The Kern Curriculum: Raising Gifted Children (And Why You Shouldn’t)

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If you’re looking for a shortcut to elite academic performance in your children, stop right there.

This post is about raising children who perform at high levels academically. But if your goal is to produce a high-performing child so you can feel successful, this isn’t for you. I’m not saying that to be rude. I’m saying it because it’s a spiritual problem, and you should treat it like one.

Go to my spirituality section and start working out first principles: the meaning of life, the ordering of a flourishing life, what love of God and neighbor actually means, and why wisdom only comes through discipline and virtuous living. Get that straight first. Then come back.

Because top academic performance can be a good thing. It often requires a love of learning, a willingness to do hard things, and a certain kind of competence that translates into other areas of life. But academic excellence is a tool and a byproduct. It’s downstream from something deeper. If you aim at “gifted” as the goal, you will poison the whole project before it starts.

What I Mean by “Gifted”

By “gifted children” I’m not talking about status games or bumper stickers or showing off at the Thanksgiving table.

I’m talking about top academic performance, the kind that requires focus, discipline, and consistency, the kind that eventually becomes a broader excellence that spills over into the rest of life. I’m talking about a child who can sit down, work through something hard, think clearly, and keep going when the material resists him.

That kind of excellence is compatible with a flourishing life. But it only stays healthy when it’s properly ordered under higher things.

Where My Boys Are

My two sons, Luke (9) and Levi (6), are doing math and reading well beyond their grade levels.

Luke is doing around 7th grade math. He is reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and other advanced books. Levi is doing around 4th grade math and reading The Hobbit on his own.

I say that because people ask, and because I want to explain something simple: we didn’t do anything magical.

We started late. We didn’t rush reading. Luke didn’t start seriously learning to read until he was six, and Levi until five. We didn’t have them do schoolwork before they were at least five years old. When they were emotionally mature enough to sit down and work for an hour or two, we started building. That’s all it was.

The Three Ingredients

Here’s the whole method. It’s not complicated. It’s just not the standard American family pattern.

1) You must homeschool

I’ll say this plainly: my methodology doesn’t work without homeschooling.

I know that’s a hard statement. There are great public school teachers, and there are children who come through the system just fine. But public schooling can do real damage to a young soul at worst, and even when the damage is absent, it can still waste enormous amounts of time and habituate a child into passivity.

If you want mastery-based learning, individualized pacing, high accountability, and a coherent household culture, you need control over the environment. Homeschooling gives you that control.

I also know this isn’t equally accessible to everyone. Single-income families make real sacrifices to do it. Single parents and dual-income households may face constraints that make it nearly impossible, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But I’m describing what worked for us, and I would rather be honest about the framework than water it down to sound universally applicable. If homeschooling isn’t possible for you, the other principles here can still bear fruit in whatever educational setting you have. They will just bear it more slowly, and with less control over the soil.

People will bring up socialization. I’m not worried. Children have always been socialized by family and community. The modern school system isn’t the only way to become a normal human being.

2) You must nurture a stable home

This post isn’t about discipleship. If you want the deeper stuff – household order, fatherhood, marriage, authority, spiritual formation – go to my spirituality section.

But I will say this: education is downstream from the emotional and moral climate of the home.

If the home is chaotic, if the parents are at war, if there’s no rhythm, if the children don’t trust you, if everything is bribery and negotiation and meltdown management, your curriculum won’t matter. The stability of the home is the soil. The schooling is the plant. If the soil is poisoned, the plant won’t thrive.

This is also where screens belong in the conversation. We didn’t demonize screens, but we didn’t let them run the house either. They were guarded behind right relationship. If everything was in order — obedience, attitude, responsibilities handled — then yes, there was room for games and shows. If things were disordered, screens only made the whole household weaker. We treated entertainment the way you treat dessert. It isn’t evil. It just isn’t the center of the diet.

3) You must challenge them gently and consistently

The core is simple: daily practice, gently enforced, aimed at mastery.

Not dabbling. Not waiting to see how they feel about it on any given morning. Not a big burst for three weeks followed by two months of nothing.

We made it a rhythm. Five days a week, for at least an hour or two a day. And we don’t follow the school break system. We don’t take summer off, winter off, spring off as a rule. We have break days. We travel. We rest. But the default is that learning is normal, like brushing your teeth.

