by Matthew Raley As a parent, I find it easy to think that my boys are rebelling against my rules. They don't like the limits I set, so they try to overturn them.

Until recently I have read the stories of Israel's rebellions against the Lord from the same perspective. The people hated the law, so they disregarded it. My misconception could stem from the definition of rebellion: it is the overthrow of authority. So the target of rebellion would seem to be law.

Yet, when Moses writes his song of witness against Israel's rebellions (Deuteronomy 31-32), the law of God is only a secondary focus.

Here is the song’s theme (32:4): “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.” This teaching about the Lord’s name (32:1-3) should “drop as the rain” and “distill as the dew, like gentle rain upon the tender grass.” The knowledge of God’s faithfulness renews the nation’s life, keeping it tender and green.

The witness Moses writes is not first concerned with the nation’s sin, but with God’s faithfulness.

Moses sings of it both in the past and the future.

The Lord found Jacob “in a desert land, and in the howling waste of the wilderness.” There the Lord kept Jacob “as the apple of his eye,” leading him into the fruitful land (32:10-14).

The Lord’s faithfulness will not change in coming generations, even after Jacob rebels against him. As a contrast to helpless idols (32:36-43), the Lord will “vindicate his people and have compassion on his servants.” God proclaims, “See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me.” Ultimately, he “cleanses,” or atones for, the land.

Here is what I learned from the song about rebellion's target. Moses does not charge the people with rebelling against law, but against grace.

To be sure, Israel has broken God’s law, and no man can itemize the trespasses in greater detail than Moses. Yet Moses charges the people with rebellion against the Lord’s protection (32:11), guidance (32:12), and material gifts (32:13-14). He portrays the Lord as jealous, like a spurned lover (32:21). Israel's rebellion is perverse, in other words, because the people cast aside God's goodness.

This means that the four characteristics of rebellion all target God's faithfulness. Idolatry says that the living God cannot be trusted because we cannot manipulate him. The principal lies rebels tell are slanders against God's record of goodness. Rebels scoff at God's gifts, especially his forgiveness. A rebel's refusal to listen is driven by his bitter determination that God is against him.

Studying Moses' song has clarified my focus as a dad.

Rules matter. But I am not to be focused on them primarily. I am to call on my boys to trust me, and I am to demonstrate trustworthiness.

For instance, I have been deliberate about keeping my promises to the boys. But I want to go further. I want to gain their implicit confidence. I do this by taking the initiative to help them with problems, not just waiting for them to ask for help. I also nurture this confidence by helping them express themselves when they're having trouble, and by paying careful attention to their emotions. I want them to assume that I am for them, not against them.

Here's what I've found in applying this focus. When my boys trust me, the rules usually aren't an issue for them. They tend to comply readily.

In other words, this approach is a way to teach obedience toward God in faith. In Christ, God's authority is expressed toward us through grace.

by Matthew Raley We've been seeing that the sin of rebellion is, at its core, a refusal to deal with reality.

Moses' description of Israel in Deuteronomy 31-32 shows a nation unwilling to worship the real God, serving only their imagined deities. They were unwilling to face the real past and present truthfully, but fabricated bitter histories. And they were unwilling to face life with humility, preserving a deluded superiority with scoffing.

The fourth characteristic of rebellion in Deuteronomy is foolish obstinacy. Repeated experience of reality will not turn Israel from folly.

Moses calls the people “stubborn” (31:27), noting that their rebellion during his life will only intensify after his death. In his song, he dramatizes their refusal to listen, calling them “foolish and senseless,” and pleading (32:6-7), “[A]sk you father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you.”

Yet again, this is a quality all too familiar in the nation’s history.

The Lord called the people “stiff-necked” after they made the golden calf (Exodus 32:9). Nothing had changed by Ezekiel’s time. The Lord warned him (Ezekiel 3:7), “But the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me. Because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart.”

Again, the logic of rebellion dictates this attitude. No rebel can admit having learned from anyone except himself. To learn from experience would be to admit that he was wrong. To listen to others would be to admit that their priorities matter. To be taught, by definition, is to be turned from one’s own way. None of these things are tolerable.

The rebel would rather self-destruct than submit.

Now, there is an important consideration for a parent in this regard. I worry about a child who has no fight.

One of the biggest reasons I am against authoritarian parenting systems that emphasize compliance -- systems like Michael Pearl's, for example -- is that they are designed to break a child's will. Not soften. Break. That is why Pearl describes his system in terms of conditioning animals.

