t is the relationship of God the Creator with us the creatures He made (p. 142). In our original state, God desired that mankind serve as caretakers for the rest of His creation. Not content to be creatures, we attempted to be godlike, and the result has been a clouding of the knowledge of ourselves. The energy mankind now expends to explain itself is a continuation of this corruption. According to Vander Goot, as the result of original sin:
our wills became corrupt, our understanding blurred, our human relationships stressful, our guardianship of other creatures unreliable, our feelings bent, and our actions inadequate. . . . (T)he scars that marred the relationship of humankind with God also marred the relationship of all things created with each other (p. 143).
As Christians, we can use the fundamental assumptions provided by various secular theories of development as means of understanding why we sometimes act the way we do. But we must temper our use of these theories with the realization that
secular science is not . . . a fiction; Christian and secular scientists do not live in different worlds. Rather, having lost their point of orientation secular scientists account for God's earth in a way that intentionally ignores the divine role in human events. They have lost the context that preserves the mystery of existence (Vander Goot, 1987, p. 146).
What we are confronted with is a form of idolatry. Important to remember, however, is that God's condemnation of idolatry is not a condemnation of the idols themselves, but of the unbelief. A particular human function may be held up to be idolized by secular science, but it is the distortion of the function and not the function itself to which the Christian must object (Vander Goot, 1987, p. 147).
With this in mind, this paper will examine several of the secular conceptions of the ways in which children progress from infants toward adolescence; it will ...