This matters because children don’t rise to your speeches. They rise to your habits.

What We Actually Did

Here’s what it looked like in practice.

We waited until they were ready. No formal schooling until at least five. No panic about early reading. We didn’t treat our toddlers like résumé projects.

Once they were emotionally grown enough to sit and focus, we started building the muscle. An hour at first, then two. Some days were smooth, some were messy. But we kept returning to the table. That’s the whole game.

Our main tool was Khan Academy for math, and we supplemented with spaced repetition using Anki on the iPad. Khan is simple: you keep going until you actually master the material. Anki is simple: you review the right things at the right time until they stick. This isn’t fancy. It’s just applying real learning principles instead of pretending that exposure equals knowledge.

We kept expectations high and pressure low. Gentle prodding is the phrase I would use. We didn’t scream. We didn’t bargain constantly. We didn’t turn school into trauma. But we also didn’t treat their preferences as law. You can be kind and still require hard things from a child. That’s a form of love.

Why This Works When So Much Else Doesn’t

I think a lot of families are running the opposite pattern without realizing it. They outsource formation. They outsource education. They let the ambient culture raise their children. The household has no rhythm. When the guilt sets in, they reach for screens to manage it, and then they wonder why their children can’t focus or endure difficulty.

And then they go looking for hacks.

There are no hacks. There’s order, discipline, love, and time.

I don’t say that to stand over anyone. I know how hard it’s. I know there are seasons where the household falls apart and you’re just surviving. But the pattern itself is worth naming clearly, because the solution isn’t a better app or a better curriculum. The solution is a well-ordered home where a parent is willing to sit down at the table and lead.

The Encouraging Part

I don’t think this requires exceptional natural giftedness. I think most children can attain high levels of performance with this approach.

Not every child will become a chess prodigy or a math Olympiad competitor. But most children can go far beyond what the modern world expects of them if you give them a stable home, daily practice, mastery-based learning, and a parent who is willing to lead.

Closing

So yes, this post is about raising gifted children.

But really it’s about something else. It’s about a well-ordered household where the pursuit of wisdom is normal, where discipline is loving, and where excellence grows naturally over time.

If you want elite academically performing kids as the goal, you’re going to hurt yourself and you’re going to hurt them.

But if you want to love God and neighbor, attain to wisdom, and raise children who can live a flourishing life, then sit down at the table five days a week. Keep it gentle. Keep it consistent. Aim for mastery. And trust that the fruit will come.

We Do Not Have His Eyes

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When Jesus says “Do not judge,” he’s warning us about blindness.

We see fragments. God sees the whole person. We see the public act. He sees the childhood, the wounds, the lies absorbed, the habits formed, the long road of choices that ended at that moment. None of that excuses evil. But it explains why our judgments so often miss the mark.

Discernment isn’t condemnation. Christians still have to name sin — parents correct, courts sentence, churches discipline. But discernment names what’s wrong and looks for repair. Condemnation just shrinks a person down to their worst moment. One protects. The other crushes.

Christ alone judges perfectly. He sees intention and ignorance, trauma and freedom, grace resisted and grace received. And he judges with pierced hands. His judgment is merciful truth — he sees the whole mess and still chooses to save. Judgment belongs to God because we’re too blind to carry it without malice creeping in.

In God, mercy doesn’t cancel justice. It brings justice to its proper end. Retribution can punish. It can’t resurrect. Divine judgment tells the truth about sin and aims at repentance, healing, restoration. God doesn’t call darkness light. He drags it into the light.

So how do we live? “Do not judge” is a call to humility. Name evil without turning it into a performance. Protect victims without stripping offenders of their humanity. Refuse gossip dressed up as righteousness. Pray for the people you’re tempted to hate. Leave final verdicts to Christ.

We don’t have his eyes. We’re working with half-sight at best. So we don’t get to play God.

Tell the truth. Do justice. Love mercy. Walk humbly.

Israel as the Icon of Earth

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The Pattern

Consider the spiral. It appears everywhere: in the unfurling of a fern, the whorl of a fingerprint, the architecture of a nautilus shell. Galaxies wheel in spirals across unthinkable distances. The double helix of DNA coils at the foundation of every living thing. Water drains in spirals, hurricanes spiral, and the very structure of our inner ear, by which we hear the Word spoken to us, is a spiral. God, it seems, has a pattern, and he is not shy about repeating it.

