Remnant Review
To understand Christian homeschooling today, you must understand the work of R. J. Rushdoony. You need to understand two things. First, he saw education as a war of the worldviews. Second, he utterly rejected the underlying concept behind the so-called classical Christian curriculum: religious syncretism. The second position was an extension of the first.
What is syncretism? This dictionary definition is accurate: "The amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought."
From the 1960's through the 1990's, the homeschool movement in the United States faced an escalating battle with state governments. The movement was overwhelmingly made up of Protestant fundamentalists who had decided that they could no longer cooperate with the educational philosophy and programs of the tax-funded schools, K-12. State by state, regulation by regulation, these were the front lines of the war of the worldviews. The states did not want students to escape from state control over the state's curricula and teaching philosophies. Also, because state funding of local districts depends on enrollment, every child pulled out of the schools cuts the income of the school district.
Throughout this period, Rushdoony was the premier spokesman for the religious rights of parents in this war against humanistic state education. This culminated in 1994 with a Texas Supreme Court decision, in which the school districts in Texas were dealt a massive blow against their control over homeschooling parents. The educational bureaucrats never recovered.
THE BATTLEGROUND IN TEXAS, 1985-1994
The states varied in their threats against homeschooling families. In Texas, the showdown came in a court case: Leeper v. Arlington. A Google search reveals hundreds of articles on this case. A total of 80 families in the state were prosecuted by school districts for criminal violations of a 1985 compulsory attendance law. In 1985, attorney Shelby Sharpe filed a class action suit against all 1,100 school districts. The result came after nine years of litigation. The initial decision came in 1987.
The Tarrant County District Court ruled that home schools are indeed private schools. On April 13, 1987, presiding Judge Charles J. Murray issued a decision (binding on all 1,100 school districts) which was a complete vindication of the rights of parents to educate their children at home in the State of Texas.
The state appealed. In 1991, an appeals court upheld the local judge's decision. The state appealed. In 1994, the Texas Supreme Court voted 9 to 0 in favor of the parents. At that point, the state was definitively beaten. The districts were fined several hundred thousand dollars. That threw the fear of the state into them. That ended the school districts' authority or willingness to interfere with parental rights in education.
In 2013, the Texas Commissioner of Education reminded the school districts and parents of state policy.
The issues surrounding students schooled at home continue to be of significant interest to parents and school districts. Because of the number of inquiries the Texas Education Agency (TEA) receives regarding this matter, I am providing some general information with respect to the Agency's position on home schooled students.The decision rendered in Leeper et al. vs. Arlington ISD et al. clearly establishes that students who are home schooled are exempt from the compulsory attendance requirement to the same extent as students enrolled in private schools. Students should be disenrolled by school officials when they receive written notice either by signing withdrawal forms or a letter of withdrawal. It is not necessary for the parents to make a personal appearance with school officials or present curriculum for review.
The school districts' defeat had been total.
That decision sent a memo to school districts across the United States. They began to back off after 1994.
The key witness in the Leeper case was Rushdoony. He was brought in by attorney Sharpe because he was the most recognized defender in the United States of Christian education. After the victory, Sharpe said this: "His testimony was way beyond anything I'd hoped for. It was one of the few times in my career that I ever saw a witness destroy the attorney who was trying to examine him." Rushdoony's complete testimony is here.
RUSHDOONY ON EDUCATION
To understand Rushdoony's position on the right of parents to educate their children, you must understand his position on education in general. He saw it as a matter of religion. He saw parents as agents of God. He saw state education as humanistic and deeply religious. He presented his case in the name of religious liberty. He saw Christian education as inherently at war with the supposed neutrality of state education. State education is part of a rival religion, he argued: the religion of humanism.
He identified this humanism with classical education, especially Greek humanism. He was religiously and philosophically opposed to what is known today as the classical Christian curriculum.
