Category: Family life

In Defense of the Family

Recently someone pointed me to this article from 2010 from an OPC Minister. I think it particularly bad and will spend some time pointing out its problems and hopefully correcting them.

http://opc.org/os.html?article_id=226

OPC Minister (Hereinafter OPC)

Families Are of this World, but the Church Is of the Next

We begin by observing that marriage is a temporary, for-this-life-only institution. Although marriage is given us by God for several reasons, its main purpose is to symbolize the relationship between Christ and his church, as the Apostle Paul teaches in Ephesians 5:25-32. This primary and exemplary purpose is more central to the institution of marriage than childbearing, which is the means by which a marriage becomes a family.

Bret

We would note in our hymnody we sing of families being reunited in the next life,

Thus to the parents and their seed
shall thy salvation come
and numerous households will meet at last
in one eternal home

But beyond hymnody the speaks of the coming day when the circle of family will be unbroken Scripture gives us reason to think that families exist beyond this life. In the book of Revelation there is the repeated mention of Nations present in the new Jerusalem. Now, as Nations are constituted in the Scriptures as a people with a shared lineage (Genesis),  a shared history (Exodus), having a common law (Deuteronomy) sharing a common land (Joshua) and having kin leadership (Judges) it seems obvious that when the book of Revelation speaks of Nations in the New Jerusalem that families, like the Church, are of the next world.

Revelation 22:1 Then he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and of the Lamb, 2in the middle of its street. On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

Revelation 21:23And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. 24 The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it…. The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it.

Rev. Kingsbury seems to think that the new Heaven and Earth is an existence that is largely discontinuous with this life. It is better to think that what is to be expected of the new Heaven and Earth is a transfiguration of this life with all the expected continuities and discontinuities. The result of the consummation then is not abolition of this world but rather redemption of it including the redemption of a family structure that exists in the next world.

Second, on this point, though the Ephesians 5 passage does teach that Christian Marriage is analogous of Christ and the Church, Ephesians 5 nowhere explicitly teaches that this analogy is the main purpose of Marriage. Now certainly, the primary purpose of Marriage, like the primary purpose of all things that we as Christians do is to glorify God but to say that the main purpose of Marriage is to symbolize the relationship between Christ and his church goes beyond what Ephesians 5 teaches.

OPC

What do the Scriptures say?

Interestingly, no text in Scripture teaches that bearing children is a universal purpose of marriage, that is, something which should characterize every marriage. While Psalms 127 and 128, among other passages, say children are a blessing, they do not say every marriage ought to produce children.

Bret

So, what is being advanced here is that Scripture does teach that children are a blessing from God but that some marriages do not need or want to be blessed by God?

OPC

Genesis 1:28 records the “dominion mandate” given to the first married couple: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Some assume, therefore, that married couples ought be about the business of filling the earth with more people. However, God gave Adam and Eve this commandment not because they were a married couple, but because they were the married couple—that is, all mankind. Hence, the dominion mandate is given to all humanity and is to be carried out by humanity as a whole, but not necessarily by every human being. To put it another way, if Genesis 1:28 means every marriage ought to produce children, then every marriage ought also to be dedicated to agricultural productivity.

Bret

1.) Where in the text of Genesis does Rev. Kingsbury find that the reason for God’s command to be fruitful and multiply was “because they were the married couple—that is, all mankind”? Of course, that is eisegetical work on th part of Rev. Kingsbury.

2.) How is the dominion mandate given to all humanity, and to be carried out by all humanity as a whole without individual humans carrying out the dominion mandate?

3.) Genesis 1:28 does not say to Adam and Eve to be farmers, though Adam likely was a tiller of the ground. Genesis 1:28 teaches a cultural mandate that requires that all men, as God’s sub-regent, to have dominion over creation. That command to be God’s sub-regent unto godly dominion remains, just as the command remains that all men be fruitful and multiply.

OPC

Marriage’s symbolic function will be moot in glory when we have perfect union with Christ, and so it will pass away: “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matt. 22:30). If marriages pass away, then so do families. The family, in its nuclear form, grows out of and depends on a marriage for its existence; therefore, whatever is true of the greater (marriage) is true of the lesser (family).

