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Do you know who Gerard Groote is? We didn’t either! He played a major role in church history, but in a very unlikely way. Pastor and founder of Franklin Classical School, George Grant encourages us with the value and benefits of classical Christian education even when things don't come to us as easily as they should.

Join us for a deep discussion on philosophy, politics, and reformation history in today’s episode of Veritas Vox where we also discuss his Bible study, The Keystone Project!

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:

Hello again. Welcome to Veritas Vox, the podcast of Veritas Press. I'm Marlin Detweiler. And today, we have with us George Grant. George and I served on the Association of Classical Christian Schools Board for many years together, and George has been a real go-to guy for me in many respects, many related to classical Christian education, sometimes even pastoral advice, as George has been a pastor for decades and someone who has been someone I've really thought of as having wise counsel. George, welcome to our podcast.

George Grant:

Well, thank you, Marlin. It's always a joy to be able to sit down and chat with you about anything and everything.

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, we're looking forward to hearing from you! To start, maybe, you can give us a little bit of your personal background, personal history, family, grandchildren, children, and that sort of thing.

George Grant:

Well, my wife and I celebrated 47 years of marriage yesterday.

Marlin Detweiler:

Congratulations. I did see that, actually!

George Grant:

Oh, thank you. The Lord has just been incredibly gracious, and she has been incredibly patient over the years. We have three children and seven grandchildren, and we finally got a girl, we have six boys, and we've been praying for a girl for some time. And we finally have a rose among the thorns. And I have been a pastor, as you say, for more than four decades. And have really been so gratified to see the Lord's favor in allowing me to serve in that fashion. I love what I love in front of those whom I love.

Marlin Detweiler:

That’s great! I think it was Steve Brown that I heard say that if you've been a pastor that long, you actually have earned your way into heaven!

George Grant:

Well, I'm not sure that my theology would agree with that. But I'll tell you, the bumps and bruises sure would attest.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I'm sure his theology and certainly mine wouldn't agree with that either. But it's worth noting that way as a way of talking about the bumps and bruises, so to speak.

George Grant:

Indeed!

Marlin Detweiler:

Tell us about your upbringing– how did you come to Christ?

George Grant:

I came to Christ in high school the very first time I ever heard the gospel preached. I was at an evangelistic crusade. A high school evangelist went from high school stadium to high school stadium, where I grew up in Texas. And I heard the gospel, and I just instantly knew that it was true. I had been around church-ish things. My father was Roman Catholic, my mother was Presbyterian, and so I had some connections, mostly Christmas and Easter. But I had always been attracted to spiritual things. I remember a very, very profound effect after watching the old movie, The Robe, on TV, but I heard the gospel and knew that it was true. And the next day, I went out and bought a Bible and three books off the sale table at this little Pentecostal bookstore.

One was Charles Spurgeon’s, The Soul Winner. One was Richard Baxter's, The Reformed Pastor, and then the other was the Geneva commentary on the Book of Judges. Because I was fascinated with politics and law, and I thought, “Oh, well, this will tell me what Christians are supposed to believe about politics and law.” I didn't know what Judges was. And so, anyway, that was the beginning of my discipleship.

Marlin Detweiler:

Oh, that's great. Well, our paths crossed, first and foremost, extensively through our initiatives and interest in classical Christian education. How did you get interested in that pedagogical model, and how has that taken you?

George Grant:

My interest arose because I had children. I wanted for my children what I knew I had not received. I did well in school and was fairly accomplished. I had begun a real serious writing career when my children were very young. I was committed to homeschooling early on and really shoehorned my wife into accepting my preferences there.

But I had never heard of classical Christian education. But what I had seen was in my area of academic specialty, the Founding Fathers, I saw in them a level of knowledge, understanding, wisdom, grace that I was altogether unfamiliar with. And so I began a journey. Rather than reading the Founding Fathers, I decided what I really needed to do is read what the Founding Fathers read and eventually decided that what needed to happen was that that model of education that I was discovering from the Founding Fathers I needed to give to my children. And so we formed a homeschool co-op. And about that time–

Marlin Detweiler:

What year would that have been?

