When educators intentionally omit God from the classroom for the alleged purpose of moral neutrality, another organizing principle and telos will necessarily fill the resulting vacuum. Many Christians have naively accepted what they thought was agnosticism in their educational models, but it turns out to be much worse.

Over one hundred years ago, Abraham Kuyper asserted what he believed to be Christian education’s proper telos: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’” He uttered this battle cry, not in a sermon or political speech, but at the dedicatory address of a new Dutch university. Undergirded by strong Calvinist convictions, Kuyper boldly planted the flag of Christ’s dominion in that domain always under siege by the enemy, the Academy. Weust follow in Kuyper’s footsteps and rededicate ourselves to a similar comprehensive educational philosophy, one that re-centers the proper orientation of educating Christians by embracing a Christocentric model of understanding each discipline’s form and content.
Why is Kuyper’s view of education so urgent? The havoc in academia left by secular humanism, postmodernity, Critical Race Theory, evolution, and the sexual revolutions is too great to ignore. Too many of our covenant children have lost their way. We cannot simply equate a Christian education with Christian teachers who avoid immoral topics. Instead, we must engage students at the appropriate levels using biblical lens. An education that honors Christ trains the student to think connect each discipline to its Creator.
As idealistic as it may seem, this orientation is by no means a radical proposition. Rather, thinking Christianly about every academic discipline exemplifies obedience to first-tier biblical commands. Consider Jesus’ restatement of the Great Commandment, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). Through the mind, we are to love the Lord with all of our mental capacity, with “the psychological faculty of understanding, reasoning, thinking, and deciding.”[1] In sum, we are to love God in all of our intellectual pursuits. In view of Scripture’s teaching, there can be “no square inch” – no realm that excludes this theocentric worldview (Col. 1:15-18).
Furthermore, the New Testament teaches that the Christian life occurs mostly in the mind, which explains Paul’s focus at the climax of Romans (12:2): “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” A constant flesh-fighting, world-renouncing mental regimen must begin early in life and characterize one’s entire educational experience, both in and out of the classroom. Engaging the mind in this way strengthens student’s faith.
The mind’s heightened role in the Christian life explains why our spiritual enemies target educational systems with such ferocity. Once they capture a student’s mind, then they have captured the student’s soul.
Edmund, a central figure in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, illustrates this. On multiple occasions, C.S. Lewis credits Edmund’s school for his flaws. Edmund’s downfall occurs due to his ability to be deceived easily, to lose sight of what is plainly true, and a failure to trust those he loves most.
Lewis most clearly attributes the school’s detrimental impact on Edmund after he becomes a casualty in battle. Upon giving him the magic healing potion, Lucy “found him standing on his feet and not only healed of his wounds but looking better than she had seen him look — oh, for ages;in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face” (italics mine).[2] In this remarkable moment, readers learn that Edmund’s affinity for folly was cultivated at school—a powerful warning against the negative trajectory on which an institution of learning can set a young person.
As with Eve in the Garden of Eden or Edmund in Narnia, Satan continues to twist truth, minimize sin and its consequences, and disrupt faith in God’s goodness. Our ancient foe’s strategy has never changed, only his tools and methods have. Unfortunately, relying on a magic potion to rescue a wayward student is not a proven parenting strategy. Students need to be taught what is true, to view sin for all it is while relentlessly holding onto God’s goodness.
Christ as the Reference Point of Academic Disciplines
How does one, then, reclaim an educational philosophy and practice? Simply this: parents and educators must intentionally reference all disciplines back to their Christian center. In doing so, we must reject false dichotomies between , entertaining a certain reverence for all things that Christ has created. We must further reject Postmodernity’s abandonment of objective truth and compartmentalization of philosophy and theology from more “empirical” fields. Adopting this view requires the parent to homeschool or find teachers that actively seek both to understand, ad then to communicate, how Christ’s fingerprints cover all intellectual activity.
