When your 7-year-old asks this month, “Mommy, what does the rainbow mean?,” be ready with something like, “Well, honey, remember the story of Noah? The rainbow is God’s promise to never flood the earth again and a reminder of God’s covenant with His people. But some wicked people who hate God and His word are trying to steal the rainbow and have turned it into a symbol of pride and sin. So every time you see the rainbow, you should do two things: thank God for His mercy, and pray for the sinners to repent and turn to Jesus.”
“Fathers, bring your children up in the paideia of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). The Greek word paideia has undergone a renaissance over the last 30 years or so, thanks to the classical Christian education movement. Many Christian families are at least familiar with the concept. Paideia is the all-encompassing enculturation and formation of a child into a citizen. Christian paideia, then, is all-encompassing Christian discipleship.
Paideia is how a people passes on its customs, culture, and religion to the next generation. Paideia instructs the mind and shapes the heart. It includes both formal instruction (like in schools) as well as informal, daily, as-you-go instruction. As Deuteronomy 6 instructs us, “You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.”
In this sense, paideia is immersive and environmental. True paideia involves embedding reminders of our culture, values, and beliefs everywhere. This is why God commands Israel to put up stones of remembrance; they were to be signs of God’s mighty deeds so that “When your children ask in time to come, ‘What do those stones mean to you?’ (Joshua 4:6-7).