9. The Parent’s Privilege: Gifting the Faith to Children by Thinking Up

9. The Parent’s Privilege: Gifting the Faith to the Children by Thinking Up.

“Jesus answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with everything you got: all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and with all your mind’; and, Love your neighbor as yourself.”  (Luke 10:27).

The Privilege: Parents who are clever and resourceful entrepreneurs who keep thinking up effective ways of helping their children to grow in learning the Faith and developing a lifestyle of following Jesus with the child’s whole mind.

Lord Protect My Child – Susan Tedeschi

The Miracle of the Mind. Jesus Christ co-designed the human mind, the mysterious seat of consciousness of each person, and the pinnacle of creation. The brain’s unlimited complexity means there is no “brain expert.” The more we know about the brain, the more we discover we don’t know. We do know it is a muscle that weighs about three pounds, and has 100 billion neurons branching out to more than 100 trillion synapse points. We know that the brain has over 100,000 miles of blood vessels. The mind needs to be constantly strengthened in its development, and can actually change by our behavior and how we decide to use it. The brain is “plastic” in that way. Jesus highlighted the importance of using the human mind when He told His followers to love God with all their mind (Matthew 22:37, Luke 10:27). And there we have one of the basic tasks of a Christ-centered home: to cultivate all the facets of the child’s mind in order to love God and belong to His truth.

The Big Three, Twice. One way to think about the human mind is to consider the idea that it has three main areas: the intellect, the conscience, and the imagination. This is the secret of how a child can live into the three eternal qualities in human life: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. So when children start to learn from the parents (from Day One), parents will need to engage in the full-time job of being aware of the child’s intellect, conscience and imagination, and how they can be helping their children grow, whether by inspiring or stimulating or stretching or strengthening. To some extent, these three facets are in all human minds, no matter the age. So the savvy parent is aware of how to approach each facet in an age-appropriate way. These three facets of the mind are all bundled together and interconnected within one brain. So there is overlap in how all three operate and interact. To characterize the profound complexity of the human mind with three simple facets is totally inadequate, but it’s probably a good place to start as we think about the parent as pastor and teacher. With these different facets of the mind in view, here is some food for thought as we consider Jesus to be the Master Pastor and Teacher:

Sharpen the Intellect. Jesus was a rigorous thinker, He was a spiritual intellectual. He was able to outthink the scholars and professional theologians of the day.  And He earnestly sought to renew the minds of His followers, of everyone who listened to Him. In Jewish homes, the parents were the first teachers, and they had the responsibility to develop in each child the tools of acquiring knowledge… reasoning, remembering, reading, discussing. Any further efforts to strengthen those tools were built on the foundation laid in the home. So when Jesus continued in His teaching ministry, He wanted to sharpen what was already present in elementary form in His audience. He taught a wide variety of listeners, young and old, immature and mature, knowledgeable and relatively uneducated. He wasn’t offering the people information so much as renewal and transformation. He kept attempting to help His audience reach understanding at a deeper level, to draw their own conclusions, to gain insight into the ways of God and His Kingdom. Jesus aimed to redeem their ability to reason effectively as He stimulated their thinking. There were a number of ways Jesus sought to sharpen the intellect of His followers as well as those on the fringes who were curious but skeptical. Jesus was the type of thinker who made those around Him better thinkers.

Nurture the Conscience.  Down through history, well-trained intellects who haven’t developed a virtuous character have proven to be a danger to society and useless to the Kingdom. Smart but immoral, intelligent but morally clueless. Raw intelligence without a conscience courts disaster. A well-educated person includes the development of integrity, someone who demonstrates goodness and virtue, someone who has moral intelligence. If the whole mind is to be put into action, then the conscience has to be included. Any home that doesn’t nurture wholesome children is not doing its job. This is especially true in a Christ-centered home, where God calls each person to grow in goodness, reflecting, albeit imperfectly, the very purity of Jesus Christ. Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5) is at the top of any to-do list for a Christian home. Jesus employed many methods to strengthen the conscience, the sense of right and wrong, of the people in the audience.

