Even God Has Prodigals

What this page is asking

The author of this site heard a sermon on Proverbs 22:6 and wrote down how it went. As he reports it, the sermon moved from the verse to an expectation of “fruits,” and tied that expectation to early rising, discipline, parental control, and avoiding bad influences. He reports its theme in four words: “deep father, deep family.”

That is all this page has of the sermon: one quoted word, one quoted phrase, and a listener’s summary of the argument. The preacher is not named here, and nothing on this page depends on who he was. A preacher may put things more carefully on another day, and a summary is not a transcript. The page tests the argument as it was reported. It does not judge the man.

The author set down a thesis to be tested: “Proverbs 22:6 is wisdom about how life generally works, not a guaranteed formula for producing faithful adult children.” Proverbs, he wrote, “are wisdom sayings that describe how life usually goes. They are not unconditional promises. Turning this proverb into a guarantee implies that every adult child’s unbelief proves defective parenting. That burden Scripture does not place on parents, and it contradicts Scripture’s own portrait of God as a Father with rebellious children.”

He also put the question in a form that can be checked: “Does this turn a proverb into a promise, potentially implying that an adult child’s apostasy demonstrates defective parenting?”

That is the question this page works through. It reads the verse in Hebrew and in the old Greek, Latin, German and English versions, sets it among its neighbours in the book, follows the homes Scripture describes, gives the promise reading its best texts, and traces how the verse has been read from the old Greek Bible to the present. It also checks the author’s brief, and in five places it corrects or qualifies it.

Two positions, labelled so they can be told apart

Two readings of the verse are compared all the way through. They are given letters so that the page can refer to them without repeating a paragraph each time.

Position F is stated here in its plain form. Part VII gives it its best texts, and Part IX quotes it in the words of a careful Victorian commentator who held it. Its last sentence is not something every preacher of the Formula says aloud. It is what the first two sentences imply, and Part X shows why it cannot be kept out.

What both positions agree on

So the disagreement is narrower than it sounds. Both positions say: train your children. They differ about what may be concluded afterwards. Position F reasons from the child back to the parent. Position W says that inference is not available.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case that Proverbs 22:6 is a covenant promise God has bound himself to keep, with the texts and the commentators who have said so, and see how far it gets. Second, narrow it: ask only for every household in the Bible where the text tells us both how the parents lived and how the children turned out, and draw your own conclusion. Third, make it a test: paste in the notes of a sermon on any proverb, with the names removed, and ask which of its claims are in the verse and which were added.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other quotation:
give the work, the edition or translation, and the section. Verify
every quotation against a reliable published source; where a
quotation cannot be verified, cut it, or say that it is given at
second hand. Do not invent quotes. Do not take verses out of context:
where a text is being applied beyond what it first addressed, say so.

  TITLE. Even God Has Prodigals

  THESIS TO TEST. Proverbs 22:6 is wisdom about how life generally
  works, not a guaranteed formula for producing faithful adult
  children.

  OCCASION. A recent sermon moved from "Train up a child in the way
  he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it"
  (Proverbs 22:6) to an expectation of "fruits." It tied that
  expectation to early rising, discipline, parental control, and
  avoiding bad influences. Its theme was "deep father, deep family."
  Report this as a listener's summary. Do not name or identify
  anyone, and do not put words in the preacher's mouth beyond the
  two quoted phrases.

  CORE CLAIM. Proverbs are wisdom sayings that describe how life
  usually goes. They are not unconditional promises. Turning this
  proverb into a guarantee implies that every adult child's unbelief
  proves defective parenting. That burden Scripture does not place
  on parents, and it contradicts Scripture's own portrait of God as
  a Father with rebellious children.

  QUESTION. Does this turn a proverb into a promise, potentially
  implying that an adult child's apostasy demonstrates defective
  parenting?

  TWO POSITIONS, labelled and used consistently.
   W, THE WISDOM READING (held): the verse commands training and
      observes that training usually lasts; the duty is the
      parents', the child answers for himself, the outcome is God's.
   F, THE FORMULA (under test): the verse is a conditional promise;
      train properly and the fruit is secured; so where the fruit is
      missing, the training was.

  POINTS TO TEST.
   1. Genre matters. Proverbs states general truths that need wisdom
      to apply. The book places contradictory sayings side by side
      on purpose: "Answer not a fool according to his folly" and
      "Answer a fool according to his folly" (26:4-5). Other
      proverbs plainly have exceptions. "The hand of the diligent
      makes rich" (10:4) does not guarantee every hard worker
      wealth. Test this against the verse's own neighbours in
      chapter 22.
   2. The Hebrew is debated. "In the way he should go" translates a
      phrase that literally reads "according to his way."
      Interpreters read it as the right moral way, the child's own
      aptitude or stage, or even ironically ("let a child have his
      own way and he will never leave it"). Present the range, with
      who holds each reading, so readers can see that the verse is
      less of a formula than it appears. Check the ancient versions.
   3. Proverbs itself expects some sons to refuse instruction.
      Chapters 1-9 are a father pleading with a son who might not
      listen. "A foolish son is a grief to his father" (17:25). The
      book assumes instructed children may still choose folly.
   4. God is the perfect Father, and his children rebel. "Children
      have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against
      me" (Isaiah 1:2). In the parable of the prodigal son, the
      father is not blamed for the son's departure (Luke 15:11-32).
      If perfect parenting does not guarantee faithful children, the
      formula cannot hold for human parents.
   5. The sermon's specifics are not in the verse. Early rising,
      tight control, and avoiding influences may or may not be wise.
      Proverbs 22:6 mentions none of them. Separate what the verse
      says from what has been added, and ask whose "fruit" a child
      is.
   6. The pastoral stakes are high. Many faithful parents have adult
      children who have left the faith. A formula reading leaves
      them with guilt and nothing else. A wisdom reading keeps the
      duty to train, leaves the outcome with God, and holds onto
      hope that the baptized child is still sought by the Father
      (Luke 15:20). Explore how this bears on "deep father, deep
      family."

  ADDITIONS.
   7. The biblical record: godly parents with faithless children and
      the reverse (Eli, Samuel, David, the kings of Judah from
      Hezekiah to Josiah, Timothy), and Ezekiel 18 on each
      generation answering for itself.
   8. How it became a promise: how Jewish and Christian readers took
      the verse before the modern parenting literature, and when
      the guarantee reading appears.
   9. A word to parents of adult children who have left: the duty
      kept, the outcome left with God, the hope that remains. No
      parenting advice.
  10. A closing diagnostic for spotting when a wisdom saying is
      being preached as a guarantee.

OBJECTIONS. Answer them inside the argument, and give the Formula
its best texts in one place: Eli, who "restrained them not"; the
requirement that an elder's children be orderly (1 Timothy 3:4-5;
Titus 1:6); the promises God makes about the children of believers
(Genesis 17:7; Acts 2:39; Isaiah 59:21); and the commentators who
have called this verse a promise. State what those texts establish
and what they do not. Where the evidence corrects the brief, say so
in a marked box.

NAMING. No living individual named as an example of anything.
Deceased writers quoted only from dated published works. Living
scholars named only as authors of published research. A modern
organisation named only as the publisher of research. Every remark
attributed to a pastor, a parent or a child is composed for
illustration and labelled as composed.

