This is a revised version of the chapter “Towards a Third Education Revolution” first published in the book The Third Education Revolution. (Pasadena, Sought After Media, 2020.
Truthpedia is a vision becoming reality. It is a 3-in-1 education ecosystem—high school, university, and encyclopedia—that reintegrates knowledge, truth, wisdom, virtue, skills, research, and community.
Using available educational technologies such as AI, Truthpedia attempts to restore education to the Church as her God-given obligation—to disciple nations (Matthew 28:19–20) and to fill the earth with the knowledge of God (Isaiah 11:9).
The success of this education revolution will depend on the Church shedding anti-intellectualism and proactively seeking the “Spirit of Truth” to cultivate the spirit, mind, body, character, and relationships (John 14:16–17; 15:26–27; 16:13).
For a thousand years, the church has sent students to the universities for their education. Truthpedia will bring professionals into the church, making it possible for schools and universities to send students to the local church.
Imagine students enrolling in accredited universities and schools but attending classes from their local church. Expert teachers will come to their church online. Even the poorest student will get to learn from the world’s best teachers.
Academic Pastors (APs) trained by Truthpedia, credentialed by universities, and approved by local churches, will mentor students individually and in small groups. Students will save up to 75% on tuition.
Learning from the best teachers within a local church-based educational community will free the students to contribute to their family’s economy and health.
Students who cannot live with their parents will room and board with elders and deacons trained to teach necessary life skills. Students will go to universities, science labs, industries, institutions and offices to learn what cannot be taught online.
“Academic Pastor” (AP) revives the lost idea that teachers are God’s gift to build up wisdom and godly character. A youth pastor, teacher, homeschooling parent or grandparent can be trained to serve as an AP if he/she is able and willing to help students study and blossom.
In other words, an Academic Pastor (AP) is a Youth Pastor version 2.0, trained to assess students, oversee studies and organize face-to-face seminars and webinars with experts.
APs will teach students to love their neighbors. They will devote at least six hours a week to serving the needy in their family and local community. An AP will organize internships for students to develop vocational and leadership skills.
Recognizing that she is the body of the One in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge (Colossians 2:3), the worldwide Church will organize global networks of scholars and professionals. Together, they will create a knowledge bank and a truth-based educational ecosystem.
Students will learn to critically examine ideologies, trends and fashions. Education will cease to be indoctrination that corrupts truth and morals. It will stimulate students to discuss and discern what is true, beautiful, good and wise.
Truthpedia will assist Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) to create, edit, adapt and translate online curricula for school and university students. Professionals who understand the strengths and weaknesses of online learning, assessment formation, lecture scripting, videography and contemporary worldviews will assist SMEs to create innovative and meaningful online curricula. Imagine Albert Einstein coming into a poor church to teach Relativity in Hindi or Arabic, or John Milton appearing in a mud hut to explain “Paradise Lost.”
Educational microfinancing will make it possible for resource-deprived churches to become centers of education. Scholarship funds and grants will supplement educational banking.
Incidentally, Truthpedia’s partners, such as Virtues Campus, are already enabling students to go to a local church to study college courses.
Truthpedia will be designed to help students develop the art of research, critical thinking and effective communication. Students will learn languages and master classics. Local churches will partner with existing facilities to teach physical fitness. The curricula will cultivate a sportsman’s spirit and personal discipline.
Students will learn how to organize teams that turn local needs into opportunities for service. Church networks will help students travel across continents to learn and serve in different cultures as they grasp international relations.
Truthpedia will train thought leaders by offering courses in classic books, ideas and biographies that have impacted history for better or for worse. The details of this vision can be found in our book, ‘The Third Education Revolution.’
A New Dark Age
A new dark age has descended upon the world of education. Secularization has robbed teachers of the respect that the Church had bestowed upon them. Teaching is no longer a sacred calling. Many teachers have become vendors in an educational shopping mall (the university) where they sell their department’s wares.
Without divine revelation, universities no longer know what logic and language are, or the difference between right and wrong, male and female. Some of the best minds in the West no longer know what sex and love, marriage and family, nation and justice, or self and God are. An intellectual revolution is required to restore the soul of education.
Once again, learning must earn public respect as a pursuit of truth and virtue. If students go to college mainly to pursue pleasure, power, and prestige or a license to get a job, then how can a college expect greater respect than a club or a workshop? This corruption has already made universities the matrix of our new dark age.
Amoral universities are swamps breeding corrupt politicians, civil servants, businessmen, journalists and judges. They can teach students how to make a great robot, but not how to be a good spouse, parent, neighbor or citizen.
This revolution is intended to make education a training in servant-leadership. It will do more than prepare students for job markets. It will guide them to find the meaning and purpose of life, to discern their personal calling, and to prepare to fulfill their vocation.
Truthpedia will reform education to become a civilizing process—not a breeding ground for immorality and corruption. It will nurture the “habits of the heart,” enabling students to love God more deeply, serve their neighbors faithfully, and steward creation responsibly. From a European perspective, the Truthpedia will spearhead a third education revolution.
The Second Education Revolution
To understand this ‘third’ education revolution, we need to look back on Europe’s history. Her second education revolution began five hundred years ago. In 1520, reformer Martin Luther published an Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate.
Three years earlier, Luther had sounded the trumpet for reforming the church. On October 31, 1517, he nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the University Church in Wittenberg. It did not take him long to realize that Europe could not be delivered from institutional corruption without breeding a new generation of leaders. That required reforming the university. As a university professor, Luther could see that wisdom required intellectual humility—to learn from divine revelation and live in God’s light.
