Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy is intentional about being academically excellent as well as Christ-centered in all we do. To achieve this, our students must have a general understanding of the Bible, Church history, theology, and Christian spirituality. They must also be encouraged to consider connections between these fields of knowledge and their other academic disciplines—because in a secular age, that type of thinking does not come naturally. The key to this endeavor is properly training our faculty in what we refer to as Theological Integration.

Theological Integration is the process by which our teachers guide students to consider how thinking in a “Christ-centered” way should affect all areas of study and learning. Most Christian schools refer to this process as “Biblical integration,” a term coined by Frank E. Gaebelein, the founding Headmaster of The Stony Brook School, in the first half of the 20th century. His work is foundational for the Christian school movement in America. But as we began training teachers toward an integration of faith and learning, we decided that a new term would be more accurate and useful in our multidenominational independent school context.

To begin, it must be emphasized that as an institution, we hold to a high view of Scripture. The first article in our Statement of Faith reads, “We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.” Therefore, the Bible shapes the way we think about theology and all of life. We work diligently and humbly to exegete the Bible to understand key principles inherent in its teachings (“biblical principles”). The difficulty, however, is that mining key principles from a complex book written millennia ago in a multitude of cultures and numerous languages is no simple task. Furthermore, our school is made up of over 160 different churches, and while there are many “biblical principles” that we all agree on, others are rooted in denominational understandings and sectarian theological readings.

This is why we are careful to use the language of Theological Integration rather than “Biblical Integration” for how we attempt to enrich our curriculum theologically. In a multidenominational school, certain sectarian or denominational interpretations should not be given priority by teachers based on their personal interpretations or given preference in their curricula. Therefore, as a school, we focus on five key theological “Big Ideas” that historical orthodox Christians have believed from the Early Church until the present. For our theological “Big Ideas,” we’ve used the language from Cornelius Plantinga’s Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living, our theological primer for faculty.