Whoa. Spurgeon.

[NOTE: this is part of my ongoing, occasional efforts to accept the fact that every post does not need to attempt to be an Opus.]

Spurgeon today, Morning & Evening:

God had one Son without sin, but not a single child without the rod.

Whoa.

Al Mohler: Tim LaHaye is like Dan Brown

PREFACE: this is going to be scathing, and long. If you can't take "scathing and long" -- run away! Run away!

DISCLAIMERS:

First: I've always liked Al Mohler. I'll probably go on liking him. But this essay -- oy!

Second: I've read all the Left Behind books except either the last one, or the last two. I thought they were clever and imaginative. Well-written? It depends on what you are looking for. If you want a light page-turner, that pretty well hooks you and keeps you going, yes. If you're looking for depth of thought, reflection and literary quality, phrases you'll savor and memorize for their craft and beauty -- oh my heavens, no!

I'd say it's a good-faith effort to imagine how Biblical prophecy might play itself out.

Anyone who wants to criticize it as literature will hear no argument from me. Anyone who wants to propose a better (read "more Biblical") scenario for how prophecy will be realized on our planet, in our history, will have no thematic argument from me.

But the most acid critiques I've read of the Left Behind series come from another place. They come from people who are threatened and outraged at the fact that the authors take Biblical prophecy seriously. Of course, they never put it that way, but that's the bottom-line.

Take Al Mohler.

Set flame to "sim." Al Mohler titles his essay The Danger of Gnosticism -- And Its Attraction. (Check out the URL; it's just funny that it ends in "666.") Out of the 568 words of the essay, 383 are straight quotations lifted from an editorial in the magazine Christian Century, not a publication noted for its Biblical intensity. I make that 68% of his essay. Guess he really, really liked it.

What is the premise of the celebrated editorial? It is that the two works are similar, in that both bring out secret and suppressed knowledge to the reader, both appeal to lurid curiosity or restlessness, both are designed to sell.

Mohler doesn't fully quote the editorial's specific sneer at dispensationalism: "[Left Behind's]unfolding of the apocalypse according to a dispensationalist eschatology presumably appeals to far-right biblical fundamentalists who scour the news for signs that the rapture is coming." The editorial refers to Rodney Clapp's article in the same issue, where he also specifically curls his lip at "the thrill of decoding the Bible by way of dispensational theology."

(Get that? Saying that "Israel" means "Israel" is "decoding"; saying that "Israel" is "the Christian Church" is -- what? Sober, sound exegesis, I guess.)

The editorial further snipes, "Both also update the dusty old gospel of the churches with action-packed stories that move so fast that readers tend not to notice the problems in the stories or the mediocrity of the prose."

Now, try something with me for a second. Put aside your hermeneutical and eschatological system for a moment. Pretend you're reading Revelation for the first time. What do you see? Explosions, chases, loud sounds, dragons, falling stars, global events, supernatural and human battles in the heavens and on earth, culminating in the return of Christ from Heaven to earth, the judgment of all mankind, and the complete transformation of all creation.

That's not an "action-packed story"?

But I digress.

Mohler agrees with the article, and pronounces his "Ditto" on its last sentence: "When the junk food of the gnostic stories fails to satisfy, churches should be there with the soul food of the gospel."

(May I pause once again, to remark on an essay that slams the "mediocrity of the prose" of these novels, and then concludes with the words, "Ditto on that last sentence"? As Buck Murdock sagely remarked, "Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.")

So, Al Mohler likes lumping together Brown and LaHaye, DaVinci and DaRapture.

Increase flames." I would have expected better of Mohler, but evidently would have been wrong.

Clearly we should feel that it is terrible that there are actually people who think that, simply because Biblical prophecy says something is going to happen, it actually is going to happen. To some, it is scandalous that there are people like LaHaye who make (good-faith but) flawed efforts to loook for real-world fulfillments of Biblical predictions.

These louts just aren't sophisticated and educated enough to know that the coming of Christ was a sort of bait-and-switch. Our Lord could roundly and severely reproach the leaders of His day for not taking the prophetic portions of Scripture seriously and literally, and for not expecting real-world fulfillments (Matthew 16:1-4) -- but then, after His departure, everything turns around! Now His representatives (like Mohler?) scorn and reproach folks who do take prophetic Scripture seriously and literally, and do look for real-world fulfillments!