The Small and the Chosen

The spiral appears in Scripture too, though you have to look with different eyes to see it. It is the shape of God’s attention, the topology of his love: always densest at the hidden center, radiating outward but weighted toward the small. Israel was not selected because it was mighty among nations. Moses reminds the people in Deuteronomy that the Lord set his love upon them not because they were more numerous than other peoples; they were the fewest. David was the youngest son, overlooked even by his own father when Samuel came calling. Mary was hidden in Nazareth, a village so insignificant that Nathanael would later ask whether anything good could come from it. And Christ himself tells us that the Kingdom belongs to the little ones, that to become great we must become as children, that the mysteries are revealed not to the wise and learned but to infants.

This is where the weight falls. The center of gravity in salvation history is never where you would expect it, never at the obvious point of power or prominence. It is always displaced toward the hidden, the overlooked, the least.

The Hidden Village of the Cosmos

Now lift your eyes to the heavens. Our sun is one star among hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies. The observable universe extends some 93 billion light-years across, and what lies beyond its edges we cannot say. Within this immensity, our planet is less than a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

And yet, the Word became flesh here. On this pale blue dot, the infinite entered finitude. The Creator took on the form of a creature. God became a particular man, in a particular place, at a particular time: a Jewish peasant in Roman-occupied Palestine, born in an animal shelter, raised in obscurity, executed as a criminal. If Israel was chosen among the nations, then Earth has been chosen among the worlds. If Nazareth was the hidden village from which salvation came, then our planet is the hidden village of the cosmos.

The Icon

Here is the mystery worth pondering: God’s selection of Israel is the icon of his selection of Earth.

Not a metaphor, not a parallel, but an icon: a window through which we glimpse the deeper structure of God’s creative and redemptive work. The same love that passed over Egypt and Babylon to rest on a wandering tribe of Semitic nomads is the love that passed over unimaginable expanses of cosmic real estate to take root on this small rocky planet. He loves the particular. He cherishes the small. He hides his glory in dust and ashes, in bread and wine, in water and oil. The God who counts the hairs on our heads and marks the fall of every sparrow is not a God of abstractions but a God of this and here and now. The scandal of particularity, which has always troubled those who want a more universal and reasonable deity, is not a problem to be solved but a revelation to be received. The particular is the doorway to the universal, and the local is the gate to the cosmic.

The Kingdom Within

The spiral does not stop at the planetary or the national. It continues inward. Christ told us that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, and the same topology that governs galaxies and nations governs the geography of the soul. There is a hidden center in you, overlooked perhaps even by yourself, and that is precisely where God wishes to dwell.

The mystics have always known this. The great Carmelite tradition speaks of the interior castle, the deepest chamber of the soul where the King takes up residence. Meister Eckhart spoke of the Seelenfünklein, the spark of the soul where God is eternally born. Augustine found that God was more intimate to him than he was to himself. You are your own Nazareth, your own tiny planet spinning in the darkness. And that is where the weight falls: at the center, at the smallest point, where God has chosen to dwell.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Why Does the Joseph Story Occupy So Much of Genesis?

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Genesis is supposed to be moving. Creation, fall, flood, Babel, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. The promise line is in motion.

Then the book almost stops.

It parks on Joseph. Chapters and chapters. Detailed scenes. Slow turns. A long family crisis that becomes the backbone of how Israel ends up in Egypt.

So why does Joseph take up so much space?

Because he is not only explaining how Israel got to Egypt. He is training you how to read the Bible. He is teaching you the shape of salvation before Jesus arrives. And that shape, when you see it clearly, pushes you toward the patristic way of understanding the cross. The victory, the rescue, the healing, the descent and rising. The whole story as liberation and new life.

Genesis wants you to learn this rhythm early, because it is the rhythm Christ will fulfill.

The story-pattern Genesis wants in your bones

Joseph is the beloved son.

He is rejected by his brothers, Israel. They envy him, hate him, strip him, throw him into a pit, and sell him for silver. They go home and live on top of the lie, while Joseph is carried away like a dead man who still breathes.

Then comes the downward path. Egypt is the land below, the place of exile, the place where you disappear. Joseph becomes a slave. Then he becomes a prisoner. He suffers as an innocent man. The story makes you sit there with him for a long time.