Luther was not alone. Two centuries of an elitist Renaissance had led many learned and devout contemporaries to similar convictions. These included Desiderius Erasmus and reformers such as Ulrich Zwingli, William Tyndale, Philip Melanchthon, John Calvin, Theodore Beza, John Knox and Andrew Melville. Their educational efforts inspired the Council of Trent (1545–63) to transform a section of the Roman Catholic Church into a global force for education.
Understanding the ‘obedience that comes from faith’ (Romans 1:5; 16:26) turned these scholars into educational reformers. They risked their careers and their lives to champion truths that eventually became the faith-foundations of the modern world.
The “truth” of human equality is an obvious example that it was God’s revelation that enabled them to transform the medieval West into the modern West. Human equality was never an observable fact. Inequality of slaves and slave owners, serfs and lords, and males and female was a self-evident fact. That fact precluded socio-economic-political freedom. It stifled individual initiative and corporate flourishing. Thanks to the reformers, “equal human dignity and rights” is a widely accepted truth.
Luther’s Open Letter acknowledged the truth of human equality as a divinely revealed foundation of education-for-all. Please allow me to repeat: contrary to the Humanist assertion, the idea that all men are “created equal” had never been “self-evident” in any culture. European society was hierarchical, divided into nobility, clergy and serfs. No university taught any social scientist that all humans were equal.
Martin Luther learned the truth of human equality from the Bible’s doctrine of the priesthood and kingship of all believers. His “Letter” challenged Europe—the Church as well as the University. For it articulated the Bible’s radical idea that all men and women were created in God’s image and all were sinners. It was the Bible that taught the reformers that the Lamb of God was sacrificed because God loved the whole world.
Many “educated” people no longer remember the Gospel that created the modern world. It taught that any sinner could become a child of God through repentance and faith. Every child of God ought to serve the Father as a priest and govern the earth to ensure that God’s will is done on His earth. This truth required universal education. Everyone must be educated to know God so that they may do their Father’s will on earth.
This theological seed of human equality sprouted and blossomed into a principled—not pragmatic—policy of modern (universal) education. In the USA, it was George Whitefield (1714-1770), the great revivalist of the First Great Awakening, who taught the truth of human equality. His exposition of the Bible made this peculiar idea appear “self-evident” to America’s founders.
Roman Catholicism invented the university. Its monasteries, nunneries, cathedral schools and universities were educating priests from before Europe’s first education revolution. However, they did not educate everyone.
Luther argued to end that discrimination because the Bible taught him that every child of God must serve the Father as His holy royal priest. This requires that every child be educated. Sonship means kingship—if your Father is the King, then you are called to rule with Him. A repentant sinner is adopted as God’s child in order to do God’s will on earth. Once a prodigal child has returned to his/her father, he/she has to serve God as a priest.
It took a while for the biblical idea of the ‘kingship of all believers’ to transform feudal Europe. Wars had to be fought to settle controversies such as whether every child of God could sing praises to God during a church service and drink the wine of the Holy Communion or whether these rights were reserved only for the priests. It took time for the West to agree that the God’s just, righteous and compassionate will cannot be done on earth unless everyone is educated to know God and discern and do his will.
Why did Luther seek the nobility’s help for his revolutionary proposal of universal education? In 1520, Luther was still a Roman Catholic priest. He knew that most of his fellow priests would not share with everyone their privilege and power of education.
Unfortunately, the idea of human equality was never self-evident. It was God’s word, a divine “seed” that planted this truth in human hearts. Luther’s Letter planted that seed in Europe’s soul. The Lord Jesus taught that the ‘kingdom of heaven’ begins as a seed—a word—that is sown. God’s kingdom comes as an idea that is communicated in words (Matthew 13:1-32). This seed-word is the sword of the Spirit. (Ephesians 6:17; Revelation 19:13-15) that defeats diabolical inequality.
Luther’s Letter on Education asked Christian nobility to obey God’s word and support education for every child of God. The reformers’ obedience made the revealed “truth” of human equality a pillar and foundation of modern liberties—social, political and economic (1 Timothy 3:15). For five centuries now this sword of the Spirit has been conquering oppressive cultures built on hierarchical philosophies and customs. If God is “Our Father” (Matthew 6:9), then we are all equally brothers and sisters.
Luther was the prototype “Protestant.” The doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers” that he articulated was a protest against his own church and the culture of serfdom. However, protests do not liberate; truth does.
Truth, Language and Liberty
Obedience to the truth of human equality in God’s kingdom motivated Luther to the monumental task of transforming German dialects into a literary language. He did this by translating the Bible. This was revolutionary. The move from Latin to German made it possible to educate everyone in their heart language.
If every child is to know truth, then a child’s mother tongue should be the language of primary education. Classical languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, Literati Chinese and Arabic had always been barriers to widespread intellectual development. Classical languages were the primary means of discrimination. They kept the masses away from the centers of power.
It is important to remember that making the language of the people the language of learning is a matrix of modern democracy. You cannot have a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” unless it functions in the language of the people.
That phrase was popularized by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address on November 19, 1863, and the basic idea was borrowed by Sun Yat-Sen in China. Yet not everyone knows that the phrase came from the prologue of the 1384 edition of Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible into medieval English. Even fewer in the English-speaking democratic West appreciate that they are able to learn because their mother tongue is also the language of their teachers and curriculum. This innovative linguistic-education reform was Europe’s Second Education Revolution.
Why did the revealed (non-self-evident) truth of the gospel become the source of modern ideas of human equality and economic-political liberties?
In 1520, Martin Luther published three books:
- The first, ‘Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate,’ applied the truth of human equality to education.
- The second, ‘On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church,’ examined how religion had become Europe’s source of slavery.
