250 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

Theology and Today's Informed Child
By Maurene Fell Pierson

"Anti-intellectualism is historically traceable in American life, and the effectiveness of Christian education is not unrelated to it. Christians ought seriously to consider whether the church school, if it does not actively develop the intellect of today's informed child, can lead him to a knowledge of Jesus Christ."

WHEN Jesus was twelve, Luke tells us, he lost himself in earnest talk with theological experts. Many twelve-year-olds today could profit by getting lost in this way.

As the only recorded incident of Jesus' childhood, this event merits reflection. Popular interpretation of it has no doubt been influenced by the Heinrich Hoffman painting called "Christ in the Temple." in the 30's and 40's or this century scarcely any middleclass Protestant home or small town church in the midwest was without a copy of it, and it still continues in popularity. The picture is misleading. The artist shows an angelic looking, other-worldly child, quite different from the probably unkempt, aggressive boy who turned -up at the temple and inserted himself into the midst of a learned discussion. The painting is docetic in influence, suggesting that an effeminate child, who "was out of this world," told the learned doctors more than a mystical thing or two, and left them bemused. The dialogue is lost. The painting does not convey, as the Scripture does, the impact of a real boy's honest questions, and the amazed replies of knowledgeable adults who have encountered surprising perception and a foundation of answers from which probing questions arise. As the New English Bible translates it, "They found him sitting in the temple, surrounded by the teachers, listening

251 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

to them, putting questions, and all who heard him were amazed at his intelligence and the answers he gave."

As one who associates in teacher-pupil relationship with both young adolescent and pre-adolescent boys and girls, I find the Scriptural account of this incident in Jesus' childhood provocative. Luke says that the parents went a day's journey without realizing that the youngster was not in the company. Here, it appears, was an active, sociable boy whose parents seemingly had real confidence in his ability to look after himself. Discovering he was not in the company, Mary and Joseph returned to Jerusalem, and located their son in the temple after three days' search. The temple was not, apparently, the first place they thought to look, perhaps because he was not predictably religious. The fact that he was there, however, suggests that he had developed in ways they had overlooked, and that he had an initiative, curiosity, and daring, capable of sending him to the center of things. One gets the feeling also that Mary and Joseph and the village rabbi had taught this boy all they could and that he wanted to find out what the temple experts had to say. He returned to Nazareth, the Scripture indicates, with either a new, or undiminished, feeling of at-homeness in the universe, and of relatedness to God whom he called Father. The Jesus that emerges from Luke's telling of this incident is a lively, active, intelligent, interested, questioning boy, a pre-adolescent at the peak of his childhood powers. In a boyish adventure he got to the theologians of his day.

I

In our church schools there are eleven- and twelve-year-olds who would also like to know what the religious experts say, but they never "go up to Jerusalem," and they are separated from the learned by a distance as great as that between Nazareth and the holy city. But ought not inquisitive boys and girls have an intellectually stimulating and faith-filled experience in our churches today? Is it not in fact necessary if they are to "know" Jesus well enough to say "yes" or no " to him?

Of course the public schools will not permit such experiences, but if parents could and would stop their children's secular education at an early elementary level, then a non-intellectual approach in Christian education would not be so damaging. But where sophisticated, accelerated, secular education is coupled with overly-simplified, non-

252 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

intellectual, slow-paced church school education, a dangerous disparity occurs in the lives of the children of Christian church members and creates problems in their attitude toward the Christian faith which need not have been brought into existence. Disparity between the demands and quality of secular education and church school education can discourage a developing sense of Christian commitment and destroy a desire to continue in church-provided study opportunities.