And then God raises him up.

Joseph is lifted to the right hand of the throne. He receives authority over the kingdom. He becomes lord over the storehouses. Bread is placed into his hands.

Then the world starts coming. Nations come to Egypt for life. And eventually his own brothers come too.

They arrive hungry, frightened, and guilty. They do not know who they are standing before. They are face to face with the one they betrayed, and he now has absolute power over their survival.

This is where the story could turn into vengeance.

Instead it turns into revelation, tears, mercy, and reconciliation. Joseph feeds them. He preserves them. He brings them near.

Genesis itself tells you what you are supposed to learn from it:

“You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good… to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.” (Genesis 50:20)

That sentence is the key to the whole mystery.

Real evil happened. The brothers are truly guilty. God does not pretend their sin is fine. And yet God takes the very evil they intended and bends it, without endorsing it, toward the saving of many.

That is the shape.

Why this shape matters when you get to the cross

By the time you reach the New Testament, you should already have categories for what God is doing in Christ. Joseph gives them to you.

Beloved son, rejected by his own. Handed over. Descended into the place below. Humiliated. Then exalted to the throne. Then he becomes life for the world. Then reconciliation.

This is why the Fathers read the cross the way they did.

They did not treat atonement as a puzzle about how God can finally be willing to forgive. They treated it as a rescue mission. Humanity is in bondage, corrupted, and dying. Death is not a metaphor in Scripture. It is an enemy. Sin is not only bad choices. It is a power. The devil is not a cute idea. He is a tyrant, a destroyer, an accuser.

So God comes down into our condition to break it.

Irenaeus talks about Christ recapitulating humanity, redoing the human story from the inside and healing it. Athanasius talks about the Word taking flesh so that, by dying, he might destroy death and restore humanity to life. The Fathers use ransom language at times, and they are not trying to diagram a literal payment to Satan. They are saying something simpler and stronger. The powers seized the innocent one, and that seizure became their downfall.

This is the basic proclamation: Christ entered death and shattered it.

Joseph is the Old Testament practice run for that proclamation.

Jesus as the true Joseph

Jesus is the beloved Son.

He is rejected by his own people. He is handed over. He is sold for silver. He is stripped and shamed. He is treated as cursed. He descends into death itself, the final exile, the real pit.

Then God raises him.

He is exalted as Lord. And what follows is not only a verdict on paper. What follows is life poured out into the world. Bread in his hands. A table set for the starving. Captives released. Sins forgiven. Death losing its claim.

And then comes the part that Joseph trained you for.

Those who betrayed him can still come near.

The risen Christ does not meet his disciples with revenge. He meets them with peace. He restores them. He feeds them. He sends them.

The one wronged becomes the one who saves.

That is Joseph. That is Jesus. Only Jesus is the final version.

The grid this gives you

If you take Joseph seriously, you stop making the cross a narrow mechanism.

You begin to see the cross and resurrection as one act of salvation. The cross is the descent into the enemy’s territory. The resurrection is the victory and the liberation. The ascension is the enthronement. Pentecost is the distribution of life. The church is the rescued people learning to live as a new humanity.

Forgiveness is inside that, and it is precious. Guilt is real. Repentance is real. Judgment is real. But the central drama is bigger than a courtroom scene. It is the defeat of death and the healing of the human race by union with Christ.

That is why the patristic model is not an optional angle. It is the interpretive grid that fits the whole Bible, including Joseph.

Genesis was already teaching you that God saves by turning evil back on itself. God does not become evil to defeat evil. God overrules it, absorbs it, and breaks it.

The brothers meant evil. God meant it for good, so that many would live.

Israel hands over the beloved Son. Evil means it for destruction. God means it for salvation.

The payoff

So the reason Joseph occupies a huge chunk of Genesis is not only because it is a great story.

It is because God wanted to lodge a pattern into you.

Descent. Exile. Suffering. Silence. Then exaltation. Then bread for the world. Then reconciliation.

Once you see that, the gospels stop feeling like a new religion dropped out of the sky. They feel like the climax of a story you have already been reading.

And the right response is not to walk away impressed with a clever connection.

It is to look at Christ and adore him.

Because the God who wrote Joseph’s story has done it in history, for real, for the whole world.

He went down to bring us up.

He entered the grave to make the grave a passage.

He took what was meant for evil and made it the place where life is stored.