- His third book was ‘A Treatise on Christian Liberty.’ This book, dedicated to the Pope, was published 12 years prior to Machiavelli’s political treatise, ‘The Prince.’
Machiavelli, an Italian diplomat, saw politics as a pursuit of power. Luther, a student of divine revelation, considered truth as a pursuit of liberty. He wrote at a time when most Christians were bonded serfs in Germany.
Luther’s Bible study on Liberty began the West’s long quest for freedom from slavery. This happened because Moses began to write the Bible so that ordinary Hebrews could learn, read and understand, how God liberated them from Egypt’s slavery.
Luther’s Bible study on Liberty climaxed in the American Declaration of Independence (1776). It acknowledged the theological truth that the Creator—not the state, and not evolution—had granted an “inalienable right” to liberty for every human being.
As a young professor, the very first course that Luther taught was on the philosophy of Aristotle. Then he was ordered to teach the Bible. He submitted a written request to be excused because, he said, he was not qualified to teach the Bible!
Luther was overruled and told to study the Bible in order to teach it. The first book of the Bible that he taught on was Psalms, followed by the apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans. That started Europe’s Reformation. By 1520 Luther was teaching Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. In this epistle, Paul wrote, “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). This began Europe’s quest for socio-political liberty.
Education and Democracy
The Second Education Revolution produced modern liberties. Modern democracy began in Scotland as “Popular Sovereignty.” That idea is captured in the phrase that begins the American and Indian constitutions, “We the people.” It required, though, for people to participate in democratic discussions. That, in turn, requires shared education or worldview.
The modern myth that Greece exported democracy was invented by John Herman Randall of New York’s Columbia College. Mortimer Adler carried that myth to Chicago University. Will Durant popularized it through his lectures and books such as The Story of Civilization.[1]
Deceived by their myth, for a hundred years now universities have not taught the truth that the greatest of Greek writers, Plato and Aristotle, condemned democracy as the worst of all political systems.
Honest professors know the reality that the only political idea that Greece ever exported was imperialism. Professors know of the failures of the Enlightenment democracies in France, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Africa. They are familiar with the failures of the recent efforts to create democracies in Arab nations and Asia. Yet, even the reality does not shake their faith in secular myths.
It was the Bible that brought political freedom to Europe. An education revolution is needed to teach that freedom is a fruit of the Gospel. Sin is the root of slavery. The good news is that the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ, shed his blood to purchase Satan’s slaves in order to make them sons of God. Slaves serve their master, Satan; sons govern their Father’s kingdom.
The reformers’ growing understanding of the kingship of all believers (Revelation 1:5-6; 2:26-27; 3:20-21) crossed the North Sea and transformed the hierarchical governance of the Scottish church in the 16th century. The Gospel so reformed the Scottish Kirk that it replaced the Roman Catholic hierarchy with a bottom-up governing structure. Churches began to govern themselves by electing their own elders when they learned from the Bible that human beings had been created to rule (Genesis 1:26-30). Sin had turned rulers into Satan’s slaves (John 8:34), and the Saviour came to restore sonship-kingship to all God’s children. The Church, freed by the Gospel, began to apply the biblical idea of liberty to political governance.
These “Republican” ideas of freedom had developed in Geneva and France before they were applied in Scotland. Gradually, these biblical ideas spread to other nations, such as the Netherlands and Switzerland in 1648, and to England after 1688. British colonies in North America experimented with them, and in 1787 the Bible’s ideas of liberty shaped the Constitution of the USA, even though some of the founders pretended that liberty was a human idea.
Scottish Reformers such as John Knox and Andrew Melville fought to apply the theological truth of human equality and dignity to reform their church and governance. They did not call their system “democracy.” They described their reforms as building the “New Jerusalem”—the “Kingdom of Heaven” on earth! George Buchanan, their scholar, called this biblical reorganization of society “Popular Sovereignty.”
Although the reformers’ efforts failed to create utopia, they changed history. The imperfections of their innovations became apparent to all observers. It was easy to appreciate their success but became difficult to call their experiment the “New Jerusalem.” That led their followers in the Scottish Enlightenment to propose a compromise. Scottish intellectuals agreed to use a modest Greek term for their Bible-inspired experiments. They began calling the new bottom-up system of governing “democracy.”
However, no European scholar suggested that their system of “popular sovereignty” had come from Greece. For everyone knew that the reformers had built their freedom upon the Bible. The term “democracy” (‘demos’ meaning ‘ruled people’) was accepted because that made it easier to impute the imperfections of their governance upon man rather than on God.
The only political system that Greece ever exported was brutal imperialism. The American Enlightenment invented the modern myth that Western democracy came from Greek city-states. Sixteenth-century protestors reformed nations because they knew that the only way to make the “voice of the people” (vox populi) the “voice of God” (vox Dei) was to educate citizens. Citizens’ minds had to be renewed by truths revealed by God.
At first, these truths may appear to be counterintuitive. Take for example the Bible’s revolutionary dictum, “The meek shall inherit the earth” (Psalm 37:11; Matthew 5:5). It poses an ethical challenge to the humanistically founded postmodern dogma that “pursuit of power” is
Education’s main purpose. Plato saw Athenian Democracy as the voice of a murderous mob (i.e., the Devil). Democracy worked in the modern West only because the Church educated generations to write God’s word upon citizens’ hearts.
Plato hated Athenian democracy because it killed his mentor, Socrates. In place of mob rule Plato advocated authoritarian governance by “philosopher kings.” That, he thought, would be the ideal way to govern city-states. Plato’s disciple, Aristotle, mentored the Macedonian prince, Alexander, to become a ruthless philosopher-tyrant.
