The Lost Tools of Learning Christianity

A reflection on The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

How are you teaching your children about God?

As believers, at times we can settle for simply talking about God with our kids. As long as we share the key stories, pray before supper, send our children to church and youth groups, and memorize the passages from our curriculum, all will be well. 

But what if all isn’t well? We live in a world of deconstructed faith and every wind of false doctrine. What if our children need more than memorized Bible verses and a children’s program at church?

In the day of Dorothy Sayers, the education system was suffering and failing its students—and therefore, failing society as a whole. The schools taught many different subjects to the children, giving the appearance of a well-rounded and educated person, yet missed an essential component: the skill itself of learning. Without knowing how to learn or think, these students not only failed to see the vital connections between the various subjects they had learned in school, but they were unequipped to ever learn any more subjects once out of school. Sayers summarized the core problem of such a system in her speech The Lost Tools of Learning:

We let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda become hypnotised by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education … and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.¹

What Sayers declared to be the problem of her time isn’t much different from the problem of our time—we know how to read and write, we have “knowledge” on a variety of subjects (not just from school but from a mere couple of words typed into Google), we have access to vast amounts of information through books, podcasts, articles, and social media graphics. Yet do we actually know how to assess that information? Do we know how to distinguish what’s good, true, and beautiful from what’s wrong and ungodly? We may be “educated,” but do we know how to learn and discern information?

While I believe there is an argument for this still being a problem in our school systems today, I want to turn your attention to our churches, where a similar problem has arisen. We are perhaps the generation to have the most access to Christian doctrine and Scripture itself—every kind of Bible translation imaginable, hundreds of Christian podcasts and online publications, churches scattered all over communities, centuries worth of books written on any subject you can imagine from a Christian perspective, and sermons made available to watch on YouTube. Yet why is it that we have become more and more illiterate on Christian doctrine?

Consider the research done by The State of Theology. They found an increase (from previous years) in evangelicals who believe that God is pleased by worship that comes from those outside the Christian faith and a significant increase in evangelicals who deny Jesus’ divinity. These are vital pieces of our faith—without them, we don’t have Christianity.²

Why are so many Christians wrong on such essential and clear doctrines? As Dorothy Sayers said, we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only do a botched and piecemeal job of our Christian education. She said this of the school systems of her day, but it’s no different in the church today. 

We devote more time to laying laws for spiritual disciplines, while our church goers don’t even understand the theology behind or purpose of such disciplines. We argue over Calvinism versus Arminianism, yet we don’t even know the God who saved us. We debate complementarianism and egalitarianism, but we don’t know why what the Bible says is even trustworthy to be believed. What good does it do our children to know all sixty-six books of the Bible in order if they don’t know the gospel that weaves them all together? Our “discernment” has become more about rooting out those who disagree with us on secondary and tertiary issues while we welcome with open arms those who Paul would have declared to be accursed for teaching a false gospel (Gal. 1:6–9). We’ve lost the tools of learning Christianity. 

I’m writing this plea not as a seasoned mother who has figured it out (I still have three very young children). I write to you as a plea from someone watching countless teens pass through church programs without ever knowing that Jesus was risen from the dead. I write as one who has watched beloved friends from Bible college become harmed by wrong theology and walk away from orthodoxy. I write as one who can only name a handful of Christian friends who are still clinging to the true faith. While I whole-heartedly believe my perseverance in the faith is only by the gracious hand of God, I know that God used the labor of my mentors who grounded me in the vital doctrines of the church over and over again. 

Sayers called the educators of her day to return to the medieval ways of education; the first fourteen to sixteen years being spent on teaching children in grammar (the basic and foundational principles of learning subjects), dialectic (logic and critical thinking), and rhetoric (the art of persuasion). “For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. … To have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.”³

The same solution can be applied to Christian thought. We need to return to the tools of learning—we need to lay a basic and foundational theology of our faith and know how to use logic and critical thinking in order to discern when a word strays from it. From there, we can learn how to present our faith to others in a persuasive and charitable way, or even defend what we believe with apologetics when others try to tear it down—rather than being swayed to their false doctrine.

When it came to theology, Sayers said that it was the most foundational part of any education, because it is what ties together every subject we will ever learn—to not know right theology is to leave loose ends over all our education.⁴ Sayers believed that “at the grammatical age, therefore, we should become acquainted with the story of God and Man in outline—i.e., the Old and New Testament presented as parts of a single narrative of Creation, Rebellion, and Redemption—and also with ‘the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments.’”⁵ What differences would it make to our children, to our churches, if we regularly grounded ourselves in such knowledge? What if we spent more time founding and reviewing the essentials of our faith than we did on all the extras? 

It’s not that the secondary and tertiary issues aren’t important; once we are well-grounded in the essentials, it’s a part of Christian maturity to deepen and widen our understanding. Secondary and tertiary issues still matter. But we can’t grow deeper and wider if the boat we are standing on can barely keep us afloat as we already are. We need to know the foundational doctrines, then how to discern truth from error so we can truly grow. It will be of no use to our children and churches if we give them a theology full of disparate pieces they can never link together and understand the purpose of. They need to know the basics and how to use those basics to think for themselves. As Sayers concluded her speech with, “For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”⁶

This isn’t a call to fret and grapple for sovereign control over our children’s faith—that belongs to God. Rather, it’s a call to steward our children as a treasure entrusted to us by God, and we must do all that is within our power to raise them to know and love their Heavenly Father.

1. Dorothy L. Sayers, “Vacation Course in Education,” Oxford (1947), p. 9.

2. “Key Findings,” The State of Theology (Ligonier, September 19, 2022), https://thestateoftheology.com.

3. Sayers, 19.

4. Sayers, 14.

5. Sayers, 14.

6. Sayers, 16.