That is the mystery Genesis sets up.

And Joseph is how it pays it off, before you ever reach Bethlehem.

Bethlehem as the Beginning of Time

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What if the Incarnation did not just enter time, but created it?

The tiny hands that gripped Mary’s finger are the same hands that said, “Let there be light.”

We usually tell the story in a line. First, God creates the world. Then history unfolds. Then, much later, Jesus is born.

That is the order we experience as creatures inside time. It is the right order for us. But it might not be the order for God.

The mystery of Advent is not only that God enters time. It is that time itself may flow from His entry.

I. Bethlehem as the Center

A newborn child lies in a manger. He is wrapped in cloth. He is dependent on his mother. He is a creature of flesh and blood.

But he is also called the Word who was in the beginning. John tells us that all things were made through him. Paul says that in him all things hold together. Colossians calls him the firstborn of all creation. Revelation calls him the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world.

Something deeper is happening here. Maybe the child is not simply entering into history. Maybe history itself is radiating out from him.

II. The Spiral: A New Shape of Time

What if the Incarnation is not the result of Creation, but its cause?

This turns the timeline inside out. Instead of a straight line (Creation, then Incarnation, then Resurrection), the shape becomes a spiral, a closed loop.

The Risen Christ is the eternal image in the mind of God. God creates the world through the Risen Christ. The world produces Mary. Mary gives birth to Christ. Christ suffers, dies, rises, and becomes the Risen Christ. The loop closes. The cause becomes the result, and the result becomes the cause.

In this shape, Bethlehem stands at the beginning of the story, not the middle. The stars were not already burning when Christ appeared. They were lit for the sake of his appearing. The house in Bethlehem is the center of the spiral.

This is an ontological claim, not a poetic flourish.

Genesis happens because of Bethlehem.

III. The Transfiguration as the Interpretive Key

To believe this, we need to explain how something in the middle of time could be the origin of time.

The answer is found on Mount Tabor.

At the Transfiguration, Jesus appears in glory. His face shines like the sun. His clothes become radiant. Moses and Elijah appear. A cloud surrounds him. A voice from heaven declares, This is my beloved Son.

This takes place before the crucifixion and resurrection. The disciples are seeing the risen Christ before he has died.

The Transfiguration is a revelation, not a preview. The veil drops for a moment, and they see what has always been true.

If the glorified Christ can appear before the resurrection, then his glorified body is not bound by temporal sequence. The risen Christ does not only act after Easter. He can act in any moment: before Genesis, during Exodus, at the end of the age.

And if he can act before Genesis, then he can be the one speaking Genesis.

The hands that formed Adam from the dust were already marked by the nails.

IV. Retroactive Causality

Once the human nature is created in Bethlehem and glorified in the Resurrection, it participates in the Eternal Now. It can act upon the past.

The humanity of Christ is not eternal in its own right. It is created from Mary. It is born in time. But once it is united to the divine person and glorified, it begins to share in divine operations.

That is the mystery of the Ascension. To sit at the right hand of the Father is a status of authority and presence, not a location. The glorified humanity of Jesus becomes the instrument through which the Logos acts throughout time.

We already believe this about the Eucharist.

At every Mass, the glorified body of Christ is truly present. Every Mass is a participation in the one sacrifice of Calvary. The glorified body reaches forward two thousand years.

Why should it not also reach backward?

If it can, then we begin to glimpse the full spiral. The risen Lord creates the world in order to enter it. Bethlehem is the reason the timeline exists.

V. The Objections (And Whether They Hold)

A claim like this must be tested. It must withstand pressure from the Church’s dogma. It will be challenged on three fronts.

1. The Ex Nihilo Problem

The objection: Creation from nothing is a divine act. The human nature of Christ is created. It cannot be the agent of an uncreated act.

The response: Creation belongs to God alone. But the human nature of Christ is the instrument of the Divine Person. As the saints and doctors have said, it is the conjunct instrument. It is wielded by the Logos, but not confused with Him.

So when we say the risen Christ created the world, we mean the Divine Person acted through His human nature, just as He later would through the sacraments.

The humanity is not the cause. It is the tool of the cause.

And tools can be wielded anywhere if the hand that uses them is not bound by time.

2. The Action-Before-Existence Problem

The objection: A creature must exist before it can act. A created human nature cannot act before its own creation.