If one assesses eleven- and twelve-year-olds as "candidates" for "theological" education, he finds signs of promise. Many boys and girls of this age are in quite good command of themselves. They have acquired and developed some skills in reading and writing and studying and can use these skills with some competence. Most of them have a keen interest in the natural world; they like factual knowledge; they enjoy acquiring information; for the most part they are quite optimistic about their ability to learn and to know, and this makes them very teachable. At this age they also seem more keenly interested in the kinds of questions that engage theologians than they will probably again be until college years. And since, in the later years of childhood, receiving instruction is the dominant mode of educational activity, it is worthwhile to remember (as Kimball and McClellan assert in Education and the New America) that one fundamental principle of instruction is that it give the learner reasons for the beliefs he accepts from others and constructs for himself.¹

Later on, when adolescent changes make these same boys and girls more subjective, more emotional, more sensitive, the qualities of late childhood are somewhat submerged. During adolescence, when all their previously acquired ideas and attitudes are "up for grabs," the ideas that were planted at this earlier age are, I think, more profoundly significant than has been generally recognized in either Christian or secular education. The ideas acquired in late childhood, and which during adolescence can act as stabilizers, as poles around which other ideas can form, must not be weak, limited, narrow. They must have strength, virility, breadth. They should be there when adolescence takes over.

It is for these reasons that boys and girls at the peak of childhood need, and can use, a consciously theological education. I am defin-

¹ Solon T. Kimball and James McClellan, Education and the New America (New York: Random House, 1963), p. 29.

253 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

ing theology broadly here as "faith trying to understand itself," seeing it as involving straight thinking and precise speaking. In practice I see the endeavor as the bringing of young teachable minds to bear upon the fact of Christian faith and the claims of that faith. I see it as teaching in a way that appeals unabashedly to the child's intellect, seeking to develop it.

II

What is the "intellect" that one would seek to develop? A good definition is given by Richard Hofstadter in Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, where he contrasts it with intelligence. Intellect, he says, is "the critical, creative, contemplative side of mind. Whereas intelligence seeks to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines. Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and looks for the meaning of situations as a whole. Intelligence can be praised as a quality in animals; intellect, being a unique manifestation of human dignity, is both praised and assailed as a quality in men. When the difference is so defined, it becomes easier to understand why we sometimes say that a mind of admittedly penetrating intelligence is relatively unintellectual, and why, by the same token, we see among minds that are unmistakably intellectual, a considerable range of intelligence."²

It seems to me that one can go on to say that intelligence, in greater or lesser degree, is something that is a part of a child's natural endowment, and that where a normal degree of it exists, intellect can be developed. Minds can be deadened, if the life of the mind is not valued. Minds can be stimulated, if the life of the mind is valued. And where the life of the mind is not valued, anti-intellectualism develops. Anti-intellectualism Hofstadter defines, in the same book, as "a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life."³

Where intellect is resented, minimized, mistrusted, church members, though intelligent, will place their minds under the guidance of their emotions, rather than their emotions under the guidance of their minds enlightened by Christian theology. Often this results in

² Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 25.
³ Ibid., p. 7.

254 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

faulty reasoning that goes something like this: "I am a Christian; therefore these ideas and opinions of mine are Christian. Christians must be loyal to their faith. I will fight for these convictions." And then unexamined ideas, quite unchristian in origin and practice, will be defended to the point where the defender develops a martyr complex and doubts everyone's Christianity but his own. If such persons teach in church schools, children can come to accept as Christian ideas which are not Christian, or they can reject Christianity along with the teacher, thinking they know what Christianity is without ever having really been confronted with it.

The ability freely, openly, to examine ideas and then to choose one's next decisive step as a faithful follower of Christ is an ability which combines Christian faith and intellect. The desire for absolute certainty, the unwillingness to doubt, to question, to examine, the desire to possess an always effective formula that can be applied unthinkingly, these are anti-intellectual traits that act as common barriers to carrying Christian faith into all areas of life; for the desire for absolute certainty is a barrier to a living faith. If boys and girls are not encouraged at the height of their childhood to look at the Christian faith and see what it is and what it is not, they may never know the church as anything but an institution, or a club, or a comfortable retreat house, and may forever miss knowing it as a body that continues the teaching, healing, enlightening ministry of Jesus.

For Jesus was not crucified because he was the good-natured, pious founder of a respectable organization. His enemies saw him as unbearably aggressive, contentious, and blasphemous. He held up limited, cherished ideas and questioned whether in the light of God's unlimited love they were really valid. He awakened numb, sleeping minds, and as the flow of life's blood coursed through the half-deadened tissue of paralyzed ideals, thoughts prickled painfully. But who wants a flesh and blood Jesus who makes one think? The Jesus many people believe in today would never have been crucified.