Even in this life, families are temporary. They are regularly broken up and reorganized as children marry and form their own families. In fact, whenever children grow up and go out into the world, their parent’s authority ends. For practical purposes, this also effectively dissolves the family. Of course, I do not deny the enduring nature of kinship ties which persist as family members go their own ways, or even when a divorce occurs. When I speak of family dissolution here, I am using the word “family” in its most narrow, technical sense, i.e., the nuclear family.

Bret

1.) The fact that in the resurrection that “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage,” does not mean or prove that family disappears in the eschaton. If indeed future marriage passes away that does not mean that past family realities disappear. Given Kingsbury’s reasoning we might also say that since they neither marry nor are given in marriage therefore gender passes away in the eschaton. If marriage passes away, then so does gender. Gender is necessary for marriage and marriage depends on gender therefore since there will no marriage in the eschaton therefore there is to be no gender. Whatever is true of the greater (marriage) is true of the lesser (gender).

Rev. Kingsbury’s reasoning is curious.

2.) A family that extends into new family units does not mean the end of families, per Rev. Kingsbury, but rather their continuance. One problem is that Rev. Kingsbury thinks in terms of “nuclear family,” while the Scripture speaks of families in their Trustee capacity. Family is not defined, per Scripture, as the Nuclear unit, but rather more in terms of what we might refer to as clans. So, Christian families are not broken up with the advent of the marriage of children and the arrival of grandchildren but instead are strengthened and extended.

OPC

Families are like the rest of this world: impermanent and continually passing away. Therefore, families have a diminished importance within a Christian taxonomy of values, especially when compared to the church. While the church is eternal and will not find her perfect expression until glory, she has begun and lives out that life already, in the here and now. The church manifests the eternal and heavenly in the middle of a temporary and earthly world. Because she is eternal, the church is more important than the temporary family.

Bret

We established earlier that Christian families are not impermanent but pass into the eschaton therefore the fallacy of this argument is obvious.

The argument that the Church is more important than the family is like arguing that the left leg is more important than the right leg when it comes to walking. It is a non sequitur argument. The fact that the Church and the family are bound up together in importance is seen in the Baptismal font. God claims our familial generations as His own and in Baptism ratifies His claim upon His and our seed. Baptism speaks of God’s faithfulness to His promise to the generations.

To argue that the Church is more important than family is like arguing that pregnancy is more important than sex. Pregnancy may well be more important than sex but without sex no ones getting pregnant.

Secondly, while I understand that “Word and Sacrament” belong uniquely to the Church I’m not sure why the Church alone is able to manifest the eternal and heavenly in the middle of a temporary and earthly world. The permanence of matters eternal can incarnate themselves in family worship and in Christian families.

OPC Minister

Because the eternal church has precedence over the earthly and temporary family, Jesus demands loyalty to himself first and last. In a decision between Jesus and his church versus the family, Jesus wins. This is simple when parents are unbelievers and guilty of obvious sin, but less obvious when one has Christian parents who attempt to usurp the church’s authority.

Bret

Of course the Lord Christ is the priority above all priorities. Who could ever disagree with that? However, lest we fall into some kind of ecclesiocentrism I would be careful about perfectly equating the Lord Christ and the Church as if the voice of the Church is always the voice of the Lord Christ. While it is true “that in a decision between Jesus and his church versus the (errant) family, Jesus wins,” it is also true that in a decision between the Lord Christ and an errant Church demanding departure from a faithful family, the family standing with the Lord Christ wins.

Rev. Kingsbury misses the close interdependence of Church and Family. For examples Elders are not qualified to serve in the Church without managing his family well. This provides insight into the interdependence of Institutional Church and family.  Elders are to be husbands of one wife thus again drawing linkage between leadership in home and church.

In a time when the family is being viciously attacked from all sides it really does us little good for representatives of the Church to be “reasoning” like this. Now, certainly, it is possible to lift the family above the Church so that it is wrongly prioritized but the answer to that is not to tear down the family but to show that the Church has its proper place in God’s economy.