In 1958, Rushdoony's first book appeared, a book on the Christian philosopher Cornelius Van Til: By What Standard? The crucial chapter in the book is chapter 1: "Behold, it was Leah." He referred back to Jacob's wedding night and the deception of his father-in-law, who substituted Leah for Rachel.
The Christian thinker, laboring as he often must on alien ground, has too often embraced as his own a non-Christian principle which he believed would be fruitful in terms of Christian thought. He has made bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh a principle which he has believed would bear fruit in a Christian world-view. This resultant hybrid world-view he believed would fall heir to this world's substance and show mastery and dominion over the human mind. In this expectation, early Christian thinkers embraced Platonism; the scholastics, Aristotelianism; the men of the enlightenment era Cartesianism and rationalism, and men of the 19th and 20th centuries, Kantianism, existentialism, and other alien brides, hoping thereby that in the dark they held Rachel. But, "in the morning, behold, it was Leah"! (pp. 1-2)
In this article, I follow through on this theme: "Behold, it was Leah." I focus especially on classical culture as Leah.
In 1961, his next book appeared: Intellectual Schizophrenia: Crisis, Culture, and Education. It was a full-scale attack on the concept of tax-funded education. He argued that such education is never neutral, and it is always coercive. He called on Christian parents to pull their children out of the tax-funded schools.
In 1963, his magnum opus on education appeared: The Messianic Character of American Education. He wrote a lengthy section against the use of Greek philosophical categories in Christian education. This appears on pages 14 through 16. Greek education was inherently the servant of the state -- a redemptive state. So is American public education, he argued.
Because Greek thought had no conception of an independent and self-sufficient God who is the source of all true authority, it could not develop the authority of this God-related reason. For the Greeks, authority came from the polis, not from God. Its deity when manifest as authority was immanent and not transcendent, and lacking in more than local scope, usually in terms of the city-state (p. 15).
He made it clear that he had no use for any curriculum that attempted to combine classical education and the Bible.
Thus, the American college before 1860 was extensively geared to a Christian concept of life, while following a medieval and celibate pattern, and a classical, Greco-Roman, curriculum, aiming to produce young gentleman in terms of the Enlightenment concept of man. Its concept of a liberal education was thus not systematic but rather traditional. A radical clarification of issues was only to come much later with the progressivists, whose greatest function perhaps was to challenge and steadily shatter the conglomerate and syncretistic character of proceeding educational theory (pp. 1-2).
Rushdoony made it clear where he stood. Yet we see today in the Christian educational movement a process which Peter -- citing Proverbs -- described as a dog returning to its vomit (II Peter 2:22). We see a systematic attempt to restore the syncretism of the compromised Christian curriculum that prevailed in the United States before 1860. The so-called classical Christian curriculum is simply a newly baptized and dumbed-down version of what prevailed prior to 1860.
What was so significant about 1860? That was the year that the world first heard about Darwin's Origin of Species, which had been published in November 1859. Darwin dealt classical education a death blow. With Darwinism, there are no permanent standards, meaning ethical, educational, intellectual, biological, or anywhere else. Darwinism destroyed the concept of natural law, a concept that had been the foundation on which Christian apologists and philosophers had built their system, appealing back to Greek philosophical categories. These categories had been developed by way of Socratic reasoning as a way to defend the legitimacy of the two empires that had replaced the Greek city-state: the first was Alexander's; the second was Rome's.
In 1871, Darwin finally got enough courage to allow the publication of the Descent of Man. In that book, he became open about what was implied in the first book. Mankind was the product of non-purposive processes of nature. God did not direct the evolutionary process. Nature itself had no purpose. It was all a matter of natural selection.
Almost immediately, the president of Harvard College, Charles Elliott, began to re-shape higher education. He began to implement the elective system. In 1869, in an article in The Atlantic, he had announced his assault on classical education, especially education tied to a reading knowledge of Greek and Latin. He demanded the modernization of higher education. His demand was met almost universally. The only holdouts were a handful of college presidents who administered faculties made up primarily of retired ministers. The most prominent such university was the College of New Jersey, which in 1896 was re-named Princeton University. In 1902, Woodrow Wilson engineered a coup d'état against the existing president, who was a self-conscious Calvinist, and under Wilson, Princeton became just another Ivy League university.
