“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” (Proverbs 22:6).
You can’t really understand the teenager who lives in your house apart from trying to understand the culture and the historical forces that have shaped his world—ones that we adults helped to create. Ours has become a global village but it is one that is vastly different from the one that you grew up in and certainly the one your grandparents grew up in. Remember a century ago there was no radio, no TV, no electricity, no movies, no computers, no e-mail or satellites. It was relatively a simple world compared to the complexities of life today.
At the beginning of the 20th century science was just coming into its own. The Enlightenment had brought about an industrial revolution in the Western World. The offspring? Science and technology. And gradually the two formed a powerful catalyst that shifted the focus in education from the mysterious to the concrete, from the unknown to the known, and from God to man. Gradually, we ceased to bow in reverence before the Creator and began to worship the human intellect.
Eventually science gave us a new faith—not in God but in ourselves. We gradually outgrew our need for God, so men thought. In the late 19th century, there lived a German philosopher by the name of Frederick Nietzsche. He was credited with being the father of the “God is dead” movement that created a lot of noise in the sixties (1960s)–but actually Nietzsche was not saying necessarily that God had a stroke and died. Rather he saw what was coming and tried to describe a world in which people live as though there is no God—a world in which human intellect and the baseness of our old natures reigned supreme, a world in which God has no control and no influence.
Nietzsche wrote, “The story I have to tell is the history of the next two centuries… Where we live, soon nobody will be able to exist.” (Erich Heller, The Importance of Nietzsche (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 5.
Of course, God didn’t die. Babies were christened, churches kept their doors open, and life went on. Following two horrific world wars, adults though began to live as though there were no God. While we talked about “God” we lived as though He were really dead.
In the novel The Brother’s Kamarazov, by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, there is a line that goes, “If there is no God, then anything is permissible….” Charles Darwin, a contemporary of Nietzsche, wrote, “A man who has no assured and ever-present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution or reward, can have no rule for his life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses which are strongest, or which seem to him the best ones.” (Charles Darwin, as quoted by Philip Yancey, “Nietzsche Was Right,” Books & Culture, January/February 1998, p. 15.)
What are those impulses which flow from the old nature? Greed, sexual desire, violence, hatred, hopelessness; and these are the themes of much of the secular music which teens listen to today.
It is in this context your kids are growing up. No, thank God, all kids don’t buy into the logic of despair and hopelessness, but thousands the world over embrace the despair and hopelessness which has left God out of life today. As history suggests: one generation talks about something, the next embraces it. And what my generation says they believed but didn’t practice, our children have embraced.
A closing thought: When there is a difference between what parents say they believe and what they practice, the next generation believes what their parents practiced. Think about it.
Resource reading: Proverbs 17.