George Grant:

I started in 1990.

Marlin Detweiler:

Okay.

George Grant:

And about that time, I corresponded with Doug Wilson, who I didn't know for anything other than a little booklet that he had written on Love. I think it was the very first thing he ever published. And he and I struck up a conversation, and lo and behold, we had started Franklin Classical School, and he had started Logos School. And I didn't know that there was even a fledgling classical education movement.

Marlin Detweiler:

You started Franklin Classical before reading Doug's book, Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning?

George Grant:

Yes, yes. Doug’s book wasn’t out yet. So Karen, my wife, flew to Moscow for the very first ACCS teacher training before there really was a full-fledged ACCS. And so anyway, that was sort of the beginning and we discovered, “Oh, there are other people like us!” Sort of like C.S. Lewis when he discovered the character in Nature of Friendship, he said, “Oh, you too? I didn't know there was anyone else!”

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, that's an interesting question. I did not know that Franklin Classical, which I didn't know about, started as something different than as a result of reading Sayer’s essay or Recovering Lost Tools of Learning. What did it look like, and how did it change shape as you became familiar with others practicing classical Christian education?

George Grant:

Well, initially, the structure of the Franklin Classical School was just a bunch of homeschoolers coming together on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings to hear me lecture about history.

Marlin Detweiler:

Okay.

George Grant:

And essentially, what was classical about it was I realized that history wasn’t just dates and dead people. It wasn't just great heroes who marched armies across landmasses. It really was art, music, literature, ideas all woven together. And so we integrated literature and art and technology, and we called it humanities. And so the humanities course, you know, long before there was an Omnibus, was this attempt to bring real integration.

Marlin Detweiler:

I’m laughing, George, because my history teachers from high school, if they were living and know, they would be in disbelief, and if they were dead, if they're dead, they'd be rolling over in their graves wondering how in the world somebody who had the relationship with history that I did in high school came to appreciate and enjoy history, in fact, even create a history curriculum.

And I could tell them, “Listen to George because he's got the kind of history that I would have enjoyed. And it's real history.”

George Grant:

Yeah. You know history is blood and thunder. It's the stories that race the heart. It's action, it's adventure. It's all of that. And typically, history classes have none of that. It's timelines and, you know, gross national products. And that is not at all what a classical approach to history is. In fact, what I discovered was before the Civil War at Harvard, they didn’t have a history department; they had a moral philosophy department.

And so, I attempted to create this moral philosophy foundation. Well, once I got to know Doug and a number of other classical educators, after I got to know you, I started to realize, “Oh, my goodness, there is this wealth. I don't have to reinvent the wheel. And it will be a much better wheel if I don't reinvent it anyway.”

And so by the second year of Frankin Classical School, we had begun to add languages and we sort of set apart the composition part of literature. We still integrated the literature into the humanities, but we started to branch out, and by the third year, we were beginning to have a more full-fledged academic sort of program.

Marlin Detweiler:

Interesting. Some years ago, I believe you were a part of this discussion– I was. Where the Association of Classical and Christian Schools Board got together to discuss a strategic approach to engaging pastors, encouraging them to be more proactive about education and specifically about classical Christian education. Were you at that discussion?

George Grant:

I was. Or at least at one of those. Yes.

Marlin Detweiler:

You, as a pastor relating to other pastors or maybe just from your own experience, how have you determined to pastor your people with regard to education and the encouragement to be involved in something that is having such an impact in so many people, recognizing that other people are coming from various perspectives and those things need to be handled in a pastoral way.

George Grant:

Right. That's the real key thing is, is to disciple the disciplers in a way that brings forth good fruit. Not everyone in our congregation follows the same model of education. We have lots of homeschoolers. We have people who do Classical Conversations. We have people who use Veritas. We have people who are in a classical school. We have three or four classical schools now in our community.

And I've been, you know, involved in helping most of them. And so one of the things that we really emphasize is just parental responsibility, parental engagement. We emphasize the jurisdictions and the spheres in our preaching and our teaching and our, discipling and in our modeling. You know, one of the things that I say to fathers all the time is if you want your children to read, they've got to see you reading.

