Schools are also a problem elsewhere. . .

According to news reports, one out of every three elementary age school children in Bavaria are unable to speak German well enough to attend classes.  It is worst in in the city of Augsburg, where two-thirds of first-graders lack competence in German language skills even to understand the teacher to understand what is being taught and they cannot read German.  Children who lack appropriate competence in German language skills must take remedial classes.  In the case of Germany, the problem is laid at immigration and the lack of integration of immigrants into German language and culture.

The blame cannot be laid upon the children but upon the adults.  On the one hand, there is the false ideal of a nation in which people speak their own language and have their own culture side by side with the language and culture of the nation itself.  On the other hand is the problem of immigration which is necessary for nations with low birth rates and the need for younger workers but if this is at the cost of  parallel cultures and languages which keeps them separate but equal, it is in the end the worst form of discrimination.

 

This also illustrates the universal problem of requiring schools to do other things than the educational agenda which is their primary purpose.  How can a school succeed in its primary purpose if it is saddled with the impossible task of respecting those who have another primary language and the language of the classroom is but secondary?  For years German schools were lauded as examples of success in both teaching and requiring higher educational accomplishment from their student population than American but now it appears that their success has become the price they must pay to preserve the ideal of immigrants who can live on the fringes of the language and culture of their new home country.

 

It is not only America which has required a common commitment to morals, ideals, language, culture, and work and family values of their past for those new to their borders.  No matter how much it is derided by the left, a commonality of culture and life is part of the fabric of every fruitful nation.  Soon, the Germans will awaken to this as Americans have.  The problem is that the homeschooling movement is not an option there nor is there in place a strong option in the religious schools -- as these options exist here. 

 

Pure means sound. . .

The Lutheran use of the word pure with respect to doctrine is often confusing to people and gives the wrong impression.  This is largely due to the fact that Lutherans themselves have given purity a connotation and example beyond what the word means.  We have, and here I am speaking of conservative, confessional Lutherans, made purity into the sole pursuit of doctrine.  We have invented sieves to run doctrine through to weed out what is impure.  This is not quite what purity means.  The goal here is not to render doctrine like oil, pressing it and straining it until it is pure, extra virgin doctrine.  The goal here is to preserve sound doctrine.  Doctrine is surely refined as challenge and heresy demand.  That is certainly what happened at Nicea.  But it was not refined from raw material into something different.  It was held against the Scriptures to make sure what was confessed was sound and if it was sound then it was also healthy.  Unsound doctrine is inherently unhealthy and will corrupt, spoil, and make rancid what God has said and done for our salvation.

Nicea gathered the bishops not to preserve purity but to make sure that every challenge and heresy had been placed against the rule and canon of what God said.  The bishops did not vote on what they thought but for what God had said.  They knew that even small deviations from the Scriptures would provide an entrance point for heresy that could not be allowed or the health of the whole Church would suffer and her ability to address the world with Christ and the power of His life would be compromised.  This was not about purity but about health, not simply about soundness but the soundness upon which truth lives and flourishes to accomplish its purpose and the unsoundness upon which it surely does not life.  

From St. Vincent of Lerins reminds us that what we believe and how we worship are inseparably connected.  I have for a long time loved the way the sainted Martin Franzmann put it -- theology must sing!  Indeed, it must, or it is not right thinking.  The theology must be sound, built upon the firm foundation of God's Word, or it cannot inspire or inform prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.  We guard doctrine not because we have been given job to refine it but unless it is sound, it is not healthy and if it is not healthy it cannot aid us in our purpose of glorifying God above all things.  Those who take pot shots at the preoccupation with doctrinal purity assume that it is about straining away impurities to preserve doctrine as if we were conservators of something to be admired.  The reality is much more ordinary.  We are guardians of truth so that the Church's song may continue, so that praise of God may abound, so that the lost and dead may be found and raised, and so that the health and healing of God may preserve us.

Not long ago my wife and I spent many hours at the St. Louis art museum.  It was a marvelous day and I highly encourage you to visit.  What is remarkable to me is how accessible such wonderful treasures are.  They are not hidden behind glass nor locked up in a vault.  They are there to move your eyes, minds, and hearts with beauty.  Surely we cannot say anything less of doctrine!  Churches are not museums preserving the doctrinal content behind thick glass cases or locked up in vaults.  We are there with the beauty of God's eternal and saving truth for the world to know and believe.  Doctrine must be sound (pure, if you will) because only when it is sound is it healthy and only when it is healthy does it heal the sin sick unto death with the medicine of Christ's saving work, raising them and us to life that death cannot overcome. 

Killing me softly. . .

