Are education and faith compatible?

Question 60063.

The assumption that faith and education pull in opposite directions is so widespread that it barely gets stated, it just hangs in the air. Get educated and you will grow out of religion. Stay religious and you will have to keep your head down in a seminar.

I do not accept the framing, and neither does the Bible. But I do think there is a real tension underneath the false one, and it is worth digging down to it rather than settling for a slogan about how Christians love learning too.

Scripture commands the life of the mind

Start with the obvious. The greatest commandment includes loving God with all your mind. That is not a decorative addition, it is a duty laid on every believer.

The Bible contains an entire genre devoted to the pursuit of understanding. Proverbs opens by stating its purpose as to know wisdom and instruction, to understand words of insight. Daniel and his friends were educated in the literature and language of Babylon and excelled at it. Paul quoted pagan poets to a philosophical audience in Athens, which means he had read them.

So the notion that faith and education are natural enemies has to be smuggled in from somewhere. It is not in the text.

Where the tension actually lies

The real conflict is not between believing and learning. It is between two accounts of where knowledge comes from and what it is for.

Modern education, in much of the West, operates on the assumption that reality can be fully described without reference to God. Not argued, assumed. That assumption governs which questions count as serious and which are filed under private preference.

Once you see that, the apparent clash between faith and education comes into focus. It is not physics against Genesis. It is one faith commitment quietly competing with another, and only one of them is required to declare itself.

The believing scientist is not a contradiction

The history here is inconvenient for the sceptic. Kepler, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendel, Pasteur, Kelvin. Not one of them thought that faith and education were in competition, and several of them said the opposite in print.

They worked from a conviction that the universe was made by a rational God and could therefore be investigated rationally, that it was contingent rather than necessary and therefore had to be examined rather than deduced. That conviction is not incidental to the rise of modern science, it is the soil it grew in.

So when a student is told that serious enquiry and Christian faith cannot occupy the same head, the honest reply is that they have occupied a good many of the best heads in the history of enquiry.

What actually happens to students who lose their faith

Here I want to be pastoral rather than triumphalist, because young people do walk away at university and it will not do to pretend they all had bad arguments.

In my experience the loss is rarely intellectual at the start. It is a lecture that treats belief as a curiosity, a hall full of people who find it faintly embarrassing, a church back home that never let anyone ask a hard question, and a first term of nobody noticing whether you get up on Sunday. The arguments arrive later and are recruited to justify a move already made.

Which means the church’s response to the challenge of faith and education cannot be a booklet of answers handed out in the summer before term. It has to be a congregation where hard questions were always welcome.

What the church has got wrong

We have sometimes deserved the reputation. Where anti-intellectualism has been treated as a mark of piety, where a young person who asked about the age of the earth was told to have more faith, where the answer to doubt was volume rather than substance, we handed the sceptic his case.

Paul told the Corinthians not to be children in their thinking. He told Timothy to bring the books and the parchments. A church that discourages study is not being spiritual, it is being disobedient.

If we want the next generation to hold faith and education together, they need to see us doing it. That means pastors who read outside their comfort, and congregations that can tell the difference between a difficult question and an attack.

Educating without being absorbed

The other error is to treat every lecture as neutral information. Daniel is the model here. He learned the whole Babylonian curriculum, and he did it thoroughly enough to be counted among the best in the kingdom, while resolving not to defile himself with the king’s food.

That is the pattern. Master the material. Do not swallow the worldview. Learn the arguments of the higher critics well enough to state them fairly, and then know why you do not accept them.

Paul does the same in Athens. He knows their poets, quotes them accurately, uses their own altar as his opening, and then preaches the resurrection. Engagement and conviction were never in competition in his mind. See also how a Christian student should handle a higher-critical course.

A word to parents and to students

To parents, the years of most anxiety about faith and education are the ones where control is going and influence is all you have left. Use it well. Ask about lectures, take the objections seriously, and do not panic at doubt. Panic teaches a young person that the faith is fragile.

To students, find the Christian Union or a solid local church in the first fortnight, not the third term. Isolation does more damage than any lecturer. And read something substantial by someone who has thought about your subject as a believer.

To both, remember that the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom. The fear of the Lord is where knowledge starts, and that ordering does not shrink the field of study, it opens it.

Faith and education in the ancient world

It is worth noticing how much of the Bible was written by educated men. Moses was trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. Daniel took the Babylonian curriculum. Luke writes in the polished Greek of an educated physician and opens his Gospel with the language of careful historical enquiry.

Paul studied under Gamaliel, the most respected rabbi of his generation, and it shows on every page of Romans. He could construct an argument, anticipate an objection, and hold a chain of reasoning across several chapters.

The pattern of faith and education in Scripture is not that God uses only the simple. He uses fishermen and He uses scholars, and He is not embarrassed by either.

What He will not tolerate is learning that puffs up. Knowledge that makes a man unteachable has stopped being education and become vanity, and Paul says as much to the Corinthians who were proud of theirs.

Teaching children to think rather than to conform

If we want the next generation to hold faith and education together, the training starts long before university. It starts with how we answer a seven year old who asks why God let the dog die.

A child who learns that questions are welcome grows into a student who brings the hard ones home. A child who learns that questions are disloyal grows into a student who takes them elsewhere, and elsewhere will not always be kind.

Deuteronomy 6 pictures instruction happening while you walk along the road, unhurried, conversational, woven into ordinary life. That is a better model than an annual apologetics weekend, though I have nothing against those either. See also how to prepare to give an answer for the hope you have.

Learning as worship

There is one more thing I would want a student to hear. Study itself can be an act of worship, and I do not mean that as a pious flourish tacked onto an essay deadline.

Kepler said he was thinking God’s thoughts after Him. When you sit down with a textbook on cell biology or medieval history or number theory, you are tracing the work of the same mind that spoke light into being. Great are the works of the LORD, studied by all who delight in them, and the psalmist who wrote that was not excluding the seminar room.

That reframes the whole business of faith and education. The question stops being whether your degree threatens your faith and becomes whether your faith is shaping how you do your degree, which is a far more interesting question and a good deal more demanding.

So, now what?

If you have been carrying a quiet suspicion that your degree and your Bible cannot both be trusted, put that suspicion down. There is no subject on the syllabus that God is not already the author of.

If you are the one going into a hostile department, go in with your eyes open. You will meet real arguments and some of them will be good ones. Answer the good ones honestly, even if the honest answer for now is that you do not know yet.

And if you are in a church that treats questions as a threat, be the person who changes that. What would it look like in your congregation if the brightest teenager in the building felt free to ask the hardest thing they could think of?

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

Matthew 22:37, ESV