Episode 146: Critical Failure–Why Are So Many Homeschooled Adults Abandoning the Bible?

This was a homeschool conference talk I gave over the weekend and fair warning–it is not for the faint of heart (I actually had people walk out/mute me). I directly tackle the reason so many kids are walking away from the Bible and their faith and deconstructing after being homeschooled. But it also applies to churched kids in general. What happens when we teach our kids to think critically about everything EXCEPT the Bible and about faith and about our own interpretations and doctrines? It’s an easy mistake to make even without meaning to. Let’s explore the problems and how to reverse is so that if our kids do deconstruct, they will still have the building materials to reconstruct a better and stronger faith.

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I don’t care who you are and how you live and what kind of example you have been. Your kids might walk away from the Bible and from the faith entirely—you have to understand and be prepared for that possibility. It requires a lot of humility, which we often lack, and it necessitates prayer and trust in God. We cannot, can not, guarantee anything about the future lives of our children—goodness, we can’t even guarantee today. We do our best and hope that they will love God and surrender their lives to Jesus, but this is not a battle we can win in the flesh or through any specific curriculum or homeschooling method. Parenting isn’t about guarantees but about flying by the seat of our pants and hoping against hope for positive results. Having this mindset has been a must for me and kept me sane during my four years of homeschooling my now twenty-one-year-old twin boys, one physically and developmentally disabled and the other supposedly normal but as all you boy moms and dads can attest to, there is nothing normal about boys! And I say that lovingly, from the time they turn fifteen months old to the time someone else buries them—they are generally a handful unless you get one of those quiet studious ones. I think that my boys were born late enough in the day that they had already run out of those and only had the wild ones left.

And sometimes we think we should try to tame them and maybe we should—after all, which of us has not been tamed since we found our salvation at the foot of the Cross and inside that empty tomb? Sometimes we forget that it was not the Bible that tamed us in any real way, but relationship. The Bible can be seen by children as the enemy when we use it in ways for them that don’t reflect our experience with the divine. So, we have to be careful else they end up like the wayward children of Israel who had a whole lot of do’s and don’ts but no indwelling of the Holy Spirit to write those commandments on their hearts in such a way that it becomes important to them, this love of God and neighbor. Every religion on earth has rules and ethics, and anyone can follow rules and observe community morality if they set their mind to it—but what sets the followers of Jesus apart is that they are being transformed from within. And guess what? We can tell the stories and we can live it out in front of them and we can hold them to our notion of what Biblical standards look like, but what we cannot do is open their eyes and draw them to our Savior—that is God’s work. And so it is of the utmost importance that while we are telling the stories and impressing upon them the beauty of the Word, that we create a hunger within them for what we have. And for that, we must constantly be changing toward perfection and they need to see it and furthermore, they need to understand that it isn’t about anything we are doing in our own power. We are following the leader, and we are largely the people who will show our kids whether or not that leader can and should be trusted.

Our maturity in the faith matters. It is a matter of life and death. My kids have seen my journey because I became a believer a mere two years before we adopted them at birth. And it isn’t my constant Bible reading and studying that has impressed upon them the reality of God but instead how they have watched me struggle and change and blow it and apologize and make amends. You see, despite all of their biblical education, they aren’t readers and so their father and I are the only Bible they have right now. They were the guinea pigs for every one of my Bible curriculum books but they are also at that age where they are discovering what it means to be grownups and I love some of their decisions and I hate others. But it’s in God’s hands now. I am just grateful that they still come to me when they have questions about what the Bible says about this or that—but what I want to talk about is why they still ask me questions and why they know that nothing is off limits.

