Discipling Children
Stephen Terry
Commentary for the January 25, 2014
Sabbath School Lesson
“He called a little child to him, and
placed the child among them. And he said: ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change
and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore,
whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom
of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.’”
Matthew 18:2-5, NIV
For
centuries, educated minds have pondered the question of nature versus nurture.
Was a child born a blank slate which any life course may be written upon? Or
did they come pre-programmed to achieve a pre-determined destiny? The former is
exemplified in statements like, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
Latching on to that perspective, totalitarian states have often exercised very
close control over children’s upbringing and education, even to the extent at
times of removing parents from the equation altogether. The Nazi Lebensborn program was based to some
degree on these ideas.[i]
Under this program, racially pure, Aryan individuals were encouraged to
procreate with other Aryans and the children were then taken by the state and
then directed through a process of education and eventually adoption by
politically approved families. This process was monitored throughout by the
S.S. under Heinrich Himmler, who apparently adopted a couple of the children
himself. Many of these children were also kidnapped from foreign countries and
subjected to a process of Germanization. Some estimates place the number of
children seized in this way as upwards of a quarter million. Many of the
children thus seized refused repatriation as they had become successfully
programmed by the German re-education process.
Within Christianity,
some feel there might be a similar process taking place within those
denominations that operate parochial school systems. Citing the biblical
passage that maintains if you raise a child a certain way, he will not depart
from it when he is older,[ii]
the denominations encourage voluntary participation in these parochial
educational programs. This Tabula rasa
approach to child rearing bears uncomfortable similarities to some aspects of
the Lebensborn, where children may be
indoctrinated into a system that discourages individuality and critical
thinking in favor of the officially approved perspective on the world. Children,
who tend to be more malleable than adults, may grow to adulthood without ever
experiencing the dialectic that occurs when well-reasoned challenges to the
prevailing paradigm are made. These challenges are simply not allowed, and
those children who express them may simply be side-lined or expelled from the school
if they persist. As may be seen through recent controversies at La Sierra
University in California, this may be even happen to faculty as well.[iii]
However, in all fairness, the termination of employment of faculty or the
expulsion from school of the students has certainly not reached the level of
the Lebensborn response to
uncooperative participants. They were usually granted a one-way passage to an
extermination camp.
When we
consider that La Sierra University is a part of the Seventh-day Adventist parochial
system, it seems contradictory to have such an approach when the denomination
is so heavily influenced by the writings of Ellen White, whom many in the
denomination herald as a prophetess, and whose writings many feel bear the
distinction of being directly influenced by the Holy Spirit. She wrote, “Every
human being, created in the image of God, is endowed with a power akin to that
of the Creator—individuality, power to think and to do. The men in whom this
power is developed are the men who bear responsibilities, who are leaders in
enterprise, and who influence character. It is the work of true education to
develop this power, to train the youth to be thinkers, and not mere reflectors
of other men’s thought. Instead of confining their study to that which men have
said or written, let students be directed to the sources of truth, to the vast
fields opened for research in nature and revelation. Let them contemplate the
great facts of duty and destiny, and the mind will expand and strengthen.
Instead of educated weaklings, institutions of learning may send forth men
strong to think and to act, men who are masters and not slaves of
circumstances, men who possess breadth of mind, clearness of thought, and the
courage of their convictions.”[iv]
Such a
sentiment is admirable and would be a profound check on the tendency to reduce
the Christian faith to little more than a thinly veiled attempt to indoctrinate
children with politically acceptable propaganda intended to prevent any
potential “boat rocking” down the road. The temptation to indoctrinate children
with unquestioned acceptance of adult belief systems is powerful and needs such
checks. The Seventh-day Adventist denomination is not alone in facing such
temptation. There has been much controversy in the past as to whether Christians
have been guilty of kidnapping Jewish children to raise as Christians much as
the Nazis kidnapped the Lebensborn children. The case of Edgardo Mortara from
the late 19th and early 20th century is an example.[v]
Born to Jewish parents, he was surreptitiously baptized as a child by a Christian
household servant, and the Catholic Church used that as a pretext to seize the
child and raise him under the guidance of the Augustinians as a Catholic. Their
efforts were so successful that he eventually became a priest and was used as
weapon of the Vatican to evangelize Jews to Catholicism. As might be expected,
the attempts of someone taught only to think in line with accepted Catholic dogma
met with very little success in his attempts to convert Jews.
Perhaps this
may be why Christian denominations meet with as little success as they do in
proselytizing among the well-educated. They have an inadequate experience in
critical thinking, relying instead on hackneyed phrases that might trigger recognizable
responses among the indoctrinated, but tend to fall flat when offered up as
supposedly profound statements to the educated. Examples might be “Fall on the
Rock of Jesus,” or “I believe this because the Bible says so,” or “We’re in the
end times.” Many educated individuals will simply see statements like these as
preludes to absolutist dogma like “Turn or burn.” Since there is little room
for critical thinking here, many will simply turn and walk away rather than
become the target of one-sided lecturing that assumes the one being lectured is
ignorant and needs to be “set straight” about God. They already know this
usually means the issue is more about control than faith and that the one doing
the lecturing is not so much interested in saving souls as in perpetuating
their perception of God in others.
Interestingly,
those who take such a “blank slate” approach toward others have a very hard
time accepting the idea of nature as opposed to nurture. When some, as those in
the LGBT community sometimes do, assert that they are what they are because God
made them that way, they respond as though nurture is the only possible
explanation for those who are different from them. That being the premise,
their solution is to re-educate or de-program those whom they feel were
incorrectly educated. Whether or not one’s sexual orientation is based on
nature or nurture, the Christian church has much to answer for over what they
have done to “correctively” reprogram individuals even to the present day.
We have
distorted the image of God from one of loving grace to one of judgmental
condemnation, and then we have imposed that image through education and
controlled socialization on the innocence of children. Much as white
supremacists have programmed their children to be dogmatically racist, we have
too often programmed ours to be arrogantly and dogmatically Christians after
our own distorted perceptions. When they critically confront those teachings,
we too often retreat behind our walls of politically acceptable dogma and
lament how they have become “lost to the church.” However, they cannot be lost
to what they have never known. They may have never encountered the real “body
of Christ.” They may have only known the organization that seeks to cast them
in the mold of plastic uniformity where acquiescence to “do this” and “don’t do
that” means success, and any challenge to those requirements, however
well-reasoned, means failure and shunning.
Of course
this does not mean that a child should simply be allowed to raise themselves.
The more advantageous perspective for both the child and the church is to
recognize that both nature and nurture are what create the well-rounded
individual. But that nurture, rather than programming the child, should seek to
expose to the child to every opportunity to think critically and engage the
world around him or her in meaningful dialectic. The scientific method is a valuable
tool for studying and understanding nature, both in us and in the world around
us. How to construct a logical argument as a foil to dogmatism is also
valuable. We might also consider as an adjunct to familiarity with the biblical
narrative an understanding of alternative narratives and philosophies. Those who
would argue against those who accept these alternatives as truth without
knowledge of their perspectives are most likely only able to argue from ignorance
and probably will receive the appropriate response to such a presentation.
A child has
a hunger for knowledge of the world around them. Most parents can tell you that
each child passes through a stage where their favorite question is “Why?” Perhaps
enabling one another to continuously sustain that innocent inquisitiveness is
the recipe to avoid the calcification of Christianity in the unbending matrix
of dogmatic assertion.
