This is not a book review; this is an examination of a child rearing method, the theology that undergirds it, and the execution of the practice. This will be long. If you want to ignore my examinations and rebuttals you can scroll to the end and be done with it—but I would rather you read all of this. The end of the post will also contain several links of importance.
Up front: a warning—this will not be the last time this sort of examination has to come up.
Parents are like soldiers in the trenches. They’re afraid. They’re living in the moment. They’re wondering if they’re doing wrong and what they could do better while trying to discover what their parents did right (and wrong) in their own experience. Quick fix books, especially the short and easy to read variety, will keep showing up on the web and in bookstores. For Christian parents, these books will cite Scripture and give a façade of being Biblically grounded. The spurious glitter of their treasures of pseudo-wisdom will fade, but sometimes not before doing incalculable damage.
The current culprit is Michael and Debi Pearl’s To Train Up A Child. Their ministry (No Greater Joy) is known within individual fundamentalist circles for their training methods and some of their other writings regarding the marriage relationship. Up front: their book and their teaching is dangerous. Not only is it Biblically naïve, it is theologically confused and potentially damaging, at the very least, physically and mentally.
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Tags: child-rearing, deb pearl, michael pearl, no greater joy, the pearls, to train up a child, training
Posted in apologetics, current affairs | Comments (10)
Barring my faulty memory (and if I’m not lazy) I want to post prayers on Monday from all over Church History and then throughout the modern day, and then my own. But this one comes from pre-Church times (Israel’s history). It comes from Daniel.
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Tags: daniel, prayer mondays
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At this point I have to take a step back from the text—but not for the sake of my own view on God’s covenant to Abraham and its historical outworking, rather for clearing out some potentially misconceptions. It is always helpful to consider the details of any situation: which turns to make, which stops are important, where to find the hotel…that’s what I normally do. But sometimes it is necessary to get a bird’s eye view of the thing and see how the lines interconnect, how they follow down another path, and how they accentuate the lay of the land. The problem is that my mind contains a different bird’s eye view than what your bird’s eye view may look like.
I started this series underscoring the importance of words and saying how their conveyed information was to be received by the primary audience to convey real information. This was then recorded for our benefit.
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Tags: abrahamic covenant, covenant theology, progressive covenants
Posted in church, dispensationalism, israel, salvation | Comments (2)
Barring my faulty memory (and if I’m not lazy) I want to post prayers on Monday from all over Church History and then throughout the modern day, and then my own. This one comes from Calvin.
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Tags: Calvin, prayer mondays
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