In his book, The Biblical Philosophy of History (1969), Rushdoony explained what took place in the final third of the 19th century. Darwinism swept aside natural law theory, which had been taught as part of the classical curriculum.
Nature has, inherent within itself, its own processes and laws which govern reality. Hence, man's attitude is one of laissez-faire; there must be no interference with nature's laws and controls. Planning was thus transferred from God to nature. Darwinism destroyed this faith in nature. The process of nature was now portrayed, not as a perfect working of law, but as blind, unconscious energy working profligately to express itself. In the struggle for survival, the fittest survive by virtue of their own adaptations, not because of natural law. Nature produces many "mistakes" which failed to survive and become extinct species and fossils. The destiny of the universe is extinction as its energy runs down (p. 7).
That was the end of classical education. That was the end of classical philosophy. In other words, that was the end of the syncretism that had prevailed in Western education prior to 1860. But this fact has yet to sink into the thinking of Protestant Christians, who are still operating on the assumption that Darwinism has not completely re-structured the thinking of modern man.
So, we find poorly educated Protestants who do not understand the implications of Darwinism for every realm of scholarship. They cling to classical education, meaning a G-rated adaptation of a hybrid system. They ignore what it really was, which I spell out in detail here. It was always a syncretistic system. They are still promoting a dead educational system that could not defend itself against Darwinism, and which surrendered educationally no later than 1900.
Darwinism killed Leah. Rushdoony was correct on this point in 1969. What we find today is a modern curriculum that is the academic equivalent of necrophilia: the classical Christian curriculum.
In his 1981 book, The Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum, Rushdoony began with a frontal assault against both Greek education and Roman education. He identified both as humanism incarnate. He identified both as statist.
The statist purpose of humanistic education was even more clearly emphasized by the Romans. According to Grimal, "Roman morality has a very distinct aim -- the subordination of the individual to the City." Religion and piety had reference to the City, for the gods with the gods of the City, and religion, by binding man to the gods, bound them to the City of the gods. . . .The liberal arts curriculum thus had a statist orientation. Man's liberty, man's salvation, was to be found in faithful subordination of himself and all his being to the City of Man. The chief end of man, a political and social animal, was to glorify the state and to serve and enjoy it all the days of his life.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Christianity came into rapid conflict with Rome and the entire world. It was a battle between Christ and Caesar, between the City of God and the City of Man, for control of the world and of history. One hand, the emphasis was on the triune God and His eternal decree, and on the other hand the emphasis was on the primacy of time, on the civil order as the order of the incarnation and divinity, and on the temporal decree of the total state.(pp. 5-6).
I do not wish to belabor the point. From the beginning of his career until the end, Rushdoony opposed what would be called today the classical Christian curriculum. He laid down the philosophical foundations for a complete reconstruction of the modern curriculum, and this reconstruction involves the abandonment of both classical culture and Darwinian evolution. He argued that Darwinian evolution has completely destroyed the concepts that had undergirded classical education, and that any attempt to return to such syncretism is futile. From day one, the bride on the other side of the bed was Leah.
What is annoying to me is simple to explain: the people who appeal to Rushdoony's books as justifications for Christian education have neither read nor understood his books. They come in the name of a reconstructed education, and they bring a corpse. They bring Leah, exhumed from her grave of 1860. They baptize the remains, they hike the price, and they tell parents that this is Christian education: classical Christian education.
Behold it is Leah, and Leah is dead.
There is a lot of money in this. The money flows in from naïve Christian parents, who have understood none of this. It is a marketing technique that is based on intellectual necrophilia. Leah was always desperately ill, and Charles Darwin buried her alive.