EXCLUDED. Advice on how to raise children. Advice on how to speak
to a child who has left. Deciding between the traditions on
election, on the covenant standing of believers' children, or on
what baptism effects. Assessment of any actual family, church or
preacher. Ground covered by earlier dossiers (the new birth and
baptism, assurance, Job's friends, children taught to look inward,
performed spirituality at home) is kept brief and linked.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. A sort of sayings by which reading is
speaking. A sort of texts into command, promise and proverb. A
find-the-exception quiz. A chooser for the readings of the Hebrew. A
sort of Proverbs' sayings by whose doing is in view. A checklist of
the sermon's list against what God did for Israel. A sort of
laments by who is grieving. A predict-the-heir exercise on the kings
of Judah. A sort of inferences by whether they follow. A sort of
claims by whether the verse makes them. A guess-the-source quiz on
the history. A figure to guess from published survey data. An
objection drill the reader answers in his own words first. A
diagnostic for a sermon.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating the
key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, explaining every
technical term in a box where it is used, and giving the reader
something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-English
quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short exercises,
and a Simple English version with no exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. Where a quotation could not be verified against a published source it was cut, and four that were verified only at second hand are marked as such in Part XIV. Five things qualified the brief. Scripture does blame some parents. The brief says the burden is one “Scripture does not place on parents.” Eli is judged because “he restrained them not,” so the burden of the duty is placed, and heavily. What Scripture never does is infer the neglect from the outcome. The ironic reading of the Hebrew is a small minority. It is real and old, but the argument must not lean on it, and this page does not. The prodigal’s father was not offered as a case study in parenting. Jesus told the parable to explain why he ate with sinners. The page uses it for what it shows about God, which is what the brief wanted from it, and says where that use stops. Luke 15:20 shows the father running, and the seeking is earlier in the chapter. The son had already turned for home. The one who goes out “until he find it” is the shepherd of verse 4. And Luke 15 does not mention baptism: that link is the historic churches’ teaching, kept brief here and cross-linked. And the wisdom reading is not a modern correction. It is what the old commentators said. The guarantee is the newcomer.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in Part XIV. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XIII with the sources beside them.

What follows

One verse and a list

Start with the argument as it was reported and take it apart. It makes four separate moves.

The first is sound. Everything turns on the other three.

What the sermon gets right

It should be said before the testing begins that the preacher was not making this up out of nothing. The verse does say “train.” Deuteronomy tells Israel to teach God’s words to their children “when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up” (6:7). Proverbs has hard things to say about parents who will not correct a child. Paul requires that an elder be “one that ruleth well his own house” (1 Timothy 3:4). And the common experience of mankind is that children mostly grow up like the homes they grew up in.

There is also a kind of parent the sermon may have had in view: the father who leaves his children’s faith to the Sunday school and then wonders where it went. A preacher who tells such a man that his children are his business is doing him a service.

The page grants all of this. Its question is what is being promised. The sermon’s answer, as reported, is fruit. Part VII gives that answer its best texts.

The step that is easy to miss

A guarantee has a property that an encouragement does not. It can be run backwards.

If I say, “Water this plant and it will probably do well,” and the plant dies, nothing follows about you. Perhaps there was frost. If I say, “Water this plant and it will live, without exception,” and the plant dies, then I have told you something about yourself: you did not water it. The stronger the promise, the sharper the accusation folded inside it.

That is why the author’s question is put the way it is. He does not ask whether the sermon accused anyone. He asks whether turning the proverb into a promise “potentially impl[ies] that an adult child’s apostasy demonstrates defective parenting.” The answer depends entirely on whether the verse is a guarantee. So that is what has to be settled.

The same father, answered twice

Here is how the two positions sound when a man in his sixties stays behind after a service. His daughter is thirty-four and has not been inside a church for ten years. Both pastors care about him, and both believe parents must teach their children.

Both pastors take the verse seriously. The first treats the daughter’s unbelief as a finding about the father and sends him to search for the cause. The second separates what the father was commanded from what the daughter has chosen. That difference runs through the rest of the page.

Try it: which reading is speaking?

Eight things that might be said in a church. All are composed by this page. Sort each by which reading of the verse it assumes. Two could be said by either.

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What kind of sentence is this?

The Bible contains many kinds of sentence. A law, a prayer, a parable, a census list and a love song are not read the same way, and nobody thinks they should be. So the first question about Proverbs 22:6 is what kind of sentence it is. The book answers in its first line: “The proverbs of Solomon” (1:1).

What a proverb is for

The Hebrew word is mashal. The book says what it expects of its reader: “To understand a proverb, and the interpretation; the words of the wise, and their dark sayings” (1:6). A proverb has to be understood and interpreted. It is given to make a person wise, and a wise person is one who knows which saying fits the moment.

The two verses at the head of this Part are the plainest proof. One says do not answer a fool. The next says answer him. They are not a mistake that slipped past the editor: they stand together because both are true, at different times, and the reader is being trained to tell the times apart. A book of guarantees could not contain both. A book of wisdom has to.

Proverbs is frank about what happens when its sayings are used without that judgement. It says so twice, in the same chapter:

The legs of the lame are not equal: so is a parable in the mouth of fools.

As a thorn goeth up into the hand of a drunkard, so is a parable in the mouth of fools.

Proverbs 26:7 and 26:9. “Parable” here translates the same word, mashal, that is elsewhere translated “proverb.”

In the first picture the proverb is useless, like legs that will not carry a man. In the second it is dangerous. A drunk man waving a thornbush hurts himself and whoever is standing near. The book’s own warning is that a true proverb, wrongly handled, wounds people.

The verse’s own neighbours

One way to tell is to look at the sentences standing next to it. Proverbs 22:6 sits in a run of sayings of exactly the same shape. Here are some of them, with a case from Scripture set beside each.

None of these is false. Humility and the fear of God do, in the ordinary run of things, lead to a better life than pride and contempt for him. Diligent people do tend to rise. Oppressors do tend to come to grief. A young person who lived by these five sayings would live well. But nobody reads 22:4 and concludes that a poor Christian must be proud. Position F asks us to read the sentence two lines further down by a different rule.

The author’s brief gave another example: “the hand of the diligent maketh rich” (10:4). Proverbs supplies its own exception to that one: “Much food is in the tillage of the poor: but there is that is destroyed for want of judgment” (13:23). “Judgment” here means justice. The poor man’s field was fruitful, and he lost the harvest to injustice.

Scripture’s own check on the proverbs

The Bible does not leave Proverbs to stand alone. Two other wisdom books sit beside it, and both exist largely to stop its sayings being pressed into laws.

Ecclesiastes says: “the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise … but time and chance happeneth to them all” (9:11). And: “there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness” (7:15). It even has a word on heirs. The Preacher has laboured all his life and must leave it to the man who comes after him: “And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool?” (2:19).

Job is a whole book about three men who knew their proverbs. Eliphaz says, “who ever perished, being innocent? … they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same” (4:7–8). It is a fair summary of a good deal of Proverbs. He applies it to the man in front of him: Job has suffered, therefore Job has sinned. Bildad applies it to Job’s dead children: “If thy children have sinned against him, and he have cast them away for their transgression” (8:4). At the end God says to them: “ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath” (42:7).

Their sayings were sound. What God condemned was running them backwards, from the outcome to a verdict on the person. An earlier dossier was given to that mistake. The Formula reading of Proverbs 22:6 is the same mistake made about a family.

When Scripture attaches a promise, it says so

There is a text that shows how the Bible itself draws the line. Paul quotes the fifth commandment and adds a remark about it:

Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.

Ephesians 6:2–3, quoting the fifth commandment (Exodus 20:12; Deuteronomy 5:16).