You see, I handled homeschooling differently than what I see from the majority of believing parents and I did it quite by accident and it had the unintentional effect of leaving the door open to them while they are deciding who they are and what they want to be and how God is going to figure into all that. And your kids will go through it too—some sooner and some later. Everyone goes through it differently, and we have all seen the young “golden children” who look like ministerial prodigies turn from the faith because they grew up within a culture and not as sinners fundamentally changed by the Cross. I don’t blame them—it isn’t like you can really tell if someone is saved or not. For parents, generally good behavior is enough to convince us that our kids are believers. But anyone can behave, and especially the compliant ones—like me. Anyone can say the right things to please their parents and set their minds at ease—okay, that wasn’t me but then that’s why I am not there in person because talking without a script can be disastrous. I will never forget the time that I went off script and told viewers that, instead of teaching adults via video, I instead announced that I made adult videos. So, if you ever hear that rumor, I am the one who evidently started it.

From the time my boys were preschoolers, I taught them critical thinking in some fun ways. Mostly it involved my telling them something ridiculous and looking into their trusting little eyes and saying, “Now, do you think that is true? Tell me why that does or doesn’t make sense.” And we would talk about it and sometimes they would talk to one another about it because I was definitely the third wheel in that relationship. But before they would run off to play, I would always tell them the truth and I made sure to really drive home the reality that just because they love me and depend on me and trust me, doesn’t mean that I am always going to be right about everything. Grown-ups lie, they misjudge their level of knowledge and expertise in areas, they fall for and pass on someone else’s lies, or they mistake their opinions for truth. And we all of us do that whether we like it or not, whether we really understand it or not. Allowing them to understand that my take on things can be questioned, that they can ask me questions knowing that I will be honest if all I can give them is an educated or uneducated guess, or will just flat out tell them I don’t know the answer to things, has really bolstered their confidence in me as someone they actually can take their Bible questions to. If I have no idea, I won’t pretend as though I do. And not just on the Bible but other topics too. Honestly and credibility begin with our being honest about what we do and do not know, and being open to new information.

Critical thinking requires honesty and credibility along with learning how to use logic as well as understanding that just because something seems logical to us, doesn’t mean that we had enough expertise to make that judgment. Critical thinking begins and ends with our honest evaluation of our own level of understanding, experience, and limitations. And most kids, and even homeschoolers, never learn critical thinking because we parents are often fooled into believing that teaching an alternate view from what they teach in public schools represents critical thinking when all we have done is to indoctrinate them in another view that they are not allowed to question—namely our views. I found out in my first year of homeschooling that I was very much indoctrinating my kids every bit as much as any public school could (and I am not going to lie, we have had wonderful public-school experiences in six different school districts, so I am not anti-public school). Among other things, I had my kids absolutely convinced that the end times were close enough that they stopped caring about being adults because they never thought they would ever be adults (and I didn’t even believe that myself, I just read the Bible to them)! I also taught them (long before homeschooling started) to revere a lot of urban legends about Christian origins because I hadn’t yet begun to delve into responsible scholarship. I thought I was teaching them to think critically but what I was really doing was simply presenting a different unquestionable narrative. And if that sounds familiar, you are not alone.

The truth is that I had to learn to think critically about the Bible before I could teach my children that it was okay to question and wrestle—like Abraham, Jacob, Moses, the Psalmists, the Prophets, and many others did. Because if we don’t allow them to think critically about the Bible and about faith we are (1) being unbiblical in our approach to faith, (2) leaving them helpless to the honest challenges, questions and wrestling that others will present them with, (3) setting them up for failure because they might only have a relationship with a set of unassailable do’s and don’ts, which makes us comfortable at our age, without any of the realities of an actual relationship with God, when relationships are messy, and (4) legalistic instead of wise. And we’re going to talk about all of those today. Or, I am, anyway.