In some circles (Mohler's?), it is the accepted stance to be appalled that there are still theological Neanderthals who are actually so barbaric and crude as to imagine that grammatico-historical exegesis applies to all of Scripture, and not just the sections about the Atonement.

Can you imagine practitioners of this school of decorder-ring interpretation in Jerusalem in the year 1 BC, debating the meaning of Scripture? "Come on, Rabbi Jacob -- as if 'donkey' means 'donkey' (Zech. 9:9)! Don't you know that our Zeitgeist dictates that a 'donkey' is a symbol of humility? Your approach is so crude and unsophisticated! And 'virgin' (Isaiah 7:14) -- of course that cannot mean a literal female who has never had sexual relations! It is a symbolic representation of the spiritual purity of the Remnant to whom deliverance comes! And 'Bethlehem' (Micah 5:2) has such a deeper meaning than a mere geographical label! It means 'House of Bread,' the Torah which replenishes our souls!" And on and on it would have gone, until everything meant everything, and thus nothing.

Yes, Dr. Mohler. Brilliant observation. People who take all of the Bible seriously are JUST LIKE Dan Brown, who completely trashes the Bible! Thanks for pointing that out. We must really keep those dispensationlists at the back of the bus. They've got to learn to stay silent around their betters.

Someone really must tell the LaHayes of the world that the Church had scoured all the truth out of the Bible by the year 1700. They must become more sophisticated. They must learn that the Bible is just a museum now -- not an actual working mine.

Afterword: One more time, because I know I will be misunderstood. My point is not to defend Tim LaHaye's book, his specific interpretations, nor his skill as a novelist. He is most scorchingly criticized because he looks for real-world fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, because he dares to be EWD (Existing While Dispensationalist), and because he doesn't just lump the whole of it into one shapeless, formeless, indistinguishable mass, shrug, and say, "Whatever. Christ. Whatever."

I don't think most of the harshest critics are animated by their offense at LaHaye and Jenkins' specific envisionings of prophecy. I think they're animated with rage at the very fact that they try to envision prophecy, as if John meant something when he wrote that his book was about actual "things which will take place after these things" (Revelation 1:19c). It is threatening to their "Yeah, well, whatever" approach to Biblical prophecy.

That is my point.

(For more on the hermeneutical approach underlying this critique, please see my essay,The Science of Bible Reading. And please do keep in mind What Dispensationalism Isn't.)

Riddle me this: on worship

When we do our reading of the Word of God in church, we read each verse one (1) time.

When we sing, we might repeat a 2-to-4-line chorus 4, 5, 6 or even more times.

Why?

Funniest. Denomination-name. Ever.

Ever since I first heard it, I've thought "Primitive Baptists" is the most hysterical name I ever heard for a denomination. What do you think, what do you picture, when you hear it?

I picture a bunch of guys in loincloths, carrying clubs, sitting on stone benches. The worship team beats rhythmically on hollowed logs. Maybe they drag their wives in by the hair with the club-hand, and carry a leg-bone to gnaw on in the other.

Favorite hymn?

"Rock of Ages," of course.

Now Jeremy Weaver ruins all my fun by actually explaining what the denomination is all about.

Thanks a lot, Jeremy.

I like mine better.

Bob Novak jumps the shark? (On Mitt Romney and "religious test")

Should evangelicals -- a word I always have to use with a puzzled expression, anymore -- have reservations about a Mormon President? I expressed some, and then expressed some more.

According to Robert Novak, it was baaaaad of me to do so.

Novak doesn't name me, and I guess I'm glad, because I've always liked him. I used to watch him on Crossfire on CNN, first opposite the mind-numbing Tom Braden, then opposite the mind-shredding Michael Kinsley (who always looked like he was on a brief break from sniggering at the back of some junior-highschool classroom, and was probably never spanked). I didn't always agree with Novak, but he was fun to watch. Never dispassionate, very aggressive, a little corny sometimes. My kind of guy.

He made for some moments of "real" TV. I remember Braden had just introduced a subject with the most biased, acid, loaded dumpsterfull of inanity I'd heard to that date. Novak was then supposed to get the conversation going.

Instead, Novak just gaped, speechless. Finally, he said something like, "I can't believe you said that." Then he got going.

Last month, in Romney's Religious Test, Novak very fiercely scolds anyone who would dare hold, let alone express, let alone be influenced by, any religiously-based reservations about Romney.

