The Bible is not a children’s book

One of the things my wife asked for Christmas was the missing volumes to her series of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, that outrageously (and refreshingly) “dark” children’s books. While many adults enjoy the wry humor in Snicket’s prose, the more significant aspect is children’s response to a cycle of stories that have no happy ending and exploits children’s worst fears (the children in the story are orphaned in the first book, and then it gets worse from there). Kids are eating up this series of stories.

Lutheran pastor Ronald F. Marshall, in “Eaten Alive,” in Touchstone (April 200) addresses the issue of children and fables from another angle. His article serves to highlight the paradox of how we often handle the Bible with children. Rather than allow the stories of faith to serve their instructional purpose with children by allowing it to speak to the “unfortunate events” in life, we are prone to “protecting” our children by glossing over the “adult” material in Scripture. But glossing over the harsh truths that these stories contain by explaining them away or rationalizing them (with explanations often out of reach of children’s capacity to understand) merely empties these stories of their power to teach and inform.

Marshall writes,

These tales—themselves usually sentimentalized in modern retellings—teach children that “much of what goes wrong in life is due to our very own natures—the propensity of all men for acting aggressively, asocially, selfishly, out of anger and anxiety,” as Bruno Bettelheim puts it in The Uses of Enchantment. But “the dominant culture wishes to pretend, particularly where children are concerned, that the dark side of man does not exist.”

Children experience anxious and destructive feelings. They can, for example, love their parents dearly, “but at times also hate them.” These upsetting feelings must be explored rather than covered up. “By keeping this monster within the child unspoken of . . . the child fails to get to know his monster better” and so loses the chance to “gain mastery over it.”

Against these illusions, the fairy tales stand with all their frightfulness—insisting on telling the truth. And the truth is indeed scary. And it is a truth that children can handle, indeed need to face.

This insight must guide the telling of the story of Jonah to our children. Forget about cleaning up Jonah. Instead, tell the story the Bible tells. It is the story God wants your children to hear.

I agree with Marshall and believe we should have more confidence in our children’s capacity for meaning making than we often give them credit. They are not alone in struggling to make meaning of these biblical stories, for they read them with their parents and in the context of a faith community—teachers, pastors, caregivers, etc.—who help interpret their meaning in the context of real life. The Bible is not a children’s book, but it is for them too, all of it.