This series of articles is written in the form of letters and is dedicated to my children. As I watch them grow up, I realize more and more just how exceedingly vulnerable children are. Ever since Adam and Eve, children of each generation have been brought into a world rife with sin. Evil is a fact of life. There is chaos in the world, the kind that no one does on purpose (like tornadoes) and the kind that is on purpose (like murder and theft).
Why am I writing this series? I write it because I want my children to have as much teaching from me as possible. My parents taught me much by precept and example that God has used to guide me through life. I not only want to do as they did. I want to excel still more, to be more faithful than my parents, more loving, more biblically accurate, more prudent, and more active.
It is easy for each generation to look down on the ones that came before. It is a form of C.S. Lewis’s “chronological snobbery.” We think that we see better than they did. We think we know better than they did. We think we make better choices than they did. Sometimes it is true, no doubt, but other times it surely is not. In my own life, I have had seemingly random flashes in which I suddenly seemed to grasp what it was like for my parents in some situation. There have been other times reading history where the description was so complete and compelling that I could, as it were, immerse my perceptions and perspectives with the people of the time. When these things have happened, my sense of condescension toward previous generations has, for the moment at least, disappeared.
It is said that hindsight is 20/20. This is to say that right perspectives and decisions are easier to put together once the situation is over and you are able to look back at how it all came together. There is truth to this. But it is too easy to look back and say that a generation should have done this or that. It is not that we should never do this, but that we should be careful of our tendency to hypocrisy. If they should have been able to see something and failed to do so, what might we be missing in our day? I take it for granted that there are things in my life, even among whole sets of parents of my generation, that we are in danger of future generations mocking us to scorn for missing.
As I examine my own heart, the storm of fears and faith that constantly conflict deep below the surface, I believe that one of the subtle motivations comes from my observation of other children of faithful parents, children of my generation who also have children of their own. I have long noticed what appears to be a dangerous trend of complacency. Children raised by godly and faithful parents often make the deadly assumption that they can take for granted in their own parenting much of what their parents labored painstakingly to instill in them. The error is obvious. If their parents exerted so much effort to shape and point them in the way of godliness, why would they not be required to do the same with their own children? Children cannot assume that the lessons their parents taught them will be passed down to their own children via genetics. Godliness is not caught by mere exposure, nor is it hereditary (sin, however, is[1]).
This series is part of an attempt at taking seriously my duty to my children as their father. I recognize them as good gifts from God who ultimately belong to Him; I am a steward. This means that I have responsibility for my children, but my responsibility to them derives from my relation to them as God defines it and not as an arbitrary or seemingly intuitive sense of duty toward them as their biological progenitor.[2]
If my children are the primary audience, then why am I publishing what I am writing on the Internet? It is a question of hitting two birds with one stone. I desire to write for the benefit of others. I also desire to write specifically for the benefit of my children. This series fulfills both desires.
Parenting is difficult. It has always been difficult. The more I reflect on how God has grown and matured me over the years, the more I have grown to appreciate and be grateful for the many things I have heard and read that have pushed me back to Scripture. I want to pass that on to others. People who read this and who know me are aware that I preach, teach, and counsel regularly. Writing is another way to have a (hopefully) helpful influence on others. It does not matter so much to me whether my influence is big or small. I want to lend my voice to the chorus of people who are pointing others to pick up and read the Word of God.
The goal of this series is simple enough. It is to supplement my parenting of my children with writing that helps to make clearer the ideas that we often talk about in seed form but rarely have or make time to discuss more thoroughly. I want to make explicit what is often implicit. I want to give them a more holistic worldview on purpose. I do not want to settle for them having to pick it up in pieces along the way.
My prayer is that the Lord would use this series in the lives of my children to teach them the way they should go. Every article will have its own main point or big idea. And each one is more or less essential for living the Christian life. I do not know whether all of my children are saved. But I want to prepare them as well as possible to live for God when they are saved. May the Lord use this series to that end.
[1] This is part of the doctrine of original sin. All people are sinners because all people are descended from Adam (cf. Romans 5:12; Psalm 51:5). This is one reason why Jesus was born by a virgin. The seed came from the Holy Spirit, not a man, and was divinely implanted. This made it possible for Jesus to be fully human without having Adam as His father.
[2] By this, I mean to say that the fact that I am my children’s biological father and legal guardian does not in itself stop anyone from claiming that my responsibility to my children is nothing more than a product of cultural convention. My children could just as much be seen as someone else’s if the culture trended that way. Evolutionists might say that parents being responsible for their children is adaptive, which is to say that it is beneficial to the survival of the species. But that could change with the opinions of the scientists. There is nothing objective arising from within humanity itself to categorically, objectively, and absolutely determine the nature of my relationship to my children and the attendant responsibilities. Plato, for example, argues in The Republic that children should be raised by the polis, or nation-state, so that parents and children do not even know who belongs to whom. Apart from God as the source of the family relationship and the objective authority to tell us how things ought to work, there is nothing stopping humanity to define the parent-child relationship how they see fit. My responsibility to my children, then, is not a given. It may seem intuitive or even a priori (not requiring any evidence or even capable of evidence being furnished), but the mere existence of alternative ideas weakens that base even if alternate ideas have not yet enjoyed wide adoption. The modern education movement and philosophy certainly has at its root a fundamental assumption that succeeding generations of children ought to serve a pragmatic role in society; their end is presupposed and engrained into the educational institutions and methodologies that seek to produce a certain kind of citizen who has certain thoughts about their children, the primary goal of which is not to strengthen the family but the nation-state according to the perspective of the ideologists who develop the philosophy and techniques embedded in the educational system.