Capture the Imagination. Very little learning will occur without forming mental images of something that isn’t present, and so the self-motivating inspiration of an energized intellect is crucial. The imagination is the intellect at play. It is reason listening to a story, or logic painting a picture. The imagination is also key in strengthening the conscience, since compassion so often starts with the heartfelt images that result in empathy. The imagination is also crucial in developing faith, since “faith is the realization of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1).  Faith is grounded in the mental images of spiritual belief. Jesus Himself had an inspired imagination, and He knew the importance of capturing the imaginations of His audience in His teaching ministry.

On the Parent as Entrepreneur of Learning and Growing in the Faith. Let’s break down these three aspects of the mind a bit further as we explore a parent’s role:

1. Truth and the Intellect. Give the children in the home the tools to pursue and understand the truth; train them in the ability to reason effectively; enable them to develop insightful common sense and logical thinking; help them be comfortable in exploring the truth intellectually and spiritually; strengthen the ability to memorize and grasp factual data; sharpen their discernment between wise and unwise, true and false, loving and unloving, mindful and mindless, logical and illogical.
2. Goodness and the Conscience. Nurture goodness in the lives of the students; cultivate their integrity and virtue; hold them accountable so they are trained for righteousness; promote a wholesome character and moral intelligence; strengthen their will to make sound decisions; help clarify moral confusion; help them develop shrewd street smarts; enable them to apply biblical principles to daily choices; help them embrace a default reaction of love; strengthen their ability to empathize.
3. Beauty and the Imagination. Inspire creativity in the children at home; help them distinguish between the beautiful and the ugly; provide opportunities for creative self-expression; train them in basic artistic skills; capture their imagination in the home through story, music, drama, and the visual arts; help them gain confidence in expressing themselves; help them take risks artistically; stimulate their God-given creative impulse; help them be sensitive to their intuition.

Entrepreneurs of Learning. Jesus was a businessman, and His business was discipleship. And the same is true of Christ-following parents. He was a true entrepreneur in His discipling ministry, employing a wide variety of pastoral and instructional methods as He went from person to person, crowd to crowd, village to village. He chose to labor long and hard in the role of pastor-teacher, inspiring listeners to become learners and budding saints. Because He was the co-designer of the human mind, He instinctively knew how  to reach His audience. He knew inherently that He needed to capture the imagination, nurture the conscience, and sharpen the intellect of His disciples, His students. An important way for a Christian parent to follow Jesus in the home is to consider the teaching methods He used in His ministry… Methods like these:

• Sharpen the Intellect – Good Questions; Variety of Discourse; Object Lessons; Guided Conversations; Test the Memory; Repetition; Thinking Out Loud.
• Nurture the Conscience – Discipline and Accountability; Personal Example of the Teacher; Demonstration; Elbow Room for the Students; Moral Reasoning Out Loud.
• Capture the Imagination – Stories and Parables; Humor; Metaphor; Illustrations; Visual Aids; Wondering Out Loud.

The Final Goal: Wisdom and Love. What was Jesus aiming for in the lives of His learners? What did He want them to look like? What was His goal in teaching? I suggest He aimed for wisdom and love in His teaching of the truth. Wisdom, love and truth seem to have a profound interrelationship in the learning process. Truth is the target, the substance, the grist for the mill. Wisdom is truth-in-action. It is acquiring the knowledge that leads to moral understanding; it is the art of practicing the truth in daily life. Along with wisdom, love is intimately related to truth. According to Scripture, “Love takes pleasure in the flowering of truth;” “Love finds its joy in the truth.” (1 Corinthians 13:6). And, “Active, genuine love is proof that we belong to the truth.” (1 John 3:19). So I suggest that wisdom and love are the twin goals of discipleship in the home. A parent’s aim for the children in the home is that they become wise, loving, and filled with the truth. That’s how the children can prove that they have understood at a deep level. There is no better way to reflect the heart of God. There is no more noble a purpose in learning and growing. Following in the steps of Jesus, a Christ-centered parent is wise and loving as s/he aims the students toward wisdom and love.

