Teaching

I have always hated hearing a parent tell his child "God says 'Children obey your parents' " when a dispute arose. True though it is (and the kids would be wise to follow that command), when the father (or mother) called God in on his side at such a time it seemed to me to take God's name in vain. It is disproportionate and offensive. The time to teach that law is when all is well and the kids are already obeying. Then the command is learned happily and with its promise from the Lord, and not as a tool in the hands of the mother.

The man who flashes a fat roll of large bills and tells me "Thou shalt not covet" is not warning me for my benefit but for his. The parent also seems to be teaching for his benefit and not for the child's.

The same principle applies to the admonitions that a wife should submit to her husband. The SBC made an issue of it and--quelle surprise--apparently a non-negligible number of men decided to use it as a club with which to browbeat their wives.

Suppose we let women teach such a rule, and men keep their mouths shut on the subject. And likewise, women not pester men to lay down their lives for them, but let men warn other men "Why don't you do right, like some other men do?" We accept such rules from Paul, who was inspired, single, and with no ulterior motives in any given relationship today. But let the teaching and explanation of such things be done in ways that do not tempt us to abuse them.

I will not at this point take up the question of whether Paul's rule is to be interpreted strictly and absolutely, taken as a general rule, or as "guidelines" (a la Pirates of the Caribbean), or ignored because it isn't fashionable. "Paging Junia..."

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I gather from The Internet Monk that some of the fringe types are taking A Full Quiver as gospel. I read the book years ago--at this late date I have no idea who gave it to me. The thesis was simple and not terribly controversial: children are a gift from God even though the world measures them as burdens in dollars and time and loss of favorite recreations. And some secular cults begrudge them the food they eat and complain about the CO2 they breath out

The authors hammered away on the point, and I don't recall much recognition of health issues. I suppose that sort of one-sided stance is inevitable, and perhaps even appropriate, when addressing some grave problems; but it makes the book a lousy pastoral document.

At any rate, I read it, and put it away somewhere and out of mind. At the time I thought vaguely that there was a difference between being open to children and trying to sire as many as possible. The former is more explicitly a servant's attitude, and I'd think more likely to welcome adoptees. Couple the latter with the non-negligible absolutist "wife obey your husband" population and you have a recipe for cooking up unhappy marriages--and unhappy children. And I gather that has happened, though at what rate I couldn't say--sampling bias rears its head again, and the Internet Monk is no use for that kind of analysis.

I wonder what these families would have been like without the book to give the attitudes shape. No doubt some would have been train wrecks in any case--some people shouldn't marry and others should pay attention to warnings from family and friends. But I suspect some mean well--or as well as most people--and were led astray by poor teaching or pastoring, with the result that fragments of doctrine assembled into something false. And false teaching has consequences; in this case reducing a woman's role into "more kids now." (I wonder what they make of Prov 31?) (Michner The Source Urbaal: "if he had different gods, he would have been a different man.")