The Knowledge of God & the St. Louis Cathedral Field Trip

---

Charlotte Mason explains that knowledge can be divided into three main topics: the Knowledge of God, the Knowledge of Man, and the Knowledge of the Universe. This week in our first segment on the TRUE, I share with you some of the elements that make up learning about God (ie. Bible studies, devotionals, prayer, catechisms, songs) as well as some of my favorite resources.

A wonderful way to learn is to be guided by mentors. This episode spotlights Andrew Hageman, Brick Lane Community Church's pastor-in-training and Junior High Youth Group Leader. In our segment on the GOOD, we discuss the joy of teaching young people and how he goes about teaching his High School Bible class at Aleithia Learning Community

In the final segment on the BEAUTIFUL, I share my family's trip to the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, Louisiana, and how the art and architecture there allowed for wonderful connections with my daughter and her studies as well as simply just being an amazing place to see.

Here are some links to some of my favorite resources:

• The Valley of Vision edited by Arthur Bennett
• Now That's a Good Question by R.C. Sproul
• Ligonier Ministries
• Morning & Evening by Charles Spurgeon
• ACTS Prayer Cards  by Not Consumed Ministries 
• First Catechism: Teaching Children Bible Truths by Great Commission Publications
• The Westminster Confession of Faith 
• Truths We Confess by R.C. Sproul (a systematic way to study the Westminster Confession of Faith)
• The New City Catechism by Kathy Keller
• Illuminated Scripture Journals Old and New Testament Box Sets  (you can get these journals individually as well as just the Old or just the New Testaments)

 This idea of all education springing from and resting upon our relation to Almighty God is one which we have ever laboured to enforce. We take a very distinct stand upon this point. We do not merely give a religious education, because that would seem to imply the possibility of some other education, a secular education, for example. But we hold that all education is divine, that every good gift of knowledge and insight comes from above, that the Lord the Holy Spirit is the supreme educator of mankind, and that the culmination of all education (which may, at the same time, be reached by a little child) is that personal knowledge of and intimacy with God in which our being finds its fullest perfection. - Charlotte Mason, Volume 3: School Education, p. 95 (disclaimer: this is the official quote from CM's book but I cannot recall where I got the one I quoted in the podcast! Sorry about that!)

"Education is the Science of Relations"; that is, that a child has natural relations with a vast number of things and thoughts: so we train him upon physical exercises, nature lore, handicrafts, science and art, and upon many living books. . . - Charlotte Mason, Volume 6: A Philosophy of Education, p. xxx

The knowledge of God is the principal knowledge, and no teaching of the Bible which does not further that knowledge is of religious value. Therefore the children read, or if they are too young to read for themselves the teacher reads to them, a passage of varying length covering an incident or some definite teaching. If there are remarks to be made about local geography or local custom, the teacher makes them before the passage has been read, emphasizing briefly but reverently any spiritual or moral truth; the children narrate what has been read after the reading; they do this with curious accuracy and yet with some originality, conveying the spiritual teaching which the teacher has indicated. - Charlotte Mason, Volume 6: A Philosophy of Education, p. 272

the Bible is not a single book, but a classic literature of wonderful beauty and interest; that, apart from its Divine sanctions and religious teaching, from all that we understand by 'Revelation,' the Bible, as a mere instrument of education, is, at the very least, as valuable as the classics of Greece or Rome. Here is poetry, the rhythm of which soothes even the jaded brain past taking pleasure in any other. Here is history, based on such broad, clear lines, such dealing of slow and sure and even-handed justice to the nations, such stories of national sins and national repentences, that the student reali[z]es, as from no other history, the solidarity of the race, the brotherhood, and, if we may call it so, the individuality of the nations. Here is philosophy which of all the philosophies which have been propounded, is alone adequate to the interpretation of human life. We say not a word here of that which is the raison d'être of the Bible, its teaching of religion, its revelation of God to man; but to urge only one point more, all the literatures of the world put together utterly fail to give us a system of ethics, in precept and example, motive and sanction, complete as that to which we have been born as our common inheritance in the Bible. - Charlotte Mason, Volume 2: Parents & Children, p. 104

All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. - 2 Timothy 3:16-17 ESV Bible

. . . give a child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information . . . - Charlotte Mason, Volume 1: Home Education, p. 174

1. Try starting a Bible Reading program with your family if you haven't done so already. Try praying together as a family before bed or as a class as you begin and end your session.
2. Have you incorporated memory verses in your weekly routines? Some ones that I learned as a child were Psalm 23, Psalm 1, Psalm 100, and Psalm 103, as well as the Lord's Prayer, the Ten Commandments, the Fruit of the Spirit, the Armor of God, and the Beatitudes passages.
3. Ready to try learning a catechism? See how far you can get this summer.