It might be seven minutes a day as you cuddle your little one to sleep and talk to her about the goodness of God and his lovingkindness for us made flesh—Christ. It’s possible. And by relying on God’s grace (not our own strength), we can teach God’s word diligently to our children to help them face a post-Christian world in which moral norms are no longer Christian norms. 

To be a parent, you apparently need to be a theologian if you want to be able to answer the questions your kids have. Because as it turns out the faith of a child is a faith that asks every difficult theological question possible.
Dad, why did God create Satan if he knew Satan would turn out evil?
That’s a question I’ve been asked. And they don’t get easier.
As parents, we need to know theology and Scripture to guide the minds and hearts of our children.
Lest I am misunderstood, no, parents do not need a theology degree or be to a church theologian with all the traditional implications. What I mean is that we need to think about who God is, who we are, and what the Bible says about both, so that we can help our children love God with their minds and hearts.
As I talk to or hear younger people communicate, I see people who want to know more about God, about Christianity, and about what it all means. And in a world in which Christian norms are no longer the norm, we need to justify, explain, and contemplate the reasons and purposes of almost everything.
What is sex? What is gender? What is good? Are phones good? Are all sexual acts good? Are we given our purpose in life, or do we find it? Do we discover or create our purpose? Why does the sun rise? Or actually, should we say instead that the earth rotates and it only appears like the sun rises? What is abortion? Is it wrong? Is it right? When? How?
What is evil? Why is there so much sexual malfeasance? Why do churches sometimes rule over people as tyrants; why do other churches make you feel the presence of the Spirit of Jesus?
Parents must know not only the answer to these questions but the reasons why we answer in the way we do and the purpose of all these things—what is sex for, just to ask one question.
Let me cite an example to explain why this is so important. We laugh at the virtue of chastity.
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Christian heroism virtually never looks like a lone ranger standing for truth. Most stories that are told that way are, in fact, not grounded in real history. It takes the whole body of Christ. And a heroic tweet, blog post, or the like often amount to tilting at windmills, an imaginary stand often aimed at an imaginary enemy. It appeals to the base, but it will be forgotten next week. 

A colleague recently compared (so-called) heroic stands of faith to Don Quixote. Someone thinks they will change the world by a controversial tweet or blog post. They think themselves to be like Athanasius, contra Mundum—against the whole world! Never mind that Athanasius never stood as an individual against the world, but worked with whole teams of peoples and congregations across the Roman World.
But here the facts do not matter. The point is the heroic stand. And the kind of heroic stand I am talking about often ends up with a knight tilting at windmills, thinking himself to be slaying a giant when he in reality has done nothing at all. Worse, he might have even hurt the cause which he putatively aims to support. 
Heroic Stands
Over the years, Christians have mocked or attacked trivial things as man buns and the length of hair on men. Too bad for Hudson Taylor, who styled his hair into something akin to a ponytail, or Samson, whose hair flowed long because of his Nazirite vow (Judges 13:5), or John Owen, whose flowing locks border on the comical.
Such foolhardy statements flow, I fear, from a heart desperate to be the hero of the story. In some circles, the only way to be a hero is to be against something or someone. How else can you galvanize a community, if not by being against some hated person or entity?
This againstness becomes a self-made trap. To gain followers and remain the hero, one must constantly find new dragons to slay. If the dragons die, then the story of the heroic knight dies too. No more book sales, no more conferences, no more internet fame. How can you get the amens from the congregation, unless you attack the enemy everyone already despises?
I wonder how we might survive an encounter with Jesus, who once said that “if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles” (Matt 5:41). As historian Michael Haykin recently explained:
This text is grounded in the brutal military tactics of the tyrannical regime of the Roman Empire. The Roman army, with its ubiquitous and endless need for transport, would often force citizens to carry equipment etc. It was a vicious and an ever-present reminder of the brutality of Roman rule, or pax Romana, as the Roman ruling elite called it (did the ordinary citizen experience it as such?).
Western Christians, raised on a pervasive diet of rights, etc., react to this saying, if they truly understand it, with disbelief. Surely, Jesus, the Son of the Lord of the Jewish people who commanded the slaying of tyrannical rulers, would command a different path?
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Transferring human obedience, creaturely obedience, into the life of God implies his creaturehood. That implication must be rejected. As the Bible tells us and consent of the church has confirmed, the Father and Son are distinguished by Fatherness and Sonness. Their relation is one of Fatherness and Sonness. 

