“Knowledge is unified by nature. Knowledge is an organic oneness, but because of the ingenuously labeled “knowledge explosion,” its unity is obscured by fragmentation. We fail to see its unified arrangement and we get lost in the shrapnel of detail without ever recognizing knowledge’s essential character. In order to grasp and control knowledge, we fragment it, dissect it, and re-structure it into inanimate classifications called subjects or disciplines. We think “in clusters” partially because we are not big enough to grasp the magnitude of knowledge, but primarily because we were taught to think that way…
…The greatest challenge facing Christian education today is that of discovering the unity of all that is known, of formulating for our children a single mental vision, of bringing every tidbit of interpreted fact and every theory of explanation into subjection of Christ…
…What do we mean when we talk about the oneness of knowledge? In the first place, it means that in every instance or portion of knowledge, all of the so-called disciplines are represented. There are no distinctly historical facts or distinctly religious facts or distinctly biological facts or distinctly musical facts. Second, it means that every portion of knowledge is at one and the same time:
[My commentary with his order]
1. religious [moral, devotional, community with symbols]
2. economic [related to man and his work and dominion]
3. historical [persons, events and ideas in a context]
4. aesthetic [concerns goodness and beauty]
5. philosophic [relationship between men and things, and the eternal]
6. mathematical [order, predictability]
7. educational [facts, questions and uses]
…[and] on to the end of our abstracted analytic categories.”
Education in the Truth (revised edition), from Redeemer Books, Lansing, MI, pp. 46-48.
G. Mark Sumpter
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