Thursday, September 22, 2022

Book Review: Along the Way, ed. Ron Bruner and Dana Kennamer Pemberton

See also the preview for this review.

Instead of writing a full review of Along the Way, here are my notes.

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Along the Way notes

The authors of Along the Way are:
Ch. 1 -- Ron Bruner and Dana Pemberton
Ch. 2 -- Ron Bruner
Ch. 3 -- Steven Bonner
Ch. 4 -- Ron Bruner
Ch. 5 -- Samjung Kang-Hamilton
Ch. 6 -- Samjung Kang-Hamilton
Ch. 7 -- Holly Catterton Allen
Ch. 8 -- Nathan Pickard
Ch. 9 -- Jeff W. Childers
Ch. 10 -- Jeff W. Childers
Ch. 11 -- Ryan Maloney
Ch. 12 -- Dana Kennamer Pemberton
Ch. 13 -- Suzetta Nutt
Ch. 14 -- Shannon Rains
Ch. 15 -- Dana Kennamer Pemberton

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Finished chapter 1.

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Finished chapter 2.

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Chapter two talks about the history of the Stone-Campbell Movement's "theology of children". Infant baptism is rejected as unbiblical, while an equally unbiblical "age of accountability" is added to explain how it is that unbaptized children who die do not go to hell (having not yet attained a certain age at which they are morally developed enough to be accountable). Those views are familiar to me from having grown up in a Church of Christ. One which is unfamiliar is a logical corrolary (although maybe not a necessary one) that [unbaptized] children are not part of the kingdom of God. Also, there are newer views which seem somewhat consonant with what I grew up with, that children are on a faith journey.

Baptism is important for salvation in the Churches of Christ -- it's essential. It may be essential for salvation in MSLN as well, or it may not be. (Because it may be, it is important.) It makes sense for it to be seen as a weighty thing connected to salvation, and thus a significant rite of passage for young people (or anyone). However, [in MSLN], children who die unbaptized are not (from that) destined to lose their salvation. So it makes sense to see them as being in relationship with God, in a sense in good standing with God (thus on a faith journey, and part of the kingdom of God).

That chapter didn't discuss child evangelism. Maybe the book will discuss it later. In case it does not, I will discuss it now.

How should adults evangelize children, given MSLN? I'm not completely sure, but my instinct at this point is to say that adults should practice "urgent libertarian holiness", desiring that their children be saved (come into a relationship with God that persists to the point that they are 100% holy) but not force them to see that in any way. Don't do anything manipulative or dishonest in teaching your children about God. Better to simply be as saved as you want them to be, and in that way anti-tempt them. But the spirit with which you relate to them (and anyone or else) should be urgent, and desirous of their salvation.

However, one aspect of salvation in MSLN is coming to love doing good, which spills over into good behavior. Should an MSLN-believing parent refrain from enforcing good behavior, since it might coerce the love of good, which is part of salvation? Unfortunately, a certain amount of coercion or coercion-adjacent behavior may be needed, not for the child's salvation, but because good behavior is necessary for children to succeed socially, or for the child to be responsible enough to take care of him- or herself, or for some other significant practical reason. These are things that enable children to make the most of their life on earth.

Children need to learn to love doing what is right for its own sake, not because it's socially rewarded or pragmatic. This is part of loving things the way God does. But that lesson has to be learned later in life, I guess.

[Maybe to some extent it can be learned in childhood, even if you can't always intentionally set up the circumstances where they have effective freedom of choice between better and worse, or can't guide children to make exactly the right choice. There's a reality that is best learned in wild places, and children can enter into some of the wild places.]

If you want to raise your children in the faith in a libertarian way, perhaps you are safe if you simply speak the truth, intending only to speak it, and not to enforce it or make it be heard or understood. Children can be exposed to much more truth in this way than if they are forced to engage with it or make a decision based on it. For instance, reading the Bible aloud to children [with no expectation of a response or even that the children necessarily listen to any given part] exposes them to much more truth than is age-appropriate or necessary for them -- but some of them may benefit from parts a parent couldn't have predicted were beneficial (the child might be ready for them sooner than the parent realizes). Children have a way of filtering out things they are not ready to hear. Pushing children to hear things might work, but be controlling or too forceful.

I will say that I was raised by a basically libertarian parenting with respect to faith. So it is an obvious thing for me to reach for as I try to think of things to recommend (and, I am biased toward it). However, I can say that I see the benefits of it. Libertarian, or libertarian-leaning parenting (in my experience) can have its downsides, for instance in preparing a person to deal with responsiblity or the social world. But, in my experience, it encourages a person to develop their own faith and their own relationship with God. I suppose those upsides and downsides are what I would expect from a disestablished thing.

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I can hear a pro-child evangelism person saying something like: It's important that we evangelize children in some other way than neutrally presenting the truth and being saved ourselves, because, even if it is the case that we persuade them to follow God for fake reasons, or out of some kind of social obligation, or for pragmatic reasons, or in some way other than that they love God for who he is -- though all this may sound less than really good, and require some kind of correction later in life, what's important is to keep them out of even worse things: temporal (drugs, gangs, premarital sex, dropping out of school) or spiritual (other religions, worldviews, simply not having a part of their brain that naturally responds to the word "God").

I can see some merit to those objections. Maybe it is the case, as with other things in life, that the lesser of two evils is better than the greater, and if those are your only two options, you should choose the lesser. But, I think that if it is at all possible to address the spiritual dangers of not evangelizing children by evangelizing them with simply presenting the truth and being saved ourselves (or perhaps something else that goes with that approach), that should be the way to go. It should be something that child evangelists think about, as a possible alternative to more manipulative or fake approaches.

I talk about anti-temptation. Is anti-temptation simply the temptation to do what is right or to love God? Like with Buber (who claims something like that we don't relate to God the same way we relate to an idol, and so we can't simply replace the object of relating or worship with God, without changing the character of it), so anti-temptation is of a different character than temptation. Temptation is about addicting and forcing, and also about taking power over someone else's mind. Temptation is about knowing someone's nature and predicting them. So anti-temptation is not about exerting psychological power on people, and not about figuring them out, knowing their psychological vulnerabilities better than they do.

Perhaps it is the case that a somewhat "tempting" child evangelism is more effective in the short run, creating a first approximation of love of God which is necessarily immature, because children are immature. Then, when children grow older, that first approximation can be corrected.

