Introduction
Education is one of humanity’s oldest and most profound endeavors. It is the way cultures transmit wisdom, refine knowledge, cultivate virtues, and prepare future generations to live meaningfully in the world. Yet in contemporary Christian contexts, “education” often appears as a contested word. Some schools and churches speak of “Christian education” as distinct from “secular education,” defining themselves against a presumed cultural threat. The result is a narrowing of horizons: general education is roughly rebranded as “non-Christian” and is implicitly deemed deficient and inferior, while “Christian education” claims privileged access to truth while claiming superiority of educational product.
This essay argues against that dichotomy. Whether Christian or non-Christian, education is education - regardless of source. That it is a shared human good which can be pursued in many forms, each valuable and worthy in its own right. Additionally, from a process perspective, education is not regarded as a static transfer of facts but a dynamic, relational, an unfolding series of events moving towards personal, if not communal, growth. In this preferred vision of education, Christian education does not replace or negate general education; rather, it offers its own distinctive contributions to public education's own distinctives.
1. Education as a Shared Human Good
Education is the cultivation of human capacities. It equips people with skills in reasoning, interpretation, and creativity. It usually shapes ethical awareness, empathy, and community belonging. All of these characteristics are not uniquely Christian goods but universal motifs arising wherever humans teach and learn from one another.
Whether one is a student of mathematics in Beijing, attending a philosophy seminar in Paris, working in a biology lab in Nairobi, or redacting a literature class in São Paulo - all of these human endeavors are participating in the same broad human project of education. To call one “secular” and another “Christian” is to do a deep disservice to the institutions committed to educating a community's young people. Broadly, education should never be distinguished between secular or religious for each approach should be working through similar discoveries. Rather, it is the interpretation of those discoveries which might divide in approach.
The derivation of the word "secular" might be instructive herein. It comes from the Latin saeculum (“of this age”), so that the original term describes the temporal world of present knowledge and understanding in deep contrast to eternality. The term was not used in opposition to God but was simply referencing any sphere of ordinary life that is being studied. It was only later, as used by religious institutions in justifying their identity and commitments; sic, the word secular was coined as a pejorative critiquing of non-religious educational bodies. In this sense, to dismiss general education as “secular” in the sense of anti-God is to misunderstand the word and to diminish the dignity of shared human inquiry across all educational enterprises.
2. The False Binary of Christian versus Secular
The language of division presently shapes how Christian education defends its traditions, attitudes, and cultural capital. By casting “the secular” as its opposite, Christian learning defines itself more by contrast than by substance. This framing reduces education to a contest of opinionated boundaries rather than an exploration of truth. What might otherwise be a shared pursuit between religious and public institutions becomes a battlefield of competing ideologies, where loyalty is measured not by what is learned but by what is, or is not, emphasized—faith versus neutrality, doctrine versus inquiry.
Thus, when Christian education defines itself in opposition to “the secular,” several dangers can arise:
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Intellectual insularity: shielding students from voices outside the tradition, cutting them off from the richness and expansiveness of human discovery. Example, denial of evolution and promotion of Adam-and-Eve narrative.
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Cultural suspicion: treating mainstream knowledge as inherently hostile, rather than as a field of dialogue that can enlarge enculturated perspective.
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Weak scholarship: confusing apologetics with education, narrowing inquiry to what serves pre-defined doctrinal ends.
This binary, ironically, contradicts Christianity’s own history. Augustine engaged Plato, Aquinas drew on Aristotle, and the French Jesuit priest cum paleontologist cum philosopher, Teilhard de Chardin, integrated evolutionary science with theology. Likewise, Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician turned philosopher, built a metaphysical vision in dialogue with both science and religion. Across the centuries, the Christian intellectual tradition has rarely feared the wider currents of thought; instead, it has repeatedly drawn upon them to articulate its deepest convictions.
To wall off Christian learning from so-called “secular” wisdom, then, is to betray this deeper lineage of integration. A process perspective continues the same spirit, recognizing that truth emerges in the relational interplay of reason, experience, and faith. By engaging rather than excluding the world’s wisdom, Christian education aligns with its own best history: not defensive, but dynamic; not insular, but open to the creative advance of knowledge in all its forms.
3. Historical Depth: Christianity’s Long Engagement with Knowledge
Christianity has never pursued truth in isolation. From its earliest centuries, it stood at the crossroads of cultures, philosophies, and sciences, engaging rather than ignoring the intellectual treasures of its age. Far from rejecting “worldly” learning, the church often served as a bridge between inherited wisdom and emerging revelation, preserving ancient texts while reframing them in theological light. This long history reveals that Christian thought has always been porous, adaptive, and dialogical - shaped as much by conversation with the world as by its internal convictions.
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Early Christianity: The church fathers relied heavily on Greek philosophy to articulate doctrines of God, creation, and the soul. Origen, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa were shaped by Platonic categories, and their theological creativity depended on this dialogue.
