It’s 1938, Hitler’s Germany.   German police arrested Katharina Plett, mother of twelve, while her husband fled to Austria with the children. A female plain-clothes police officer knocked at the door of Katharina Plett’s house around 11:00 AM.  When she opened the door, other officers, who had hidden themselves, forced their way in.  They allowed Mrs Plett to change her clothes, but a police officer followed her into her bedroom in case “she would arm herself and shoot us all.” Hitler’s finest were taking no chances with this declared enemy of the state.

She was taken to Gelsenkirchen and thrown into prison.  Her husband, desperately seeking information, was told that no information would be given. A written request for information was denied. The media of German wrote nothing of the arrest and imprisonment of the wife and mother.

Her crime?  Home-schooling her children, a punishable offense in the eyes of Hitler’s state.  She and her husband weren’t the only ones to feel Nazi wrath: seven home-schooling families in Northwest Germany were forced to enroll their children in a public school. The Paderborn County school board levied fines against the families and ordered the children to attend school or the police would forcibly take them to school. The Nazi state had decreed that any resistance by the parents would result in the removal of these thirteen elementary age children from their homes and into state custody.

In 1937, those families had pulled their children out of the public schools to begin teaching them at home, because, as Christians, they wanted to protect their children from the humanistic and godless values being taught to their children in the public schools captivated by Hitler’s philosophy for a new, pure Germany.

The German state, in an official statement said, "You and your children are not living in isolation on some island, but rather in an environment posing intra- and extracurricular situations where you'll have to accept that your world view will be curtailed."  The statement issued by the state further explained that home-schooling could not be allowed as "children should not be encapsulated or kept apart from the outside world. In these cases, the parents' rights to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society…"  Read that, “Hitler’s society.”

I should stop and explain that something is wrong.  There’s something wrong with the above report, something very wrong.  All of the above is true except one thing:  the date.  The date of the news report isn’t out of Germany in 1938; the correct date of the report is the Germany of today, now; actually, 2005-2006.  Not Hitler, not 70 years ago; today, right now, home-schooling is illegal in Germany.  The statements issued by the state are statements made only four years ago.

The arrest, the jailing, the levying of fines, the fleeing of the husband and children occurred in the now, not 70 years ago.  The law against home-schooling which the parents violated did originate in Hitler’s Germany, but is still a binding law there today.

Why?  The state told us: “. . . you'll have to accept that your world view will be curtailed.”  The state does have some smarts that many Christians don’t--Christianity is a worldview and that worldview cuts against the grain of the state.  Ours is a worldview that drives a stake through the statist drive for unlimited power in that the Bible teaches us that there is a power higher than the state, that man is a sinner in need of a Savior which is not the state, that man is created in the image and likeness of God, and that image and likeness is to be respected by the state, that man’s salvation is not located in the state, that man is not the servant of the state, and that man’s destiny is not in the hands of the state.  Such a worldview is intolerable to the statist mentality and has been intolerable since and before the days of Nebuchadnezzar.

But that’s way over there in Germany and Germany is an ocean and a continent away. Did you hear about this in January of this year?  “In a move designed to send a message to parents, a Montgomery County New York couple were arrested and ticketed for home-schooling their children and for failing to register them and their curriculum with the school district.

“Richard Cressy, 47, and Margie Cressy, 41, both of the town of Glen, New York, never registered their four children or their home-schooling curriculum with the local school district, said the Sheriff’s Office,” reports WRGB, a CBS affiliate in Albany, New York.

"The Superintendent of the Fonda-Fultonville Central School District confirmed the four children, ranging in age from 8 to 14, had not been registered with the school district for the last seven years.

“The couple may lose custody of their children. The case has been turned over to the Montgomery County District Attorney and the Child Protective Unit.”

The Bible warns that the world is neither the friend of the Christian nor of the Christian family.  The values and the thinking of the Christian are not the values and thinking of the state.  The elites of American society, the prestigious schools, and the intellectuals all long for the Europeanization of America.  They admire the culture of the European nations which discarded the Bible long ago, a prime example being the French Revolution in the 18^th century.  For them, European culture is a model.

Is it possible that in America the Christian, whether he home-schools his children or not, will find the years to come to be years of living dangerously?  If so, it would behoove our churches to become rock-solid fortresses of teaching the Word and foregoing its present culture of entertainment.  It would behoove our churches to produce disciples trained to stand on the Rock, instead of producing bemused spectators in the bleachers.  The Word is not taught when its “teachers” engage in “what-does-this-verse-mean-to–you” presentations and allegorized, spiritualized Scriptures with various levels of “hidden” meanings which make the Bible meaningless putty.

The early church with its worldview gave the world a fit. (“Those who have turned the world upside down have come here.”)  The Christian world view hasn't changed one iota.  The world's fit is intensifying. 

Dr. Mike Halsey, Pastor