The response: This would be true for any ordinary creature. But the human nature of Christ exists within a person who is eternal. The Transfiguration shows us that His glorified humanity can appear before the resurrection. The Ascension tells us that His body now reigns outside time.

It does not exist eternally. But it can be wielded eternally.

In God’s economy, time is not a string. It is a spiral. From our perspective, the humanity comes later. From God’s perspective, it is present wherever He wills.

3. The Blueprint vs. Architect Problem

The objection: Christ is the blueprint of creation, not its builder. The Logos created the world. The Incarnate Christ came later.

The response: Scripture does not only say the world was made for Christ. It says all things were made through Him. Not only through the Logos Asarkos (Word without flesh), but through the Christos—Jesus the Messiah. Mount Tabor shows us that He is not only the goal. He is the one doing the work.

Why must we insist that the Incarnate One came only afterward? Why can we not say the very body that lay in a manger, the very hands that were pierced, those were the hands that lit the stars?

To say otherwise is to separate the Logos from His human nature more than Chalcedon permits.

VI. The Spiral Holds

Before Abraham was, “I Am.”
In Him, all things hold together.
He is the Alpha and the Omega.

He is not the result of the story.
He is the one who wrote it.
And He wrote Himself into its center.
In Bethlehem.

My First Real Year of Fruit, and What It Taught Me

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I’ve been tending the garden since late 2021. Planting, pruning, mulching, hauling compost, watching the trees take root and settle in. This year was supposed to be the turning point. The fruit trees were old enough to produce in earnest. I thought this was the year we would really see the harvest.

The fruit came, but so did everything else. Fungus spread through the trees. Apple scab, peach leaf curl, rust. Japanese beetles chewed through leaves. Aphids clustered on stems and drained them. By midsummer the damage was clear. Nature wanted to take back what I had planted.

There were some wins. The standard peach tree gave a good yield. Grapes and raspberries came in. Green beans took off in the beds. Garlic I had planted the year before came out strong. But it wasn’t the kind of success I had pictured. The fruit trees that were supposed to carry the year mostly struggled. Other vegetables sputtered. Carrots stayed small. Much of the work I had put in over the seasons seemed to vanish in front of me.

I had underestimated the fight. Palatine is basically a marsh. The damp air itself seems to breed fungus. Even with compost delivered, raised beds, and grow bags, the results fell short. Trying to imagine feeding my family on what I grew this season felt impossible.

I came away with more gratitude for modern farming. There are reasons why agriculture looks the way it does. You see it once you’ve spent time battling pests and fungus by hand. Gardening is worth it, and I’ll keep going, but it is not simple. It humbles you.

People talk about food forests, permaculture, and self-sufficiency. Maybe that works somewhere else. After this year, I’m not so sure about here. I want to believe it can be done, but standing in the garden, looking at the leaves eaten and the fruit diseased, I can’t help but doubt it.

The Bible Is Not Enough, and to Follow Saints, not Simply Preachers

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If I could go back and tell my 18-year-old self one thing, it would be this: the Bible is not enough.

I do not say that because I lost my love for Scripture. I say it because I misunderstood what it was for.

2 Timothy 3:16 was quoted to me as proof that the Bible is sufficient for the Christian life. The text does not say that. It says Scripture is inspired and useful. Useful for teaching, correcting, and training. A tool. But tools do not build by themselves. They need the hands of a craftsman. The Bible needs the Church.

When we tried to make the Bible stand alone, the results spoke for themselves. Endless arguments. Endless church splits. Each man became his own teacher. Preachers could explain Greek grammar but could not govern their own lives. Movements could fill stadiums but could not form disciples.

I followed preachers. John MacArthur. R.C. Sproul. Voddie Baucham. Paul Washer. They were strong voices, but they were not enough. Many of the most famous names in our day ended in scandal. Tullian Tchividjian. Carl Lentz. Bill Hybels. Brian Houston. The Bible in their hands did not stop their collapse.

The solution is not better preachers. The solution is the Church. The Church is the place where God shapes His people. The Bible belongs inside the life of the Church. It is one of the main tools by which the Spirit trains us, but it works rightly only in the household of God.