WAR OF THE WORLDVIEWS
Christian curriculum promoters love to use the word "worldview." They use it all the time. They keep telling the parents that their curriculum will provide a Christian worldview. They never define this worldview. They never define the presuppositions of Christian education. They never define the presuppositions of classical education. But they tell the trusting parents that this is a consistent Christian worldview. They tell them that they need to buy this curriculum, in order to make certain that their children have a Christian world-and-life view. But they never define it. They never show how their curriculum is systematically Christian. They never show how it can be conformed with classical education, which was based on a rival set of presuppositions. It was based on a rival worldview, which placed the state at the center of society. It placed the city-state at the center, and after the city states all fell to Alexander, it placed the Alexandrian Empire at the center. When Alexander's empires fell to the Romans, it placed the Roman Empire there. This was how natural law theory was first presented.
How is it that Christianity, which was at war spiritually with the classical world, and which was persecuted almost unto the death by the Roman Empire for almost three centuries, somehow is consistent with the worldview of classical religion, classical politics, and classical philosophy? To ask the question is to answer it. There is no consistency. There never was. But this is not an acceptable answer to the people who sell the necrophiliac Christian curriculum.
The reason why I wrote my article showing what the classical religion was really all about, is because I wanted to make it clear that what is palmed off on parents as a classical curriculum is a warmed-over, G-rated whitewash of classical religion, classical philosophy, and classical politics. It is surely a whitewash of classical education, which rested on the gymnasium and the debauchery associated with it.
How was it that the unified worldview of Greece and Rome was at war, first with the religion of the Hebrews, and then with the religion of the Christians? How was it these rival worldviews fought to the death? How was it that syncretism was possible between rival religious worldviews and rival civilizations? How was it that the Greeks and the Romans, in their attempt to be consistent, recognized that Christianity could not be absorbed into the classical world? It was a war to the death. Nevertheless, these naïve Christian parents are shelling out money to sellers of necrophiliac curricula that clearly are theologically schizophrenic. They are an attempt to bring back the pre-1860 syncretism that Rushdoony warned was fatal to begin with, and which died at the hands of Darwinism.
Christian parents don't know any of this. They had rotten educations. They have never studied classical religion and classical culture. They have never studied classical education. They don't know what went on in the gymnasia.
These curriculum developers do not want to sit down and develop a completely comprehensive curriculum based on rival worldviews. If they did, it would begin with an attack on classical culture in the name of the Bible. But the sellers of these curriculum materials do not want to take the responsibility for re-structuring their curriculum materials, so they piece together a syncretistic system of education, based on a complete whitewash of classical education. They sell it to unsuspecting parents, who in turn give it to their hapless children.
To subject children to this syncretism is irresponsible. Either teach each system as a separate worldview, so that students can see the differences clearly, or else teach the war as it took place in the history of the West.
There's too much money in this for them to abandon it. There is too much work for them to re-structure it. So, the necrophilia continues.
Behold, it is Leah, and Leah is dead.
DEFENDING THE CLASSICAL CHRISTIAN CURRICULUM
The so-called, self-proclaimed classical Christian curriculum sells like hotcakes. Why does it sell? Because the promoters have persuaded the buyers that there is a fundamental unity between classical civilization and Christianity. There is a fundamental unity of principles, including religious professions of faith, that will link forever the world of pagan Greece, pagan Rome, and Christianity. In fact, the promoters say, you cannot discuss Christianity without also discussing classical religion and classical culture, because there is a fundamental fusion between the two systems.
Doubt me? Consider this promotional.
1. Truth and beauty. In classical education, children are to sink into timeless pieces of literature, examine, appreciate, and replicate artistic masterpieces, enjoy nature, and relish in musical marvels. Where there is real beauty, there is truth.
Timeless principles? This is Plato -- his unproven analogy of the cave. This is Parmenides' system of fixed standards, immune to Heraclitus' endless historical change. This is Socrates' theory of the metaphysically existing ideas, way out in the void. This is Greek humanism to the core.
