Welcome to podcast #24. For the last two months I have been speaking to the subject of Christian Worldview integration and the processes of reintegrating with existing curriculum structures. Today I want to summarize these eight podcasts. I also want to remind you that we are still sending out free copies of my book, Disciplining this Generation for a Digital World, to anyone that sends us an email. I will have the details at the end of the podcast.

These podcasts have based on a paper I wrote years ago entitled: “All Truth is God’s Truth.” You can download it in its entirety from our website, www.thechristianeducator.org. I have received several comments about this series and one in particular stood out as a reasonable criticism. One homeschool mom wrote: “The more recent ones have been harder to digest simply as I’m not sure how to translate them into practical everyday teaching. More examples from a practical standpoint might be helpful to me personally. Just a thought….” Signed Peggy.   I can empathize with Peggy, much of what I have been speaking about may seem overly theoretical especially if she is using good home school curriculum. A real good curriculum would already be written from a Christian worldview but just because it says Christian on the box doesn’t necessarily mean it is doing a great job in this department. I have found in far too many examples where the curriculum may cut and paste a Bible verse into the lesson without adequately integrating the Biblical truth in the way the lesson sees the content. Homeschoolers or Christian schools that only use curriculum that comes from a Christian Worldview do have an advantage. If the curriculum is written well and comes from the same Christian perspective of the school or home then much of the work is done. Of course the educator cannot rely entirely on the curriculum – this solves only on part of discipleship based Christian education. The educator must have a grasp of the integrated concepts and the environment must also facilitate the process.

Unfortunately, there are very few educational contexts where all three aspects of Christian education converge to make the perfect setting. In fact, I don’t think the perfect curriculum; educator and environment are anywhere to be found in our fallen imperfect world. Thus we have to be diligent to constantly review and improve our curriculum and everything else in our discipleship process. I think our biggest challenge comes from the context in which we are called to disciple. As we endeavor to educate our children about the world in which they live how much of the fallen perspectives of this world enter into what we teach? If we are going to inspire our children towards a holy lifestyle and a pure and truthful understanding of the world how much of the world do we expose them too? And, as I have pointed out many times in these past podcasts, the Bible is a book revealing God’s relationship to mankind and His Creation, it is not a comprehensive encyclopedia of the knowledge of everything. He directs us to consider creation in order to marvel at his glory and wisdom (Psalms 19:1-6). In order for our kids to become faithful disciples in the world today they need to have some understanding of concepts in science, mathematics, modern socials studies, history, language arts, etc. None of which can be taught directly from the pages of scripture but all of which must be influenced by the concepts in Scripture. There are no easy answers here and there is no quick fix approach we can take that will solve this challenge.

The challenge is further complicated by the fact that every student is different and has their own specific gifts and callings. The depth and degree that one student needs to explore a specific discipline will differ from student to student. I have four children, the youngest of which graduates this year, (Hallelujah) and all four of my children are going in different directions in their lives. My oldest was a Math major and has answered the call to education but my daughter is pursuing a call to medicine. She has had to study the biological sciences and has to be much more familiar with the science of living things whereas my oldest has explored the theoretical logic of mathematics. Their gifts and callings are taking them in very different directions and their preparation has to be tailored to take them there.

I have used the phrase “reintegration of Christian worldview” to point attention to the idea that Biblical truth has been removed from our curriculum. I don’t mean that it has consciously been sanitized from textbooks although, I am sure, this is going on all the time. I use the idea of reintegration to point out that all truth is truly defined by God, and our falleness has skewed our perspective. Let me be even more blunt. I believe that if we can integrate all of God’s perspective on any subject we have the essence of truth on that subject. If Christianity is true, if Jesus really is the way, the truth and the life; then a Christian worldview is the right view of the world. Any other worldview would cloud the truth about the subject and must be seen as a false premise or emphasis and we must reintegrate the right perspective, that is the Christian, Biblical perspective. I know how dogmatic and rigid this sounds but if you are not so committed to your beliefs that you are willing to make a stand for them as truth then, well, you will not be successful in the discipleship of your children. Eventually, they will find out how committed you truly are.

At the heart of Christian education and the integration of truth to reality is the desire to avoid any sense of dualism in how we see and teach our world. What I mean by this is avoiding the constant tendency to make two categories for truth, religious, spiritual truth and practical, everyday, natural truth. There are no different categories of truth, something is either true or it is not. If the Bible is truly God’s Word then it carries with it the infallible perspective of the Creator and must be seen as true in whatever area it speaks to. We can’t have a Biblical truth that contradicts a natural truth. Both cannot be true if they truly contradict themselves. I have heard people dismiss the Bible as having any relevance to science because the Bible is supposed to be speaking to religion. The idea that religion can’t inform science or science to religion is making a false division based upon the arbitrary division of study we have established. Religion, science, math, language, socials are all just categories of study about our world and must be taken as a whole. Dualism wants to separate the sacred from the secular but there really is no such thing as the secular. Everything we see and know has its very foundation in the sacred place the Creator has given it.

