CMCG
Theology of the Child
I believe that tomorrow you will have the opportunity to talk about some chapters of a forthcoming book that I have been editing together with Peter Privett and to which Keith has also made a contribution. I don’t want to pre-empt your discussion tomorrow, but I would like to say some things about the experience of producing this book because it has proved a fascinating and educating experience. I’ve learned a lot from doing it and I would like to share some of what I’ve learned with you. The book, which is being published in February next year to honour the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Year of the Child, is called Through the Eyes of a Child and has 13 chapters on some of the most complex and beautiful themes in Christian theology. Keith, for example, has written a wonderful chapter on Creation, but there are chapters on Nakedness and Vulnerability, Spirituality, Play, Word, Sin, Forgiveness, Grace, Salvation, Death, Judgement, Angels, and Heaven and Hell.
We start however with a chapter from Nigel Asbridge of the Children’s Society asking the very complicated question: what is a child? Many people think that that is a relatively easy question to answer, but it is not. The status of ‘child’ and the duration of ‘childhood’ has varied throughout history and is different in various countries today. It is all relative to boundaries in our society and depends entirely on what we are talking about: the age of consent, the age at which someone can buy tobacco and alcohol or a lottery ticket, the age of criminal responsibility, the age below which you can get a ‘child fare’, a ‘child meal’ or a discount, the age you can drive, the age of sexual maturity. You all know I’m sure that there’s a murky area of the teenage years when young people make themselves look older to get into a showing of Resident Evil Zombie Murderers at the cinema and make themselves look younger to get a child fare on a train.
In all these things the ‘child’ is defined as being not-adult. There are borderlines between being a child and crossing a societal boundary or threshold. So we properly get upset when we find children dragged into areas of adult responsibility and behaviour in all the evils of our global society, whether it’s children struggling to care for a parent or a siblings when they should be at school, working long hours to provide for the family, carrying guns and being used in warfare or being forced into sex work. There’s a truly terrible photograph in the book which I have reproduced for you of two laughing children pressing guns to the side of another’s head. But there is a flip side to all of these perspectives which can cause problems when we start to think theologically.
First, there is the idea that children are in the process of becoming, specifically that they are becoming adults. Adulthood is what they achieve, where they end up. We don’t look at it the other way round and ask what is lost by becoming an adult and whether the condition of being a child is in fact exemplary of our theological state before God: we are God’s children. Let’s think about these phrases: adults are amnesiac children, - they remind us of what we have forgotten; adults are ruined children, - in growing up we lose particular abilities and facilities that are part of what it means to be fully human; adults are lost to childhood, -our relationship with the world changes; adults are further from God than are children, - our faith and personal relationship with God also becomes changed by the results of cognitive development and physical maturity. These are uncomfortable ways to think about adult-child relations, not least because it transfers power from us to the children. But it is noticeable that writers like Philip Pullman and J K Rowling describe such relationships in ways which completely delight children and which make sense to them. Pullman’s adults envy the children’s love relationships with their soul-companions; the Dursleys are terrified of Harry’s power. Lyra and Will save the universe and deliver the dead; Harry and his friends defeat evil and bring peace to the world.
Another problem is that if we have strong feelings about children ‘doing’ things and having responsibilities, we can throw the baby out with the bath water and assume that children should not be doing anything that we have not sanctioned for them. We reduce them to passive learners whose task is to end up like us. We tend to presume that by protecting them we have nothing to learn from them; they are blank pages or sponges, waiting to absorb our wisdom and emerge fully fledged as adults. In no discipline has children’s voices been more absent than in theology. What do kids know about God? Theology is written by adults for adults and out of an adult spiritual sensibility. Theology is delicate, beautiful, complex and difficult. Therefore children can have no discourse which informs it, no experience which sharpens it. This is frankly arrant nonsense and recent theological understanding has begun to challenge this position and bring children into the ambit of these wise and grave theologians. When this happens exciting and unusual things take place, which are both wonderful and disturbing, as God is.
In the book we begin with a theological premise that God sees children very differently from the way we tend to. For God, children are not immature human beings in the process of becoming but complete and completed human beings. How radical a viewpoint this is! We are so used to our experience of growing older that we have trouble recognising that God does not view us exclusively in this way and does not judge us on how old, wise or developed or ‘finished’ we are. Jesus is completely the Son of God even as he is born helpless and vulnerable. We assume that children are in a state of becoming somehow ‘fully human’, but God does not. Certainly we grow, as Jesus himself grew (Luke 2.52) but what this means, is that the gifts and potentials which God endows in each one of us at conception, all that is built into our DNA, are revealed to others as we are nurtured. This is something which we can easily miss and means that nurture has of itself a profound spiritual significance, which enlarges the tragedy of God’s own suffering if it is neglected, - as I want to talk about later.