A thousand years after Plato wrote The Republic, an English philosopher, Alcuin, planted the seed of Europe’s first education revolution. He explained to Emperor Charlemagne that baptizing pagans does not “convert” them. For salvation is by faith, and faith comes from learning the word of God (Romans 10:17). That lesson triggered Charlemagne’s patronage of the Carolingian Renaissance. I call this revival of learning and culture Europe’s “First Education Revolution.” It climaxed in the founding of Europe’s first universities. Those medieval universities functioned in an elitist language—Latin. That is why they could not educate the masses or empower them to govern their nations. The voice of ignorant, religiously manipulated masses cannot be trusted to govern nations.
Protestant nations were able to pursue and sustain freedoms because the Church taught God’s wisdom to every child. That explains why the U.S. Constitution could begin with the phrase “We, the people…” The medieval West, steeped in a Greek worldview, would have asserted, “We, the victorious military leaders that defeated the British Empire …”
The US Constitution began by affirming popular sovereignty because it was a political vision built upon the theological truth of the ‘kingship of all believers.’ Where did this idea come from that all God’s children, not just victorious militias or philosopher-kings, should govern their Father’s creation? It came from the very first chapter of the Bible. The Bible is the seed that has nurtured and sustained the American experiment and Western democracies.
The Constitution of my motherland, India, followed the American Constitution. It also started with the phrase “We, the people” because the founders of modern India were products of Christian education, introduced by British missionaries such as William Carey.
The founders of modern India did not study in Hindu ashrams or Muslim madrassas. By the end of the nineteenth century, when many of them went to universities, the “Enlightenment” had already begun to darken “Christian” education. Thankfully, however, India’s Constituent Assembly had learned that our hierarchical society, based on caste and gender discriminations, needed to be rebuilt on the biblical revelation that all men and women are created equal. The builders of free India agreed that education was needed to deliver India from our myth that the god Brahma created castes inherently unequal. “We, the people” can be sovereign only if every child is given equal opportunity to develop her/his potential and become a servant-leader.
Postmodernism that makes education a pursuit purely of power, prestige, wealth and status, is a bigger problem in India than in the West. Because our society is already divided as a religious hierarchy. If theology is mythology, not truth, then there is no solid ground for India to choose between the Christian “myth” of human equality or the Hindu myth of created inequality. Without biblical education a Hindu nation would have no foundation for building a democratic India.
The West Without Its Soul
In the West, the Second Education Revolution has been corrupted first by Enlightenment’s rootless “Modernism” and now by postmodernism. The Western Enlightenment was piracy. It hijacked Christian education, ridiculed the Bible, and yet built its castle on biblical assumptions of equality, liberty and human rights.
Modernism, that is, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (published in three parts in 1794, 1795, and 1807), has ended in the Postmodern ‘Age of Nonsense’ because Reason is incapable of proving itself, let alone Equality or Liberty. A new education revolution is necessary because the West’s elite universities have turned the “Enlightenment” into intellectual and moral “endarkenment.”
Human reason becomes barren when it is divorced from divine revelation. Now, Western philosophers ‘know’ that the human brain cannot know the truth. For them, it is nothing more than chemistry—an accidentally evolved monkey brain.
It is no longer “self-evident” to an average student that all men are created, let alone “created equal.” Students are asked to believe the non-observable Modernist myth that zillions of accidents evolved everyone equally. Knowledge as a pursuit of power cannot motivate citizens to serve one another humbly. The Good News that God loves, forgives and accepts sinners like us is the basis for our Father’s command that we love and serve those who have sinned against us.
Inequality is a self-evident, observable fact. President Obama was honest in admitting in a 2017 documentary, The Final Year, that human equality is a story. In his worldview it was a (pragmatically) useful myth that should be believed. For without this Christian myth, a Black man could not have become the president of the USA.
Truthpedia is needed because goddess-worshipping feminists prefer the myth that females are more evolved than males. Nazis and Brahmins prefer the story that Aryans are the most evolved race. If everyone has his own story, then a Hindu has every reason to believe that the only “true story” is that he is superior to everyone else.
In other words, should education teach stories, myths and hypotheses, or should it be a pursuit of veritas—the truth? President Obama did not transform America’s foundational “self-evident” truth of human equality into a “useful story.” This feat was accomplished by occult alchemists who championed an American philosophy called Pragmatism. John Dewey made Pragmatism the basis of postmodern education.
America’s pragmatic theory of “truth” was pioneered by philosopher, logician and scientist Charles Sanders Pierce (1839–1914). Psychologist-philosopher William James (1842–1910) popularized this “humanist” theory. John Dewey (1859–1952) replaced Revelation with Pragmatism as the philosophical foundation of secular, state-controlled education.
Dewey wrote volumes on more topics than most people could ever contemplate. However, he omitted discussing the question of truth because it is a matter of the spirit, not the human brain alone. A mere animal or a bio-machine cannot know what is true or good without the spiritual capacity for relationship with God.
Reviving the Soul
Can I “know” the dream you had last night? Neither my senses nor my logic can figure out what you dreamt. Meditation, mystic experience, parapsychology, astrology, telepathy, hypnosis and spirit-channelling are also powerless. The only way for me to know your dream is for you or God to reveal it to me in words.
You can reveal your private truth because language, by its nature, is revelatory. It reveals what is in your mind and heart. The Apostle Paul turned Europe’s pagan, story-based slave culture into a truth-based culture of liberty because he understood the “spiritual” nature of his role as a teacher-revealer.
Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “These are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 2:10-14)
Truth (veritas in Latin) was once the purpose of Western universities. Divorcing Reason from Revelation forced the university to give up the hope of finding truth. Desacralization precluded the supernatural, spiritual dimension of reality. Doubt ceased being the first step in the quest of truth. It became the end. Language and logic, imagination and intuition are not just matters of the human brain. They are aspects of the spirit.