Quoth the Bobster:

The U.S. Constitution prohibits a religious test for public office, but that is precisely what is being posed now. Prominent, respectable Evangelical Christians have told me, not for quotation, that millions of their co-religionists cannot and will not vote for Romney for president solely because he is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Uh-huh, well... what?! Did Bob Novak actually just accuse "Evangelical Christians" of violating the Constitution? No... no, he must have misspoken, or we misunderstood, or something. Right?

Evidently not, because he immediately says again, "Romney is well aware that an unconstitutional religious test is being applied to him...."

Okay, now that Novak's got that out of his system, is he ready to be a little mellower, a little more rational?

Not so much:

...relatively few fanatics ...highly emotional collision of religious faith and religious bias with American politics ...The Republican whispering campaign against Mormons ...ridicule of the church's doctrine. ......amateur theologians ...mixed up....

Um... "unconstitutional"? What is he talking about? Closest I can even guess is this, from Article VI:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

Okay, so there can be no federally-imposed religious test. Got it. What does that have to do with how I, a free and private citizen, decide as to how to cast my vote? Nothing. It means that, if a witch doctor is elected, the government can't bar him from serving due to his refusal to affirm the Trinity. But does that mean that if a witch doctor runs for President, I can't let that fact figure into my considerations? Not even close.

I am free not to vote for someone because he affirms an irrational religion, or for any other reason I choose. Nothing un-Constitutional about it. Novak isn't serving the Constitution well with this spoutoff.

Nor does he drape himself in glory with this gem:

These amateur theologians occasionally get mixed up, with some Republicans asserting that Mormons do not believe in the divinity of Christ. The first of Mormon founder Joseph Smith's 13 Articles of Faith reads: "We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost." It is true that the Mormon understanding of the Trinity is not what is taught by Catholic and most Protestant faiths. But nobody today seeks to disqualify Jews and non-Trinitarian Protestants from high office.

If I didn't like Novak so much, I'd find delicious irony in such a dismally, abysmally, multi-facetedly ignorant paragraph opening with a barrage against "mixed up" "amateur theologians." Ohh, Bob, Bob... I hear Yoda saying, "How embarrassing! How embarrassing!"

That shark in your rear-view mirror, Bob -- it's not a good thing.

ENDNOTE: to be painfully clear, I'm not advocating any particular attitude towards Romney. My main point is that it is neither un-Constitutional nor un-American to take into consideration a candidate's worldview. And if his religion doesn't affect his worldview, then he's a hypocrite -- which, itself, is worth consideration.

T. D. Jakes does an Osteen?

I've never quite understood it, but to many folks TD Jakes is "all that" and a bag of fries. Now Slice of Laodicea directs us to this answer by TD Jakes to a Muslim's question as to whether only Christians go to Heaven:

"When it comes to Heaven, I try to leave that up to God. I certainly believe that Christianity is right, but when it comes down to the final test--who goes and who doesn't go--Jesus said, Other sheep have I who are not of this fold. Them also must I bring. I'll let Him identify who those sheep are and I stay out of the conversation."

Hard not to think of Joel Osteen's miserable bobbling of the same softball question from Larry King. (Osteen, to his credit, later apologized; will Jakes?)

So, Jakes is apparently a modalist heretic, and is unclear on what one must do to be saved. Otherwise, really great preacher.

How can I call this a "softball question"? Certainly not in the sense that it is not an emotional question, nor that it is not a momentous question. It is both. However, I daresay most genuine Christian converts could have given a Biblical answer to that poor, lost woman's question. Jakes doesn't. Oh, he alludes to a Bible passage -- but he mangles it pretty mercilessly in the process.

Look: some matters in the Bible are open to honest debate (timing of the Rapture, exact structure of church government, meaning of "Parbar"), and some things aren't. Among the things that aren't would be truths such as the Trinity, and the Gospel. Those are areas most new converts face, to some degree, pretty close to their conversion. Often they are matters that are clarified in connection with our conversion. "Who is this God I'm being called to believe in?" is a fundamental question, and "Trinity" is part of the Biblical answer; and "Do I really have to be converted?" is another, and "Yes!" is the Bible's response to that.

Jakes is 0 for 2 on that score, and they're a pretty significant two.

And this is the man adored by so many professing Christians.

I don't know which is more discouraging: the dearth of principled, admirable leadership in the Republican Party, or that same chasm among professing evangelicals.

