I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.This is a snippet from a much larger citation that was meant to explain why Paul didn't "go deep" in Christ's teachings with the newly Christianized people in Corinth - He taught basic principles first because that was all they could handle at the time.
Incorrectly, many modern Christians have re-translated this idea as an eternal infancy where Christ and his Gospel is simplified into some watered-down milk and matured adult followers of Christ should be satisfied with such a insubstantial religious diet. "Milk before meat" where, for many sincere seekers, the real sustaining meat rarely comes from modern churches.
It reminds me of one description of Pablum, the old infant cereal:
- Pablum
- Something overly bland, simplistic, especially speech or writing
When I read this, I think mostly of "pre-digested". The baby food industry plows away at making nutrition easily bottled and "slid down the gullet" effortlessly. There are even packaged tubes of "easy food" so that older children (perhaps even adults) don't have to endure chewing and can simply suck down ground-up nutrients from some factory. Yet, there are voices that decry this pre-digestion trend and that post-infant humans are not designed or meant to suck food out of toothpaste tubes.
We are witnessing a similar infantilization of public education - pre-canned and packaged for the ease of both teacher and student and the profit of industry. The act of acquiring and using skills and knowledge has been reduced to staring at screens and taking easy-to-grade multiple-choice tests. The literature is screaming to anyone that will listen that such "pre-digested" education is less-than-inadequate and even the machine-graded tests are making the poor schooling plain to see.
Following in the footsteps of a failed system of Pablum, Christianity itself is being run through a mindless factory where the Gospel of Jesus Christ is crushed through a tight sieve, filtering out any challenging or demanding concepts or effort, mixing in some re-interpreted scripture passages like so many crushed-up vitamin pills, and presenting a constant watery gush of "Jesus" slurry that goes down easily for spiritual toddlers. Your typical church may only serve up religious Pablum, the sanitized bible stories and easy-to-swallow morals of huggy-Jesus and some "unconditional love" that we used to reserve for naturally-ignorant children, now offered to religiously anemic adults as the whole Gospel.
No wonder so many people, especially young adults, abandon Pablum-saturated religions and turn to other sources in hope of spiritual fulfillment, despairing that there always will be large empty spaces in their souls that slide into social and physical vandalism of all kinds and often prisons of mental illness or physical degeneracy. Pre-digested Bible-babel is literally an existential sham, where deeper meaning and fulfillment is substituted with a baby-jesus who cannot possibly "save".
The scripture about "milk" actually describes a religious infancy, from which we are to develop into maturity. The days of being spoon-fed bible stories by mothering nursery-teachers must graduate quickly into each individual person accessing scriptures themselves, studying what God, Christ, prophets, and apostles actually say, unvarnished by the opinions or "watering-down" of translators. Ultimately, we should go to God directly, praying for clarification and answers for ourselves, listening for the Spirit of God to tell us what is true. That is the "meat" that Paul was referring to - not being a follower of one preacher or another, but getting the truth of the matter from Christ himself through spiritual confirmations to our own spiritual struggling.
Satisfactory mature answers will NOT come through some milky Kindergarten Pablum curriculum alone. We need to actually *chew* on these transcendentally meaningful things.
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