Knowing God and Multiplication

What does it matter whether a school is Christian or not? Surely a child's learning of multiplication has no connection with whether the teacher is a Christian. 2x2=4 for the Christian, the Muslim, and the atheist alike.

In a recent faculty training session, Andrew Kern from the Circe Institute quoted Aristotle from his Nicomachean Ethics. "It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits." (NE 1094b) The word Aristotle used for "nature" was physis, the root of words like "physical" and "physics." I want to expand what Aristotle said by replacing physis with ousia the word for "essence," and looking at this question from the point of view of a world that has seen God in the flesh.

The classic wording for the revelation of God as Trinity is mia ousia, treis hypostaseis, which means "one essence, three persons." Before God revealed Himself to us, we had a limited understanding of what the essence of a thing was. We assumed it was static and lifeless. Once God showed His own essence to be dynamic and involving three persons...Father, Son, and Holy Spirit...we could see that the essence of anything that has been created through Him (and all things have been, according to John 1:3) is a bit more complex.

Putting all this back into Aristotle's words, it is the mark of an educated person to learn and explore each area of knowledge according to the nature of that knowledge, understanding first that the nature of anything is rooted somehow in the nature of God, Who has revealed Himself to us most fully in Jesus Christ. (Colossians 1:19)

So, yes, you can learn your math facts without ever knowing God. What you will have failed to achieve, however, is the full understanding of mathematics, or any other discipline, and for that you will have missed becoming the truly educated person that God intended you to be.