Each discipline reveals the Triune God in a different way. The sciences and mathematics become a study in God’s art of creation with revelation, not unprovable theories, as their point of departure.[3] History becomes an outworking of God’s purposes in time, in which He sent Christ in the “fullness of time.” Literature becomes an imaginative retelling of the human experience in light of the creation-fall-redemption patterns, an art that Christ used frequently to deliver truth through narrative. The art of rhetoric becomes a manner of communicating as Christ himself did – with stories, speeches, revelation, and questions. The fine arts become a means of contemplating, enjoying, and creating objects of “glory and beauty.” The study of languages becomes a means of understanding and appreciating other cultures in the aftermath of the Fall of Babel.
This pursuit inculcates wisdom, rather than mere knowledge. And as the Bible teaches, wisdom begins with “the fear of the Lord” (Prov. 9:10). The Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck, who later taught at the university that Kuyper founded, articulated this concept eloquently:
“But what the Scriptures require is a knowledge which has the fear of God as its beginning (Prov. 1:7). When it severs its connections with the principle it may still, under false pretenses, bear the name of knowledge, but it will gradually degenerate into a worldly wisdom which is foolishness with God. Any science, philosophy or knowledge which supposes that it can stand on its own pretentions, and can leave God out of its assumptions, becomes its opposite, and disillusions everyone who builds his expectations on it. [4]
Do any disciplines that are taught in schools include God in their assumptions now?
When educators intentionally omit God from the classroom for the alleged purpose of moral neutrality, another organizing principle and telos will necessarily fill the resulting vacuum. Many Christians have naively accepted what they thought was agnosticism in their educational models, but it turns out to be much worse.
In order to reorient our educational practices, we must reconstruct our philosophical underpinnings. My colleague, Rev. Matt Marino, offers a helpful illustration:
“Imagine a ‘solar system of ideas’ in which God functions like the sun does in our solar system. Not only is He the source of light, but also the center of gravity. All else derives its being from Him, and nothing else can explain itself without reference to Him.”[5]
When the disciplines no longer orbit around God, they fall out of their circuit and lose both their mean and their relation to one another.
Marino’s metaphor also suggests that all disciplines can simultaneously sustain their own orbits while maintaining their collective course around God. He gives gravity, light, and meaning to all arts and disciplines. This model keeps them all centered.
In view of this paradigm, Christian parents must own their children’s education. If we are to obey Deuteronomy 6:4-9, then parents must teach their children to love the Lord and to obey His commands. Parents are responsible to “teach [God’s laws] diligently to your children” and cultivate a domestic culture pervaded by theological conversations (6:7) with ubiquitous reference to the Law (8-9). We make a theological error – one with significant repercussions – when we compartmentalize God’s law or relegate it to Sunday School. We must do the hard work to treat all disciplines, not simply theological ones, in light of Deuteronomy 6.
Objections
Three objections to this proposal come to mind. First is the notion that children must attend public schools to evangelize their classmates. In its immediate context, Christ gave the Great Commission to eleven grown men with whom he invested significant time during His earthly ministry. They were not children. Instead, the child’s vocation is to comprehend the faith (Deut. 6:6-8; Prov. 22:6). One cannot effectively propagate that which he does not understand. Though godly children might be compelling young evangelists (in part because of their simplicity and innocence), the burden of the Great Commission is not yet theirs, any more than it is the average believer to baptize converts. Students need to be equipped prior to being sent out into a dangerous mission field. Let Christian teachers and administrators bear the burden of bringing the gospel into secular schools.
Second, many science-minded people feel that the Bible and science are at odds. I once heard a pastor proclaim, “Genesis 1 has no bearing on the rest of Scripture.” Nonsense. This view increased dramatically in the post-Darwin age; it is not the view of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, Robert Boyle, and other Christian scientists who ushered in the Scientific Revolution. To presume that one knows precisely how the earth was formed, mechanically speaking, is simply fallacious. No one was present to document creation except God Himself. O The tendency to interpret the Bible in view of scientific theories is a post-Enlightenment temptation that leads away from Christ, reflecting a lack of confidence in the God of order.