In 2016 Evangelicals debated about the best way to affirm that God is one and yet Father and Son. The old answer is: the Father begets the Son eternally; the Son is eternally begotten. Beget and begotten are old words to describe how fathers generate children. A mother births them; a father begets.
In recent years, evangelicals attempted to find a new way to talk about Father and Son. They said that the Father relates to the Son because he has paternal authority; the Son relates to the Father in a mode of submission. Authority and submission distinguish Father and Son.
For the most part, people found the new approach insufficient. It implied eternal inferiority of the Son, implied two wills, and inserted the human life of Jesus where he obeyed the Father into God. It unintentionally implied a creaturely characteristic in God since Jesus’s creaturely obedience to the Father gets imported into how God is eternally!
Recently, however, a theologian reaffirmed that the Father eternally has authority over the eternally submissive Son. Interestingly, the theologian cited Augustine and Hilary of Poitiers as proponents of his position. 
Two Reasons Why Eternal Submission Does Not Work
First, Jesus submits to the Father in his role of Mediator, one who became obedient to the point of death in the form of a slave (Phil 2:7). But he was equal to the Father in the form of deity (Phil 2:6).
To transfer submission into God as the way the Father and Son differ is to transfer a creaturely characteristic into God. Because Jesus took on humanity, he obeys the Father vicariously in his role of Mediator for our sake.
Second, the church Fathers such as Augustine and Hilary made the above distinction clearly. They affirmed the obedience of the Son according to his humanity. But they did not pass through this obedience into God to explain how the Son and Father eternally related.
Just one example. Augustine in The Trinity writes: “In the form of a servant which he took he is the Father’s inferior; in the form of God in which he existed even before he took this other he is the Father’s equal.” Elsewhere, he says “the Father is greater than is the form of the servant, whereas the Son is his equal in the form of God.”[1]
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Phones and their social media apps algorithmically draws our time to exploit us. They do not just sell our privacy. They also shape our desires. By their use, we show a love for the digital, the use of the finger to swipe and tap. An ephemeral practice that leads nowhere and leaves nothing behind. 

Today, I took my daughter to swimming lessons. With five other parents, I observed the class. I should say: I observed. At one point during the class, I looked around and saw every parent—all five—mesmerized by their phones. No parent watched their child. All watched their phones.
I am not uniquely virtuous. Last week, I was mesmerized by my phone. I missed my daughter when she dunked her head under water. She told me, don’t look at your phone! I mostly obeyed. I looked at my phone, but not for long. The compulsion to look took over, and I fell into a mania of technology. But I held on to my sanity. I stopped, and here is what I saw.
I saw a young boy tell my daughter, You are doing great! I watched my daughter swim in the deep end with a life jacket. I walked near her and told her she did great. She looked at me with glee, a smile broken across her face, saying something like, That is my daddy! 
Whatever moment we had, we had because I was not memorized by the screen but by her. 
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Books are a life line forcing us into complementation against our internal compulsion. They are in this sense the front line in our defense against becoming mere machines who work and live and die as cogs in the economic process. So remember the ordering of things. Use the internet as an appetizer. Use books as a meditative feast.

Do not exclusively read articles online. Think of online articles as portals to books. Articles may answer an important question, give insight into an issue, and help us to know what to seek and to know.
But books deliver the contemplative ruminations that thinking requires. Online articles are an appetizer. Both are important. And the media of books and the internet are here to stay.
But there is an ordering. First the short article. Then the book.
Internet
Here is how I think of social media, online articles, and the rest. Social media can connect you with the greatest thinkers alive today, if you follow those thinkers. You can open up your eyes to ideas that are profound. But you can only skim the surface. These great thinkers will link to great appetizing articles and books.
Podcasts stand in the middle. A good podcast might allow you to learn something by overhearing an intelligent conversation. It replaces medieval disputations. A good podcast might also contain a lecture, replacing the older University system of lectures. Students used to choose to listen to a lecture. Now they choose to listen to a podcast.
We can deny it all we want but podcasts in some ways have replaced traditional forms of education.
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