Valerie

I've been thinking about the spanking chapter for my book. I
suggested in a post yesterday (half-heartedly) that I would love to
quote the anti-spankers in here and give them credit if they agreed.
I think I might really like to do that. You all spoke so eloquently
and passionately about it. Would any of you consider allowing me to
use your opinions in the book?

love, Valerie

Judie C. Rall

> I've been thinking about the spanking chapter for my book. I
> suggested in a post yesterday (half-heartedly) that I would love to
> quote the anti-spankers in here and give them credit if they agreed.
> I think I might really like to do that. You all spoke so eloquently
> and passionately about it. Would any of you consider allowing me to
> use your opinions in the book?
>
> love, Valerie
>
>

I absolutely would.

I would like to explain the whole biblical spanking thing, just so we
can get that over with. I have a website about it, but I will post the
gist of it here.

I would also like to say that, I WAS a born-again Christian for 20
years. I was fed all their doctrine and pretty much believed it.
Finally, because of basic doctrinal flaws and misteaching, I no
longer call myself Christian, though I believe in God and still
worship him/her in my own way. One of the basic things I cannot
tolerate in a religion of Love is the hurting of other people.

God does not ever harm us.....he/she allows us to learn from the
consequences of our own actions. This is how I raise my children,
and this is why I believe people have to go through hard things in
their lives....to learn the lessons they specifically came here to
earth to learn.

Read the first five books of the Bible, which we call the Books of
Law or the Torah. This is the Law which God gave to Moses and
which he intended the children of Israel to live by. What is
mentioned in these five books about childrearing and discipline?

Deuteronomy 1:39 says "And the little ones that you said would be
taken captive, your children who do not yet know good from bad--
they will enter the land. I will give it to them and they will take
possession of it."

From this we learn that young children do not know good from bad.
Their actions are not intentionally defiant or disobedient. The
reason these children could enter the land is that they were
considered guiltless. They were not held accountable for any
wrong actions.

Deuteronomy 6:6-9 says "These commandments that I give you
today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along
the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as
symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write
them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates."

This passage injoins the parent to give verbal instruction to their
children, and to use every opportunity to impress God's commands
upon them. He also encouraged us to give our children visible
reminders of God's expectations and promises.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says "If a man has a stubborn and
rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not
listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall
take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town.
They shall say to the elders, 'This son of ours is stubborn and
rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard.'
Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must
purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be
afraid."

This passage is instruction given to parents whose GROWN child
has become a profligate and a drunkard. A profligate was
someone who spent all his money on riotous living, like the
Prodigal Son of Luke 15:11-32. The purpose of the stoning was not
to change the behavior of this adult child, but to purge evil from the
house of Israel. The parents said that their discipline had not
changed his behavior, so now he had to be punished. That
is the difference between discipline and punishment. A child is
disciplined while there is still hope of him changing. Punishment is
a final judgement of God against a person when there is no longer
any hope of changing his heart. Punishment is not a form of
discipline, and this stoning is not an example of discipline. In
discipline, we show grace to the child. In punishment, God shows
justice.

As parents, we are required to show to our child the same grace in
discipline that God has shown us. Since we no longer live under
the Old Law, punishment is something we leave to God when all
our efforts to discipline have failed.

Think about this father and mother in the example above. They
knew that stoning would end the life of their child. No matter what
a child has done, a mother always loves her child and wants the
best for him. Before taking their child to the elders of the city, they
would have tried every possible loving method of discipline. They
would not have taken their child there if there had been any hope
that he would change. Knowing that children are often impetuous
in their youth, but often grow out of this as they mature, they would
have brought the child up until he was an adult, always hoping he
would heed their discipline and change. Only when he was an adult
would such an extreme measure be taken. This kind of treatment
would never have been given a child.

These three passages constitute everything God said to the
children of Israel specifically about parenting. You will
notice that while they are told to discipline, spanking or the use of
the "rod" is not mentioned anywhere in the books
of Law. Parents were allowed to decide individually what kind of
discipline was best for their special and unique
child. The were NOT taught that spanking was required.

Christians who maintain that spanking is manditory discipline for
children are applying a one-size-fits-all approach to parenting which
is in contradiction to Proverbs 22:6. In this passage, the original
text indicates that we are to parent children according to their God-
given inborn design. We are to respect their individual differences
and train them accordingly. Spanking is not necessary or
desirable in most cases where discipline is required, and is
certainly not mandatory to good Christian parenting.

Many Christians point to Hebrews 12:5-6 which says "My son, do
not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when
he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and
he scourges everyone he accepts as a son." The writer of
Hebrews was quoting Proverbs 3:11-12 which makes this same
statement. They point to the word "scourges" (also translated
disciplines, chastises) and say that this is the same kind of
scourging Paul received when he was beaten, perhaps the same
kind of scourging Jesus received before he was
crucified.

There are two ways you can take this passage, literally and
metaphorically. If you take the passage literally, you
are saying that you believe that each child should be physically
scourged and beaten in the same way Paul and Jesus were.
These beatings often resulted in a bleeding and bruised body for
the recipient. I don't believe that those who advocate spanking
would say that children ought to receive this kind of scourging,
which would be physically damaging to the child. So we are forced
to conclude that this passage is used metaphorically.

God doesn't actually beat us up with a whip; he does use the
circumstances of our lives to discipline us. This is
what he expects us to do with our children as well. There are
many creative and effective ways of guiding children
toward right behavior without using spanking or any other form of
discipline that would hurt them.


A Definition of "Discipline"

My way of defining discipline is simply that it is a framework which
provides motivation for right behavior. Once the frame of a house is
set upon the foundation, the builders are pretty much committed to
a particular shape and style of house. While our foundation is, of
course, Jesus Christ, the framework which we use to shape the
house is called Attachment Parenting.

