Petra Distinctives

When God created the world, both His activity and His works were true, good, and beautiful.  Because we are made in God’s image, we must imitate God’s work of creation and Christ’s work of re-creation by ordering our lives in terms of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.  When we do so in obedience to the Creator, we find “the good life” that man has always sought.  At Petra Academy, we make these distinctives our pursuit.

Veritas (Truth)

Humans find themselves in the curious position of living in a world that they did not create.  Thus, from infancy on we spend our lives discovering both order in the world and insights into the character of the One who created it.  As many have reminded us, though, “…the wisdom of this world is folly with God.”  From the standpoint of man as man, then, our situation is not only curious, but also tragic.

Into this apparent tragedy, however, stepped the great “I Am.”  Because we have beheld His glory, we are able to begin “to affirm of what is, that it is, and of what is not, that it is not” (Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1011b25), i.e., we are able to begin to know and speak the truth.  He is what is, and all knowledge is thus necessarily rooted in Him.  Since Christ has revealed Himself to us, we are able to begin to know Him.  And because we are able to begin to know Him, we are able to begin to know all things.

Pulchritudo (Beauty)

All beauty has its origin in God.  After making the world, God filled the created order with beauty, declaring that everything was “very good.”  God then commissioned man to imitate His creative act by using Creation to make new things—tools, statues, houses, cathedrals, poems.  The beauty of man’s work and art is derived from the beauty of God’s original good Creation.

Though Creation fell with man, yet beauty remains—the world is full of objects and events that pierce our souls.  Even in his fallen state, man still imitates God’s creative act by bringing the elements of Creation into new shapes and orders, thereby revealing hidden glories.

But because of the Fall, beauty has an additional purpose.  All beautiful things point to an even higher beauty, to a Transcendent One who is Beauty itself.  Thus, beauty in our world gives us true, intense pleasure, but leaves us with a desperate longing for Ultimate Beauty—for the Face and Presence of our Creator God.

Probitas (Goodness)

Classical educator David Hicks makes an unusual claim:  “The greatest part of education is instilling in the young the desire to be good.”  The reason we embrace this claim is that we find goodness perfectly etched on the person of Jesus Christ, even as He “makes all things new” with hands that wear our wounds.

This is the source of our audacious pursuit of “whatever is good”:  that God who proclaimed His Creation “good” is renewing that same Creation in Christ.  We believe that the scope of that goodness extends to the breadth of the renewed Creation, that the “kings of the earth” and “nations” will have “splendor…glory, and…honor” to contribute to the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:24, 26).  Nothing that is good will pass away, to the glory of the Lord, who makes all things new.