Disclaimer: I am neither a scholar, or a theologian, but I play one on the radio. Seriously, about ten years ago I began to dive deeply into the Olympic sized pool of Biblical scholarship, and I think the first book I read was David DeSilva’s Honor, Patronage, Kinship, and Purity: Unlocking New Testament Culture—and my brain exploded. I became obsessed with Biblical sociology—as my Amazon bill attests to. It changed how I read everything, and different scholars had different opinions based upon their field of expertise, and when they were all combined the Bible became this beautiful mosaic highlighting the story of God’s rescue plan for humanity while teaching us wisdom and love and compassion and hospitality and humility and presenting us with conflicting commandments that force us to cleave to Him, to wrestle with Him, to be continually depending on His wisdom and begging Him for a larger share of it. And I learned about Covenants and these obscure passages in the Bible—it was like I had been living in a dark room and someone flipped on a switch. The point is that we cannot think critically without experience, exposure, and wisdom.

Experience in relationship with God and others alerts us when a verse about God and our responsibilities toward others are being taken out of context and manipulated and misrepresented. We need to know who God is and isn’t before we go out trying to be His ambassadors in the world and especially before we try to model Him for our kiddos. Exposure is almost as important, and the least utilized and especially within fundamentalism and triumphalist denominations. If all we have are approved interpretations, we will be incapable of thinking critically and if we are not allowed to be exposed to people who see things differently, we will have no other choice than to assume that there is only one way to look at a passage. Quashing questions and shaming and discouraging the questioner are all ways of stomping out the dangers of exposure to new ideas but a faith that doesn’t know of any other alternative isn’t faith at all—because faith is inherently about trust and it is a fluid thing. Where there is no room for questions and wrestling, no faith is needed—sometimes, no faith is even possible. And the freedom to question must be instilled early, and at home, where it is safe, or it will happen out in the world where you have no say whatsoever. And for those of us who were not allowed to question and were forced to accept what we were presented with, often blindly, we must learn the freedom the Bible gives us to question, first and foremost, before we are safe people to be questioned. And without wisdom, the ability to know when to hold fast and when to let go, what to do and what not to do, and all the nuances of a real faith walk—it can become nothing but an exercise in fear-based legalism where others suffer for our inability to be flexible when the situation demands it.

You see, teaching critical thinking when it comes to topics like evolution, sexuality, science, math, etc. and then shutting it down when it comes to the Bible is probably the biggest mistake we as parents can make and I believe it is why our kids are experiencing such crisis when they leave our homes and find critical thinkers everywhere on the one subject they weren’t allowed to really even independently think about. And let me tell you that there is no more important subject on earth to teach our kids to think critically about. Because someday they will, and if it isn’t with us then someone else is going to be in control of the dialogue and they are going to make arguments that fundamentalism and triumphalism aren’t going to be able to satisfy if your kids are smart.

A few definitions here—fundamentalism is not all bad and I agree with most of its tenets, but we get into trouble when we force the Bible into the very modern box that says every single verse means exactly what it looks like it means and is absolutely true and that there are no errors, scribal or otherwise, and that we must take everything literally. Fundamentalism never existed until very modern times when the idea of evolution and some scientific discoveries brought certain elements of the text into doubt. Ancient people, for example, absolutely believed in a flat earth—not just the Israelites but every pagan nation based not on critical thinking but what they could see with their eyes and what made sense to them. Until 500 BC, they also believed that brains were useless skull wadding and that thoughts originated in the heart and emotions from the other internal organs—so the OT supports this belief while in the NT, Jesus and Paul talk about thoughts originating in the mind instead of the organs.

As a scientist who has also studied the ancient world, I much appreciate that God spoke to Moses’s audience in terms of what they could understand and not in terms of scientific accuracy—because if God had been scientifically accurate, He would have had to invent new words and would have no way of even beginning to teach them what those words meant. And for that matter, it would be beyond our understanding as well. And although it seems wise to tell kids that every word is literally and accurately true, which is important to us as post-Enlightenment people, instead of truth, which is based on the priority that ancients gave to wisdom, it is also a recipe for disaster. God speaks to us where we are, and He spoke to them where they were—in the wilderness, listening to Moses tell the story of God’s rescue plan to save humanity from the evils of sin and death that they saw all around them in the ancient Near Eastern world. It was not a book to teach them about science, they simply wouldn’t have even understood the concept of a world that wasn’t micromanaged by gods and goddesses—as evidenced by their continually worshiping regional deities alongside Yahweh throughout their existence!

