Some time back I was having a conversation with a friend of mine who is the counseling pastor at a local church. We were discussing a few of the many theological issues that I still have not fully resolved to my own liking. During the course of this conversation he made a statement that has really stuck with me and that I quite often use as a yardstick while working out my own theology.

Essentially what he told me was, that while I am attempting to discover who the God of the Bible really is, to be sure that the theology that I come up with is a theology that I would want for my children and my children’s children.

I think that in this ever evolving age that we live in, a statement like that carries more and more weight with each passing year. I sometimes rant about Fundamentalism, but to be quite honest there are many aspects of Fundamentalist Christianity that are enviable. The desire to live a holy life before God, shunning the “ways of the world” is not a bad thing. In fact, that is precisely what I believe that Jesus called us to do.

In fact, I believe that the pure and innocent lives that many who claimed the moniker of “fundamentalist” just a few short generations ago would be preferable in many ways to having to grow up in the increasingly secular world that we presently find ourselves in here in the 21st century. But those days of innocence are long gone and hiding our heads in the proverbial sand does much more harm than good. Realistically, the only way to possibly think that you can raise your children and not have them influenced by today’s secular and  scientifically advancing world is to live on some compound in the middle of nowhere (with no Internet access!), and pray that they never leave and experience the “real world.” So although I find some of the aspects of fundamentalism somewhat enviable, I realize that envy is really not for fundamentalism itself, but instead for the lost world from which that type of religion was viable. But the world has moved on since then.

So how do you develop a personal theology that you can pass on to your children that is biblically sound but that can withstand the rigors of a world where militant atheism, gay marriage, secular humanism and even Christians bashing each other over doctrinal differences is part of the daily news. How do you explain to them that God created the world when science has largely “proven” evolution. In an ever increasing “naturalist” world that denies the miraculous, how can you convince them that Jesus was in fact raised from the dead and that they should put their faith in Him, even when the shelves in the religious section of the local bookstore has an ever increasing number of books that will tell them that is a myth and that the “historical Jesus” was at best simply a gifted Jewish prophet. How do you instill in your children reverence for the Bible as God’s word, but still account for the fact that it really is not “inerrant” (with just a bit of research they will find out for themselves that inerrancy in the fundamentalist sense is kind of like believing in Santa Claus) without enrolling them in college level theology courses?

Well to begin with, ignoring science or claiming that the dinosaur bones that they have more than likely handled with their own hands by the time that they have graduated high school are a devious ploy of the devil to trick mankind simply won’t work (I was actually told that as a child).  We may be able to shelter our younger children by homeschooling them, but unless we send them to some fundamentalist university and then convince them to live in a world without television or Internet, they are going to eventually encounter real science. Although God could have made the world in six days, the overwhelming evidence points more to the direction that He may have taken a wee bit longer than that.  In developing a theological ideology for our children we simply cannot ignore what modern science is telling us, instead we must find a way to integrate the God of the Bible with what we have proven scientifically, otherwise they will quite often question everything that we ever told them about God.

(Now I am not taking a “naturalist” view here. Science has never disproved the miraculous and naturalism is an entirely different subject.)

Secondly, I am not going to teach my children to hate homosexuals or anybody else for that matter. While I believe that the Bible is fairly clear about same-sex relationships and thing that it take some fairly creative hermeneutical  gymnastics to justify homosexuality, I am not telling my children that “God hates fags” and is sending them all straight to Hell. (To my own embarrassment, I must admit that I once did just that.)

Thirdly and while I am on the subject of Hell, I have no plans to teach my children that a wrathful God plans on subjecting the damned to an eternity of torment either. Whether annihilationism or just a “separation from God”  does more justice to scripture on the doctrine of Hell I have yet to fully ascertain, but I am convinced that much of our current doctrine on Hell was a fabrication of the Catholic church, influenced  by Greek thought. And many of our youth today have a very difficult time reconciling what we claim is a God of love and eternal torment for the “damned”.

I don’t want my children to become Christians because of fear of Hell. I want them to become Christians because they love a God who they realize loves them more than they could possibly understand.

Fourthly, I do not plan on teaching my children that the Hindu or Islamic child that they sit next to in school is going to Hell if they never (in this lifetime) become a Christian. While I do believe that Jesus Christ is the resurrected Son of God, I simply do not have enough information to go on to make the assertion that all “good” Hindus or anybody else is going to “Hell”. While I would like to be a Christian inclusivist or even a universalist, I am not quite there yet either. What I do believe is that God, through His grace, introduced me to His Son, and that is the path that I must take. Even if there are other paths that lead to salvation, I remain convinced that the Christian path is the superior one and that is what I will teach my children. What God has in store for non-Christians is His business; my business is to represent His love to everyone that He places in my path.

Fifth, I have no plans to teach my children that God is some sort of cosmic ATM machine nor is He an Alladin’s lamp who will grant your every desire and make you healthy and wealthy if you just say the right prayer or send a big enough check to the church. I do believe that God does bless people, but more than ever I believe that those blessings simply come automatically when we begin to live a life such as the one that Jesus provided an example of. Not that God doesn’t supernaturally intervene at times for those who put Him first in their lives, because I do believe that He does. But when He does, I think that it is quite often either to bring glory to His name or to build our faith.

We no longer live in a world where we can simply declare to our children as dogmatic many of these areas of Christianity that in fact really quite gray and expect them to just accept it as fact because “we said so”. While I do believe that the Bible is inspired, I have also discovered that many of the things that I was told that the Bible said just simply aren’t in there. In today’s Information Age, we cannot expect that our children will not eventually make the same realizations.

So, as I continue to “work out my own Christ-centered theology”, I seek to craft a theology so that it will withstand the close scrutiny that I know that my children will give to it…and their children as well. Although Christ could possibly return before my children’s children reach the age where they begin to ask the difficult questions, I think that I owe it to them to have answers to whatever questions they may ask about God and the Bible in case He doesn’t. And I don’t think “because the pastor said so” will be sufficient in a world where today’s knowledge  is outdated six months from now and information (as well as misinformation) on every subject imaginable is only a mouse click away.