OK, I lied. No contest. The latter.

Libbie nails it again: Gospel authority vs. "evangelical" woman "pastors"

Libbie's Musings of an English Muffin is a regular visit of mine; I really must shake off my torpor and admit as much in my links. (I don't feel too bad; Libbie doesn't admit to frequenting mine in her links, though she confesses to visiting Scary Frank's.)

Today she unloads on T4G and that article. She's speaking of the "controversial" article in the Together for the Gospel statement dealing with women and ministry. Among her memorable and on-target musings:

I remain a little puzzled that this is the issue it is among evangelicals, as it doesn't seem to me that scripture is silent of the matter....

There are passages that explicitly say that women are not to teach or have authority over men. They are not fuzzy passages that require a koine greek concordance to understand the plain meaning of them.

The [explanations] I have read for women to ignore these passages seem to range from dismissing the passages as only for a particular time, to Paul being a hideous woman-hater, to them actually not being part of scripture at all.

Now, in all honesty, I have also seen every one of these arguments used to say that homosexuality isn't a sin either. And it seems obvious to me that none of these arguments should have any weight among people who believe in the complete inspiration and infallibility of scripture.

Because once you begin to say that you don't like a passage because it doesn't apply anymore, or because it's not really scripture, or because it was a part of scripture that was just Paul's humanity sneaking through, then you deal a blow to the authority of scripture itself that I think does great harm to the authority of the gospel contained within it.

Amen, and well-said. You go, girl. (That's American for "Spot on!")

Can you keep a secret? Chuck Colson's excellent point about the resurrection

Colson, first famous due to Watergate and then through his conversion to faith in Christ, knows something about keeping secrets. He points to...

...the infamous Watergate cover-up in which I was very much involved. Surprising though it may seem to some, it took only two weeks from the time that the president was first told the extent of the cover-up to the time when John Dean, his counsel, went to the prosecutors and made a secret deal to testify against the president in exchange for a lighter sentence. Now, mind you, this happened among twelve people, perhaps the most powerful in America, loyal to their leader. In a situation like that, as I saw up close, the desire to save oneself has a way of overriding loyalty or any idealism.

And from what were they saving themselves? Not torture nor death, but loss of reputation, scandal, possible prison time. If "elite" men like this could buckle so quickly under relatively mild pressure, how much more quickly would simple rustics collaps under greater and more certain threat?

This is Colson's point, and he makes it well:

Just think about the situation Christ’s disciples were in after He left them. Here was a group of peasants, powerless, up against the most powerful empire in the world. Possible prison time was the very least of their worries. They knew that torture and execution could be in their future if they refused to stop preaching the name of Jesus Christ.

But they couldn’t stop.

To a man, they kept talking about Christ’s life, death, and resurrection to anyone who would listen. None of them would deny or retract their story. Eventually, just as the authorities had threatened, most of them were executed for it. But still, all of them maintained to the very end that Jesus had risen from the dead—that they had seen Him, touched Him, talked with Him.

Read his essay in full. It is a potent underscoring of the credibility of the witnesses to the Resurrection, from an angle I've never heard better explained.

That Spurgeon and his imagery!

It's funny how I sometimes see things wrong at first glance.

I read Spurgeon's Morning and Evening every day. Today, I was a bit startled when the august preacher wrote,

He who is in a wilderness infested with rubber bands must handle matters wisely if he would journey safely.

When I tried to picture that, I thought a re-read was in order. Of course, that isn't what Spurgeon wrote at all. He actually wrote:

He who is in a wilderness infested with robber bands must handle matters wisely if he would journey safely.

Yeah, but... my way's funnier.

BibleWorks 7 Review

[NOTE: this supplements my review over at Pyromaniacs.]

What resources do you get with BibleWorks 7 (BW7)? "Time would fail me to tell of" thirty-two English translations, plus versions in twenty-two other modern languages. Now, free tools such as the valuable E-Sword also have a lot of free versions. What they don't have is the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic resources built in to BW7. You get the BHS4 Hebrew OT, and Nestle-Aland27/UBS4 Greek NT, as well as Robinson-Pierpont Greek New Testament (Byzantine Textform 2005), Scrivener's, Stephanus', and other variations in both Testaments.

But wait -- there's a virtual-ton more. Suffice it to say here that I'm very enthused about this version, and heartily recommend it to any serious student, particularly to anyone who's a student of the original languages. It is an amazing resource, a treasure house.