Paul notices which commandments carry a promise and which do not, and says this is the first that does. The promise is attached to the child’s duty, and it is made to the child. Two verses later comes the parents’ duty: “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord” (6:4). No promise is attached to it. If Paul had understood Proverbs 22:6 as God’s pledge to parents, this was the place to say so.

Try it: command, promise or proverb?

Eight sentences from Scripture. Sort each by what kind of sentence it is.

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Try it: find the exception

Six proverbs. For each, choose the person in Scripture whose life is an exception to it. The point is not that the proverbs are wrong. It is that the Bible that contains them also contains these people.

Eleven Hebrew words

The English verse most people know has twenty-one words. The Hebrew has eleven, and one of the most important English words does not correspond to any of them.

The verse, word by word

So a plain rendering is: “Dedicate a youth according to his way; even when he grows old he will not turn from it.” The whole question of what the verse means is the question of what “his way” means.

The translators of 1611 knew this. They put “in the way he should go” in the text, and in the margin they printed the note quoted at the head of Part I: “Heb. in his way.” Most modern printings of the Authorised Version leave the margin out.

Six ways it has been read

The author’s brief named three readings. The commentators offer at least six. Choose each in turn. For each one the box gives the reading, who has held it, and what it does to the Formula.

The page does not need to choose between these, and it does not. The first is the oldest in English and may well be right. The point is what they have in common. On the neutral reading the verse cuts both ways. On the aptitude and stage readings it is advice about method. On the status reading it is about launching a young man. On the ironic reading it is a warning. And on the traditional reading, as Part IX will show, the men who held it most firmly were the first to say it has exceptions.

The verse through the translations

If the verse were plainly a promise, the translators would have found it so. Here is how it was put into Greek, Latin, German and English over about two thousand years.

Coverdale and the Bishops’ Bible are given in their original spelling. The Geneva text is quoted from the printing of 1599 in modernised spelling. Several recent English versions translate the first word as “start” and print “his way” in the text or a note.

Three things stand out. First, the oldest Greek Bibles that survive do not contain the verse. Whatever the Greek-speaking early Church taught parents, it is unlikely to have rested on Proverbs 22:6. Second, the two most widely used Bibles of the Western church before the English ones, Jerome’s and Luther’s, both turn the verse into a remark about how habits stick. Third, the English tradition that gave us “should go” has flagged the Hebrew in its margins since 1611.

How old is “a child”?

One more detail bears on the sermon. The Talmud records an early rabbinic discussion of this verse, and what the rabbis argued about was the age it refers to:

Rabbi Yehuda and Rabbi Neḥemya … One said that the verse is referring to the ages from sixteen until twenty-two, and one said it is referring to the ages from eighteen until twenty-four.

Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 30a, on “Train a child in the way that he should go.” William Davidson Edition (English), at Sefaria. That edition weaves the translator’s explanation into a very terse original.

Hildebrandt’s study reached a similar place by another road. “In Proverbs,” he concluded, the na‘ar “is a late adolescent/young adult,” and the verse “addresses a late adolescent’s entrance into his place in adult society.” If that is right, the verse is less about the nursery than English readers assume, and the “training” looks more like setting a young man on his road than like a regime of rising times and supervised friendships.

Not everyone accepts this. The same word is used of a “child” whose heart is foolish in 22:15, nine verses later. But it is a second reason for caution about building a method on one half-line.

The son who might not listen

The Formula reads Proverbs 22:6 as a sentence addressed to parents about what they can secure. So it is worth asking who the book as a whole is addressed to, and what it expects of him.

Who the book is talking to

The answer is on the first page. The proverbs are written “to give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion” (1:4). The “young man” is the na‘ar of 22:6. Then the address begins: “My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother” (1:8).

“My son” comes in twenty-three verses of the book, fifteen of them in the first nine chapters. Those chapters are a father and mother pleading. And the pleading is conditional from the start. Look at the grammar of the verse at the head of this Part. “If thou wilt receive my words … then shalt thou understand.” The father has done the teaching. Whether it takes is left with the son.

Bruce Waltke, in the fullest modern commentary on the book, draws the conclusion for 22:6:

The proverb, however, must not be pushed to mean that the educator is ultimately responsible for the youth’s entire moral orientation. … The book is addressed to youths, not parents. Were the parents ultimately responsible for his moral choice, there would be no point in addressing the book to youth.

Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, Chapters 15–31, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 2005), p. 206, on 22:6. Given here at second hand, as quoted in a published summary of the commentary; see Part XIV.

The son the book is afraid of

Proverbs does not only allow that an instructed son might refuse. It describes him, repeatedly, and in the father’s own words.

Three things stand out. First, several of these say outright that the son had been taught. “A fool despiseth his father’s instruction”: there was instruction to despise. The scorner of 13:1 “heareth not rebuke”: there was rebuke. The man in 5:13 had “teachers” and people “that instructed me.” He was trained. He hated it. Second, the grief is the parents’ and the fault is the son’s. None of these sayings turns to the father and asks what he did wrong. The fool is called a fool. Third, if 22:6 were a guarantee, these verses would describe something that cannot happen. A book cannot promise in one chapter that trained children never depart and lament in a dozen others that taught sons despise their teaching.

Proverbs also blames parents

It would be a one-sided reading that stopped there. The same book holds parents to account.

“He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes” (13:24). “Chasten thy son while there is hope” (19:18). “The rod and reproof give wisdom: but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame” (29:15). “Foolishness is bound in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him” (22:15), which stands nine verses after the verse this page is about.

So Proverbs teaches both things. A parent who leaves a child to himself has failed that child, and will share in the shame. And a child who has been taught may despise the teaching, and the folly is his own. The Formula keeps the first half and deletes the second. A reading that said parents make no difference would keep the second and delete the first. The book will not let either half go.

Try it: whose doing is in view?

Eight sayings from Proverbs. For each, decide whether the saying is about something the parent does or fails to do, or about something the child does.

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The author of the proverb

One case settles more than the rest, and it is the man whose name is on the book.

Solomon was a trained child. He says so: “For I was my father’s son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live” (Proverbs 4:3–4). The history books agree. David’s last recorded words to him are a charge “to walk in his ways, to keep his statutes” (1 Kings 2:3), and in Chronicles: “And thou, Solomon my son, know thou the God of thy father, and serve him with a perfect heart” (1 Chronicles 28:9).

Then:

For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his wives turned away his heart after other gods: and his heart was not perfect with the LORD his God, as was the heart of David his father.

1 Kings 11:4. Compare the wording of the proverb: “when he is old, he will not depart from it.”

The proverb says “when he is old.” The history says “when Solomon was old.” The man to whom the proverb is attributed was trained in the way he should go, by the man after God’s own heart, and when he was old he departed from it. Matthew Henry noticed this in 1710, and Part IX quotes him.

A trained son can turn. The book knows it, because its author did.

Even God has prodigals

This is the centre of the page. The Formula says that right training secures the result. To test a claim like that, find the case where the training was beyond criticism and see what the result was. Scripture supplies that case, and it is not a human one.

God as a parent, in his own words

The Old Testament speaks of God as Israel’s father from the Exodus on. “Israel is my son, even my firstborn” (Exodus 4:22). And it describes his fathering in the ordinary vocabulary of bringing up a child.

He carried them: “the LORD thy God bare thee, as a man doth bear his son, in all the way that ye went” (Deuteronomy 1:31). He taught them to walk: “I taught Ephraim also to go, taking them by their arms” (Hosea 11:3). He disciplined them: “as a man chasteneth his son, so the LORD thy God chasteneth thee” (Deuteronomy 8:5). He loved them: “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt” (Hosea 11:1).