Since Immanuel Kant’s (1724-1804) critique of reason, philosophers have known that, without revelation, the human mind cannot know true truth—basic foundations of reality.
Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) spent his university years trying to figure out language. How did language evolve? What was its purpose?
Wittgenstein came to the same pessimistic conclusion as the Indian sage, the Buddha. The Bible’s view of Logos (Word) as spiritual helped the West make sense of logic and words as means of communicating truth. Without divine Logos human logic and language become intrinsically incapable of knowing and communicating truth. At best your words can express your animal feelings. Language can have nothing to do with truth.
Truthpedia is needed because educators who see pragmatism as the philosophy of education cannot tolerate anyone who claims to know and teach truth.
Why have universities become so intolerant? They can’t tolerate truth because universities know that the “Enlightenment’s” confidence in human reason has failed. The best a researcher is allowed to do is to “hope” that your rigorous scientific method allows you to “assert” a proposition confidently. Your thorough and meticulous research does not allow you to label your convictions “true.”
In other words, Pragmatism has tied universities to agnosticism. They require you to affirm that your beliefs are only relatively true; even your morality is adjustable. Therefore, no one should trust you. The media may be a public educator, but just like the university, it has to be understood as spinning stories 24/7. Why? It is “fake news” paid to manipulate the audience, not to communicate truth. This truthless intellectual culture has made the West’s political-bureaucratic elite a manipulative, self-seeking “swamp.”
President Obama’s belief that human equality is not a self-evident truth but a useful story comes from Dewey’s contemporaries, Carl Jung (1875-1961) and Joseph Campbell (1904-1987). When these astute thinkers realized that the Enlightenment’s reason cannot know the truth, the foundation of reality and ethics, they turned to dreams and myths in search of meaning.
Without God and his revelation, the materialistic (scientific) view of man became terrible. It was articulated most clearly by Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904–1990). His conclusions implied that the American Declaration of Independence was deluded: freedom and dignity were merely theological illusions, not worth fighting for.
Skinner was a celebrated psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor and social philosopher. He taught psychology at Harvard University from 1958 to 1974. His 1971 book “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” was on the New York Times’ bestseller list for eighteen weeks. For him the self-evident, scientific conclusion (truth) was that spirit, God, soul, or self does not exist. The Buddha, Nietzsche, Freud and William James were right: The term “God is dead” means that man (self) must also be dead. Therefore, Truth is dead.
The belief that God is dead means that “I” does not/cannot exist. No “I AM” has ever existed—whether human, diabolical or divine.
This makes the idea of liberty for an individual an illusion, spread by the Bible. Skinner insisted that “I did not direct my life. I didn’t design it. I never made decisions. Things always came up and made them for me. That’s what life is.”
Skinner’s conclusion is a postmodern deconstruction of “self” as discussed in my book, “This Book Changed Everything: The Bible’s Amazing Impact On Our World.”
Skinner’s “determinism,” or non-existence of self with free will, was a logical conclusion of the idea that the spiritual realm does not exist. Matter alone is real. Skinner revolted against the fact that the Bible had embedded the myth of “human dignity” into Western culture. Freedom had been enshrined in the Declaration of Independence as America’s foundational belief. This was a fruit of Jonathan Edwards’s (1703–1758) Calvinism.
Edwards was America’s first philosopher and revivalist. He taught the revealed nature of truth in his 1754 book “The Freedom of the Will.” Theological notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘dignity’ that built America did not fit into Skinner’s anti-spiritual, materialistic worldview. As an atheist scientist, he had to dismiss the American idea of freedom as a “myth.”
Skinner had pragmatic reasons for attacking the “Christian myth” of an inalienable right to liberty. That right makes it difficult to control the behavior of a bio-machine called man. Individual liberty prevents scientists from organizing society to make life happy.
The West’s education system based on anti-spiritual reason is flawed. Truth and freedom are matters of the “spirit,” not brain chemistry. Education based on a materialistic philosophy has to destroy the biblical foundation of freedom. Graduates, brainwashed and indoctrinated by state education, will destroy themselves and the freedoms built upon revealed truths. Postmodern philosopher-kings already control Western universities and the mass media. Their protégés want to control citizens. Citizens brainwashed by their education have no philosophical basis for resisting authoritarian rulers. Under threat, many will freely surrender their liberties.
Postmodern myths enslave because “stories” cannot be questioned. The truth liberates because it can be examined and debated. Truth demands evidence and reason. That’s why truth (veritas) based education opens the mind and spirit. The Bible, which is filled with truths revealed by God, made the West a uniquely thinking civilization. Placing the truth of the Bible at the heart of education will revive the West’s soul.
Yet, the greatest danger to the third education revolution may come from pastors and elders who see church-based college education as their opportunity to brainwash students. A wise and secure pastor will be humble. He will allow students to question his opinions. Their questions should motivate him to study and think. Fundamentalism, afraid of questions, promotes indoctrination.
Theology means using reason to make sense of revelation. Building a questioning and investigating culture within a church college will make Christianity the West’s most robust worldview, necessary for recovering its soul.
Prosperity and Revelation
Having lost truth, Western education systems are forced to reject the exceptional nature of their unique liberty and economic flourishing. The July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence said that governments are instituted to protect “inalienable rights” that the Creator (not the state) has bestowed upon every human being. These include one’s right to pursue happiness.
