Give Them Grace by Elyse Fitzpatrick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Give Them Grace asks readers a very important question: how does believing the gospel change the way that you parent? Fitzpatrick asserts that if the way that we parent is the same as a devout Muslim or Jew, there must be something wrong. I think this is a paradigm shift that is very important for Christian parents, and one that I have been excited to see more and more of in books written in the last five to ten years.
The overall message of the book will be a balm to many readers. Resting in grace, parenting with humility, dependence on God, these are all messages that parents need to be reminded of. There are no guarantees and no quick fixes. Parenting is hard. I think many parents will find this an encouragement on many levels.
Because I have seen her books recommended in presbyterian circles so often, I was genuinely surprised by how un-covenantal this book was. (Fitzpatrick has a Sovereign Grace / Reformed Baptist background.) In the first several chapters alone, it talks many times about not presuming your children are regenerate, that they might pray a prayer just to please you and if they aren’t saved, they don’t have the Holy Spirit and therefore can’t obey God’s law from the heart. In examples of how to speak to a child, parents say things like “someday you’ll know how wonderful God is and how much he loves you.” Worse yet, speaking to an older child, “Because you don’t believe in Jesus’s love for you, your whole life will be spent trying to win and never being satisfied. And then you’ll have to stand before God, and all you’ll have is your record of failure. Striking out isn’t the worst thing that will ever happen to you. Living your life to win something other than Jesus is.” In example “scripts” there are different things to say to unbelieving versus believing children.
This is hard for me to read, even though I know that my children might turn away from God and need to be spoken to as an unbeliever, I think that it can be very confusing to children to speak to them as if they do not have faith. Let’s not encourage doubt or for them to question whether they “really” believe, let’s teach them to rest in God, as he is the author of their faith, anyway.
Though Fitzpatrick explains a fully orbed portrait of discipline that looks like discipleship, she uses the word “discipline” as a synonym for “spanking” which irks me. Parents say “I must discipline you” which is true generally, but what they mean is “I am choosing to spank you for this infraction.” It’s a pet peeve. Reading her model for talking to a child who defied his parent by not stopping playing when told it was time for dinner, shocked me. “If you believe that he has loved you and received punishment for you, then this kind of punishment will help remind you to live wisely, and the pain of it will soon be gone. But if you don’t believe in his great goodness, then the punishment you receive today will be just the beginning of a lifetime of pain. Today, you can ask for forgiveness, and I will forgive you, and if you ask him, so will the Lord. But if you wait, if you harden your heart and refuse to change, then a day will come when it will be too late to ask for forgiveness.” This sort of talk feels manipulative to me.
However, I appreciate the stand the authors have taken against forcing children to show repentance after being spanked. Many evangelical authors espouse this idea, and I know many adults who remember faking repentance and lying to avoid further punishment.
Many readers will appreciate the attempt at coupling of theology and a philosophy of parenting with more practical advice. I feel like I talk to my kids fairly theologically but the models were a stretch, and I couldn’t imagine talking to my children like that. However, it did incite me to think about how I would phrase a similar discussion, and that sort of premeditation is always helpful in parenting.
This is a good addition to the already crowded Christian Parenting shelves at bookstores, but I am still waiting for a book that I feel more comfortable recommending.
Wow. I was stunned to think that you would think Jews would parent differently than Christians, but maybe I don’t know what you mean by that, so this is a totally innocent question, why do you think Christians would parent differently from Jews?
(a Jewish reader)
It’s a great question, and I didn’t meant that to be offensive in any way. In our tradition of Christianity, we commonly talk about how the life, death and resurrection of Jesus changes everything.
The good news is that God is making all things new, a new heaven and a new earth without pain or sorrow or death. And that process was started by Jesus’ radical act of mercy in dying on the cross. We can’t be good enough to earn God’s favor. But in faith, all of Christ’s holiness is counted as ours. It’s his obedience, not ours, that really counts.
This radical grace is the center of our belief system. And we talk about how it changes everything. Knowing that you can’t do enough right things to make God happy, how can you expect your child to? Do you want them to believe that being good and following the rules is the highest virtue, when Christ’s obedience is what really counts? It ought to be a paradigm shift, but traditionally it hasn’t been.
Thanks for the thoughtful response.