And so, in Genesis one, God spoke of the creation of the universe in their modern vernacular of the building and furnishing of a Temple. It made perfect sense to them that Yahweh was announcing that He had taken up residence as their god and king. We modern folks forget that the Bible was written for us but it wasn’t written to us and when we don’t know what they knew, we can draw disastrous conclusions—disastrous because they cause divisions and infighting when none are warranted and we take up positions based on what makes sense to us. And, of course, we pass that onto our kids, and they become locked into fundamentalist ideas that there is only one way to see what is written—and it is our way, not theirs. When that happens, we also tend toward elitism, as though now in all our modernity we are the ultimate arbiters of what this ancient document written to ancient people actually means. We must always be humble before the text and especially before our God who is always generous and compassionate to communicate with us where we are according to our understanding and not according to His, because our brains are just way too small, and we still know far too little.

Triumphalism is another problem in Western Christianity. Triumphalism is the practice of religion that forces us to always be focused on victory, positivity, and personal and denominational glorification. We got that from Rome, by the way, this idea that we are marching gloriously on to victory, and we have so many hymns about it that we don’t even question it. The problem is that triumphalism allows no discussion of the very real evils happening to our brothers and sisters in the contested regions of the world where Christians have no political or, more importantly, military power. The Bible speaks of a non-triumphal reality of suffering and injustice and lamentation. In fact, 40% of the Psalms are lamentations, crying out in agony, pain, confusion, and anger toward God over horrible circumstances. And an entire book of the Bible is dedicated to Lamentations! The Prophets lament, Moses laments, David laments—we see lamentations everywhere except in those places where Christianity is coupled with power and protection. But we must think critically about the reality of the historical church in the world, and we must teach our children to think critically about the triumphalist, Christian nationalistic narrative because it is not reflected in the Bible nor in the rest of the world and when our adult kids are asked the hard questions about theodicy—how a good God can allow terrible evils—if they aren’t familiar with the terrible evils described in the Bible and have only been handed empty platitudes, they will be, again, unprepared. Believe me, the Western Church will not be victorious, but Jesus will be. It’s going to be a messy ride, though.

It’s messy because relationships are messy. Faith is messy. And we should embrace the mess, and teach our kids to do the same or they will leave our houses so rigid that they will snap as soon as pressure is applied. We need to raise them up as children of the Book, yes, but all of the book and especially the messy parts. And we need to get to the point where we and they can do it fearlessly. We parents have been indoctrinated to believe that doubt is the enemy but not allowing doubt is what we truly must guard against. Do we answer a fool according to his folly or not? Back-to-back verses in Proverbs 26 give us entirely different answers because wisdom teaches us that life isn’t black and white but instead situational. If God is love, then why did the Canaanite genocide happen? Did it even happen or is it an example of ancient hyperbole, literary exaggeration to drive home a point that we see all through Scripture because that is how they communicated. Are we afraid to really really talk with our kids about the Bible? Are we only talking at them and telling them what we want them to accept—even if it doesn’t tell the whole story?

