7 Ways to Read the Bible that Lift Up Children

7 Ways to Read the Bible that Lift Up Children March 24, 2017

"Bible" by Dwight Stone, Flickr. Used according to Creative Commons license.
“Bible” by Dwight Stone, Flickr. Used according to Creative Commons license.

Children play many roles within biblical stories. They do many good, brave acts: for example, the prophetic critique of Miriam, the courageous speech of Samuel, and the faith of Naaman’s slave girl. Children also do much evil: consider the sibling abuse inflicted by Cain on his brother Abel, the money-lust of the servant boy Gehazi, and the spoiled children of Eli.

In many American churches, these stories about children are valued less than stories about adults. The stories are often reduced to “just stories for children” and then they are kept out of the “adult church.” They are enclosed in “children’s bibles” and flannel graph. But these stories are just as much a part of the Bible as stories featuring adults!

Here are seven ways to read the Bible that lift up children:

#1: Pay Attention to Children’s Roles in Stories

 

The starting point for lifting up children in how we read the Bible, then, is to seek out, study, and value every story about children within the Bible, no matter how small. Just as there are lots of resources for people wanting to study every mention of women in the Bible, we should have lots of resources about every mention of children in the Bible.

We must work to bring up these sorts of conversations, too, at every possible occasion. We should be asking our pastors for sermons on children in the Bible. We should have Bible studies in the middle of the week on children in the Bible. We should have liturgy reflecting on children in the Bible. Stories about children are not just light material; they are the keys to understanding what Jesus meant when he said to become like children. How will we understand Jesus’ command if we neglect the children in the very Scriptures Jesus taught?

#2: Make Sure Children are Included in Stories

While children do play many roles in the Bible, those roles are often anonymous. Sometimes children are pushed to the side of a story, kept at arm’s length by us or the text. Take the example of Naaman’s slave girl, whose prophetic witness to Naaman regarding the prophet Elisha sets in motion all of the events of 2 Kings 5—the end result of which changes world politics. The child shows up only once, in the beginning of the story. Then she disappears and the adult men take over. The little girl remains nameless; we never find out what happens to her. Despite being the most important person in the story, she is abandoned.

A really important part of lifting up children in how we read the Bible, then, is to make sure we do not keep the children in our Bible stories at arm’s length. Instead of skimming over a child’s role in a story, we need to include that child in the storytelling and the story’s message. We need to bring the child to the front and center of the story. And when our pastors or theologians do not do this, when they exclude children from their own Bible stories, we need to challenge them on that. We need to say, “Hey, it’s not right to keep the child in this story on the sidelines. How about we give the child the spotlight for once?”[i]

Another key part of making sure children are not excluded from their own stories is to make it a priority to examine the right-here and right-now for the children in the stories. What were their social contexts? What issues were they facing during the stories? What was life like for them?[ii] Making sure we ask questions like these will change the sorts of answers we will be looking for when we read the Bible. If we do not know, for example, that the child Jesus put in the middle of his disciples lived in a time and place where children have no rights and were considered on the same level as slaves, we will miss a vital part of Jesus’ message.

#3: Consider What Stories Without Children Say About Children

There are many Bible stories that do not involve children. But these stories still have a big impact on how we as Christians should think about them. In fact, the heart of child liberation theology suggests that all Bible stories and all of Jesus’ teachings have a really big impact on how we should think about children. Our big theological ideas—notions like free will, the nature of sin, and how justification and salvation work—if these ideas are not relevant to children, if they are not discussed in a way that includes children, then we have missed the mark.[iii] We have instead created ideas that exclude children and encourage people to think that the adult’s way of thinking and doing things is more important than the child’s way. And that is counter to the messages of Jesus.

So what should we do instead? What we need to do is to make sure the theme of children is sewn in and out of all our theological notions, no matter how big or small those notions are. We need to think about how every Bible story, whether that story stars children or not, impacts children and influences how we think about children.

One example of how this can be done comes from the story about Simon the Evangelist and the Ethiopian eunuch in the Book of Acts. Even though the eunuch is an adult, Simon acts certain ways around them—loving them as they are, accepting them as they are, and not attempting to change their identity—that can inform how we interact with children. In this case, Simon’s treatment of the eunuch can be read as a model for how the American church should interact with their LGBTQ children. Like Simon, the church should embrace LGBTQ children as they are and rejoice with them as they share the Gospel.[iv] By making stories like this a launching point for how we can better liberate, love, and protect children, we are opening up more fully the impact the Bible can have on our lives and children around us.

