Archive for April 2005
Baby Wise
Ezzo, Gary. On Becoming Baby Wise. Hawks Flight & Association, 2001.
Of all the decisions new parents make, perhaps the most controversial is the style of care and feeding to use. There are a lot of competing ideas out there, some of which are strongly opposed to one another, although at times it seems they have more in common than folks are willing to admit. The two ideas that you will most often encounter are demand feeding and schedule feeding.
We have used schedule feeding for our children, and are very happy with the results. We have no experience with demand feeding, though I have heard cogent criticism of it. There is also criticism of schedule feeding, though I think much of it misses the point. Schedule feeding is not blindly clock-driven, but appropriately moderates regularity in service of the baby’s needs. Much of the underlying difference between the two methods is the question of whether babies are autonomous and able to accurately judge their needs; or whether babies are under the authority of parents who are able to wisely balance their child’s felt needs and desires with their child’s actual needs, the family’s needs, and the goal of developing good habits. Schedule feeding is the method that is presented in Baby Wise.
Some caution is needed in approaching Baby Wise. Ezzo frames schedule feeding as the only proper way to parent, which I think is an overstatement. Feeding style is an important decision that has broad influence, including even character development. But it is nonetheless a matter of personal preference, not a matter of religious importance.
Baby Wise has a lot of ideas to digest. We found three points to be of central importance:
- No snack/pacify feeding. This generally means to feed on a schedule, but with some flexibility.
- Follow a pattern of feed, wake, sleep. Avoid letting feeding becoming a crutch for sleeping.
- Establish a fairly consistent morning feeding time.
There are three corollaries that we also found helpful:
- It’s ok for a baby to cry, provided their diaper is clean and it’s not time to eat.
- This approach requires significant discipline, patience, and consistency on the parents’ part. In particular, the father should be committed to leading, encouraging, and helping through this.
- It does not matter whether you are breastfeeding or bottle feeding. We only have experience with bottle feeding, but we know families that have successfully used these methods when breastfeeding. The main challenge with breastfeeding is that it’s more difficult to know how much food the baby is receiving.
While using these principles, all of our children slept through the night by about 12 weeks, and as babies were always at least 80th percentile in weight. Even more importantly, they have been generally sweet and submissive. While we cannot know how much of this is due to schedule feeding, this is what we practice and recommend.
Lisa has also read and recommends Tracy Hogg’s Secrets of the Baby Whisperer, whose approach is similar to the above.
Holy Trinity
Letham, Robert. The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology and Worship. Phillipsburg, NJ: P & R Publishing, 2005.
This is an outstanding book. Letham begins with an overview of the Biblical doctrine of the trinity. He then describes the historical development of the doctrine of the trinity from the early church to the present, covering both the orthodox and heterodox. The book closes with an excellent overview of how the trinity ought to inform our life and worship.
While the entire book is very good, this closing section is the best part. Christianity is inescapably trinitarian: God’s nature is fundamentally triune, and His relation to man, through creation, revelation, salvation and glorification, is an unavoidable expression of His triunity. Yet so often our life and worship is practically unitarian. Letham wants to see the church recover an essential trinitarian life and worship, and this God-glorifying focus is very refreshing. Letham develops how this appropriate focus on the trinity will have vital practical outworking in our salvation, sanctification, worship, prayer, evangelism, and sacrificial love for fellow believers with whom we are united to Jesus.
Letham encourages us to see the trinity as expressed through all of reality, and to enjoy unity in diversity and diversity in unity. This contrasts on the one hand with postmodernism’s diversity without unity, and on the other hand Islam’s unity without diversity. Only Trinitarianism can understand a reality that is both united and diverse. (This echoes Van Til’s apologetic emphasis on the problem of the one and the many, to which only Trinitarian Christianity has an answer.)
It seems to me that an appropriate focus on the gospel must result in an appropriate understanding and focus on the trinity. Even more clearly than in creation, the gospel showcases both the unified and diverse act of God in saving us. Each person of the trinity plays a distinct role in our salvation, but the unity of God’s purpose and action in saving us is also clear.
Following are several quotes that struck me while reading this book:
Quoting Gregory Nazianzen, Oration on Holy Baptism:
This I give you to share, and to defend all your life, the one Godhead and power, found in the three in unity, and comprising the three separately; not unequal, in substances or natures, neither increased nor diminished by superiorities or inferiorities; in every respect equal, in every respect the same; just as the beauty and the greatness of the heavens is one; the infinite conjunction of three infinite ones, each God when considered in himself; as the Father, so the Son; as the Son, so the Holy Spirit; the three one God when contemplated together; each God because consubstantial; one God because of the monarchia. No sooner do I conceive of the one than I am illumined by the splendour of the three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the one. When I think of any one of the three I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me. I cannot grasp the greatness of that one so as to attribute a greater greatness to the rest. When I contemplate the three together, I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light.
On the filioque and Jesus’ eternal submission (but not subordination) to the Father (p. 401), reminding us that God is who He has objectively revealed Himself to be:
The economic Trinity is a reliable gauge of the immanent trinity, owing to the faithfulness of God [emphasis mine]. [Quoting Jurgen Moltmann], “One cannot say, therefore, that something holds true in God’s revelation, but not in God’s being.”
Quoting Sergius Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church:
The dogma of the Holy Trinity is not only a doctrinal form, but a loving Christian experience which is constantly developing; it is a fact of the Christian life. For life in Christ unites with the Holy Trinity, gives a knowledge of the Father’s love and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. There is no truly Christian life, apart from knowledge of the Trinity; this is abundantly witnessed in Christian literature.
I gotta have my orange juice. 