The primary task in Christian discipleship is helping people escape the sins of this world. At its simplest, that means displacing whatever they already have with an other-worldly focus. This fallen world cannot be fixed, and God’s plan of redemption is pulling out everyone He decides to save and destroying the fallen part of His Creation. We cry, “Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus!” We want to get this over with and see the final redemption.
But we are stuck here for now. Until That Day when He comes to cleanse all things of sin, producing a New Heaven and a New Earth, we are commanded to do our best to show glimpses of That Day whenever we can. We condemn sin and we exhibit righteousness. We know in advance most of the world won’t get it, but that’s not the point. What does all this have to do with rearing children? We have in the hearts and minds of our children the best chance we are going to have with any humans on this earth of making God’s revelation clear. Our stewardship over our children is by far more complete than over any other human we shall encounter.
I assert the very fundamental core of Christian Education is bringing children to mysticism. Since the very nature of Christian faith is mysticism by definition, how can we avoid the inherent obligation of raising children with a fully mystical understanding of the world? That happens to be God’s own viewpoint, insofar as He allows us to know about Him.
I’m not going to spin out a whole book on Christian Education here, but there is one thing I wish Christian parents would consider: Why do we still use the forms and tools of this fallen world? The single greatest hindrance to spiritual development is fear, in particular, unjustified fear. All that I find utterly objectionable in false portrayals of the gospel of Jesus Christ is touched by this one huge error. Why do we teach people to fear?
Hopefully you aren’t stupid enough to equate the popular KJV translation for reverence — “fear” — for the term I use here. This is about the unjust fear of Satan or anything he might try to do. We have bought into the very popular fear-instilling images of this fallen world, in particular of Western Civilization, as a critical core component of our “Christian” education, and child rearing in particular. Satan can do nothing God does not permit as the Divine Referee in our struggle on earth. We can choose to put ourselves under Satan’s dominion, but he can’t choose it for us.
Yes, it’s a fairly complicated picture with various threads of authority in your life. People whom God appoints to carry earthly authority can choose evil which exposes you to Satanic dominion. There are counter-measures in both directions, but if you fear all this, you have missed the point. We live in a fallen world; bad things will happen to the parts of us which belong to this world. If the things we teach our children keep them focused on their fears regarding earthly consequences, this hardly encourages them to be other-worldly.
Somehow we have bought into this notion being a Christian is about fixing the problems of this life. That’s not Christ; that’s Law. Just get a grip on the proper understanding of the Laws of God and you will have all you are going to have on that plane. When Jesus spoke to His nation regarding the proper understanding of the Law of Moses, He was clarifying a major problem with their grasp of all things. It was a Hellenized mess absorbing people’s minds in materialism and pure logic, and completely removing the Spirit Realm from consideration. It’s bad enough people with dead spirits cannot understand any part of the Spirit Realm, but the Jewish leadership had bricked up the entrance itself. They denied the existence of it by embracing the Aristotelian epistemology and tried to fit the ancient Hebrew Scriptures into that matrix. A very bad fit it was. But the whole of Western Christianity has bought the same Aristotelian lies about the very nature of all things, and we have this powerful move to dismiss the ineffable simply because it’s ineffable.
Jesus said the ineffable Spirit Realm was the only thing which mattered, and He spoke in parables to force the issue, culminated in dying on the Cross. Stop trying to make the Cross logical! Doing so surrenders the whole ground of consideration, and we get the results Paul had at Athens. Pull your children out of this world. You can’t do that physically; it’s a parable. Rather, you determine to fix their minds on the Spirit Realm insofar as it lies within your stewardship from God.
One of the worst things we do is get lazy and try to use childhood fears as leverage to gain compliance. We deepen our sin by exposing them to fairy tales from a deeply fallen culture (mostly arising from primitive Germanic paganism), put them in front of the TV where even worse influences dominate, and expect them to come easily to Christ. We have absorbed this insane mechanistic assumption of human logic that fear will save us some work.
That is not to say I argue against corporal punishment. Everyone knows the biblical culture of ancient Hebrew believed in spanking. God spanked, but on a different scale. We spank not reflexively but as a last result when nothing else works. If a child chooses to operate on the lower level of appetites and fear, then we do what we must to keep them from harming themselves too much, and from harming others. The worst mistake we make in using “the rod” is doing so for our own convenience. We aren’t mystical enough in the first place, so we operate from too much of this world’s evaluation. We perpetuate that into the next generation by abusing the rod, either in excess of use or excess of refusing, but it’s always the mistake of taking a shortcut on our end.
Let’s take care of that one major idiocy of modern secular humanism: Spanking does not teach violence, per se. The very completely damned modern Western culture does that. Spanking teaches them violence has a very restricted use, entirely within the parameters of God’s Laws. Violence is not inherently evil, but highly discouraged. Simplistic social and political propaganda comes darn near to justifying violence to get “experts” to stop lying about it. They are reasoning and acting on a childish level and we should consider ways to make them stop destroying the world. (Take that, “Child Development Experts”!) But notice the whole point is avoiding it, not resorting to it reflexively for the sake of convenience. Otherwise, we really are teaching them violence as a way of getting what we want without regard to what is actually good.
