Marcia J. Bungea,b
aUnit for Reformed Theology and Development of the South African society Potchefstroom Campus, North-West University South Africa
bProfessor and Bernhardson Distinguished Chair of Lutheran Studies in Religion Gustavus Adolphus College Saint Peter, MN
How to cite: Bunge, M.J., 2016, ‘Task, sources and significance of theologies of childhood’, in J. Grobbelaar & G. Breed (eds.), Theologies of Childhood and the Children of Africa, pp. 92-112, AOSIS, Cape Town. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/aosis.2016.
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half of the population is under 15. Given its high percentage of young people, Africa overall is considered to be the world’s ‘youngest continent’.
All human beings, regardless where they live, enter the world as infants;
no one comes into the world alone or as an adult. Each one of us must be nurtured and nourished in order to thrive. Children, like adults, participate in various spheres of our everyday lives: our families, neighbourhoods, nations and religious communities.
Even though children make up a large portion of the human population everywhere, and the largest portion in Africa, they are not consistently given the attention they deserve. All nations, whether rich or poor, often treat children as second-class citizens. In many countries around the world, children lack adequate health care, education or proper nutrition.
According to international reports such as UNICEF’s annual State of the world’s children, many African nations score very low on several key indicators of child wellbeing. Yet even those countries ranked most highly in the world for their attention to child protection and excellent schools, such as Norway, Finland, Sweden or Denmark, still see children struggle with drug or alcohol abuse and must consistently look for ways to strengthen their support of children.
Although churches worldwide support children in numerous ways and seek to follow Jesus’ own example of welcoming children, churches in all contexts must confess that they sometimes miss the mark. Christian communities throughout the history of the church and around the world have certainly cared for and protected children such as by providing religious education programmes; establishing orphanages, schools, and clinics and offering relief to victims of war or natural disasters and children in poverty. Nevertheless, most churches have at times neglected, marginalised or even abused children. Child abuse takes place in all
denominations worldwide (not just in the Roman Catholic Church), and many churches exhibit a lack of commitment to children in other, subtler ways. For example, religious-education programmes and children’s ministries often lack sound materials, well-qualified leaders, parental support or sufficient funding. Furthermore, although the Christian church as a whole possesses rich insights into children, it has not consistently and effectively used its wisdom to become a strong and reliable advocate for children in contemporary public and political debates on child well-being. On the international level, even though rights-based programming ‘now dominates the agendas of child-centred governmental and non-governmental institutions’ (Stephenson 2003:52), many Christians still side-step or reject engagement with international debates about children’s rights. For instance, although the Roman Catholic Church has supported the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), many Protestant Christians have not, even though several scholars have convincingly shown that a rights-based framework is compatible with Christian beliefs and values (cf. Marshall & Parvis 2004).
Furthermore, despite the needs of children, their presence around the world and in the global Church, and their predominance in sub-Saharan Africa, Christian theologians in South Africa and other countries generally have little to say about children and our obligations to them. Even though attention to children is growing in all areas of the academy, prompting the establishment of interdisciplinary childhood-studies programmes at universities around the world, many theologians still do not treat childhood as a topic meriting serious attention, and they have not sought to articulate robust theological understandings of children themselves. Theological programmes around the world offer few courses, if any, that include attention
to children or the youth beyond religious education or youth and family courses. This happens even though children, like other human beings, should be a matter of concern within all areas of theological education, including systematic or contextual theology. Certainly, many theologians have devoted significant attention to issues related to children such as abortion, human sexuality, contraception, gender relations, marriage and the family. In addition, they have generated insightful multi-religious exchanges and sophisticated interfaith dialogues about these and other global issues that also affect children such as health care, education, economic justice, globalisation, ecology and women’s rights. However, even studies on theologies of the family or human rights and even various contemporary forms of contextualised or liberation theologies (for example liberation, feminist, womanist) have largely neglected fundamental questions directly regarding children themselves. These studies rarely explore issues such as the nature and status of children, the duties and responsibilities of both children and parents, or the role of religious communities and the state in protecting children and providing them with the resources they need to thrive. Often, such issues are considered
‘beneath’ the work of systematic and contextual theologians and suitable only for practitioners or educators.
For this reason and others, discourse within theological education and the broader church has often been dominated by simplistic and ambivalent views of children that diminish their complexity and integrity, fostering narrow understandings of adult-child relationships or commitments to children. Christian communities in the United States, for example, both today and in the past, have tended to speak about children in one-dimensional terms. Some have perceived children mainly as innocent or spiritually wise, thereby often underestimating adult responsibilities for
teaching and guiding children and helping them develop morally and spiritually. Others have tended to view children primarily as sinful and in need of instruction, thereby narrowly restricting their view of adult-child relationships to instruction, discipline and punishment and thus neglecting the lessons that children can teach adults. Mainline and conservative churches alike have often focused solely on the faith formation of children, neglecting the task of child advocacy and protection. These and other examples of simplistic conceptions of children, which can be found in churches and cultures in South Africa and around the world, tend to undermine our commitment to children and have serious consequences for children themselves.
Given the minimal attention to children in the church and theological education and given the wide-spread challenges that children face in the church, in South Africa and in all nations, there is a clear and urgent need for articulating sound and complex theological understandings of children and our obligations to them, or ‘theologies of childhood’. The aim of this chapter is to outline the precise task of, possible resources for and the significance of theologies of childhood for South Africa and the wider church.
I hope that, by defining the task of and resources for ‘theologies of childhood’, the chapter can illustrate the potential power of vibrant and informed theological understandings of children and childhood to challenge common assumptions in the church about children and to generate a renewed commitment to serving them. As theologians from South Africa and around the world develop robust theologies of childhood in their specific contexts, they will also discover ways in which they can contribute meaningfully to interdisciplinary research and programmes in the area of childhood studies. Finally, since every person on earth either is
or once was a child and since people across religious traditions and nations share a common concern for children, theologians who reflect seriously on childhood have the opportunity to generate genuinely fresh approaches to interfaith understanding and to develop practical strategies nationally and internationally for advancing child well-being.