And the next verse of Hosea reads: “As they called them, so they went from them: they sacrificed unto Baalim” (11:2).

The prophets return to this again and again. “Woe to the rebellious children, saith the LORD” (Isaiah 30:1). “Children that will not hear the law of the LORD” (30:9). “A son honoureth his father … if then I be a father, where is mine honour?” (Malachi 1:6). “Do ye thus requite the LORD, O foolish people and unwise? is not he thy father that hath bought thee?” (Deuteronomy 32:6). “Thou shalt call me, My father; and shalt not turn away from me” (Jeremiah 3:19). They did turn away. Three verses on comes the appeal: “Return, ye backsliding children” (3:22).

John Calvin, commenting on the verse at the head of this Part, puts it in a sentence:

… he not only had performed the part of a kind father, by giving them food and the ordinary means of support, but had labored to raise them to an honorable rank. For in every sort of kindness towards them he had, as it were, exhausted himself, as he elsewhere reproaches them, What could have been done to my vineyard that I have not done?

John Calvin, Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah (1551), on Isaiah 1:2; trans. William Pringle (Calvin Translation Society, 1850).

The sermon’s list, item by item

Now set the sermon’s list beside this. As the author reports it, the fruit was tied to early rising, discipline, parental control and avoiding bad influences, and the theme was the depth of the father. Take each item and ask whether God did it for Israel. Open each one to see the text.

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The phrase about rising early deserves a second look, because the sermon named it. In the Authorised Version it belongs almost entirely to one speaker. It comes eleven times in Jeremiah, ten of them of God and once of his prophet, and always in the same shape: “I spake unto you, rising up early and speaking, but ye heard not” (7:13). “I have even sent unto you all my servants the prophets, daily rising up early and sending them: Yet they hearkened not unto me” (7:25–26). “Though I taught them, rising up early and teaching them, yet they have not hearkened to receive instruction” (32:33). The Bible’s great example of a father who rose early for his children is the one whose children did not listen.

A human father who got the result

There is a chapter in Jeremiah that puts the two side by side. A clan called the Rechabites had been told by their ancestor Jonadab, generations earlier, to drink no wine. Jeremiah sets wine in front of them. They refuse: “We will drink no wine: for Jonadab the son of Rechab our father commanded us” (35:6). Then God speaks:

The words of Jonadab the son of Rechab, that he commanded his sons not to drink wine, are performed; for unto this day they drink none, but obey their father’s commandment: notwithstanding I have spoken unto you, rising early and speaking; but ye hearkened not unto me.

Jeremiah 35:14

Here is a human father whose sons obeyed him for generations, and the divine Father, who rose early, whose children would not. God commends the Rechabites. He draws no conclusion that Jonadab was the better parent. If “deep father, deep family” were a law, this chapter would say that Jonadab was deeper than God.

The Father in the parable

The author’s brief brings in the parable of the prodigal son: “the father is not blamed for the son’s departure.” That is true, and it is worth seeing exactly how.

A man has two sons. The younger asks for his inheritance, takes it to a far country and wastes it “with riotous living” (Luke 15:13). Nothing in the story suggests the father caused this. Nobody in the story suggests it either. When the elder brother complains, his complaint is about the welcome: “thou never gavest me a kid … but as soon as this thy son was come … thou hast killed for him the fatted calf” (15:29–30). Even the angry son does not say, “this is what comes of the way you raised him.”

And the father has not one difficult son but two. The younger leaves. The elder stays, and when the feast begins “he was angry, and would not go in” (15:28). The father goes out to him as well. The story ends without telling us whether he came in. A father who is a picture of God has one son in a far country and one sulking in the yard.

The same note sounds from Jesus’ own lips over Jerusalem: “how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” (Matthew 23:37). “I would.” “Ye would not.” John’s Gospel puts it in one line: “He came unto his own, and his own received him not” (1:11).

And it goes back to the beginning. Luke’s genealogy runs back through seventy-odd generations to “Adam, which was the son of God” (3:38). Adam was made without fault and placed in a garden with a single prohibition and no bad company but one. He was not short of training.

Try it: who is grieving?

Eight laments over children. For each, decide whether the speaker is God or a human parent.

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The record of the homes

Part V looked at the one perfect Father. This Part looks at the ordinary ones. If the Formula describes how God has arranged the world, the families of the Bible should show it.

The first family

Adam and Eve had two sons whose stories are told. “Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground” (Genesis 4:2). They had the same parents and the same home. One is remembered for his faith (Hebrews 11:4). The other killed him.

Scripture gives a reason for the difference, and it does not mention the parents: “And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous” (1 John 3:12). Before the murder God speaks to Cain directly, as a responsible person with a choice in front of him: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door” (Genesis 4:7).

The pattern recurs. Isaac and Rebekah had twins. One valued the covenant and one “for one morsel of meat sold his birthright” (Hebrews 12:16), and married in a way that was “a grief of mind unto Isaac and to Rebekah” (Genesis 26:35). Those parents were not blameless: “Isaac loved Esau … but Rebekah loved Jacob” (25:28). But the same favouritism that the Formula would blame for Esau would also have to be credited for Jacob.

Eli and Samuel: the pair that decides it

Two fathers stand next to each other in the opening chapters of 1 Samuel, and between them they show what Scripture will and will not say.

The two outcomes are alike. In both houses the sons of a priest and judge turned out corrupt. If the outcome were the evidence, the two fathers would get the same verdict. They do not. Eli is judged, and the text says for what: he knew and did not restrain. Samuel is not judged, though his sons went the same way.

So Scripture’s rule is visible here. It blames a parent for a named neglect. It does not read the neglect off the result. And there is one more turn. The boy Samuel was himself brought up in Eli’s house, from the time he was weaned, beside Hophni and Phinehas. The failing household produced the faithful prophet. The faithful prophet produced the crooked judges.

Matthew Henry’s comment on Samuel’s sons, written about 1708, is the wisdom reading in one line:

Note, Those that have the most grace themselves cannot give grace to their children. … Many that have been well educated, and have conducted themselves well while they were under their parents’ eye, when they have gone abroad into the world and set up for themselves have proved bad. Let none therefore be secure either of themselves or theirs, but depend on divine grace.

Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Old and New Testament, vol. 2 (1708), on 1 Samuel 8:1–3.

Try it: predict the heir

The books of Kings and Chronicles pass a verdict on every king of Judah. Of eight of them it says that he “did that which was right.” If right-living fathers produce right-living sons, their heirs should be easy to predict. For each king, say what you expect of the son who succeeded him.

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Some cautions are in order. A palace is not an ordinary home. The text seldom says how a prince was brought up. Several of these kings were themselves mixed: Joash did right “all the days of Jehoiada the priest” and then turned (2 Chronicles 24:2, 17–18), and Uzziah’s heart “was lifted up to his destruction” (26:16). The list cannot prove that upbringing makes no difference, and this page does not say it makes none.

What it can do is test a rule. The rule under test is that the father’s character settles the son’s. In the one long run of fathers and sons that the Bible grades for us, it does not.

“Deep father, deep family”

Here the sermon’s theme meets the record directly. Two kings of Judah are singled out above all the others.

If any two men in the Old Testament qualify as deep fathers, these do. Each had a father who was the reverse of deep. Each left a family that was the reverse of deep. God himself draws the contrast for one of Josiah’s sons: “did not thy father eat and drink, and do judgment and justice, and then it was well with him? … But thine eyes and thine heart are not but for thy covetousness” (Jeremiah 22:15, 17). The father is praised. The son is blamed. No link is drawn between the two except that the son had the example and ignored it.

