A Christian apologist on YouTube suggests that (American) public schools no longer teach children how to think, but instead what to feel. Which is a recipe for disaster. I think the same is true of churches over here in Britain, which is a recipe for spiritual shipwreck.
The context of the video was a Q&A, in which a teenage girl asked how it’s possible to discover what is true about the Bible, seeing that so many different opinions come across from social media.
He replied that maybe the first move would be to take a course in logic. And by way of demonstration, he asked how many of the audience had taken such a course. A very few raised their hands, and he laughed, “You’re the home-schoolers!” Some choice words on the law of non-contradiction, and so on, were very much to the point.
Sitting in, subsequently, on a Sunday session for teens, I can only say I agree. The session was one of a series on “encounters with Jesus,” and the reading was the passage in Luke on the blind man in Jericho. All sorts of teaching points occurred to me, such as what the beggar would have understood by the address he used to Jesus, “Son of David,” and why that might lead him to hope for healing. “Your faith has healed you” invites all kinds of questions about the nature of faith – that the issue wasn’t how much he believed, but what, and who, he believed. And so on.
But all the set questions were about feelings – how the kids would feel to be blind (with some games a long the lines of blind-man’s-bluff to concentrate the emotions, perhaps?), what it’s like not to be listened to, or to be a social outcast, whether that be our own experience, or the challenge to notice others in those sad conditions…
The take-home point, of course, was that we can always find a way to feel that Jesus cares for us, like he cared for the blind man. This boiled down to finding ways to remind themselves that Jesus loves, but nothing about how to know he does, nor the basis of gaining a loving relationship with him in the first place. The Holy Spirit got a mention as the one who might prompt us to experience Jesus. The Father didn’t get a mention, nor the relationship between them, and how that might be the basis of an assurance more solid than feelings.
It seems to me that something more solid is going to be needed when those kids first encounter a skilled Muslim apologist, or even a clued-up socialist, when they get to college. Or even when they try to explain their religion to a neighbour.
It’s an interesting fact that my Complete NIV Concordance lists over six pages of Bible entries for the word “know” and its cognates – a total of 1,325 entries. For “feel” there are just 39 entries. That’s a ratio of about 34:1. “Truth” and “true” have about one and a half pages. They say facts don’t care about your feelings, but the word of God appears to give them a remarkably low priority as well.
I don’t think that’s because God dislikes emotions, but because godly feelings are downstream of truth, and Spirit-endowed faith in it, which leads to settled love, joy, peace and so on, rather than passions elicited by changeable circumstances. So we ought, surely, to be teaching our kids, from the start, how to tap into the knowledge of God’s eternal saving truths, or what we once called “the means of grace.” Maybe the course in logic would be a good place to start.
We can then leave the State Schools to tell them what to feel – but if they know the Truth, I suspect the indoctrination will be water off a duck’s back. That will be no bad thing, because wet ducks sink.
Let the world deride or pity, I will glory in Thy name;
Fading is the world’s best pleasure, all its boasted pomp and show;
Solid joys and lasting treasure none but Zion’s children know.
