A Letter to Three Daughters

Last year for International Women’s Day, I wrote a letter to my three daughters. International Women’s Day was last week, so here is a slightly edited version of that letter.

Dear J, G and H,

This world will tell you lies. It will lie to you about your value, about your appearance, about your place. It is filled with people who will see you as weak, who see you as less valuable – to them and to God – and who see you as an object, all because you are female.

I pray you keep this letter in mind when you hear those things. I am afraid that, though the world is changing, it will not do so fast enough to spare you from the warped wisdom and twisted value system that prioritizes, above all things, the gender of a person.

Because you are more than women, as I am more than a man. We are children of God, three daughters and a son. We are loved, valued, respected, prized by the one who made us – the parent of the entire world, the one who is big enough to breathe life into existence, small enough to weep with us when that life goes awry.

But you are, in fact, women. And you should be proud of that. I pray you never accept the attempts of men to make your gender a cause for shame, embarrassment or pity. You are women. Congratulations!

This is my prayer for you:

Telling God’s Story, Not the Old Testament’s

You might recall that way back, at the beginning of this blog, I compared the Old Testament to an embarrassing family member for whom one must frequently apologize. While I don’t feel that’s the case anymore, there remains a problem: How to teach it to children.

My wife and I have gone around this issue a few times since we had our first daughter more than four years ago, and our struggles have led us to Peter Enns, a biblical scholar we both respect for his willingness to both love the Bible and present it as it was intended to be read – as opposed to how modern-day Christians might like it to be read.

The problem as I see it with presenting the Old Testament stories to children is three-fold:

God Keeps Choosing Us

We’ve had some birthdays in the Disoriented household this month; I have now been a father for four of my 30 years of life. I was not prepared for the numerous ways in which fatherhood changes a person. It’s not the same for everyone, I’m sure, but having children, especially daughters, changed the way I look at everything from movies and advertising to the Bible and God.

The latter is especially significant. The Bible describes God as a parent numerous times, ascribing to him the characteristics of both mother and father (we tend only to focus on the latter, to our discredit). Certainly, we have picked up that mantle. We often address God as “Father,” we talk about divine correction, we often analogize God’s actions with the actions of a parent.

But I don’t think you can really get a handle on God’s love until you experience what it’s like to love unconditionally as a parent – at least I couldn’t. My view of God has been radically reshaped by finally understanding the parental perspective on the actions of my children.

Perhaps one of the most damaging doctrines with which I was raised is the notion that God does not hear/listen to the prayers of those who have sinned. This notion is taken, as far as I can tell, from a single verse, Isaiah 59:2: “Your misdeeds have separated you from God. Your sins have hidden his face from you, so that you aren’t heard.”

Capitulating to Our Culture

I was doing a quick shopping run the other day for my wife when I ran into this set of books prominently displayed at our favorite grocery store:

I was immediately leery, as book publishers seem to have certain ideas about what boys need to know versus what girls need to know about the same general topics. The covers are fairly innocuous – sailboat versus horse, diving versus jumping rope – nothing too offensive. Of course, inside the books was a different story:

Full disclosure: That’s the first page I opened to in the boys’ book. I flipped around the girls’ book briefly to find a page that corresponded – fun summer idea on one page and an activity on the other.

So boys are told they can skip stones and solve puzzles, and girls are told they can look good … and lie on the beach. Note also the actual text – “a girl has her image to think of” … “be a beautiful beach babe” – and the unnaturally skinny, bikini-clad preteens in the girls’ book, as well. And I would be remiss as a typographic nerd if I didn’t point out that the boys’ book has a strong, bold headline font compared to the girls’ frilly, cutesy font, which along with giving the boys’ book a better design also reinforces the subtle message that boys are to be strong and adventurous while girls should look pretty.

Opening Communion for the 3-Year-Olds

Yesterday, Richard Beck posted the following quote from Jurgen Moltmann:

Because this fellowship comes into being on the basis of Christ’s unconditional and prevenient invitation, the fellowship will be an open one. It cannot limit Christ’s invitation to its own account. Everyone can participate who wants to participate in the fellowship of Christ. The communion is the answer to Christ’s open invitation…

Because of Christ’s prevenient and unconditional invitation, the fellowship of the table cannot be restricted to people who are ‘faithful to the church’, or to the ‘inner circle’ of the community. For it is not the feast of the particularly righteous, or the people who think that they are particularly devout; it is the feast of the weary and heavy-laden, who have heard the call to refreshment. We must ask ourselves whether baptism and confirmation ought to go on counting as the presuppositions of ‘admittance’ to the Lord’s supper. If we remember that Jesus’ meal with tax-collectors and sinners is also present in the Lord’s supper, then the open invitation to it should also be carried ‘into the highways and byways’. It will then lose its ‘mystery’ character, but it will not become an ordinary, everyday meal for all that, because the invitation is a call to the fellowship of the crucified one and an invitation in his name to reconciliation with God…”

I loved this quote for a couple of reasons, one because of my past experience and the other because of my daughter’s recent experience.

Crankiness in the Church

Thank God for crayons.

I think this most Sundays. Our 3-year-old daughter doesn’t like going to the in-service Sunday school class, so for the past year or so, she’s been sitting with us all the way through the service. That’s not a good idea. But part of the rules is that if she wants to sit with the grown-ups then she needs to act like one and be quiet – and, in a classic case of proving that sometimes our kids will actually live up to our expectations if we set them high enough, she’s done a great job.

Of course, she’s helped a great deal by a little purse full of toys, two snacks (one for when the singing starts, the other for the sermon) and the Sunday Scribes bags the church provides, each with a pad of paper and baggie of crayons. J quietly sits on the floor and creates page after page of crayon drawings and hands them to me while I worship, pray, take communion and listen to the preaching.

