“God ‘knows our souls in adversity,’ Ps. 31:7; so, should we know the souls of others, IF they be knit to us in any bond of KINDRED, or NATURE, or neighborhood or the like. That bond should provoke us; for bonds are the veins and arteries to derive comfort. All bonds are to derive good, whether bonds of neighborhood, or acquaintance, &c. A man should think with himself, I have this bond to do my neighbor good. It is God’s providence that I should be acquainted with him and do that to that him that I cannot do to a stranger. Let us consider all bonds and let this work upon us: let us consider their grievance is a bond to tie us.”
Richard Sibbes
Complete Works – Vol. III, p. 69
1.) Kindred bonds are the veins and arteries to derive comfort. Hence kin stand uniquely close to us and those not kin are not our veins and arteries wherein we derive comfort. Clearly, Sibbes is communicating that kindred bonds are ordinarily to be prioritized over non-kindred bonds.
2.) Note the category of neighbor and stranger. Sibbes concurs with the idea of the Ordo Amoris and teaches that we have more responsibility to our neighbor (the closer the neighbor the greater the responsibility) than we do to a stranger. This does not mean we hate the stranger. It merely means that God has ordained concentric circles of greater to lesser responsibility for men. The closer someone is to me in vital relationship and/or a shared doctrinally confessed faith the more I am obligated to look out for them. The further someone is to me in vital relationship and/or a shared doctrinally confessed faith the less obligated I am to look out for them. So, for example, I have a greater obligation to look out for the Reformed Christian over and above the Roman Catholic or the Arminian. So, for example, I have a greater obligation to look out for my children than I do for my cousins but a greater obligation for my cousins than for the stranger I bump into at the smoke shop.
“We see in the current of Scripture ordinarily that when God converted any one man, He converted his whole family. ‘Salvation this day come to thy house’ saith Christ to Zaccheus, Luke 19:9. When salvation came into his heart, it came to his house; all was the better for it. So the jailer, when he believed he and his whole house were baptized, Acts 16:33. When God blesseth the governor once, then it is supposed all the house comes under the covenant of grace. Abraham and his house were blessed Gen. 22:17.”
Complete Works – Vol II, p. 354
1.) OT or NT, God deals with people in their familial covenantal structures. To leave the children outside of the covenant of grace, by not giving them the sign of the covenant is to particularize and atomize man, seeing him only as a sovereign individual. It is the error of the Enlightenment liberal worldview.
2.) Covenantal unity establishes Kinism. If the head of the house is drawn by irresistible grace than all in the household family covenant (Kin) are placed within the circle of the covenant of grace. This establishes again the idea that God Himself is a Kinist. People are not saved by blood relation but salvation tends to run in familial lines.
“To leave the children outside of the covenant of grace, by not giving them the sign of the covenant is to particularize and atomize man, seeing him only as a sovereign individual. It is the error of the Enlightenment liberal worldview.”
And the atomistic individualism of Liberalism ultimately comes (surprise!) from the ancient pagan source of Democritean-Epicurean atomism, which not-so-incidentally was intimately connected to ancient atheism.
https://www.newoxfordreview.org/documents/the-christian-the-epicurean/
“But the lines of demarcation are blurred by those numerous nominal Christians who are really Epicureans in the Lamb’s clothing. Liberal Christians use the language of love and compassion to advance the sexual license of the Epicurean. Or they use Christ’s words against judging others to advance the cause of abortion. Or they draw from Christ’s suffering the Epicurean lesson that suffering is not redemptive but simply evil, and is to, be avoided by suicide and euthanasia. Furthermore, by making God so merciful that we needn’t fear His justice, and by consigning Hell to the realm of myth, they duplicate the effect of Epicurus’s position. These are the Liberal Christians, and though the Christian and the Epicurean inhabit different universes, they may be sitting side by side Sunday morning in the same pew.”
This is one of the surviving teachings of the great atomist philosopher Democritus, which modern decadents shitlibs can readily agree with:
https://books.google.fi/books?id=i_1u3X4yqdAC&lpg=PP1&hl=fi&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false
“D140. I do not think that one should have children; for in having children I see many great dangers and much distress, and few blessings and those meagre and weak. IV.24.31”
But I would dare say that strict Anabaptist or Baptist “separationism” – separating oneself from the mainstream world and its ways – does have one striking advantage. Namely, that when “the world” goes corrupt and decadent, one can that way avoid the contagion of its breath, so to speak.
Such people as the Old Order Amish have flourished demographically, or rather, I believe God has chosen to bless them that way, because they have dared to be “fools of Christ”; they dared to look weird, unhip and unprogressive in the eyes of the world, instead of chasing for the world’s approval.
Gary North gave this self-critical testimony of how American Calvinists had accommodated themselves way too much to modern bourgeois mores – with the very concrete consequence that all the evil spiritual and philosophical germs of secular humanist academia were eventually brought to their camp as well:
https://www.garynorth.com/freebooks/docs/a_pdfs/gncf.pdf
“Presbyterian seminaries in that era indulged in a form of academic initiation, a suicidal practice that led irrevocably to the capture of all of them by the liberals: they sent their young candidates for their faculties to Germany to swim in the cesspool of theological liberalism for a year or two. About all the guidance the young men received before departing was a warning: “When you inhale, be sure to keep your mouth above water.” Can you imagine Martin Luther insisting that every Lutheran scholar spend a year studying theology at the Vatican? But even this does not do justice to the degree of absurdity. Can you imagine Luther recommending that they study in Istanbul?8
…
The denomination recognized higher academic degrees as the main criteria for permanent positions, and the humanist world that granted such degrees was hostile to the orthodox faith. Thus, the lure of Harvard, Princeton (University), Yale, and the German theological swamps was too great, just as it has been too great for Christian colleges in the twentieth century. Academic prestige had been the golden calf for Presbyterians for three centuries, but the worship of this idol became an all-consuming lust after the secularization of higher education in America.”
The Amish, whatever their theological deficiencies might have been, did not participate in this particular form of idol-worship. They have not chased for bourgeois respectability (even as Western middle-class lifestyle has become more and more apostate and decadent). And God has rewarded them for it.
The reverential attitude towards infidel scholarship is also very largely responsible for the way Christian preachers promote modern egalitarian ideas cooked up among humanist intellectuals, in a pathetically imitative me-too spirit.