List of ten goodies above and beyond what I discussed at Pyromaniacs:

1. Be Eugene Peterson! You can make your own translation, and get it formatted and included into the BW7 database. (Okay, don't go off on me saying "Peterson" and "translation" in the same paragraph; you get my point.)
2. Outlines! You can make your own Bible outlines, and have them display as you go through Bible books.
3. Maps! They've got all sorts of cool maps, including satellite imagery.
4. All sorts of potential add-ons! At the forum, you can find a list of user-created add-ons.
5. Customizable all over the place! You can change a lot of how BW7 displays and works, to your own preferences.
6. MS Word interface! You can insert Bible text into your Word document via a hot-key combination.
7. Flash cards! You can make your own Hebrew/Greek/Aramaic flash card system. You can do it in terms of frequency, or in terms of the specific vocabulary of the book(s) you are studying.
8. Cheaper upgrades! Pay full price for your first BW, and every upgrade after is significantly discounted.
9. Nice guys! The programmers with BW are hardworking, very nice folks, totally easy to work with.
10. Great instructional videos! Earlier versions had well-intentioned, informative, but kind of lame and long videos. This version has a ton of them, and they tend to be more bite-sized, specific, and very helpful.

Wish list. There are relatively minor changes I hope may be made in future editions.

1. Updates. It is a really good feature that you can check online for updates -- and the programmers frequently update the program and data files to improve, catch bugs, correct typo's. But you must check manually. You click on Help, then Check for updates, and then you find out whether there are any. You check boxes, download, install. (Oddly, you have to approva that BW will shut down -- then you have to approve that it will shut down!) The program should check automatically and alert users to updates -- as, for instance, AvantBrowser and other software does.
2. Non-intuitive searches. The methods of searching are, to me, not intuitive, not patterned (say) on standard web or window searches. For instance, if you want to search for all occurrences of the word word, you don't type in word. You have to type in period-word: .word. If you want to search for the phrase "word of God," you don't type "word of God," as in a standard web or Windows search; or check a box that says "All the words." You use an apostrophe, and type 'word of God. It goes on, gets even more Byzantine, for more complex searches. Now, it's all quite learnable, and they have very handy online reminders and context-sensitive help -- it just would soften the learning-curve if it were standardized -- or if it used a GUI box, as other programs do.
3. The ASE. There is an Advanced Search Engine that I, so far, have been unable to learn. For years. Now, the brainiacs at the site (advanced users) use it, love it, probably think I'm a wimp for not "getting" it -- but I don't. I've tried, and I don't. It's GUI, but it is -- to me -- indecipherable. Hebrew was easier. I do think it could be done easier, using a GUI box with options to check. But I've raised this at the forum, and didn't elicit much sympathy among users. So perhaps you'll find it easy, too. (I would hasten to add that, though I can't/don't use this feature, I get immense profit from the program, and enthusiastically recommend it nonetheless.)
4. Less wimpy taskbar/QuickStart icons. Need I say this is my most trivial "gripe"? The icon they use might be great full-size, but it looks like a bit of speckled tiling on the taskbar and especially Quick Launch. So I used an icon editor and made my own, just so it could be distinctive.

In closing: check out BW7. It's a terrific tool.

Homeschoolers driven by fear? And so?

Pastor Jim West wrote a defense of subjecting our children to government indoctrination called The Theology of the Cross and the Theology of Homeschooling. Please read it rather than taking my summary as fair; I'll just summarize the angle I wish to attack.

Citing Luther's theology of the cross vs. theology of glory, West tries to argue that homeschooling parents are motivated by fear rather than faith. A theology-of-glory person avoids obstacles, but a theology-of-the-cross person welcomes them, because he has faith in the Gospel's transformative power. Homeschoolers are more of the former category, West argues, than the latter. They withdraw from the world out of fear, and do not in faith rise to the challenge to be salt and light in the world. They lack confidence in the power of the Gospel. In his words:

It fears; it lives in fearfulness, and it has forgotten that "perfect love casts out fear". The theology of homeschooling calls for a withdrawal from society because, at its heart, it does not believe. Not really. Not that God can change people and thereby change society through the Gospel. And finally it supposes that society, social structures, and God ordained offices are evil. Indeed, it calls what God has ordained evil and withdrawal good. It errs in so doing, theologically.