It runs the other way as well. Jonathan, the most loyal friend in the Bible, was the son of Saul. Timothy’s faith came through his grandmother and his mother (2 Timothy 1:5), and Luke says of the home only that “his father was a Greek” (Acts 16:1). The apostle John writes to “the elect lady and her children” that he rejoiced to find “of thy children walking in truth” (2 John 1, 4): some of them.

And Jesus told his own disciples what to expect in their households: “from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father” (Luke 12:52–53). He was speaking to the people who would be the deepest fathers and mothers the Church has had. He did not promise them deep families. He told them their houses would be split.

Ezekiel’s three generations

One chapter of the Bible is given entirely to this question. The exiles in Babylon had a proverb of their own: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (Ezekiel 18:2). They used it to say that they were suffering for what their parents had done. God’s reply begins by taking the proverb away from them: “ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel. Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine” (18:3–4).

Then he sets out a family of three generations. A man who is “just, and do[es] that which is lawful and right” (18:5). His son, “a robber, a shedder of blood” (18:10). And that man’s son, who “seeth all his father’s sins which he hath done, and considereth, and doeth not such like” (18:14). A righteous man with a violent son. A violent man with a righteous son. Each is judged for himself, and the verdict is the verse at the head of this Part.

Two things should be said about that chapter. It was written to stop children blaming their parents for their own condition, so its first target is the opposite error to the Formula’s. But the principle it lays down runs in both directions, and it says so in as many words: “neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.” And it treats the sequence as an ordinary thing. God does not present the just man’s violent son as a puzzle that needs explaining. He presents him as a case that arises.

The Law had assumed the same. Deuteronomy makes provision for “a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them” (21:18; emphasis added). The statute supposes parents who did discipline, and a son who still would not hear. It does not put the parents on trial.

The Formula’s best texts

Position F did not come from nowhere, and a page that only knocked down its weakest form would prove nothing. This Part sets out the texts a careful defender would bring, in what the page takes to be their order of strength, and asks of each what it establishes.

1. Eli: a father judged for his sons

“His sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not” (1 Samuel 3:13). This is the clearest case in the Bible of a parent held to account for what his children became, and the defender of the Formula is right to press it. John Wesley, preaching on Proverbs 22:6 in 1783, used it in just this way: good men, he says, “have often too much easiness of temper,” and go no further in restraining their children than Eli did.

What it establishes: that a parent’s neglect is real, that it has consequences in the children, and that God holds the parent responsible for it. What it does not establish: that the neglect can be inferred from the children. Part VI set Samuel beside Eli for that reason. And Wesley, in the next breath, concedes the point this page is making: “But it must be acknowledged, some have been trained therein with all possible care and diligence; and yet before they were old, yea, in the strength of their years, they did utterly depart from it.”

2. The elder and his household

This is the text most often quoted, and it deserves care.

One that ruleth well his own house, having his children in subjection with all gravity; (For if a man know not how to rule his own house, how shall he take care of the church of God?)

1 Timothy 3:4–5. And Titus 1:6: “the husband of one wife, having faithful children not accused of riot or unruly.”

If a man’s children can disqualify him from office, the argument runs, then Scripture does read a father from his family. Four things should be said.

It is about a household he is now ruling. “His own house.” “In subjection.” The picture is of children at home under their father’s authority, and the test is whether the home is in order. It is hard to see how a man could have a married daughter of thirty-four “in subjection,” or be said to be ruling her house. The text is about management that can be observed, by the people who would have to appoint him.

It is a qualification for a task, and not a verdict on a soul. The same list requires that an elder be “apt to teach” and “not a novice” (3:2, 6). A new convert is not in sin for being a new convert. He is simply not to be made an elder yet. A man whose household is in disorder is likewise not to be put in charge of God’s household. The text does not say why his household is in disorder, and it does not need to.

The requirement assumes the thing the Formula denies. Paul is writing about men who are otherwise fit to be elders: blameless, sober, hospitable, able to teach. He tells Timothy and Titus to check the children of such men as well. That instruction only makes sense if a man can have all the other marks of godliness and still have children who are out of hand. If deep fathers always had deep families, the extra check would be redundant.

And one word is worth noticing. The “riot” that an elder’s children must not be accused of is, in Greek, asōtia. Luke uses the related word for what the younger son did in the far country: he wasted his substance “with riotous living,” asōtōs (15:13). The father whom Jesus chose as a picture of God had a son who could be accused of exactly that.

What these texts establish: that the state of a man’s household is relevant evidence when a church is choosing its leaders. What they do not establish: that a grown child’s unbelief shows his father failed. The translation “faithful children” in Titus is itself disputed, some taking it as “believing” and some as “trustworthy,” and the page does not need to settle that.

3. God’s promises about children

This is the strongest ground, and Position F at its best is built here. Scripture does contain promises that reach to the next generation.

Charles Bridges, an Anglican vicar whose commentary on Proverbs has been in print since 1846, read 22:6 in the light of these. For him the verse was “the parental promise,” to be expected “as confidently as any other free promise of the gospel.” Part IX quotes him at length. He was no fool, and he had thought about the objection: the fruit may come late, he says, “perhaps not till the godly parent has been laid in the grave,” and “Education is utterly distinct from grace.”

Three things can be said that every tradition quoted on this site could accept.

These are promises about what God does, and they rest on his mercy. None of them is worded as a wage. “I will establish.” “The mercy of the LORD.” “As many as the Lord our God shall call.” They give a parent every reason to pray for a child and to hope for him. They do not describe a mechanism in which a method goes in and a believer comes out.

The same Scripture records children of the promise who turned from it. Esau was Abraham’s grandson and Isaac’s son. Paul faces the question head on: “For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel: Neither, because they are the seed of Abraham, are they all children” (Romans 9:6–7). Psalm 103 itself goes on: “to such as keep his covenant” (v. 18). The whole of Part V was about covenant children who rebelled.

And Genesis 18:19 says what God knew of Abraham. It is a statement of God’s purpose for one man and his line. It is a fine text on the duty of a father to “command his children.” It is not offered as a rule that every father who commands will be obeyed. Abraham’s own first son was sent away (Genesis 21:9–14).

How these promises work, who is included in them, and what they have to do with baptism are matters on which Lutherans, Reformed, Catholics and Baptists give different accounts. This page does not choose between them. The narrow point is one they share: whatever God has promised concerning the children of believers, he has not promised it as the output of rising early, firm discipline, close control and careful company.

4. The other proverbs that say “shall”

“Correct thy son, and he shall give thee rest; yea, he shall give delight unto thy soul” (Proverbs 29:17). “Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell” (23:14). These sound like guarantees too.

They are the same kind of sentence as 22:6, and Part II has already said what kind that is. Nobody concludes from 23:14 that a rod can save a soul. The verse is saying that discipline, as a rule, turns a child from a road that ends badly. Read as a mechanism it would contradict everything the New Testament says about how anyone is saved.

5. Sowing and reaping

“Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap” (Galatians 6:7). Look at the pronouns. A man reaps what he sows, in his own life: “he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption” (6:8). Two verses earlier Paul has said, “every man shall bear his own burden” (6:5). The text is about each person answering for himself, which is the opposite of what the Formula needs it to say.

The logic, set out

Put the five together and one conclusion is secure: a parent who neglects a child is answerable for it. Position W holds that as firmly as Position F.