#4: Apply Everything to the Right-Here and Right-Now

Child liberation theology is false if it only thinks about children in the abstract—if our ideas just remain in our heads and do not create changes in our lives. After all, “Faith that does nothing is worth nothing.”[v] Any theology—even a liberation theology—that does not help us in the right-here and right-now is also dead.[vi] No matter how fancy or complicated or gigantic a theology may be, Jesus never said that thinking fancy theologies is how we show our love for God. Jesus said loving our neighbors is how we do that. And who are our neighbors if they do not include the children in our families, our churches, our schools, and our world?[vii] If our theologies are not encouraging us to help those same children in the right-here and right-now, then we are not loving God.

Jesus tell us in Mark 1:15 that “The Kingdom of God is at hand.” So child liberation theology needs to embrace the right-here and right-now where the Kingdom of God is. We must be faithful to our Lord and Savior in transforming our anti-child world into the Kingdom of God.

How we read the Bible is a part of this. How we read the Bible needs to be about, needs to be entirely oriented towards, transforming our anti-child world into a world that loves and respects children. Into a world that, like Jesus did, places children in the center of our conversations and says, “Let the little children come to me and forbid them not.” If our theologizing does not lead to the liberation of children, then we are “like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead” (Matthew 23:27). In Matthew 18:6, Jesus said, “These little ones believe in me. It would be best for the person who causes one of them to lose faith to be drowned in the sea with a millstone hung around his neck.”

Rational or impressive as our adult theologies may be, if they are hurting children, Jesus cares little for them. He would rather such theologies sink to the bottom of the ocean. Instead, we need theologies that liberate, that bring faith, that breathe life into our world, most especially our children. Theologies that lift up children and value them and fight on their behalf, empowering children to unfold into their own beautiful selves.

#5: Read with Children

The fifth element of lifting up children in how we read the Bible is to read the Bible with actual children. By this I am not suggesting that you read your children a Bible passage as a bedtime story—though if you do that, that is an excellent way to increase your child’s literacy. I would encourage all parents to read to their children, whether from the Bible or from other books. It is a healthy practice that stimulates a child’s brain development and language skills.[viii]

What I mean by reading with children is more than just reading to children. Reading to children is not the same as reading with children. Reading with children means that we approach the Bible with children as learning partners. It means that, when we study the Bible, we consider children to be sources of revelation just as much as adults are. It means we consider children’s interpretations to be just as important as our own. Reading the Bible with children, in other words, means accepting children as capable of providing revelation.[ix]

When we read the Bible with children, we are not simply accepting children. We are also “joining children in their world.”[x] This is a new vantage point from which we can know and learn—and children become our guides. When we enter the children’s perspectives, we are strangers in a foreign land. Instead of us adults guiding children, the powers are reversed: children take us by the hand and show us what a given passage means to them. In this way child liberation theology is not simply a theology of children; it is a “with” theology. It is a theology with children, with children in the lead.[xi]

#6: See Children’s Worlds as Vehicles for Truth

The sixth element in lifting up children in how we read the Bible is to view children—their selves, their worlds, their experiences, and their stories—as vehicles for truth. In many Christian communities, what can be a vehicle for truth is limited. For example, in certain fundamentalist faith communities, the Bible and the Bible alone is considered a source of truth. Science, psychology, geology, and any other way that most people think we get knowledge are flawed because they are not the Bible. In some Orthodox communities, tradition is also considered a source of truth. The thoughts of the early church fathers and the many creeds throughout history inform Orthodox Christians about the nature of the universe.

Child liberation theology, like other liberation theologies, points us to people’s experiences and stories as sources of truth.[xii] In the case of child liberation theology, we are specifically interested in children’s experiences and stories. This means we need to expand our view of what can give us truth. If we limit the sources of truth to only the Bible and tradition, all of which have been written by adults, we are necessarily excluding children’s points of view. For example, male adults wrote all the images and metaphors used in the Bible. Might this explain why God so often is described as a male adult, too?[xiii] What might happen if children described God instead—and if we took their descriptions seriously?

Part of lifting up children in how we read the Bible, therefore, involves taking children seriously in how they talk and think about the Bible and how their experiences and stories influence their talk and thoughts. We need to see children’s talk and thoughts as vehicles for better knowing God.[xiv] “In a community a person’s word must be heard and evaluated alongside that of others,”[xv] children included.

#7: Let Children Create Their Own Theologies

Taking children’s talk and thoughts about the Bible seriously also means something else: that we have confidence in children’s ability to create their own theologies. Children are not to simply memorize and assent to traditions established by adults; children are to be active participants in knowing God.[xvi]

Why do we think that theology is solely the domain of adults? Theology is the study of God: theo means God and logy means study. Can children not study God in the same way that adults do? Child liberation theology says they can, and thus we must create spaces for children to do their own theologizing.

