A modest proposal: the Bible matters to how we raise our children

I’d rather err with the Baptists | HeadHeartHand Blog.

I can make this brief.

The post linked above makes more sense if we have some tract on TULIP as our authoritative, inerrant, and sufficient guide to life and faith rather than the Bible.

I’ve written many many things dealing with what the Bible says and assumes about Christian parents and their children before. I’m not going to go into it all again.

But none of that matters to this kind of discussion. It is not even considered. All we have is TULIP with the doctrines of regeneration and conversion. From those data points we deduce family life and Christian parenting. We come up with something we don’t see in Scripture.

And that doesn’t even matter to us. We know TULIP is true and our applications thereof are never questioned.

Jonathan Swift could easily be writing about the way experiential Calvinists apply Scripture when he wrote this scene:

Those to whom the king had entrusted me, observing how ill I was clad, ordered a tailor to come next morning, and take measure for a
suit of clothes. This operator did his office after a different manner from those of his trade in Europe. He first took my altitude by a quadrant, and then, with a rule and compasses, described the dimensions and outlines of my whole body, all which he entered upon paper; and in six days brought my clothes very ill made, and quite out of shape, by happening to mistake a figure in the calculation. But my comfort was, that I observed such accidents very frequent, and little regarded.

Why not actually measure the dimensions of our parenting by all the Biblical content? My fear is that such a method has been dismissed as “Judaism” in the post linked above.