Does it get corrected? Or do people go through life with a basically immature relationship to God? How do you explain to a 30 year old that their relationship to God and life in general is immature? What about a 50 year old? There comes an age at which we feel like we are mature, and just like children, come to be unable to comprehend certain sentences, such as "you are a functioning, perhaps even psychologically healthy and well-adjusted adult, but you are deeply spiritually immature".

Probably it does get corrected in some cases, and not in others.

Some people believe in child immaturity more than is warranted. I first attended a public school that mostly had low-income students, up to grade 5. The school was a charter school with some history, and it had things like Orff-Schulwerk (or Orff-Schulwerk inspired) music education and "families" (a weekly class with the same teacher over the whole elementary school education, with students of different grade levels in each "families" class). So it had some affinity with Waldorf education or things like that. There was (perhaps therefore) a kind of generosity and respect from the teachers.

Low-income students have to go on to deal with life in a real way. Teachers who see children with generosity and respect treat (treated) those children as though they were significant and to be expected to be mature. They couldn't afford to be immature.

I remember some of the students in a grade higher than mine were more mature than me, and I still somehow expect them to be more mature than me, and always so. Even maybe those 5th graders [at that age] that I knew when I was in 4th grade [they are somehow still more mature than me now] -- there are dimensions to maturity that some children possess but which adults sometimes do not.

But then I graduated and started attending an elementary school that went to the 6th grade, part of a private Christian school system that I attended until 12th grade. At my previous school, it was like we were seen as having our roots in the future as full adults. But at my new school, it was like we were seen as having our roots in some innocent, cute past -- when we were five years old, perhaps. This may have been exacerbated by the teacher I had, who perhaps was inclined to look down on us and infantilize us, in a way that other teachers at the school may not have been. I (and a number of my classmates) did not like her, and going to 7th grade, with many teachers, was a breath of fresh air.

But though none of the other teachers were as intensely anti-maturity as her, it seemed like even the more "real" or serious ones either could not see the possibility of a Christian school that carried on the maturity of my public school, or could but were stuck in the environment they were in, which was more powerful than them.

Certainly class had something to do with it, comparing expectations one would have for low-income people versus middle-class as most of the private school students were. I don't want to say that secular schooling is really better for people's maturity than Christian schooling, although I do think my particular secular elementary school was better than my Christian education. (I think secular schooling could fail to really communicate the need for maturity to their students, even though the teachers would well be aware of that need -- a problem of too much despair, perhaps, rather than of too little facing "reality" / dark things.) But I think that perhaps an emphasis on "you are a child of God" makes you think "I need to be a child; I need to be a child my whole life; I need to be childlike my whole life; it is better for me to have the sins of childhood my whole life than the sins of adulthood" and to have a sense that someone will take care of you -- God, but you don't really believe in God for yourself necessarily, so if you don't, then the church, or some other human or group of humans. Then, church leadership becomes unhappy that their "children" don't become "adults" like them and help them work. So the church leadership overworks and takes too much control. (A pattern I have seen, which again, is from my particular experience, but which might apply elsewhere.)

[Teaching Children to Care, I would say, would have fit fairly well in my public elementary school -- perhaps some of the teachers were aware of it, even.]

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Perhaps adulthood is overrated, and we should honor childhood? I think there are two different paths to honoring childhood. One is the way of my public school, which honored how it could be that 10-year-olds could have their roots in the future, in capability, responsibility and respect and respectworthiness. Childhood can be mature, can be 100% childhood and 100% mature, and calling out the maturity of childhood honors childhood.

Another way to honor childhood is to say that the things in it which are precious, cute, immature, antithetical to capable, responsible adulthood, are to be valued, are in fact worthy of respect, though, when adults practice them, they usually are not fully respectful. We honor children by saying that it is their radical difference from adulthood that is to be honored, not their similarities with adults, the maturity that they can share with (some) adults.

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One understandable fear that might justify protecting immaturity is to protect children from abusive "taskmasters". It's not good to hate children in their immaturity. Better to respect them for having, in fact, their roots in their future, though their behaviors happen to have something to do with being 5 or 10 years old.

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Ch. 3

The author says (p. 41) --Since our children are children of God, we should so weave them into the life of the church that they cannot ever recall life without Christ.--

This sounds somewhat dangerous to me. It's like being in water your whole life so you never deeply understand wetness. In fact, this sounds somewhat like my upbringing. I had a shallow faith, that was only redeemed by seriously confronting atheism. That shallow faith (including a shallow love and trust of God) was not sufficient to save me. Imagining a future where other obvious life challenges are done away with through civilizational development, where can we find that deepening work? Maybe by not steeping our children in our faith, so that they can see it in an alien way, for themselves.

Another danger is that "Christ" is a word that often means "Jesus as we understand him". To be raised in Christianity that is so totalizing, it may be that some never seriously question "Jesus as we understand him". But to have had a non-Christian life enables us to see "Jesus as we understand him" and not-"Jesus as we understand him". This helps us to look for "Jesus as he is". We will end up with a new "Jesus as we understand him" which searches for "Jesus as he is". I might believe it if told that the author of this section is in favor of searching for "Jesus as he is", and might try to pursue that or talk about it around younger people. But, a church that is too good at making a comfortable, complete mental environment (intellectually comfortable even if not so in other ways), reduces the likelihood that the church as a whole will spontaneously generate the openness to change that may be necessary if their "Jesus as they understand him" is bad. Or, taking all churches in the church universal, if the church universal is always really good at integrating people into its own environments, if the church needs reform, there may not be enough reformers.

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The author talks a lot about children being the spiritual teachers of adults. I like this thought, generally.

I think that an adult can easily filter out the immaturity of children and disregard [it] in terms of its instructive value, and instead focus on the ways that children are mature, more so, or differently, than adults. Likewise, adolescents and young adults are similar to children in that respect.

"Maturity as we understand it" is shaped by secular thinking (like by academic psychology, or mental health), and also by the ways that we are damaged and recover as we live. Secular thinking can have some wisdom but is not totally reliable and can invalidate belief in and trust of God. The ways that we are damaged and heal may be like the ways that we lose a limb but now the pain has gone away from healing -- better that we hadn't lost the limb in the first place, and better that it grow back than that we make our "adult" state the standard for "the way things should be".

When we change our minds, we think we have done so toward a better truth, and often that is so. But we can also change our minds due to something like (or literally?) brain damage, and life with its traumas and grinding sameness and ongoingness does something to us that it hasn't yet done to those sufficiently younger than us.