Kids are hypocrisy detectors, and when we homeschooling parents are on our soap boxes pontificating about the importance of getting our kids out of public schools because they aren’t being taught to think critically and then we forbid our kids to think critically when it comes to the most important book, the most important aspect, and the most important relationship of their lives—the house of cards is going to fall and a lot of adults are never able to get over that because they lack the tools to reassemble their faith—not upon the false foundation of fundamentalism and triumphalism or whatever -ism they were raised with—but on the foundation of God’s salvific work through Jesus, which is the true metanarrative of the Bible. Not young earth creationism, not the flood, not the identity of the Nephilim or Nimrod or Melchizedek, not how the divine name is pronounced or the claimed pagan origins of this or that doctrine or ritual or when or if the rapture is going to happen. None of that—we need to provide them with the building blocks to reconstruct in case they deconstruct. We cannot afford to simply indoctrinate them with what we want them to believe and see it as enough because as we can see all around us, it is not enough. Our kids are walking away, and who can blame them when we tell them to think critically when we ourselves too often have mistaken the adoption of alternate world views with a critical assessment of the situation. Believe what I tell you to believe, accept my explanations, don’t ask those questions, have more faith, pray more, don’t listen to that other denomination or that scholar or that theologian, and you will be okay just so long as you don’t stray from our path. I mean, God’s path…

And so, I embarked upon this very unique ministry, this very strange ministry—certainly not the ministry I wanted or thought I was being prepared for. I had a series of dreams involving children beginning in 2004, where I was surrounded by one hundred children and none of them were biological. So, you can imagine how terrifying that was. I had no idea how that was going to happen, and I didn’t even want to think about it. I was absolutely terrified that meant we were going to be foster parents to all one hundred at the same time. But, you know, I had no desire whatsoever to make that happen, so I just put it on the shelf. Ten years later, a friend from Ghana had a vision about me that was almost the same. Still, I waited. A year later I had a dream about believing parents who were leaving their kids behind, so I went back for them. I found Jesus with them, and He told me that the parents had gone off expecting to meet Him, but He was lingering for the sake of the children and wouldn’t be coming when they expected.

But a year before having that last dream, God slammed me to the mat by giving me a very odd book to write—teaching serious Bible college level materials to children. And so, I wrote Honor and Shame in the Bible, and the process was amazing—it was like it just flowed out of my brain, in order, making perfect sense but then when God gives me a book to write, that’s always how it happens. I have like twenty unfinished manuscripts in my files of books I tried to write without Him. It doesn’t work. And I taught families how to look at the Bible critically, like scholars, in terms of honor/shame culture which couldn’t be more different than our own if we tried. And I started getting feedback from parents because their kids were really getting it, and they were analyzing the text based on this one small subject and they couldn’t wait for Bible study because they were able to engage with the text in ways they never thought possible. And they were having family discussions and debates about what was going on based on this understanding. Parents and children were learning to see the Bible as something to interact with, struggle, and question their previous assumptions—by critically looking at the Bible stories with a more ancient set of eyes. And it started to come alive. And it all led to understanding Jesus and His mission better.

And then came my volume on Covenants, and it happened again. Kids were writing their own suzerain vassal covenants and exploring what it meant to be in Covenant through the eyes of Noah, Abraham, Moses, Phineas, David, and Jesus. They learned about kings and vassals and land grants and the difference between covenants and treaties and testaments and they were understanding concepts that weren’t very well understood just a hundred years ago but are now clear because of archaeology and the deciphering of ancient languages. And again, it all led to understanding Jesus and His mission better.

Then I wrote a much-needed volume on the ancient dyadic community mindset and a lot of the gruesome question of the Bible where only fifteen of the fifty lessons were suitable for children—but I wanted to equip parents with real answers and real ways to begin to look at the texts about sexuality so that they could answer the questions as their children became old enough to ask them. I knew that these sections of Scripture were very frustrating to those who are unacquainted with the ancient Near Eastern audience of Scripture, and the laws and mindsets and basic context of those times—how they thought and lived and behaved and what made sense to them but was lost to us until just recently. And again, it all led to understanding Jesus and His mission better.

My final volume tackled what being an image-bearer meant to the people of the ancient world, and we explored some “what if” stories about how life could have been different apart from the rebellion in the Garden. But the bulk of the book was about our New Creation life and how we represent God as image bearers through the development of the fruit of the Spirit. All of it was designed to make kids see themselves in the Bible, to enter in and be a part of the story of God’s rescue plan for humanity. And, of course, it all led to understanding Jesus and His mission better.

