Teaching our kids to think: Introduction

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.Matt 22:37

I sometimes think that there was a gap in my Christian discipleship. I had great teaching from my parents, my church and my youth group about God, Jesus, the gospel and the bible. In my teens, I started to learn about the evidence and reasoning that supports faith in Jesus. But there was still a substantial gap.

Would I attribute my reticence to talk about faith to this gap in my knowledge? Perhaps (although there were probably larger obstacles, like pride and a desire to run with the crowd!)  

Do I think that my Christian witness was less effective? Yes. 

Do I want my kids to grow up with a similar knowledge gap? Absolutely not.

Now I didn't miss out on anything crucial (like the crucifixion or resurrection).  I understood the basics of my own faith and worldview.  The big gap was in understanding how others see the world, and in having the skill to expose the contradictions and fallacies in those worldviews. Unlike Paul, I hadn't learnt to: 

... demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and ... take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.2 Cor 10:5

Nor was I properly equipped to:

See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.Col 2:8

Lately, my education has been greatly improved by two books - they are both very readable and worth the time and cost. A Spectator's guide to Worldviews (Simon Smart) gives a great introduction to about 10 ways of viewing the world. It is written with a Christian audience in mind, and highlights common ground as well as points of departure. 

The second book is the knockout: Tactics: a game plan for discussing your Christian Convictions (Greg Koukl). This is a simple introduction to the art of inserting a stone in someone's shoe - pointing out weaknesses in someone's worldview that will hopefully lead to questions and, ultimately, the truth of Christ.

So at the moment I'm thinking through some of the implications for this new area of knowledge, and setting myself a challenge: how can I train my children up in this skill? How can I help them to identify error and illogicality? How can I help them learn to ask the gentle questions that expose folly and falsehood?

The next series of posts will start to unpack some of the ideas. For subject matter we'll be looking at the current debates around gay marriage (who's scared of an argument, huh?). I've chosen that because it's timely, because the issue is the hot point of a clash between western secularism and Christianity, and because so much of the argument (including in the Tasmanian House of Assembly!) provides examples of poor reasoning, overblown hyperbole, and rhetoric without evidence.