We are at war! And like most wars, this war deals in the life or death of its participants. It is a war of two worldviews: the humanistic worldview against the biblical worldview. Unfortunately, many participants are unaware that they are engaged in a struggle of life or death. We saw the influence of this battle, on how we understand life and creation, in our culture in our last session (020 Worldviews Impact on Culture: Human Life). Today we will look at the affect of this titanic battle on the family and marriage.
Nowhere is the cost of the war of worldviews greater than in the family. The importance of the family has been recognized by almost every civilization since the beginning of history. The focus of attacks by the forces arrayed against a biblical worldview has been on many fronts. Assaults are launched from multiple sources: Literature, television, movies, music, education, local governments, federal government, and the United Nations, to name a few. The success of these attacks against the family lies at the root of the social chaos we see in our culture today.
As we move from the person and his choices, the next unit of civilization is the family. It is the family and the close relations that are fostered in and by family that is the point of attack. The importance of the family, as a unit, has been recognized by almost every civilization since the beginning of history. The primary force in the family has been marriage. Marriage is the significant relationship between a man and a woman that, has produced, supported, shepherded, and grown the family. Marriage has been a highly regarded social institution, inspiring moral belief, which encourage and protect it. A strong family has been the foundation of all great civilizations. A strong family inspires other positive relationships and contributes to a stable social environment.
Nowhere, in our time, has the clash of worlds views become more visible and dangerous than in the relationships of the family. The results are shaking the foundations of our culture. We are in danger of losing the battle of worldviews because the Church has not been active in making our culture realize the underlying assumptions of a humanistic worldview.
The following passage provides a glimpse of the battleground. Do you recall who said it?
Right now the failure of our families is hurting America deeply. When families fall, society falls. The anarchy and lack of structure in our inner cities are a testament to how quickly civilization falls apart when the family foundation cracks. Children need love and discipline. A welfare check is not a husband. The state is not a father. It is from parents that children come to understand values, to see themselves as men and women, mothers and fathers.
And for those concerned about children growing up in poverty, we should know this: marriage is probably the best antipoverty program of them all. Among families headed by married couples today, there is a poverty rate of 5.7 percent. But 33.4 percent of families are headed by a single mother are in poverty today.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Where there are no mature, responsible men around to teach boys how to become good men, gangs serve in their place. In fact, gangs have become a surrogate family for much of a generation of inner-city boys. I recently visited with some former gang members in Albuquerque, New Mexico. In a private meeting they told me why they had joined gangs. These teenage boys said that gangs gave them a sense of security. They made them feel wanted, and useful. They got support from their friends. And, they said, "It was like having a family." "Like family" - unfortunately, that says it all.
The system perpetuates itself as these young men father children whom they have no intention of caring for, by women whose welfare checks support them. Teenage girls, mired in the same hopelessness, lack sufficient motive to say no to this trap.
Answers to our problems won't be easy. We can start by dismantling a welfare system that encourages dependency and subsidizes broken families. We can attach conditions - such as school attendance, or work - to welfare. We can limit the time a recipient gets benefits. We can stop penalizing marriage for welfare mothers. We can enforce child support payment.
Ultimately, however, marriage is a moral issue that requires cultural consensus, and the use of social sanctions. Bearing babies irresponsibly is, simply, wrong. Failure to support children one has fathered is wrong. We must be unequivocal about this.
Ring a bell? Agree or disagree? Here is the rest of this quote.
It doesn't help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown - a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman - mocking the importance of a father, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice."
I know it is not fashionable to talk about moral values, but we need to do it. Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at them, I think that most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong. Now it's time to make the discussion public.
It's time to talk again about family, hard work, integrity and personal responsibility. We cannot be embarrassed out of out belief that two parents, married to each other, are better in most cases for children than one. That honest work is better than hand-outs - or crime. That we are our brother's keepers. That it's worth making an effort, even when rewards aren't immediate.
So I think the time has come to renew our public commitment to our Judeo-Christian values - in our churches and synagogues, our civic organizations and our schools. We are, as our children recite each morning, "one nation under God." That's a useful framework for acknowledging a duty and an authority higher than our own pleasures and personal ambitions.
These remarks sparked a tempest of indignation, jokes, and ridicule of the speaker, who was Dan Quayle, then the vice president of the United States in 1992. Sadly, few were willing to stand beside Mr. Quayle in his defense of the family. For the principal character of the television show “Murphy Brown” and the show’s many viewers, there is no normative definition of family. Murphy Brown says all that is important is “commitment, love, and caring.” The speech and the response to the speech are a clear example of the conflict between a humanistic worldview (Murphy Brown) and the biblical worldview held by vice president Quayle.
