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Let the Little Children Come: Child Rearing as Challenge to Contemporary Christian Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2013

John Wall
John Wall
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, Camden
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Abstract

A contemporary culture of market individualism in the United States today is increasingly marginalizing the lives of children. This situation requires Christian ethicists to raise once again, as in the historical past, the question of the larger meaning and purpose of child rearing as a serious disciplinary concern. This paper identifies fundamental issues of child rearing ontology, teleology, deontology, and practice, and maps out some newly emerging Christian ethical responses by communitarians, liberationists, and covenantalists. It then develops a larger social ethics of child rearing—drawing on a range of historical theological resources—able to speak to children's issues in a disciplinarily complex, publicly meaningful, and culturally transformative way. Its argument is that child rearing should be rescued from its increasing social privatization through a revised covenantal social ethic that strengthens the unique tasks of families but also places them within a larger interdependent nexus of community and state supports.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , Spring 2004 , pp. 64 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 2004

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References

1 In the early 1970s, children overtook the elderly as the poorest group in the country. During today's relative affluence, 16.9% of American children under 18—or 12.1 million children altogether—live below the rate of poverty (United States Census Bureau, “Census 2000,” available on Census web site, www.census.gov, P60–210, vi and ix). Approximately 10 million children have no form of health insurance, according to Hewlett, Sylvia Ann and West, Cornell, The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America's Beleaguered Moms and Dads (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 250.Google ScholarThatcher, Adrian calls children, as a result, the new socially “oppressed” in Marriage After Modernity: Christian Marriage in Postmodern Times (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 132.Google Scholar

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56 Ibid.

57 Ibid., 6.

58 I have elsewhere developed what I called a “critical covenant” with children based on a synthesis of the historical child rearing ethics of Thomas, Calvin, and Schleiermacher. See Wall, John, “Animals and Innocents: Theological Reflections on the Meaning and Purpose of Child-Rearing,” Theology Today 59/4 (January 2003), 559–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 I defend this larger position in Wall, John, “The Economy of the Gift: Paul Ricoeur's Significance for Theological Ethics,” Journal of Religious Ethics 29/2 (Summer 2001), 235–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See Tracy, David, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 1991)Google Scholar, Browning, Don S., A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1991)Google Scholar, and Kearney, Richard, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (New York: Routledge, 2003).Google Scholar

60 Anglican theologian Thatcher, Adrian makes such an argument in Marriage After Modernity, 294–302.Google Scholar