The Formula needs something else: a child who goes wrong shows that the parent neglected him. That is a different statement, and it does not follow from the first. From “rain makes the street wet” you cannot conclude, on finding a wet street, that it has rained. Someone may have washed a car.

Try it: does it follow?

Six pieces of reasoning. For each, decide whether the conclusion follows from what comes before it.

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What the verse does not say

The author’s fifth point is the simplest to check. The sermon tied the fruit to early rising, discipline, parental control and avoiding bad influences. Proverbs 22:6 mentions none of them. The verse says: dedicate a youth according to his way. It does not say how.

That does not make the four things wrong. A preacher is entitled to gather wisdom from the rest of Scripture and offer it to parents. The question is whether each item is taught elsewhere, what Scripture says about its limits, and whether anything in the Bible attaches the promised fruit to it.

Try it: is it in the verse?

Eight things a preacher might say in a sermon on Proverbs 22:6. Sort each by where it comes from.

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The four items, one at a time

On the last item Scripture offers three cases that are hard to forget. Judas spent some three years in the best company there has ever been. “Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?” (John 6:70). The elder brother in the parable never left home, never kept bad company, and says so: “neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment” (Luke 15:29). He is the one outside the feast at the end. And Solomon had the warning in writing. God had said of the nations, “surely they will turn away your heart after their gods,” and the text adds, “Solomon clave unto these in love” (1 Kings 11:2). Good company does not guarantee the heart, and a known warning does not either.

So of the four items, three are sound wisdom that Scripture also qualifies, and one is not taught in the form the sermon gave it. All four are worth a parent’s attention. None is in Proverbs 22:6, and no text promises faithful adult children to those who do them.

What the research found about control

One of the longest studies of how faith passes between generations was begun in 1970 by the sociologist Vern Bengtson, who died in 2019. It followed some three hundred and fifty families over several decades. He summarised its main finding in an interview when his book came out:

We found that the highest generational transmission occurs in families with a high degree of warmth—particularly if the father is perceived as warm and close. It’s not enough for parents to be role models, send their kids to church, be involved in church and have devotional activities at home.

Vern L. Bengtson, interviewed in The Christian Century, December 2013, on Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down across Generations (Oxford University Press, 2013).

This is one study, of American families, and it measures what people say about their religion, which is not the same as faith. It is quoted for a modest reason. Where a father’s part has been measured, the thing that mattered most was not on the sermon’s list. It was closer to Colossians 3:21.

Whose fruit?

The sermon’s key word was “fruits.” It is a biblical word, and it is worth asking how the Bible uses it.

Fruit is what grows on a person’s own life. “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, Meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22–23). Every item is a quality of the person who bears it. When Jesus says, “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:20), he is telling his hearers how to recognise false prophets: by what the prophets themselves do. “For every tree is known by his own fruit” (Luke 6:44).

A child has fruit of his own. Proverbs says so in its first chapter, of those who refused instruction: “Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way” (1:31). There is the word “way” again. In 22:6 the youth is started on “his way.” In 1:31 the one who would not listen eats the fruit of “their own way.” The fruit of a way belongs to the one who walks it.

And the grower does not make the growth. “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6–7). In the parable of the sower one man scatters one kind of seed and gets four results, according to the ground (Matthew 13:3–8). In another parable the farmer sows and then sleeps and rises, “and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how” (Mark 4:27).

There is one sense in which Scripture calls children fruit, and it is in the psalm at the head of this Part: “the fruit of the womb is his reward.” They are fruit as a gift is fruit. The psalm’s point is that they come from God. It does not say they are a crop whose quality reports on the farmer.

If a parent’s fruit is to be looked for, Galatians says where to look: for love, patience, gentleness and faithfulness in the parent. A father can show every one of those to a son who has left. That is fruit, and it is his.

How a proverb became a promise

It would be natural to suppose that the Formula is the old reading and that Position W is a modern softening of it. The record runs the other way. This Part sets out how the verse was read, century by century, as far as this page has been able to check.

Before the Reformation

Part III showed that the oldest Greek Bibles do not contain the verse and that the Latin Bible read “It is a proverb: A young man according to his way.” A medieval Christian hearing that in church heard a remark about how youthful habits last. The Pulpit Commentary lists the sayings that were current beside it, among them a Latin jingle, Quod nova testa capit, inveterata sapit: what a new jar takes in, it tastes of when it is old. The line behind that is from the Roman poet Horace, and the Protestant commentators quote it again and again.

The greatest of the medieval Jewish commentators read the verse the same way, and said in so many words that it cuts in both directions:

According to what you teach a child and train him in matters, either for good or bad, even when he grows old, he will not turn away from it.

Rashi (Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes, d. 1105), commentary on Proverbs 22:6; trans. A. J. Rosenberg, The Judaica Press Complete Tanach with Rashi, at Sefaria.

Two centuries later Gersonides took it as a warning: train a youth according to the way his own nature inclines him, on the assumption that he will accept correction when he is older, and you will find he cannot be turned from it. Neither man saw a promise in it.

The Protestant commentators

The English Bibles from Coverdale on gave the verse its familiar moral sense: the way he should go. The men who wrote the standard commentaries on those Bibles all read it that way. And every one of them, having done so, adds that it has exceptions.

These four men agreed on very little else. Poole and Henry were Presbyterians, Gill a strict Calvinist Baptist, Wesley an Arminian whom Gill wrote against. On this verse they say the same thing in almost the same words: generally, ordinarily, for the most part. Gill calls it an “observation.” Poole says the contrary view is one “which experience confutes.” Wesley is willing to call it a promise, and in the same sentence says it is not a universal one.

Notice also the last sentence of Henry’s comment, quoted at the head of this Part. It is addressed to parents whose children have departed, and what it offers them is comfort: you did your duty.

1846: “the parental promise”

The earliest statement of the Formula this page has found is in the commentary of Charles Bridges, published in 1846. He was a devout and learned man and his book is still read with profit. On this verse he writes:

This training is indeed a work of watchful anxiety, attended with painful, and often long-protracted, exercise of faith and patience. Who could hold on in it, but for the Divine support of the parental promise — When he is old, he shall not depart from it? …

If then the promise is not fulfilled, it is because the duty is not performed. … With such a plain promise — the promise of “him who cannot lie, or repent,” and who will be true to every tittle of his word — need we ever be cast down?

Charles Bridges, An Exposition of the Book of Proverbs (1846), on 22:6; text as given in the public-domain edition at StudyLight, with his Scripture references omitted.

There it is in one sentence: If then the promise is not fulfilled, it is because the duty is not performed. Henry had written that parents whose children depart may take comfort in having done their duty. Bridges writes that if the children depart, the duty was not done. The two sentences were written 136 years apart, about the same verse, by men of the same faith.

Bridges should be read fairly. He grounds the promise in God’s covenant with believers and their children. He allows that the fruit may come “not till the godly parent has been laid in the grave.” He says that education “is utterly distinct from grace.” He is trying to encourage tired parents, and for a parent whose child is still young his page is full of good sense. But a guarantee comforts only until it appears not to have been kept. After that it does the opposite.

Why then? One clue is in his own footnotes. He cites the philosopher John Locke with approval: “of all the men we meet with, nine parts out of ten are what they are, good or bad, useful or not, according to their education.” That is a confidence about the power of upbringing that belongs to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries more than to the sixteenth. The page offers this as an observation and not as a finding: by Bridges’ day it had become much easier to believe that a child is what his training makes him.

