The English word the King James Bible translates as nurture is paideia. In classical Greek it did not mean comfort or sentiment. It meant education in the fullest sense the ancient world knew — the deliberate, lifelong formation of a person’s mind, body, character, taste, and soul. The seven liberal arts. The great works of Homer and Plato. The disciplines of virtue. The shaping of a citizen who could think clearly, speak truthfully, recognize beauty, and live justly.
St. Paul did not choose this word casually. He was raised in Tarsus, one of the great Hellenistic intellectual centers of the ancient world, and trained in classical Greek rhetoric. He could quote Aratus, Menander, and Epimenides from memory — and he did, in his sermons and his letters. When Paul stood on the Areopagus in Athens and addressed the Greek philosophers in their own tongue with their own poets in his mouth, he was speaking from inside the classical tradition, not outside it.
So when Paul wrote to the Ephesians and told fathers to raise their children “in the paideia of the Lord,” he was not borrowing a vague pastoral metaphor. He was invoking the entire classical Greek apparatus for forming a human being — and baptizing it into Christ.
The classical curriculum is not a tool the church borrowed from pagan antiquity. It is the very form Scripture commands. Paul tells us to give our children paideia — and then tells us whose paideia: the Lord’s.
This is why VCA Virtual is classical and Christian, both, without compromise on either side. We do not read Homer despite Scripture. We do not read Augustine instead of Plato. We read all of them, in their proper order, under the lordship of Christ, because that is precisely what Paul commanded the fathers of Ephesus to do.