But if one stops to consider it, does it not appear that Jesus was crucified because, among other things, he was an evaluator of evaluations, a critic of that which was considered above criticism, a troubler of mankind, in short, intellectual? And if the mind of the child of today is not stimulated and quickened in his church school education, will he ever come to know this crucified Jesus whom God has raised from the dead? May he not either leave the church, or do as has

255 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

been sometimes done, reject Jesus by accepting in his place a white Protestant all-american Christ who bears as much resemblance to the New Testament Jesus as any local country club does to the early church?

III

One who reads Victor Obenhaus's sociological study, Church and Faith in Mid-America, can hardly fail to see that it adds up to an appalling statement of the non-intellectual, secularized quality of church life in the midwest.⁴ Ideas prevalent in the local church life studied were often drawn, not from traditional Christian belief, but from secular organizations and from business and political life, and the church members were apparently unaware that this was so. The state of affairs revealed by this study exists, I believe, because a large portion of church members have never received a basic preparatory Christian education that includes serious study of Christian theology, church history, and the Old and New Testament illumined by the insights of Biblical criticism. Thus many church members have little background to draw from when it comes to thinking "christianly." Also a sizable portion of church members do not seem to have developed their critical faculties. To be sure, many Christian church members criticize, but they are not, for the most part, critically astute, and they tend to drive from their midst those who are. They may defend their own ideas, they may deride differing ideas, but they seldom examine ideas. In fact, the belief that the examining of ideas is evil, that it is the enemy of human warmth and feeling, that it is unchristian, is almost a religious tenet, almost an article of faith in some local church life. The suspicion of intellect, wherever it occurs, Hofstadter says, is founded "upon a set of fictional and wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice, and the 'purely' theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It is pitted against democracy, since the intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect, and by extension, for the intellec-

⁴ Victor Obenhaus, The Church and Faith in Mid-America (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963), p. 23.

256 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

tual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic sentiment . . . ?"⁵

Yet as Hofstadter points out: "Since some tension between the mind and heart, between emotion and intellect, is everywhere a persistent feature of Christian experience, it would be a mistake to suggest there is anything distinctively American in religious anti-intellectualism."⁶ But he shows that under American westward expansion, conditions which favored anti-intellectualism in religious life became more dominant than those which would discourage it. His book traces some of the social movements in our history in which "intellect has been dissevered from its co-ordinate place among the human virtues and assigned the position of a special kind of vice."⁷ He says, "Anti-intellectualism first got its grip on our ways of thinking because it was fostered by an evangelical religion that also purveyed many humane and democratic sentiments. It made its way into our politics because it became associated with our passions for equality. It has become formidable in our education partly because our educational beliefs are evangelistically egalitarian. Hence, as far as possible, our anti-intellectualism must be excised from the benevolent impulses upon which it lives by constant and delicate acts of intellectual surgery which spare these impulses themselves. . . ."⁸ "Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of a claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated."⁹ (Italics, mine.)

The fear of intellect exists in many churches today. It must be overcome with faith in Jesus Christ. If our Christian faith fails to overcome this fear of intellect, our church schools will become increasingly ineffective. They will, in fact, be unable to give to junior and senior high school youth the basic preparatory education in church history, Christian theology, and the Bible that is needed for adult Christian life. In fact, they may not have any students left to give it to.

⁵ Hofstadter, op. cit., pp. 45-46.
⁶ Ibid., p. 55.
⁷ Ibid., p. 47.
⁸ Ibid., p. 23.
⁹ Ibid., p. 46.

257 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

IV

That the influence of public school life-adjustment theory has had an anti-intellectual influence upon Christian education is a possibility to be considered as Christians chart the future course of the church school. Hofstadter says, "The appearance within professional education of an influential anti-intellectual movement is one of the striking features of American thought." "The life-adjustment movement . . . was an attempt on the part of educational leaders and the United States Office of Education to make completely dominant the values of the crusade against intellectualism that had been going on since 1910."¹⁰ In the 40's and 50's the life-adjustment view gained ascendancy in the public schools, and while this view is now past its peak, and was always opposed by some teachers and parents, it still exerts influence.