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The Middle Ages: In monasteries and cathedral schools, Christian scholars preserved not only Scripture but also the writings of Cicero, Aristotle, and Galen. Islamic scholars like Averroes and Avicenna transmitted Aristotelian thought to the West, where it was integrated by Thomas Aquinas into a grand synthesis of faith and reason.
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The Renaissance and Enlightenment: Far from retreating, Christian scholars engaged the rebirth of classical learning, the rise of modern science, and the new humanism. Copernicus and Kepler worked within a theological worldview while reshaping astronomy; Locke and Milton drew on Protestant ideas of liberty while contributing to modern political thought.
The Modern and Postmodern Age: Alfred North Whitehead, mathematician turned philosopher, articulated a process vision that reconnected theology and philosophy with the emerging sciences of relativity and quantum physics. Later process scholars have continued this trajectory, drawing on cosmology, ecology, and postmodern critique to sustain a dialogue between faith and the cutting edges of human inquiry.
This legacy makes clear that Christian engagement with knowledge has never been a matter of purity versus compromise but of integration of past knowledge with renewal of present directions. Each era borrowed, translated, and transformed what it received, weaving external insights into its own theological fabric. For religious bodies to remember this historical perspective can help resist the temptation of building defensive binaries. The church has always been strongest when it was in conversation with the intellectual life of its time, drawing wisdom from the world not as a threat to faith but as a catalyst for deeper understanding.
4. Education and the Public Good
Education is never a private endeavor alone. While it shapes individuals, its fruits spill outward into the life of society - building citizens, sustaining institutions, and guiding cultures toward justice or away from it. To speak of education without reference to the public good is to miss its civic dimension. For instance, every classroom, lecture hall, and library participates in the ongoing project of integrating democracy into nationalized culture, nurturing the habits of dialogue, responsibility, and imagination on which a shared future engaged with many voices critically depends. Education then, is not only for personal formation but also for the public good. It fosters informed citizens, strengthens democracy, and equips societies to face shared challenges. To divide education into Christian and secular camps is to risk eroding this common fabric.
Moreover, from a process perspective, knowledge is relational and cumulative. What one community discovers can benefit all; what one society neglects can impoverish all. A healthy pluralist society thrives when multiple voices - religious, philosophical, scientific, artistic - must be allowed to converse and challenge one another. If Christian education retreats into enclaves suspicious of “the secular,” it risks not only its own vitality but also its contribution to the broader civic good. Education, therefore, is best seen as a communal weaving: threads of diverse traditions, insights, and experiences brought together into a tapestry of shared wisdom.
Seen in this light, dividing education into “Christian” and “secular” not only impoverishes faith but also weakens society. When schools withdraw into suspicion of one another, the common fabric frays, and shared wisdom is lost. A process perspective reminds us that knowledge is relational and cumulative, that discoveries belong not to one community but to the whole human family. Education for the public good is thus not an optional extra - it is the very measure of whether learning fulfills its deepest purpose: to contribute to the flourishing of all.
5. Education in a Process Perspective
If reality itself is process - dynamic, relational, and unfolding - then education must ever be understood in processual terms. Knowledge and learning are never finished products delivered to passive minds but is instruction across dimensions of reality in various process stages of becoming either more-or-less than it is in response to the ecosystems being studied.
Education is also a processual activity in which learners and teachers co-create "meaningful meaning" together. Every act of learning is more than the transfer of information; it is a transformation that reshapes identity, possibility, and community. To approach education in this way is to see it not as a static achievement but as an ever-deepening participation in the creative advance of life.
Process philosophy reframes education not as the possession of fixed truths but as an unfolding journey of becoming. Several key insights follow:
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Relationality: Knowledge is co-created in interaction between teacher and student, learner and text, individual and community.
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Eventfulness: Learning is not simply the storage of information but the transformation of the learner through new experiences.
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Creativity: Each educational act introduces novelty, generating fresh possibilities for thought and action.
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Open-endedness: Because reality itself is never closed, never ended, but is always processual - education is likewise never finished, never close, but always provisional, always growing, ever flowing.
God is never-ending, ever flowing. Education is infused with sacred depth. To learn is to participate in the creative advance of the universe - to weave one’s life into the ongoing story of the world. God is never-ending, ever flowing. The same must be said of religious education, even when faith communities present their doctrines as closed or final. When the church insists on fixity, it places itself at cross-purposes with reality and with God’s own Self. Neither reality nor God is static. Both are ever in process, moving forward from experience to experience, inviting us to grow with them.
A process perspective thus redefines education as sacred encounter: always leaning into moments of novelty breaking in, relationships deepening, and wisdom emerging through shared communal experience. No classroom is ever final, no curriculum ever complete, because reality itself is always becoming. To educate is to join this divine cosmic movement which would allow the nurturing of creativity, the cultivation of social responsibility, and the opening up of newer pathways of justice, equality, and possibility. In this light, education becomes not only preparation for life but for life itself that is integrally woven into the ongoing evolution of the world-soul.