It doesn't take too much acquaintance with life to realize that a child is going to need his or her will to be strong. Adults have to make decisions, and make their decisions stick. Christ calls us to persevere against the world's constant wickedness. A Christian's duty is frequently to stand alone.

In light of this, I am not raising compliant boys. I am fortifying their wills for the days ahead, when they will need every last bit of resolution for godliness.

Is there a difference between resolution and obstinacy?

I believe there is. I've noticed that resolute people are able to persist in moving toward their goals because they adapt. They are profound learners, and quick listeners. That is, they do not ignore reality, but find real ways around real barriers.

A resolute leader such as Lincoln offers a good example. He refused to consider any outcome of the Civil War but restoring the Union. But in his drive toward that goal, he adapted to circumstances constantly. He changed his generals, maintained political coalitions, and managed the timing of such pronouncements as the Emancipation Proclamation. He adapted.

So how do we foster a resolve that is tempered by a willingness to learn?

Teaching a high view of God is the answer once again. When our children are taught to listen to him, to learn his ways, and to pursue his goals, they inherit a balance of traits than can only come from reverence. Our awe of God teaches us both what is yet to be learned and what must never be compromised.

Next week, we'll discover from Deuteronomy what may be the most important point of all about rebellion.

by Matthew Raley Sarcasm is my default mode. My favorite form of literature is satire, and I bond quickly with anyone who has wit.

I am like much of my generation, which seems to have rejected the true believer's ardor in favor of irony. But in me, scoffing is also a tic that comes with being self-taught. Autodidacts don't submit. They too quickly dismiss what they've heard before because the notion wasn't original with them. These qualities made me a difficult boy to raise -- as my parents often affirm.

So the third characteristic of rebellion that we discovered in Deuteronomy 31-32, contempt, was uncomfortable for me to study.

The Lord foretells that the Israelites “will despise me,” having “grown fat” from the land’s fruit (31:20). Moses finishes that sketch in the song (32:15). “But Jeshurun grew fat, and kicked; you grew fat, stout, and sleek; then he forsook God who made him and scoffed at the Rock of his salvation.”

Persistent scoffing was a feature of Israel’s camp life in the wilderness.

One thinks of Korah’s sarcastic jab at Moses, taking the phrase that described the land of Canaan and applying it to Egypt (Numbers 16:13). “Is it a small thing that you have brought us up out of a land flowing with milk and honey, to kill us in the wilderness, that you must also make yourself a prince over us?”

Scoffing would remain the scourge of Israel’s prophets right down to the last, as the Lord warned Ezekiel (2:6). “And you, son of man, be not afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you and you sit on scorpions. Be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house.”

I identify too closely with this kind of contempt.

As I said in another post, scoffing is like an energy drink. It gives a false feeling of superiority, of remaining unaffected by others, and of knowing people’s “real” motivations. And once you get hooked on it, weaning yourself off the security of sarcasm is difficult.

A pattern of scoffing, in this sense, is just like the patterns of idolatry and lying we've already seen: it breaks a person's contact with that unyielding master, reality. It fortifies him in rebellion, the exaltation of his subjective world over the claims of others.

The job of a parent is often to strengthen some of a child's ways against others.

In my case, Dad and Mom tamed my contempt for others, and for authority generally, by strengthening my sense of God's majesty and a reverence for truth. With a conviction that I must not lie, I was already sensitized to my own fakery. More than that, having already believed that God will not adapt to my priorities but that I must adapt to his, I was not going to venture any contempt for him.

These have helped me keep my flair for satire within a proper, narrow scope: puncturing self-regard, my own included, and exposing the folly of human hatred against God.

The most potent tool for parenting is not rules, which feed a scoffer's conceit, but a high view of God. That alone can humble the proud.

by Matthew Raley The first moral precept I can remember learning is, "Do not lie."

The form it took was more specific: "Never lie to Dad." And its logic was compelling. If Dad finds out you lied to anybody else, the effect is the same as lying to Dad. Ergo, just don't.

From Deuteronomy 31-32, we have seen that there are four sinful patterns involved in rebellion, the disregard or overthrow of authority. The first is idolatry, inventing a god that is pliable. Idolatry makes war on reality by insisting that everything conform to our subjective demands, even God.

The second pattern of sin in rebellion, according to Deuteronomy, is deceit.

