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Once education becomes secularized, God’s Word can then be
marginalized, privatized, and made solely personal. When dual-
ism reigns, Christianity is not applicable to the public square or
the daily workplace. It’s only good for Sunday morning services,
inside the walls of a building, and nothing beyond.
N
OT FAR AWAY, in the center of town, stands a
large church. The sermons are replete with Scrip-
ture, and the congregation has a reputation as “Bible-
believing” people. This is why what I’m about to say is so
hard to believe. The difficulty isn’t obvious to most, and
many who attend the church don’t even realize there’s a
problem. It has to do with the Sunday School.
You see, the Sunday School teachers don’t teach the
children and youth that the biblical truths taught in the
sanctuary are actually true and applicable to all of life.
They don’t want to “impose” Christianity on the next
generation or sway the youth one way or another when
it comes to the Bible.
There is no discussion about how the Bible relates to
all of life, provides a standard for moral order, or brings
meaning to all human endeavors. They say this sort of
teaching is appropriate for the sanctuary but not for the
Sunday School. The rule-of-thumb for Sunday School is
“neutrality in all.”
This matter is never addressed from the pulpit, lest
Sunday School teachers take offense. Besides, the vast
majority of parents don’t have a problem with the Sunday
School. They figure if they do their job at home, there’s
nothing to be concerned about.
Does such a Sunday School really exist? No Bible-
believing church would tolerate such a program! Yet
most churches and the parents who attend them see no
problem with a Monday through Friday educational
system that does the very same thing, five days a week, six
hours a day!
Let me explain. If it is not okay for one hour on Sunday
to give young people the idea that God’s Word plays a
“neutral” role in life and does not provide the overarch-
ing light and truth by which all other things are to be
understood and measured, why then is it okay to give
them this message on Monday through Friday?
Why does the church, in general, see no problem with
schools that provide instruction in academics divorced
from God’s Word, where teachers make no connections
whatsoever between the Lordship of Christ and math,
history, literature, and biology and where the light by
which all things are to be understood has been thor-
oughly put out? The outcome is not necessarily atheism
but surely dualism: the toxic notion that Jesus is Lord of
the church but nothing more.
Separating the Word of God from academics in school
has spawned a debilitating, yet popular, mindset known
as “SSD” or the “Sacred-Secular Divide.” This dualism
constricts the light of Scripture to Sunday morning
sermons and does not apply it to business, law, medicine,
art, civil governance or anything else outside the four
walls of a church.
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