There is no question that progressive education had at its core something sound and important and necessary for American education. John Dewey brought joy and light into stuffy schoolrooms. Progressive education had freshness in methods; it attempted to capture and use the interest of the child and employ his need for activity; it concerned the minds of teachers and educators with a more adequate sense of the child's nature; it acted to reduce arbitrary authoritarianism in teachers, and it developed the child's capacity for expression as well as his ability to learn; but it had real weaknesses, too. Strong in the area of method, it was weak in the area of curricula.

The life-adjustment theory of progressive education was distinguished by its diffuse purpose and goals, its lack of respect for solid, demanding curricula and for the mastery of subject matter. "Traditional education had been founded upon a primary conviction about the value of the various subject-matter disciplines and on the assumption that the child, through some degree of mastery of academic subjects, would enlarge his mind for the general ends of life . . . "¹¹ The merits of this earlier theory were degraded and discarded by committed life-adjustment educators.

Today, church school teachers' magazines reflect freshness in techniques and an understanding of child development. These are good fruits of progressive education. But I believe that public school life-adjustment theory, with its negation of the merits of traditional

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 323 and p. 343.
¹¹ Ibid., p. 355.

258 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

educational theory, discouraged within the church a concept of the church school as a place where the child can and should receive preparatory education for adult Christian life. The influence of life-adjustment theory seems evident to me in the consistent negation church school teachers' magazines make of techniques that lead to the mastery of subject matter. A conception that knowledge has little or nothing to do with "life values" was an essential premise of the whole life-adjustment movement.¹² Articles and lesson outlines that I read sometimes suggest that the acquisition of "mere" information is unimportant, if not unworthy, and that it may stand in the way of a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. I think this is nonsense. If it is true that no one is saved by knowledge, it is equally true that no one is saved by ignorance either. Every teacher has seen mere information make a difference in the thinking of boys and girls. I have seen the information that there are two creation stories in Genesis coming from different periods in Israel's history make a significant difference in the thinking of boys and girls. I have seen the information that the skin of all normal human beings contains not different but varying amounts of the same coloring elements also make a significant difference in the thinking of boys and girls. Information is mental furniture. Minds empty of it have nothing for "the person" to "sit upon" and reflect.

The church school, as envisioned by professional Christian educators in Christian education publications, seems to me to be, like life-adjustment schools, diffusely vague about purpose and goals. Of course it has a big, overall goal: to lead boys and girls "to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ." This is more apt to be achieved, the material I read avers, when emphasis is consistently placed upon the interaction of persons, upon the Christian living that goes on in the church school class room now, rather than upon the acquisition of information. Life-adjustment education was also concerned with now, and was unsympathetic to education leading to intellectual development and cumulative knowledge. I have no objection to the "up-grading" of Christian living now; I do object to the "downgrading" of serious, individual study and the suggestion that it is competitive and leads to unchristian attitudes. Something other than the casual gathering and sharing of data by committees and the interaction of persons in small group learning is involved in get-

¹² Ibid., p. 345.

259 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

ting to the place where one "knows" Jesus Christ and possesses the informational background necessary for understanding the Bible and the Church. Is demanding, individual, lonely study that leads to a mastery of subject matter really incompatible with existential Christian living? Does a belief that they are incompatible arise from a deep understanding of the Christian faith, or does it come, in part, from having anti-intellectualist life-adjustment theory religiously re-enforced by churchly anti-intellectualism? Does the belief arise out of commitment to Jesus Christ or to an educational theory?

V

In many communities today's church school child of eleven and twelve is an informed child. And also, as Kimball and McClellan point out in Education and the New America, "The disciplines of experimentation, rational interpretation of observation, and impartiality of justice have penetrated the world of childhood."¹³ Not infrequently the child's elementary education is "accelerated." His Christian education should take these facts into consideration. In addition, the books, the educational TV programs, the magazines, that are a part of the cultural life of a number of the boys and girls in our churches, all confront children at an early age with a kind of information that ought to be related in a meaningful way to the Christian faith. Through the communication media of our society, the child may encounter Buddhist priests literally on fire for their faith, African tribesmen still in the stone age, a radio telescope turned like a giant ear toward outer space, an enlarged diagram of the molecule DNA purported to hold the secret of life, the bones of a fossil "man" dating back a million and a half years, and a tree-like diagram, linking man's ancestors with the anthropoids.

