What Shall We Say About A Child's Heart?

How theological and biblical illiteracy hijacks parental capacity to love well.

Book research this week has me examining a parenting resource I haven’t read before: Tedd Tripp’s popular book Shepherding a Child’s Heart. The titular thesis tells parents that their responsibility goes deeper than shaping behaviors and into the realm of a child’s heart. The book, riddled with stowaway anthropological and theological claims, contains a primary and ever-present theme: people are sinners.

This hyperfocus on sin (which, please note, is a term that remains undefined for readers) combines with an impoverished portrayal of children as essentially sinful adults in little bodies. So when Tripp eventually gets around to giving examples of how this shepherding might look, children’s hearts are parsed almost exclusively in terms of adult behaviors using vocabulary borrowed from nouthetic counseling. For instance, Tripp describes 1st grader Harold as a “relationship junkie” with “sexually loaded” thoughts¹; well-behaved 2nd grader George as “wicked,” like “one whose cup is washed and clean on the outside, but is filthy on the inside”²; “overbearing” Genny who chooses games at recess and needs to be “rescued from a life of finding comfort and meaning in controlling others.”³ Tripp’s antidote for these things is scrupulous religiosity: Harold “must understand that only God can slake the thirst of his soul for relationship;”⁴ George needs to learn that “even his good behavior require[s] repentance, because…it reflected pride and self-righteousness;”⁵ and Genny will be taught to regularly pray to counteract her teacher-identified overbearing behavior.⁶

Tripp’s claims regarding sin hang on an excerpt from Romans 1, nodded at via parenthetical versification and discussed as a given in an introductory chapter titled: Your Child’s Development: Godward Orientation. No exegesis is offered, nor is there any attempt to meaningfully address or place this excerpt—which becomes foundational for all that follows—in its literary, canonical, or even the immediate context of the epistle.

If readers even bother to look up the passages, they are given no examination of whether these verses apply to believers or unbelievers, whether they are universal human truths or provide contrast to other potential responses to God—let alone consideration of how this works out in regards to a child’s developmental spiritual capacity to understand and respond to God. Instead, sacred writ is manipulated to fit a preconceived theological construct about “sin,” which not-incidentally remains perpetually undefined (along w/other Christianese terms like “cross”, “gospel,” “repentance,” “obedience,” etc) and instead shows up repeatedly in confusing and contradictory word salads that lend an appearance of spiritual authority.

I cannot underscore how common this casual use of theological terms and the biblical text is in popular Christian books that are sold to the laity by the thousands. This should trouble those of us who claim to highly value the authority of Scripture. I’ve no doubt of Tripp’s sincerity, indeed his written words are flavored with an almost fanatical zeal, but this kind of convenient prooftexting of Scripture reveals a hermeneutical arrogance and functional disregard for Scripture. Tripp’s book—which retains a 4.7 average rating on Amazon—has circulated for decades as authoritatively “biblical,” even though very little biblical substantiation is actually on the pages. Besides a handful of passages quoted in full, most references show up in passing parentheticals that are then tallied in an appendix unmoored from the rest of the book.

What are readers supposed to do with this?

Biblical and theological illiteracy leaves people incredibly vulnerable to self-platformed leaders who present their opinions as God endorsed, using copious Bible verses to gain credibility, and routinely use theological terms without defining them. In Tripp’s book, unnamed stowaway doctrines like penal substitutionary atonement and total depravity effectively catechize parents (who, remember, likely are reading because they desire parenting help) into specific and arguably myopic theologies.

The end result is problematic because of the inaccurate or incomplete doctrine it pushes *and also* because of what it neglects. It is embarrassing how easily Christian parenting books coopt deep theological mysteries like the cross and atonement for their own ends. I couldn’t help but reflect how Fleming Rutledge spills 600+ pages of ink in an attempt to plumb these depths in her outstanding book The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. A brief skim of the table of contents can show us how the multiplicity of rich biblical motifs offers us beginner vocabulary for something beyond our ability to name.

Is it acceptable to utilize the theological mysteries of the Christian faith in order to baptize personal opinions about modern parenting practices? And, anthropologically speaking, if one was going to rip a prooftexted opening from an epistle, why not Paul’s greeting to the church in Ephesus? Or Corinth?

What a markedly different anthropological starting point if we begin to expand our starting lens:

Which again highlights how selective reading leaves us all the poorer. Perhaps you may be thinking that, given Tripp’s publication timeline, this is a problem in our past, that today’s standards are up to date.

