Christ's Lordship and Christian Education

This is the text of the message I preached in PHC's chapel service this morning.

Patrick Henry College, for all the long years of its existence [Note: PHC was founded in 2000], and especially in recent months, has been at a point of institutional crisis—a crisis, you might say, of self-definition. What, we ask, is PHC supposed to be? What is its purpose, its role, and its goal as an educational institution? What does the “ideal” PHC student look like, and how do we go about producing him?

We can begin to formulate an answer to all of these questions, and some related questions that have not yet been raised, by thinking about what Wheaton College President Duane Litfin has called the challenge of the Christian college: to see more fully Whom we serve. If we begin to think together about what it means to be distinctively Christian, and just who this Christ whom we serve, it will put our thoughts about what PHC is and should be in the proper perspective. So, now, for a few minutes, let’s think first about who Christ is to us, and then apply those considerations to our experience here at PHC.

Consider the phrase “distinctively Christian education.” This shows up in the literature of scores or hundreds of self-defined Christian colleges, but what does it mean? What are we saying when we talk about a college or educational program being Christ-centered? I think this phrase has become something of a cliché, something we don’t really understand because we’re so familiar with it. When we say that an education is Christ-centered, do we really mean that it is focused upon the second person of the Trinity? Do we really just mean God-centered, or is there some real sense in which a Christian liberal arts education is specifically Son-centered?

Continue Reading "Christ's Lordship and Christian Education"