Classical Education

The Emperor is Naked!

Why Go Back to Greeks Ways
Why not Return to Biblical Methods?

In the last five years there has been a growing trend which is reflected in the availability of numerous Greek mythology and philosophy books in homeschool catalogs and curriculum fairs. I feel like the little boy who felt that he must point out the obviously lack of clothing on the Emperor. Well-intentioned Christians have combined classical Greek educational methods with Bible-based curricula, which is exactly the same error that the early Church committed!

The classical Greek approach focuses on
Greek literature and man's reasoning.
The Hebrew methods focus on
God's Word and faith.

We understand this desire to return to a better way, but believe that instead of returning to the ancient Greek ways that we need to return to the Biblical model. Our only hope for stable, ongoing, integrated culture is placing the word of God at the center of our thinking, speaking and acting. Literature and all literary arts must give the place to the mastery of the Bible. And they themselves become servants to the Word of God. The Bible warns us against Greek philosophies:

Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. (Col 2:8).

Under the Greek system learning begets goodness. Under the biblical system goodness begets learning. All non-Biblical education assumes man can become learned without God. Biblical education makes knowledge the foundation of learning.

Greece was a once mighty empire. The Greeks promoted beautiful fashion, fine dining, sonorous music, aesthetic arts, vigorous athletics, captivating entertainment and a bevy of similarly stimulating activities. The Greeks were the most advanced and sophisticated of their time. Were it not for their excellence (applying the principle to modern terms), we would not have heart transplants, ballet, air transportation or, for that matter, the internet. So why didn't the Greek empire survive more than a few hundred years? Historians concur, they were destroyed by moral decay. Pursuing knowledge without God is a recipe for disaster. We simply cannot and will not survive without clear moral direction.

One of the most important things we can teach
our children is how to discern worldviews.

Methodology is not and cannot be neutral. Our philosophy will dictate our methodology. Our methodology will affect our outcome. A Christian's education should be based on a God focused biblial worldview. John D. Beckett explains in his book Loving Monday: Succeeding in Business Without Selling Your Soul:

A biblical worldview has awesome implications for those of us in the secular, Greek-thinking West. As we allow it, the Bible speaks to us concerning government, economics, education, science, art, communications and business. Really, it speaks to all of life.

Abraham Joshua Heschel encapsulated this approach to study by saying that the Greeks study in order to understand while the Hebrews study in order to revere. God's Word and ways are ineffable: only by doing them does one understand them.

The Jewish Talmud tells a story of an elderly rabbi's counsel to his young nephew. The boy already knew the Torah, the Old Testament Law. Now he wanted to study the wisdom of the Greeks.

The rabbi recalled God's words to Joshua: "You shall meditate on it [biblical law] day and night."

"Go, then," said the rabbi. "Find a time that is neither day nor night, and learn then Greek wisdom."

Like that rabbi, who put little stock in the value of studying Greek philosophy, Tertullian, an early Christian theologian, wrestled with the conflict in his day between Greek and Hebrew thought. He asked: "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" (Christian Overman, Assumptions That Affect Our Lives).

Digging Through the Layers

What we now consider "The Church" is almost nothing like the Early New Testament Church. Author/speaker Richard Booker once explained this, by giving the example of an archeologist digging through layers to find out what life was like in ancient times. To understand the Early Church we must dig through layers of a mountain of man's influences shoveling off and discarding man's traditions, theories, interpretations, and philosophies from Greek and Roman civilizations, Constantine, Marcion, Catholicism, etc., to be able to examine the Early Church. During the Reformation, men such as Wycliffe and Calvin were digging in the right spot. They dug up and discarded many theological errors and found a view of God's plan of salvation by grace, but anti-Semitic layers remain and now there are new layers of tradition, interpretations, western thought (a return to the Greek and Roman thought) and conditioning that need removal. Only then can we have a clear view of the Early Church worship.

Greek thought views the world through the mind (abstract thought). Ancient Hebrew thought views the world through the senses (concrete thought). Here are a few atticles on other sites on this topic:

• Hellenic Philosophy and Christianity
• The Contour of Hebrew Thought
• Hebrew Thought
• Greek vs Hebrew Education Methodology
• Greek vs Hebrew View of Man

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Taking the Challenge
We must do more than rail against guideless education. We must identify a distinctively Christian curriculum - one that takes its identity, its motion from the reality of our redeemed condition - one that begins with the authority of the risen Christ speaking through His Word.

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What is Education?
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What About the Classics?

The Heart of Wisdom approach recommends immersing your children in living books or classical literature. We believe you should read the greatest classic—the Bible—the only real, literal, living book, daily, and attempt to read several classics throughout the year.

What is a Classic?

What is a classic book? The answer depends on who you ask. A classic to a Christian can be quite different from the world's definition. In a broad sense, the term classic is applied to anything accepted either as a model of excellence or as a work of enduring cultural relevance and value. The differences between Heart of Wisdom’s classical list and the classics included in classical secular education are the book lists.

Classics According to Classical Education

Encarta defines classical education as the study of Greek and Roman literature, one of the oldest forms of education known.  In classical education, a classic is any ancient Greek or Roman literary work of the first or highest quality.