The Lord tells Moses that Israel will “break my covenant that I have made with them,” a phrase he repeats four verses later (31:16, 20). Israel’s oath-breaking is the specific reason God commands Moses to place the Book of the Law beside the ark “for a witness” (31:26). Every transaction with a lying people must be verified.

In his song in chapter 32, Moses declares that the people are “a crooked and twisted generation,” calling them “children in whom there is no faithfulness” (32:5, 20). He pointedly refers to the nation as “Jacob” (32:9), the grasping, usurping, deceitful patriarch whom the Lord blessed only through prolonged wrestling.

Lying was typical of the nation’s behavior under Moses.

There was deceit in the people’s fantasies about their life as slaves in Egypt (e.g. Exodus 16:3), where they imagined that they once “sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full.” The making of the golden calf was not only idolatry, but was the breaking of a promise made by the people in Exodus 19:8. “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.” Deceit would also characterize future generations. In Joshua 24:19-22, the people explicitly confirmed the Lord’s covenant, only to break it throughout their history.

The perverse logic of rebellion is at work.

No rebel can acknowledge a duty to tell the truth or keep promises without undercutting his war against authority. The ultimate truth is the rebel’s own will. Anything binding his will must be cut, and accuracy becomes just one more shackle. The first casualty in the rebel’s war for control is the truth.

Our culture is uniquely decadent in world history, apparently committed to a principle that words do not matter. I see this at a number of levels.

We seem to have a legalistic view of oaths now, as if the precision of words allows one to escape telling the truth. "It depends on what is is." The more common view of oaths in human cultures down through the ages has been that words leaving lips are absolutely binding on the soul. Certainly every age has seen its share of infidelity, but few have indulged the nihilism of writing infidelity off as normal.

Furthermore, because words were seen as bonds, human cultures have consistently treated vows as a matter of prescription,  not invention. For instance, few people even fifty years ago contemplated that a couple should write their own wedding vows "so the ceremony will be more meaningful." There was a simple reason: if someone could write their own vows, then they could make marriage whatever they wanted it to be.

I see our decadence in seemingly smaller issues, such as usage. In our society, flippancy in using words can be found in people speaking of "humans," not "human beings," as if referring to a mere species, and in such published howlers as when the AP referred to Leviticus as a "chapter" in the Bible. Americans now operate at a deep level of illiteracy, and they do so because words do not matter to them.

Loose speech is an overlooked contributor to the mainstreaming of deceit. We now live in a society where a Standard & Poor's triple-A rating is near meaningless, where promises are merely strategic, and where leadership and sales are interchangeable terms.

So parents face monumental challenges in teaching a child to speak and act truly. But they should also understand the power of this training. When a child forms a resolution to tell the truth and to keep promises, he or she gains habits of discernment, self-control, and healthy submission that undermine the allure of rebellion.

In other words, when Dad and Mom confronted deceit in me, I believe they were installing in my heart-and-mind another powerful software for syncing with reality.

by Matthew Raley Rebellion in a child is not a phase, and it doesn't just happen. Rebellion is the sin of disregarding or overthrowing authority, and as we saw last week, it is the convergence of four patterns.

These four are on display in Deuteronomy 31-32, where Israel's past and future rebellions are confronted. In chapter 31, the Lord commands Moses to draft a written witness against Israel to set beside the ark of the covenant. Chapter 32 contains the witness itself, a song about the Lord's faithfulness and the nation's twisted response.

Let's think in more detail about the first pattern described in these chapters, idolatry.

After Moses’s death, the Lord says (31:16), Israel “will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them . . . .” The sexual metaphor captures the intimacy of Israel’s coming betrayal: having taken God’s faithful love the people will reject any bond with him.

Moses dramatizes this unfaithfulness in the song of witness (32:16-18). “They stirred him to jealousy with strange gods . . . They sacrificed to demons that were no gods, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently.”

Rebellion through idolatry has been characteristic of Israel throughout Moses’s life. Most notoriously, the nation made the golden calf at Sinai (Exodus 32:1-6), calling it by the Lord’s name and proclaiming that it had brought them out of Egypt. Israel also worshiped Baal of Peor in Moab (Number 25:1-5).

