Teach your children wisely.
You want to teach your children sound doctrine. Your doctrine. Big mistake.
The hardest part, you see, is admitting that you might be wrong. But here is the deal: other than the Gospel (and what is explicit in scripture, with no possible ambiguity) it is not the case that you might be wrong, it is rather the case that you are almost certainly wrong, at least in some of the details. And not just on some of your doctrine, but most or all of it. We fallible miserable creatures all are wrong, to some degree, about everything except the Gospel. Deal with it.
The best way to teach your children is to have the largest possible circle of orthodoxy. Or, to invert that, to have the smallest number of line-in-the-sand doctrines.
You don’t have to avoid teaching what you believe to your children. By no means. You do not have to be ecumenical. You just have to be clear that other Christians have other viewpoints, and nobody will really know for certain about so many things until we all are on the other side of glory, and then it won’t matter if we were wrong. It won’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. This is hard. You don’t want to take that route, do you? Hint: that is not your righteousness pricking you, it’s your ego and pride.
The more you shrink your circle of orthodoxy, the more you place your children at risk. 1
The obvious case is creation. If you teach your children that they must accept that creation occurred in six literal days, and that it is an important doctrine, they will likely, up to say age 14 or so, maybe a little longer, accept your teaching. You just better hope that when they get to college they do not study science, because they will be presented with the incontrovertible evidence that the earth and universe are billions of years old. 2 If they lose their faith at that point, (I’ve seen it happen more than once) you’ll resort to blaming the pointy-headed professors. But it won’t be their fault. It will be your fault. You will have set them up for failure. At that point, all your good intentions will not be worth a bucket of warm spit.
You don't see that happening do you? No, you are molding your stout sons and daughters into your version of creation orthodoxy and they are responding better than you ever could have hoped or imagined.
You fool. That's for now. Enjoy it while it lasts. They are still children. They think you are actually quite smart and reliable. Soon they will not be children.
On the other hand, if you teach them that some fine Christians think the earth is old, and we can agree to disagree on this unimportant doctrine, then the risk is minimized.
Your solution to the Problem of Evil? It’s wrong. You do not have one. You may have something that allows you to sleep at night, which is fine. But Problem of Evil quasi-solutions do not transfer well. That is, nobody is ever truly satisfied with anyone else’s PoE “solution”. So do not tell your kids that they must deal with this insoluble problem the way you deal with it. Do not teach them a solution; teach them how to cope as well as they can with the fact that, at least up until now, there is no solution.
Your doctrine of God? Your doctrines of immutablility, impeccability, impassibility, simplicity? To varying degrees you have them wrong. It is virtually guaranteed. The “derivations” of these from scripture are not deductive, even with the premise that the bible is the infallible word of God. No, they are based, as any examination of their "proofs" will show, on tenuous threads of inductive reasoning. They might be right. There may even be a high probability that they are right. But it is not 100% certainty. And since even the proponents of these doctrines (in three out of four cases, that would be me) differ in the details, it is almost certainly the case that your (and my) particular version of any of these doctrines is wrong.
That’s okay.3 Teach your children (older in this case) that this is the conclusion you have reached. But you might be wrong. You can say that, can’t you?
The more your child comes to disagree with doctrines that you taught as absolute, the more they will face an unnecessarily difficult and painful path. Choose your lines in the sand wisely.
The Nicene creed, I submit, is a very wise choice of the maximum quantity of theology about which one can teach their children in an uncompromising manner. In everything else be flexible.
1 As a Calvinist I don’t believe you can place your children at eternal risk. They are either elect or they are not. However, you can certainly contribute to their path being more difficult than necessary by placing them, for no reason other than your ego and pride, in a needless state of cognitive dissonance.
2 If you send them to a university that doesn’t teach real science, like Liberty University, you’ll just be delaying the inevitable.
3 Except for the fact that the modern so-called scholars who like to attach the heresy word to non-affirmation of these doctrines. Only they do it (in my experience) in a cowardly way. They say “Such and such dead theologian (bonus points if it was a marquee Reformed theologian or for even more bonus points, a Puritan) believed that a denial of this or that doctrine was heresy. They generally lack the you-know-what to tell you that they view it as heresy. Even though you both know that they do. I would respect someone who calls me a heretic outright, rather than letting a dead guy be the bad cop. Sigh. Like atheists, they don't make pharisees like they used to!
I agree wholeheartedly. Wish I had thought of this myself.
ReplyDeletegood post. Been thinking about these things now that I have a one year old. It seem like an impossible task to raise faithful children in this world. Do you have kids? How have they grappled with some of the lines you've drawn around your faith?
ReplyDelete