Unfortunately, no. In fact, I’d argue that the Christian parenting experts of earlier decades were proto-influencers simply ahead of the curve of the current flood of self-platformed teachers and pastors who utilize theological and biblical takes to speak omnicompetently into every area of a believer’s life. Case in point: as I was writing this article today, someone on instagram shared a page from the NIV Adventure Bible. Have a look:

This scandalously inaccurate study note ignores Jesus’ direct explanation in the text, inserts a supposition regarding “right away” obedience that supports modern Christian parenting ideals, is ironically dangerous given the broader context of Matthew 18, and left me shaking my head, given how Jesus’ Parable of the Two Sons suggests that parents might at least be given permission to stop chanting “delayed-obedience-is-disobedience” at our children.

So what are we to make of all of this? Well, much can be said about how insufficient a nouthetic approach to parenting is, both in its insistence that the pages of Scripture exclusively and comprehensively speak to every area of family life and the inevitable manipulation of the biblical text that results. The book I’m currently writing will include a thorough consideration of the exponential impact of this on the generations formed under its steady drumbeat. For now, I’d like to consider what Tripp’s interpretive choices reveal.

The anthropological focus on humans as sinners, the application of negatively framed adult behaviors to children’s hearts, the call to continual spiritual introspection—all reveal a preferred understanding of God. It’s one that hides in the garden doubting God’s goodness, wanders through a wilderness cowering under a belief that God means people harm, comes alongside the steward who buries the grace of a God he deems harsh and cruel.

Perhaps no iconoclast can shatter the religiosity of Bible-verse-saturated self-help books except an encounter with God Himself. And praise the glorious riches of His grace, the biblical narrative reveals a God who intentionally pursues fallen humanity, inviting us out of our hiding and self-loathing and into His transformative presence. In the garden, He provides clothing and promised restoration. In the wilderness, God makes a way to tabernacle among unclean people, teaching them by His miraculous works and Word that He is not like the treacherous and capricious deities we long to worship. Instead, He carries His people as a father does a son.

And in the fulness of time, God Himself loves the world in this way: He humbles Himself, becoming human, dwelling among us—putting a sinful world to rights as He heals the sick, announces forgiveness of sins, and sets people free—again and again showing us what He is like.

This doesn’t mean we ignore theological doctrines about sin and the need of the human condition, but it does reorient our interpretations around the reality that God loves people.

People, sinners all, are of great worth to Him—even while they are still sinners.

This can be difficult for religious people to accept. We are paralyzed in fear, hiding the grace entrusted to us and then flinging it back in His face, imagining God to be harsh and cruel. We begrudge the fattened calf He lavishes on others and insist on laboring for a favor and belonging that’s always been ours. We calculate wages, totting things up by our human calculators, angered by God’s generosity toward others.

We pore over the Scriptures, indexing verses without end, imagining that in them we have found life. We tie up heavy loads, weighted down with our Bible verses and pages and pages of opinions that stuff others full of words about God in ways that curb their hunger for Jesus Himself.

This is tragic on so many levels, not least because in the most stunning plot twist yet, Christ not only tabernacles among people, but in people, restoring the original anthropological identity of the imago dei, where humans—men, women, and dare-we-say-children—become living icons of a good God.

Interestingly, the temple-adjacent language of idolatry is sprinkled throughout Tripp’s book, a strikingly ironic parallel given how much of the book’s theological framing rewrites God after our own image. As I read chapter after chapter of this, Matthew 7 echoed in my imagination, especially the bit where Jesus invites people to trust in God’s incomparable goodness, because they have experienced times when human parents knew how to give good gifts to their children.

The maze of tortured theologies that winds through much of popular Christian parenting teaching leaves me wondering how, in a heart-breaking inversion, we’ve come to insist that God instead wants parents to be cruel to children. Christian parents are told how to calculate behaviors using cherry-picked categories, foisting impossible standards on the newest people⁷, and doling out punishments in God’s Name. Like the unforgiving servant, Christian adults give lip-service to grace that soothes our fears but perhaps do not know how to grant it to the vulnerable children entrusted to our care. Today, I’m of the opinion that the theological starting places of many of these resources reveals they are ill-equipped to attempt to describe the state of a child’s heart.

If nothing else, parents might be sobered by the reality that Jesus’ evaluation of children is quite different. Adults have something to learn from a child’s inherent posture of humility and dependence. Jesus, stunningly, chooses to identify with children. And He has the sternest of warnings for those who harm children in any way, including ways that—whatever our zealous intentions—cause a child who believes in Him to stumble. “See to it that you do not despise one of these little ones,” Jesus says.

Those who have ears to hear: let them hear.

1. Shepherding a Child’s Heart, by: Tedd Tripp, 2nd Edition 2005, pg. 168.

2. Ibid, 165.

3. Ibid, 169.

4. Ibid, 168.

5. Ibid, 165.

6. Ibid, 169.

7. Pondering/borrowing this phrase from Lucy Sailer this week on twitter when she wrote about setting “highest standard for the newest humans.”