Who does not love the sultry voice of Roberta Flack singing that iconic song Killing Me Softly with His Song?  I love it.  My personal favorite is the line, He sang as if he knew me.  It was not quite real.  So it is for those who view the Scriptures through an academic lens, as if its point were to mine the words to discover the individuals whose pen put them down, the cultural milieu in which they were written, and the way the first hearers understood it.  Of course, as interesting as that might be, it does not preach.  It does not really help.  It is as if we are looking at two different Scriptures -- the one that has God speaking and the one in which it is merely words on a page.  They speak of God's Word as if they know it but they don't -- they know only the Bible as book, words, curiosity, and detail.  They have focused so much on the text and what is behind it, they no longer hear Christ's voice speaking.

It is not that I am not interested, it is interesting.  The point is not that it does not capture the imagination but that it cannot address the heart.  For so long none of us can remember its beginning, we have been captivated by what some have called the “academic Bible” and have become a stranger to the “scriptural Bible.”  Commentaries seem to love the intricate details of the text but too often ignore what is said.  This modern view of the text with its preoccupation with textual criticism and theories of origin has treated the Scriptures like a corpse and attempted a postmortem to a book which we claim is alive and speaks life to us.  The invention of critical methodology has ended up killing the Scriptures, turning its life into an idea and the primary focus on where that idea came from and who it came from.  In early Christianity there was a reverence to the Scriptures not as a book off limits but because it was alive, still addressing the Church and the world with the words of life.  

There are those who open the pages of the Bible with questions and these questions are not directed to the Scriptures themselves but to what is not there.  It is a modern form of Gnosticism in which the Bible becomes a puzzle to disassembled in order to see how it goes together or how it might go together differently than what we have.  The people of God are not the focus of this kind of academic pursuit.  Everyone knows that when the people of God gather around the Bible, they come together to hear its voice, the voice of the Good Shepherd, still calling, gathering, enlightening, and sanctifying a people to be the Lords.  They respond with a single voice in common confession of this God, what He has said and what He now gives in the means of grace that are the Word and Sacraments.  The job of the Church is not to untangle a knot of words but to address us with the Word of God and in so doing to teach us how to read the Word.  The Church does this through catechesis, to be sure, but primarily through liturgy and preaching.  Here the people of God discover that this book is their book, not to do with as they please, but as the Word written for them. This Word lives in them and through them, ordering them and their lives and mirroring it to the world around them.  One of the benefits of reading the early fathers is to learn again the joy, focus, and application of Scripture as this living voice of God and not some problem to be solved or mystery to be made ordinary.  

Lutherans were, not surprisingly, the ones to coin the term Patrology, because they held up this sacramental Word, efficacious in its voice to accomplish in us what it says.  I wish I could say we still as a whole believed and practiced this.  We must reclaim the Bible for the Church from the academics which are killing us softly, enticing us with the idea of a story that ends up masking the voice of Scripture, and distracting us from what it says.  We need to get away from the idea of a synthetic or plastic Scripture and remember again what it is like to hear the voice of the living God speak in love to His people.  When this begins to happen again, we will find not only our preaching reinvigorated but our life refreshed as God means for it to be whenever we gather around His Word.  Without this, we will become a people who sing as if we knew Him when know only our own intellect, curiosity, and interest.

Too good. . .

At a Bible study so long ago I cannot even remember when, a voice objected to the characterization of the world as evil.  Indeed, it came as we had just completed singing from The Lutheran Hymnal the John Mason Neale text:

The world is very evil,
The times are waxing late:
Be sober and keep vigil,
The Judge is at the gate:
The Judge that comes in mercy,
The Judge that comes with might,
To terminate the evil,
To diadem the right. 

It is a solemn warning and a sober call not to be deceived as the world comes to its end.  That hymn was written into English by Neale in the 1800s from a text by Bernard of Morlas writing in the twelfth century.  For the modern mind, the hymn is hopelessly wrong since that times are not waxing late but the days continue to trudge on toward their appointed end and we have weathered many calls through the ages that Jesus is coming soon.

In his book, Orthodoxy, (written even later in 1908), GK Chesterton wrote about the world.  He suggests that at least to the modern eye and ear and heart, the world is not evil at all.  It is good -- not decent but filled with good things that few of us want to abandon -- not now or even in the face of the end.

“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.”

I will let slip his parenthesis about the shattering of Christianity at the Reformation.  Indeed, he is correct.  The modern world is far too good, filled with good things that are also too good.  It is like a sweet treat that is too sweet and later unleashes its fury upon us in rolls of fat.  The good things are borderline good and can easily become evil.  That is the problem with progress.  It often betrays a problem we did not see as learn to live with it.  The virtues are turned but so are the vices.  Let loose from restraint, the vices corrupt us not simply by our consent to them but by no longer clearly being vices in and of themselves.  Once we are no longer sure what is vice and virtue, it is enough to corrupt us for our judgment is compromised even as our hearts and desires.

