In education, the words secular, government, and public are not synonymous with neutrality. A public school is every bit as enmeshed in a system of ardently held, worldview-shaping religio-philosophical underpinnings as any religious school out there. It is not neutral because it is not possible to be neutral.

The claim that every school is intrinsically religious is hard to grasp at face value. The naked eye sees religious schools adhering to faith commitments and non-religious schools educating within a neutral philosophical landscape.
Neutrality is an attractive option for many; after all, isn’t it better to teach the curriculum without letting the monkey-wrench of theology jam the gears? Can’t we get on with the business of learning about maths, science, and history, without shoehorning in religious claims? That’s not as easy as it seems.
While at the level of 2+3=5, or spelling the word apple, it may be possible to operate with a species of impartiality. However, this sort of learning represents a narrow slice of the educational pie, the rest of the pie being filled with a chunky metaphysical stew.

What is the purpose of learning? What does it mean to be human? How should we treat others? How should we interact with the earth on which we find ourselves? A “neutral” education would have to navigate around these matters and, in doing so, would cease to be much of an education at all.
In education, the words secular, government, and public are not synonymous with neutrality. A public school is every bit as enmeshed in a system of ardently held, worldview-shaping religio-philosophical underpinnings as any religious school out there. It is not neutral because it is not possible to be neutral.

You don’t need a chapel to be religious.
The concept of a neutral school – or a neutral anything, for that matter – is born out of a narrow understanding of religion. If, by religion, one is speaking of priests, chapels, and ceremonies, then of course, there are non-religious schools.
Van Brummelen (1988, p2) argues for an expanded definition, stating that it is possible to “define religion in its broad sense as a system of ardently-held beliefs that undergird your worldview…” These beliefs are the eyes of the mind; you don’t look at them, you look through them at everything else.
As the saying goes, you can’t get anywhere unless you start somewhere. To think yourself in a straight line, you must start from a basic set of philosophical assumptions; these are not argued for, they are argued from.
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Written by Joel R. Beeke and Brian G. Hedges |
Thursday, April 25, 2024
In the course of his book, Swinnock considered at least sixteen specific attributes of God. He defined God’s attributes as “those perfections in the divine nature which are ascribed to Him so that we can better understand Him. They are called attributes because they are attributed to Him for our sake, even though they are not in Him as they are in humans or angels.”8 Swinnock’s definitions of these attributes are rooted in Scripture, clearly explained, and simply expressed.

The Puritans rightly believed that though “the magnitude of God’s perfections is well beyond the reach of our finite understanding,” yet “we can know what He has chosen to reveal.”1
On the one hand, God is incomparable and incomprehensible. “For who in the heaven can be compared unto the LORD? who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the LORD?” (Ps. 89:6). But on the other hand, God has made Himself known by revealing Himself through His works (Ps. 8:1; 19:1–6; Rom. 1:18–20); His Word (Ps. 19:7–11; Heb. 1:1); and supremely in His incarnate Son, the Lord Jesus Christ (John 17:3; Heb. 1:2; 1 John 5:20).
As we saw in the previous chapter, this conviction grounded the Puritans’ sermons, discourses, and theological treatises in the clear teaching of Scripture, making them reliable, helpful guides for believers today. What Spurgeon once said of John Bunyan could be said of all the best Puritan divines: “Read anything of his, and you will see that it is almost like reading the Bible itself. He had read it till his very soul was saturated with Scripture…. Prick him anywhere—his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him. He cannot speak without quoting a text, for his very soul is full of the Word of God.”2 The writings of the Puritans are saturated with Scripture. They were profoundly biblical thinkers, gripped with a passion for knowing, loving, and obeying God.
One of the finest examples is Swinnock’s The Incomparableness of God, recently reprinted in a modernized edition as The Blessed and Boundless God.3 Swinnock’s book-length meditation on Psalm 89:6 (quoted above) is a careful and practical study of God’s being, attributes, works, and words.
Swinnock wrote about the incomparable excellence of God’s being, showing that God’s being is independent, perfect, universal, unchangeable, eternal, simple, infinite, and incomprehensible.4 He began by asserting that “God is His own first cause” and “His own last end.”5 Angelic and human beings derive their existence from God, but God is entirely self-existent, dependent on no one.
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Written by Darrell B. Harrison |
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
When viewed through the lens of theological anthropology, we would do well to understand that there are no such categories as “black” people or “white” people (Galatians 3:28). They are merely cultural distinctions that serve only to foster and perpetuate animosity between various groups of God’s image-bearers.

Regarding the situation at Harvard University involving allegations of plagiarism by its 30th president, Dr. Claudine Gay, and the subsequent calls for her to resign from that position, what is fundamentally at the root of that institutional kerfuffle is society’s acceptance of the faulty notion that there is such a thing as human “races.”
The legacy of the 19th-century eugenicist and evolutionist Dr. Samuel George Morton, widely regarded as the “father” of scientific racism and a staunch proponent of polygenesis, the idea that each human “race” was a separate act of creation, continues to cast a long and precarious shadow over today’s culture more than 170 years after his death.
Morton’s poly (many) genesis (origin) stands in stark contrast to what Scripture teaches, namely, that humanity originated from one act of creation (monogenesis), not many acts (e.g. Gen 1:27; Acts 17:26).
But let’s take the Bible out of it for a moment.
Science itself acknowledges that there is no biological or scientific basis for human “races,” a fact to which Harvard’s own website attests: “Contemporary scientific consensus agrees that race has no biological basis, but scientific racism still exists. While it’s now more subtle than craniometry, its long history demonstrates the influence social ideas about race can have on supposedly unbiased research.”[1] Conversely, the late Dr. Robert Wald Sussman, in his book “The Myth of Race,” said,
What many people do not realize is that this racial structure is not based on reality. Anthropologists have shown for many years now that there is no biological reality to human race. There are no major complex behaviors that directly correlate with what might be considered human “racial” characteristics. There is no inherent relationship between intelligence, law-abidingness, or economic practices and “race,” just as there is no relationship between nose size, height, blood group, or skin color and any set of complex human behaviors. However, over the past 500 years, we have been taught by an informal, mutually reinforcing consortium of intellectuals, politicians, statesmen, business and economic leaders, and their books, that human racial biology is real and that certain races are biologically better than others. The biologically deterministic, racist worldview…has been tested and disproven consistently and yet its proponents have remained resistant to all empirical scientific evidence for more than 500 years.
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