In other words, wisdom is the natural gift of older people, but some wisdom is bad wisdom. Children may accept good wisdom more readily than adults, for lacking the damage acquired by adults.

Along the Way notes

Ch. 4

The author mentions Deuteronomy 6:20-22 which talks about children asking the meaning of the observance of the Mosaic Law. Children ask questions about all kinds of things. So parents (and sometimes others) have to give some kind of answer.

I feel like at this point, I'm reaching the limits of my experience, because I don't spend much time around children, do not have any of my own. So maybe I won't say how it is that parents should explain MSLN to their children, because I don't know and don't trust myself to guess. I guess you can always try to tell your children the truth, without intending that they convert to your religion (in keeping with what I've written already in these notes). But I don't know how to do that.

Along the Way notes

Ch. 5

p. 65 --As J. J. Dillon has put it, children are "deep thinkers and feelers who wrestle with life's mysteries and hunger for meaning and value by which to live their lives." [source for Dillon quote: "The Spiritual Child: Appreciating Children's Transformative Effects on Adults," Encounter 13 (2000): 4]--

Do we find ourselves encountering adults who are "deep feelers and thinkers who wrestle with life's mysteries and hunger for meaning and value by which to live their lives"? Do we take them seriously? The framing of "wrestle with life's mysteries" makes it sound like the profound truths are things that if you try to engage with them, the best you can manage is to "wrestle" with them, and they will always remain "mysteries". In other words, you will naively think there are useful answers to those questions, but in fact there are not, and you will struggle uselessly to understand them. This might prove you to be a "good person" or a "deep person", but also from another perspective, a "stupid person" or a "naive person". We can afford to be patronizing to children (although that may not be the author of this chapter's, or Dillon's, intended meaning), by praising them for thinking and feeling deeply (uselessly), for being noble humans with sensitive spirits, but adults have "reality" to deal with -- tasks to do, things to maintain. Children may be among their things to maintain, and maybe spending time in their deep thinking / feeling, meaning-seeking world is good for our children, so that their hearts can be validated until they are old enough to not need meaning, and instead perform tasks and fit in to a social environment, like a functional adult.

But, as Dillon's article title and quote may together suggest, maybe children can have a transformative effect on adults by showing the adults that deep-thinking-and-feeling, meaning-seeking side. Do we see parents, once presented by that side, feeling something stir in them, their own childhood coming to them to be integrated with their adulthood, and the adults then becoming deep-thinking, deep-feeling meaning-seekers? Or do the adults instead feel a sense of "being humbled" and honor their children, while not fundamentally adopting their children's values? Are their children an image of God that they "worship" rather than "obey", or rather than grasping by sharing the same heart? Maybe the outcome depends on the specific parents in question.

Framing the truth as a "profound mystery" is supposed to humble us, but then it becomes useless since we can't understand it. But what if the truth really makes perfect sense, is just as profound as ever, and therefore motivates us to behave (perhaps radically) differently? Children may be looking for the non-mysterious truth, that's what we call "wrestling with mystery".

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Overall, I like the sensibility of this chapter / author better than the previous ones, (a note to those who might only want to read part of this book).

The chapter ends (p. 76) with: --Along the way, we adults can also grow, for the best way to learn is to teach, and the best way to be loved is to love.--

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Ch. 6

The author (same as last chapter) talks about techniques of prayer with children.

It's possible that adult-initiated prayers push prayer into a child's mind (same with other religious experiences), but that this could be a bad thing in the long run. For one, this makes prayer a social thing. Social things have a fleshly compellingness (peer pressure, desire to please authority figures, perhaps other social instincts). Maybe the child doesn't deeply want to pray, and will learn to go through the motions on many levels but not deeply love and trust God for him- or herself.

Also, any experience can become obsessing and burn a person out if it is repeated too often. This was my experience with church services, the inciting event for me quitting going to church. As a child, I felt like, for religious reasons, I needed to fully engage with every prayer and every song that was part of my environment. Eventually, the corrosiveness of those prayers and songs (as experiences, as social obligations) broke my ability to tolerate them. Praying or singing (or the like) in a home might be seen as a magic spell to bring God into a family, but the magic can work far too well, at least for people like me.

(Spells are often cast out of anxiety.)

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Finished ch. 6.

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Ch. 7

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Finished Ch. 7

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Ch. 8

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This chapter is about how unbiblical theological presuppositions are why Churches of Christ don't let children take communion.

I am not sure about the biblical warrant for excluding children, but I do think it's good to have some exclusive elements to church, which say "you are not there yet, you need to change before you're really a Christian". The author of this chapter seems to want to include everyone into one body -- one body in which we all belong. But does that one body belong to God? No, not exactly. It's not just that "we all sin" or "we all mess up", which are words that will bring you inclusion and belonging in the social structure of the church, so unless you are sufficiently theistically minded, you will think "I'm okay" since what you really track is whether a people group includes you, not whether you love God with all your being. The sense of "I'm not there yet", should sober you and drive you, because there is real danger to remaining where you are in your moral development and your relationship to God.

The author describes a historical, modern, and near-future vision of Church of Christ communion. The historical and modern are affected by individualist and Anselmian (penal substitutionary) ideas. But the near future one makes communion about entering the Messianic era.

I am not convinced from this chapter that Anselm was totally wrong. My naive sense, from reading a book on the atonement, is that there are multiple theories of the atonement, which all make some sense, but aren't conclusively "the" answer. Maybe from an Anselmian point of view, we should exclude (children? the unbaptized? the unconfirmed? those who are not disciples of Jesus?) from communion.

Church wants to include everyone, but the disciples of Jesus are few. I remember when I was just entering college, I was appraised by two different older people, one of whom was an individualist Christian, who casually called me someone "raised in the church", rather than Christian, the other a church-attending Christian who, after hearing what I said, said that I wasn't a Christian. But I had gone to church and identified myself with Christianity... I called myself a Christian -- wasn't I a Christian? What is this label "Christian" and why should we want it so much? Being a disciple of Jesus is somewhat better defined -- do you obey Jesus' commands in the Gospels? Do you seriously aspire to? But "Christian" is something that has been and is defined by the church, and it's unclear whether it's really about inclusion in the social body of the church or if it means that you are saved in the eyes of God, or something else.

It's the church's job (so it seems) to include everyone, but Jesus says that some follow him, and some don't. Do we prevent people from really following Jesus by turning them into "Christians"?

