The word “manners” can elicit various images, and not all of these images are good. To some, the word may evoke a picture of a self-righteous curmudgeon who snarls as he shouts, “Mind your manners!”
To others, the word may call to mind a meticulous relative, one notorious for her absence of grace and proper proportion. However, still for others, the word elicits someone sweet and is accompanied by feelings of something lost in our society.
But whatever picture you may have in your mind, I want to suggest that manners are indispensable, especially in the education of children, and that the failure to train our children in them harms those we are called by God to teach.
Scripture as the Foundation
As with all things, we should look first to the Scriptures to guide us. Are there any insights into manners from the Bible? In the Old Testament, there are clear examples of standards of what appropriate social conduct is, practices we would today call manners.
In Leviticus, God gives a direct command for the treatment of the elderly: “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man” (Lev. 19:32a), and in Proverbs, we are encouraged not to overstay our welcome when we visit our neighbour (Prov. 25:17).
In the New Testament, we are told to be careful with the words we use (Eph. 4:29). These, and various other directives, should inform our conduct and help shape our behaviour toward others. But there is something even more fundamental than these specific examples in the Scriptures.
Love Is Proved by Action
The two greatest commandments, Christ tells us, are to love God with our entire being and to love our neighbour as ourselves (Matt. 22:36–40). Now it is disingenuous to claim to love God with our whole heart if we do not regularly spend time with him in prayer and read his Word; however, what it means to love our neighbour is often debated, as Luke 10:29 illustrates: “But he, desiring to justify himself, said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’”
Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians helps give us a greater appreciation for and clarity about the significance of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and it does so in a way that should shape our regular routines and conduct with one another.
In Galatians 5:14, there is an apparent tension with the passage from Matthew 22. Paul writes, “For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’” But wait, what about loving God? The first and pre-eminent of the greatest commandments is, on first reading, peculiar in its absence. There is, however, no tension or contradiction. The paradox reveals reality in a way that we may not have otherwise seen.
Simply put, how we love God is put on display by how we love our neighbour, the person we see in front of us who is made in the image of God. The two greatest commandments are one—though distinctions must be made at times—and they are bound together in our treatment of the neighbour before us.
While it is important to spend time in prayer and God’s Word, it’s all too possible to do so and remain detached from God, as many of the religious leaders did in Jesus’ time. But we need the grace of God Almighty and the love of Christ in our hearts to direct us rightly to our neighbour. We can have dreams of loving humanity while in reality despising those around us, as Dostoyevsky suggests through one of his characters in The Brothers Karamazov:
It takes more than dreams of sacrifice about abstract people; real love is active in its response to the person in front of us. It is in our neighbour that our love for God is proved and fulfilled and our heart is given the opportunity to grow.
But what does all this have to do with manners? Simply this: Manners are the outward forms of an inward care for others. They are ways—though varied in different times, locations, and cultures—that we display our love for others.
Manners are the outward forms of an inward care for others.
To Love Is to Say “Thank You”
Now it is true that we can have good manners and hard hearts, but it is difficult to see how we can genuinely and regularly show care for others while ignoring manners. It is difficult to understand how we can be attentive in our love for others and not say “Please” when we ask for something and “Thank you” when we receive help or a gift.
It is also difficult to see how we can care for others if we never bother even to look at them when they speak to us, or to ask them, with genuine interest, how they are. It is in these small but meaningful ways that we help fulfill the calling that God places upon us and our children to love our neighbours as ourselves.
As a parent and an educator, I can promise you this: children do not learn manners naturally. Considering how we are to train children up in the way that they should go (Prov. 22:6; Eph. 6:4), and as loving others and looking for ways to bless them is God’s calling on all of our lives, good manners are one of the indispensable ways that we can help children orient themselves to the life God calls them and us to.
Errors on Every Side
But is this all not legalism? Will this not lead to a subtle works-based salvation? It is possible that manners, like many other good things, can, without a proper understanding of the gospel, lead a child astray.
However, if our children do not have a clear understanding of what God expects of us, namely that we are to love others in concrete ways, it is unlikely that our children will understand the depth of human sin residing in their own hearts—that we are curved in on ourselves (in the famous Augustinian idea: incurvatus in se). We prefer to please ourselves rather than care for our neighbours, and only the gospel can set us free to truly serve others as we ought.
Any child’s education must be handled with care, and there are errors on every side. Can manners ever be a problem? Yes. Whenever we look down upon others because we do something that they do not do, we are no better than Pharisees and have twisted the intent of manners into something perverse and vain.
But there is another concern that I should mention here. We must encourage basic manners, such as saying “Please” and “Thank you,” not being rude when speaking to someone, and not interrupting when someone is speaking; however, not all manners are created equal. There are other manners, things that are viewed as polite forms of behaviour in our current culture, that we must resist as Christians.
It is now considered good manners in our culture to affirm people in sin or, at the very least, to not say anything that may unsettle a person’s expression of himself or herself, however destructive these expressions may be. Though we want to be polite and always filled with grace when we speak, Christian manners must not require silence when there are serious temporal and eternal consequences at stake in a person’s life due to his or her behaviour. We are called to be good rather than “nice” and always inoffensive.
Something else worth mentioning is that though much of what used to be considered basic manners is fading in our culture, even a recovery of these forms of proper conduct is insufficient. Christian manners go further. Christian manners mean going the extra mile (Matt. 5:41), doing good to those who persecute us, and loving our enemies (Matt. 5:44). We should be more thankful, hospitable, charitable, generous, and more kind than mere “good manners” would seem to imply. While basic manners are important, and children need to be taught them, what God calls his people to is higher still.
Manners, at their best, are the cultural forms that we use to show others our love and care for them. Though there are times when manners may be distorted and some of their cultural expressions found wanting, they are essential to teach to our children, and we neglect them at our peril and theirs, as well as the common good.
