The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

In terms of historical and spiritual influence on the creation of the American Republic, there are three great universities: Harvard, William and Mary, and Princeton. My father attended the first and I the second. Last week, the Vision Forum Faith and Freedom Tour advance team visited Princeton for the first time.

To say that these schools of learning are today mere shadows of their former selves would be a kind charity. In fact, they are antitypes of the vision established by their founders and proclaimed by many of the amazing Christian leaders who brought the universities into their golden eras during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today, they are gates of immorality and temples of false religion with a philosophical commitment among their faculties to the destruction of biblical Christianity.

Contrary to the silly and juvenile caricatures of some who mock home school parents and those committed to the restoration of the biblical family, the debate today is not over whether men and women should be educated or receive higher education, but how this should be accomplished and to what end. Christians have a duty to assume the absolute sufficiency of Scripture on matters of higher education. They must prayerfully evaluate the precepts and principles of Scripture, wisely applying them to the facts. This requires much meditation on God’s Word. It means thoughtful and careful analysis. But prayerful analysis is not new when it comes to the question of higher education. Jonathan Edwards himself, writing at a time when the colleges openly proclaimed Christ, nonetheless expressed profound misgivings about university life, noting the tendency of colleges to produce morally destitute individuals. To read Edwards comments, see my blog from yesterday. For my own thoughts on this subject, get my recording, Making Wise Decisions About College and Life After Home School.

The Puritan vision for the college was a noble mission to train Christian leaders for the pulpit and to evangelize the Indians. Much was accomplished in pursuit of these goals. In my own view, however, the great failure of the Puritan higher education model was that it was not reformed in its methodology, drawing too highly on the distinctively Roman Catholic medieval scholastic vision of education rather than on a presuppositionally biblical pedagogy. In the end, it was the Puritan university which produced the liberal thinking which destroyed the Puritan pulpit and the Puritan family (yes, there were other factors as well, including the half-way covenant). But this is a complex subject worthy of greater elaboration on another occasion. In the meantime, let me recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s excellent book Three Centuries of Harvard, for his discussion on the incorporation of the medieval scholasticism into Puritan pedagogy.

The above building is Nassau Hall, once the largest academic building in the United States. In 1777, it was occupied by about 170 Redcoats. Then-nineteen-year-old Alexander Hamilton surrounded the building and sent two cannonballs through the front door, after which the frightened British surrendered. Ironically, the man who would kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel (Aaron Burr) is buried about five hundred yards from the spot where Hamilton defeated the British.

A statue on campus to the great servant of God, John Witherspoon, a former president of the College of New Jersey and the man who personally trained the most Founding Fathers.

Beautiful buildings that house ugly philosophies.