Education is a matter of eternal consequence, and the stakes are too high to take the issue lightly. We need more universities like The Masters University that seeks to teach the lordship of Christ.
“For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.”2 Corinthians 5:10
An education that honours the Lord should prepare us for all that He will hold us accountable to when we stand before Him. We must learn how to discern all of life under the lordship of Christ.
This assumes an absolute commitment to Christ and Scripture. Without this, education will teach the wrong worldview and will fail to equip one to please Christ or make an eternal difference. Any erosion to Christ and Scripture causes education to fall dangerously short of its intended purpose.
One way to think about this commitment is through the phrase “Christ in all things,” derived from Ephesians 1:23. This emphasizes that Christ is not only lord over some things but everything. Every assertion within any subject or discipline must be taken captive to the lordship of Christ.
“For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” 2 Corinthians 10:4-5
What does this mean for The Master’s University?
It demands that we take everything on campus, put it under the microscope, and see how Scripture determines every single thing be defined and done as an act of worship to Christ (cf. 1 Cor. 10:31).
There is a reason that the symbol of The Master’s University is a shield. The church is the pillar and grounds of the truth (1 Tim. 3:15) — and at TMU, we believe our role is to shield this sacred trust by faithfully educating the next generation of the church, ensuring that the truth is not distorted but upheld as the authoritative definer of all things (cf.Gal. 2:5; 2 Cor. 10:3-5).
Have we been perfect in our endeavor? No. But we know and pursue the standard we must hold ourselves to.
We know we cannot just teach a variety of subjects with Christ on the side.
We know we cannot just have certain things look Christian on our campus.
We know we cannot use human observations to define Christ and Scripture.
Rather, the standard is nothing less than Christ in all things. This is what makes for a true education — one that gives the whole truth and true wisdom, one that prepares for all of life, one that makes an eternal difference, and one that pleases the God who ordained it (Prov. 8:22; Col. 1:9-11; 2:8). That has been our commitment for almost 100 years, and we pray that by God’s good grace, it will be our resolve for many more.
In recent years what is inelegantly referred to as “cancel culture” has moved from focusing its attention on present-day matters to imposing its narrative on how we view the past. Indeed, in the Anglo-American world, the principal battlefield on which the culture wars are fought is that of the past. That is why so much effort has gone into corrupting the historical memory of America and Australia.
With the ascendancy of the decolonisation movement, a campaign that seeks to exact vengeance against the past has acquired an unprecedented intensity. It promotes the claim that the very foundation of the Anglo-American world must be condemned. From this perspective, its past has no redeeming features. It encourages the public, especially the young, to learn to hate their Christian heritage.
The beginnings of Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States are represented as a form of original sin that still haunts society.
Australia is demonised as an evil settler-colonial society whose past is a history of shame. The Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has characterised it as the “black armband” view of history. From this perspective, the past is inherently evil and corrupt; its influence is malevolent, and the sway it exercises over present-day society is implicated in oppressive and exploitative behaviour.
Arguably, one of the most significant achievements of the war against the past is to racialise the origins of Western civilisation and, by implication, subject contemporary society to a racialised imperative. Virtually every important historical personality is cast into the role of a racist villain. Aristotle has been denounced as the philosophical inspiration of white supremacy. Shakespeare’s plays are demonised as a purveyor of white privilege. Some academics and educators dismiss Winston Churchill’s status as a heroic foe of Nazi Germany and accuse him of being a war criminal.
In the case of America, the decolonisers assert the US was founded to entrench slavery and contend that, to this day, the nation is dominated by this legacy.
As a cultural practice, the racialisation of society has cast its net wide so that the most unlikely normal aspects of life can be deemed a manifestation of white privilege. Its most visible targets are the symbols of our past, such as statues or street names. However, the war against the past is so driven by hatred that it lashes out against the most trivial targets. Australian activists have denounced classical music and opera as racist. Even the names of plants and animals have been brought into the frame of decolonisation.
Dr. Brett Summerell, the Australian Institute of Botanical Science’s chief scientist, has decried that the “names of effectively all Australian plants were defined by white – primarily male – botanists”. He observed that many plants were “named using Latinised terms to describe features or locations, and a number are named after (usually white male) politicians or patrons”. As an illustration of the problem of allowing white male scientists to give plants a name, Summerell points to the plant genus Hibbertia, named after George Hibbert, a man “who made his fortune from slave trading”.
