Integration of Subjects and Apologetics in the Rhetoric School

One essential distinctive of Classical Christian Education is the integration of disciplines in the Upper-School (Logic and Rhetoric Schools). While students are engaging in a variety of disciplines, each discipline is connected to the others. Ideally, what a student is learning in history should be incorporated into Bible and Literature. For example, in 9th grade, our students study the Modern era. When they are learning about the French Revolution in history and the disestablishment of Western Civilization, they will be reading Edmund Burke’s “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and Charles Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities” in Literature. All of the subjects in the Classical Christian Curriculum should be united. Unfortunately, this is not true of the modern university, as R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsey note on their book on Apologetics:

The university has become the multiversity and students feel the impact of the disintegration of higher education. The students’ schedules are filled with liberal arts courses which expose them to a wide variety of academic disciplines. But these disciplines have no apparent cohesion with each other.[i]

Sproul, Gerstner, and Lindsey are right about our modern colleges and universities. The original idea of the Classical and Medieval University was intended to be a place where the disciplines would be taught as unity, not separation. In fact, the word university, literally means “unity in diversity.” While there are many diverse disciplines, they are united in truth. They are not to be taught apart from other disciplines and truths. This is what we intend to pursue at Grace Classical Christian Academy. We desire this school to be a place of study where science is taught with reference to mathematics and theology, where history is taught with reference to literature and the fine arts, etc.

Not only is it the purpose of the Rhetoric School at GCCA to integrate the disciplines our students are learning; it is also the mission of the school to integrate the skill of Apologetics in every lesson. While it is absolutely true that all truth is God’s truth, and that true knowledge and insight can be gained by reading pagans and secular works, we also want our students to be able to use the knowledge they have gained in the classroom to interact with and engage our secular culture. Christopher Dawson recognized the necessity of an education that interacts with the culture when he wrote that “the educated person cannot play his full part in modern life unless he has a clear sense of the nature and achievements of Christian culture: how Western Civilization became Christian and how far it is Christian today and what ways it has ceased to be Christian: in short, a knowledge of our Christian roots and of the abiding Christian elements in Western culture.”[ii] According to Dawson, a person has not received a sufficient education if he cannot articulate the birth of Western Civilization, its integration with Christianity, and the breakdown of the Western worldview.

This is exactly what we are attempting to do in the upper school at Grace. I’ve often thought about it like this. When we study the Ancient world, we are looking at the birth of Western Civilization in the Greeks and Romans; in the Medieval world, we see the integration of Western Civilization with the Christian worldview; in the Modern world, we experience the breakdown of Western Civilization through the Enlightenment and secular humanism. Having graduated from GCCA, our students should be able to demonstrate why our culture is in such disarray today.

Now why does all of this matter? It matters because we live in a culture that is almost completely ignorant as to how they got where they are. It is often said that “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” This is why when we study the Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens in 10th grade, our students are encouraged to take notice of how democracy can degenerate into tyranny, giving examples of how we see the breakdown of democracy in our society today. When our students study the Enlightenment in 9th grade, we read Rousseau’s “Social Contract,” so that the students may identify how this Social Contract Theory has affected attitudes toward civil government in modern radical liberalism. Because all knowledge should lead to application, our hope is that these students will take what they have learned to give all glory to the Triune God, by engaging the Post-Christian culture in which they live out their vocations.

The apostle Paul, in his Second letter to the church in Corinth, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit wrote, “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5). Through the knowledge they have received, our students should be equipped to go out into the world and proclaim the truth of the Christian faith, being prepared to refute, or literally destroy, every false worldview that seeks to subvert Christ’s authority. I recently witnessed one student of mine do this exactly during a presentation at the Logic and Rhetoric School convocation. This student, upon reading and meditating upon Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility,” was able to use what he had learned in history about the Enlightenment philosophes and what he had read in literature concerning the Romantic movement, in order to demonstrate a shift in emphasis in our Postmodern world. Furthermore, this student related the problems and fallacies of Romanticism with a modern movement that is gaining lots of traction among young people today, which has influences both from the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. This is exactly what we want from our Logic and Rhetoric students. Their education does not end when they leave the classroom. It continues as they take what they have learned into the world, applying what they have learned and integrating it with evangelism and apologetics, in order to defend God’s truth against the enemies of Christ, and refute all that is dishonoring to His holy name.

By Benjamin Booth,
GCCA Logic and Rhetoric Teacher

[i] R.C. Sproul, John Gerstner, and Arthur Lindsey, Classical Apologetics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984).

[ii] Christopher Dawson, The Crisis of Western Education (Steubenville: Franciscan University Press, 1989) 135.