In our culture, the word liberty means a person has the “perfect liberty” to think or feel or just do as one wants. What we choose is not important but the fact that we have absolutely free choice is. Our sense of dignity is expressed in our right of choice. Now here is the caveat–we have the right to choose anything we want if we do not deny others the right to choose what they want. Sounds good but what does this right of choice mean? The right of choice means that we have the right to choose whatever value we want if we do not claim that what we choose is based on an absolute, that is a normative standard of truth or behavior, that applies to everyone. If Dan Quayle had just expressed his private, subjective opinion would his words generate such a response? No! What caused the outrage was that Dan Quayle had the audacity to speak not his opinion but he spoke these views as “objective moral truths.” Whoa! This goes to the heart of most moral disagreements in our culture.
There are many people in our culture who hold views similar to a biblical worldview but they hold it for the wrong reason–they see it as personal choice, and there are many people like this in the church. You may agree that abortion is wrong but you defend another person’s right to choose for themselves. How many times have you heard the statement made by political candidates: “I oppose abortion but I believe in the right of each person to choose for themselves.” We no longer understand that there is a distinction between beliefs and objective truths. We live in a culture that only recognizes the existence of subjective truth. Where has objective truth gone? Whatever happened to absolutes?
Marriage, today, is largely understood as a social construct, something one can define based on their preferences. Gone are the days when marriage was understood as a moral commitment founded on objective truths that placed demands on us despite our preferences. Most of our grandparents would be at loss to understand what we meant when we tell them we are getting a divorce because now we love someone else, or that we are not happy, or that it is interfering with our career, yet are these not valid reasons for divorce today? They are, if you understand marriage as a social contract that can be broken on a whim and not a joining of a man and woman before God. Do you believe for a moment that if we had to go before God and obtain, His permission to dissolve a marriage, He would accept most reasons given for getting a divorce?
The biblical worldview teaches that God created man and woman to live in relationship. The way man and woman were made by God established intercourse and marital relationship and the family. These relationships came with divinely created objective truths. Allowing for latitude in cultural expression, when we enter into a covenant of marriage and family before God, we agree that we will submit ourselves to God’s absolutes in His structure. Nowhere are we given the right to choose to make these institutions what we want without grave penalties. Today, we are beginning to experience something of what those penalties are.
The humanistic worldview sees man as autonomous and free to choose his social constructs. What man wants to do is his choice. Man’s right to choose is the foundational rule of a humanistic worldview. This belief is summarized succinctly by the French philosopher Pierre Manent: “no individual can have an obligation to which he has not consented.” Marriage and the family then can be altered as we see fit. All choices that we may make are morally equivalent and as such there is no basis for saying one is better than another, it is only one’s preference. Woe unto anyone, like a Dan Quayle, who has the audacity to suggest that personal choice must give way to an objective truth. If there are no wrong choices, then no way of life can be criticized, then there is no sin and without sin there is no guilt. This is “paradise,” the right to do what you want without ever suffering guilt. No wonder humanists are willing to fight and is there any doubt why they have so many willing participants? Yet, this paradise does not come to us without cost.
Man, as the biblical head of the family, was to be a husband, a father, a provider, a protector, a mentor, a companion, a leader--responsible for his family. In our culture, the man is no longer seen as the head of the family, he is often absent, physically as well as emotionally. Man has gone from protector to predator. He is understood to be driven by an insatiable lust need to indulge his unending desires for sex, material wealth, and power. Man has become the problem and not the solution in many corners of our culture. Unfortunately, there is a hint of truth in this description. Many men have deserted their families, they have forsaken their responsibilities perhaps to be what so many people expect them to be-–an unencumbered man, free from the weight of obligations and responsibilities, free from those items that prevent him from “enjoying the pleasures” of life. In this realm the breakdown of the family is understood as a good thing--it is the liberation from the tyranny of “roles and rules.” One no longer has to do what is expected but is now free to be only concerned with things that provide him pleasure.
Woman, as the biblical partner of man, is the “crown of her husband,” mother, the administrator of the household, nurturer, an encourager, a protector, a companion, leader–responsible for her family. In our culture, the woman has become many things but rarely will you ever find the woman described as the “crown of her husband.” She is expected to be a career person, unlike the man who is “driven,” she is seeking “fulfillment, ” “completion,” looking for the means to overthrow the oppression of man who has unjustly forced her to repress her “natural self.” She is seeking liberation from the tyranny of “roles and rules.”
