In defense of the novel proposition that “the Christian school (and the use of it) is a demand of the covenant,” Mr. Andy Lanning speaks often of “togetherness.” So Lanning: “the essence of the Christian school is the togetherness of the endeavor to instruct the covenant seed. The Christian school is the covenant parents’ and other believers’ working together in the covenant instruction of the covenant seed.” (from Lanning’s article “The Christian School as Demand of the Covenant,” Sword and Shield, Vol. 2, No. 7, p.9; italics are his).
This position is the condemnation of any in the Christian community who choose not to support Christian day schools by sending their children to those schools but who instead would educate their children at home. Home schooling is, in principle, against God’s covenant. It is disruptive of and a hindrance to the covenant fellowship of God’s people in their generations and in their work in common of nurturing the children of the Church. There is covenant togetherness, manifest in the use of Christian schools by all. And there is the anti-covenant independentism, of home schoolers. “Because the essence of the Christian school is parents’ working together in the rearing of the covenant seed, the opposite of a Christian school is independentism on the part of a family” (p. 10). This independentism of home schoolers is sin against God, his covenant, his covenant schools, and his covenant people.
This position of Mr. Lanning and the Sects that have recently hopped out of the Protestant Reformed Churches is wrong.
For Mr. Lanning defines “covenant togetherness” his way, not how Scripture defines it and the Reformed Creeds and Church Orders speak of it. The Bible and the Reformed faith speak of a “togetherness” of God’s covenant people that is a spiritual communion, a communion of the saints. This is the “unity of the Spirit” (Ephesians 4: 3). It is the unity of the one body and one Spirit of Christ (4:4), to which we were called in one hope of our calling, and which is a union also of “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all (4:5, 6a). Ours is precisely not, therefore, a union of brick and mortar, of school boards, and of school teachers, and curricula, a union which is advanced, as alleged, by a system, structure, and schedule forged by early twentieth-century education gurus such as John Dewey to make educated Americans out of us all and an unum out of the pluribus of our citizenry. Such a form of “togetherness education” may be and is helpful for many of God’s people. Other forms, as well, of schooling togetherness, variations on the theme, may be helpful. But the form itself, and such “togetherness” of some school down the road other than the home, doth not biblical unity make. If indeed it is the case that in the body of Christ “there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free,” surely using either Hope
School or a Home School makes no difference in itself, that is essentially, because “Christ is all and in all” (Colossians 3: 11).
Our unity, our “togetherness” in Christ is something Christ makes—by his blood, by his Spirit, and in his truth. It is a unity he makes in our hearts. It is a unity in which all of us, home schoolers and day schoolers alike, desire the glory of God and the blessedness of all the body of Christ. This unity, of Christ, works in our hearts to renounce all forms of anti-covenantal independentism. Including the independentism of browbeating, pontificating sectarians who would invent a commandment and promote a togetherness of the northern tribes—apart from Judah, apart from Christ.
In the spiritual and essential unity and wonderful diversity of the body of our Savior, including members who employ day schools, some who prefer to home school, or others who would be glad for some combination of both, let us be found “endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3), with grace on our lips, seasoning our words, as those together guided by his word and his alone–into and from the school of Christ.
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