6. A Sacramental Theology of Truth
If Section 5 showed education as process, Section 6 presses further: education is not only processual but sacramental. If all creation is God’s self-expression, then every act of learning becomes a potential meeting place with the divine. Truth is not divided into sacred and secular domains but flows as one living stream through the whole fabric of reality.
To discover a mathematical theorem, to map a new ecosystem, or to compose a piece of music, is to glimpse an aspect of divine creativity. In this sense, education is sacramental: it mediates God’s presence through the world’s intelligibility. The search for truth, wherever it takes place, is an encounter with divine possibility. As Whitehead suggests,
Such a vision elevates education from a merely human endeavor to a deeply spiritual one. It challenges Christian educators to move beyond the old divide between “holy” and “worldly” knowledge, recognizing instead the sacred in all authentic learning. To teach and to learn is, in this light, to participate in God’s ongoing self-disclosure - a communion of minds and hearts with the Living Creativity at the heart of the universe.
7. Christian Education Within This Frame
If education in general is already a sacred good, then Christian education should not be imagined as a competing system but as a distinctive contribution within the larger whole. Its task is not to divide the field of knowledge into “ours” and “theirs,” but to bring the resources of faith - its moral vision, spiritual practices, and narrative depth - into dialogue with all that humanity discovers. This also means that the church must listen to society and not blindly believe that it's practices of yesteryear should be unquestioned or preferred. As is often the case with traditional practices, they have been found to be more harmful than good.
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A moral horizon that frames knowledge within questions of justice, love, and human flourishing.
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Spiritual practices that cultivate attentiveness, gratitude, and responsibility toward God and neighbor.
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Narrative depth that situates learning within the broader story of creation, redemption, and hope.
These mediating gifts are real, but they do not exhaust what education is. Nor should they be used to dismiss the broader field of human learning. At its best, Christian education participates in the shared work of discovery, while offering its own insights as dialogue within the larger, general conversation of the world - a world that often sees more clearly than religiously bound faith communities, long practiced in unseeing, judgment, and indifference.
To be truly Christian, then, is not to shrink from the world but to embrace its insights more deeply, confident that all “true-truth” is God’s truth. That ancient beliefs and practices must be opened up from their closed-and-fixed positional convictions. This may be what the Apostle Paul hinted at when speaking of mirrors and meat: that cultural practices are not inherently right or good but may prove unjust and harmful, demanding discernment, humility, and transformation.
✨The Mirror → 1 Corinthians 13:12
Paul is pointing to the partial, provisional nature of human knowledge, compared to the fuller vision of a loving God’s redeeming future.
✨ The Meat → 1 Corinthians 8 (and also Romans 14)
Here Paul is showing that cultural/religious practices aren’t inherently good or bad but must be discerned in light of love, justice, and the common good.
8. Practical Implications: What Process Education Looks Like
The vision remains incomplete unless we imagine what it might look like in practice. How would Christian education change if it embraced process thought and the sacramental depth of truth?
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Science: Teaching evolution as a dimension of God’s ongoing creativity, rather than as a rival to faith. This would hold with all the sciences as they morph and transform, adjust and adapt. Processual theology does likewise - not holding God's image in impassible, transcendent closures but seeing God as present, infilling, redeeming.
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Literature: Reading works from diverse cultures as encounters with the many ways humans wrestle with meaning, suffering, and hope.
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Dialogue: Welcoming interfaith and non-religious voices into classrooms, modeling respect and curiosity rather than fear.
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Ethics and Civic Life: Forming students not just for private piety but for public responsibility, encouraging them to serve the common good.
Such practices reveal that Christian education does not diminish the scope of learning but expands it. It becomes truly Christian not by standing apart from the world but by engaging it with openness, creativity, and reverence. In this way, education fulfills its dual calling: to form persons of depth and to nurture communities of justice, compassion, and shared flourishing.
Conclusion
Education in process reveals itself not as a battleground between “Christian” and “secular” but as a shared pilgrimage toward truth. To pointedly cling to oppositional binaries is to impoverish both faith and learning. But when embracing relationality, openness, and creativity is to more fully align education with the very movement of reality with God’s own divine Life.
Christian theology can enrich this journey by not walling itself off from general society but by bringing its moral horizon, spiritual practices, and narrative depth into conversation with the discoveries of science, art, and culture. At its best, Christian education is not a fortress but a table - where insights are exchanged, tested, and deepened in community.
The church must therefore loosen its grip on fixed certainties and rediscover the provisional, ever-unfolding nature of truth. As Paul once said, “we see in a mirror dimly” (1 Cor. 13:12), and what we count as “clean” or “unclean” in cultural practice may not align with God’s justice or love (1 Cor. 8; Rom. 14). These reminders invite humility to remember and to practice that:
"Knowledge is always partial, and faith must always be discerning."
To embrace education as process is to confess that God is still creating, still disclosing, still inviting. Learning is sacramental, a participation in the divine poetry of the world. To teach and to learn in this light is not simply to prepare for life but to share in the very life of God - ever becoming, ever flowing, ever new.
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