Indoctrination!

Our mutual heritage contains a suspicion of being manipulated. This stretches back to the days when the printing press made many books available, and many people learned to read them, sometimes in revived ancient languages like Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. People found that what they had been told their lives and about God himself were something other than what they found in scripture. Time went on, and this new found distrust turned up in the French enlightenment among men like Voltaire, who declared that the “infamy must be obliterated !”  What infamy was he referring to?  The infamy of guilt, placed upon man by the Church. What was happening? The suspicion aroused by the new reading and learning against some practices of the Church had progressed over hundreds of years to be a suspicion against the Holy Scriptures of the Church. Irony!

The Scriptures contain in their core the discovery and acknowledgement that “all have sinned and come short of the Glory of God!” (Rom. 3:23). This unhappy idea was deemed to be a block to progress and the happiness of mankind, and therefore a case of “indoctrination” that stood in the way of the perfection of politics. Going forward, the Western world would continue its hatred of indoctrination. Really, if we look back farther, we see that the Greeks and Romans learned to turn their backs on tales of the gods and become practical thinkers, thereby foreshadowing a revulsion toward indoctrination in those early ages as well. The twentieth century ingrained in us a suspicion of indoctrination, as we watched the horrifying actions of totalitarian regimes, left and right, compelling their citizens through ideology in acts of bloody murder. It seems that indoctrination is truly to be feared…or is there something else going on?

Man is an aching need for belonging. As Luther points out in his teaching on the First Commandment, we are to have no other gods before God himself. These other things, the things we worry about first (clothes, shelter, safety, money…) are gods, and therefore idols. There is no possibility of an ‘unindoctrinated’ or purely rational and factual person.  That is not what people are. People are subject to nature, subject to their desires, and subject to the forces of history. Only an indoctrination into the paths of righteousness can save man (Voltaire included) from his own sinfulness in the face of all of these pressures. Those paths were walked by the sinless Son of God, who bids us to take up our cross and follow him. That cross, the easy yoke, the light burden, is in fact indoctrination. At our Lutheran schools, we dare to indoctrinate: “train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Is this a great responsibility? Yes. But, Voltaire’s condemnation of the Church does not stick. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Let us indoctrinate.

– Dan Snyder, Headmaster