A challenge for MSLN Christianity would be to say "church and disciples are one", at least in that "in our general assembly, our maximally socially inclusive space, we preach a gospel of you are not there yet and there is real spiritual danger to that, and graciously, there is a way for you to get there, obey Jesus". In that way, the identity of "I really belong to the 'body of Christ' (the church universal, which we perhaps unjustifiably indentify with corporate churches and the particular corporate church we attend)" does not smother or prevent the possibility of motions of sober drivenness toward complete holiness.

The "Messianic kingdom" means something to the author -- I suppose not an Anselmian or individualist thing. I think for him it has something to do with being the people who do God's work in the world. (The people who call people to repent so that Jesus' blood of atonement can cover them? Seemingly not. The people who call people to repent to the point of having the heart of God -- i.e. completely turning against sin and being willing to go to the literal cross, putting God ahead of even their own lives? That might sound better to him, but I'm not sure in practice that's what he has in mind. It's possible he really means "feed people physical food" or "help people with the same psychological problems a secular therapist would" and things in that category.)

In any case, the Messianic kingdom sounds good to me, for some meaning of "Messianic kingdom", and I can agree that probably that is part of the meaning of the Lord's Supper.

The author ends the chapter like this (p. 124): --The theological trajectories we inherited for the Lord's Supper are being challenged and transformed. So, what would happen if the table we gather around on Sunday morning lost its boundary markers and altar theology, and instead, became an enactment of the Messianic era? What would happen if we welcomed our children to a table that empowered them to shape their lives by the story of Jesus? What would happen if our children saw a table without boundaries? Would it then not lead our children to be bearers of the Messianic kingdom? Would our children not be living out the story of Jesus?--

I am not too optimistic about the power of official rituals to shape deep commitment, at least, not without the children, themselves, apart form anyone else ("individualistically", perhaps), taking on the identity of disciple of Jesus, relating to God by themselves, for themselves. This is part of the story of Jesus, who was an individual.

Official things are things which a social group institutes by its own authority whether its members agree to it in every moment or not. Perhaps sometimes it is the case that all members agree to one official institution at one point in time, by taking a vote. But after that, there is no essential guarantee that an official statement made by a group is really affirmed by everyone in it. So the official thing provides a face for everyone without them necessarily really being the rest of the person behind the face. Official things help create a sense of "we are a social body", which can have some benefits. But they are also dangerous because they enable people to wear a face that is not theirs, and to see the face that is not theirs when they look in a mirror.

(Looking back, I agree with the two people who thought I wasn't necessarily a Christian when I was a freshman in college.)

Why did Jesus institute the Lord's Supper? I haven't done a thorough study of this. But clearly at least he did institute a ritual. How often did he intend us to take the Lord's Supper? Some churches practice it once a week, but others only once a year. Some takings of the Lord's Supper can be meaningful, in the sense of being communicative of something deep. I think I have experienced that twice in my life. Those two, or at least one of them, was sacramental -- not because a priest (or magisterium) said so, or because it was some kind of dry objective fact in which I had faith, but because of my own relationship with God in the spiritual world at that particular time in my life, I knew that that particular experience was a kind of communicative vision. I do not assume that my weekly takings of communion back when I went to church had any special power or significance, any more than if I said Christian words without really meaning them. Maybe we should only take communion a few times in our lives, or only when moved to personally. Then, it should not be offered regularly, but should be sought out.

I could see a small group of people spontaneously (and non-coercively) seeking out the Lord's Supper, such that all of them really did want to do it. But the larger the group, the more official that institution becomes, and the more likely a significant portion of people are just along for the ride. "Power is a broken relationship" if some people can affect many people without the many (or individuals in the many) being able to affect them back. "Coercion", "force", and this kind of "power" are all the same, or are significantly similar. If you do things in a large group, you tend to have a few people, or a majority, making decisions for every individual. If you don't feel moved to take communion at the time and setting, and in the manner, decided by some impenetrable "leadership" or "church majority", you can take it or leave it. Maybe the most expedient thing to do is to turn part of yourself off and make a meaningless action at the expected time.

Humility says that you change yourself to fit other people (maybe... but why don't other people humbly change themselves to allow you to not have to fit them when that's not necessary?) If humility says that you change yourself to fit other people, then you could easily go from being real and a misfit, to being fake but outwardly compliant. (Perhaps there is a humility to undergoing the rigors and isolation that come from obeying God, who sometimes is the one who tells you who you are in opposition to your social setting.)

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Ch. 9

This chapter is about baptism, with a connection to how to approach children's baptism. It's the first of two chapters on the subject.

So far, I agree with the author about some things, perhaps many. For instance, the old view of baptism in the Churches of Christ was much like other conservative Protestants -- in that, there was a view that there is a life of sin, some decisive conversion with some kind of act, and then a state of being saved. So baptism happened to be the completion of the decisive conversion in the Churches of Christ, unlike saying the "sinner's prayer" or something like that in other groups. This old view is sort of what I was raised under, and it didn't exactly make sense. I certainly lacked an important element of salvation when I was growing up, but I also possessed an important element of it. I couldn't easily repent of my whole-souled alienation from God, but that meant I couldn't easily "repent to" a whole-souled identification with God. I now understand that my lack of a whole-souled identification with God is enough to keep me out of heaven (and threatens to keep, I assume, the author of this chapter out of heaven, along with any other church person -- in that sense, nobody is saved). I think I agree with some of this chapter's author's emphases on holiness, but I am not sure he understands that holiness is life-or-death.

I think there are two kinds of people: those who effectively enough see that it is possible (or probable, or certain) that there is something life or death about life and that we don't necessarily know what it is or are in right relationship with that truth, but must come to know (or have come to know) it, or the way to it; and those who do not effectively enough see that. I got the feeling after reading this chapter that the author is not a "life-or-death" type person. Conservative Protestants, perhaps, or conservative Americans, tend to be that more so. The secular people who are responsible for life and death issues tend to be more so. I think that if I were a conservative Protestant, or a serious-minded secular person, I would not trust the author of this chapter, because he seems to not understand or even be cleverly avoiding the issue of life or death.

I do agree with the author that my naive reading of the New Testament (or maybe the Bible as a whole) does not leave me with the sense that sins or atonement for sins are "the" issue. I have learned (to my chagrin, I guess) that my own writing can have an emphasis that obscures the facts that it presents. (I wrote a book that presents Christian words, but I fear that its emphasis is really on left-leaning, existentialist-leaning, humanism -- not sufficiently theistic humanism, thus effectively secular humanism -- which was not my intention.)

