More, How We Got Here

Psalm 78:41 again and again they tempted God and limited the Holy one....

I am fascinated to read of those events that helped turn Christianity from a dominion stance, looking at all of life, knowing that Christ really was Lord over all of it. To one that became turned so sharply inward towards the individual that we became comfortable with the idea of "full-time Christian service" and this now seems normal to most believers! That we struggle, and it's so hard to see that every believers walk should be of full time service to our Lord. This is from Credenda Agenda ....

The Academic Civil War
Roy Atwood

And Jesus said, "Seek first vocational-technical training and all that Kingdom of God and righteousness stuff can be added later." —Matthew 6:35....

...Abandonment of the classical Christian model in higher education and the ascent of vocational-technical college training began with the 1862 Morrill Act...

...The predominantly Unitarian North opened this academic front with the mission of undermining America's historically Trinitarian colleges and universities. Their classical Christian curricula had mentored virtually every major leader of the New Nation since devout Puritans founded Harvard in 1636. The Morrill Act was the North's long-term strategic move to displace the academy's classical Christian tradition and to reconstruct the nation on purely economic, technological, scientific, democratic, rationalistic, and secular (i.e., anything-but-Christian) foundations...

..." Horace Mann, the father of the American government school system and a Calvinist-turned-Unitarian, encouraged "daily reading of the Bible, devotional exercises, and the constant inculcation of the precepts of Christian morality in all the Public schools" so it would disarm critics who knew where his secular vision for education would lead. Using the rhetoric of religion, Mann outflanked pious evangelicals with god-words while establishing a new educational system at war with God's Word....

Prior to 1862, education was almost universally understood as the shaping of a person's life and character through personal, covenantal nurturing and rigorous study of the classical liberal arts from a biblical perspective. Prior to the Morrill Act, the "useful arts" had no place within the Christian liberal arts curriculum....

...The new federally funded land-grant universities redefined education as egalitarian training to serve the American National Will, not "sectarian" interests like serving Christ and His kingdom. Their federally bankrolled success soon pressured even staunchly traditional Christian liberal arts colleges to add new departments of technical education and engineering...

...There are many reasons for the church's drift away from the classical Christian liberal arts college education, but the Morrill Act-inspired belief that practical skills can be taught without religious assumptions was—and still is—chief among them....

...the priorities of Matthew 6:33 have been overturned even among well meaning Christians, just as the strategists behind the Morrill Act had hoped for one hundred and forty years ago. Read more>>