Kids are smart, and they are hungry to be treated as co-heirs in the Kingdom, which they are. How we present information must be age sensitive and yet we must be even more sensitive to explore and think critically ourselves—we cannot be afraid of the text, but we do have to respect it. We can’t box it in as though we need to be kept safe from it, as though it could possibly give us an entirely complete picture of God—who is forced to communicate His ineffable, indescribable greatness through metaphors because there simply are no words that are sufficient. When they come to understand that God is bigger than the Bible and that the Bible is a tool to help us into a beginning of understanding of just a glimpse of His majesty, the Bible can become their ally instead of their jailer. A companion in their quest to commune with our God and embrace Him in His complexity. And when that happens, they will still struggle with the hard questions and the doubts and the confusion, but it will be with the Bible as a companion that speaks different truths in different situations and not as an adversary who is cold, cruel, and detached from our struggles. We must give them a Bible that is like Jesus and not a Bible that fits into what we think we can manage and control. Jesus was unpredictable in His beautiful wisdom—never saying quite what we would expect, or doing what we think He should, or conforming to any standard of behavior that we can predict with any amount of assurance. The Bible doesn’t tell us why one man is stoned for gathering sticks on the Sabbath when David lived despite his sexual assault of Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. God is complex. Jesus is complex. The Bible, therefore, is complex as well and probably inspires more questions than it gives answers to.

To honestly be in relationship with the God of the Bible and Sinai and the Cross and the empty tomb takes a lot of stepping back and letting go of our need to be certain, which has reached idolatrous levels in the modern world. In reality, a God who can be predicted is a God that is small enough to fit into my approval zone and not big enough to rescue us from sin and death. When children can be told that, like Aslan, God isn’t tame and manageable but wild and good, He becomes big enough for them to trust with their lives, their fear, their sadness, their future, and their questions and anger as well. The God who fits in a box is generally either shockingly permissive or crushingly legalistic—and cares about what we care about and hates what we hate. The Bible tells different stories about God for the same reason that our friends, families, and neighbors can tell entirely different stories about us without any of them being lies. As we are complex creatures by design, God is even more so and thank God for it. But this beauty cannot be appreciated when we do not allow our kids to think critically about what they are reading, and what it might mean, and to listen to other critical thinkers, and when they don’t even know that it is possible to look at the Bible and see what it really does and doesn’t say. When we take off our denominational, fundamentalist, triumphalist glasses and really delve into what it is saying. And yes, kids can do that too—a little at first but more and more as they grow older and deeper in relationship and wisdom.

Questions are only the enemy when we neurotically believe that we must have all the answers or else our kids will become heathens. Those fears are baseless even though they are drilled into us by leadership that doesn’t have all the answers but fears losing control. Or by those whose egos do not allow an appearance of ignorance. But we are all ignorant, it is inevitable. We are all wrong about things, it’s undeniable. We all have a very small and limited understanding, and that’s okay. We all read things into the Bible that just aren’t there. We have all fallen for urban legends and hoaxes. We have all made faulty assumptions based more on 21^st century Western ideals and Hollywood than on the ancient context of the original audience. And one of the most valuable ways of teaching our kids to think critically is to openly admit when we find we were wrong and to apologize—from experience I can tell you that kids are used to being wrong and it is so discouraging until they really understand that we as parents are wrong too, more often than we know. I always say that the only way I know to keep from being proven wrong is to stop studying and never listen to anyone. But that would be an illusion because I would still be wrong. And it seems to me that when we love someone, we don’t want to be stuck with what we knew about them at any given point but instead desire to know them more and more. But it requires thinking critically and re-evaluating when necessary and listening to a lot of others and not being married to our denominational understandings or so enamored with any teacher (and especially me) that we put their materials in a place where only God deserves to sit.