Even if the emphasis of the scriptures is on something other than life or death, for someone concerned with life or death, do its words say "don't worry about life-or-death"? Are the facts of the worldview presented in scripture such that we can forget about that, just because it has some language that doesn't sound directly oriented toward life-or-death, to the level of bluntness and simplicity (/ oversimplification) of revivalism? It may be unfortunate that Scripture is written in such a way that it can be misinterpreted, but the wise will not forget the truth when they read it. The quiet words, if taken as seriously as they deserve to be taken, can really deserve to dominate our understanding of the plentiful, loud words.

(I don't know where that principle of interpretation would take someone if applied rigorously, but it makes sense to me.)

I believe that children who are not baptized do not go to hell for that, but instead are resurrected to the Millennium along with most other people, where they can get baptized if it's necessary for salvation. I don't think we can rule out that it is necessary for salvation, as it's (probably?) part of obedience to God, and total obedience to God is necessary for salvation. It is dangerous to bias children against baptism or that they think that it couldn't possibly have anything to do with salvation, because that could make them resist obeying God -- those are some important things for us to think about in this life. It is a good thing for children to be baptized whenever it is really their idea and they basically understand what it means (at least I don't see an obvious problem with that and I do see a strong prima facie motivation for it).

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Ch. 10

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Finished Ch. 10

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I thought I should re-read chapter nine to explain some of what I said about it.

--

p. 126 - 127 --Growing out of a heritage of revivalist preaching, the meaning and significance of baptism might seem plain and obvious: sinners are baptized to express their obedience to Christ, to have their sins washed away, and to become members of the Lord's church. This is good, as far as it goes. Yet when we turn to the New Testament, we discover that Jesus and the early Christian writers go much further.--

The question I would have to begin with is: what is most important? Could it be anything other than keeping people out of hell, so that they can be with God forever? If you do something like Pascal's wager, you see that mathematically, eternal life dominates everything else. You might also think of it like: do people matter? If people really matter, shouldn't they exist? The thing that makes them not exist (from an annihilationist standpoint, which I think is probably the Biblical one and the only one which makes sense philosophically) is hell. So if you love people, if you really value them, you must keep them out of hell. If they go to hell, they are lost, and no longer exist. It doesn't matter how nice their lives were, or how good their religious walk was, unless those things contribute to keeping them out of hell, so that they can continue to exist, with God.

If this emphasis on people and them existing matters, then if we lose sight of it, we have been deceived.

Now, I can see how obeying Christ and having a person's sins washed away could connect to people living, existing, with God, and not dying / being destroyed. Being a member of the church might have some connection.

The author of ch. 9 wants to add things to these, to flesh out baptism. Do any of these take away our responsibility to be concerned for the salvation of people (including children), from the second death; at all, or especially with respect to the roles of baptism in helping people be saved?

The author lists the following other interpretations of baptism: p. 127 --an ordeal of sacrifice and self-denial-- --a sacred womb, a place of spiritual rebirth, where a person goes in order to see what the kingdom looks like-- --like crossing the Red Sea, a watershed event of liberation that helps define the identity of the people and their covenant relationship with God-- --[a place to] leave behind the evil powers that had enslaved them to drown under the waves-- --the baptistery as a tomb: taken under the water to join Jesus in death, the baptized person is raised up to live differently-- --baptism is the water floating Noah's boat, saving humankind-- --an adoption ritual, a special venue of operation for the Holy Spirit, washing and renewing a person by God's grace so that they may become heirs of the Father, full of hope and the good deeds flowing out of it. --the baptistery is a place to meet the community of faith and become part of Jesus' body, as one of its many members; it is a key to congregational unity and instrumental in helping disciples find their places in the body-- --the baptistery is a place to change clothes, putting on Jesus, and it dismantles false distinctions between people by putting everyone on the same footing before God-- --Baptism connects a person with the Father, Son, and Spirit, opening a door into the very life of God--

He ends that list with --And yes -- baptism cleans us, bringing forgiveness of sins--

The effect that his rhetoric has on me is to make me think "Oh, forgiveness of sins is this little thing over to the side, but look how rich and deep is this baptism concept! Look at how beautiful, spiritual, and poetic it really is!" Because, for better or worse, the Bible is often beautiful, spiritual, and poetic. But... still... what about people ending up in hell? Isn't that last part (about bringing forgiveness of sins) completely dominant over everything else, unless they also contribute to keeping people out of hell? And, if they also contribute to salvation, isn't it unlikely that they remove the importance of forgiveness, by adding more things that are also of life and death importance?

I wonder if the author of this chapter has some doctrinal understanding somewhere that causes him to think that a) there is some other source of forgiveness of sins, or b) that forgiveness of sins doesn't matter. Maybe I missed it, reading the chapter the first time.

p. 127 - 128 --How many different ways can we talk about the importance of baptism and its meaning? The Bible shows how important baptism was to Jesus, the apostles, and the early church. Underemphasizing baptism is an answer to many different questions. Yet the questions are not so much about qualifying for church membership or certifying eternal destiny. Most of the time, they are not even about how to "get saved." Instead, they are more about identity, the direction of a person's life, their place within the community, handling relationships, and cooperating with the activity of the Father, Son, and Spirit in experiencing daily transformation of character and behavior.--

The author's rhetoric starts out by reassuring me that baptism is important (at least, that's its effect on me). Baptism is so important, its meaning is so rich, that it's mostly not about "getting saved". He doesn't deny that it's about getting saved. But "getting saved" (is this identical with people not being destroyed in hell?) is not that big a deal to him? Perhaps this is only his emphasis, or the effect of his words on me. Does he deny that baptism can be about "certifying eternal destiny" when he says that baptism is "not so much" about that? I wouldn't assume that baptism is the sole determining factor of salvation, but surely if it washes away sins, it might be a necessary part of it?

Does the author think that baptism is a life-or-death thing that must be accomplished before someone can go to heaven, or not?

Does life-or-deathness matter? Does baptism perform a necessary role in salvation (in some sense removing or forgiving sin)? If baptism is a life-or-death thing, and life-or-deathness matters, then it makes a lot of sense to have a revivalist view of baptism. It makes sense to be anxious about whether your children have entered the age of accountability and now if they die for some unforeseen reason, they might be going to hell. It makes sense to communicate to your children that they are not full members of the church, because in fact they are not saved and should not completely feel like they are. Their faith in God may be pure and innocent, but God is completely holy and every child has sinned. Maybe that makes God weird and inhumane in our eyes, but perhaps that seems so to us because we are not holy ourselves and lack the intuitive sense that sin is unacceptable. Much of what the author pushes back against comes out of simply being concerned about the loss of people and thinking that baptism has some essential role to play in them not being lost, through dealing with their sin problem.

p. 129 --In short, less preoccupation with the "essentiality of baptism" and greater study of its essence would be a welcome change, going a long way towards equipping us to address those practical matters from a solid foundation.--

The author goes on to a section entitled "The Essence of Baptism".