Here is my challenge. Spell out these timeless principles. Show me what they are, where they come from, and why they are timeless. Show me how they are autonomous: self-regulating and self-attesting. Show me how their existence can be defended in terms of Socratic reasoning. Van Til said they cannot be. So did Rushdoony. Show me that these autonomous timeless principles have been adopted and applied in many societies, because they are timeless. Show me how Athens and Jerusalem ever came to an agreement on these principles. Show me when.
I do not think any defender of the classical Christian curriculum can answer these questions. I know this: so far, none of them has done so in public. It is as if they are unaware of these fundamental issues of epistemology: "What do we know, and how can we know it?"
As the late-night TV Ronco ads used to say: "But wait! There's more!"
Classical Conversations is a classical, Christian education. Some might see those words placed together and not see the connection. In fact, some might go as far as to say they don't connect. It probably won't surprise you to hear me say, well, they do go together! Actually, I'm a firm believer that classical + Christian are better suited to each other than classical + humanistic. But, I didn't always know that.
I am saying it: the words don't connect.
I am not making this up. This promotional is representative of the whole sorry deception, which in some cases is self-deception. This has gone on for 30 years in Christian day school and homeschool circles. There is a seemingly endless supply of confused, poorly educated Protestant parents who do not recognize an oxymoronic curriculum when the see it.
Stick the word "classical" in front of "Christian," and there will be buyers.
If asked -- they never are -- the sellers will no doubt insist that this curriculum is in no way a compromise, that this is not a manifestation of religious syncretism. But it is. Christian parents should examine the curriculum to see if it presents a sharp contrast between classical humanism and Christianity, lesson by lesson, course by course.
Understand, I am not saying that students should not be exposed to the history, philosophy, politics, religion, and literature of the classical world. I am saying that such an examination should not be presented as if there were some overarching unity between classical civilization and Christianity. Such unity did not exist in theory or practice. This was why Christians were persecuted by Rome for almost three centuries. The emperors were being consistent with classical civilization. A careful study of classical civilization should make it clear to students why this conflict existed. The model was Marcus Aurelius: the only philosopher-king in the history of Rome, and a systematic persecutor of Christians. Justin Martyr was one of his victims.
ACTS 17
There is something deeply wrong theologically when a Christian operates with the assumption that Paul's sermon in Athens, recorded in Acts 17, was not a categorical rejection of the entire classical religious world. Paul did not appeal to Plato. He did not appeal to Aristotle. He appealed rather to the Greek world's theological insurance policy, namely, the unknown God. Just in case there might be an unknown God who was not being properly worshipped, the Greeks worshiped him, at least once in a while. Paul's message was simple: the God of the Bible isn't buying it. You can't buy your way into salvation, based on an appeal to some unknown God.
In other words, Paul said, there was a fundamental conflict between the worldview of classical Greece, as it existed in the time of Jesus, and the worldview of Jesus and the new church. He could also have made exactly the same statement with respect to the religion of Judaism, as it had been taught to him by Gamaliel. There was no compromise possible there, either. The Talmudic school recognized the influence of Hellenic Judaism, and it rejected Hellenism out of hand. Talmudic Jews recognized clearly that Hellenism was an invasion of an alien religion into the community of the faithful.
How is it that Christians who would instantly recognize the incompatibility of an Islamic Christian curriculum, a Buddhist Christian curriculum, or a Hindu Christian curriculum, rush out to spend money on a classical Christian curriculum? Somehow, Protestant evangelicals are convinced today that there is a fundamental unity between classical religion, classical culture, and Christianity. This is why they insist that their children suffer what they never had to tolerate, namely, a study of Latin. This will make their children, at best, readers of pigeon Latin. Instead of assigning their children a textbook in Koine Greek grammar, so they can read the New Testament in the original language, or assigning their children Hebrew, so they can read the Old Testament, they assign their children Latin. Why? The ability to read a little bit of Latin is not basic to any academic discipline or any profession in the world. The ability to read Latin is regarded as a peculiarity -- not a bad thing, but of no particular career value. Why spend years trying to master a dead language?