As president, George Washington repeatedly reminded the nation that the right to pursue happiness implies the right to private property. In his formal presidential addresses, writings and prayers, at least 48 times Washington referred to every citizen’s right to “sit under his own vine and fig tree with no one making him insecure and afraid.” That imagery, affirming the right to private property, comes from 1 Kings 4:25, 2 Kings 18:31, Micah 4:4, and Zechariah 3:10.
This seed from God’s word produced America’s undeniable economic success. The belief that every person has a right to the wealth that he or she creates or inherits comes from the fact that God himself commanded, “Thou shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:15 KJV). God’s command gives everyone a right to property.
The God who requires the wealthy to love their poor neighbors sincerely and sacrificially commanded both the rich and the poor to refrain from coveting what belongs to someone else (Exodus 20:17).
A nation prospers when the poor do not covet but create wealth for themselves. Education must restore the Creator’s lost image in citizens. God did not loot. He worked to fill this beautiful earth with abundance. Being made in His image means that we must be creative, not covetous.
An education that teaches that a “struggle for existence” and “survival of the fittest” help us evolve encourages cheating and looting. Evolution never commanded anyone, “You shall not covet or steal.” God created us to be creative and productive like Him.
Postmodern universities have already destroyed the West’s founding faith that the Creator endowed each person with inalienable rights. Post-truth education gives to left-wing socialists the right to covet and loot what belongs to others. It indoctrinates students to believe that anyone who inherits wealth is unjustly “privileged.” Teachers theorize that “the capitalists” who create wealth loot others—especially poor workers. This economic ethic of looting has promoted the immoral attitude that the poor have an inalienable right to covet and loot the property that belongs to others. They believe that wealth belongs to the poor; therefore, they should be able to walk into a store and take what they want without paying for it.
In the summer of 2020, in the face of rioting, some “clever” socialists offered the following advice to poor voters:
“Please don’t take the trouble to loot shops because that is dangerous for you. The wealthy “fund the police.” Therefore, they own the law enforcement system. Instead, vote for socialism. That will give the state the power to loot the capitalists on your behalf. We’ll call it “tax.” A tax is whatever we, the Government choose to call a tax. If you give us the power to loot, we’ll give you a monthly cheque. That will free you to sit in front of a TV, enjoy drugs, play games and gamble. The wealth created by the hardworking tax-payers will take care of all your medical and educational expenses, even if you came into America illegally. If you vote for socialism, you will give us the power to punish the capitalists who make America wealthy.”
This ideology taught in universities is guaranteed to make everyone equal—equally poor. By rejecting divine revelation, the West has become a beautiful castle that has at its foundation nothing but sinking sand. The biblical root that nourished the West’s magnificent tree has been eaten up by humanist ideologies. The trunk of the tree—education—is infected with debilitating intellectual viruses. A new Education Revolution is needed to revive the truths that shaped much of the modern civilized world and its prosperity.
It is sad that the Church has become intellectually weaker than the University. This is because it abandoned itsuniversities and retreated into Bible seminaries to train only priests. The obligation to train God’s children to do their Father’s will on earth was handed over to the state—which does not know God.
God’s will is not being done because Christian education no longer trains leaders for every sphere of society. The Church has so weakened itself that it does not even believe that it can take education back from deceiving spirits.
And yet, all authority over visible and invisible realms has been given to the Church’s head, the Christ. The resurrected “Ruler of the kings of the earth” (Revelation 1:5) gives to his body the command to shepherd his little lambs. It is a sin to abandon God’s children to the wolves—the ideologies of death. Along with that responsibility to care for God’s sheep comes the authority and commission to teach all nations. That is a mandate to bring all nations under his discipline (Matthew 28:18-20). That is the Third Education Revolution.
Europe’s First Education Revolution
Now let us look back a little further. The sixteenth-century reformers that educated Western Europe and its colonies were products of Europe’s first education revolution. It began. As I noted, with the Frankish king Charlemagne (748-814 A.D.) He was made the Roman emperor in 800 A.D.
Charlemagne began his rule with an assumption that to convert someone to Christianity meant to baptize that person. Therefore, he ordered pagans to be baptized (“converted”) forcefully on “pain of death.” That policy of forced conversions was abandoned when the English philosopher Alcuin (735–804) persuaded Charlemagne: “Faith is a free act of the will, not a forced act. We must appeal to the conscience, not compel it by violence. You can force people to be baptized, but you cannot force them to believe.”
Alcuin explained to Charlemagne what St. Boniface (675–754), the apostle to German Barbarians, had emphasized a century earlier. That is, to convert means to educate. Conversion is the spiritual process of God’s Spirit of Truth writing His law in the heart and mind of a repentant sinner. This process makes a rebel a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17) who lives in “the obedience of faith” (Romans 1:5).
Twentieth Century missions failed to disciple nations because many “evangelicals” made the mistake of thinking that to convert means to lead people to pray “The sinner’s prayer.” They failed to see that the obligation to disciple nations means to fill the earth with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the seas (Isaiah 11:1-9; Habakkuk 2:14).
Charlemagne’s intellectual transformation resulted in what is called the Carolingian Renaissance. It produced a magisterial flowering of scholarship, literature, art and architecture during the 8th century. Charlemagne himself learned to read. He became such a lover of books that priests had to read to him even while he ate. His favorite author was St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430). That resulted in Augustine’s educational curriculum becoming Europe’s standard for almost a thousand years! All the pioneers of the Second Education Revolution studied it. Charlemagne’s court produced books that taught elementary Latin. He financed a royal library that contained in-depth works on language and Christian faith.
While scholars wrote in Latin, Charlemagne also supported the translation of Christian creeds and prayers into vernaculars along with teaching grammar and music. He encouraged monasteries to establish Scriptoriums. Fasting, praying and performing religious rituals continued, but monks also dedicated their lives to copying every available manuscript. They wrote books on history, poetry, art, music, architecture, technology and law, along with Bible exegesis, commentaries and theology.