Relationship. The context for learning wisdom and love is personal relationship. Jesus chose to have an intimate group of twelve students in a classroom-without-walls, to teach, to show the way. Truth, goodness and beauty are best delivered to the child in the context of a loving relationship between parent and child, that is how the Faith is developed for the long haul. Only children who trust and respect their parents are able to give themselves fully and wholeheartedly to the discipleship process. Only parents who intentionally establish relationships of love, mutual respect and trust with the children are able to engage at the deeper levels of growing in the Christian faith.

“We have the mind of the Messiah!” (1 Corinthians 2:16).

The Three Eternal Realities. When St. Paul exclaimed to the Corinthians that believers have the “mind of Christ,” He was speaking into a mystery. Jesus, fully God, fully man, had a human brain like the rest of us. But His mind was somehow full of God’s presence as well, shaped and inspired by His Spirit. What does a heavenly brain look like? We have a sense of what makes up the mind of God when we consider the divine qualities of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. These three primary qualities of the nature of God have been called “the Big Three, the “deepest realities,” the attributes of being,” and if we want to get fancy here, the “Three Transcendentals,” which simply means “that which exceeds.” I love the version of one old Bible translation of this verse, where the “mind of Christ” was translated as “the wit of Christ.” In other words, if we need to live with the mind of Christ, we must keep our wits about us.

In His Image. Because God so lovingly made us in His image, every child has the capacity to live into those same three elements of deep Reality. Each child is miraculously capable of participating in what really matters in life. Children can grow in developing an identity that reflects our true, good and beautiful God. Creator Lord is the origin and source of the Big Three in our lives, and we can only acquire and grow into them through an intentional relationship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. As has often been observed… All truth is God’s truth; all goodness is God’s goodness; all beauty is God’s beauty.

Making Connections Between the Two Big Three’s. Once we are willing to accept the divine existence of Truth, Goodness and Beauty, we can start to consider what our human minds are made of, what the growing mind of the child looks like. We can point to their sharpened intellect as the way to comprehend Truth, the strengthened conscience their mindful helper in developing Goodness, and the creative imagination as their key to participating in Beauty. Their inspired intellect with its ability to reason, think rationally, acquire knowledge; their inspired conscience with its ability to nurture a life of integrity, character and virtue; their inspired imagination with its ability to express their God-given creative impulse, give shape to what is real, and enables them to have faith and trust in what they can’t see. God gave us all, children included, the tools in our mind to experience these ultimate desires with which were created.

The Unifier. Historian Joseph Pearce put it this way in a recent essay… “Love is the path to goodness; reason is the path to truth; creativity is the path to beauty. Love, reason and creativity find their unifying principle in the Person of Christ; Who is not only the end to which we strive but the very means by Whom the end is achieved. He is the Way, the path of love, reason and creativity which leads to Truth, Goodness and Beauty. The way of love leads to the Good of God, reason leads us to God’s Truth, and creativity leads us to the presence of God’s Beauty. The beautiful always leads us back to love and reason.”

Subversive. Because the Big Three runs counter to our culture’s values these days, it is actually very subversive for a parent to inspire a child’s potential by growing in Truth, Goodness and Beauty. For children to begin reflecting God’s nature in this way is a difficult task for parent and children, so we all need all the help we can get. Our contemporary world understands truth to be merely personal preference, that virtues can change with the weather, and that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Living into objective, universal qualities leaves one vulnerable to charges of being offensive, judgmental, arrogant, and anti-freedom. We have all heard this common refrain, “Yes, that may be your truth, but it’s not my truth.” These days each individual person can foolishly define their own identity and value system, as subjective as that may be. But parents need not be intimidated while helping their children develop their divine identity, lovingly steering them towards Truth, Goodness and Beauty in a world in which that is a foreign concept.

“So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through – then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfil the work of all three? In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy! After all HE was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination. And in that case art, literature might really be able to help the world today. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech).