Children and the Theologians

Clearing the Way for Grace

Jerome W. Berryman

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780819223470
• eBook ISBN: 9780819227126
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The long history of children in theology is told via analysis of some twenty-five theologians, grouped according to six historical periods.
Each account examines what a particular theologian thought about children and the experience it was based upon. Four themes that have shaped our attitudes about children in the church emerge from this history: ambivalence, ambiguity, indifference, and grace. The result of this study is to promote a healthier church, which will respect and utilize the distinctive gifts of children. In so doing, theologians will be better able to help clear the way for grace in the postmodern church.

Chapter 1

Last Supper, Bohdan Piasecki (1998)
Irish School of Ecumenics, Milltown Park, Ireland
(Copyright © B.A.S.I.C [Brothers and Sisters in Christ], Dublin, Ireland)

FROM PRESENCE TO TEXTS:
Children in the Jesus Traditions

This painting challenges the mostly unconscious influence of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, which in terms of this book presents a low or at least indifferent view of children. It was painted by Bohdan Piasecki, a leading contemporary artist in Poland, who lives near Warsaw.

Leonardo’s great mural was painted on the dry plaster of the refectory wall of the Dominican monastery (or convent) at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan about 1495–1498. The celibate men (or women) reflected on the men of Leonardo’s Last Supper as they ate their meals. This masterpiece is full of dramatic emotion and action, remarkable characterization, and a precise, single-point perspective that focuses on Christ. Only about 20 percent of the original painted surface survives, so it “hovers like a ghost on the wall” (Nicholl 2004, 302). Still, the absence of children and families should not go unquestioned.

Last supper, Leonardo da Vinci (1498)
Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy
(Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali / Art Resource, NY
S.Maria delle Grazie, Milan, Italy)

Piasecki’s painting also has Christ at the center but, as with other Jewish teachers and interpreters of scripture in the first century, he is surrounded with men, women, and children. The people are from Jesus’ socio-economic group and century rather than what a contemporary to Leonardo called “Milanese courtiers and important citizens” (quoted in Nicholl 2004, 296). In Piasecki’s painting it is evening because this may have been the Passover meal although that is not certain. The people are eating unleavened bread, roast lamb, and bitter herbs as if it were and children are present with their families because they are valued, whether the disciples themselves are married or not. Besides, if this is the Passover children must be present because they will be asked traditional questions such as, “Why is this night different from all other nights?” as they still are today.

“Did you hear that?”
A child pulled at my long, white alb as I hurried along the cloister, crowded with people between services on a Sunday morning at the Cathedral.

“What?” I slowed down.

“What they said in church . . . ”

I came to a full stop in the midst of the swirling adults and dropped to my knees to look the eight-year-old boy in the eye. Infinity formed around us.

“What did they say?”

“They wanted us to do THREE parables! How can you do THREE parables all at once? There wasn’t time. We didn’t even have any materials!” (The child was not quite right. In Lectionary A for the Sunday closest to July 27 Episcopalians read four parables bundled into Matthew 13:31– 33 and 44–49a, but the observation was still impressive!)

“I know. Sometimes grown-ups don’t understand.”

I took the boy’s hands in mine for a moment, said goodbye, and then stood up. The time, place, and pressing adult tasks returned to consciousness and I hurried on my way to the education hour.

There was a lot packed into that brief theological encounter between a child and his priest. Most of it was nonverbal and depended on having worked with parables together in the same way with mutual respect many times. That is part of why so few words were necessary. The child felt perfectly at home talking about exegetical matters with me on a busy Sunday morning and he was right to firmly expect me to respond with intelligence, a sense of playfulness, and my full attention.

Stringing three (or four) parables together on an abstract theme of growth (or any other theme) did not make complete sense. The child was right. No single parable was allowed its unique voice and the bundling implied that a single, uniform interpretation (whatever it might be) could satisfy these unique, provocative, and artful clusters of Jesus’ words. It really is better to take as much time as is needed to enter the world of each parable and wonder about it, like he had learned to do in the church school, following the method of Godly Play^TM.

The method by which the child learned how to identify parables and make existential meaning with them is relevant but it is not the point here. The point is that sometimes adults greatly underestimate children’s experience of God and the kind of theological thought they are capable of when they have appropriate materials and informed adults to work with them. Most Christian theologians have underestimated children in this regard, so it is important to know and understand the history of what they have said about children to correct this mistake, as well as to learn from them.

We need to know what our theologians have said about children, because their words still shape our views about children in the church today. Besides, this is an exciting story, worth telling in itself. Most of all, however, we need to be aware of our inheritance from the past to move forward in the future toward being better able to cooperate with the grace of children, who have sustained the church—despite its past ambivalence, ambiguity, and indifference about them—from generation to generation.

This opening chapter will proceed “at a slant,” as the poet Emily Dickinson might have said. The angle we will approach children and the theologians from invokes the image of Hermann Hesse burning leaves. Why?

Hesse did his theology in fiction and he did it impressively enough to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, primarily for his six novels that examined all sides of spiritual development from childhood beyond adulthood. Two important influences on this book have come from Hesse. One is his “developmental history of the soul,” and the other is the elegant game his last novel described. In this chapter we will first say a bit more about Hesse and then consider Jesus and the children. Finally, the four themes about children that have emerged from the gospels and the history of theology will be introduced.

The history of children and the theologians will then be told beginning with St. Paul as the first Christian theologian and it will proceed to the discussion about children among theologians today in chapter 6. We will then look back over this history as a de facto doctrine of children that operates informally in the church and then look forward to propose a more unified, fully conscious, and constructive doctrine of children as a means of grace and provide suggestions for a spiritual practice to accompany it.

Hermann Hesse Burning Leaves
and “A Bit of Theology”

The image of Hermann Hesse burning leaves reminds us of his interest in what he called the “developmental history of the soul.” It also evokes the game at the center of his last book The Glass Bead Game. We shall return to this game in chapter 8.

Hesse’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1946 primarily recognized his novels—Demian, Siddhartha, The Steppenwolf, Narcissus and Goldmund, Journey to the East, and The Glass Bead Game—about the longing for and search for spiritual maturity from childhood into adulthood and beyond. His considerable poetry with many of the same themes was also acknowledged by this recognition.

Hesse began his last book, The Glass Bead Game, in 1931. This was when he settled in for the decade of concentrated effort it took to write his culminating work. It was also the year he married Ninon Dolbin in November and moved into the new house in Montagnola, high above Lugano in the Italian-speaking, southern part of Switzerland.

The Glass Bead Game was completed on April 29, 1942 but the manuscript languished in Berlin for seven months because it was not approved for publication by the Nazi government. It was published first in Switzerland in 1943 and then in Germany soon after the war and received the Nobel Prize in 1946.

Visitors often mentioned observing Hesse outdoors, burning grass and leaves. Zeller includes a picture of him making a bonfire in his biography of Hesse (Zeller 1971, 142), and the Chilean writer and diplomat Miguel Serrano remembered he “was surprised to find Hesse in the garden standing by the fence and wearing a broad-brimmed hat. He was burning grass. He then noticed me and went to open the gate” (Serrano 1968, 20).

As he burned grass and leaves, Hesse daydreamed about a “hundred-gated cathedral of the spirit.” A 1936 poem, “Hours in the Garden,” elaborated on this. As he watched the ashes of the past filter down through the grate, he could hear music and see the wise harmoniously building a timeless structure of the spirit, like the theologians we shall meet in this book, as they reflect on children.

In 1932 he published an essay called “A Bit of Theology.” In it he spoke of “the “developmental history of the soul.” Hesse kept his own childhood and youth continually in his mind as he wrote his last six novels. As he said, “My purpose is to delineate that piece of humanity and love, of instinct and sublimation, that I know of from my own experience, and for whose truth, sincerity, and actuality I can vouch” (quoted in Zeller 1971, 8).

The publication of his essay “A Bit of Theology” was in 1932, the same year that Karl Barth published the first volume of his Church Dogmatics, when Barth was a professor of theology in Bonn (1930–1935). We shall come to Barth in chapter 6, but for now it is enough to note this and that his study of Anselm, whom we shall meet in chapter 3, was published a few years before in 1930 also while in Bonn. Hesse was beginning his decade of work on The Glass Bead Game as Barth worked on the Barmen Declaration of 1934, which led to his dismissal as a professor in Germany when he refused to make an unqualified oath of support for Hitler. Barth returned to Switzerland where he was born and spent the rest of his life there.

In “A Bit of Theology” Hesse wrote:

I know it from my own experience and from the documents of many other souls. Always, at all times in history and in all religions and forms of life, we find the same typical experiences, always in the same progression and succession: loss of innocence, striving for justice under the law, the consequent despair in the futile struggle to overcome guilt by deeds or by knowledge, and finally the emergence from hell into a transformed world and into a new kind of innocence. (quoted in Ziolkowski 1965, 55–56)

Hesse’s last six novels examined this triadic rhythm from all sides, especially the second period, which was the most interesting to him as a novelist because of the struggles that take place during that time and when one falls back into it from the third stage. This journey, which has vestiges in all human beings, moves from innocence (paradise, childhood, a time without a sense of responsibility) to the conflicts of adulthood. This conflict cannot help but foster guilt in adults as the awareness unfolds that the ideal cannot be realized. This moves one to despair, which can lead to either “downfall” (self-destructive behavior from drugs to an obsessive compulsive and narcissistic life) or to the “Third Kingdom of the Spirit,” which is an experience of a reality beyond the conflicts of morality and law to “grace and redemption” and “faith” (Ziolkowski 1965, 54). Both Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and his triadic rhythm of life have, as we said, influenced this book about children and the theologians.

The foundational assumption of this book is that children know God in their nonspecific way and they need to be respected for that. What they need help with from adults is to learn the art of how to identify this experience and express, refine, name, value, and wonder about it in the most appropriate language and action. When children are invited to play deeply in a community of children with God and the scriptures, adults are sometimes astonished to discover how theologically-minded they actually are. Adults who guide such play soon realize that they learn as much from the children as the children do from them. The experience of becoming like children to enter the kingdom and welcoming children to know God is as true and as counter-cultural today as was when Jesus’ sayings about children first began to be circulated.

Jesus began as a mysterious presence to his contemporaries. As the first and second generations continued to remember him, he became a text as well as a presence. A “literal reading” of the text is intended here, in the sense that Rowan Williams used that phrase. By this I mean that the rough surface of the texts will not be smoothed over to create a simple, easy-to-grasp summary (Higton 2004, 63). What Jesus said and did concerning children can no more be blended into a harmony or distilled into an essence than the gospels can be, as was attempted by previous generations. This is why so many texts have been reproduced here to read alongside my suggested interpretations. This honors the reader’s own ability to interpret them and allows the rough edges of what Jesus said and did to show. It also honors the church as a “community of readers, argumentative and unmanageable, but therefore a community which can give us the gift of a deeper reading of Scripture” (Higton, 2004, 68). That is the overarching hope here.

The revelation of Jesus concerning his relationship with God and our appreciation of that relationship through the Holy Spirit is made manifest by the whole life of Jesus from birth to death. While his death and resurrection and his moral sayings have been given great attention over the centuries, his comments and actions concerning children have often been pushed to the edge of theological concern or transposed into superficial abstractions that were given greater authority than the depths their original parabolic form revealed. While many have pushed the parabolic children aside for other and important concerns, this book will focus, perhaps to a fault, only on children, so we ask now—what did Jesus say about them?

Children in the Jesus Traditions

There are four traditions, the “rough edges,” about Jesus and children in the gospels. One tradition, a high view, respects children and what they can teach us about mature spirituality. A low view sees children as getting in the way of adults who desire to become true disciples of Christ. In a third tradition, Jesus does not seem to think about children at all! There is a kind of objective indifference, not an indifference that scorns children but one that pays them no mind for the moment because of other concerns that have crowded in to displace them in Jesus’ attention. A fourth “rough edge” also emerges from the texts: Children are understood as a means of grace for the continuity of Christ’s presence in the church as a source of wonder and creativity.

Matthew, Mark, and Luke include the high and low views of children mixed with some indifference. They add up to a gospel of ambivalence. John, on the other hand, presents a tradition of Jesus that is mostly indifferent. The theme of children as a means of grace stands in the background to all four gospels. It is different from the high view of children, because it is focused on the promise of the generations.

God promised to be with the generations of Abraham (Genesis 15:3–5; 22:17; 28:14), but Jesus broadened this family beyond biological kinship by adopting the children around him. When he blessed and held them he adopted them and made them heirs of his kingdom and part of the benefits and obligations involved in this broader kind of family (Gundry 2008, 154–158). The church has continued because these children have kept coming in each generation to revive it.

Let us now look at each of these four themes—the low view, the high view, the indifferent view, and grace—in more detail. All scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version and they are supplied in abundance, as we have said, to show the rough edges of the texts about children and as an invitation to the reader to join in their interpretation.

A Low View of Children

A cluster of six sayings from the synoptic gospels illustrates the tradition of Jesus’ low view of children. This view has drawn approval over the centuries from many theologians, which is certainly understandable. Children are often disruptive to the well-ordered life and single-minded holiness. The responsibilities they place on adults are not always welcome and sometimes are almost impossible to meet.

Most of the time, however, theologians have not spoken about their low view of children directly. Their way of life has disclosed this standpoint. For example, in the seventeenth century a young man named “Christian,” the hero in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, flees his family with his fingers in his ears to muffle their calls to him as he sets out for the Celestial City. It is ironic that all forms of celibacy and cloistered life undertaken to seek the kingdom of heaven exclude the very children that Jesus said show how to enter it.

The first group of passages suggests that one should leave parents, children, family, and fields to follow Jesus and that if this is done there will be a reward now or in the future. This group of sayings may be found in all three synoptic gospels:

And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields, for my name’s sake, will receive a hundredfold and will inherit eternal life (Matthew 19:29).

Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age—houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life. (Mark 10:29-30)

And he said to them, “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has lefthouse or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of thekingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age.(Luke 18:29-30)

Jesus also acknowledged that there would be betrayal and hatred in families for those who followed him in a single-minded way. This reference is found only in Mark, but it fits well with the rest of these hard sayings.

Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. (Mark 13:12-13)

Jesus also told his disciples not to look back, like Bunyan’s Christian, to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Reference
• Index