Let the Children Come by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

Author:Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore [Miller-McLemore, Bonnie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fortress Press
Published: 2019-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

Reclaiming Children as Gift and Task

The challenge today is to recapture the “radicalness,” as Gundry-Volf expresses it, of the gospel passages in which Jesus welcomes children. This requires change not only in adult attitude but also in children’s place within society. In Gundry-Volf’s words, “Jesus did not just teach how to make an adult world kinder and more just for children; he taught the arrival of a social world in part defined by and organized around children.”

Christian views of children as divine gift challenge and even condemn some contemporary popular views and practices. Children, in essence, inherently question the whole economy of exchange that turns them into a commodity or even a nonentity. If children are gift, wholly unearned, they are ours “only in trust,” as Whitmore asserts, coming from and ultimately returning to God. This limits adult power over them and forbids their use as a means to other ends.

Equally important, children are not pure gifts with no strings attached. From the adults around them, children require in return unearned “gifting,” without which they will not survive, demanded simply because of what children are in and of themselves. A genuine gift creates an ongoing relationship because a gift leaves a disequilibrium that suggests the hope that sharing gifts will continue ad infinitum. Market exchange, by contrast, rigidifies relationships. It aims at an equilibrium in which exchanging money for a product ends the relationship.

Most people who toss around the idea of children as gift know neither the Christian imperatives attached to the claim nor how later Christian history developed them. John Calvin in particular stands out as a sixteenth-century theologian who especially loved the language of children as God’s gift and understood the dialectic between gift and task, or the need for a return gifting. This is not so surprising since he saw Scripture as a central source of divine truth. If he promotes the theme, it is partly because the Biblical narratives suggest it to him. The idea of children as gift also results from the deep appreciation for divine providence, or God’s oversight of human destiny, through which he filters his entire theology. In declaring the fruits of God’s purposeful beneficence, he underscores again and again that children are a special blessing.

His commentaries on the stories of barrenness and procreation in Genesis and on references to children in the Psalms are wonderfully illustrative. Speaking about the conception of Isaac, Calvin declares that every birth is like a visit from God. Lifting up the man with many sons who is likened to the happy warrior with a quiver full of arrows in Psalm 127, he repeats a favored phrase of his: the fruit of the womb is God’s gift. This phrase, in fact, echoes Elizabeth’s greeting of her pregnant kinswoman Mary in Luke 1:42. Calvin departs significantly from other theologians, such as Augustine and Luther, in his reading of the reference in Psalm 8 to “the mouths of babes and infants” singing God’s praises. This does not refer allegorically to those young in faith.

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