In the same way, pastors, if you want your congregation to be serious about education, you need to be serious about education. If you want your people to be lifelong learners, you've got to be a lifelong learner, and you've got to model that.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, well, you wrote an article for us not too long ago called Education and Culture, and then in parentheses and Politics, where you explain that education is a part of everything we do; it's not simply a transfer of information. You kind of alluded to that already. It's not just developing skills, but it's a process of discipleship. Can you expand on that a little bit or expound on that a little bit?

George Grant:

Yeah. You know, education in its truest sense is not the accumulation of facts and skills. It's the recognition that we have a world of wonder for us to discover. It's the recognition that I don't know what I need to know yet. I've not learned all that I ought to learn yet. I've not done all that I ought to do yet.

And therefore, I need to be equipped. I need to have my imagination stirred and so, in a real sense, what we have in true education is that Deuteronomy 6 model of a parent walking with a child through the course of life, making note of the good providence of God in all things, and answering good questions like in Deuteronomy, chapter 6. “Father, what do these statutes and commandments of the Lord mean?”

So for me, real Christian education is equipping students with the tools for a lifetime of learning. It's to use Milton's phrase and Dorothy Sayers phrase, “It is repairing the ruins of our parents,” Adam and Eve, and going about the process of cultivating the garden, the gardens of our hearts and of our imaginations.

Marlin Detweiler:

You probably more than the people that I know. I think you're in the top two people of people I would identify as readers. You are one of the most significant readers that I know. I suspect that all the books behind you are not books that are decorations, but every one of them is a book that you've read the whole way through.

What is it about reading that you could impress on us of its importance and how we benefit from being readers?

George Grant:

Well, one of the things about reading is that it's the ability for us to engage in a conversation with previous generations and lay hold of that wisdom. It's also like going to an art museum. You get to see things imaginatively that you've never seen before. You're able to walk streets that you may never have the opportunity to walk and meet people that you will never have the opportunity to meet.

You know, I've just gotten through reading two big, big books, one Andrew Roberts new biography of King George the Third. As a student of American history, I thought I knew about King George the Third, but I just read almost a thousand pages which caused me to realize in almost every page, there's something new to learn.

And then I read a book by Anna Kaey entitled The Restless Republic about the period immediately after the English Civil War, during the Cromwellian Protectorate. Again, a subject that I know very well, all of the stuff about the Westminster Assembly and all of the rest. And I discovered new things on every page and what it did was it stirred my imagination. It fueled my desire to know more. It deepened my understanding, and it broadened my understanding, you know, where I had very narrow categories before I saw some of those categories shattered. So it's an enlightening process.

But on top of it all for me, reading is just a lot of fun. I encounter new words, new ideas, and new people, and beautiful figures of speech. Sometimes a sentence will take my breath away, and I'll think, “Oh, what a craftsman that that is beautifully put,” or “I don't know this word. I've never seen this word before. This word comes from,” you know, those kinds of things. It's just a joy of discovery.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah! I must admit that we are different in that sense. The reading that I enjoy and the study of history is learning from the past in order to live better in the present. And we're all very different. And it is fascinating to here for me to hear people who are so accomplished in their fields with a different sense of motivation and a different sense of interest because people come to enjoy different things because God's made us different.

And I'm always fascinated to hear your love of reading and learning and connecting to those people that you can't meet today except through what they've written. There's not a question there, but it's just an observation that's really fun for me. How do you select what you read?

George Grant:

Well, some of what I read is mandated by what I'm teaching. So when I'm teaching at our classical school, I obviously have a course of reading. I try to never revisit old lectures. Obviously, history doesn't change, and so I'm teaching depending on–

Marlin Detweiler:

Well, that depends on who you ask. That's what we believe!

George Grant:

True! So one of the things that I try to do is do fresh reading every year. We're coming up on the summer where there are lots and lots of conferences that I will be speaking at. And so I typically start preparing for those by reading first– at the ACCS conference, for instance, I'm lecturing on John Buchan. And so there's a new biography by Ursula Buchan, his grand niece. And so I'm about ready to start reading that in preparation for that lecture. So some of what I read is mandated by what I'm teaching or what I'm preaching. But then, I always try to follow the footnote trail. So I'll go off on spurts where I'm reading in a particular area, and one book will suggest another book, will suggest another book. And then sometimes I just follow particular authors.

