Pre-Evangelism For Your Children – 2 – The Imagination

If we want our children to love and embrace the ‘ facts’ of the gospel, we need to step back and think about how children gain their knowledge.

Modernism likes to see itself as interested in only ‘objective facts’. For modernism, the keys to understanding the world are a good microscope, telescope or any other instrument that can record objective facts about the world. If we collect enough of these objective facts from the sciences of physics, chemistry, geoscience, astronomy, genetics and the like, we will understand reality, it reasons. None of those subjective values and personal judgments about morality, ethics, beauty or truth are to be considered. Those are not testable, verifiable or measurable in a laboratory, therefore they are simply statements of human preference or desire, but do not represent reality. If we want to know reality and understand ultimate questions such as who we are, how we got here, where we are going, what we are here for, we must turn to the ‘objective’ sciences. Knowing reality then, becomes an exercise in fact-collecting. Supposedly, collect enough of these autonomous, scientific facts, and you will know reality.

Most modern school curriculi reflect this modernist thinking. Reality is a collection of raw, uninterpreted facts, and therefore a child must collect as many of these as possible, as unrelated or eclectic as these facts might be. Math facts, history facts, geography facts, chemistry facts, biology facts, language facts, and social sciences facts (the most laughable of all) – if a child completes a good twelve years of this kind of fact-collecting, then he is ‘educated’.

The problem with this whole endeavor is that is incredibly conceited, and blind to its own arrogance. The idea that facts exist by themselves was never believed before the advent of modernism, and is now being abandoned again in post-modernism. It was a conceit of the Enlightenment – that we are capable of perfect objectivity, even though we are perceiving subjects. In truth, all ‘facts’ are known by subjects – us. We understand those facts only by relating them to other facts. We understand one thing by placing it in context of other things. A microscope might record objective data, but it is a subject who looks into the scope and interprets the data. We understand the significance of the facts under consideration, the value of the facts we’re seeing, only by connecting them with a much bigger grid of understanding. That grid is the imagination.

In other words, though objective reality exists outside of us, we only know that reality as perceiving subjects. We perceive that reality through a pre-existing grid which interprets the facts. The grid, or the imagination, determines how we will understand the raw data of the world that is given to us. If the grid is wrong, it will misconstrue what it sees 100% of the time. The telescope might be flawless, but that’s not the point. Humans use those telescopes and decide what the data means.

Romans 1 makes this idea this fairly clear. Once the grid of ultimate devotion to God was abandoned and replaced with a grid of idolatry, mankind became increasingly deceived in his perceptions of the world.

because, although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools (Ro 1:21-22).

Man’s fact-collecting mission would now always arrive at the wrong conclusions, because his grid was now idolatrous.

Why all this discussion of knowledge and objectivity in a conversation about child evangelism? Because many Christian parents have embraced the modernist idea of collecting objective facts, when it comes to educating their children. Theirs is identical to a secularist’s approach, except that to the list of algebra facts, economics facts and art facts, they add Bible facts. They believe that their children must be exposed to as many good, objective Bible facts as possible, and all will turn out well. Years later, their children, now young adults, announce that they no longer believe what they were taught in Sunday School. What happened? Did the Bible facts change in their content? Did the child discover that those facts were not objective?

What happened is that the child’s interpretation of those Bible facts changed. His feeling towards the biblical data changed, which in turn, changed the meaning, the interpretation of those Bible facts. And it changed because of what was going on behind the facts – in his imagination.

The imagination is the faculty which God gives humans to make sense of reality by analogy. We learn of one thing by comparing it, or contrasting it, or connecting it, to another. This is like that. Without these comparisons and analogies, nothing in the world would make sense, not the watch on your wrist, not the colour red, not the face of your spouse. Nothing would be recognized, because nothing could be related to anything else. In truth, there are no brute facts. Everything is understood as the imagination relates it, weighs it, and understands it in light of the whole.

For Christians, the shaping of the imagination becomes particularly crucial, because not only do we want our children to interpret the raw sensory data of the world according to God’s view of reality, we need them to understand many things that cannot be seen – God’s attributes, grace, justice, nobility, holiness, judgement, to name just a few. They will only understand these ultimate unseen realities through the imagination – through the analogies that explain the unseen with the seen. If their imaginations are filled with incorrect analogies, they will misconstrue and misunderstand unseen realities that are critical to the gospel and the Christian life. Worse, they will respond to those realities wrongly, treating them differently to what they are.