In the same Victorian generation J. C. Ryle, later the first Bishop of Liverpool, opened a widely reprinted paper on the verse by asking why most children of his time did not grow up to walk with God. His answer: “The plain truth is, the Lord’s commandment in our text is not regarded—and therefore the Lord’s promise in our text is not fulfilled.” Ryle was speaking of a nation’s neglect and not of any one family, and the same paper says, “I know that you cannot convert your child.” But the two words are now fixed side by side: commandment, and promise.

The twentieth century

By the late twentieth century the promise reading was common enough in popular teaching that one of the most widely read evangelical writers on the family felt he had to answer it. James Dobson, who died in 2025, was asked whether the verse means that the children of dedicated Christian parents will never be lost:

I wish Solomon’s message to us could be interpreted that definitively. I know that the common understanding of the passage is to accept it as a divine guarantee, but it was not expressed in that context. … Didn’t the Creator handle Adam and Eve with infinite wisdom and love? He made no mistakes in “fathering” them. … Nevertheless, they ignored the explicit warning from God and stumbled into sin.

James C. Dobson, Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide (Tyndale House, 2000), as reprinted by the institute he founded under the title “Faithful Parents and Rebellious Children.”

He calls the guarantee “the common understanding.” He adds that his own reading is “somewhat controversial among laymen, but less so among biblical scholars,” and quotes a commentary by the faculty of a conservative seminary to the same effect: “Many of the proverbs are not absolute guarantees for they express truths that are necessarily conditioned by prevailing circumstances.”

The commentaries had in fact never moved. Derek Kidner in 1964 read “his way” as respect for the child’s “individuality and vocation, though not for his self-will.” Ted Hildebrandt’s study of 1988 begins: “This proverb has brought encouragement, hope, anxiety and guilt to countless parents who have faced the uncertainty and confusion of child-rearing.” Bruce Waltke in 2005 wrote that the proverb “must not be pushed.” And the volume that replaced Kidner’s in the same series says it most directly:

Some find here a promise that if they bring their children up in the ways of God, then they can guarantee that their children will be believers. Yet this is confusing a proverb with a promise. A proverb describes what is typically true, not what is universally true.

Lindsay Wilson, Proverbs: An Introduction and Commentary, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries (Inter-Varsity Press, 2017), p. 243. Given at second hand; see Part XIV.

Try it: who said it, and when?

Eight sentences about Proverbs 22:6. Match each to its author and date.

What the Formula does to a family

The author’s sixth point is that the pastoral stakes are high. This Part asks what the Formula does when it is believed. It does not suppose that any preacher intends these effects. It follows the logic.

Three things that follow from a guarantee

The test nobody can pass

Now apply the first of those to the people in Parts V and VI.

Samuel’s sons took bribes. By the Formula, Samuel failed as a father. Scripture does not say so, and it had the opportunity. Josiah’s three sons did evil. By the Formula, the king who turned to the Lord “with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might” failed at home. And Israel rebelled. By the Formula, the one who nourished and brought them up did not do it properly.

Nobody who preaches the Formula believes that last sentence. But it is the same inference, and it cannot be allowed in one case and refused in another. Either a child’s rebellion is evidence against the parent or it is not. If it is, Isaiah 1:2 is a confession. Since it is plainly a complaint, with heaven and earth called as witnesses, the inference is unsound, and it is unsound for every father.

The disciples made the same move about a blind man, in the verse at the head of this Part. They saw a hard outcome and went looking for the person whose fault it was, and “his parents” was the second name on their list. Jesus’ answer begins with one word: “Neither.”

What four listeners heard

A sermon is heard by particular people. Here are four of them, as this page imagines them, on the way home from a sermon that preached the verse as a guarantee.

The first has been handed guilt. The second has been handed fear, and his children will feel it. The third have been handed credit that is not theirs. The fourth has been told that her faith is a fact about someone else. Earlier dossiers looked at what happens to children raised under that weight: How to Make a Child Anxious and Can You Fool Your Children?

Position W says something different to each. To the mother: you were commanded to teach him, and you did; he is a man now and answers for himself; God has not finished. To the young father: train them, love them, and do not suppose you hold their hearts. To the couple: thank God, and take no credit. To the girl: your faith is yours, and so are your questions.

The proverb is still true

None of this means the verse is empty. A proverb that is not a guarantee is still a proverb, and this one is borne out by ordinary experience and by such counting as has been done.

Before the figure is shown, guess it.

That is what “generally” looks like when it is counted. Most people raised in a faith keep it. A large minority do not. A saying that described this would say something like: bring a child up in it, and as a rule he will stay. That is the proverb.

Three cautions about the figure. It counts what people call themselves, which is not the same as faith. “Raised Protestant” covers every kind of home from the devout to the nominal, so it says nothing about what careful training achieves. And it is one country in one decade. It is offered as an illustration of what a general truth is, and of nothing more.

If your grown child has left

This Part is for one kind of reader: the parent of a grown son or daughter who no longer believes. It offers no advice on what to say to that son or daughter. It sets out what the argument of this page leaves you with.

First, what this page has not said

It has not said you were a perfect parent. Nobody is told that, and James says of everyone, “in many things we offend all” (3:2). There may be things you would do differently, and some of them may have mattered.

Here the two readings part company in a way that is easy to miss. The Formula treats a parent’s failure as the explanation of the child’s unbelief, and has nothing to do with the failure afterwards except point at it. The gospel has something to do with it. “If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? But there is forgiveness with thee” (Psalm 130:3–4). A real fault as a parent is dealt with the way every other real fault is dealt with: it is confessed and forgiven. It is not turned into a life sentence by a proverb.

Five things that remain

A mother, a bishop, and a sentence often quoted

Many parents have been helped by a story from Augustine’s Confessions. His mother Monica had wept and prayed for years over her brilliant, unbelieving son. She begged a bishop to speak to him. The bishop refused, judging that Augustine was not yet ready to listen, and told her to keep praying. She would not stop asking, and at last he said:

Go your way, and God bless you, for it is not possible that the son of these tears should perish.

Augustine, Confessions III.12.21 (c. 397); trans. J. G. Pilkington (1887), at New Advent.

It is a kind thing to have said, and in that case it came true. It should be held as what it is. It is a bishop’s encouragement to one mother, and Augustine says she took it “as though it were a voice from heaven.” It is not a text of Scripture, and it would be a pity to rebuild the Formula out of it, with tears in the place of early rising.

One detail in the story is seldom mentioned. The bishop told Monica that he himself had been handed over to the same sect as a child, “by his misguided mother,” had read and copied nearly all its books, and had come to see through it without anyone arguing him out of it. He was trained up in the way he should not go, and when he was older he departed from it. Rashi said the proverb works “either for good or bad.” It has exceptions in both directions, and some of them are mercies.

Proverb or promise?

The page has argued that Proverbs 22:6 is a wisdom saying, and that preaching it as a guarantee does harm the preacher does not intend. The same slip can be made with any proverb. This Part offers a way to notice it.

What a sermon on this verse can safely say

Ten statements about a sermon

Think of the last sermon you heard on this verse, or on any proverb about results: wealth, health, long life, a happy home. Answer for that sermon. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and the result is a prompt for thought and nothing more.

The thornbush

Part II quoted Proverbs’ warning about itself: “As a thorn goeth up into the hand of a drunkard, so is a parable in the mouth of fools” (26:9). It is a harsh picture, and it is not being applied here to the preacher whose sermon began this page. He may have meant only to stir up careless fathers, and that is a good thing to do.

