16 June 2021
It was recently announced that Calvin University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a tertiary academic institution supposedly standing in the Reformed tradition and even named after the Reformer John Calvin, will not be offering any courses in Ancient Greek next year. The University has stated that a decline in interest in the classics is to blame, which is of course true, but this is only a symptom of a much more serious disease: the contemporary Western University itself. Calvin Theological Seminary had also recently stopped requiring Greek undergraduate courses as a prerequisite for entry, a move which itself would have John Calvin turning in his grave.
But it is not only the lowering of standards that’s the issue, it is also the grave distortion and abuse of education that lies at the heart of the agenda of the modern university. Like Princeton University, another historically Presbyterian Institution which recently went as far as to remove the Greek and Latin requirements even for Classics majors in the name of combating “systemic racism”, Calvin University not only dumbs down their students to the point of not being able to read the Bible or most of the greatest theological and philosophical works in its original languages—something which had been expected of scholars for thousands of years—but it also continually indoctrinates its students with one of the most accursed ideologies ever known to mankind: Cultural Marxism, with the current “Black Lives Matter”-edition promoted by this very university being an extraordinarily bankrupt variant thereof.
The study of the Classics is absolutely key to understanding ancient Greco-Roman culture, the historical context in which the New Testament originated. Furthermore, a Classical education enables us to better understand the roots of Western civilization and the historical development of Western identity.
It therefore saddens the Pactum Institute and our members to witness this rapid decline of the Western University as it is now manifested in the examples of Calvin University and Princeton University's anti-intellectual abandonment of the Classics. This move amounts to nothing less than an attack on the authority and place of Scripture, an attack on Christ’s Church and on the very foundations of Western civilization. Nonetheless, this only further incentivizes us to proceed fervently on the course we have set out, namely to exercise godly dominion in the sphere of academia by taking its every thought captive in obedience to Christ (II Corinthians 10:5).