I’m always trying to communicate our work in news ways. Here’s another shot.
We start with creation in God’s image, implying inherent value and purpose. According to God’s purpose, we each, every one, possess special gifts designed by Him to fulfill our calling. God expresses His infinity through His created diversity. Educationally then, we start with God’s purpose for men, the identification of the characteristics of the mature and devout man or woman. Then we identify the elements of education that will furnish those characteristics in method and content.
We find, out of the work of Verna Hall in Christian history, that we can systematize our thinking via a set of virtually universal, historically identified basic and simple Biblical principles with virtually infinite expansion of applications (known as sphere topics). Verna’s work was mostly limited to relational government applications. I found that those principles again had virtually limitless application to every kind of relational government and economic activity—these two things summarizing the totality of human life. Christ’s Two Commandments have both relational and economic aspects, as love establishes relationship, but then acts to perfect relationship.
RJ Rushdoony’s theological work gave the historic due grounding. Interestingly, at one time Dr. Rushdoony and Verna Hall thought to work together, but found that their respective callings would not yoke together well. Nonetheless, the two viewpoints have served well to produce amazing fruit wherever this work has gone. These places include Southern California, where I was able to serve several of my teachers’ families in our school—Martin Selbrede, James B. Rose, Marshall Foster, and Chris Hoops. Then we served in Connecticut, North Carolina, and sent with dear friends the work to Uganda, where via a student, Godfrey Kyazze, it is prospering far and wide, including to the many individuals, churches, and the highest levels of government and educational institutions. It is amazing to watch—totally beyond anything I did or could do. In fact, most of my career has been frustrated, not achieving a foothold for building an institution, or even finishing the great amount of work left to do.
Very early in the work, I realized my purpose was to bridge the proverbial gap between Biblical faith and practice, later realizing that I must include God’s imperative, the divine disadvantage of faith, so that we never think more highly of ourselves than we ought, and that we may be correctible. For what do we have that we did not receive?
This foundation, especially understanding the centrality of the nature of God as the Holy Trinity—One God, Three Persons in perfect and exhaustive relationship without diminishing the Individuality of the Persons. An essay by BB Warfield served to establish this foundation for me. The Seven Principles Verna Hall discovered as ubiquitous in early American history and before, gave a practical and systematic basis to apply Dr. Rushdoony’s work. I claim that was possible upon the foundation of Scripture as the Seed, and Providential history as God’s Fruit, taking lessons from the best examples and the worst.
In the classroom, this legacy enabled us to re-establish the wholeness of God’s life subjects, and to teach them in such a way as to reach each student where his present need lay, holding no one back, nor dropping any through the cracks. Further unity in the subject, with concrete relationships between parts of a subject, and between subjects, lays the foundation for true mastery for God’s glory. As a farmer can only do his job, and God must bring the increase, only God can bring the fruit of learning and accomplishment.