When a child is parented according to attachment parenting
principles, he has learned to trust his parents because
of their consistently sensitive care of him. He intuitively trusts what
they say, and is easier to discipline. The
discipline is based upon their intimate relationship, and his
dependence upon it. When there is a "break" or
disruption in the attachment relationship caused by the child's
behavior, he is highly motivated to re-establish the
security and intimacy of that relationship. He does not like the
feeling of having physical or psychological space
put between him and the parent. He will change his behavior in
order to come back into a right relationship with
the parent, which means he can once again enjoy the physical and
emotional comfort and security that this
relationship provides.

This is exactly what God does when we sin. He does not leave us
in the sense that he stops caring for us, but he
does break fellowship with us until we have repented. This is what
we as parents should do. We still continue to
care for the needs of our child, but we withdraw fellowship from
him. This is so uncomfortable for him emotionally
that he quickly seeks to change his behavior and repent.

Trust is based upon the meeting of physical needs. A child who
does not trust his parents to take care of him will
not respect their guidance and discipline either. By not using
attachment parenting principles, parents are forced
into a position where they must use more aggressive disciplinary
techniques.

When a child misbehaves, the first question to ask is, "What need
does my child need that I have ignored or
overlooked?" or "What aspect of our shared relationship has been
violated?

Some researchers believe that over 50% of the adults currently
incarcerated in prisons are there as a direct result of
disturbed attachment relationships or complete attachment breaks
during childhood. Each person needs to be part
of a healthy, shared attachment relationship to develop normally.
Spanking is one avenue for introducing attachment breaks into the
internal working model, though it is not the only avenue. When a
child is spanked, even though the rest of his experiences with his
parents are positive, an unknown element has been introduced into
his world which causes him to question his parents. Spanking
causes the child to feel disrespected on a very basic level. This
effects different children in different ways, depending on their
individual temperaments. You never know how it is going to effect
your particular child.

In my opinion, with so many other effective disciplinary methods,
spanking is undesirable and rarely needed. Also, since spanking
was not specifically commanded in the Law of Moses, it was not
something God expected them to do. Remember that the Law was
considered perfect, and those who followed it perfectly (which is no
one, of course) could be considered right with God. If God didn't
think spanking was necessary for the parent to be a "good parent"
or didn't think it was necessary for the child, then why do we say
that it IS necessary, since God never wrote a word about it?

Since the New Testament is based upon disciplining with grace,
spanking would not be in harmony with New Testament teaching.

One final verse which often gives parents trouble is the verse "He
who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful
to discipline him" (Proverbs 13:24). The word "rod" is used in
various ways in scripture, and in the original Hebrew there were
eight to ten different meanings for the word. The pole that
shepherds used to guide their sheep along the road was called a
rod. It was not used to hit the sheep, but to guide them as they
walked and keep them on the road. This would correspond to the
framework we talked about earlier. It is simply a guide. The
shepherd also had a large club called a rod which he used to drive
away predators, but it never was used to hit the sheep. God also
spoke of the "rod of my mouth" which he used for discipline also.
In short, the rod was any article or method used to guide, teach, or
discipline. It did not have to be a physical method, either, or
God could not have used his mouth as a rod.

The verse is correct in that, if you do not provide discipline for your
child, he will learn to behave badly. But the rod in this verse is not
specifically referring to spanking, but to any disciplinary method
which gets the job done.


Many parents prefer spanking because it's quick and easy, and
gets the behavior stopped right away. But children learn through
modeling, and though spanking does show the child that you
disapprove of this behavior, it does not teach what is right behavior.
We can find a similar analogy with the Old and New Testaments.
In the Old Law, there was a standard, and people were expected to
live by the standard. Just because people knew the Law and that
they would be punished for disobeying it, that did not keep the
people from disobeying. In the New Testament, we are given the
Holy Spirit to empower us to live righteously. Yet, we expect our
children to obey with only the threat of punishment to keep them
from sinning. If it did not work in the Old Law, it will not work
now. Indeed, we have been given a more excellent way. We need
to teach them from the standpoint of an inner knowledge of
rightness rather than an externally imposed law. We need to teach
them to be Spirit-led believers, notPharisaical lawkeepers. Most
importantly, we need to model grace to them in every encounter we
have.

Briefly, I would like to talk about the Proverbs 23:13-14 which says,
"Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you punish him with the
rod, he will not die. Punish him with the rod and save his soul from
death." Once again, the word punishment is used in this passage,
so we know that this passage was talking about an action which
was a last resort type of thing. It was very physically painful and
would NOT have been applied to anything but a grown child. Also,
these verses were NOT part of the Law of Moses, but were added
much later. They were supposedly wise sayings from a king.
However, for much of the history of the Jews these sayings were
not available, and they were not required to adhere to them as part
of the Law. So while some people may like these sayings, the
Jews were not required (by God) to adhere to them as part of the
perfect nature of the Law, although certainly, the Jewish leaders
may have tried to bind this man-made commandment upon the
people. Indeed, anyone who knows anything about the Jews know
that they loved to write commentaries on the scripture, giving their
own interpretation and binding that upon people. I look at this
verse as just one of those commentaries.

So, there are NO verses in the Law of Moses or the New
Testament which in any way lead us to believe spanking is
acceptable. And the commentaries on the law are just
that....commentaries, and open to interpretation. I believe the
commentaries, and especially the books of poetry (Job, Psalms,
Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon) are wonderful books,
but not divinely inspired, simply wisdom literature written by wise
individuals. They had much to say that was valuable, but they
were not speaking for God in all cases.

Hope that clears up the confusion. Thanks.

Judie