Finally, some associate Kuyper with radical Christians with some type of theonomic agenda. However, this is not my agenda, and furthermore, recovering a Christocentric view of education does not belong to any single eschatological movement. At its baseline, Christian education is an earnest attempt to be faithful to fundamental passages in Scripture that instruct us how to orient our pursuit of knowledge, particularly in the shadow of the revealed Son of God. In this light, Ryan McIhenny writes, “Christian cultural activity is always done within the context of the completed work of God in and through Christ and the now/not yet completion of his kingdom.”[6] My motivation in writing this article, starting a new college, and devoting my energies to my children is simply this: to be faithful as a father to train my children “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Our American system is in disrepair, and we must build new institutions to provide them with what is required of us.
Conclusion
If Christians are to honor the Lord as the creator and source of all true wisdom and knowledge, the starting place for catechizing is as early as possible, and it must extend through the college level. In this way, the answers to the catechism questions “Who made me?” and “Who made all things?” are not theoretical; in fact, the answers to those questions propel me to spend all my days thinking about how and why He made all things, how they glorify Him, and ultimately, why all things remain His today. When such thinking governs our approach to learning, we will begin to see how every square inch belongs to our Savior, fueling generations of exuberant worshippers.
Dr. Ryan Smith, a member of Resurrection Presbyterian Church (OPC) in Matthews, N.C., is the president of New Aberdeen College, a new confessionally Reformed college based near Charlotte.

[1] Johannes P. Louw and Eugene Albert Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains (New York: United Bible Societies, 1996), 323–324.
[2] C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Ebook. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010; 125.
[3] The Scientific Revolution was an achievement in Western civilization led by devout Christian men such as Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and Robert Boyle who understood the Creator is one of order. I am indebted to Christopher Watkin in his ill named Biblical Critical Theory for the assertion that only in the Western, monotheistic society could any scientific discoveries exist. With deities who are capricious, unknowable, and disorderly, the Eastern and African peoples had no starting point to make important scientific discoveries. Contemporary Christian thinkers who dismiss Genesis 1 for theories create slippery slopes that eventually result in people not believing that man and woman were made in the image of God, having a divine purpose for the sexuality, or maintaining a biblical hierarchy in church life.  [4] Herman Bavinck, “Man’s Highest Good” in The Wonderful Works of God. Glenside, PA: Westminster Seminary Press, 2019; 4.[5] Matt Marino, “Theology’s Role in Classical Christian Education.” Conference lecture, Summer Roundtable; June 29, 2024.[6] Ryan C. McIlhenny, Kingdoms Apart: Engaging the Two Kingdoms Perspective. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2012; xxiii.

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Appreciating Him as the thunder, darkness, and lightning above Mount Sinai is such a vital part of our being able to pray. We need to really and truly comprehend His majesty, for it is in that bigness that mountains get moved. A weak, powerless, struggling God can’t do anything for anybody. However, the one who spoke all things into existence can help with your difficulties at work and home in a way that a being that just comes alongside for a hug cannot. It is a joy unspeakable to be in His presence and that is what we are communicating when we gather together in prayer.

When I sit down to write these devotionals through the Larger Catechism I always read and pray through the questions, partly because I think the Westminster Divines designed all of the material we have from their deliberations to help us primarily to worship God better. To know God is to love Him, to be mesmerized by His grace, to rest and be at peace in His love. The more time we spend growing in that goodness the more we will appreciate and adore the maker of Heaven and of Earth. In the questions we have before us today there are some advantageous reasons given as to why we should pray, how we should pray, and where we can go to find some help in seeking to do it better and with better form/purpose. These dusty confessions and catechisms have so much life in them if we would only approach them with the spirit in which they were ordered. If we look at them as drudgerous listings of angels dancing on the head of a pin it’s no surprise we don’t get anything out of them.