Then our sister and sometime-visitor here Kate responded in a post she says West was unwilling to allow. Like the two comments West allowed on his site, she argues that we do not HS out of fear and unbelief. She makes great points.

My wife observed that, in fact, the first waves of homeschoolers had a lot more to fear from their course of action than we generally do today. Society rejected them, thought them weird at best. They had to endure persecution from various government functionaries, and many had to defend their rights in court, at great expense. They were driven to confront their fear, due to their convictions -- because their concern for their children's souls was greater than this fear. She's absolutely right, of course.

Here's my somewhat-different response.

West has written the sort of article I might have written twenty-plus years ago, when I knew very little about homeschooling. At that time, my only HSing contacts was in fact a couple who struck me as having escapist and elitist leanings.

The following years brought me kids, experience of PSing as it is done today, and eventually a great deal more thought about and exposure to HSing. That's a story for another post, perhaps. The upshot is that I converted in a big way.

For my part, I don't accept West's premise. I don't agree with him that parents who free their children from government indoctrination are motivated by a faithless fear. Fear can be a perfectly good, rational, and godly motivator in child-training and care.

Why don't I let my goofy, adorable, indispensible little six-year-old play in the street, unsupervised? Fear. Why don't I let him run up the bank of a raging, rushing river? Fear. Does this fear indicate a lack of faith on my part? Don't I trust the sovereignty and goodness of God? Couldn't God protect him in any of those situations -- stop careening cars, split surging rivers in two? Of course.

But God gave me to my children to be their parent so that I could protect them, so that I could let my rational, sane fears drive me to take pro-active measures. That's my job -- and I'm the worst kind of contemptible fool if I try to shrug my God-given responsibilty back off onto God.
When the Galatians were wobbling under temptation to a false Gospel, what did Paul say? "I am afraid I may have labored over you in vain" (Galatians 4:11). Should he have been rebuked for his lack of faith? He went on to say, "my little children, for whom I am again in the anguish of childbirth until Christ is formed in you! I wish I could be present with you now and change my tone, for I am perplexed about you" (vv. 19-20). Is this ungodly anxiety? If it was anxiety, Paul did not regard it as a vice. In fact, Paul told the Philippians that one trait he loved in Pastor Timothy was that he, like Paul, would "genuinely be anxious" about their welfare (Philippians 2:20, Greek).

So what of public schools? Don't I want my kids to be salt and light, to engage the world with the Gospel? I do, passionately.

So, on West's line of argument, why don't I really "go for the gold"? Why don't I stop sequestering them in our sound, local church? Why don't I send them off to a Roman Catholic church, or a Kingdom Hall, or a Mormon church, from age 5 on? Shouldn't they evangelize those pagans? Isn't that a wonderful opportunity?

Of course it isn't. Their shoulders aren't broad enough to bear that weight. They're young saplings; they need support, nourishment, time, and a modicum of protection.

And so what are the government schools today? Are they (as I once naively imagined) flawed but fundamentally impartial purveyors of the mechanics of mathematics and writing, and the "brute facts" of history? In no way. As a school official condescendingly informed me when I protested a school interference, "Yes, Mr. Phillips; we know that used to be the model. But we take a more holistic approach now. Anything and everything that concerns the child is our concern."

I won't quote you the exact wording of my inner response to that. The "dynamic equivalent" would be, "Yeah, right."

Government schools today are religious institutions. It is basically the same -- to my mind -- as sending them to a Unitarian church. They do have a religious worldview (secular humanism), and they do set out to indoctrinate our children from Day One. Since the government itself is sterile, it uses us as brood stock, and seeks to turn our children into compliant statelings, suckled on the State's teat from progressively earlier days on.

I speak in generalities, of course. There are courageous Christian teachers trying to work within the system. Plus, I am explaining my perspective, and my rationale. I do not assume to know the situational considerations motivating other parents. Mine is one legitimate Christian choice; it is not the only one.

My target is this "fear factor" criticism. I find it silly, in this connection. My children are not born knowing what to fear -- so I do it for them, in their younger years. As they mature, I do it less. My older son and daughter are in different categories -- but I still express concerns to them, as I see fit. And fear -- intelligent, rational, responsible fear -- is sometimes behind those concerns.

As parents, it's our job to be afraid of the right things, and do something pro-active about it.

It is the failure (or refusal) to be motivated by appropriate fear that indicates defective faith.