Much better is for our children to see us living and acting on a totally other-worldly focus. We teach them a healthy respect for how the world outside the home is utterly insane. We teach them we must not participate in that. We teach them they can’t really leave this world in the literal sense until God pulls the plug. He, and He alone, has that prerogative. So long as there is life left in us, we thread our spiritually minded way through a very damned world. Not because we hope to fix anything, but because that’s what we must do. We take the eternal viewpoint our mission is to endure the threats of this life on the lower plane, all the sorrows and discomforts, because in the long run, those don’t matter.
Inculcating fear in children is a screaming assertion this world does matter, and that’s a lie of Satan.
1 Kings 12:13-14 shows the results of Solomon parenting style. If you justify spanking children after Proverbs 23:13, you also have to be willing to justify stoning rebellious children after Deuteronomy 21:18-21. As Machiavelli said “never do any enemy a small injury”. Have you seen Cool Hand Luke? Its an accurate fictional portrait of a sociopath. A sociopath will respond to your punishments with fury and will only seek ways to make you pay for humiliating him. When anyone tries to force Luke to submit, he escalates the situation until they kill him. Exactly the same behavior you should expect from a sociopathic kid… I know because I’m an aspergic sociopath, like Adam Lanza. If you want to know how an aspergic sociopath son would behave read this: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/12/22/i-was-adam-lanza.html
Aside from sociopathic revenge (which God partly blames on parents according to Ephesians 6:4) there is sadomasochism: http://nospank.net/sexdngrs.htm Its no wonder that spanking is called “the english vice”.
Anyway, there are other possible readings of Proverbs 23:13. Notice that it says “he shall not die”, yet over 1000 children die each year in USA as a result of corporal punishment. If “beatest him with the rod” literally means to beat a child with a rod, then the Bible would be lying. But the Bible is the Word of God and does not lie. Thus, the passage must be referring to a non physical correction with a figurative rod. Also notice that Exodus 21:20 discusses a situation in which a man must be punished if he beats his male or female slave that he owns to death with a rod. One can conclude that the rod in Proverbs cannot be the same rod as is mentioned in Exodus. If it were, then the Bible would be lying. The hebrew word “shebet” through most of OT refers to God Authority. If you read the “shebet” verses in Proverbs, you will see that you can always substitute the word “authority” for “rod”. If “rod” can be referring to God authority or a nation authority in some of the above verses, then it is referring to a parent authority in the following verses. You cannot kill someone with your authority. You can be striking (beating) them with your authority by using your authority to discipline (teach, disciple, educate, instruct) and guide them. I hold to the figurative interpretation of this verse. So many Christians have taken FIVE verses and hung a whole child rearing philosophy on them. Parents are told to use this as a primary form of punishment (what these experts refer to as discipline). Some use the words “punishment” and “discipline” interchangeably when they mean two entirely different things. These people are basing their theology on nothing more than the traditions of men. Also, notice that Deuteronomy 25:3 imposes a limit of 40 stripes to beat a grown man in the back (which unlike the buttocks is no erogenous part), “then thy brother should seem vile unto thee”, so if the rod were literal a limit should have been stated for beating children also.
Steven, you have yanked this all out of context. I have to wonder at your reading comprehension of what I wrote.
Solomon’s failure was not his lack of moral grasp as expressed in Proverbs, but his failure to apply the moral truth in his own life, particularly in the matter of indulging his many wives and concubines in the idolatry. But even that doesn’t explain all the factors behind Rehoboam’s folly. This was a critical juncture in God’s sovereign plans for human politics, and more than once in the Bible some of the best kings did terribly stupid things because it was part of a wider plan at which we gain only a mere glimpse. Repeatedly, the moral principle is stated as God herding humans as ignorant cows when it comes to politics.
Not kill someone under your authority? My friend, you really do not understand Hebrew social history. While there would be social repercussions, a parent could lawfully kill their own child up through age 9. Spanking a child who was psychopathic would expose whether that child could adapt or would remain a threat to social stability. That left the father a choice of exiling or executing, presumably based on his own conscience. And a man who was clan head was often required to execute his own kin for their crimes, lest he justify something worse done to his clan. I think the Pharisees would really appreciate your effort to parse the Hebrew words, or how you miss the point of Paul’s warning to Ephesian Christians about discipline without a heart-led moral purpose. Look, a rod of authority has no symbolic meaning if it is never used for actual beating. We pray we don’t need it for that, but it’s not just ceremonial decoration as with so many other cultures outside the ANE.
Yet I agree readily that Anglo-American culture gets it all wrong, and said as much in the post above. Anglo-Americans might suffer from some weird sexual fantasies with spanking the buttocks, but you have zero grounds for suggesting Hebrew folks faced that kind of cultural perversion. I hardly endorse what is taught in mainstream religion. They get some elements right, but often miss the whole point. And their leaders have no excuse for ignoring the vast wealth of information available on how to understand Hebrew culture and intellectual traditions. I’m still shaking my head at a couple of PhDs I talked with who flatly refused to use that approach in discerning Scripture, but insisted on leading their congregations down the wide highway of pop-theology.