Alcuin was Charlemagne’s “minister.” As such, he taught the emperor rhetoric, dialectic (logic) and astronomy. Einhard (775–840) tutored the Emperor in arithmetic. He had been educated at Fulda monastery, where St. Boniface was buried.
The education revolution that began with an Emperor-Priest team peaked in the founding of the university of Bologna in Italy (1088). There, priests studied Justinian Law. The Church built other universities to teach medicine and philosophy, along with scriptures and theology.
Reflection on divine revelation (Theology) was understood to be the queen of all sciences. Church-Education justified the use of reason, because reasoning was considered an aspect of God’s image in man. This gave meaning to every intellectual discipline and to life itself. For the Bible commanded believers to “think about” what it says instead of believing blindly (Philippians 4:8).
Popes and bishops licensed universities because they understood that the Bible exhorts Christians to “think.” A deep respect for the life of the mind made the university the educational arm of the Church, for the Church and by the Church.
Church-owned universities trained God’s ministers to serve the Church and the king. That is why Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom still serve the Crown. Harvard University spelled out its motto as “Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae.” Translated from Latin, it means that the university was created to help students seek “Truth for Christ and the Church.”
The University of Bologna, run by monks, taught Law because the Church had already built Europe’s best, most trusted and powerful justice delivery system. Church-owned universities trained monks, priests, chancellors and bishops in God’s Law, which had been codified in the civil and canon laws of the Justinian Code. Law education trained ministers of God’s justice to serve the Church as judges, chancellors and advocates.
Following Charlemagne’s example, most kings employed educated “ministers” of the church as their court “ministers” (chaplains and advisors). That’s why the officer who advises the British monarch is still called the “Prime Minister.” Other “ministers” support his or her sacred responsibility to govern each aspect of the nation with God’s justice, righteousness, wisdom and compassion. We still see today the impact of this first education revolution.
Writing things down: The Old Testament roots of European education
The first and second education revolutions have even deeper origins, which merit understanding. Consider this: Any genius can invent a script which only he can decipher. A written language creates and enriches a culture only if others are taught to read it. The earliest known writing systems were developed in Iraq and Egypt more than 1,000 years before Abraham and 3,000 years before Christ.
Abraham grew up in Iraq and spent a brief time in Egypt. His grandson Jacob took his extended family into Egypt, where they lived for four hundred years, first as honored guests and then as slaves.
These slaves were freed without an armed revolution. They returned to Canaan, to the land God had promised them. God’s promise was that He would make them a “great nation.” Most slaves would have been illiterate. Moses, their leader, would have learned to read and write, for he grew up in the palace, adopted by an Egyptian princess.
Today’s “experts” would have required Moses to tell stories to illiterate oral learners. But his God was politically incorrect by postmodern standards. He gave to illiterate shepherds a text to learn, the Ten Commandments, written on two tablets of stone.
Moses put a copy of that sacred text in a wooden chest and covered it with gold. A copy of God’s word was sacred. The oral learners were not allowed to worship idols or invent myths about their deities. Not an imaginary god, but the sacred, written text of the Covenant between God and Israel was put in the heart of the camp, in the holiest of holy places.
What would make Israel a “great nation”? They would need to reject made-up gods and stories about them. They would need to know the true God and His word that is truth.
God made things more difficult: He required them to learn to write and make copies of His law. His word must be written, carved or stitched everywhere so that ultimately it gets written upon their hearts. The Savior God required slaves to become thinkers. They needed to meditate upon God’s written word day and night.
Shepherds and slaves would become a great nation by becoming teachers of God’s word. God required freed slaves to make sure that every one of their children knew and revered God’s written word (Deuteronomy 6:7).
When rescued slaves were wandering in the wilderness, Moses taught them that military conquests will not make them a great nation. Slaves will be transformed by meditating upon God’s written word and obeying it. That internalization of God’s word will create the socio-cultural capital necessary to transform them into a great and wise nation:
“See, I have taught you decrees and laws as the Lord my God commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it. Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to him? And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?” (Deuteronomy 5:4-8).
The Holy of Holies housed more than God’s moral law. Just before writing the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), God asked Moses to write the history of the Amalekites’ attack on vulnerable wanderers. Thus, the very first section of the sacred texts that Moses wrote and put next to the Covenant was the history of this specific battle. “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Write this [history] on a scroll as something to be remembered and make sure that Joshua hears it.’” (Exodus 17:14).
Why did God ask Moses to write history? Moses, the old man, had climbed up a hill to pray and watch the battle as his young assistant, Joshua led untrained troops to victory. If one of Joshua’s contemporaries were to write the “story” of that battle, the narrator might have described victorious Joshua’s leadership, battle strategy, courage and prowess. But Hur and Aaron witnessed the conflict as well as the fact that the battle’s outcome was determined by Moses’ prayer. The two witnesses grasped the truth.
A flattering story would have hurt Joshua and Israel. It would have made Joshua and his people trust in the sword. But Joshua’s sword was completely useless before Jericho’s impregnable walls. Joshua needed to be reminded that the living God had brought the Hebrews out of slavery. Reliance upon Him had made them victorious over the Amalekites. Only a humble and exclusive reliance upon the living God would enable them to win the promised land occupied by nations stronger than former slaves who had nothing.
God was active in human history then, and He is active now. Secularizing providential history corrupts truth.
Pagan shrines did not have sacred texts. They installed idols of man-made gods. Why would anyone worship gods of stone, wood or metal? Pagans worshipped imaginary gods who did not intervene in history. That’s why they had to invent stories (myths) to motivate people to worship imaginary gods.
