It’s not enough to know what is good and what is true; we must come to love what is good and love what is true. We are now in the realm of the affections, and suddenly the parenting terrain is vast and the task before us utterly daunting. For now we will no longer be satisfied with filling our children’s heads with the information they’ll need to be able to succeed, but we will be aiming at something more profound and therefore more difficult: cultivating knowledge and virtue, right thinking and right feeling, understanding and desires.

My friend said something to me over breakfast that has been rattling around my old cerebrum ever since. We were talking about how different generations have approached raising Christian children and he said this about the approach of our parents: “It feels like they wanted to teach us only enough theology to sustain a personal spiritual life, and no more.”

We might call this the theologically minimalist approach.

There were plenty of exceptions, but in the broadly evangelical world, I think it was the norm rather than the exception. The important thing was to accept Christ as your personal Lord and Saviour. After that, we had some notions of personal piety like daily quiet time, but not much energy was spent setting a theological foundation or developing a compelling vision of Christian maturity.

I discern something similar in the way evangelical Christians often think and talk about parenting in our own day.

Parenting Minimalism

There seems to be an assumption that, beyond teaching the Bible and the gospel to our kids and praying that they come to saving faith, there isn’t much that would differentiate Christian parenting from non-Christian parenting. The content and pedagogy of their education can be pretty well the same; the books they read and shows they watch and music they listen to can be pretty well the same. In short, their actual cultural formation can be pretty well the same. This is a kind of parenting minimalism that actually makes some sense in a context where the broader culture still has strong vestiges of Christian influence, as was arguably the case until not that long ago. It might not have been ideal, but it seemed like it could work out decently well.

But, to be blunt, those days are well behind us. Even as my own generation, the millennials, was being formed and coming of age in the 1990s and 2000s, it became clear that not all was well. The shaping influence of the broader culture was already militating against the spiritual priorities of our parents. We heard the gospel at church (and perhaps at home), but were being shaped more fundamentally by the priorities of our peer groups, the media we took in, and the education we received.

The result? Millennials left the church at a higher rate than any previous generation.

Christian Paideia

As I started having my own children, I began thinking again about education. But education is not really the word I’m looking for. We have this entrenched modern notion that education is what happens during the school day and it relates to what fills the student’s head. It concerns that secular middle space where mathematics, literacy, and (maybe) history are necessary preconditions for gainful employment. That’s how most people think of education today—that thing you need to get a good job. And many Christians, not knowing any better, adopt this view.

We need a better word than education until it can be rehabilitated. One option is formation, which I’ve already used once or twice in this piece, but the problem with that word is how broadly it can be used for unrelated topics, such as industrial processes. Education is too narrow, formation a bit too broad, so let’s just reach over into another bucket—the Greek bucket—and use paideia. This is the word Paul uses in Ephesians when he speaks of raising children in the “nurture [paideia] and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4).

The idea here is of a whole-person approach to shaping the next generation. As Joe Rigney puts it, “Paideia is the all-encompassing enculturation and formation of a child into a citizen. Christian paideia, then, is all-encompassing Christian discipleship.” We find this idea clearly described in Deuteronomy 6, where God commands the Israelites to embrace a deeply thorough approach—when you get up, when you sit down, when you walk—to teaching their children.

We tend to think of education as relegated to intellectual knowledge, but paideia includes character formation and virtue as well.

It’s not enough to know what is good and what is true; we must come to love what is good and love what is true.

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