 

The Hypotheticals of Littlejohn and McAtee

Over here

http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2015/09/thinking-thrice-before-support.php

Dr. Brad Littlejohn gives a series of  hypothetical examples that might prove that Christians should re-think supporting Kim Davis’ resistance to issuing sodomite marriage licenses. His examples are as follows,

In the year 2006, Captain Joseph Rodriguez of Aurora, CO, a Christian, was dishonorably discharged from the Army after refusing to follow orders to deploy his company to Iraq, on the grounds that it was a Biblically unjust war.
In 2007, Amy White of Evansville, IN, a Christian, was fired from her job as a grocery sales clerk for refusing to process any purchases of pornographic magazines.
In 2008, Judge William Clark of Macon, GA, a Christian, was forced into early retirement for refusing to hear the majority of divorce cases in his court, on the grounds that none of them met biblical grounds for divorce. 
In 2009, Molly Thompson of Billings, MT, a Christian, was fired from her job as a hotel clerk for refusing to allow gay couples, or obviously unwed couples, to check into the same hotel room. 
In 2010, John Barlow of Rochester, MN, a Christian, lost his job as a loan officer at a payday loan company for actively advising his customers not to take out loans from the company, and to go elsewhere where they would not be usuriously exploited,

In 2011, Michael Jones, a policeman of St. Petersburg, FL, and a Christian, was jailed and suspended from the force after conspiring to shelter an undocumented immigrant mother and her son, rather than arresting them to get them deported, as he was ordered.

 

From these examples Dr. Littlejohn asks rhetorically,

Here is my question: if Christians are going to hold up Kim Davis as a paragon of Christ-like refusal to compromise with injustice, then how soon are we going to hold up the hypothetical John Barlow or Joseph Rodriguez or William Black as well? Are we all prepared to examine our own vocations with the same rigor, and leave all to follow Christ? And if not, then is our admiration of Kim Davis simply proof of what progressives accuse us of–namely, a highly selective Pharisaism that takes sexual sins with profound seriousness, and everything else as relatively negotiable?

But this is a case where sauce for the good is sauce for the gander.

** In 2006 Mary Lewiston worked as a organ procurement agent for Planned Parenthood. Everything that Mary does is in keeping with the law. Mary is asked to cut a baby’s head open to secure it’s brains for delivery to the buyer. Mary does so because she follows Dr. Littlejohn’s advice and decides this is “prudent.”

** In 2007 John Sanchez worked as a Pharmaceutical salesman. He knows that his task is really to get people hooked on prescription drugs. His job is perfectly consistent with the laws. John decides to continue being a drug pusher because to raise a Christian objection would ruin his testimony with his coworkers who desperately need Christ.

** In 2008 Alex Cho worked for Pepsi. His wife Donna Cho worked of Lays. Both of them realize that fetal cells are used to enhance the taste of the products of the companies they work for. Everything they do is consistent with the laws of the land. The do not raise a protest as Christians because they learned from Dr. Littlejohn that, Christians, like their Savior, are never supposed to be quarrelsome.

** In 2010 Dr. John Little worked as the head of research at Monsanto. He is responsible for genetically engineering food that he knows increases the likelihood of tumors in people as well as demonstrating a pattern of reproductive problems in those who consume the food. He knows his food is modifying human DNA. However, Dr. John Little reasons that the vastly increased yields of his crops can feed the world. Dr. John Little operates perfectly within the bounds of the law. Dr. John Little keeps poisoning the food source for the glory of Jesus.

** In 2011 Dr. Thabiti Smith worked as the head of vaccine development for Merck Industries. Dr. Thabiti Smith knows that deadly agents are put into the vaccines but reasons that the good outweighs the bad. Dr. Thabiti Smith decides that this passes Dr. Littlejohn’s “Prudence test.”

Here is my question: Where would Dr. Littlejohn have us draw the line for Christian resistance? If we don’t draw it at the point where the enemy is seeking to protect the institution of Marriage and family won’t it make it easier to not draw the line in other places? If we will not draw the line at the point where Marriage is being redefined how are we not complicit in social order libertinism?  If we will not draw the line here will it not prove what the progressives accuse us of — namely that at the end of the day we are not really any different from them.

The Christian Faith and Marriage — A Brief Distillation

Human history begins with a wedding in the garden (Gen. 2:22-24). In the Fall, the first place where one finds Alienation, after alienation from God, is alienation between the husband and wife (Gen. 3:12). The re-creation, which restores man to God’s Kingdom garden, begins with Christ’s miracle at a Wedding in Cana of Galilee (John 2:1-11). The relation between between Christ and the Church is analogized as a marriage (Eph. 5:22-33).  Finally history is consummated with the Marriage feast of the lamb (Rev. 19:6-9). Scripture thus forms an inclusio around the theme of marriage broken, marriage restored and marriage consummated. Beyond this redemptive thrust we learn that God hates divorce ( Malachi 2:16), designates that marriage should be honored by all (Hebrews 13:4-7),  and teaches that marriage provides a covenantal set apart-ness (has a sanctifying effect) even for a unbelieving spouse (I Cor. 7:14f).