The logic of the crusade against the past is that there is literally nothing about Australia’s past worth celebrating. This message is continually communicated by institutions of culture. Schools have become an important site for indoctrinating young people with a negative rendition of their cultural inheritance.
This development is particularly striking in Britain, where the war against the past is relentlessly pursued in the classroom. British schools often rely on teaching material that instructs teachers to avoid presenting the British Empire as an equal balance of good and bad. They are told the British Empire should be taught as any other power that committed atrocities. The curriculum guidelines suggest that the deeds of the British Empire are comparable to those of Nazi Germany. In effect, these guidelines seek to make British children feel guilty about their nation’s past.
All aspects of the past come with a health warning and even school libraries are being cleansed of old books. School libraries in Australia have removed “outdated and offensive books on colonialism” from their collections.
The purge of a school library in Melbourne was guided by Dr Al Fricker, a Dja Wurrung man, and expert in Indigenous education with Deakin University. While auditing all 7000 titles on its library shelves, Fricker justified removing books because they were almost 50 years old and were “simply gathering dust anyway”.
There is something truly disturbing about the idea that a library ought to rid itself of old non-fiction books. Once upon a time, old books were treasured and treated with care by libraries, not treated with suspicion. It is not just old books targeted in schools; any appreciation of the legacy of the past is cleansed from the curriculum.
From a very young age, children are exposed to a form of education that aims to morally distance them from their cultural legacy and deprive them of a sense of pride in their past. In the UK, primary schoolchildren as young as five are offered US-style lessons about “white privilege”. Teachers are instructed to avoid teaching “white saviour narratives” during lessons on slavery by de-emphasising the role of white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce.
Significant sections of these societies have adopted the attitude of thinking the worst about their nation’s history. These sentiments are often transmitted to schoolchildren, and many youngsters grow up estranged from their communities’ past. According to a survey by the London-based Policy Exchange think-tank, almost half of the young people between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed that schools should “teach students that Britain was founded on racism and remains structurally racist today”.
Their reaction is not surprising since 42 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds have been taught that “Britain is currently a racist country”.
Often, during history lessons, more time was devoted to disabusing pupils’ beliefs in the celebrated accounts of their communities’ past than to acquaint children with the important deeds of their ancestors.
This curriculum is more likely to motivate children to feel emotionally alienated from their ancestors than to feel a sense of pride about their nation’s past.
Apologists for an anti-patriotic curriculum continually protest that the past needs to be painted in even darker colours than is the norm. One American website advising history teachers complained: “History is an essential theme of the education curriculum. This is because learning about a nation’s origin is very important. However, in children’s history classes, kids are deprived of the parts of history considered murky. The curriculum is more focused on portraying America as a rational and noble nation.”
Disabusing the young of the belief that their country is a noble nation is one of the drivers of a curriculum designed to deprive pupils of possessing a sense of national pride.
Why does all this matter? If schools and other institutions of culture transmit a narrative based on suspicion and hatred for the past, society is in serious trouble. It means young people are not only dispossessed of their historical inheritance but are also indoctrinated to feel estranged from it.
Until recently it was recognised that education and the socialisation of young people depended on acquainting the young with the experience of the past. Education is a realm where young people become acquainted with the experience of the past and learn about the values that have evolved over the centuries through a generational transaction. This occurs principally through the family and young people’s education at school.
Throughout the modern era, leading thinkers from across the ideological divide understood the significance of transmitting the knowledge of the past to young people. The conservative thinker Matthew Arnold’s formulation of passing on “the best that has been thought and said in the world” is virtually identical to the ultra-radical Lenin’s insistence that education needs to transmit the “store of human knowledge”. Writing from a conservative perspective, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott concluded: “Education in its most general significance may be recognised as a specific transaction which may go on between the generations of human beings in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world they inhabit.” Oakeshott went on to call it a “moral transaction”, one “upon which a recognisably human life depends for its continuance”.
This socialisation of young people through the intergenerational transmission of the legacy of the past forges connections between members of society. It provides young people with the cultural and moral resources necessary to make their way in the world and gain strength from the experience of their elders. A 16-year-old boy who knows that his uncle and grandfather served in the Navy has a model of duty available to him even if he doesn’t join up when he comes of age. A girl whose mother commits herself to environmental activism grows up oriented towards valuing the planet. This is more than school-acquired knowledge; it is fundamental to the adulthood that children and teenagers envision as they get older. The stories that children hear from their parents, relatives, and neighbours help them to understand who they are, and where they come from.