He says that baptism is about Jesus. With regard to the famous Acts 2:38 passage, he says that baptism of cleansing for sin was a normal Jewish thing, but what was really new was the promise of "the gift of the Holy Spirit" and that all this was centered "in the name of Jesus". Somehow, as a reader, I feel like just proved that forgiveness of sins doesn't matter, because of that. Does this make sense logically? Maybe if we say "Jewish things are false, irrelevant, something like that, but new, specifically Christian things are true, relevant, valid, etc." Is that what the author wants to claim? It might be fitting in a Church of Christ context to reject Jewish understandings in favor of post-Jewish ones. Are there ever cases when Jewish religious understandings are correct, and might this be one of them? Is there any chance that when Peter said that baptism was for the forgiveness of sins [or he might have said that when he said "repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins" and we can't rule that out], he might have been saying what was true and impressed on him by Jesus or the Spirit to say? I wouldn't take any chances with salvation. I would go ahead and assume baptism has something essential to do with washing away sins. If not, fine. [If it turns out it doesn't, that's fine.]

I remember growing up, I was aware of Baptist responses to Church of Christ doctrines on baptism. One of them was "if baptism is necessary for salvation, then why isn't it sufficiently emphasized such that no one could possibly be uncertain about whether it is necessary?" My response to that nowadays is, why should we assume that God is interested in making things that easy for us? Maybe he's looking for people who really love him and are searching for ways to follow him, taking responsibility to look through reality to find ways to follow him, instead of having him feed us the plan of salvation, requiring less initiative on our part, or perhaps none at all. But, that has the cruel implication that many of us will never be saved, because no one taught us to look at reality. (But I will address why I am not worried about that cruel implication later.)

I assume that many people are tired of Baptist-Church of Christ debates -- if they are not still a thing to the intended audience of this book, then the older readers and writer of the book might remember those old days without fondness. But, is the issue here really that "yeah, basically the Baptists are right" or people end up making a doctrinal move that happens to align them with the Baptists all along. This may be appropriate, if the Baptists are right, but it seems like the kind of thing that should talked about openly.

p. 130 --By his own admission, Jesus was baptized "to fulfill all righteousness". It was the right thing for him to do. That may surprise some of us who have traditionally approached baptism strictly as a legal maneuver by which we deal with our sins, or as the culmination of a conversion process, since those are two things that Jesus' baptism could not mean. He needed neither conversion nor forgiveness.--

Maybe baptism is about (at least) two things: obedience, and washing away sins. Jesus, being clean, was washed, but no sins were removed. Jesus was obeying God, and if he never got baptized, he would have sinned. So Jesus was fulfilling righteousness by obeying God, and we have the same need to obey. In contrast to Jesus, we have sins that need (in some sense) to be washed away by baptism.

p. 133 --Salvation is a journey and a process. There may be a sense in which the Lord's salvation is a thing we can possess, or a state that we enter at a certain crucial point in our walk, but there is also a deep sense in which "we are being saved," (1 Cor. 1:18). In other words, we are caught up in an ongoing process of salvation, as part of a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17)".--

I agree with the author of this chapter that salvation is a journey. I think growing up in the church is much more of a gradual journey experience than an intense and clear decision. But I think that for a conservative Church of Christ person, their concern might be something like this (I knew some conservative Church of Christ members when I was in college, and I hope I am remembering their point of view accurately): "Yes, salvation is a journey. We want to get as far from falling away from God and losing our salvation as possible. That's a journey. Yes, we grow to love God more deeply. Also a journey. But superimposed on that 'journey' metaphor is the concept of 'are your sins washed away?' and we want to know, have our sins been forgiven? Have our children's sins been forgiven? If they have reached the age of accountability and not been baptized, and die, do they go to hell?" Saying that salvation is a journey doesn't exactly deal with that issue.

He goes on to talk about how salvation is about becoming like Jesus. I feel like a basic holiness message would not have been too strange to the conservative Church of Christ people I knew. Still the question remains, in terms of dealing with past sins, how do we know that those are dealt with? Do we need to be baptized for them to be washed away?

p. 136 --We [authorial "we"] recognize that all people are (or become) sinners and need forgiveness. That includes children raised in the church.--

I guess it's possible that some kids haven't sinned yet, but how would their parents know that? How would the kids know that? The author acknowledges the possibility of needing forgiveness. So if people need forgiveness, oughtn't there be some urgency to getting them baptized, if that is necessary for forgiveness?

Immediately following: --Nor do we want to downplay the importance of powerful spiritual experiences in the lives of young people. But to treat those preparing for baptism as if the only way to get ready is by owning up to their sinfulness or by having an intense experience of some kind, is to ignore the fact that different people come to baptism in different ways.. This was true in the first century as it is today. The Gentile idol-worshipper who was accustomed to the immoral life of his pagan culture experienced baptism in a very different way than the law-abiding Jewess who had been preparing for the Messiah's coming all her life. Their journeys into the baptistery to join Jesus were similar in some ways, but very different in others.--

I guess the implication is that church kids are like the "law-abiding Jewess", while adult converts are like the "Gentile idol-worshipper"? Was the law-abiding Jewess sinless? No, probably not. Then probably the church kids aren't sinless either. Needing forgiveness isn't about having done really bad things or turning away from God. It's just about at all having intended something against God or consciously-enough failed to intend something that would go with loving God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Anything less than 100% is sin, and sin leads to death. Being a merely good person doesn't save you. So they "Jewess", "Gentile", church kid, and adult convert are all basically in the same situation of needing forgiveness, perhaps urgently. It's like if you have four people whose livers are failing, one because of a car accident that damaged the liver, one because of a congenital defect, one because of years of drinking, and one from hepatitis C from years of injection drugs -- that's a complicated set of issues some of which may involve it being somewhat due to the sin of the people involved, but we really can't judge. It's complicated, and all their life stories are nuanced and particular. But, is it, or is it not, the case that they need a liver transplant to keep them from dying soon? In that sense, they are all the same and should be told basically the same thing.

