Proverbs 15:20 ESV
A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish man despises his mother.
[https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=proverbs+15%3A20&version=ESV]
Modernity as a whole despises its ancestors. Progress is the creed of liberal and conservative alike, and we look at the past with something like contempt. Even when we honor it, we honor the past for breaking with its own past. We remember the American War for Independence for its discontinuity, not its continuity. To an extent, this attitude of remembering conflicts, not peacetime, is only natural, but we lose much when we despise the wisdom and teaching of those who came before us.
What is foolish in despising one’s mother? The moral aspect, certainly, is at the center. God commands that we honor our parents, and so we ought to honor them (Eph. 6:2). More, in light of the New Testament, we can say that we honor our parents in imitation of how Christ honors His Father (1 Cor. 11:1; Dan. 7:13-14). To disobey God is foolishness, and so to dishonor my mother would be foolishness. This honor, of course, has limits; I honor my father and my mother as my father and my mother, not as God, and so His word supersedes theirs. In all this I honor them still (and I have an easier task in having been blessed with most excellent parents).
This command, though, has a practical aspect as well. All sane human societies (read: most societies outside the modern West) acknowledge the importance of the parents in teaching their children (even in Sparta, where they acknowledged it by making sure the aristocrats were educated and raised by the state in public boarding schools, in order to perpetuate its power and system- sound familiar?). Mothers and fathers shape their children, teach them the basics of life and how to understand the world. They do this intentionally and unintentionally, but regardless their influence is pervasive. Further, God willing, the parents are going to be more experienced and wiser than their children, at least while they are children. Whether by the parent’s excellence or their unimpressiveness, the child may someday outpace their parents, but we all start as fools, controlled by appetite and emotion.
There is wisdom in listening to our parents, then, because they are wiser than us on average. Experience, in the hands of a person desiring wisdom, brings wisdom, and so age and wisdom can correlate. Don’t take this as an entire endorsement, though. We have only to look at your average congressman to figure out that the saying, “There’s no fool like an old fool,” has an unfortunate amount of truth in it. Somebody who has marinated in foolishness for a decade or two more than average really is going to be impressively foolish.
In modernity, then, we like to despise the past. We have, we aver, reasons to do so. The past was racist, misogynist, and bigoted. Those three words off-loaded, we consider the matter done with. This, though, is foolishness. This is despising our mothers, our grandmothers, our great-grandmothers, despising our own heritage.
Great evils lie in the past, but it hardly has a monopoly. Slavery was the status quo in America two-hundred years ago, but today we murder a much larger number of babies than they did. Great good lies in the present, but it definitely doesn’t have a monopoly. Our forefathers have a wealth of experience, and we should learn from them, learn not to stub our toes on the same tables they stubbed their toes on.
I mentioned that we see the American War for Independence as discontinuity and not continuity, and it’s time to explain that. In one sense, that war was a discontinuity. America undeniable left the governance of Britian, undeniable established independence. Yet viewed from another perspective, it was an example of continuity. The establishing of America, as flawed as it was, was built upon hundreds of years of English culture and English theologians, upon a theology of resistance and governance that traced its roots back through Lex Rex and Cromwell to the 95 Theses, the Magna Carta, and beyond them to Scripture. The American War for Independence was in a very real way the continuation of the colony’s English heritage, not a rejection.
We mustn’t take the past on board without thought. Just as parents can be wrong, the past can be wrong, often is. The past has much wisdom to offer and much foolishness. We would lose that wisdom, were we to despise it; that cannot be abided. Yet we would gain much foolishness if our reasoning stopped at ‘past equals good’. Blind conservation and blind progression are alike paths to hell. Worse, humans tend to like short-term outcomes and sensual pleasures, so if we choose merely by instinct or affection, we’ll probably hold onto those things which are superficial or harmful, progress towards the same, leaving behind or staying away from the truly good.
In this struggle, we must turn at all times to the final standard by which we can judge all wisdom, whether our parents’ wisdom or their parents’ wisdom or the wisdom of men long dead and only very distantly related. This standard is Scripture. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” declares Paul, “that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The word of God has the authority and the wisdom which can judge all man’s thoughts and passions, sift wisdom from foolishness. It is, in fact, peculiarly adapted to discerning the thoughts of man, that being an element the purpose the author of Hebrews declares for it in Hebrews 4:12- “… the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” We must honor our mothers and fathers, honor those who came before us and give us wisdom, and above all this, by all this, this we must honor our heavenly Father, the Lord of glory (Ps. 24:8).
God bless.
Written by Colson Potter
Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.