In the part 2 of this series we spoke directly to the issue of the inerrancy of the Scriptures. We have to be committed to the idea that Bible is without error when it was first transmitted from the original authors and inspired by the Holy Spirit in its full cannon if we are going to build a Biblical worldview particularly in light of the difficult contradictions we face in modern, educational curriculum. Of course this does not mean that we have an infallible ability to see the Bible or Creation without any bias or misinterpretation. David Couchman, founder of Faith Radio in the UK and author of the “Facing the Challenge” series of courses offers a very balanced answer to the apparent contradictions we see between modern science and the Bible, “If our study of the Bible and of nature seems to lead to a contradiction, we do not need to give up our faith, nor do we need to panic. It is more likely that our interpretation of one or the other is wrong, rather than God has contradicted himself. The wisest course (and the most difficult), may be for us to suspend judgment until more data becomes available. Meanwhile, we need to go back to the Bible and the natural world, to see whether we have misunderstood one or the other.”

In part 3 I emphasised the need to see how we build our worldview from the basic presuppositions that we conclude to be true about our perspective. Everyone has presuppositions or items of faith they build their world upon. Modern science builds its view of the world based upon the presupposition that it can know something to be true if it can be observed, measured and repeated. The secular scientist pre-supposes that using this method will eventually answer all the greater questions of Universe. He pre-supposes that there cannot by any method outside of the empirical scientific method to knowing truth. There are 5 key presuppositions that all Christians share in common, they are:

1. The belief that there is both a spiritual realm and physical realm. It is ontology that drives us further to find answers that cannot be know naturally.
2. Our Theological presupposition is that there is one God who is the Creator of everything and that He loves us.
3. Our epistemology is that God is communicating with us through general revelations such as the evidence we see in creation and inside of ourselves as well as special revelation. This is the idea that God is speaking to us by his Word and his Holy Spirit.
4. Our anthropology is that man was created in God’s image and has fallen from the place of purity and innocence to become what he is today. We need more than what we have in ourselves to succeed in God’s intention for who He made us to be.
5. The final area of presupposition is our meta-narrative or big story understanding of creation and our part in the story.

All five of these categories cannot be proven by some historical or scientific search. They are the presuppositions we build our history and science upon. These beliefs are the paradigms, or building blocks upon which we see our world.

Once we commit to these presuppositions, another way of saying this is to “place faith in these beliefs” we can go further into exploring how they affect and connect to everything we understand about our world. When we go further into our Christian understanding of the Bible three great areas of truth emerge that will shape our curriculum and perspective of every discipline and subject we teach.

1. God is the creator and origin of all things and thus he gives all things purpose and intention.
2. Mankind fell through sin and rebellion from relationship with God and caused spiritual death to enter into himself and thus into all of creation.
3. Christ came into the world as God’s sin substitute that through his death and resurrection God would restore what mankind lost in the Garden of Eden.

These great truths of scripture have to be finely interwoven into everything we teach. Here is where the educator must reintegrate the subjects and disciplines with the concepts and principles that arise from holding and believing these truths.

There are three categories or methods of integration that we will employ as we bring our Biblical beliefs to the subjects:

The first is called Presuppositional Integration when both the subject curriculum and the Bible agree. This form of integration occurs when the Biblical perspective and the subject matter being taught both have the same, compatible presuppositions or the Bible itself creates the presuppositions in the specific discipline.

The second is called complementary Integration when there is partial agreement. This type of Biblical Integration takes place when aspects of the discipline and the Christian worldview complement each other but may not be directly related.

Finally there is the Direct Interaction Integration when the subject curriculum and the Bible do not agree. Here is when the teacher must undertake the discipline of apologetics. The area of study is in direct conflict with the Biblical, Christian worldview and the teacher must reconstruct most of what is commonly taught within the disciple in order to maintain a Christian perspective.

In the podcasts that followed I spent time fleshing out these concepts in both the theoretical disciplines as well as in the more practical applied skill based disciplines. Throughout this series we came up against the idea of how much do we include those ideas that are based upon different presuppositions. The more we rely upon standard textbooks and government outcomes the more we must be diligent in helping our students see the differing worldviews. In the long run, if done correctly, this can give our students the ability to contrast their beliefs with those of the world. They will be prepared to give an answer to those huge ideologies that seem to attack their faith as they engage the world. I have seen this in my own daughter’s journey through university. The bio-chemistry sciences are full of evolutionary theory. She has been able to navigate through this with very few surprises. When her faith has been challenged she is able to  understand at the presuppositional level why there are such contradictions from here belief in the Bible. She has the ability to rethink what is being taught and internally integrate her faith into the subject matter.

Christian worldview integration is at the very heart of our entire experience as believers. How do we bring Christ, who is in us, to our lives? How do we see the world, our friends, our jobs, our purpose in light of the great truths we embrace as Christians. If we fail at this task our students will construct a worldview that separates their faith from reality and weakens the impact that any faith they have upon the world in which they live. To the degree that we, as educators, succeed in presenting our curriculum from a Christian worldview will be the degree that we succeed in helping our students answer these huge questions about life and faith and how they are entwined together. We will open up God’s world to them and enable them to discern the real from the false. We will give our students a framework to study any discipline and bring the truth to the forefront. In the words of Justin Martyr: “Whatever has been well said anywhere or by anyone belongs to us Christians.”

Next week I hope to bring an interview to you from our Global Citizenship director and some of the students who participated in this year’s 6 week educational project in Puerto Escondido, Mexico.

We would love to hear from you and I deeply value your comments. If you would like us to mail you a free copy of my book simply send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it and let us know what type of an educator you are, home schooler, classroom teacher, school administrator, or interested parent. Please let us know how you heard about the podcast and, of course, please include your mailing address.