A parent’s role is far more than entering facts into the child’s CPU. A parent has twenty years or so to build up a storehouse of analogous knowledge. He or she is a crucial part of putting together a child’s internal mental map, using all kinds of analogies: “This is how we understand that as we relate it to this.” As we build these analogies, we are not only shaping a child’s grid, we are teaching him how he ought to feel about the facts he will encounter. Before the child’s vocabulary has even filled out, we are providing him with a sense of proportion: this is like that, and deserves this kind of response. I say again, many parents think the goal of training is the imparting of cognitive knowledge. However, if you would like your child to rightly interpret the knowledge he encounters, you must shape his imagination through analogous knowledge.

How do we build analogous knowledge? There are several ways that emerge from Scriptural example and from the world that God has created. We will begin to examine these next week.

Pre-Evangelism For Your Children -1

Studies by Barna, for what they are worth, show that most children growing up in evangelical churches will abandon the faith. According to the studies, even though many of those who drop out of church are actively involved in church during their teen years, by their early twenties most have stopped participating actively in the Christian faith. In total, six out of ten twentysomethings dropped out of church and general Christian living. Worse, it’s not just a temporary phase, but the trend seems to be continuing deeper into adulthood, even when those who have dropped out of church have children of their own. In other words, such people, who grew up in evangelical churches, are well and truly denying the faith with their lives.

All kinds of reasons have been proposed for this phenomenon: the age-segregation of the church, shallow youth ministry, inconsistency of Christian adults, lack of spiritual leadership in the home, lack of serious discipleship in the local church, and proliferation of unwholesome media. Any or all of these may be contributing factors. However, it seems what is missing in these conversations is how a child’s disposition towards Christianity is shaped long before he or she encounters the truths of the gospel, or the demands of discipleship.

Before the child is able to weigh the propositions that explain the gospel, or consider the validity of biblical teaching, he already has prejudices for or against the claims of Christ. He either has a disposition, a sensibility that Christianity is true and good and beautiful and ought to be embraced, or he does not. As he grows, this sense increases or decreases in either direction, and largely shapes how he interprets the facts of Christianity as they are placed before him.

In other words, a child is no tabula rasa. He arrives with a set of faculties that immediately begin to make sense of the world by interpreting the raw data of the world through an ever-growing ‘grid’ of interpretations, sensibilities and dispositions. No fact he encounters is understood on its own; it is understood through a network of other facts, feelings and desires. This includes ‘facts’ like Jesus is the Son of God, hell actually exists, and Jesus deserves your total allegiance and ultimate love. How the person responds to those statements, both when he is five and twenty-five, are largely a result of this grid.

Another term for this grid is the imagination. How a person imagines reality in totality, how he pictures ultimate things that make sense of the raw data of his life, how he places value on things and orders them, is his imagination. This imagination can either be Christian or non-Christian. It can be religious or secular. And it is shaped long before the child can read or answer catechism questions.

J. Gresham Machen put it this way: “…[I]t would be a great mistake to suppose that all men are equally well prepared to receive the gospel. It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel.” (Christianity and Culture, 7).

It’s my belief that many of the evangelical dropouts we witness today are abandoning the faith because they grew up with a fundamentally secular imagination, with a thin evangelical overlay. Over time, or as a result of some life circumstance, the underlying grid pushes the person to re-evaluate his beliefs and align them more consistently with the grid. Since the grid is essentially one that views God as a weightless, if not non-existent concern, at some point the thoughtful person recognizes that his Christian faith is a wrinkle in his worldview, an error in the program, an extraneous digit that does not belong. Consequently, he announces that he “no longer believes”.

The question for Christian parents becomes, how is that grid shaped? How does one shape the imagination so that the child has a prejudice towards Christianity’s truths, both before and long after he has embraced them?Parents need to think long and hard how to shape those prior conditions of the mind. Our goal over the next several posts will be to consider some ways that the Christian imagination of a child may be shaped.