The picture is useful because of what it says about the saying. The thorn is real. It is the same thornbush whoever holds it. What makes it dangerous is being swung about without regard to who is standing near. In any congregation, some of the people standing near a sermon on Proverbs 22:6 have a grown child who has left. They are not hard to hit.

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Twenty-two items. Nearly everything here is free and online. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. Proverbs 22:1–16; 26:1–12; 1:1–9. Read this first. Ten minutes. The verse among its neighbours, the two warnings about a proverb in the wrong mouth, and the book’s own account of what it is for.
2. 2. Isaiah 1:2–4 and 5:1–7; Hosea 11:1–9; Jeremiah 7:21–28 and the whole of chapter 35; Luke 15. Read this first. Twenty minutes. God as a father, in his own words, and the three parables together.
3. 3. 1 Samuel 2:12–36; 3:10–18; 8:1–9; 12:1–5; Ezekiel 18. Read this first. Twenty minutes. Eli and Samuel side by side, and the chapter on fathers and sons. Write down what each father is blamed for.
4. 4. Proverbs 1–9, noting every “my son” and every “if”; 4:1–9; 5:7–14; 1 Kings 2:1–4 and 11:1–13; 1 Chronicles 28:9. Thirty minutes. The book’s address to the son, and its author’s own history.
5. 5. The kings of Judah: 1 Kings 15:1–15; 2 Chronicles 20:31–21:7; 24:1–2, 17–22; 25:1–2; 26:1–5, 16; 27:1–2; 28:1–4; 2 Kings 18:1–7; 21:1–9, 19–22; 22:1–2; 23:25–37; 24:17–19; 2 Chronicles 33:10–13; Jeremiah 22:13–19. Forty minutes. Every verdict used in Part VI.
6. 6. 1 Timothy 3:1–7; Titus 1:5–9; Genesis 17:1–8; 18:17–19; 21:8–14; Psalm 103:13–18; Isaiah 59:20–21; Acts 2:37–39; Romans 9:6–13; Galatians 6:1–10. Twenty-five minutes. The Formula’s best texts, each with its context.
7. 7. Psalm 127; Ephesians 6:1–4; Colossians 3:20–21; Deuteronomy 6:4–9; 21:18–21; 24:16; Galatians 5:22–23; 1 Corinthians 3:5–9; Matthew 13:1–9; Mark 4:26–29; John 6:66–71; 17:15. Twenty minutes. The sermon’s list, and whose fruit is whose.
8. 8. Job 1; 4:7–8; 8:1–7; 42:7–9; Ecclesiastes 2:18–21; 7:15; 9:11; 11:1–6; John 9:1–3. Fifteen minutes. Scripture’s own check on proverbs run backwards.
9. 9. The Hebrew text and the old versions. The Hebrew, with Rashi, Gersonides (in Hebrew) and Malbim, is at Sefaria under Proverbs 22:6; so is Kiddushin 30a. Luther 1545, the Geneva Bible (1599 printing), the Vulgate, Douay-Rheims, Young’s Literal Translation, Darby and the American Standard Version can be set side by side at Bible Gateway. Coverdale (1535) and the Bishops’ Bible (1568) are at textusreceptusbibles.com. The Authorised Version’s marginal notes are printed in any edition with the translators’ margin. Fifteen minutes.
10. 10. Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Proverbs of Solomon, trans. M. G. Easton (T. & T. Clark, 1875), on 22:6; The Pulpit Commentary, Proverbs, on 22:6; The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges, Proverbs, on 22:6; Albert Barnes, Notes, on 22:6. All free at Bible Hub, on one page. Fifteen minutes. The statements about the Septuagint are from Delitzsch and the Pulpit Commentary.
11. 11. Matthew Poole, Annotations upon the Holy Bible (1683), on Proverbs 22:6; John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament (1763–66), on the same. Free at Bible Hub. Five minutes.
12. 12. Matthew Henry, An Exposition of the Old and New Testament: vol. 3 (1710) on Proverbs 22:6; vol. 2 (1708) on 1 Samuel 8:1–3. Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Ten minutes.
13. 13. John Wesley, Sermon 95, “On the Education of Children” (1783). Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, whose scanned text has several obvious misprints (“form” for “from”), corrected in the quotations here. Twenty minutes.
14. 14. Charles Bridges, An Exposition of the Book of Proverbs (1846), on 22:6. Free at StudyLight; the spelling there has been Americanised. Fifteen minutes. Read the whole entry, which is more balanced than the one sentence quoted in Part IX. Scripture references in parentheses have been omitted from the quotations.
15. 15. J. C. Ryle, “The Duties of Parents,” collected in The Upper Room (1888). Free online in several reprints, some with modernised wording; the two sentences quoted are as given in one of those. Forty minutes.
16. 16. John Calvin, Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah (1551), on 1:2; trans. William Pringle (1850). Free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Ten minutes.
17. 17. Ted Hildebrandt, “Proverbs 22:6a: Train Up a Child?” Grace Theological Journal 9.1 (1988), pp. 3–19. Free online at the author’s site. Forty minutes. The fullest study of the Hebrew, and the source for the survey of readings in Part III.
18. 18. Four modern works quoted at second hand. Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, Chapters 15–31 (Eerdmans, 2005), p. 206, and Lindsay Wilson, Proverbs (Inter-Varsity Press, 2017), p. 243, are quoted as given in an online commentary on Proverbs 22 that cites both by page. Derek Kidner, Proverbs (Tyndale Press, 1964), p. 147, is quoted as given by a later expositor. Richard J. Clifford, Proverbs (Westminster John Knox, 1999), p. 197, is quoted as given in Jason DeRouchie, “Train Up a Child in the Way He Should Go” (2016). All four are library books. Check them against the printed page before relying on the exact wording.
19. 19. James C. Dobson, Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide (Tyndale House, 2000); the passage is reprinted on the website of the institute he founded as “Faithful Parents and Rebellious Children.” He cites John White, Parents in Pain (InterVarsity Press, 1979), and The Bible Knowledge Commentary: Old Testament (Victor Books, 1985), whose sentence on proverbs is quoted here as he gives it.
20. 20. On the numbers. Pew Research Center, 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, report of 26 February 2025, chapter on religious switching: 70 per cent of adults raised Protestant still identify as Protestant, and 57 per cent of those raised Catholic as Catholic. Vern L. Bengtson with Norella M. Putney and Susan Harris, Families and Faith: How Religion Is Passed Down across Generations (Oxford University Press, 2013); and “Families and faith,” an interview with Bengtson, The Christian Century, December 2013.
21. 21. Martin Luther, Large Catechism (1529), Part IV, paragraphs 77–82, trans. F. Bente and W. H. T. Dau, Triglot Concordia (1921); free at bookofconcord.org. Augustine, Confessions III.12, trans. J. G. Pilkington, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 1 (1887); free at New Advent, whose editors have modernised some of the wording.
22. 22. A sermon, and one family. Do this one. Take your notes of the last sermon you heard on a proverb, and mark each claim “in the verse” or “added.” Then think of one couple you know whose grown child has left the faith, and ask what this page would have you say to them, and what it would have you stop assuming.

No living individual is named on this page as an example of anything; the sermon that prompted it is described as a listener reported it, without identifying its preacher or his church, and no judgement of any person is intended. Living scholars are named only as the authors of published research and commentary, and a modern organisation only as the publisher of research. Apart from those, every individual quoted is deceased, or biblical, and is quoted from a dated, published source. Every remark attributed to a pastor, a father, a mother, a son or a daughter, and every person described, is composed by this page for illustration and does not describe any real person or family. This page gives no advice on raising children.