Israel’s idolatry after Moses is well-documented in the Old Testament. The prophet Ezekiel, whom the Lord called to “nations of rebels” (Ezekiel 2:3), offers an important reference point. He gave repeated descriptions of the nation’s whoring after false gods, with abominations even brought into the temple (8:7-18). Inside, “engraved on the wall all around, was every form of creeping things and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel.”

So Israel's rebellion both under Moses and after him consistently involved the worship of false gods.

The close association between the scriptural concepts of rebellion and idolatry is no accident. Rebellion has a perverse logic. The Bible’s God is sovereign, making submission to him the only option. For the rebel to gain control of his life, he must fabricate a new god, a pliable deity whom he can manipulate through rituals and rationalizations. A woman who was leaving her husband put this rationale to me quite succinctly: “My god wants me to be free.”

People often grow up treating God like he’s made of Legos.

There’s a pile of ideas of about God on the carpet, and your job is to assemble God out of them. So you try different ideas and see how God looks. If an idea about God’s justice doesn’t work for you, it’s like a black Lego that looks out of place. Pull it off and try a red one, a piece of mercy perhaps, and see if it doesn’t look better. Or if a Bible verse seems like a “hard saying” to you, it’s nothing more than a block that’s too big. The Bible has other verses. Find a smaller block.

Whatever. They’re your Legos.

If you want to nurture your child in a way that prevents rebellion, that first thing you have to do is teach him about idolatry. Train him that the real God does not conform to his imagination.

One summer when Dylan was 2 years old, we stopped in Ashland, Oregon, one of neo-paganism's many little pleasure domes. In a store, I noticed a wall full of Buddhas and a sampling of Hindu gods. I walked Dylan over to a shelf at his eye-level, got down on one knee, pointed to a fat and happy Siddhartha, and said, "Son, this is an idol. Many people believe this is a god."

Knitted eyebrows.

"People pray to him, and even bring him food."

Laughter.

I pointed at the whole wall of shelves. "This store sells idols."

I did this more than once when Dylan was small. He is now 9, and has a deep aversion to idols. The other night, I was reading him The Lightning Thief, the well-written series opener by Rick Riordan that treats Greek mythology as if it were happening today. We enjoyed it enormously. After I closed the book, he knitted his eyebrows and said, "I can't understand why anyone would pray to those gods."

When we instill the truth early that God is God, and will not yield His being to the human imagination, we are building powerful categories for discerning reality from fantasy. Further, we are teaching a child to yield to reality -- the one thing a rebel will never do.

http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ex%2032.1-6&version=ESV

by Matthew Raley One day when I was 11, I stood eyes down in our family’s laundry room while Dad bawled me out. I don’t remember what I had done. But I do remember taking my eyes off a pile of dirty rags and giving Dad the sharpest look my face could make. And I remember the look as a conscious decision.

Dad changed. His voice dropped. “You are looking at me with defiance. Don’t you know that rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft?”

He was quoting the verse we examined last week, 1 Samuel 15.23, in which the prophet defines rebellion as the overthrow or disregard of authority, and the search for power.

Rebellion is not a phase in a child's life. Identity formation is a phase; rebellion is a sin.

It takes strength for a child to maintain defiance against his parents -- moral and emotional strength. Morally, a child has to be convinced that his defiance is right. Emotionally, he has to be able to hold his course without parental approval.

Maintaining strength requires the child to twist his mind and habits with falsehoods.

The twisting is on display in Deuteronomy 31. The Lord and Moses confront the rebellions of Israel, both in the past and those coming in the future. The passage shows that rebellion is a close association of four distinct sins, all of which give rebels a feeling of empowerment.

1. Idolatry.

The Lord says (31:16) that after Moses' death Israel “will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them . . . .” That is, they will leave the true God who loves them, has brought them out of Egypt, and is giving them their own land, and will follow the gods of their imagination.

Rebels have to receive spiritual blessing from somewhere. They fabricate gods who will meet the need. A woman recently told me she was leaving her husband. "Your God wants me to be in bondage," she said. "My god wants me to be free."

2. Lying.

The Lord tells Moses that Israel will “break my covenant that I have made with them,” a phrase he repeats four verses later (31:16, 20). He is referring back to the covenant at Sinai and ahead to the renewal of that covenant in the land (Joshua 24.19-22). The nation is going to lie.

I have noticed a pattern in rebellious people, both young and old, of deceit. They create different personalities for different sets of people. They make up half-histories of ill treatment -- legitimate claims, but highly selective. And they tell outright falsehoods.