Through this intergenerational dialogue, the experience of the past is both tested and revitalised.
Unfortunately, institutions of culture have become captured by a spirit that is entirely antithetical to the project of transmitting society’s historical legacy to young people. Instead of transmitting the values upheld by previous generations, educational institutions are often in the business of dispossessing young people from their cultural inheritance.
Consequently, they are complicit in promoting the condition of social amnesia. In effect, the younger generation is deprived of the knowledge that would help them to know where they come from. They are historically disconnected from the experience and influence of previous generations. Uprooted from the past they are often disoriented and confused about their place in the world. Nor is the problem confined to institutions of education. The project of estranging society from its historical inheritance has proved to be remarkably successful. The media and the entertainment industry – for example, Netflix and Hollywood – communicate the sentiment of intolerant anti-traditionalist scorn.
This deep-seated mistrust of tradition goes so far as to warn mothers and fathers to be wary of the child-rearing practices used by parents in previous times. The advice and views of grandparents is frequently attacked as irrelevant and possibly prejudicial to the development of the child by so-called parenting experts. As a result of the institutionalisation of these attitudes, children are no longer socialised into the values held by their grandparents and certainly not by their more distant ancestors.
It is through the alienation of society from its history that opponents of Western culture seek to gain moral and political hegemony. The stakes are high in this conflict since the project of contaminating the past diminishes the capacity of society to endow people’s lives with meaning. A society that becomes ashamed of its historical legacy invariably loses its way. It weakens society’s capacity to socialise children and dooms them to a state of a permanent crisis of identity.
This article is from The Australian and it does not make mention of the role Christianity had in our history and the fact that we are in a spiritual battle that is in its last stages. Satan and his demons know their time is short. Their strategy has changed. The theory of evolution which convinced most that God is not needed to explain the existence of the Cosmos is under threat from the discovery of DNA and the electron microscope. DNA is complex information that controls the highly complex machinery in each cell. The only source of highly complex information is an intelligent source outside of its creation. Satan knew the evolution strategy would eventually fail so he prepared the younger generation in particular for his next strategy – ALIENS. Even the most outspoken atheists such as Richard Dawkins when pressed on the evidence for intelligent design “It could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, by probably some kind of Darwinian means, to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet.
If you have not heard Dawkins speak on intelligent design then you need to listen to this interview with Ben Stein. DAWKINS IS OPEN TO ALIENS BUT NOT GOD.
Just look at all the computer games for young children and films that are about ALIENS. What about the thousands of reported UFOs and Alien abductions. Satan has prepared people for his final strategy. Demons are already manifesting as Aliens and the saviour of mankind. It is only a matter of time before the Antichrist (possessed by Satan) comes on the scene.
Article from The International Chronicles – Interactive Forum of Political Culture January 21st 2022
THE “ACADEMY” IS DEAD… IT WAS COWARDLY AND FECKLESSLY ALLOWED TO BE SLOWLY CHOKED TO DEATH AND MURDERED BY THE MARXIST PROFESSORIAL CLASS AND ITS ACADEMIC MINIONS. THE APPALLING IDEOLOGY OF DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND EQUITY (DIE) IS DEMOLISHING EDUCATION AND BUSINESS… AND HAS NOW DRIVEN A BRILLIANT MAN FROM ITS REALM.
“There were many reasons why I resigned, including the fact that I can now teach many more people and with less interference online. But here’s a few more:
First reason: my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified “minority” candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?
Second reason: This is one of many issues of appalling ideology currently demolishing the universities and, downstream, the general culture. Not least because there simply is not enough qualified BIPOC people in the pipeline to meet diversity targets quickly enough (BIPOC: black, indigenous and people of colour, for those of you not in the knowing woke). This has been common knowledge among any remotely truthful academic who has served on a hiring committee for the last three decades. This means we’re out to produce a generation of researchers utterly unqualified for the job. And we’ve seen what that means already in the horrible grievance studies “disciplines.” That, combined with the death of objective testing, has compromised the universities so badly that it can hardly be overstated. And what happens in the universities eventually colours everything. As we have discovered.
