to do the necessary preparatory cultural work that will bring about any lasting change.

Politics are of course involved in all of this, but the task of a true culture warrior is not the replacement of one political faction with another one. What we are after is the replacement of one culture with another one, one civilization with another one.

But you may want to stop me here. Wait a minute. Aren’t we supposed to be repairing the ruins? Yes, we are, and the civilization we are seeking to build had its antecedents in the first Christendom. Absolutely. But since the Enlightenment, the process of cultural exchange has been moving steadily in the wrong direction. This means that we are doing more than simply repairing the ruins. We also have to remove the bright aluminum nightclub so that we might get down to the cathedral ruins that we need to rebuild.

It is the tendency of carnal men (as well as carnal educators) to live out their days with very limited horizons. With liberals taking the long view, with their long view being an aimless evolutionary arc, and with secular right-wing reactionaries urging us to realize “what time it is,” with a narrative arc like a mortar shot, the classical Christian educator often feels torn.

But we are very tiny Christians, not fruit flies or midges. We need the light of eternity, and fortunately God has created us with eternity in our hearts (Ecc. 3:11). We have the capacity to think well past our personal horizons—and if classical Christian education is to be anything more than a passing pedagogical fad, those horizons need to be outside the world. We must not be building schools that are contained or imprisoned by the immanent frame.  

Eternity, Not Eternity Words

The occupational hazards of teaching in a classical Christian school can be similar to the occupational hazards of occupying a pulpit. We are Christians, which means that we come to the Father by means of His spoken Word, the Lord Jesus. We know the Lord Jesus through His enscripturated Word, the holy Bible. And because we are people of the Word in this sense, we must be people of words.

Now people who make their living through handling words are either going to be poisoned by them, or liberated by them. We are poisoned by them when we take them for granted. We are liberated by them when we learn to see them as the delivery platforms for truth—with words as the cracker and truth as the cheese.

What I am talking about here is actually the heart of all true evangelical faith, which is the union of word and referent. Not just a logical relationship between the sign and the thing signified, although even an acknowledgement of that is increasingly rare in these diseased times, but I want to go further than that. I am talking rather about a union, with sign and signifier welded together in the imagination. Not just cheese on a cracker, but a union of cracker and cheese.

The task of the classical Christian educator is to teach all subjects as parts of an integrated whole, with the Scriptures at the center. But what is the nature of this integration?

If applied in a trivial sense, appeal to a “Christian worldview” will be nothing more than our expanded version of “talking points,” touching lightly on the outside of the thing. This is, of course, a temptation for any position that has a dogmatic content to it. It is relatively easy to get the parrots to say what you want them to, just as it is easy to get third-graders to chant their declensions.

But as I never tire of saying, there is always a ditch on both sides of the road. If you inculcate mindless chanting of clunkity clunkity worldview facts, it will not be long before some thoughtful people revolt against it. This is part of what drives some into the SCL orbit. But this is a fallen world, and such superficial reactions rarely stay put. The revolt can then develop into copping a pose of nuance and sophistication, where you open your mind so wide that your brains fall out. But at least you weren’t doing that clunkity clunkity thing.

Compare this to the writing of poetry. The classical forms are hard and challenging and have been the delivery platforms of some of the greatest poetry in the world. But the classical forms can also give us Hallmark poetry, moon/Juning, and love/doving. So the people revolt against that, and free verse is born—what Robert Frost compared to playing tennis with the net down. Great geniuses can work with the form, but so can everybody else.  

Onward. 

The Intersection of Time and Eternity

Let us go back to Ecc. 3:11. God has created us, minute creatures, but He also created us with the capacity to have an enlarged heart. We are mere specks of dust inhabiting another speck of dust in the corner of the solar system. The size of planet earth compared to the size of the solar system is like a golf ball compared to the greater Los Angeles area. And that’s just the solar system. Now compare our planet to the galaxy we are in. Now do all the other galaxies.

But here is the thing. We, these tiny midges, have been given eyes. And we can see those galaxies. We can think about them, talk about them, and see ourselves standing in some minute way alongside them. We are large enough to see how small we are. Lewis put it this way:

“Men look on the starry heavens with reverence: monkeys do not. The silence of the eternal spaces terrified Pascal, but it was the greatness of Pascal that enabled them to do so. When we are frightened by the greatness of the universe, we are (almost literally) frightened by our own shadows: for these light years and billions of centuries are mere arithmetic until the shadow of man, the poet, the maker of myth, falls upon them” (C.S. Lewis, “Dogma and the Universe” God in the Dock, p. 41). 

A certain phrase has been used an awful lot in the last few years and, with a few qualifications, I actually like the phrase. We are frequently told that so-and-so “knows what time it is,” or that his counterpart “doesn’t know what time it is.” Lewis again. He once said that “whatever is not eternal is eternally out of date.” But what time is it?

It is time to remember there is a transcendent heaven over our heads. It is time to teach our children to remember this.

Andrew Nelson Lytle, one of the Southern Agrarians, once that that we were not so much modern men as we were “momentary men.” For those engaged in our fierce cultural battles—including the central cultural battle, which is education—without reference to the eternal . . . all such are simply right-wing momentary men.

Audacity and Hope

From everlasting to everlasting, God is God (Ps. 90:2). We are like grass that flourishes in the morning, and withers at night (Ps. 90:5-6). We spend our days like a story that has already been told (Ps. 90:9). We might stretch out our days to eighty years, but then like midges in a sunbeam, we fly off (Ps. 90:10). We look to God for mercy so that He might make us, such as we are, glad for all of our days (Ps. 90:14).

So here we are, an assembly of smoke and vapor. If we have been granted the divine wisdom, we see ourselves as smoke and vapor. And from that position, with that vantage, what do we ask for? We ask for the telos of all human history. We look for the fulfillment of the Great Commission, the overflow of the cultural mandate, and the dominion of glory. And we plead with Jehovah make our schools part of that. We ask for the conclusion of the psalm, and we plead God’s Scripture back to Him.