Too often, we present our kids with what we consider to be “the final word” and do not allow them the opportunity to journey with God and others because we are more concerned with orthodoxy (having all the right ideas, creeds, doctrines, etc.) than with orthopraxy, which is what the Bible stresses. Orthopraxy requires a lot of critical thinking and is the bane of legalism, because orthopraxy is about doing the right things in the right ways at the right times. Orthopraxy tells us to love our neighbor and to love God with all we have. Orthodoxy tells us what that is and isn’t allowed to look like according to black and white rules that do not allow for wisdom to have any say at all. The Qumran Covenanters (the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls), who might have been the Essenes spoken of by Josephus, were all about legalism. You do not break the Sabbath even to save a drowning man, whereas the Pharisees expected a person to break the Sabbath to save lives—as do modern Jews to this day. Discovering orthopraxy requires us to think critically about the Bible and especially the Torah but also about the Proverbs and the Psalms. Is the person who dashes Babylonian babies against the rocks really blessed or was that the honest venting of a man who is at the rock bottom of despair? Do we answer a fool according to his folly or not? Depends on the exact situation. Is it okay to beat a slave to death if it takes more than two days for him to die? What about the pilgrims who slaughtered Native Americans because they believed they were living in the new promised land and found permission in the book of Joshua?

What was the Torah ultimately guiding us toward? The ministry of Jesus. An end to our oppression of others, a society to which many of the Torah laws—well, we’re just all grateful that is no longer our context. But they did represent an important trajectory out of sin and death and into life and love. Everything begins somewhere. And being captured and forced to be the wife of the man who slaughtered your family, as horrific as we rightfully see it now, was far better than the battlefield rape that was considered a soldier’s right in the rest of the world. Orthopraxy teaches us to weigh every decision by what love looks like to that person, in that moment and according to their need and there are no hard and fast rules, no detailed instruction manual outlining every situation. The Bible was given to us to guide us on to wisdom and love, not to replace our need to think critically about what is actually good, or bad, in a situation and act on it. The Torah is good, but it only provided the bare minimum of behavior modification in the otherwise brutal and vile realities of the ancient Near Eastern world.

The truth is that without Jesus, and a real relationship with Him and an understanding of His ministry and teachings as the Greater Moses, Greater Solomon, Greater Jonah and Greater Temple, the Torah is very confusing and especially for children. And so by interweaving the Genesis stories with archaeology, sociology, sound exegesis, history and most importantly Jesus on my radio show, Context for Kids, I am teaching kids to go beyond the text into a living, breathing, struggling, questioning, happy, sad, real faith that is not simply a set of beliefs but an outworking of trust and the inherent messiness of God being real, Jesus being real, and our relationship with Him very real as well. I don’t want them to have a relationship with a book and a set of beliefs. That leaves us no better off than Muslims or Buddhists. I want them to have a vibrant, growing, interactive relationship with the King of kings where they are allowed to do all the things that the Biblical authors did as they wrestled with God and knew Him and knew that He knew them. And how many of them had not a scrap of Bible to even help them along.

One last word. One pitfall of parents coming to an understanding of Torah after they were already believers is a knowledge of Jesus, and sometimes we take it for granted that we can read Torah portions to our kids and they can just pick up what we attained through entirely different means—you know, by focusing on Jesus and His teachings and actions. But it just doesn’t work. Not in the long run. Jesus is the goal of Torah, which means that Torah serves Jesus and not the other way around. That’s why Jesus clashed with the religious authorities who had turned the Torah into an idol, and even more so their interpretations which were more inspired by Hellenistic law codes than the ancient wisdom literature that was given to us by Moses. Jesus wanted them to see the point of Torah, but they were interested in legislating what they could and couldn’t get away with. Your kids need Jesus more than they need the Torah because only Jesus could walk out the true, long-term, non-culturally specific intentions of God that we could only guess at without Him.