Children and Natural Theology
October 11, 2005
I have been leafing through Nancy Pearcey’s Total Truth of late, as it came up in some commentary I cited here earlier. For those who don’t know, this book is the latest neoreformed attempt at reaching a popular evangelical audience with what the author deems a solidly Christian and biblical worldview.
The book is not quite all bad, and I may have more to say about it later, but one of the things to strike me immediately me was this: Pearcey seems quite dismissive of evangelical piety in her reaction against Evangelicalism as too much of a merely pietistic affair that requires intellectual grounding to survive modern education and culture without being either discarded as childish rubbish or preserved in an insulated, private and subjective arena while one also does any number of seemingly contradictory things, such as working in a Planned Parenthood clinic. (Appealing no doubt to the worst possible Evangelical fear, Pearcey cites just such an example–a good Evangelical woman on the PP payroll without any sense of cognitive dissonance.) What is needed, in Pearcey’s view, is intellectual formation in the proper “worldview” which is the result of reflecting Christianly on the implications of the basic creation-fall-redemption narrative of scripture.
Formation in this sense is a highly rationalistic, intellectual affair that is not evidently attached to any disciplines of piety and devotion. These are either assumed to be in place already or are considered largely irrelevant. Either way, this is in error, and a major fault of the “integrated Christian world and life-viewers” may be that they do not apply themselves to the liturgical practices and histories of their churches. (I suspect even Prof. Koyzis will agree with me for once on this topic.) The Evangelical and Reformed child or young person’s experience of catechesis and Christian formation, such as they are (i.e., terms seldom used and their meaning within the history of the church largely unknown), has long been far too disengaged from devotional piety and induction into orthopraxic worship, which is often non-existent in any case these days. If it is not “worldview” formation children receive, it is still material that appeals primarily to the intellect in the sense of stories told–a narrative presentation of scripture–with an emphasis on the parts of the bible that are written as narrative.
The problem with this is that it leads to precisely the kind of adolescent and adult attrition that Pearcey is trying to stave off. As the architects of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd have said–Sofia Cavalletti, Patricia Coulter, Gianna Gobbi, and others behind such books as Listening to God With Children: The Montessori Method Applied to the Catechesis of Children and The Religious Potential of the Child: Experiencing Scripture and Liturgy With Young Children–this is precisely what they insist on avoiding because what is told as stories is easily dismissed later as “just stories.” Instead they focus on the symbolic and typological aspects of scripture that beckon a deeper, not unintellectual but much deeper than intellectual, recognition of the intertwining meanings and presence of God in the glimpses, calls, responses, echoes and anticipations of Christ in especially the psalms and prophetic books as well as their counterparts in the Mass. This is an approach that is rich and deep; it is Catholic but it’s also employed by Lutherans, Episcopalians and typically other mainline Protestants whose liturgical practice is still intact enough to make such stuff intelligible, let alone attractive. Not so for the Evangelical/Reformed bloc. This is a serious problem.
Ironically, the one potentially negative bias in the CGS curriculum is that is insufficiently “Calvinistic,” although this seems to be a necessary implication of its main strength. CGS is largely premised on the assumptions of people who take natural theology as a given with their rather Illichian idea that the teacher must constantly strive to genuinely listen to God with and through children rather than imposing, directing, and controlling responses. I believe this is the proper direction to err in, but the fact remains that some children are little devils, exhibiting a surprising propensity for practical depravity at very early ages. I am uncomfortable with any idealization of small children as uniformly privileged in having an intrinsically nearer or purer contact with God than adults. Of course the opposite extreme is bad too, if not worse. There is more general truth to the “Platonic” Catholic view of Gobbi et al. It is astonishing and humbling what one learns, listening to God with children. And one may converse as well, but the conversation must stay within the bounds of language intelligible to children which is very close to the intellect of the heart, and of passions and experience–longing, desire, an overwhelming feeling of love or fear, of rage or guilt, of the dilemmas of young consciences that feel the tuggings of God and the devil through the moral law.
And this is precisely where Pearcey’s worldview stuff seems very weak. Her kind of approach is of course not intended for Christians in their most formative stages of growth. It stakes everything on adolescent and adult education. But those adolescents and adults have likely been presented with “the faith” in terms of stories, doctrines, and moral pre/proscriptions. That is why it is all such weak stuff easily blown away by a stint at “Dupont College.”
Whenever adults rush children along to accept nice stories and inept, formulaic answers–or merely the adult answers–to such typical queries as “How can God do anything if he’s invisible,” they are not serving the formation of a living faith. In a question like that, which I’ve heard a few times recently, “invisibility” is really about the reality and efficacy of what the child sees as the highly remote and dubious adult concept of God. A four or five-year old who asks that sort of thing after announcing the boringness of church (defined as “sitting on a hard bench for a long time”) is already on track for a legitimate modern rejection of Christianity in the form of earnestly told “nice stories”–the church-religion that constantly menaces true faith. Bless them, they are rejecting something that ought to be rejected! The benches are hard, and even where they aren’t, church is boring and not so childish as it is unbelieveable and insulting to children who have not yet been indoctrinated in the advantages of feigned or sincere but hollow piety as a necessary practice for tribal cohesion and social acceptance–at least until they leave home. (If church is made to be an entertaining TV-like show, this merely masks and defers the problem.)
The only legitimate way to justify the reality and ways of God to children (and adults)–“why is this worth the long periods of sitting and listening?”–is to look with them for their feeling faith, their experience of the presence of God in ways and places adult “teachers” have likely forgotten. Then that experience can be connected with its counterparts in the sacramental life of the church and the proclamation of the Word. Upon that foundation one might build a solid “worldview” as an adult. But I would not put much stock in worldviews, however brilliant, that are set atop a stack of stories one was told and whose truth is confirmed later in life more by various theories, interpretations, and so on rather than regular, vicarious encounters.
This is Children and Natural Theology in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Fessio on NPR’s “Stale Flatus” Show | Next: Jesuitenpest! | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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