Christian Parents – – Strive for Homes With High “Relative Humidity” This Weekend

The great theologian Cornelius Van Til describes the atmosphere of his boyhood home:

Ours was not in any sense a pietistic family.  There were not any great emotional outbursts on any occasion that I recall.  There was much ado about making hay in the summer and about caring for the cows and sheep in the winter, but round about it all, there was a deep conditioning atmosphere.  Though there were not tropical showers of revivals, the relative humidity was always very high.  At every meal the whole family was present.  There was a closing as well as an opening prayer, and a chapter of the Bible was read each time .  . . The Bible became for me, in all its parts, in every syllable, the very Word of God.  I learned that I must believe the Scripture story, and that “faith” was a gift of God.  Whyat has happened in the past, and particularly what happened in the past in Palestine, was of the greatest moment to me.  (Van Til, Why I Believe in God).

(Full disclosure: at the Brauns house, we don’t pull off the bit about all of the family being at every meal – – don’t get bogged down in the word “every”- – the point is that the “relative humidity” of Truth was high in the Van Til home).