‘Such perfecting of praise out of the mouth of a babe’: Sarah Wight as Child Prophet
Recovering the voice of the child in the Church is hard. Christians must reckon with Jesus’ instruction to be like a child, yet the Church usually measures faith by mastery of an adult vocabulary of religious experience. The historian has to dig past adult prejudices and silences. Recent research ha...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
1994
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| In: |
Studies in church history
Year: 1994, Volume: 31, Pages: 313-324 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Recovering the voice of the child in the Church is hard. Christians must reckon with Jesus’ instruction to be like a child, yet the Church usually measures faith by mastery of an adult vocabulary of religious experience. The historian has to dig past adult prejudices and silences. Recent research has done much to rescue the children of early modern England from anonymity. We know, for example, about the ideal of an ‘ordered society’, in which children and youths took their place as ‘inferiors’, and yet were valued and loved. We also know that the vision of order was rarely achieved, in a country swarming with juveniles. Attempts to make the vision outward and visible can be seen in arrangements for seating in church, where the young sat apart from their elders, and in the all-pervasive discipline of catechizing, where the assumption that age instructs youth is inherent in the pattern of proceeding by question and answer. Most of the sources that tell us about childhood, however, are heavily prescriptive, or rush past youth after listing a few predictable sins. |
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| ISSN: | 2059-0644 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Studies in church history
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S042420840001295X |