3. Scorn.

The Lord foretells that the Israelites “will despise me,” having “grown fat” from the land’s fruit (31:20).

A rebel’s emotional life needs the energy drink of scoffing. The feeling of superiority, of remaining unaffected by others, and of knowing people’s “real” motivations becomes the animating power of the rebel’s personality. There’s security in sarcasm.

4. Stubbornness.

Moses tells the people (31:27), “For I know how rebellious and stubborn you are. Behold, even today while I am yet alive with you, you have been rebellious against the Lord. How much more after my death!”

Rebels do not listen. They debate, rationalize, and shift blame. But they do not consider the points of view they don't agree with.

We will look at each of these characteristics in more detail over the next few weeks.

For now, here's the point. I do not think of my fatherly task as controlling my boys behavior at all levels so as to make them compliant. Instead, my task is to counter these four sins separately, before they join. My boys need to learn how to gain strength from the true God, Jesus Christ, strength from being personally truthful, from cultivating humility, and from a habit of listening to counsel. They need to draw strength from grace.

This is how my parents raised me. So, in our laundry room when I consciously attempted defiance, I did not have the toxic compound of sins to carry it off. My strength was already coming from good sources. I submitted sincerely, for the right reasons.

Looking back, it was a crucial moment in the formation of my identity as a man.

by Matthew Raley

I have found myself writing on parenting lately. The cloud that has settled in recent weeks over Michael Pearl's dangerous parenting system is one reason. Another reason is that I am working on a book about how God passes his fatherly virtues to men, and makes them sources of vitality for their families.

In developing this book, I've been interviewing my dad. I'm grateful for my parents and their firm, grace-filled love. So Dad and I have been talking about the trials of men in general, and how Christ transformed him through his struggles.

One of the issues that comes up repeatedly is Dad's colorful past as a rebel. In his youth, he rebelled against the Baptists -- a common enough target. But in the midst of his career among hippies, he realized that their counter-culture was just fundamentalist legalism on acid. He still had to look right and talk right and have acceptable opinions. So he rebelled against hippies too. After he began following Christ, he rebelled (in no particular order here) against contemporary worship songs, Arminianism, and Christian parenting books (irony duly noted).

He came by his rebellious tendencies honestly. His father was a professional baritone who seems to have fired a succession of voice coaches. Dad's mother found ways around church rules against playing cards and wine. His grandmother was shunned by the Amish for wearing straw hats. So the Raleys have a soft spot for rebels.

However, Dad told me in our interviews that his goal as a father was to lead my brother and me away from rebellion. He had two important intuitions. First, he saw that a father's role is to help each of his children form unique identities. But, second, he saw that all human identity has to be formed in response to God's authority. Rebellion perverts identity.

Dad recognized what most evangelicals have forgotten: rebellion is a sin.

Most evangelicals now think of it as a stage. Rebelling against authority is a necessary part of growing up. After the 1960s, many Christian parents feared they would make rebellion worse with too many rules, some almost abdicating their parental role when their kids turned 13. (12? 10?) To most evangelicals, the concept of rebellion as a sin is unmentionable -- as if it were uncouth to bring up the r-word in sophisticated company.

The Bible is clear on this subject. Samuel says (1 Samuel 15.23), "For rebellion is as the sin of divination, and presumption is as iniquity and idolatry."

Two fascinating things about this verse. First, the parallelism compares rebellion with presumption or insubordination as synonyms. Rebellion is the disregard or overthrow of authority. Second, Samuel compares rebellion with occult worship -- that is, with the attempt to control things that are only controlled by God. He is saying that a rebel strives through perverse means to gain power.

Rebellion in a child is no phase. It confuses personal identity with control. It is lawlessness animated by wounded pride.

There has been a change in parenting attitudes over the last couple of decades. A growing minority of young families are reasserting parental authority and influence. The increasing use of home schooling, and the rising popularity of replacing dating with courtship are evidence of this shift.

So are Michael Pearl's sales figures.

Parents who believe they should use the legitimate authority God has given them to nurture their children are absolutely right. Children need strong parents. Tools like home schooling can serve this aspiration well.

But parenting systems that employ behavior modification and promise total compliance are not the answer. Identity formation is a God-ordained process of maturing into adulthood. It is not rebellion. Parents need to recognize this process as a normal part of growth, and should not fear it or try to dominate it. There are profound differences between using authority and becoming an authoritarian -- differences of tone, methods, and goals.