So for years and years, if Umberto Eco came up with a new book, I just bought it. That was just it. And it was it went right to the top of the stack immediately. And Paul Johnson, same thing. If Paul Johnson comes out with a new book, and he did two or three a year for many years. Well, it just went to the top of the stack. So that's sort of the way I read.

I also read multiple books at the same time. I've always got some fiction, I've always got some history biography, and I've always got some theology so that I balance out my reading because I know that I have the innate ability to be unbalanced. And so that's good corrective and help. If I know that there's a particular struggle that I'm walking through that I need help with I will go, and I will read in that area.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, that's very good. I think there's a lot of application that we hearing you say that can get put to our own lives facing struggle, fight, chasing the threads and connections. The footnotes is an interesting thought because those are very clear and provide lots of fodder and opportunity.

We did about a 20-minute video that you played a very significant role in called The New Old Way. It's been out for a while, and it's basically the idea of introducing classical Christian education in a 20-minute snippet to people who've not really considered it. In it, you tell a story that shows incredible foresight at Saint Mary's College. I don't want you to tell that story here because that one's already recorded, and people can go get that one off of our website.

But I'm curious if there are other stories that you've used over the years to help explain maybe the value and benefits of classical Christian education or the idea of things that don't come to us as easily as they should, that metaphorically we might relate to.

George Grant:

Well the two stories that I tell all the time that I dearly love are the story of Gerard Groote who lived during the 14th century, which was a dark time in history with the Black Death and the Hundred Years War in the Hanseatic League and the Babylonian Captivity of the church and Tamerlan's invasions and all kinds of awful, awful things.

And Gerard Groote was orphaned at an early age. His father was on the Hanseatic League board, and so he inherited a great deal of wealth, grew up as a spoiled brat, became an insufferable young man, and then by his own testimony, a dissolute adult. But he was dramatically converted through the preaching of an Augustinian friar and decided to go home to his little home village of Deventer in the Netherlands. And there decided to spend the rest of his life collecting books and reading and growing in grace.

But a wave of the Black Death swept through his village, leaving behind a whole bunch of children on the street who were orphaned. And compelled, he took them in, and he didn't know what to do with them, but he just decided to live life in front of them. And since he had devoted his life to reading, he taught them to read. And over time, what was born was this little community called the Brethren of the Common Life.

He died only about 15 years after beginning this experiment, but many of the children determined that what they had received was so remarkable; grounding in the classics, discipleship, the ability to explore the wealth of Christian literature that they went on to establish little houses just like that in their home villages. And the little movement spread for about 150 years.

Marlin Detweiler:

Wow.

George Grant:

And 150 years after Gerard Groote’s death, we discover a new movement. Martin Luther was educated at a Brethren Common Life school. John Calvin was educated in a Brethren of Common Life School. Ulrich Lindley was educated and a Brother of Common Life School. Mark Butzer was educated at our Brethren a Common Life School. All scattered, all under the radar.

No one knew that this little experiment that started really with Gerard Groote thinking that he would just give some boys some breakfast, that that would a150 years later spawn the Reformation. But it did.

Marlin Detweiler:

That's incredible. I have found in my life that if an idea won't go away, act on it. And normally, if it won't go away, it's of God, and it will turn into something very interesting. But the key is just taking the first steps. Take something in and do something. And to see that happen is a remarkable testimony of that kind of thing. I think many people are afraid of entrepreneurial endeavors like that, and some are more gifted than others, no doubt. But the idea of just jumping in, you figure it out as you go sometimes.