God prohibited Jews and Christians from inventing gods and myths. In place of made-up stories, Moses was commanded to write and put historical truth in the Holy of Holies. This is what made the Jews “the people of the book,” which was, in fact, a library of books. They revered sacred scrolls, not idols. God’s Spirit commanded, inspired and enabled men to write His truth. Words written by Moses and other prophets were the word of God.
The key lesson? Truth must be written down. Enough people must learn to read and communicate truth to others. For truth, not myth, must be the intellectual foundation of a free people.
The New Testament Temple and the Cathedral
Where would the son of a carpenter or fisherman go to learn to read and write? During the New Testament times they went to the local synagogue. The local priest served as the teacher.
What if the local priest failed to answer a student’s penetrating questions?
In that case a 12-year-old carpenter’s son took his questions to the Temple in Jerusalem. For the Temple was the intellectual capital of Israel. It was much more than the place for worship and rituals. The Temple was the sun that radiated God’s light to the nation. It was Israel’s de facto university.
Jewish scholars congregated in the Temple. That included experts in public health and scribes who studied, copied and exegeted the Scriptures in order to shed light on topics of vital interest.
The Rabbis came to the temple to teach wisdom to priests as well as to the people. Priests and Levites then took God’s wisdom to the remotest parts of the nation. Law experts applied God’s absolute laws and man’s relative laws to the complexities of new and specific cases.
Jesus of Nazareth went to the Temple to learn from the best-available experts. At the end of the day, however, he was a self-taught teacher—a Rabbi. Jesus studied, fasted and prayed. He was baptized with God’s Spirit of wisdom, knowledge and understanding. (Isaiah 9:2). God’s Holy Spirit made his words “life and Spirit” that came from the Father (John 6:63). His words were the seed that brought Heaven’s kingdom into the soil of the human soul.
The Lord Jesus sent his apostles not as a militia but as sowers of the seed of God’s word. He did not ask them to subjugate unbelievers with swords. He sent them to spread God’s word, which is the sword of the Spirit. Their mandate was to implant God’s word in the human heart. God’s truth-word was the sword that would conquer Satan’s kingdom of deception:
“For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12).
Paul became Christ’s Apostle, who brought God’s word to Europe. He didn’t attack the Roman Empire with a metal sword. This man who started winning pagan Europe was a man of “letters.” He branded himself as a “preacher and a teacher of the truth to Gentiles.” (1 Timothy 2:7, Titus 1:1, etc).
Paul had a vision for Academic Pastors explained earlier. He established local churches that were “the pillar and the foundation of the truth.” (1 Timothy 3:15)
Paul believed in “truth” because he believed in the spirit. He was the Jewish Rabbi who sowed the seeds of Europe’s initial education. Irish monks watered the literary seeds of western civilization. The Carolingian Renaissance nurtured the saplings the monks and nuns had planted.
This understanding of ancient Israel and God’s kingdom transformed medieval cathedrals into centers of education. Some of these Cathedral schools grew into the universities that continue to this day. Notre Dame in Paris is a classic example. Other famous European universities grew out of monasteries between the 11th and 13th centuries. That is why a chapel was always the most important building in every traditional college in Oxford or Cambridge. Both were once Augustinian monasteries, fruit of an education revolution.
From the First to the Second Education Revolution: A Final Word
A Second Education Revolution became necessary in the 16th Century because pagan weeds suppressed the wheat that Paul had planted and faithful monks and nuns had nurtured. “Christian” professors and priests suppressed the revealed truth by relying upon pagan rationalism and myths. That forced the reformers to confront Scholasticism.
One of the tragic confrontations climaxed in Oxford on October 16, 1555. University professors, students and citizens gathered around bishop Stephen Gardiner and several priests in the public square on the Broad Street to watch reformers Bishop Latimer and Bishop Ridley be burnt at the stake. Bags of gunpowder were hung around their necks to make their murder a spectacle! Their crime? They wanted the Bible to be translated into English for all the people to read and understand.
Before their horrible execution, the two martyrs knelt down and prayed. The older saint, Bishop Hugh Latimer, encouraged his fellow martyr: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England as shall never be put out.’ (Foxe’s book of Martyrs 1583 edition.)
Sure enough, within years Oxford University began to be reformed. It rejected the intellectual darkness into which Scholasticism had fallen and instead embraced Psalm 27:1, Dominus illuminatio mea (“The Lord is my light”), as its motto.
Oxford was able to burn reformers alive because by the sixteenth century Christian universities had become the source of Europe’s darkness. They had allowed Scholasticism to mix God’s revealed truth with Aristotelian Rationalism as interpreted by Muslims such as Avicenna and Averroes. Adding Platonic philosophy to that intellectual cocktail had made intellectuals stagger with dizziness. The Psalmist knew, “The unfolding of your words gives light; it gives understanding to the simple.” (Psalm 119:130).
A similar story is unfolding today. There are universities in the Western world that love darkness more than the light. The new revolutionaries who choose to confront darkness will need to deny themselves and take up their cross. They can believe the promise, as Latimer and Ridley did, that the darkness shall not overcome the light. (John 1:5)
What part do you have to play in a Third Education Revolution so that God’s light may shine through His word and transform our education and nation? How can you be part of the Third Education Revolution needed by our children and our nations?
Prof. Vishal Mangalwadi, MA, LLD
is a world-renowned expert on education and philosophy. Christianity Today described him as “India’s foremost Christian intellectual.” Vishal is the visionary behind The Third Education Revolution.
[1] For a detailed discussion please see David Gress’ study “From Plato to NATO” (New York, Simon & Shuster, 1998)