Once upon a time it was typical for both nuclear family and extended family to not only share blood thus having a natural tie that binds, but as importantly the family had a shared world and life view. This shared world and life view also served as a tie that bound the family together. Between blood and faith nothing could cut the familial bonds of affection and loyalty.
However modernity first attacked the natural worldview ties chiefly by seizing our children and training them in educational centers where the children were separated from their parents beliefs. Now modernity is finishing off the family working to dissolve the natural ties of blood. The family is under attack. Read the recent Atlantic Monthly article on the family by David Brooks wherein Brooks seeks to convince the readers of the need to rid ourselves of the blood family in favor of “make it up as you go” family. The modernists created the problems that has given us the crack up of the family and now the modernists are offering “solutions” that will only serve to make the problem worse. If Brooks “solution” was to be followed we would soon slide into third world status. Children would not be able to identify their parents and parents would begin to conclude that providing for their particular children was not their unique responsibility. Brooks has only offered a more sophisticated version of Hillary’s “it takes a village to raise a child.” Brooks gives us families defined as anything from two Lesbians and their cats as well as some waif they found on the streets to group marriages as combined with children adopted by the group and the group’s children who don’t know which two people of the group are their mother and father. It’s insane but such is modernity.
The family will not survive this attack on blood unless it can restore its understanding of the need to have a shared Weltanschauung (world and life view). The family has to return to the idea of a shared Christianity … a shared confession … a shared theology and a shared understanding of who God is or the family will not survive. A shared world and life view informs the family why blood is important. A shared understanding of God means a shared understanding of a family structure where there is the honoring of thy Father and thy Mother. A shared understanding of the Christian God means a shared understanding of marriage wherein a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves now to his one singular wife so as to establish another sub-unit expression of the trustee family. A sub-unit that is supportive of the extended family while at the same time being distinct from the extended family.
This means parents you have to go crazy training your children to share your faith … your morality … your theology or else you will lose your children to the gale force winds of modernity and post-modernity. Family will sink under the pressures brought by the Marxist Revolutionaries unless we can restore the importance of blood by emphasizing the importance of faith.
As Christians we absolutely have to stop losing our children to contrary faith systems and worldviews because if we cannot pass our Worldview on to them they will dismiss the importance of shared blood ties. Without the God of the Bible and belief in Him there is no reason to value blood ties. At the same time the importance of worldview isn’t going to take unless our children understand how important blood ties are. Our families thus can be neither solely propositional families nor solely blood families. It must be both or it will be neither.
This is why we need to keep our children home and not ship them out to be trained by non blood related strangers who do not own our Christian world and life view. The end result of doing that has been the interruption of the idea of “covenant succession” whereby the faith is supposed to be passed on to our blood kin seed. If we can not keep our children the church will pass, for a season, into dark chaos and old night. It’s already on the cusp of just that.
On this post we completely agree. Well said, and thank you.