I think maybe the issue with baptism is that it is both about conversion and about washing away sins (if you believe that's what it does), and it is less necessary for conversion than for washing away sins. [I don't understand what motivated this paragraph now. It might make more sense if you have just read the relevant part of Along the Way.]

p. 140 --Furthermore, although we would not presume to speak for God, Scripture does not support an attitude of fear and anxiety regarding the status of unbaptized children in the church, as if the ceremony of baptism were necessary to convey magical protection of our loved ones.--

This is sort of true and sort of not. The background worldview of the New Testament is that people can be lost to hell, there is a way to heaven through Jesus, and Jesus commands and institutes different things which contribute to salvation. I can't think of any time the NT church says much one way or another about child salvation or anxiety about that. I'm not sure exactly what the emphasis of the NT is, but it doesn't have a clear "letter of Paul where he lays out revivalism verse after verse". So maybe from a literary perspective, it "feels" like it's really about some kind of narrative other than life-or-death, are you saved?

(I think it's perfectly fine for God to institute a ceremony which conveys magical protection of our loved ones, and fully in keeping with reality. (Putting a seatbelt on -- is that a magical ceremony?))

--

Now, I do agree with the author that revivalism has its flaws. For instance, what happens if you slip on the way to the baptistery? Baptists have it a little easier, because if you intend to follow God, then there's no tragedy if you die soon after, since you're going to heaven. But then, what about the "age of accountability" that seems necessary for those who practice believer's baptism, or, I would think, equally well for those who say that children are in need of salvation at some age, even if all they have to do is something like pray the "sinner's prayer"? Exactly when does that age of accountability kick in? Can anyone know when their little ones are safely innocent, or when they have just slipped over into needing salvation or else they go to hell when they die?

There are some more problems that are faced when we consider the process of evangelism, given the thought that people need to follow Jesus to be saved. For instance, what if the youth minister at your church decided not to take you to the annual regional youth rally? But that was the year that that one speaker was going to be there, who uniquely spoke to your sinfulness, who could have brought you to a state of repentance and conversion? Or what if you are a member of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon (and there are still some, by the way)? Or you lived in the New World before Columbus came?

I don't think that there is no such thing as tragedy, that God stamps it all out. But I do think that he would not design a system of life that would cause there to be unforced errors on his part in bringing people to salvation. Having a world where people need to hear about Jesus to be saved (so that they can respond appropriately), but that world is significantly bad at giving them a chance, and then they go to hell when they die, does not sound like something God would do, because God is a self-interested being, and his personal desire is for us to live. Self-interested beings do rational things.

It's always possible that God is doing something mysterious or strange that he understands and that we never will, but it's also possible that we just don't understand the not-too-mysterious truth. I tend to think that if possible, I should understand God, because then I will understand his point of view better, and can love him better that way. If I reach the limit of my understanding, maybe then there is an insoluble mystery that I have to live with. But, is that the case here?

I am not an expert on the Bible, and knowing the Bible is the kind of intellectual work that I am not good at, because I don't retain and manage bodies of facts very well. But, I did read someone else's take on the Bible that is very well-researched (although I can't say that I know for certain that it is absolutely correct, because I don't have the "chops" to seriously verify it). My strength is more in philosophy, and I see how it works there, and that mostly contents me to say that it's true.

The basic idea is that we don't go to heaven or hell when we die, instead, we rest in the grave, then we are resurrected after Jesus returns, live on earth a thousand years (the Millennium / Resurrection) and then when that's up, we either go to heaven or hell. During those thousand years, we hear about Jesus, and learn. (Some of us also weep and gnash our teeth, and experience the penalties of having been wealthy, fake Christians, or whatever -- which are not the same as hell, and which don't necessarily keep us out of heaven.) We can't enter heaven unless we are no longer sinners, and the process of overcoming sin is not trivial, but if we don't procrastinate, we can make it, it just could be hard and take a long time. It's possible for us to harden ourselves (similar idea to "falling away") and thus be incapable of growing to the point of 100% repentance and being in tune with God, loving him with all of our hearts, souls, minds, and strength.

So from this point of view, I would say that we should move with a certain kind of urgency toward obeying God whenever we get the chance, to ward off the tendency to get into procrastination. So it makes sense for the child to want to be baptized once they make the decision, and not wait around very long.

Obviously a child can't repent except under their own will, so you can't really do anything to make your child come into tune with God in their hearts, except provide an environment in which they are provided the good ideas and good examples to choose to follow. You can apply your will to get them to behave or feel or even think they believe something, and maybe they will also really believe that thing to some extent, but maybe they don't and it was just the strength of your will on them. Sometimes that's okay (like keeping them from urgent physical harm), but when it comes to choosing God, to turn away from sin, and toward him, that's 100% their decision and you can't do any persuading of them any which way. But again, providing them with good choices is helpful.

What about baptism? Should you apply your will to get your kid to be baptized? Baptism is a discrete event -- so if your will overshadows theirs, is that not really a baptism? Maybe not. So maybe then that's a reason for them to validly need to be re-baptized, because in some important sense, they didn't mean it themselves the first time.

If your child dies, that is painful but doesn't have to be tragic, because they aren't going to hell (except in some exceedingly unlikely event that they have hardened themselves so young), and unless you harden yourself, which you are unlikely to do in this life, you will be resurrected to the next life and you can see them again (unless there's some unusual reason that you wouldn't).

Does it matter if they are baptized to wash away their sins? I'm not 100% sure about baptism, but I see that it certainly could be necessary, and that's good enough for me. I'd do it, if I hadn't already. If it is necessary to wash away sins, just like how hearing about Jesus is necessary for salvation, everyone gets a chance to fill in that gap in the Millennium.

--

Re-read ch. 10 (the follow up to ch. 9).

--

Read ch. 11

--

Started ch. 12.

So far I like the taste of this chapter and author as much as or more than the other one I liked (ch. 5 and 6) and would also recommend it to be read. [On finishing the chapter, I still think so.]

--

p. 180 --I recently heard the phrase "What we win them with is what we win them to."--

This in reference to how when we make children's ministry into a fun thing (like with talking vegetable videos or making children's church happen inside a spaceship), we might be making them into consumers of church, and then years later they won't be able to be workers in the church.