We need to restore the r-word to our vocabulary because it clarifies many of these issues. The restoration needs to start with an examination of the sin of rebellion biblically -- what rebellion is, and what it is not. I will use the next several weeks here to lay out the case.

by Matthew Raley

So, I'm watching the ads on "mute" and I notice the repetitive cycling of images. One public service spot against smoking goes like this: parent takes a drag from a cigarette, kid puffs on his asthma inhaler, parent with smoke, kid with inhaler, smoke, inhaler, smoke, inhaler.

Soon, I'm fighting for breath myself.

This is the state of California spending yet more money it doesn't have to change the behavior of its citizenry, and using the time-honored marketing tactic of repetition. It will probably work. I feel guilty by the end it and I've never smoked a cigarette.

Our society is mad about behavior modification. It works.

B. F. Skinner (1904-1990) became one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century by applying a simple discovery. He observed that, if you wanted a rat to press a bar, prodding him with stimuli was less effective than rewarding him after he pressed it. Skinner taught how positive and negative reinforcement could change behavior.

The applications go well beyond marketing and management.

On June 25, 2006, the New York Times published an article called, "What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage." Author Amy Sutherland related that, in the course of researching a book about animal trainers, she had an epiphany. "I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband."

Could she get her husband to pick his dirty shirts off the floor and put them in the hamper? By rewarding small steps toward the desired outcome, she found that, lo, she could.

Her article was on the most-emailed list for a long while.

Evangelical parents are keen to train their kids in the right behaviors, and their focus is overwhelmingly on  modification strategies. Here is some advice on how to deal "creatively" with lying:

Draw up a contract with your child. After everyone agrees that lying, for example, is a cause for correction, establish and transcribe a reasonable punishment. Have you and your child sign and date the document. Then, whenever a situation comes up that would invite lying, gently remind him about the contract. Knowing that you will follow through on the penalty may be the extra incentive your child needs to choose to tell the truth.

Notice that the decision about lying is incentivized. The child makes a voluntary agreement about the punishment, and is reminded of it under temptation. If this scheme works, the child is not being taught to tell the truth, but to negotiate and weigh consequences. If I wanted to nurture a little pragmatist, this is exactly what I would do.

More from the same article:

Last week we ran into a few "heart" issues with Haven. It all came to a head when we caught her lying. Her correction has been to listen to the New Testament on tape. She usually gets to listen to an Adventures in Odyssey tape, but for the next 20 nights she will be filling her heart with the Truth.

Not the New Testament, Mom! Anything but that! Sentimentalizing the consequence with the words "filling her heart with Truth" doesn't cover up the fact that the Bible is being used as negative reinforcement.

Locally, we are dealing with the dark side of behavior modification in the killing of a 7-year-old girl. Michael Pearl's teaching on parenting is now under deserved scrutiny, not because he advocates child abuse (which he does not) but because of his extreme views about training children.

Pearl repeatedly compares children with animals, and uses the words training and conditioning interchangeably, as here (To Train Up a Child, p 12):

If the dog learns through conditioning (consistent behavior on the part of the trainer) that he will never be allowed to violate his master's command, he will always obey. If parents carefully and consistently train up a child, his or her performance will be as consistently satisfying as that rendered by a well trained seeing-eye dog.

"Performance." "Consistently satisfying." Even if that expansive claim were true, I wouldn't want my sons to obey like dogs. I want them to obey as respectful human beings.

Pearl makes an easy target, with this kind of irresponsible comparison and with his outlandish doctrine. But our culture as a whole is fixated on behavior modification. From marketing to management to relationships, we are profoundly manipulative. And evangelical Christians are little different.

I believe Christian parenting can demonstrate the power of Jesus Christ. Christ does not condition children for performance; he raises them up in new life. A parent's job is to guide a unique little person, made in the image of God, to his or her Savior.

This starts with recognizing that the child's soul and conscience are able to relate to God directly, apart from our control (Luke 1.39-45; Matthew 18.1-4; Mark 10.13-16). Further, a wise parent does not frame behavioral issues in terms of giving a satisfactory performance, but in terms of the new life Christ gives (Colossians 3.1-17).

Our parenting should be about Christ, not about us.

It's time to reject the degrading puppetry of behavior modification, regardless of whether the puppeteer is a fundamentalist or a psychologist. We need to engage firmly, humbly, and humanely with children's souls.