I don’t have kids, and I shouldn’t venture to speak for “Jewish parents” as if they were a monolithic entity or if there were one single Judaism that informed all parenting by all Jews. But it’s clear that most Jews I know both accept that they cannot completely fulfill the law, and that G-d is merciful. After all, in prayer, we call upon G-d as el-rachum (the compassionate one) and el mole rachamim (the one of all mercy), and presumably we believe that those are actual qualities of G-d. There’s a tendency among non-Jews to characterize Judaism as a religion that is about following rules, but that characterization really kind of misses the point of following the rules in the first place. Mitzvah means not only commandment but also kindness; we are taught to delight in the mitzvot, and the basis of the mitzvot is to avoid doing what us hateful to us to others. That would also seem to apply to children. I’m sure not all Jewish parents live up to their ideals (as surely few parents of any faith do), but I don’t think Jewish parenting is founded on the notion that G-d lacks grace or that children should be treated as if they will never receive grace when they err. Jews also pray (e.g. on Yom Kippur) that G-d will wash away their sins.
I agree with you about Judaism being mischaracterized as rules following. God did not suddenly change between the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. He’s the same God, merciful, loving and forgiving. He loves his people because they are his, not because they “earn” it. I think CHRISTIANS misconstrue scripture and make their children think of God as a cosmic scorekeeper concerned about rules.
As much as I agree that Christians inaccurately portray Judaism, Jesus’ message was a change. There’s a reason his hearers reacted to it strongly (for or against.) It’s interesting to read something like Pirkei Avot and see a lot of similar ideas (same time frame, etc.) But Jesus’s message of the kingdom of God being here now, and all of it’s implications, it’s different.
What we believe ought to change who we are. If we believe different things, it should make a different in how we chose to live. Of course, I also think that there is a great deal of “common grace” and practices that just make sense and people of every faith and experience can come to the same conclusions.
What bothers me most is people who don’t think about what they are doing and send a really mixed, contrary message to their children.
FWIW: I think the decisively different point between Xty and Judaism, the point that changes everything, if you will, is Jesus: the idea that G-d has a son whom he specifically dispatched to make an atoning sacrifice for the sins of (potentially the entire — depending on how Reformed you are) world. The sacrifices of G-d for men / humanity are clear in the OT, but their embodiment in a family relationship of this type to me and the necessary outcomes for human relationships are to me not so fully explored in Judaism as it has developed as a religion in the last two thousand years, which has focused more on the relationships between fellow humans and their ethics. (I am sure there are Jews who would disagree with me on this; this is just my opinion).
The implications of that decision for parenting — that a father should decide that G-d should become man, and then, in turn, sacrifice his most precious relationship for humanity — are largely unexplored in most discussions of Christian parenting that I have read, particularly recently. (I am also not a connoisseur of every parenting method written for the Christian.)
I like this idea. We talk a lot about doing ministry “incarnationally” but I think people don’t apply the same principles to parenting. It’s interesting to me how much parenting is divorced from theology, particularly among people who integrate theology well in many other aspects of life.
Regardless of creed, if we truly believe that which we claim, then our believes ought to shape our practices. In so far that Christianity is different from Judaism, Islam, Atheism, etc … then the practices of each group’s followers ought, to some extent, differ accordingly.
This may not be the case with all things (e.g., basic tasks), but there should be some nuanced difference in how we carry out those things that are central to what it means to be human.
Thanks for this thoughtful review, Kristen. I’d be curious to hear your list of favorite parenting books! Are there any that ARE written from a covenantal perspective?
There really isn’t a book that I love that approaches parenting theologically from a covenantal perspective. There are a lot of good and useful books, but not one that frames things the way I would. It is interesting to me how many reformed-recommended parenting books are by baptists.
I wish someone from a covenantal perspective would right a book!! Maybe you in a couple years, Kristen? ;)
Kristen,
I think you are spot-on in the review. I literally threw the book across the room at one point. The irony for me is this: I had a bunch of moms at the church I serve concerned that this book was serving up antinomianism. So when I read it, I was all on board for about 3 pages, when I realized that she was offering covenant children about half the grace they actually needed. Well-put!
Todd
Thanks, Todd. Glad to hear you agree, it’s far too frequent to see pastors espouse grace for themselves and their congregations but somehow miss any connection to parenting. We can’t handle the law, but surely our small children will be able to perfectly obey (all the way, the cheerful way), no problem.
I am finally reading Dan Allender’s parenting book (I sort of avoid them in general, I read GTG because so many people asked me about it.) It might become my go-to recommendation.