It’s an easy mistake to make. Jesus’ own parents (Luke 2. 41-51) are worried and distressed when Jesus goes missing and cannot understand his explanation when they find him back in the Temple learning and listening and deepening his knowledge and wisdom in the scriptures. He is after all only a child. Yet those same scriptures tell us that God’s call comes to people of all ages and that call to respond to him is both complete and valid. God calls the child Samuel (1 Samuel 3.1-19) and the young Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1.4-8). Both are entrusted with God’s news. God does not patronise children by saying ‘You’ll understand all this when you are older’ or ‘when you’re bigger you can carry messages for me’. God calls and finds children worthy of divine truth. That worthiness matters. Similarly, Jesus finds children worthy of blessing (Mark 10.16) and worthy of healing (Mark 5.41). This last passage has particular resonance because the event is so significant that the words of Jesus are not only preserved but come blasting out of the text. Little girl, get up. Live, be alive. Jesus speaks directly to the girl and she responds directly to his command. The healing and the miracle are to my mind after editing this book secondary to the lesson about how God relates to children and young people. There is no mediation through the parents, no talking about her in the third person, just a requirement that the girl be cared for. Why? Because the parents have to nurture this spiritual being who has received a personal call from Jesus. A dead person does not need something to eat. Why don’t we listen? Our children are not dead or sleeping, but we treat them as though they were. They are responding to God and our task is to care for them so they are best nurtured to respond to the words of Jesus. So doing this kind of theology throws new light on biblical passages we thought we all knew.
David Hay and Rebecca Nye have shown that children demonstrate both consciousness of God and a sense of relationship with God.[1] Our problem is that we sometimes find this challenging, or even subversive. In the new book Rebecca notes further that children can effortlessly weave their spirituality and consciousness of God into everyday talk and actions. They don’t compartmentalise it, save it for special times of day or for Sunday; it’s just there, colouring their ideas and imagination. Like Blake and Stanley Spencer, they see God visibly displayed among the mundane. And adults can want to reinterpret children’s experiences and ideas because they are uncomfortable and difficult to handle, taking their testimonies and insights and reworking them into something duller, safer and less edgy, using language that is sometimes more sophisticated, but also less creative and penetrating . It can also be compartmentalised and controlled. The news which both Samuel and Jeremiah delivered was very difficult for adults. The Godly Play idea of adults getting out of the way so that children can have clear sight of God takes a remarkable discipline which is sometimes poorly understood. We ourselves want God to see us more clearly, and we can find the idea that our children and young people are moved and inspired by the Holy Spirit to bring fresh things to our adult-dominated Church profoundly disturbing.
If we persist in assuming theology is only for adults then we are blind to what is God is doing and have only partial descriptions of the world and God’s interaction with it. I hope that the book we have written will play a part in changing that mindset and begin to open up readers to fresh engagement with theology as a discipline which is mediated by all human beings.
I want now to pick out some of the interesting perspectives which have emerged from the various chapters and which will prove challenging and perhaps controversial.
One of the ideas which emerges is about the unborn child. We tend to assume that the child in the womb has no facility for spiritual engagement, but we do this because we don’t remember being unborn and we have no apparent evidence of foetal spirituality. Or do we? Scripture says that the child Elisabeth was carrying leaped in the womb when the pregnant Mary, her cousin, visited her. Elisabeth says that this is in response to the Holy Child ‘for as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting the child in my womb leaped for joy’. (Luke 1. 39-56). This passage provides the basis of the Hail Mary and the Magnificat, words which have powerful liturgical presence in Christianity, but the context is two pregnant women responding to their unborn children in the presence of the Holy Spirit. This means that we can know more of the spirituality of the unborn child through the experience of pregnant women and in the experience of the family at birth. It is well known that birth often provokes powerful spiritual as well as emotional response, and it is a cause of terrible disappointment to new parents when those often poorly articulated feelings which are not just about, but include, their baby, are not handled properly when they bring the child for baptism. This is not just a pastoral matter. There is a theological gap here which needs to be addressed. I say in my own chapter that I was particularly moved by Rosemary Kay’s Saul, in which she details the experiences of her child Saul who was born prematurely at 23 weeks, struggled and suffered in hospital for months and finally died of meningitis just before the date on which he should have been born full term. The story is told through Saul’s eyes, not just of the suffering that he endured, or the difficulty of being new born and making sense of a world he could not live in, but of his spirituality, his apperception of the eternity that is coming for him. In his short life, Saul learns joy, grief, pain, anger, tenderness, love and hope and all of these inform the letting go and embrace of the afterlife that will be the common experience of all of us. Of course this is a fiction, born out of a powerful empathy between Rosemary and the little child who died. She speaks him to us because he could not, but in doing so, she reminds us to look for and pay attention to the spiritual needs of the tiniest infants in situations where we might more than most treat them as objects or at least less than real beings loved and desired by God for ever.
Another important idea which emerges from the chapters is that of the sheer generosity of children, showing God to us by acting out the overflowing heart of God’s love, the pleroma which Ephesians tell us is continually spilling into the creation. The story is told of a child whose heart is full of forgiveness and who sees this automatically as being of God’s nature. Told, when making a Simnel cake with his aunt that Judas has no place on the cake because of his betrayal of Jesus, the child drives a stake through the heart of a long tradition of Christian theology, not to mention the worst place in Dante’s Inferno, by saying ‘didn’t he know that God would forgive him?’ A number of children show bewilderment that there isn’t their instinctive generosity to be found among adults. A boy with a pizza gives a homeless man a piece of the pizza and can’t understand why adults demur. Children record that they fall out with their friends all the time, but forgiveness comes easily and naturally, because life is so much nicer that way. Of course there are arguments, name calling and even violence, but underneath is a spirituality that longs for reconciliation and unity. What changes then? So when things go wrong, what happens? What is it that we do to children that obscures generosity and the spiritual apperception of forgiveness?