Covenant theology finds much of its substance in God’s faithfulness to the seed of the generations who are the fruit of godly Marriage (Malachi 2:15). Covenant theology, which bespeaks God’s covenant faithfulness to familial generations, could not exist if there were not covenant families as formed by covenant marriages. The whole covenantal structure of Scripture presupposes Marriage and family. The Church is even spoken of as  “the Household of God” ( (Ephesians 2:19).

When we, as a people, as a church, or as a culture get marriage and family wrong we twist the very foundations of our Christian theology and yet we would never get marriage and family wrong without first having twisted our Christian theology.

 

 

Sexuality and Man & Woman as Image Bearers of God

In the embrace of homosexuality there is the attempt to strip off the imago dei by the Lesbian or sodomite in question. Sexuality is so closely tied up with the Image of God in men and women that when one defiles and reverses their sexuality they at the same time are seeking to rip the image of God out of themselves.

The reason this can be advanced is that male and female together comprise the image of God.

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

When a man or a woman seek to strip themselves of their God ordained sexuality they are therefore seeking to undress themselves of the Image of God appointed to them in their composite role as image bearers.

There is also the reality that in man and woman together reflecting the character of God, in all their glorious God appointed sexuality, the fact that, together as image bearers, they reflect the one and the many found in the Unity and plurality of the Godhead. In seeking to strip off their God ordained masculine or feminine sexuality there is the attempt to turn God into a monad absent of His plurality.

The embrace then of Lesbianism and / or Sodomy then is, at its foundational level, an attack on God via the means of the attempt to erase God’s Image by erasing God’s ordained sexuality placed upon the man and the woman as God’s creaturely image bearers.

This explains why this particular sin is so dangerous and why St. Paul can write,

I Corinthians 6:17 — Flee immorality. Every other sin that a man commits is outside the body, but the immoral man sins against his own body.

The lesbian and / or the sodomite is sinning against their own body because by illicit coupling they seek to disembody themselves of the image of God contained in their physical bodies as given in their sexuality.

Sexual sin is particularly primal. It goes to the core of our identity as image bearers of God. While one can never successfully sanitize themselves of the fact that they are the Imago Dei, one can so twist their self understanding of the reality that they are image bearers that the twisting begins to approach a searing of the conscience so severe that few recover.

Alienism & Christianity

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d,
As home his footsteps he hath turn’d,
From wandering on a foreign strand!
If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

– Sir Walter Scott

Civility is a kind of relation that recognizes the moral priority of more intimate relations. We don’t owe fellow citizens the same sort of obligations we owe family, friends, and co-religionists. Civic relations respect this order of duties and affections, as when a wife is excused from testifying against her husband. (Nomocratic rule supports this moral priority). But in teleocratic regimes, everything may be collapsed into political membership, and children may be ordered to inform on their parents, or taken away from parents who subvert their loyalty to the state, as by teaching them religion…. 

What is plain, at any rate, is that Alienism is far from a marginal force. It offers malcontents of all sorts an ideology or gnosis that enables them to interpret normal life maliciously as a crude though somewhat disguised struggle between oppressors and victims. If the oppression isn’t obvious, that is because the oppressors are so cunning and their victims so totally subjugated that even their perceptual powers are in thrall. Acquiring the liberating gnosis is called “consciousness-raising.” The process enables the initiate to strip off the mask of oppressive structures and see capitalism as exploitation, freedom as “repressive tolerance,” and prosperity as “invisible poverty.”
 
Joe Sobran
Pensees
 

When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is that God favors eliminating the natural priority of family in favor of prioritizing the stranger and the alien so that the stranger and alien, in essence, are now the benefactors of the priority that was once bent towards family. Alienism, run amok, thus prefers the alien and the stranger above and over members of one’s own household. When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is that the proverb “Charity begins at home,” is seen as demonically sourced. When Christianity embraces Alienism the result is the owning of the sulfur doctrines of the “Fatherhood of God of all men,” and the “Brotherhood of men with all men,” with the consequence that the  Universal affection those doctrine require stamp out all the particular affections of family, people, and nation.  Christianity, does indeed teach the necessity of the Universal when it teaches to, “do good to all men,” but not without adding, “especially to those who are of the household of faith,” thus demonstrating that the Particular still remains. Christianity insists upon the Particular when it teaches, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever,” and this without denying the noble character of the Good Samaritan.