I wonder to what extent it's worth teaching children at all? Maybe it's best to leave them to play all throughout their childhoods, and just pick up Bible teaching that trickles down to them, that they overhear from people reading the Bible out loud, or that their peers talk about. Probably this does not sound like a good idea from the perspective of this book overall, and likely not from the author of this chapter. But if you take "don't be consumerist" and take it far enough, do you end up with the cold and dark side of the truth that even adult church shies away from? (The numerous ways Satan deceives and attacks us, our weird and frightening God who must be respected, and/or our weird and frightening world where God struggles to do good, or the danger that we are all in from sin, how none of us entirely has our salvation secure, as some examples.) These topics can only be really talked about in a serious spirit, or they sound unbelievable. But can we teach children with such a serious spirit? Perhaps we can avoid talking about those examples given, if they are "too much" for children, and certainly adults can sort of give lip service (or "mind service") to dark realities that they become intellectually aware of when they are older. But I don't know that people can become serious enough to really get those realities such that they can be very effective given them if the climate of their minds filters them out. And that climate is established when children are young.

I suppose I was raised in that climate, and have managed to get out of it. The way I did so was through doggedness, turning back to the text even when it didn't make sense culturally and thus experientially to me (I had the filters), and then lots of intense personal experience which opened up the world of spiritual darkness to me (the darkness that is present very commonly in people's lives at various times, but which is somehow usually unseeable). I don't expect other people to have the same background as me. So, should we teach children about God, if that roots them in "child-appropriate" views of the world? Perhaps we could teach them, but not in a fun, engaging, way, or even as "normal people", going against what feels to us like "child-appropriate" teaching.

Maybe the way to look at this teaching is like what someone earlier in the book said: is this "first-approximation" teaching something that can be revised successfully when children are older? So, is the "vibe" of a teacher (or of all the adults in the church), such that children connect with seriousness, sufficient to face spiritual darkness and death when they get older?

The irony is that children's lived experiences are often closer to that of "I live in a weird, scary world of spirits and inexplicable rules of life" than many adults are. Maybe adults are frightened of children's fears, and keep them from fearing? I think we sometimes try to protect children from dark realities when they are young. But darkness is already a part of their lives, so how can they deal with it? What may be the case is that they are not ready cognitively to fully understand darkness. But darkness is a part of their lives and they have to deal with it somehow. We also try to keep adult realities out of kids' minds. Maybe this has some use, but kids are already living in the adult world and have to deal with it. And they have to grow up to become adults someday. Maybe it would be better if they started preparing for that when they were young.

A children's teacher could be transparent, and simply be open about their own experiences (with some discretion, for protecting legitimate privacy concerns, and for what the children can handle).

--

Finished ch. 12.

--

ch. 13

p. 195 (quoting Stewart and Berryman, Young Children and Worship, pp. 13 - 14): --The experience of God is one of mystery, awe and wonder.--

This sentiment is one that I feel like I read more than once from various authors in this book.

For me, the experience of God is either one of business-like guidance and support, or if more "heightened" or "special", of closeness, perhaps empathy and sorrow (me empathizing with him), and kinship. To some extent this follows from MSLN.

--

Finished ch. 13

--

Ch. 14

This book is about involving children in "the mission of the church".

p. 208 --Children are often moved to action when they encounter pain. They are kingdom bearers and as such must participate in God's redemptive work by sharing hope, showing compassion, and proclaiming the gospel.--

(After a description of taking kids to do disaster relief at a site of a severe tornado.)

Not so much as a comment on this chapter, here's a thought of how I might talk to children who are moved by the pain of the world.

People are different. In any given day, or year, there are things that a given person is good at. Some people are good at one thing, some good at another. Some people love to do certain things and thus do them a lot, and usually get better at them. Some people are good at doing things, but don't like doing them, or to work on them wears them out. If you can work at something you're good at for many years, that's a good personal fit.

Children are not as good as adults at doing some things, because they don't have as much practice. Adults, though, aren't as good as children at learning new things. So when you are a child, you have an advantage over adults in being able to learn. You can learn all kinds of things -- all about cartoons, movies, music, toys, games, etc., but also about how to care about people and how to work. It is okay to learn about cartoons, movies, music, etc., but if you want to learn more about caring about people and how to work, that helps you to help people someday.

Maybe you can try to have a higher paying job someday, and donate the extra money you make to good charities. Or, you can try to prepare for a job that directly helps people. People have physical needs (food, water, shelter, healthcare), psychological needs (the ability to trust, the ability to protect their mind from bad thoughts), social needs (the ability to relate well to other people), and spiritual needs (the ability to love and trust God). You can seek to learn more that will help you be competent and experienced in any of these areas. Then, you will be more prepared when you are older to go down life paths that help a lot of people (and also don't harm too many people as a side effect).

(I could come up with a long list of professions that fit into meeting the needs listed in the previous paragraph.)

You may someday choose a career for yourself that focuses on meeting those needs. You could choose one major in college over another based on thinking about that. Or if you don't go to college, you could pick one trade or line of business to invest your time and/or money in, or another. But, if you find yourself unable to control the way your life goes as much as you want, you can always work with whatever part of your life is under your control, and try to use that as effectively as you can. Maybe you can just focus on becoming a good friend or family member, because there is also a need for that.

(A long list of non-career ways to help.)

As a child, you may get the opportunity to work in the field that you feel called to, or to practice doing good in some other way. That's good training, and does some good. But if not, you can at least read books, watch videos, etc. that help you prepare, and try to think deeply about what it would be like to do good.

--

p. 213 --Children often think outside the box of limited resources and time and encourage the church to engage in opportunities for service that may have been overlooked.--

This is part of the comparative advantage of children.

(Also mentioned on pp. 213 - 214 are children's abilities to do simple things (perform gestures or acts of care with simplicity), and by being children who communicate as an act of care, (my thought:) bearing the loadedness of "child", which means something to the recipient of care, a bit of connection with family, innocence, simple caring, etc.)

--

Finished ch. 14

--

Ch. 15

p. 229 --I believe that if we listen to children long enough and carefully enough, they too will tell us what they need. This kind of listening requires relationship. As we seek to welcome children, we cannot simply implement the right programs or find the perfect techniques. We must know children, and they must know us. Hospitality is a relational act, not a strategy. When we build trusting and respectful relationships with children, we may be surprised how insightful they can be about their own needs.--

(After a discussion of the author's father, who as a physician had a similar approach to diagnosing patients.)

I wonder if this works even more generally, that a kind of attention (a listening to and waiting on) reveals the deeper needs, at least in cultural / psychological / social / political type worlds. And similarly the requirement that we be in a relationship with the world we want to diagnose.

--

Finished Ch. 15 / the book overall.

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