"I was once leading a seminar for teachers at our Christian school, and in the course of discussion mentioned that many of the girls in the school would, within a few short years, be adult women and would take their place in our midst. The teachers heard all this with aplomb, but when I went on to say that within a few short years the boys they were instructing would be lawyers, airline pilots, pastors, etc., the looks on the faces of the assembled teachers ranged from concern to mild panic. Boys take a lot of faith."
"This is good because the presence or absence of faith reveals whether or not we have a biblical doctrine of our future...
"Say a boy breaks a chair because he was jumping from a bunk bed. Unbelief sees the cost of replacing the chair. Faith sees aggressiveness and courage, both of which obviously need to be directed and disciplined. Suppose a boy gets into a fight protecting his sister. Unbelief sees the lack of wisdom that created a situation that could have been easily avoided; faith sees an immature masculinity that is starting to assume the burden of manhood."
"When Theodore Roosevelt was at Harvard, he taught Sunday school for a time at Christ Church, until he was dismissed. A boy showed up one Sunday with a black eye. He admitted he had been fighting, and on a Sunday too. He told the future president that a bigger boy had been pinching his sister, and so he fought him. TR told him that he had done perfectly right and gave him a dollar."
Quotations from Douglas Wilson, "Future Men"
6 comments:
Hi all. Thanks for the updates on your family life.
I thought I commented on this. Hmm? did you delete me?? How could you? Wah! Hey... Lisa called. I am sorry things didn't work to get together this summer. Next year in Virginia!
Cullen is great.
On the other hand, Douglas Wilson sounds like a clown trapped in an echo chamber. If we could somehow vaccinate people against the "fallacy of the excluded middle," an entire genre of politico-theologians like this guy and Rush Limbaugh would disappear overnight.
Ok, I wasn't meaning to be offensive, but I really take issue with this Wilson guy. I sent you more detail in email.
Wisdom is far more important than aggression, as any sober reading of the NT (or OT!) will show, for goodness' sake. To use the language of faith to argue otherwise is very bad. Maybe little sisters get beaten up in Alabama more frequently, but in my experience, there have been few, if any, instances that required less wisdom and more aggression.
This is particularly important at a time when our country is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of _civilians_ (by conservative counts) in Iraq because "mistakes were made." Too much aggression and not enough wisdom gets innocent people killed. I think the Bible has something to say about that....
I picked up this book by Douglas Wilson after it had been recommended by a variety of people over at www.stevekmccoy.com.
I didn't take these quotes to mean that aggression is more important than wisdom. Rather, that there is a feminizing tendency in our culture that tends to squelch certain masculine characteristics that should not be squelched: such as being protective, rising to a challenge, etc.
And I took Wilson to be saying that even though these characteristics need to be nurtured with wisdom, they are not to be obliterated altogether.
Ken, I trust y'all are fine down there. Nice to see the pics of your boy - I don't make in here as much as I should. On the Wilson thing, it seems to me that the point is that God gave men and women different roles and responsibilities and accordingly appropriate aptitudes and characteristics (unPC as it is). Manliness is doing what God requires of you as a man - sometimes turning the cheek and sometimes defending others. Knowing the papa, I'm sure the son will be instructed as such.
Wade
Post a Comment