What the child thinks about these things is important later to the youth who is seeking a sense of identity, who is trying to link his personal history with the history of all things. As S. N. Eisenstadt says, ". . . the linkage of personal time and transition with cosmic time become especially accentuated in that age span usually designated as youth."¹⁴ If the pre-adolescent child acquires sound foundational ideas, these can stabilize the youth, for the child has already

¹³ Kimball and McClellan, op. cit., p. 290.
¹⁴ Erik Erikson (ed.), Youth: Change and Challenge (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1963, "Archetypal Patterns of Youth," S. N. Eisenstadt), p. 26.

260 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

begun the process of linkage. Is not the keen interest many children exhibit in prehistory, in dinosaurs, cave men and fossils, a kind of unspoken questioning, an asking, "Where did we all come from? Where did I come from?"

One of the most characteristically human of all man's tendencies, and one so plainly seen in man's children, is the propensity to look back, to try to learn from whence one has come. The tendency springs from an individual need to orient oneself, to relate oneself, to have a sense of belonging and to get from it a sense of direction. To the adult persons in the child's community fall the privilege and responsibility of guiding children in this human tendency to look back. And this is the great challenge to the Christian theologian and Christian educator today: to relate all of history and pre-history to what is seen in Jesus Christ. If we are truly the people of God, we will see and declare God's hand in all of human and cosmic history in a way that is meaningful to children today. Christian teachers do not have to change the facts of human knowledge as they lead their pupils to reflect upon them in the light of Christian faith. They can, without apology, make a Christian interpretation of them, if they have studied enough to recognize what they are. As William Beck says in "The Riddle of Life," "What occurs occurs; the rest relates to one's state of mind."¹⁵

The Christian has a basic conviction, an under-girding point of view, a belief that the universe is not empty and lost but that God is with us. All the Christian has is a basic trust that the essential nature of that which has called all things into being is seen in Jesus. This is all he has, but it is everything. And because of this there is no person, no problem, no knowledge, from which he can separate himself. For the Christian, nothing is, or ever has been, outside God's presence.

VI

Christian education must begin to use materials it has previously ignored or feared. Pre-adolescent boys and girls should be taught that higher criticism and Biblical scholarship exist and that they have made important contributions to understanding the Bible today. Children can be taught the nature of myth and legend and learn to

¹⁵ Saturday Evening Post (William Beck, "The Riddle of Life," May 10, 1958), p. 95.

261 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

see how they convey truth and information about the persons who used them. Shock on the part of students who learn of higher criticism at college or seminary level is not infrequently reported. But the shock, I believe, is not inherent in the information itself, but in the fact that the information was so long withheld in their Christian education. I have observed that boys and girls of eleven and twelve years who are introduced to the existence of higher criticism are not shocked. They are interested. It makes sense to them that man's mind, curious about the how of all things, was naturally curious about how the Bible developed.

Eleven and twelve year olds of my acquaintance have been introduced to the fact of higher criticism by means of a study of the two creation stories in Genesis. In a week day Christian education class one boy asked why it was that the first chapter in Genesis said that God made animals and then man, and the second chapter said God made Adam first and then animals. What was the reason for this? Another boy asked whether the teacher thought that what "Darwin said about God not making people is true." Here were questions that a Christian teacher ought to answer theologically and in the framework of modern knowledge. The integrity of the teacher and the children's development as thinking Christians were deeply involved. But in order to answer the questions responsibly, it was necessary to add appreciably to the partial, scientific, Biblical, and historical information that these children already had. The teacher answered both boys' questions briefly at the time, telling the first boy that he had discovered what Bible scholars have also observed, that there are two creation stories in Genesis. He told the second boy that when reading Darwin's Origin of the Species, he found Darwin speaking of the Creator as being responsible for the process of evolution. The teacher then told the class that both boys' questions led into areas that deserved further exploration in other class sessions. So in the following weeks the class got into evolutionary theory, its meaning (the relatedness of all life), and the fossil record which supports it. They got into Hebrew history, they learned about J, E, JE, D, and P. They learned that there are two creation stories in the Bible coming from different periods of time; they learned about two modern theories of creation, the explosion theory and the steady-state theory. They learned something of the nature of myth and legend.

