I recently read a review of several children’s books and videos about the story of Jonah. The reviewer was incensed that children were not learning about a wrathful God. Storybooks that don’t portray the whale as “a terrifying sea monster” are “a lie we should quit telling our children,” he wrote. “We do not bring them to God by pretending that he is cuddly and not terrible.”

One can forgive him for losing sight of the reality that everything is learned this way, in stages. Does any rightminded person start his children on calculus before they can count? Do we demand they recite the doctrinal points regarding propitiation before allowing them to sing “Jesus Loves Me?” But by this reviewer’s logic, the proper thing to do when one’s children sing “Jesus Loves Me”, is to stand over them and recite after every verse something to this effect: He loves some of you, but others are children of the devil, as He Himself said, and will be cast down with the Evil One into a dark pit at some predetermined but unknown point between the resurrection of the dead and establishment of the New Jerusalem.

It’s a legitimate question nonetheless, this matter of what we teach our children about God, and when we teach it. The Bible is entirely true, and we know further that all of it is “profitable for reproof and instruction.” At the same time, it is filled with terrible things. When do we teach them, in detail, to our children? Mark Twain once quipped, after all, that whenever he heard about a library banning one of his books for its potential deleterious effects on the minds of children, he would chuckle at the thought that they were still free to check out the Bible.

I suppose the reviewer’s concern was that children who read these stories about Jonah will only ever get the edited versions. Perhaps his insistence on shocking them with the wrath of God is like one of those mega-doses of antibiotics, administered out of the doctor’s fear that their parents can’t be trusted to give them the full regimen. Or perhaps he’s someone who believes every mention of God’s love and mercy must be given equal time with his wrath. We can’t have people going about believing in a cuddly God, after all. They might start smiling.

I think it’s incontrovertible that God hates sin, and I think it’s important for teachers of the Word to teach the whole Word. But I reject this notion that people must be cowed into faith. It was on display in this particular essay, but we can find it throughout the Christian community. Consider those ubiquitous church marquees with slogans like: Jesus: Accept him now or regret it forever.

And I especially reject this tack when applied to children. They respond to love with love, and to fear with retreat. I certainly avoided God for twenty years in no small part from a conceptualization of him as angry and waiting to punish me unless I behaved better. And I know plenty of other adults with similar training. As an empirical matter, it doesn’t seem to work.

But more than that, it seems a gross mischaracterization of God. “Let the little children come to Me,” Christ said. He didn’t say: “Scare them my way. Dwell on how My Father punished wrongdoers, until they’re shivering in their little boots.” He drew them to Himself with love. Speaking as someone who experienced the reverse, I think hell and judgment ought to come later in a child’s education, not first.

To read Tony’s “Angry God,” part I, click here.