“After all, science is not an abstract concept. It does not have a life of its own. It varies in accordance with the Scriptural and worldview in which it is rooted. It becomes what it is through what its representatives may or may not believe. This is true of science considered as a whole, as well as in terms of separate parts. Men like Lombroso and Ferri arrive at different criminal law that Gratama or Groen.
But we hereby declare that the modern state, which by its basic principle must keep itself neutral, cannot establish or maintain schools of science, nor even act as its patron. Science cannot and should not be colorless. Neutrality here means unbelief. He who rejects the authority of the King is a rebel. Science that denies its guiding principle is unbelief.
This is not widely recognized in Christian circles. It is believed that the state as we know it cannot have theology taught; but it is forgotten to add that on the same ground and with the same right, no branch of science can be entrusted to it, and the less so, the less it shows the character of an auxiliary science. If the state with the Bible is rejected, then the University has been given its death warrant.
I am now considering the matter entirely in the abstract. But one arrives at the same result if one considers things from a practical point of view. The university is a fortress controlling the entire field of thought and action. It follows that no group in popular life will be able to leave it in the hands of those hostile to its principle. Here we have the key to the position.
P. J. Hoedemaker
The Politics of Antithesis — pg. 75-76
Hoedemaker makes the point here that Thomas Kuhn’s was lauded for when Kuhn’s wrote, “Structures of Scientific Revolutions.” Kuhn’s point there as Hoedemaker’s point here is that Science is not worldview free and does not exist in some neutral vacuum where it is unencumbered by apriorist convictions of the Scientists doing the “science.”
Of course the greater point here is that as long as either the University of the State operates apart from the compass of God’s Word in favor of a idealized but never realized “neutrality,” the consequence will be, as sure as night follows day, that the people of the nation will become pagan. If we cannot have God’s Word as our Lodestone in the University, and indeed in all our government education, than the result will be that our churches will soon become pagan as a result of our children being catechized by a different faith in the school system that is being covered with the fig leaf of neutrality. Having been catechized in the State religion in the school system, — all the time being convinced that they have not been since all their education was “neutral” — at least some of them will then return to the Church and via their “neutral education” reinterpret Christianity to comport with their “neutral education” that was never really neutral.
In my estimation this perhaps the chief problem of the Church in America. As long as the Education centers remain in the hands of the “neutral” statists, just so long Christianity will be a begging religion.
And R2K loves it so.
Just remember the words of Hoedemaker here. “He who rejects the authority of the King is a rebel.”
Pastor McAtee,
I couldn’t agree with you more regarding the chief problem with the American church, that the vast majority of us (and pastors) have “been catechized by a different faith in the state schools”. This is so insidious because we are the fish swimming in this enlightenment/egalitarian water. It is not as though this egalitarian mindset was proposed to us at some point in time and, though we may have been fooled by it for a while, we can eventually go back to our earlier pre-enlightenment understanding; we as a nation have none of that understanding left. We have been swimming in this water for generations now and it has become the prism through which we see and interpret everything, including God’s truth.
Ivan Ilyin’s comment that, “we do not perceive man through God, but instead comprehend God through man”, is indeed as true today as when he wrote it.
Hello Mark,
I am slowly making my way through Ivan Ilyin’s book that you mention.
Your comment is spot on.