Alienism is the faith of the Unitarian. It believes in and actively seeks to build a world where “all colors bleed into one,” so that mankind is as undifferentiated as the Unitarian God it serves. Alienism is the faith that hates all God ordained distinctions in favor of an equality of the garbage scow where distinctions likewise are non-existent. Alienism denies the God ordained distinctions of mankind just as Unitarianism denies the Trinitarian distinctions in the Godhead. As the Alienist worships a Unitarian God, mankind must be made in that god’s Unitarian image.  As such, distinctions melt away in the name of equality (sameness) as equality is pursued in the name of practical Unitarianism.  Women are men. Children are purple penguins. Marriage is distinction-less. Bathrooms are gender-less. Ethnicity is a social construct. Pronouns must become gender neutral. All roads lead to god. Why can’t you “Co-exist”?

Alienism, as it comes into the Christian faith, trades in the Revolutionary language of “Citizen,” or “Comrade,” — that language that flattens out all distinctions in favor of a grand oneness —  for the Anabaptist “Brother,” which does the same thing but with a Christian patina. Alienism, as it comes into the Christian faith, posits a eschatological vision of a Unitarian border-less world where, because Jesus has triumphed, therefore the particularity of Nations cease to exist. Where such a eschatological vision exists any pointing to passages in the Scriptures that speak about Nations remaining in the New Jerusalem is shouted down as “heresy,” and “hateful.”

Alienism will settle for nothing less than the complete inversion of orthodox Christianity.  According to Alienism it is a positive good when thy sons and thy daughters shall be given unto another people, and thine eyes shall look, and fail with longing for them all the day long; and there shall be no might in thine hand. According to Alienism it is a sure sign of Christian maturity when,  the stranger that is within thee shall get up above thee very high; and thou shalt come down very low.  He shall lend to thee, and thou shalt not lend to him: he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.  This is all acceptable to Christian Alienism just as long as we so reduce the meaning of Christianity so that everyone can be considered Christian. The definitional distinctions that a robust Christianity demands are as offensive as every other distinction to the Christian Alienist. In such a way the rank and file Christian can be brow beat about his insensitivity and lack of love for Jesus if he even begins to object to the Alienist vision and worldview.

Usually, Christian Alienism, is not quite as cutting edge as “secular” Alienism. For some reason Christians think that they honor Jesus if they stay 10-15 years off the cutting edge. Because this is so Christian Alienists will allow for Homosexual Christians as long as those Homosexual Christians are not practicing Homosexual Christians. “See,” thinks the Alienist Christian, “we are sensitive to the need to blur distinctions also.” Alienist Christians can be found who will even speak about their “Brother Muslims.” Alienist Christians prove their mettle most obviously when they insist that Jesus is especially pleased when the worship of the WASP  takes place in multicultural settings. This despite the fact that these same people take great pleasure in the existence of uniquely Korean congregations in their denominations.

In the end, Alienism as Christianity, is just another disguised version of the Marxist vision to eliminate all distinctions.
The aim of socialism is not only to abolish the present division of mankind into small states and end all national isolation; not only to bring the nations closer together, but to merge them….”

Vladimir Lenin
The Rights of Nations to Self Determination — pg. 76

“Princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men.”

-Adam Weishaupt, quoted in Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Orion Books Limited, 1993), p. 32.

Capitalism developed the ever more inhuman polarization of the sexes. The cult of making distinctions, which serves only for oppression, is now being swept away by awareness of resemblance and identity.

M. Walser
Uber die neusten Stimmungen im Westen
In: Kursbuch, Bd. 20, 1970, S. 19-41.

”What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and hereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

~ Frederick Engels in “The Principles of Communism”, 1847

“The equality of races and nations is one of the most important elements of the moral strength and might of the Soviet state. Soviet anthropology develops the one correct concept, that all the races of mankind are biologically equal. The genuinely materialist conception of the origin of man and of races serves the struggle against racism, against all idealist, mystic conceptions of man, his past, present and future.”

—Mikhail Nesturkh, Soviet anthropologist, 1959
“The Origin of Man” (Moscow)Mikhail Nesturkh, Soviet anthropologist, 1959

Alienism is very likely the greatest threat to orthodox Christianity today and so of course the Church has embraced it.