Looking at the humanist’s modern man and woman, is it any wonder that the family, the biblical family is bordering on extinction. Dad, mom, children, have become nothing more than “rights-bearing people.” The government has become intrusive, looking to dictate how and what family is and how children should be raised. Perhaps government has done so well managing the country that it believes that it is right for it to step in and raise our next generation. The novel “1984," did not become reality in 1984, but what about 2014 or 2024?
What about divorce? Divorce has become our culture’s “fix-all” solution for the problems of marriage. The most popular solution to fix problems in a marriage, divorce, is the greatest cause of broken marriages. Gone are the days of working out problems, that takes too much time and trouble, get a divorce. Perhaps with every marriage we should provide a “Get out of marriage free card.” Marriages are no longer thought to be “made in heaven” and the way things are going it will not be long before marriages are no longer made anywhere.
Our “family friendly” government taxes marriages unfairly. Many government social policies do not see marriage as a social good. The day is coming when you can marry whomever or whatever you please, or as many as you please–it’s your choice. It would be funny if it were not so serious. You may choose to ignore the following but do you realize that 80 to 85 percent of criminals come from homes where the father was not physically or emotionally present. Among male homosexuals, the numbers are almost identical. Children from broken families are likely poorer, less educated, more likely to have children out of wedlock, be on welfare, have substance abuse problems, illnesses, accidents, be abused, have multiple sex partners, be depressed, and commit suicide. Why does our culture think divorce is such a great idea–can we say selfish? There are circumstances where divorce is justified, but not at the today’s rate. Do you realize that the divorce rate is almost identical to the death rate in the United States, with the divorce rate tracking a fraction higher? The divorce rate and the death rate are both are much higher than they should be and both are destructive. We cannot avoid death but the same is not true of divorce.
The divorce rate among those who “should” hold a biblical worldview is as high, if not higher, than those of a humanistic worldview. Why? The only conclusion that makes sense is that many who claim the biblical worldview are lying to themselves, in part if not in whole. Are we not to be in the world but not of the world? In John 17.16 Jesus, praying to God, says of His followers: “They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.” Let me ask again: “Why are so many Christians getting divorces?”
The biblical worldview explains that we are made in His image, male and female. This would suggest that if we are a male, then the role of a father, husband, brother, single or married, are roles that are part of who we are and not something from which we need to be liberated. This also suggests that if we are a female, the role of a mother, wife, sister, single or married, are roles are part of who we are and not something from which we need to be liberated. The roles and relationships are expressions of who we are, they are part of our identity. A man, a woman, joined as husband and wife, form a family. The family is the primal institution of human society, it is the basis for all society. The family is where we teach and learn the fundamental relationships between people, it is where we learn to care, love, protect, and encourage each other, it is through the eyes of our family that we first learn to see ourselves.
Marriage, the bonding agent of the family, is not necessarily all about satisfying your wildest sexual fantasies, about fulfilling yourself, about being happy or complete. Marriage is about learning to put others before yourself, it is about teaching, and practicing servant leadership, it is about respecting and loving one’s family, it is about mirroring God’s relationship with us in our relationships with others, it is about being faithful to one’s God, one’s spouse and one’s child, it is about be willing to make the hard choices and do the right things because they are the right things to do, it is all about realizing why God created marriage for us and learning to live in His created order.
Church, we are all called to the mission field, we are all called to be witnesses to those near us, of the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ–we are called to begin in our families. How can we change the culture if we can’t have an affect on our families? How can we ask God to give us a ministry, if we ignore the ministry opportunities, He has placed before us in our families? How can we be a light to the world if we cannot cast a shadow in our families? How can we be holy, as He is holy, if we ignore, put down, or dishonor those He has given us to love, obey, respect and honor?
The problems we have in our culture begin at home, in the family. Some of the problems in the home we have brought on ourselves, other problems have been brought into our homes by our government, by our schools and yes even our churches. The only way to drive the problems out of our families is a return to a biblical family. A family where a man and a woman created in God’s image, make God the head of the house and together strive to be holy as God is holy and raise their children to do the same. If you want to understand the problems confronting our culture, look no further than the family. If you want to know how to correct those problems, look no further than the family. As the family goes, so goes our culture. We had better tread carefully.
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