I think my favorite example of people who could speak Latin, appears in the movie Tombstone. There, the alcoholic, consumptive, womanizing Doc Holliday interacts with the murderous Johnny Ringo. They traded phrases in Latin. It never happened, but it was a great scene in the movie. That was in 1881. This was considered an oddity, even back in 1881.
Why would parents want their children to be able to read Latin, but not Arabic? Which is more important today? Which has been more important for the last 500 years? Why not Chinese? Why not Spanish? It takes years to master a language out of a textbook. Why waste this time on a dead language? Anyone can buy low-cost translations of the Latin classics and the Greek classics. We can download translations made prior to 1923 free of charge. But this is not good enough for Christian parents who cannot read Latin. They are determined that their children will be able to read Latin.
They don't know what their children are supposed to read in Latin. They know nothing of the Latin church fathers. They know little of Renaissance literature in Latin. But they want their children to read Latin. They just can't say why.
There is a reason why, but parents have not thought of it. Historical scholarship.
MEDIEVAL LATIN
The ability to read Latin was important in the late medieval world, because literacy was limited, and scholarship crossed kingly borders. Universities conducted classes in Latin. Students from around Europe attended. There were so few literate people, that it was necessary that literate people communicate with each other by letter, and the only common language was Latin. So, in the context of the late medieval world and even the Renaissance, it made sense for an educated person to be able to read Latin. The division of intellectual labor was such that it was necessary to have the ability to read Latin, and educated men possessed this ability.
With the coming of printing and the coming of cheap translations, literacy spread to the middle classes. It became profitable for someone to learn how to read, because it was possible for someone of middling resources to be able to buy printed books. At that point, there was a separation between those who could read Latin, who were people who had gone to a university, or who had been trained by a scholar who read Latin, and those people who were literate, but who could only read in the vernacular.
From that time on, the elite prided itself, collectively speaking, on the ability to be able to read at least a little Latin. That was what distinguished them from such people as businessmen who could read and who had knowledge of accounting. These businessmen were not the social equals of the first families of Europe. The first families of Europe wanted to maintain their status, which they granted only to themselves, and therefore they trained at least some of their young men in the language of Latin. It was a matter of social status to be able to read Latin.
This continued to separate the formally educated classes from the self-educated classes until the early 18th century. People did not speak in Latin, even in major universities, after 1500. But they read a little Latin, and that was sufficient to identify them as part of the social elite. Latin became little more than a pathway to social status.
The desire to read Latin is today a desire to achieve social status. It is not based on a desire to translate long-ignored manuscripts or long-forgotten books.
Within two decades, translation software will translate any remaining neglected Latin works. Years spent in mastering late-medieval Latin will prove to have been wasted years.
SYNCRETISM
It is true that the early Christian philosophical defenders of the faith relied on Greek wisdom to defend their position. They did not appeal to the scholarship or philosophy of Rome, because there wasn't any. Whatever existed in Rome was a derivative of the remnants of Greek culture. There were common religious practices, especially regarding the care and feeding of the dead. There were common gods. But if we are talking about philosophy, Rome was Greek.
The early Christian philosophers tended to appeal to Plato. They did not appeal to Greek religious practices. They surely did not appeal to the moral practices of Greece and Rome, especially regarding sexual behavior. But there was an importation of Greek philosophical categories, mainly Platonic categories, in the first few centuries of the church. This was limited to highly educated people. Only indirectly did these categories filter down to the common believer.
Literacy faded throughout what had been the Roman Empire after the fall of Rome to the barbarians in the late fifth century. Literacy was limited to small pockets of educated men, especially monastic centers in Ireland. Nobody other than monks and bureaucrats could afford the time to learn how to read. Nobody else could afford to buy the hand-copied manuscripts of the ancient world.