I’m pretty sure your reading of this post is radically different from what most of my other readers get from it. And then there are numerous other posts on the same subject that offer a larger context of my beliefs. Why do you pick out one or two small details like that? (shaking my head and chuckling)
Pastor, I hope I’m not bothering you. That said:
“But even that doesn’t explain all the factors behind Rehoboam’s folly”
Exactly. Solomon was a lustful idolater, but that wasn’t related to Rehoboam. An unbiased literal exegesis of Proverbs implies that Solomon was wrong at best, lying at worse, when he portrayed the rod as a magic wand able to save souls (Proverbs 23:14) and exorcise foolishness (Proverbs 22:15) through child-beating. I don’t accept child rearing advice from someone who failed as a parent.
“Repeatedly, the moral principle is stated as God herding humans as ignorant cows when it comes to politics”
Trying to hide Solomon failure behind your Theodicy of choice (Predestination) is a jedi mind trick.
“Not kill someone under your authority? My friend, you really do not understand Hebrew social history. While there would be social repercussions, a parent could lawfully kill their own child”
Thats exactly like the pagan Patria Potestas, my friend. Would you kill you own children nowadays? Most fundies believe in spanking but not in stoning, something I find rather incoherent.
“up through age 9”
I can’t find this in the Bible (can you give me the exact verse?). Given the behavior of the stoned kid (“and a drunkard”) I think he was a teen.
“Spanking a child who was psychopathic would expose whether that child could adapt or would remain a threat to social stability. That left the father a choice of exiling or executing, presumably based on his own conscience”
Don’t equate psychopathy with sociopathy. Its like equating schizophrenia with STPD. There is a spectrum, also. Spanking a slightly psycho kid, who otherwise would remain mostly peaceful, could CAUSE a threat to social stability. To turn a little scholar into a little kamikaze just because you blindly trust in Solomon magic wand is foolish.
“And a man who was clan head was often required to execute his own kin for their crimes, lest he justify something worse done to his clan”
Required by who?
“I think the Pharisees would really appreciate your effort to parse the Hebrew words, or how you miss the point of Paul’s warning to Ephesian Christians about discipline without a heart-led moral purpose”
I think its a jedi mind trick to equate my disagreement with pharisaism. Pharisees strike me as the typical child-beating fundies, Sadduces as the liberal clergy, and Rome as the secular government. Christ rejected all them. I don’t miss the point: I simply don’t believe it means what you believe it means. Exegesis is an art, not a science.
“Look, a rod of authority has no symbolic meaning if it is never used for actual beating”
Why? Ceremonial swords are never used to fight yet they have symbolic meaning. Also, this contradicts your next statement “We pray we don’t need it for that”.
“but it’s not just ceremonial decoration as with so many other cultures outside the ANE”
Corporal punishment was used worldwide. It isn’t specifically ANE. Also, I only trust your “ANE” as long as it fits my own insight. As you acknowledged in Icons and Idols “I can’t promise I’ll hit myself consistently” and in Logical Odds and Ends “We are not ANE”.
“Yet I agree readily that Anglo-American culture gets it all wrong, and said as much in the post above. Anglo-Americans might suffer from some weird sexual fantasies with spanking the buttocks, but you have zero grounds for suggesting Hebrew folks faced that kind of cultural perversion”
Spanking is a trademark of american conservatism, yet “the english vice” was coined for Victorian England by France. Sadomasochism happens wordwide (its a top fetish among east asians for ex), so it isn’t related to anglo culture or genetics, but to human psychology. It may happen in any population, even the chosen people (there are a lot of jews into porn). Maybe thats why Rehoboam was a spoiled brat: Solomon magic wand was his favorite toy. This implies that its possible to spoil a (masochistic) kid through pain.
“I hardly endorse what is taught in mainstream religion”
Yet you are still tied to your cultural background, consciously or not. If you weren’t raised by american conservatives you wouldn’t regard Predestination and spanking as essentials. ln contrast, I don’t allow my cultural background to creep into my mysticism.
“I’m still shaking my head at a couple of PhDs I talked with who flatly refused to use that approach in discerning Scripture, but insisted on leading their congregations down the wide highway of pop-theology”
Perception is subjective. We read the same Scriptures, we pray to the same God, we are both mystics, we are both introverts, yet we have different theologies. If these PhDs lead megachurches they are extroverts, so their perception will be even more different.
“I’m pretty sure your reading of this post is radically different from what most of my other readers get from it”
Fine. I’m an eccentric. I don’t fear numbers. I’m crusading for the liberty and dignity of children, which biblically implies I’m crusading for Christ (Matthew 19:14, Mathew 25:40).
“Why do you pick out one or two small details like that?”
Because thats the only way to make my point. As your friend, its my moral duty to warn you about the dark side of spanking. I hope you like my constructive criticism ^^
At this point, the only answer I have is that you place your reasoning above the revelation of God. Point-by-point reply is pointless. No, I’m not at all angry or bothered, but I will not be distracted from the calling and purpose behind this blog. Readers can make up their own mind.