To me, that’s a win-win-win. She’s learning how to be quiet for extended stretches of time when silence would be truly necessary (a funeral or wedding, for example), my wife and I get to fully engage in worship, and the folks around us aren’t distracted by toddler shenanigans.

For others, apparently, this is not the ideal situation.

When Fear and Arrogance Never Meet

Peter Enns has been running a terrific series of guest posts by Carlos Bovell, author of the forthcoming Rehabilitating Inerrancy in a Culture of Fear.

In his first post, Bovell talks about a question he had as he was struggling with his own beliefs on the topic of biblical inerrancy:

Why do believers have to wait for people like [Bart] Ehrman to publish books before we find out about all these problems with scripture, problems that scholars have known about all along?

This has been one of my complaints, as well. Growing up, I heard nothing about the disputed authorship of the Pauline epistles, or the probability of 2 Isaiah, or the paucity of historical, scientific or archaeological evidence in support of pretty much any event described in the Bible before the reign of King David.

In fact, I was taught quite the opposite.

I’m not saying my Sunday school classes should have been a lesson in historical-critical scholarship, but if the curriculum at my Christian high school could take the time to argue apologetically for the historical accuracy of, say, the Genesis flood account, certainly it could have taken the time to present at least the other side of the story.

A Letter to Three Daughters

Yesterday was International Women’s Day. Inspired by Alise Wright’s letter to her sons in honor of the day, what follows is a letter to my three daughters, who one day will read this and think: “Dad, could you be any more embarrassing?”

Dear J, G and H,

This world will tell you lies. It will lie to you about your value, about your appearance, about your place. It is filled with people who will see you as weak, who see you as less valuable – to them and to God – and who see you as an object, all because you are female.

I pray you keep this letter in mind when you hear those things. I am afraid that, though the world is changing, it will not do so fast enough to spare you from the warped wisdom and twisted value system that prioritizes, above all things, the gender of a person.

Because you are more than women, as I am more than a man. We are children of God, three daughters and a son. We are loved, valued, respected, prized by the one who made us – the parent of the entire world, the one who is big enough to breathe life into existence, small enough to weep with us when that life goes awry.

But you are, in fact, women. And you should be proud of that. I pray you never accept the attempts of men to make your gender a cause for shame, embarrassment or pity. You are women. Congratulations!

This is my prayer for you:

I pray that you will strive to be the women God has made you to be. I don’t know what that is yet. I would be no less proud of each of you if you were a minister or a homemaker, a scientist or a schoolteacher, a soldier or a nurse.

I pray that you will hold fast to Jesus, as the women who followed him to the cross did, after all the men abandoned him.

Are Children Evil?

It occurred to me while reading back over yesterday’s post that my former self would have responded much differently to that set of Puritan descriptions for how we should raise our children. As you might recall, Tamar Moag described the Puritans’ use of language as a clue to why they felt corporal punishment was necessary:

… the recurrent use of words such as ‘stubborn’ and ‘rebellious’ to describe children’s nature, and words such as ‘conquer’, ‘subdue’, ‘obedience’, and ‘repress’ to describe the parental role. A 1732 letter by Susanna Wesley to her son John offers an instance of this type of writing: ‘When a child is corrected it must be conquered, and this will be no hard matter to do’.

Why do those words strike me so differently today than they would have 10-15 years ago? Some of it is having children. I really enjoy my kids. They’re not perfect, by any means, and, yes, they can certainly be stubborn and rebellious – our older daughter just went to time out as I’m typing this – but I don’t think they need to be conquered, subdued or repressed.

Words like that strike me as a natural outgrowth of original sin theology. If we are born with a “sin nature” genetically inherited from Adam and Eve, then that kind of phrasing is understandable. We have to admit it’s technically accurate, even if uncomfortable to see expressed.

But I think we need a new theology because that one doesn’t make sense. The text of Genesis 1-3 doesn’t support it.

‘Blessed Are the Laptop Shooters …’

By now you’ve surely heard of or seen the video above, in which an angry father, disrespected on Facebook by his 15-year-old daughter, empties a clip from his handgun into her laptop. As of this morning, it has nearly 24 million views. The day Tommy Jordan released his video, numerous friends of mine posted it to their feeds, all of them with some variant of, “This is awesome!”

I agree it’s awesome, assuming the definition of “awesome” is “extremely impressive or daunting; inspiring great apprehension or fear” and not “extremely good; excellent.”

Yes, it’s a fun video. Who hasn’t wanted to do something like this? We’ve all felt disrespected at some point or other, and the idea of enacting irreversible, humiliating public consequences touches a nerve. It’s cathartic, in a way. But here’s the thing: That’s not how we’re supposed to parent. We don’t discipline because we’re angry or feel hurt. We don’t punish to soothe a primitive desire for retribution.

We do it because we love. And while I get that love looks different in different families, I have a hard time coming to grips with violence as an expression of it.

This is why I’ve talked so much about the genocidal passages of Judges and 1 Samuel. Jesus ascribes to God the qualities of a parent in the Sermon on the Mount, and viewed through that lens, it’s impossible to see how love – even our imperfect, incomplete, human view of it – is compatible with slaughter and bloodshed.

Emptying a round into a laptop isn’t the same thing as ordering ethnic cleansing, of course, but the video and the many positive reactions to it reaffirm that we have a violence problem in America. Unfortunately, as we’ll see, the problem stems largely from Christianity – more specifically, how Christians have traditionally read and interpreted the Bible.