Feed your soul. Feed it. Here’s the Q/A’s for today:
Q. 185. How are we to pray?
A. We are to pray with an awful apprehension of the majesty of God, and deep sense of our own unworthiness, necessities, and sins; with penitent, thankful, and enlarged hearts; with understanding, faith, sincerity, fervency, love, and perseverance, waiting upon him, with humble submission to his will.
Q. 186. What rule hath God given for our direction in the duty of prayer?
A. The whole word of God is of use to direct us in the duty of prayer; but the special rule of direction is that form of prayer which our Saviour Christ taught his disciples, commonly called The Lord’s prayer.
Of the clauses which make up Q.185 the one that pops out at me first is humble submission to His will. Like a lot of things in the Christian life it says a lot more than we maybe want to hear. Whenever we come to God in prayer we are testifying of our own weakness, our whole and full reliance on Him for all things. There is truth to the idea that prayer is an act of love, of expressing our desire to be blessed by our Father who art in Heaven. Keeping that relationship in mind when we bow down is central to our being heard. A petulant child who whines is less likely to be heard than a young one who calmly asks nicely.
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God plans to rescue and redeem people from every culture: from Iran to China, from ancient Greece to ancient Rome, right down to people from the secular post-Christian West. And the beautiful thing is that rather than do it himself, which he has the power to, God chooses to work through us, despite our fears and our inadequacies. God delights in using the weak things of the world—because it’s when we realise we don’t have the ability, we’re forced to rely on him, as we’re supposed to.

Some of my favourite places to speak at are venues like coffee shops, workplaces, or universities. After one such university event, where the Christian Union had asked me to talk on “Why did Jesus have to die?” we had an amazing time of Q&A after which I felt the Spirit nudge me to end the event by leading people who wanted to in a prayer to commit their lives to Jesus. It was an incredible evening and God was very much at work. But I remember that one particular evening not for how powerfully the Lord moved, but for a conversation afterwards. As we were packing up to leave, a campus ministry leader came up us and asked: “How did you do what you did there?”
“What do you mean?”, I replied.
“You just preached the gospel very openly then prayed, very publicly, and invited people to respond to Jesus—and you did that in a university meeting room. I didn’t think evangelism like that was possible in this day and age. How did you and your colleague do that?”
That’s not the first time I’ve heard that sentiment expressed: that evangelism simply isn’t possible. That a workplace, campus, group of people, or even our culture is so secular and so post-Christian that evangelism just doesn’t work anymore.
I confess I’ve occasionally fallen into the same way of thinking myself. A few years ago I became friends with Peter, a Christian GP. And I remember being very surprised when one day he casually remarked “I love being a GP, it creates so many fantastic opportunities for evangelism”. Without thinking, I said words to the effect of “Really? I thought the health service was so secular and any expression of religious faith so frowned upon, that evangelism just isn’t possible?” Those three little words just slipped out: evangelism isn’t possible.[1]
Why did I instinctively respond with incredulity? Why was that campus minister baffled by seeing evangelism take place on campus? Why do many of us (if we are honest) worry or doubt that evangelism is really possible in “this day and age”? I think it’s because there is a massive temptation to buy into the myth that the secular UK (or the West in general) is simply too difficult ground for the gospel. But is this actually true? And if we’re in danger of thinking this, how can we overcome the Impossibility Gap?
Challenging the Myth of Impossibility
Because the Impossibility Gap is so deep rooted in many of us (we haven’t deliberately adopted it, but we’ve become quietly and subtly infected by it), I want to hit it and hit it hard—so here are six powerful pieces of counter-evidence that taken together will, I hope, form a powerful corrective.