This is why the saints matter. They are not replacements for Scripture. They are the fruit of the Church. They are proof of what happens when Scripture is read, prayed, and lived within the body of Christ. Augustine confessing his sins. Monica persevering in prayer. Anthony leaving everything for God. Francis choosing poverty. Perpetua walking toward death without fear. These are the lives formed by the Church around the Word.

If you read the Bible in isolation, you will invent a Christianity in your own image. If you follow celebrity preachers, you will invent a Christianity in theirs. If you want a life shaped by Christ, you need the Church. The Bible in her hands. The Spirit at work in her worship. The saints as her fruit.

At eighteen, I thought I needed more knowledge and more preachers. What I really needed was the Church.

The Great Cancer of American Protestantism

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The greatest error I needed to resolve in my thinking over the past few years was the mistake of seeing the cross of Christ as a transaction. This is common teaching in American Christianity, and removing it was like surgically removing cancer. I can’t overstate the damage this does to the soul.

If all Christ did was pay a legal debt, all kinds of evil ideas will start to oxidize downstream. It twists the image of the Father into a vengeful despot, cheapens the cross to be a sort of a bank you can swipe the sin credit card on, and misunderstands what problem God is dealing with on a cosmic scale. It’s easy to become embittered by this vision. I empathize with any atheists who have been pitched this vision and have walked away in anger.

It took me many years to recover the historical tradition of the fathers, the ancient teaching of the church. Once you see it, you will never return to a transactional cross again.

God came to unite himself to his creation, so that he could suffer with it, and thereby transfigure it. Transfiguration is what he does. When Jesus was transfigured atop the mountain, it wasn’t a random show off to his three best disciples. It was a hermeneutical key to explain his modus operandi.

The problem with evil is that God cannot touch it. By its definition, evil is not a thing, but the absence of a thing, the privation of God. If he cannot touch evil, he cannot get rid of it. How does he solve this dilemma? He becomes man, and joins himself to his creation. By suffering and dying on the cross, he transfigures, in his flesh, the very suffering introduced by evil itself. What the devil intended for evil God meant for good. The very symbol of death became the tree of life.

A suffering God is the God I long to worship. I can now suffer with joy, because in my suffering I can partake in union with God, who suffers alongside me and has blessed suffering as a means of his grace. There he joins us on the cross, and there we fill up what still remain in the suffering of Christ.

Your Mother Never Knew You: Michael the Archangel, Limbo, and Gene Wolfe’s Wizard Knight

~ Kern Family ~ 2 Comments

I tore into The Wizard Knight right after finishing Gene Wolfe’s celebrated Book of the New Sun. I expected another dark alien world with Wolfe’s usual cloaked narrative. Instead I found bright meadows, talking cats, honorable knights, and overall a much more straightforward surface read.

Then I reached the final paragraph, closed the cover, and wept. The novel has not left my mind since.

If you have never read Wolfe, this is the easiest book to start with. Knights, dragons, giants, elf queens, princesses… everything sits right on the surface as you’d expect it in a fantasy adventure novel. Yet beneath that bright surface runs the same ocean‑depth you find in his denser books.

Read it once for the adventure. Let it baffle you. Then come back and try to uncover the deeper meanings of the book.

My thesis (spoilers below)

What finally clicked for me is a simple, if startling, idea that I took in a slightly different form from a writeup from Marc Aramini, a writer who knew Wolfe personally:

Able is a child in the womb who is dying, and his adventure in Mythgarthr is a mystical kind of limbo where he gets to live a full lifetime to become a knight.

Everything literal in the book still holds: he is truly fighting giants, time really does run at different speeds on each plane, and he is really experiencing a “world” for himself while literally in the womb of his mother. But the location of that world shifts. Mythgarthr is less a dimension the boy stumbles into and more a limbo where a life too brief for earth can stretch out and ripen.

A few puzzle pieces that lock into place

Puzzle on first readHow it looks through the womb lens
Able’s memories are “mixed up with a little girl’s.”An unborn son sharing the conscious overflow of his mother.
Parka’s silver bow‑string never breaks and whispers like heartbeats.It is the umbilical cord: bright, unbroken, carrying breath and memory from mother to child.
The sea heals Able, and Garsecg calls blood “the sea inside you.”Amniotic water and maternal blood nurturing a child who must fight for life.
Able sees the real Able in an ambulance in America.The “real Able” (the baby on earth) glimpsed from inside the suspended moment via a vision.
Michael the Archangel pauses Able and says, “Your mother never knew you.”Literal for a baby who will never be born alive; Michael prepares the soul to meet Christ.

