Taliesan

Children’s groups in churches are filled with doctrinal nonsense. But shallow experience is far more harmful than doctrinal nonesense, because the doctrine tends to roll off their little minds like water off wax, but pseudo-experience inures them to the real thing.

The superficiality that is endemic in the evangelical traditions is the effort to get children ’saved”, by which is meant get them to “give their hearts to Jesus” from which they get forgiveness of sins and eternal salvation.

Now forensic justification is an important truth of the New Testament, but is not the focus and hinge in the Christian life the evangelical churches have made it into.

Just because something is true in a certain context does not mean it is true or edifying outside that context. Even in mature adults justification often swells to an emphasis which is so outsized it has lost its original context, which is a life where Jesus is Lord. There follows a spiritual life that functons by “cheap grace”, to use Bonhoeffer’s phrase. Cheap grace is grace that costs those who consume it nothing. This is a wide and deep theological issue that I am not going to try and treat here (see Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship.) Bonhoeffer’s arguments can be focused into one point, contained in his famous quote from that book: “…when Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” So the true cost of grace is always the old man’s right to exist.

Cheap grace is not only a theological error, but also (like all theological errors) is psychologically unsound. Stir up in a child religious wonder or guilt, then resolve that nascent religious experience into a release triggered by a legal transaction in an unseen realm, and you make the beginnings of the classic neurotic religious protestant, who is saved because he believes in believing and this has nothing to do with what kind of person he is. Everyone knows these people; they are “ok” not in the sense they are good people (Jesus hasn’t made them good) but because they at one point in their lives checked off the box called “heaven or hell?” on their mental checklist. That checkbox, inked by 40 year old ink, is what they look back at 100 times a day in their conscience. This form of protestant faith is really a neurotic talismanic obsession.

But what we are trying to do for our children is have them grow up to be good people. Yes, this is the task of even the Christian parent. It is sad to even have to say this, but: Christian parents, your job is to instill virtue in your children. This means to make them love what is good, and hate what is bad.

So the foundation of childhood should not be forensic justification or any other New Testament truth, but character formation around a center of law and wisdom and the fear of God, as we describe later. The foundation of character is law; the capstone will be Jesus. Reverse the order and you make freaks.

The problem of inauthenticity is as real among evangelical adults as among their children, but my concern here is the children. A certain number of parents reading this will understand immediately what I am talking about when I express concern about the inurement to Christian maturity that forensic justification produces. This discussion is for them.

Those who are only offended by this discussion are themselves part of the problem and, frankly, my agenda here is not to convince you - but to offer thoughts on how parents can protect their children from you.

—-

Forensic justification is particularly corrosive in a young child’s mind. It produces massive inauthentic religious experience fostered by well-meaning but shallow youth workers, who are themselves rooted in an assumption that the experience of forensic justification in and of itself is worth more than the life of character that follows.

Think of the salvation experiences fostered in evangelical children’s churchs around the country. The gospel is presented in 10 minutes with the aid of puppets, the children are invited to “get saved” or to “invite Jesus into your heart”, and frequently, they do.

Of course, there is no salvation in the New Testament outside a conscious commitment of the entire life to the Lordship of Jesus. I question how many children are capable of this decision.

I’m not saying all these experiences are necessarily false. They can be real. All we have to go on is the empirical evidence, which says that few of them are life-changing in the way that New Testament salvation experiences were. And there are no other standards with which to evaluate them. If few of them are life-changing, then they are predominantly false.

And what else do you expect from 5 and 7 and 9 year old children? How many of them have the capacity to make a decision which is supposed to radically alter the rest of their lives?

Invariably, when I make this argument, someone is horrified, as if I’m devalueing a child’s sincerity and needlessly complicating the gospel. There follows a string of indignant sentimentalities, like “Jesus honors the smallest child’s intent”, etc.

Of course Jesus said “let the children come to me.” Those who come to him, change forever. Those who don’t, didn’t. The discussion is about which of them really come to Him, versus complying with the obvious wishes of authority figures or peers, as children do.

Children learn during these church moments to carry on a religious schizophrenia. There is this life, where nothing ultimately important happens, and there is the unseen religious sphere, where everything important happened when I was a kid. This is not the language any of these kids, once grown, will now admit thinking, of course, but this is the structure of their internal life. Two tiers, two sides, one beyond the veil and one here, and this side is less real than the other. In those who understand it, it might be Platonism. But for most this is simply Docetism.
So all this comes to some quite practical advice: keep your children away from children’s groups in churches where they are invited to “get saved”. Especially where various manipulations are used to run up the numerical count.

When the moment comes for your child to make a conscious, informed decision to be a disciple of Jesus Chrsit, let it come about in a sweet, serious conversation between the two of you. Let it be a conversation where the child clearly understands something of what kind of a commitment he is making. Let is be a moment he will always remember as the hinge of his life.

When this sort of conversation happens, justification will be an important but small part of the whole picture. The focus of the decision will be on making Jesus Lord and pledging a life’s allegiance to Him; the removal of past sins by His blood is a necessary part of that commitment but it is not the ongoing focus.

Therefore the focus of his life will not suddenly shift from his deeds in the here and now to an unseen transaction. That unseen transaction (grasped by faith) will free him to live out the call of Jesus in the concrete here and now. No schizophrenia, but new life.