In the 11th century, there was a revival of classical learning by way of Islam. It went from Islam to Jewish scholars in Spain, and from there across the Pyrenees into northern Europe. By the 13th century, Latin translations of Greek works were becoming common among educated men in northern Europe.
The Protestant Reformation was in part a reaction against the church's fusion of Aristotelian logic and Christian morality, but a clean break with the classical world was not made by the Reformers. Leaders were products of the universities, and their categories were influenced by Greek philosophical categories. The debates that had arisen in the pre-Socratic world carried down into the Protestant Reformation. They still do.
The Christians always had an intellectual inferiority complex with respect to classical learning. This extended into Oxford and Cambridge. For a decade, the cavalry officer Oliver Cromwell was technically in charge of the curriculum at Oxford, because he was the Lord Protector. He made no changes in the curriculum. This was in the 1650's.
Higher education in the Protestant world, as in the Catholic world, and surely in the Eastern Orthodox world, was based on Greek philosophical categories. This did not end until 1860.
VAN TIL'S RESISTANCE
In the Netherlands in the late 19th century, there grew up a body of scholarship within Calvinist circles that began with a rejection of Greek philosophical categories. An immigrant to the United States, Cornelius Van Til, adopted this outlook as his own. In the 1920's, in graduate seminars under the legendary classicist and atheist A. A. Bowman, Van Til studied the Greek classics of philosophy in the Greek language. The students had to make translations of the original documents, and use these in their debates in the classroom. There were three men who did this, and I studied under two of them. One of them was Philip Wheelwright, an expert on Heraclitus, and the other was Van Til.
Van Til made a clean break with scholasticism, but also a clean break with the classical philosophical tradition. He began to re-structure what is traditionally called apologetics, namely, the philosophical defense of the faith. This represented a radical reconstruction of Protestant thought. He was not followed by many, but there is no question that he launched the first self-consciously anti-classical philosophical defense of Christianity.
He said the defense of the faith had been compromised from the very beginning by the early Christian apologists. He wrote a series of syllabi for his classes on this: Christianity in Conflict.
He was adamant that the rival worldviews of Christianity and classical philosophy cannot be reconciled in any way. They are rival worldviews. He argued this repeatedly throughout his career.
Van Til's thought became foundational to Rushdoony's thought. It undergirded his attack on Greek humanism.
THE DARK SIDE OF CLASSICAL CULTURE
Rushdoony was well aware of the occult side of classical culture. He wrote about this in two chapters in his book, The One and the Many (1971): Chapter IV, "The Unity of the Polis," and Chapter 5, "Rome: The City of Man." He recognized that the rationalism of classical philosophy was matched by the occultism of classical religion.
To conceal the extent of the conflict between Christianity and classical culture, the promoters of the classical Christian curriculum conceal from parents the extent of the occultism, the debauchery, and the culture of war that classical culture incarnated. They pretend that these elements were somehow peripheral to classical religion and its outcome, classical culture. They pretend that the occult side of classical culture was not integral to classical education -- what we call a package deal. In short, they deny the relevance of the war of the worldviews. They pretend that the two cultures were consistent, and they pretend that they have produced curriculum materials which bring together the two in a coherent synthesis.
This marketing strategy works. It sells. Parents buy it. This is because the parents have had such terrible educations in ancient history. They have accepted the myth of neutrality, even though they think they haven't. The public schools' textbooks have long concealed the occultism and the statism of the classical world. Then they explain the West in terms of the triumph of Greek humanism, which was succeeded by social Darwinism of the statist, central planning variety after 1890.
If readers want to know why I am so opposed to the classical Christian curriculum, this is why. Classical education was Leah, and Leah is dead.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (1864)
Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1902)
Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (1915)
Jane Ellen Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1922)
Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (1925)
Charles Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (1944)
Robert Flaceliere, Love in Ancient Greece (1960)
Ethelbert Stauffer, Christ and the Caesars (1955)
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1: Plato (1963)
© 2022 GaryNorth.com, Inc., 2005-2021 All Rights Reserved. Reproduction without permission prohibited.