Suddenly the “two-dimensional” side characters make sense. They are archetypes in a myth crafted for one child’s formation. The dragon, Setr, far from being an external villain, becomes the ego, formidable but capable of being directed toward selfless courage. Every quest trains Able to choose self‑gift over self‑preservation, so that when the moment of earthly death finally arrives he answers it like a knight.

Michael’s Message in the Last Paragraphs

At the very end of The Wizard, we read the following:

“We live in Aelfrice, and for whole days we are children again, as we were the first time I came. Children, we run and shout among the groves and grottoes of an endless wood more beautiful than any you will ever see. Children, we go to the sea I love, to splash in the shallows and play with kelpies. She has given me a new dog, a white puppy with red ears. I call him Farvan; and at night we speak to him of the play now past and the play to come and he tells us puppy things.

But we are not always children, and sometimes we lie upon our backs in fine green grass to watch the world above where time runs swift. There we saw Marder knight Wistan and Bold Berthold slay Schildstarr. Soon time will ripen, and we will come again.

Michael has found me at last, and that is why I have written this for you, Ben. He tells us of a great lord in need of a knight. I have told Michael that I will be this lord’s champion if I may bring my lady. He says it will be permitted.

We go soon. You will see this, Ben, for Michael has found a way. Do not worry about me. I am fine.

All best, Art
(Arthur Ormsby)”

I suspect that this is exactly where Wolfe wanted to land the plane. A “great lord” is likely the closest thing we’ll get to a tip from Wolfe, a strong Catholic. This is none other than Michael the Archangel being sent by Christ to call Able, the baby-turned-knight, into the beatific vision.

My wife and I miscarried three times. I suspect Wolfe wanted to speculate what it would be like for our children to enter limbo. What does Christ do with infants who won’t be able to live a full life? Here, my theory is that Wolfe wanted to do some imaginative theology: he allows them to experience an earth-like fantastical adventure where their souls can truly grow up and be formed into noble souls.

So while the book reads on the surface like a colorful fantasy novel, it seems more like a meditation on what it means for a baby to grow up and become an ideal. And I absolutely adore the idea. I trust that the great Lord cares for all the unborn children who won’t make it, and that he’s going to fully form them into grown knights fit for his service. This is an ending I can consider just, one that I can accept with great peace.

The Double Cleansing: Why You Should Expect Corruption in Religion

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The Gospels record Jesus cleansing the temple in two places, once in John 2, near the beginning of His ministry, and again in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19) during His final week.

Most of us probably remember this as one event. Some say it was one event remembered in different ways, or John organizing his Gospel thematically. But most of the Church Fathers took the accounts as separate. That reading makes the most sense. Jesus went up to Jerusalem each year. If he began and ended his public ministry by cleansing the temple, we should see that as deliberate. It bookends his ministry and indicates a very important message.

The temple was where people came to worship. But over time, it had become a place to make money. The traders and moneychangers set up shop in the outer courts. The poor had to pay extra. The outsiders were pushed aside. It was still called a house of prayer, but that name no longer matched what was happening inside.

Jesus does not ignore it. He drives them out. He flips the table not once, but twice. What was he confronting? He was confronting the way religion can be used to take advantage of people, especially the poor.

There will always be cunning minds ready to use religion for profit. That was true then and it is still true now. What I’m suggesting is that this is normal. We shouldn’t be scandalized by a greedy and corrupt church. The Gospels are not just stories. They show us the patterns we should expect throughout our life journeys.

So when we see corruption in our churches, or financial scandal, or religion used to squeeze the weak, we should not act surprised. This is what Jesus took pains to clean up twice deliberately, as if to underline the point: this is where religion is vulnerable, and this is where you need to join me in cleaning it up.

We were never promised clean institutions. We were called into them to take up this work. If you follow Jesus, you will face this same fight. Some tables may need to be flipped again.

It would be foolish to walk away from religion because of its corruptions, knowing full well that Jesus almost seemed more passionate about his religious system because of it. But it would also be ignorant to be scandalized by what you see. If the Lord took up a job twice, we should take double notice. Fully expect a corrupt religious system, and let the impurity be a fire in your belly to cleanse it so as to make way for a house of prayer.