All my craven colleagues must craft DIE statements to obtain a research grant. They all lie (excepting the minority of true believers) and they teach their students to do the same. And they do it constantly, with various rationalizations and justifications, further corrupting what is already a stunningly corrupt enterprise. Some of my colleagues even allow themselves to undergo so-called anti-bias training, conducted by supremely unqualified Human Resources personnel, lecturing inanely and blithely and in an accusatory manner about theoretically all-pervasive racist/sexist/heterosexist attitudes. Such training is now often a precondition to occupy a faculty position on a hiring committee.
Need I point out that implicit attitudes cannot — by the definitions generated by those who have made them a central point of our culture — be transformed by short-term explicit training? Assuming that those biases exist in the manner claimed, and that is a very weak claim, and I’m speaking scientifically here. The Implicit Association test — the much-vaunted IAT, which purports to objectively diagnose implicit bias (that’s automatic racism and the like) is by no means powerful enough — valid and reliable enough — to do what it purports to do. Two of the original designers of that test, Anthony Greenwald and Brian Nosek, have said as much, publicly. The third, Professor Mahzarin Banaji of Harvard, remains recalcitrant. Much of this can be attributed to her overtly leftist political agenda, as well as to her embeddedness within a sub-discipline of psychology, social psychology, so corrupt that it denied the existence of left-wing authoritarianism for six decades after World War II. The same social psychologists, broadly speaking, also casually regard conservatism (in the guise of “system justification”) as a form of psychopathology.
Banaji’s continued countenancing of the misuse of her research instrument, combined with the status of her position at Harvard, is a prime reason we still suffer under the DIE yoke, with its baleful effect on what was once the closest we had ever come to truly meritorious selection. There are good reasons to suppose that DIE-motivated eradication of objective testing, such as the GRE for graduate school admission, will have deleterious effects on the ability of students so selected to master such topics as the statistics all social sciences (and medicine, for that matter) rely upon completely for their validity.
Furthermore, the accrediting boards for graduate clinical psychology training programs in Canada are now planning to refuse to accredit university clinical programs unless they have a “social justice” orientation. That, combined with some recent legislative changes in Canada, claiming to outlaw so-called “conversion therapy” (but really making it exceedingly risky for clinicians to do anything ever but agree always and about everything with their clients) have likely doomed the practice of clinical psychology, which always depended entirely on trust and privacy. Similar moves are afoot in other professional disciplines, such as medicine and law. And if you don’t think that psychologists, lawyers and other professionals are anything but terrified of their now woke governing professional colleges, much to everyone’s extreme detriment, you simply don’t understand how far this has all gone.
Just exactly what am I supposed to do when I meet a graduate student or young professor, hired on DIE grounds? Manifest instant skepticism regarding their professional ability? What a slap in the face to a truly meritorious young outsider. And perhaps that’s the point. The DIE ideology is not friend to peace and tolerance. It is absolutely and completely the enemy of competence and justice.
And for those of you who think that I am overstating the case, or that this is something limited in some trivial sense to the universities, consider some other examples: This report from Hollywood, cliched hotbed of “liberal” sentiment, for example, indicates just how far this has gone. In 2020, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscar people) embarked on a five-year plan (does that ring any historical bells?) “to diversify our organization and expand our definition of the best,” They did so in an attempt which included developing “new representation and inclusion standards for Oscars,” to, hypothetically, “better reflect the diversity of the movie-going audience.” What fruit has this initiative, offspring of the DIE ideology, borne? According to a recent article, penned by Peter Kiefer and Peter Savodnik, but posted on former NY Times’ journalist Bari Weiss’s Common Sense website (and Weiss left the Times, because of the intrusion of radical left ideology into that newspaper, just as Tara Henley did recently, vis a vis the CBC): “We spoke to more than 25 writers, directors, and producers — all of whom identify as liberal, and all of whom described a pervasive fear of running afoul of the new dogma. … How to survive the revolution? By becoming its most ardent supporter. … Suddenly, every conversation with every agent or head of content started with: Is anyone BIPOC attached to this?”
And this is everywhere — and if you don’t see it, your head is either in the sand or shoved somewhere far more unmentionable. CBS, for example, has literally mandated that every writers’ room be at least 40 percent BIPOC in 2021 (50 percent in 2022).