What afflicts us is desire unleashed from restraint but even more uncertain about virtue or vice at all.  We presume we are in Eden again discovering all things new.  The sexual oddities of the present are surely part of this discovery but there is nothing new in them.  The first sign of sin's destruction was the corruption of sexual desire.  But the problems are not simply sexual.  We cannot define woman or man in a culture where this is merely the property of desire.  We cannot define marriage when it is ripped from the fabric of the fruitful love that begets.  We cannot define life when death is merely another choice and we cannot define death when life is so easily surrendered to desire.  When children become an unwanted  distraction from our self-fulfillment or a drag on our pursuit of happiness, we have nothing invested in the future and are fully free to wreck destruction upon everything from nature to humanity.  It is a cruel joke that freedom has become the license to pursue stupidity.  Indeed, sin has made us stupid -- so stupid that we mistake virtue for vice and vice for virtue and pursue them with equal vigor.

Chesterton is surely correct in judging the times and humanity solely on the basis of pity.  The charity of the present is not really mercy at all.  To sit by and allow a person to cut off his organs for the imagined gender of his feelings is no charity.  To allow the child to be ripped from the womb with a chemical death sentence is hardly charity.  To live on the screen while insulated from both the joys as well as costs of commitment is no charity at all.  And these are but a few of the false charities that modernity lauds without paying any attention to the price of such imagined largess.  Christ is not come to impose artificial boundaries upon us in the hopes that we will figure out the means to holiness but to raise those dead in trespasses and sins, blind to the difference between goodness and evil, hopelessly lost in the forest of desire with self-control, and cleanse those who do not even know they are dirty with the washing of regeneration and the clothing of righteousness.  Christ is not some sort of brakes to apply when things get out of control but the control that is freedom.  Not in the least of His gifts is the Spirit who restores our sight and teaches us what is evil and what is good and then works in our hearts to choose goodness and abandon sin.  It will surely not be perfect this side of glory but it is headed in the right direction.  With it comes the absolution that rescues us from the fall and restores us to battle again the evil within amid the evil without. 

Cursive to the rescue. . .

As I have posted before, the advent of AI and the difficulty of those teaching in schools to identify the work students did not do has created a crisis of sorts.  It is, however, a crisis that could be averted by the return to the ancient (translate that in my day) blue book of blank sheets of paper with lines awaiting the train of thought from the writer.  It would be an elegant solution to the problem had the schools not at some point decided to forego teaching cursive.  Even if you wanted to return to the blue books and to the handwritten essays and answers of yesteryear, it would be a monumental effort on the part of a school population that knows only how to print and teachers who have rusty skills trying to figure out the scrawl that passes for cursive.  

The truth is that AI answers is the least of our problems.  What is much bigger is the challenge to thinking.  We live in a Google age in which people do not think but simply surf, do not think critically but presume anything and everything on the internet has the same value, and do not think inventively but follow the crowd even more than in previous days.  AI and screens are partly responsible for the fact that if presented with a blank page, modern students would not know how to write on those pages and probably not know what to write.

Cursive represents a time when we valued thought, thoughtfulness, and practiced thought.  Now we value time and ease -- do it fast and do it as easily as possible.  While it may be efficient, it is hardly effective.  The great gulf between students are the few who know what they are thinking and why they think it and those who simply mirror the thinking of the moment and have no clue why they should agree or disagree.  Schools are partly responsible for this and classical schools are partly an answer to the current situation.  While it might be felt on the collegiate level, it begins far earlier.  The roots of the modern day problem were planted in screens as baby sitters, entertainment over finding your own solution to boredom, and schools weighed down with the need to correct the social ills all the while reducing the content and what is needed to master the content for matriculation to the next grade or graduation.

I continue to be amazed by the fact that nearly all our students will end up elementary, high school, and college with a very limited list of actual books they have read.  A synopsis is not the same and neither is the abridged version enough.  They may well know their games and the characters therein but Shakespeare and the great authors down through history are strangers to them.  They do not know original sources but only what others have said about them or the equivalent of a sound bite version of their literary contributions.  

It has got to start somewhere so I vote to begin the revolution with cursive.  Let's teach the old Palmer Method that I learned.  Let's put up the posters that display the upper and lower case forms of cursive.  Let's ask our kids to write again and ask them to read more and read the whole content of the books, stories, essays, and poetry that once defined literacy.  It is not enough to know how to type in a few words into a search engine.  We are in desperate need of creative thinking, thoughtful reflection, and critical judgment.