The modern classical approach focuses on the Great Books of the Western World (GBBWW). Virtually every book in this collection is required reading in a liberal arts curriculum, and includes works of art, science, philosophy, poetry, prose and history from the time of the Greeks until the early 20th century. Plato, Herodotus, Virgil, and Aristotle are some of the main authors. This list was developed by Mortimer J. Adler and Britannica Editors. They believed these books were the core of Western learning and culture. Most of the books on this list were written by non-Christians, men like Aeschylus, Apollonius, Aquinas, Dewey, Euclid, Euripides, Freud, Hippocrates, Homer, Marx, Plato, Ptolemy, Muhammad (the Quran or Koran), Thoreau, etc. Click here for a typical Classic list.

Classics According to Heart of Wisdom

Heart of Wisdom’s suggested books lists include models of excellence or  works of enduring cultural relevance and value, and do not include mythology nor books by the ancient Greek philosophers. Click here to see the classics we recommend by grade level.

To answer the recent criticism I've added notes by other Christian excerpts. (Catholics and Reformed Christians that believe in Replacement Theology are very offended by criticism of Greek philosophy).

Greek Philosophy in the Christian Church

The neo-Platonists who Hellenized the earliest church took their cue from Greek philosophy, which declared that the spiritual good had become entrapped in the material evil. Official Christendom, seeking escape from the material world, concentrated its erudition on the spiritual to the neglect of the natural and cloistered what knowledge it had among a sterile elite, denying it to the "secular" world. This philosophy of education plunged the Western world into the Dark Ages of human ignorance, superstition, disease, and depravity.(by Dr. John Garr click for full article)

Christians have been conditioned by centuries of tradition taught by an over-Hellenized, over-Latinized church to believe that human life is separated into two parts–the spiritual, which is inherently good, and the material, which is inherently evil. This dualism presents a bifurcated view of life that leaves most Christians confused, often living a lie, and bearing the burden of unnecessary guilt. Many view their bodies–particularly their sexual functions–as inherently evil, emotion-filled casings in which their spirits and souls of divine origin are trapped.

Dualism crept into the teachings of the church as quickly as Gentiles came to dominate it in demographics and leadership. The Greek and Latin fathers of the ante-Nicene, Nicene, and post-Nicene eras progressively introduced Greek philosophy into the church, seeking to reconcile neo-Platonic rationalism with the Hebraic teaching of Jesus and the apostles.

Among the first heresies that challenged the very existence of the nascent church was Gnosticism, which built upon the foundation of Platonism the concept that man was saved by secret knowledge, not by faith, as the New Testament writers declared.

Among those who were most heavily influenced by Gnosticism was Marcion who was eventually excommunicated from the church by his own father for believing that Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament was the Demiurge, the evil god who created the material world and trapped the sparks of divinity of the human spirit in the evil of material bodies. He taught that Jesus was the good God who magically appeared on earth in the form of an apparition so that men might see him and follow his example. Jesus was not human, the Jewish Messiah born of a virgin in the fulfillment of the Old Testament, for the good God could not be trapped in an evil body, Marcion declared. He repudiated all of the Old Testament and most of the New Testament writings in favor of his own truncated canon that included an edited Gospel of Luke and some of Paul’s epistles.

R.C. Sproul gives a glimse of Greek philosophy speaking of the word Logos in Following Christ.

Introducing the New Testamentgives a brief overview of the Greek heritage in today's church.

Harper's Bible Dictionary explains the merging of Christian beliefs with Greek philosophy:

Philo, a wealthy Alexandrian Jew, both statesman and philosopher, the most prolific author of Hellenistic Judaism (i.e., the non-Palestinian branch of Judaism most influenced by Hellenistic culture). Although stemming from the period of the rabbinic sages Hillel, Shammai, and Gamaliel, as well as Jesus and Paul, Philo’s writings are remarkably free of rabbinic concerns and betray no awareness of any Christian person or event. Rather, Philo combined a fierce loyalty to Judaism with a profound love of Greek philosophy to present a literary defense of Judaism to his racially troubled city and an extensive allegorical interpretation of Scripture that made Jewish law consonant with the ideals of Stoic, Pythagorean, and especially Platonic thought.

Notes on Col 2:8 Vain Philosophy

Again, this is in answer to the recent criticism from a person promoting Greek philosophy.

1. Paul prays constantly that the believers in Colossae and Laodicea may really understand what they have in Christ, who is the storehouse where God has placed all the “treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (2:1–5). Gnostics claim access to a superior knowledge, but the secret of the Christian’s life is to remain rooted in the Lord (vv. 6–7). Paul then lists a series of warnings. Spiritual reality is not to be found in “deceptive philosophy,” but in union with a Christ in whom all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form (vv. 8–15). Spiritual reality is not found in legalism (vv. 16–17), in the worship of angels (vv. 18–19), or in an asceticism which makes a person look good, but has no value in restraining expressions of one’s sin nature (vv. 20–23). Richards, L. (1991). The Bible Reader's Companion. Includes index. (814). Wheaton, Ill.: Victor Books.