262 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

Finally the teacher returned to the question about Darwin and said that when he read The Origin of the Species he did not find it to be a denial of God. but to be a record of observations which suggested the way life probably developed on earth. He said that there has been, and still is, much confusion about Darwin's personal religious beliefs, that some people say he did not believe in God, that others say he did. Then he read the class the last sentence in The Origin in which Darwin speaks of "the Creator." But said the teacher, had Darwin denied a creator, he personally would not feel that he must make the same denial. Darwin, like any man, was limited, the teacher pointed out; he did not know everything, nor did he claim to. Like all men who have truly searched for knowledge and added greatly to man's store of it, he seemed sometimes more impressed with how much he did not know than with how much he did. At times, in The Origin, the teacher said he found Darwin saying, "to our ignorance it seems" rather than "to our knowledge." The teacher told the class that there was one thing, however, he felt quite sure Darwin did not believe. He was sure he did not believe that God picked up some clay in his hands, sculptured a human form, breathed into it, and this became the first man. "But," queried the teacher, "you don't believe that either, do you?" There was a chorus of "no's" and a look of relief on each young face because what each wanted said had been said. The teacher then went on to review their new knowledge of the existence of two creation stories in Genesis, to discuss the kind of literature the Adam and Eve story is, and to help them see that both stories make the same statement about man's creatureliness and his dependence upon God.

VII

As they leave childhood, boys and girls ought also to have spelled out for them the fact that the Christian education they have received and will receive is education within a particular tradition, faith, point of view. They ought to see that this point of view has sometimes become distorted; that it has sometimes been maintained in an autocratic, dictatorial way; but that it is also a point of view that can be lived in any time, any place, any culture; and that while it is continually in need of clarifying reformation, it is the vehicle which carries a life-giving cargo. They can learn that if they follow Jesus,

263 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

entering into a personal relationship with him, trusting God-in-Christ, they can be today's clarifiers of this point of view.

To be sure, Jesus is not simply a "great point of view." He is God Incarcnate. But unless a person sees rather clearly the point of view involved in commitment to him, he may have little understanding of the Christian faith, and possibly, little faith. Christian commitment is unavoidably intellectual as well as emotional.

In Education and the New America Kimball and McClellan have some thought-provoking things to say about the nature of commitment in today's complex society. They maintain that in today's society, commitment is not primarily a state of personal feelings. They say ". . . education for commitment involves both learning the process of acceptance and rejection and learning to judge among the objectives for those that are worthy of acceptance, meaning that it is primarily an intellectual affair though with emotional overtones that cannot be ignored."¹⁶

It is foolhardy to fence off a child's Christian education from the rest of his intellectual life, to make it primarily emotional and to believe that unaided he will tear down the barriers that make it seem irrelevant, set apart. For it is more than likely that, if his Christian education is fenced off, he will leap the fence and leave the area of Christian education altogether. Late childhood, I believe, is a crucial period in the theological education of a child. I think it is at this age that the church often loses gifted children, though they may continue in church school and related activities for a few years thereafter. Christian education today must remove barriers within itself that prevent the Word-of-God-in-Christ from being heard by children in today's society. It is my conviction that by the time the informed child of today is twelve his Christian education should be de-mythologized. Rudolf Bultmann says: "To de-mythologize is to reject not Scripture or the Christian message as a whole, but the world-view of Scripture which all too often is retained in Christian dogmatics and in the preaching of the church. To de-mythologize is to deny that the message of Scripture and of the Church is bound to an ancient world-view which is obsolete."¹⁷

¹⁶ Kimball and McClellan, op. cit., p. 243.
¹⁷ Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: The Scribner Library, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), p. 35.

264 - Theology and Today's Informed Child

VIII

Christian church school teachers cannot lead boys and girls to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. They can only accept him themselves and live out this acceptance in today's world.

Paul Tillich says, "How can the gospel be communicated? We are asking: How do we make the message heard and seen, and then either rejected or accepted? The question cannot be: How do we communicate the Gospel so that others will accept it? For this there is no method."¹⁸

Christian teachers can only remove the barriers of time and space and language so that the eternal voice that speaks through the Bible will be heard: "Come. Follow me." And as in the past, so will it be in the future: if the voice is heard, the affirmative response to it seen, some will follow.

¹⁸ Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 201.