George Grant:

Yeah! You know, the Czechs believe that one of their native sons who lived through the 30 Years' War, John Amos Comenius, they claim that he is the father of modern education because he created something called the Pansophic Collegium, which became the basis for the curriculum at Cambridge University in Sweden. He was asked by the King of Sweden to come and reshape education. He was asked to come to Harvard and shape Harvard. He was in exile, lived with a tiny group of people called the Moravian Brethren. They were the heirs of the Hussites from the city of Prague. But after the Battle of White Mountain, they were scattered, and he just devoted himself as a pastor and an educator to this tiny band of refugees.

At the end of his life, the Holy Roman Emperor broke up their refugee camp in the mountains of Poland, and they were scattered again. He wound up in Amsterdam, where Rembrandt painted his portrait, and many of his others wound up in Germany and Austria, and they became the Moravian brethren that helped Count Zinzendorf gather together. But my point is, is that all he did was disciple his people by recovering the lost tools of learning. And as a result, he becomes the father of modern education.

Marlin Detweiler:

Wow. Yeah, well, I’m going change the subject here. I gave you a little warning on this question, but I'm really anxious to hear it. You were a vocal– I say vocal. I don't how vocal you were. I saw it on Facebook every now and then. But you were a Never Trumper. He became president. What are your thoughts in retrospect?

George Grant:

Well, I was not really a Never Trumper. I was a Trump-skeptic. I was skeptical because of the character issue. Right. And I remain skeptical to this day based on his character. However, I voted for him the second time around– I did not vote for the first time. I did not vote for Hillary the first time; of course, I voted for a third-party candidate. I felt safe in doing so, and I was elated when he won just because he was running against Hillary. I was elated when he won because I live in a very, very, very red state, in a very, very red precinct; I knew that I could vote for a third-party candidate and not risk giving a vote to Hillary.

However, in the next election, I did vote for Trump based upon his record and based upon the judges that he appointed, based upon the way he had handled the economy and a number of other things. There are a lot of things about Trump's record that I disagree with, but I think that almost anyone who is thinking can look at what we've got right now and recognize that we would be in a much better place if Trump were president.

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah, I don't know. It's hard to imagine some of the things that we've had to deal with over the last 20 years. And as we get involved in education, and we saw great needs, but the needs of clearly become even more significant. And the challenges that we face today really call for our involvement in training the next generation to lead and to lead very differently.

George Grant:

Well, 30 years ago, when we were really getting started with classical Christian education, we really had a very different culture. We did we're in a different world now. And what that means is our mission doesn't change. But oftentimes, the way we communicate our mission and who we communicate our mission to have changed.

Marlin Detweiler:

I think that's very well put. One other thing. This is unrelated also, or at least it seems unrelated, but maybe you'll say that it's not and show me why– you're involved in a project called Keystones about getting deeper into scripture. Tell us about that.

George Grant:

Yeah, it is directly related. It's an outflow of my concern to properly disciple. One of the things that I am aware of as a pastor is that while most Christians really want to know God's word and want to be consistent in God's word, almost none of us are. And so I discovered through my fascination with Thomas Chalmers, a 19th-century Scottish pastoral reformer and the father of the modern missions movement, the Modern Bible Society movement, the mentor for people like Andrew and Alexander and Horatius Bonar and Robert Murray McShane, and a host of others, Hudson Taylor, close friends with William Wilberforce. I mean, he was just this phenomenal. He used the discipleship method that he never wrote down; he never codified. But I was determined to try and pull it together and codify it. It's a way of studying the Bible in-depth, what we used to call 40 years ago, inductive Bible study. But it's actually inductive and deductive, kind of brought together in a Bible study method that will enable you to literally, through the memorization of just five verses in a process of digging into divining, know the entire outline of the book of Ephesians just with six verses. So anyway, it's something I've worked on for 20 years.

Marlin Detweiler:

Wow! That is really cool. One of the things I've observed in my involvements in education, which go back to really 1992, is that in that time frame– while we may have seen some great improvements in classical Christian education in that community, which is still relatively small and growing– is that biblical literacy isn't what it was back then and it wasn't great then. And I think what you're doing for adults will work its way down into children, too.

George, thank you so much. We've taken more of your time than I've asked for. We've got a little bit longer, but it's been remarkable. Thank you for joining us on Veritas, Vox.

George Grant:

It is always a pleasure, Marlin.