May 14, 2017

The current shibboleth that is widely touted and accepted without question today is the claim that diversity is a value to be embraced by all. In fact diversity in many quarters is being forced upon hapless students in the educational institutions of our land. But upon closer examination it is not true diversity that is being advocated. Wouldn’t true diversity allow all view points to be expressed and even taught from the podium?

Video of the Sermon

For example consider the one way “diversity” present in modern so-called education. A diversity which would promote the sodomite agenda yet exclude any teaching of God’s Law Word on marriage, family or human sexuality. God’s Law Word is rejected from any curriculum as being too narrow. But is that diversity, to exclude one truth claim because it is judged by modern pagans as too narrow? This is no diversity by even a modern definition of that term. Rather it is a craftily designed form of propaganda which sets a trap against any who would criticize this mantra of diversity. It would claim that the only truth to be taught is that there is no absolute truth. Therefore any teaching which makes absolute truth claims, such as God’s Law Word, must be excluded as opposing diversity. But this is self contradictory. If only one view point can be allowed to be taught, that is uniformitarianism not diversity.

If they really believed in diversity they would allow the teaching of all view points even that of God’s Law Word. True diversity would not exclude the whole realm of teaching which asserts that there is absolute truth.

What largely passes for education in our day, both in lower as well as higher education, in nothing less than pure indoctrination in political correctness.

One college professor, who is a self professed atheist, liberal, socialist sees the hypocrisy in this and has stated that “that elite private colleges are religious institutions… What does it mean to say that these institutions are religious schools? First, that they possess a dogma, unwritten but understood by all: a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, or at best, a narrow range within which disagreement is permitted. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and also a right set of things to think and talk about. Secularism is taken for granted. Environmentalism is a sacred cause. Issues of identity—principally the holy trinity of race, gender, and sexuality—occupy the center of concern. The presiding presence is Michel Foucault, with his theories of power, discourse, and the social construction of the self, who plays the same role on the left as Marx once did. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and collective virtue, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the moral truth.

This is a religious attitude. It is certainly not a scholarly or intellectual attitude….I haven’t heard too many people talk about creating safe spaces for Christians, or preventing micro-aggressions against conservatives, or banning hate speech against athletes, or disinviting socialists. What I have heard, frequently, for as long as I have been involved in academia, are open expressions of contempt or prejudice or hostility against those suspect groups or members of those groups. If you are a white man, you are routinely regarded as guilty until proven innocent, the worst possible construction is put upon your words, and anything you say on a sensitive issue is received with suspicion at best….Progressive faculty and students at selective private colleges will often say that they want to dismantle the hierarchies of power that persist in society at large. Their actions often suggest that in fact they would like to invert them. All groups are equal, but some are more equal than others…Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states…The test of your commitment to free speech as a general principle is whether you are willing to tolerate the speech of others, especially those with whom you most disagree. If you are using your speech to try to silence speech, you are not in favor of free speech. You are only in favor of yourself….True diversity means true disagreement…[he closes by asking what colleges what to be] Do they want to be socialization machines for the upper-middle class, ideological enforcers of progressive dogma? Or do they want to be educational institutions in the only sense that really matters: places of free, frank, and fearless inquiry?”[1]

Clearly what has come to pass as higher education in America is profoundly ill, perhaps taken with a cancer that is fatal. But there is a true education that is non-elitist, one available to all who choose to take it, in one sense it costs nothing at all, but in another it costs everything, your whole self, soul, mind and body.

When we turn to the Word of God we find that there is true eduction conducted everyday, and not just within the walls of some ivy covered academic institution, it is going on in every place in this world.

It is the Education of Grace. “For the grace of God that bringeth salvation hath appeared to all men, Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world;” Titus 2:11-12.

Here is an interesting picture, the Grace of God which brings salvation has a teaching ability which it is continually engaged in. The Greek word is Paidegogon, at tutor, an instructor. It is the root of our English word Pedagogy – a method of teaching or training. In the original it has the implication of making a disciple, a student who isn’t merely focused on regurgitating a set of facts they have memorized but rather a life that is transformed by what is learned such that the disciple becomes like their master our Lord Jesus Christ. So God’s Grace is at work in the world today teaching two negative lessons and three positive lessons.

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Footnote:

[1] https://theamericanscholar.org/on-political-correctness/#