Since children are children and not adults, they will have questions and struggles that are unique to their respective ages. It is important, therefore, that we give children the ability to think theologically about those questions that are unique to them. We do not want children to be “busy solving other people’s theological puzzles”[xvii]—namely, the theological puzzles of adults that have no bearings on the real problems and challenges children face today. Children must be given freedom to develop “their own way of speaking about God” and to “generate new symbols, concepts, and models that they find congenial for expressing their religious vision.”[xviii]

Works Cited

[i] This parallels Jesuit liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo’s hermeneutics of suspicion, in which traditional interpretations of the Bible are challenged in order to lift up people from the margins of those interpretations. Child liberation theology also employs a hermeneutics of suspicion. Child liberation theologian Janet Pais writes in Suffer the Children that the theology “assert[s] the right…to question basic assumptions of traditional interpretation that may result from and perpetuate oppressive systems. In relation to children, such assumptions might be called ‘adultist.’”

[ii] Just as feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza suggests a hermeneutics of suspicion ought to be applied not only to the text but also to the social conditions from which the text arose, child liberation theology demands that we give full consideration to both the child’s role in each narrative as well as the social conditions surrounding that child. We must make that child the priority in how we exegete the passage in every way possible.

[iii] This parallels the sentiment of Black liberation theologian James H. Cone in Black Power and Black Theology, where he writes that, “Black Theology is not prepared to discuss the doctrine of God, man, Christ, Church, Holy Spirit—the whole spectrum of Christian theology—without making each doctrine an analysis of the emancipation of black people.”

[iv] For an analysis of how the eunuch story relates to LGBTQ issues, see Lawrence Richardson, The Salt Collective, “The Biblical Case for Transgender,” link, accessed on July 1, 2016. Also see Lianne Simon, Patheos, “Testimony of a happily married intersex eunuch,” October 5, 2013, link, accessed on July 1, 2016.

[v] James 2:20.

[vi] Peruvian liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez declares in his conclusion to A Theology of Liberation, “All the political theologies, the theologies of hope, of revolution, and liberation, are not worth one act of genuine solidarity with exploited social classes. They are not worth one act of faith, love, and hope, committed—in one way or another—in active participation to liberate humankind from everything that dehumanizes it.”

[vii] Jeanette Harder, Let the Children Come, Herald Press, 2010: “Jesus commands us to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ He goes on to command us to, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The children in our families, our churches, and the communities where we live and work are our ‘neighbors.’”

[viii] Jeffrey Brown, PBS, “I is for infant: Reading aloud to young children benefits brain development,” June 24, 2014, link, accessed on May 18, 2016.

[ix] Nico Botha, Association for Education and Research in Europe (GBFE) in South Africa, “Children as Theological Hermeneutic: Is there a New Epistemological Break Emerging?”, November 2012, link, accessed on May 13, 2016: “Of particular importance for this paper is the idea that children are sources of revelation. The issue of changing the gaze when it comes to children and to respect them as a new mission hermeneutic, has to do with the challenge to accept the witness, prophecy and revelation from children as representatives of Jesus.”

[x] Ibid: “I want to suggest that the emergence of children worldwide as agents of mission, necessitates a new epistemology. One of the building blocks of such an epistemology is the suggestion by Strachan (2011:283) of ‘joining children in their world’. She implies quite strongly a shift in paradigm in hinting a ‘redress in favour of the children’. The new missiological epistemology can only come to the fore if we start in the world of children and learn from their experiences.”

[xi] Ibid: “In a theology from below, the very first act is commitment. And therefore a theology from below is a ‘with’ theology. In concrete terms, and in the context of the paper, a theology where purportedly children are the interpretive key, cannot be a theology about or for children, but a theology “with” children.”

[xii] Kwok Pui-lan, “Mothers and Daughters, Writers and Fighters,” Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective, ed. by Letty M. Russell, Westminster Press, 1988, p. 29: “[We must] shift our attention from the Bible and tradition to people’s stories. The exclusiveness of the Christian claim often stems from a narrow and mystified view of the Bible and church teaching… Our religious imagination cannot be based on the Bible alone, which often excludes women’s experience.”

[xiii] Ibid, p. 30: “The images and metaphors we use to talk about God are necessarily culturally conditioned, and biblical ones are no exception.”

[xiv] Ibid, p. 30: “Opening this treasure chest is the first step to doing our own theology. With full confidence, we claim that our own culture and our people’s aspirations are vehicles for knowing and appreciating the ultimate. This would also imply that our Christian identity must be radically expanded. Instead of fencing us from the world, it should open us to all the rich manifestations that embody the divine.”

[xv] Mercy Amba Oduyoye, “Be a Woman, and Africa Will Be Strong,” Inheriting Our Mothers’ Gardens: Feminist Theology in Third World Perspective, Wesminster Press, 1988, p. 49.

[xvi] Pui-lan, p. 30: “We have to move from a passive reception of the traditions to an active construction of our own theology.”

[xvii] Ibid, p. 31.

[xviii] Ibid, p. 31.


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