Dare to Be a Daniel

What you may hear

Children’s class, closing the lesson:

“So what do we learn from Daniel? Daniel was brave. He prayed even when it was against the law. So this week, when it’s hard to do the right thing, be like Daniel!”

Or with any hero: be like David, be courageous like Esther, have faith like Abraham, be a friend like Jonathan.

Why it matters

This is the most common error in the guide and the least likely to be recognized as one, because nothing false has been said. Daniel was brave. Children should be brave. Every sentence is true and the lesson is still wrong, because of what was left out and what the child now believes the Bible is.

A child taught this way learns that Scripture is a collection of admirable people and that his job is to match them. Two things follow, and both are predictable. He will fail — he is not braver than Daniel — and he will conclude that the Bible is mainly about his performance. When he is fifteen and has stopped succeeding, the book will have nothing to say to him, because he was taught it as a standard and never as a gift.

It also loses the actual point of the passage. Daniel in the den is not primarily a story about Daniel’s courage. It is a story about a God who shuts the mouths of lions and delivers his people, told to exiles who needed to know their God was still God in Babylon. That is gospel. Be brave is not.

Moralism is not the opposite of Christianity. It is Christianity with the Christ removed and the imperative left standing, and it is the default setting of nearly every children’s curriculum in print.

What to do instead

1. Ask what God is doing in the passage. Not what the human character is doing. This one question, asked every week, will fix most of it.
2. Let the text be about the rescue. Then, if the character’s faithfulness is genuinely part of the passage, teach it as the fruit of trusting that God — never as the lesson’s point.
3. End on what has been given, not on what is owed. A children’s lesson that ends with a command has ended in the wrong place.
4. Watch the curriculum. Most published children’s material is moralistic by default. The application box at the end of the lesson is where it usually lives, and you may replace it.
5. Do not strip out obedience. The answer to moralism is not that behavior does not matter. It is that behavior follows the gift rather than earning it.

One line you can actually use

“The story isn’t ‘be like Daniel.’ It’s ’look what God did for Daniel — and he’s your God too.’”

If the student asks

A child asks: > “So I don’t have to be brave?”

Do not answer with a paragraph about law and gospel.

“You’ll get to be brave sometimes, and God will help you. But the reason you can be brave isn’t that you’re strong. It’s that God is holding onto you, the way he held onto Daniel. He doesn’t let go when you’re scared.”

An adult asks: “Aren’t we supposed to imitate the saints? Hebrews 11 does exactly that.” Grant it, and note what Hebrews 11 says about them — they were commended for faith, and what they trusted was a promise they had not yet received. The chapter is about the object of their faith, not their character.

The confessional citation

Binding:

• Small Catechism, the Ten Commandments — every explanation begins with we should fear and love God. Even the law, in the Catechism, is taught inside a relationship God established. A children’s lesson that gives the command without the God who gives it has not even taught the law correctly.
• Small Catechism, the Creed, Second Article — that I may be his own and live under him in his kingdom. The order: redemption first, then the living under.
• Augsburg Confession VI — faith should produce good fruits, and we must do the good works commanded by God — but not in order to merit justification. Decisive: fruit, not root, and the article says both halves.

Supplementary: Formula of Concord VI on the third use of the law.

Scripture: Luke 24:27; Hebrews 11:39–40.

What not to do

• Do not overcorrect into no application at all. Children can be told what to do. They must not be told that doing it is the point.
• Do not force Christ into every verse artificially. A strained typology teaches children that the Bible is a puzzle only clever people can solve. Follow the connections Scripture itself draws.
• Do not humiliate the teacher who does this. Every children’s curriculum in the building probably does it too.
• Do not make the correction abstract. “Avoid moralism” means nothing to a volunteer. “Ask what God is doing” is portable and can be used next Sunday.