First, however tough a context for evangelism the secular West may be, Christianity has grown (and grown rapidly) in equally tough (or even tougher) contexts in the past. For instance, look at the growth of the Church in the first century. The first century Greek and Roman world was not easy, far from it. Yes, it was very religious, but religiously pluralistic—the pagan world had little time for the idea there was one God and that every other god was a false one. Add to that the ever daily threat and problem of persecution, as the young Church was seen as an increasing threat to the authorities. Yet despite those challenges—a hostile culture and hostile rulers—the Church grew from 120 people in AD33 to 31 million by AD350; or to put it even more dramatically, from 0% to 52.9% of the Roman Empire in 300 years.[2] The early Church didn’t look at the culture and think “impossible”, they looked at it and thought “What a challenge! Let’s follow the Spirit’s lead and see what happens”.
From the past, we can also look to the present. For today, Christianity is growing like wildfire in far tougher contexts than the West. Look at China, where the Church is growing exponentially despite the best attempts of the Communist Party to stamp it out, that there are probably about 120 million Christians in China. Indeed, China is on track to become the world’s largest Christian nation by the 2030s.[3] That growth has all happened in the past few decades. Or consider Iran, where a totalitarian Islamic regime rules with the iron fist of Sharia Law and has made conversion from Islam illegal. But despite arrests and torture, the Iranian church now numbers over a million and is the fastest growing church in the world.[4] There are similar stories across the Middle East. Christians in these terrifically difficult settings could easily say “Evangelism is impossible; it can’t be done!” but they haven’t and God is at work in amazing ways. Let’s be encouraged by and learn from their courage, faith, and example.
Third, sometimes the Impossibility Gap grows because we have a tendency to romanticise our own past. We imagine that churches were full to bursting in Victorian times (and before) and we pine for the lost Golden Age of Christianity, when our country was so thoroughly Christian it was like living in heaven on earth.[5] But that is far from the reality. In Victorian times, surveys of religious attendance show a very mixed picture. For example, Horace Mann, commenting on the 1851 Religious Census remarked that ‘a sadly formidable proportion of the English people are habitual neglecters of the public ordinances of religion’.[6] One can read contemporary reports of ministers grumbling how ‘There were only a dozen people in church on Sunday, and three of them were drunk’.
A little earlier in time and Wilberforce, that famous Christian MP and reformer, was so upset by the spiritual state of the country that in 1787 he wrote in his journal that ‘God Almighty has set before me two great objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the Reformation of Manners’[7] (he meant by the latter the spiritual reformation of his country). A few decades earlier still, John Wesley was so concerned by the religious state of the UK that he threw himself into the re-evangelism of the UK, covering over 250,000 miles on on horseback and preaching over 40,000 sermons as he sought to share Jesus.
It is clear: the past was not a Christian utopia, but as tough then as it is now, yet that didn’t hold back Wesley and others from faithfully preaching the gospel. And I’m thankful that they did: it’s because of that Great Chain of Witnesses which stretches down through the centuries that you and I eventually heard the gospel ourselves.
Fourth, it’s helpful to remember that the West is highly unusual. The secularism that we see in places like the UK, Europe, and North America are a cultural blip both historically and geographical. In most parts of the world today, religion is growing—humanity is becoming more not less religious and worldwide, atheism is in decline. According to the latest research from the well-respected Pew Research Centre, by 2060 the number of people identifying as atheists or agnostics will have declined to 12% (from 16% today).[8] And those patterns are increasingly being reflected in the UK through factors like immigration. Many of the largest churches in cities like London are now immigrant churches—and there’s a beautiful sign of God’s long-term provision in the way that those immigrant churches are now helping to re-evangelise the nation that evangelised them through the missionary movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Fifth, remember that the UK and the West are not Christendom. Sometimes we can have such a myopic view of culture and history that we begin to assume that God’s plans and purposes for his Kingdom have the UK, or the US, or the West at their centre. And no wonder we then get distressed when those countries undergo seismic cultural shifts.
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