Comments on: Are Pro-Spanking Christians Feckless or Faithful? A Response to Jonathan Merritt http://www.canonandculture.com/are-pro-spanking-christians-feckless-or-faithful-a-response-to-jonathan-merritt/ Conversations on Christianity & the Public Square Fri, 26 Sep 2014 03:21:18 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.0 By: Tim http://www.canonandculture.com/are-pro-spanking-christians-feckless-or-faithful-a-response-to-jonathan-merritt/#comment-59866 Fri, 26 Sep 2014 03:21:18 +0000 http://www.canonandculture.com/?p=1484#comment-59866 Maybe hitting your kids worked out well for them and for you, I don’t know. But I know that not hitting our kids worked out great for them and for us. They are now adults who love God, serve him and the people he’s put in their lives, and our kids have never given us one reason to even suspect we made the wrong choice by rejecting hitting them as a form of discipline.

By the way, that Hebrews passage you cite says nothing about corporal punishment, merely that discipline is beneficial. No one has said it isn’t. The same goes for the Proverbs 3 passage. Proverbs 29 does use the word “rod”, but emphasizes the merit of discipline, not the method of using corporal punishment.

So if you want to rely on these passages as giving you permission to hit your kids I guess that’s your choice. But you don’t have to hit a kid to discipline him or her, so why would you choose to do so?

]]>