Corporal Discipline (a/k/a corporal punishment and spanking) is strongly supported by God in the Bible
Recent changes in some of our positions on this topic
Last Updated March 17, 2008
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Our Corporal Discipline page is consistently one of the most popular links on our site. For that reason we felt it was important to explain to our visitors that we have recently (March, 2008) changed some of our positions on this issue, and why we did it. This all came about because of an excellent video we recently watched titled "What the Bible has to say about spanking" by Dr. S. M. Davis. In our opinion, this video should be in every home and church in America. As the parents of six children ages 4 - 22, we have seen no finer education material on this topic than this video. As a result of new information (new to us) we learned from it, we have changed some of our positions and have clarified others:
We will from now on refer to it as corporal "discipline" instead of "punishment" because there is a biblical difference between the two, and the former is the more accurate. In order to limit the size of this page, we won't delve into that any further. Watch Dr. Davis's video for more information. Because this page has been indexed by many search engines as corporalpunishment.html, we'll leave it named that way so it won't drop out of those search engines.
We previously had concluded that paddles and rods were both appropriate for corporal discipline. After watching Dr. Davis's video, we now take the position that only rods are.
We tried to define what we think the Bible is referring to when it speaks of using a "rod". We are just going to echo the excellent exegesis that Dr. Davis did in this video to support our position.
We have placed much greater emphasis on this page to never administering corporal discipline to a child when you're angry.
We needed to do a better job of explaining why we believe God's word only allows for the use of corporal discipline on the buttocks.