We are now at the point where race, ethnicity, “gender,” or sexual preference is first, accepted as the fundamental characteristic defining each person (just as the radical leftists were hoping), and second, is now treated as the most important qualification for study, research, and employment.
Need I point out that this is insane? Even the benighted New York Times has its doubts. A headline from August 11, 2021: Are Workplace Diversity Programs Doing More Harm than Good? In a word, yes. How can accusing your employees of racism etc. sufficient to require re-training (particularly in relation to those who are working in good faith to overcome whatever bias they might still, in these modern, liberal times, manifest) be anything other than insulting, annoying, invasive, high-handed, moralizing, inappropriate, ill-considered, counterproductive, and otherwise unjustifiable?
And if you think DIE is bad, wait until you get a load of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) scores. Purporting to assess corporate moral responsibility, these scores, which can dramatically affect an enterprise’s financial viability, are nothing less than the equivalent of China’s damnable social credit system, applied to the entrepreneurial and financial world. CEOs: what in the world is wrong with you? Can’t you see that the ideologues who push such appalling nonsense are driven by an agenda that is not only absolutely antithetical to your free-market enterprise, as such, but precisely targeted at the freedoms that made your success possible? Can’t you see that by going along, sheep-like (just as the professors are doing; just as the artists and writers are doing) you are generating a veritable fifth column within your businesses? Are you really so blind, cowed, and cowardly? With all your so-called privilege?
And it’s not just the universities. And the professional colleges. And Hollywood. And the corporate world. Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity — that radical leftist Trinity — is destroying us. Wondering about the divisiveness that is currently besetting us? Look no farther than DIE. Wondering — more specifically — about the attractiveness of Trump? Look no farther than DIE. When does the left go too far? When they worship at the altar of DIE and insist that the rest of us, who mostly want to be left alone, do so as well. Enough already. Enough. Enough.
Finally, do you know that Vladimir Putin himself is capitalizing on this woke madness? Anna Mahjar-Barducci at MEMRI.org covered his recent speech. I quote from the article’s translation: “The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags, as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs, and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society.
The destruction of age-old values, religion, and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones — all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.
“This, I believe, should call to mind some of what we are witnessing now. Looking at what is happening in a number of Western countries, we are amazed to see the domestic practices — which we, fortunately, have left, I hope — in the distant past. The fight for equality and against discrimination has turned into aggressive dogmatism bordering on absurdity when the works of the great authors of the past — such as Shakespeare — are no longer taught at schools or universities because their ideas are believed to be backward. The classics are declared backward and ignorant of the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, memos are distributed about proper storytelling and how many characters of what color or gender should be in a movie. This is even worse than the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.”
This, from the head of the former totalitarian enterprise, against whom we fought a five decades’ long Cold War, risking the entire planet (in a very real manner). This, from the head of a country riven in a literally genocidal manner by ideas that Putin himself attributes to the progressives in the West, to the generally accepting audience of his once-burned (once (!)) twice-shy listeners.
And all of you going along with the DIE activists, whatever your reasons: this is on you. Professors. Cowering cravenly in pretense and silence. Teaching your students to dissimulate and lie. To get along. As the walls crumble. For shame. CEOs: signaling a virtue you don’t possess and shouldn’t want to please a minority who literally live their lives by displeasure. You’re evil capitalists, after all, and should be proud of it. At the moment, I can’t tell if you’re more reprehensibly timid even than the professors. Why the hell don’t you banish the human resource DIE upstarts back to the more-appropriately-named Personnel departments, stop them from interfering with the psyches of you and your employees, and be done with it? Musicians, artists, writers: stop bending your sacred and meritorious art to the demands of the propagandists before you fatally betray the spirit of your own intuition. Stop censoring your thought. Stop saying you will hire for your orchestral and theatrical productions for any reason other than talent and excellence. That’s all you have. That’s all any of us have.
He who sows the wind will reap the whirlwind. And the wind is rising. Please spread the word and share.
For Christians, Jesus told us what it will be like before He returns and it will be tough as the following Scripture indicates. Our priority must be prayer and joining with like-minded Christians to support one another. God has work He has assigned for each one of us to do. We need to know what that is and stay focused.
“What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” And Jesus answered them… “Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.“
LIVING ETERNAL NOW 