The Sons of this World are More Shrewd . . . .
In light of the Gospel reading from the One-Year Lectionary for the Ninth Sunday after Trinity on the parable of the Unjust Steward, I offer a few paragraphs from John Schaller’s “The Battle for the Christian School as a Battle for the Christian Worldview,” published in Theologische Quartelschrift, Vol 7, 1910, 204—221. Highlighting our Lord’s statement:
“For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light.”
You can read the entire translated article HERE.
Of course, the job of establishing educational institutions for the children of the world does not belong primarily to Christians. Indeed, our attempts in this direction are likely to meet with little success because the world wants to be deceived. However, God has entrusted us with children whom we should give back to him, whom we should educate in the worldview that conforms to his divine will. What a damned sin it is—I am speaking with Luther—if this is neglected! It is horrible to think how many parents who pretend to be Christians have already earned hell for their children. Let us note well: to educate children in a Christian way does not just mean to tell them they should be Christians. It also does not just mean to teach them to know from memory a certain treasury of religious knowledge. Instead, it means to lead them to the worldview that God, their Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier, is the highest good and his honor should be the goal of every human aspiration so that their own self is nothing compared to it. This concept, and not a hair less, is what Paul means when he says parents should educate their children in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Now to be sure all attempts of Christian parents in this regard are imperfect, as is the total sanctification of their life in general. Daily forgiveness of sin is necessary for us here also even if we have done all things in a way we perceive to be right. But how can it be justified if someone not only doesn’t do everything he could for Christian education, but he doesn’t do one percent, in fact, he even deliberately abandons children to influences opposed to God? It is indeed a crying shame to see how the church in our day suffers unspeakable harm because so many Christians strike a compromise in the matter of their children’s education. As a result, the form of worldliness rises to the top, and the Christian faith stays at the bottom.
These compromises mainly take two forms: In the first case, the parents think they have completely satisfied their Christian duty if they send their children to Sunday School while they provide them with the irreligious public school every other day the week. In the second case, the parents place their firm confidence in confirmation instruction, which is supposed to complete a Christian education in half a year, when the child has been exposed to the public school education which is formed by the world for more than six years of his life. If both of these compromises are blended so that Sunday School and confirmation instruction come together at times, very little changes. A compromise which comes about like this only has infinitely small advantages over those parts from which it was assembled. In the examination of these compromises that follows, there is no value in judging the worth of the instruction which is taught in Sunday School or the confirmation classroom in and of itself. It really depends entirely on this question: does the Gospel get the attention it deserves? When we are shedding light on the responsibility of parents, we obviously don’t have to consider here what the Holy Spirit can perhaps work in children through the means of the most inadequate religious instruction. To be sure, God can save a poor child from the pit into which the parents have plunged him. For us the question is: can the parents be held responsible when they plunge their child into the pit?
If parents just hope that the Christian education of their children is not at all compromised when the public school is allowed to train them for years and then they are sent to Sunday School once a week for a brief hour or finally entrusted to the pastor for confirmation class after seven years of schooling, those parents are demonstrating little sensible thought. Instead they must be telling themselves that the ongoing instruction in a religious school certainly won’t produce any interest in religion for their children. And on the other hand, they are telling themselves the small amount of religious instruction in Sunday School and confirmation class is just enough to produce a strong and thorough knowledge of religion in their children.
An example from nature may illustrate the first point. The first time a person tours the prairie in the Dakotas, it strikes him that the few trees, planted by people, never stand entirely straight. All of them lean in one direction. With many of them it is not just the trunk that has this tendency, but all the branches are also bent in a certain direction. The result is that the treetop at times looks like a mop of hair which has been blown from the back to the front over the face. When one asks why they look like this (an appearance which jars nature lovers), the inhabitants of the region say that the constant and sometimes violent winds which come mostly from the northwest are responsible for it. Their continual influence on the small trees blows them gradually but without fail from growing in a straight line. If the wind blows from a different direction now and then, it cannot overcome the effect of the very frequent northwest wind. Therefore all the trees have grown leaning that direction.
It is easy to make the application. Those trees are like the children who are sent from Christian homes into the public school and are left for years under its influence. The constant northwest wind is the religion-less instruction these poor children receive. The other winds which should counteract the constant northwest wind are the few religious hours which these children receive in Sunday School and confirmation class. Can one be surprised if they wither away spiritually and grow with a lean? Day after day, week after week, year after year, the spirit of the world blows on them. Their thoughts are directed with every power of the craft of education to “worldly things” which are never connected to God and divine thoughts. Every influence which the school can assert aims at this: make their pupils into complete children of the world. Should one be allowed to hope that all this doesn’t leave a mark on the children? Should one also be allowed to hope that the barest minimum of religious instruction offers a sufficient counterweight? Can one expect these children will bring forth true fruits of godliness and serve their neighbor for God’s sake? Anyone who thinks like this must indeed be slapping his common sense in the face. But the sad truth of it is very few parents make themselves think seriously about this point. In their task with the greatest responsibility here on this earth, they act without thinking and their poor children suffer as a result. The evil fruits only show themselves afterwards, when one can’t do much more about it, i.e. when the children are freed from the discipline of parents and go the way which they have learned to go while under the authority of their parents. Then the parents see how their children are more and more estranged from the church. Then the bitter cries go up everywhere about how so many confirmands become unfaithful to their confirmation vows and follow the world. But if we are honest with ourselves for once: can any other result be expected when bringing up children in this way has been our practice for so long?
However, it is no less a violation against common sense, let alone the reason of the enlightened Christian, if lasting results are expected from instruction only in the Sunday School and confirmation class. Consider carefully: We need to instruct children in the divine worldview, which is opposed to the ambition and the entire way of natural man. We need to establish them in divine wisdom. How true the word of the Lord is here: “The people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.” If the child is to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic; if he is to be taught the basic concepts of geography and secure a certain number of historical concepts; if much later he should learn a skilled trade—no one thinks it is nearly enough if that child occupies himself with that subject casually for an hour on one day of the week. Nor do they think it is enough if he spends an hour with it every day for half a year. There is good reason that lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic, instruction in grammar, geography and history, are carried on daily for years. It is only in this way a person obtains a thorough knowledge that remains his intellectual property as long as he lives. It is only in this way he learns to think definitively about these areas in the right way. This is so obvious to us that we have even experienced parents in the bigger cities who allow their children almost none of the time required for confirmation instruction. With a sigh, pastors have to adapt so that they only get the children for instruction after school, when they are intellectually exhausted and cannot make much of an effort. In addition, they also have to adapt to the idea that they should expect as little work as possible from the children because of the demands which worldly instruction makes on them.
Now compare this idea with the surprising view some Christians have that education in Christianity needs almost no time at all. They think that the highest wisdom there is—God’s revelation in his Word—could be acquired in such a casual way. Is anyone able to say, then, that here the divine worldview is missed by a wide margin? “Yes,” you might say, “but in our congregations there are a great many people who, in spite of being educated in the way that was just described, can be counted as dear church members?” You are right, but how do you account for things like this? These people are very easily still blown about by every wind of teaching, so that they often lean toward the world and its practices. Quite often in congregational meetings they demonstrate very little Christian understanding, and they only apply the world’s standards in congregational matters. And again how do you account for the many thousands who, although born of Christian parents, still become alienated from Christianity so quickly as a result of this kind of education? Doesn’t it happen with them just as Christ says, “They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away”?24 In such people, how can one expect the apostle’s prayer to be fulfilled: “that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God!”