Christian Classical Education (CCE) is, first, a Christian education. That is, it is not secular education with some Christian icing on top—a chapel here, a Bible class there. Rather, it is an approach to education that assumes the truth(s) of Christianity as its points of departure and arrival; of reference and integration. “For from him and through him and to him are all things.” What does this mean? Among other things, Christ is the Word of God by whom all things were created and are presently being sustained. All things exist to showcase and increase his glory. Every factual, moral, and aesthetic detail is about Jesus Christ and illustrates to us his significance. Christ is therefore the integration point of all creation. He is the one hub that ties together algebra, Latin, zoology, historiography, epistemology, linguistics, gymnastics and literature. These subjects mean, both individually and corporately, because the Triune God, revealed sufficiently in Nature and savingly in Christ, relates to them as Creator and Sustainer. As one modern pastor-theologian has said, “Christ is the ground of all, and he is the goal of all,” and that includes theology as well as arithmetic.

Christian Classical Education (CCE) is also a classical education. “Classical” is a rich term that has developed over history. First, a classical education includes the study of the seven liberal arts, often referred to as “the tools of learning,” which are comprised of the trivium (i.e. grammar, logic and rhetoric: the language arts) and the quadrivium (i.e. arithmetic, geometry, music, and cosmology: the mathematical arts). We also use this to refer to the Great Books of the Western canon, which includes works from the Classical and Medieval eras, as well as from the Renaissance and Modern eras. Classical education also includes the ongoing study and eventual mastery of Latin and Greek, the languages in which many of these Great Works were written. Finally, our approach to classical education also takes up the great pedagogical tools forged over time, from Socrates’s dialectic, to the medieval disputatio, to John Milton Gregory’s “seven laws of teaching,” to Charlotte Mason’s insight that education should begin in awed wonder at God and his creation, to Dorothy Sayers’s insight of “teaching with the grain.”

By “classical,” then, we refer to a certain mode (Latin and Greek, along with English), certain content (the liberal arts and Great Works), and to certain pedagogical approaches.

Being a Christian classical academy, we crown the liberal arts with the studies of Christian philosophy, and theology: the Queen of the liberal arts.

In the terms of H. Richard Niebuhr, we are drawing up the best of pagan culture into Christian culture. We are taking dominion. We are utilizing our God-given birthright to benefit from the gifts of His common grace across time and place. We are studying it all in a distinctly Christian way and using it to forge a distinctly Christian culture.

You might simply say that we are studying God’s world (classical) through God’s Word (Christian).

What about the “covenantal” part?

We mean two things in saying that our school is “covenantal.” First, while our approach to Christian education constitutes a separate sphere from the Church (i.e. we do not serve communion at school, nor do we teach arithmetic at church), it is yet a sphere within the Kingdom of God. It is a ministry by citizens of the kingdom for citizens of the kingdom. The sphere of covenantal Christian education, as we see, approach, and define it, is therefore exclusively offered to members of the New Covenant; we partner exclusively with Christian parents.

Second, we are signaling that it is a solemn thing to partner with parents to assist them in providing a robust, Christian education for their children. It is no contract: it is a covenant. It is a solemn, personal agreement between two parties before God with the mutual exchange of both promises and duties. This covenantal shape to our institution echoes the way that God has always dealt with his people, and how his people have often dealt with one another.