Childer - Volume 18, Issue 1

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Teaching Children to Doubt

Douglas Wilson

Scripture says that parents are to bring their children up in the "nurture and admonition of the Lord." Further, the apostle Paul addresses the children in the congregation of Ephesus directly, saying to them that they are to obey their parents "in the Lord." Now in order for the children to obey their parents in the Lord, the children themselves must be in the Lord.

But the fact that covenant children are in the Lord does not remove the need for discipline, love, education, and nourishment. Paul does not just tell the children to do what they need to do "in the Lord," and expect everything else to take care of itself. Children, including covenant children, are vulnerable to abuse and neglect. This is why Paul gives explicit instruction to parents on what they are to do.

The center of the Christian faith is faith. This means that the center of biblical child-rearing is the teaching and nurture of faith. What Christian adults are to be, Christian parents are to instruct their children to become. If Christian maturity involves believing God in truth (and it does), then Christian parenting means teaching kids to believe God in truth.

In short, we are required to teach our children how to love God, how to believe God, and how to hope in God. It is not to the purpose to say that love must arise spontaneously and cannot be taught. If that were true, then why did God give the greatest commandment (love the Lord your God with all that you have and are) in the middle of a passage on covenant education (Deut. 6:4-9)? Love can be taught. "You shall love the Lord your God" (Deut. 6:5).These words shall be in your heart (v. 6). And you shall teach them diligently to your children (v. 7). Teach what? Teach them how to believe God, hope in God, and at the foundational level, to love Him with all their hearts. But it cannot be taught by parents who are covenantally lazy or presumptive.

Children can be taught to believe and they can be taught to doubt. Refusing to teach them at all is tantamount to teaching them to doubt. Some parents shrink back from doing this because they are afraid that all they will successfully teach will be the external and parroted answers to the catechism. But parents are not just told to teach their children the contents of our faith. The commandment tells parents to teach their children to love their faith.

The way many parents teach their children to doubt their faith is by doubting it themselves. A child comes to her father and asks if she can come to the Lord's Table. She is baptized. She goes to church every Sunday. She prays. She sings psalms and hymns, many of them by heart. She is a member of the visible church. Why can she not come to the Table? There is only one reason—adults in authority over her do not believe that she is truly regenerate. They are not saying she isn't, either. They don't know. They jury is still out. They doubt.

She thinks to herself that her parents, or her elders, or her pastor, or all of them together must know more about this than she does. She thought she loved Jesus. She thought she believed the Bible. But apparently there are grounds for doubting this, and so she does as she is taught—and she begins to doubt it also. And who taught her to think this way? Who taught her to question her sincere love for Jesus? Those who were solemnly charged to teach her to believe have instead done the opposite.

But what do we do about the bad actors? There are covenant kids out there who are clearly sons of Belial. They have been excluded from the Table also (according to the common practice) but it has never bothered them at all. It would bother them to be brought to the Table. What should we do in paedocommunion churches where such kids have been brought to the Table early, but who, as time goes by, reveal an evil heart of unbelief? This is where some sentimental paedocommunion advocates falter. The Table is a table for all disciples and is therefore a table of discipline. Covenant membership is not just a matter of privileges detached from responsibilities.

But judgments like this must not to be based on a subjective attempt to read the heart. We may read the Bible, and we may read demonstrable actions. This means that some covenant children need to be taught to doubt. They are communicant Christians, and yet they disrespect their parents constantly, indulge in sexual immorality, and shoplift regularly. The Bible teaches that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. Obviously, we do not excommunicate a four-year-old for not putting his toys away fast enough. Just as obviously, we must excommunicate a defiant teenager who is living in high rebellion. If a situation like this arises, his paedocommunionist parents cannot suddenly start arguing that he is "too young" to be disciplined by the church. If that were true, he ought not to have been reckoned among the disciples. But he should be reckoned among the disciples, and it follows that he is subject to discipline. Of course, all allowances should be made for age and maturity, but the principle is clear enough.

Because we have gummed this up, the end result is that we tend to teach the tender-hearted covenant children to doubt, and the hard-hearted ones to presume. This really ought to be reversed.