Veith Jr. / Moerbe Family Vocation

God's Calling in Marriage, Parenting, and Childhood
1. Auflage 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2409-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

What does it mean to be called as a husband, a wife, a parent, a child? How does the grace of the gospel impact how we carry out our particular calling? How does God's presence influence the struggles that families face? Gene Veith joins forces with his daughter Mary Moerbe to explore these kinds of questions as well as the roles of calling and vocation in family life. Though we have little control over who is in our family (other than choosing a spouse and deciding to have children), God has placed us with specific people for specific reasons. Veith and Moerbe show how our roles are distinct and important to God's plan for our lives-and that when we have a biblical understanding of those roles in our families, we can move away from common dysfunctions and toward forgiveness and healing. Writing with sensitivity and wisdom, Veith and Moerbe address the common problems facing contemporary families: the crosses, the weaknesses, and the uncertainties. They articulate a compelling, biblical paradigm for creating and sustaining loving and forgiving families who maintain hope in the face of cultural pressure. This book is an important resource for all Christians, including pastors, counselors, and those working in family ministry.

Gene Edward Veith (PhD, University of Kansas) is provost and professor of literature emeritus at Patrick Henry College. He previously worked as the culture editor of World magazine. Veith and his wife, Jackquelyn, have three grown children and seven grandchildren.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Veith Jr., Gene Edward

Moerbe, Mary J.

Leseproben

1

INTRODUCTION

Confusing the Family

God settles the solitary in a home.

PSALM 68:6

The institution of the family is necessary to our very existence, basic to our culture, and critical to our happiness and well-being. As children, we were brought to life, nurtured, and shaped by our family. As adolescents and young adults, we were preoccupied with finding someone with whom we could start a family of our own. Adults who have managed to do that spend much of their time working to support their families and, if they have children, laboring to raise them. No one is more important to us than our parents, our spouse, and our children. Typically, we want to spend more time with our family, which we consider to be our haven in the storms of life. We rhapsodize over “family values” and want to bring them back. So why is family life so confusing? Why do marriage and parenthood often seem so difficult to get right?

Married couples often quarrel and fight, arguing about sex, money, and their own clashing personalities. Parents agonize over how to raise their children and often feel they have made terrible mistakes. Children sometimes break their parents’ hearts, turning into ungrateful little rebels. And parents sometimes break their children’s hearts, inflicting emotional wounds that make the child desperate to get away. The man, the woman, and the children often become casualties of divorce, which leaves indelible wounds of its own. If a person’s family is the source of the greatest joys in life, it can also be the source of the greatest miseries.

Christians know that God looms behind the family. They know that God established the family and its different roles, that he upholds parenthood in the Ten Commandments, that Christ has something to do with marriage. But Christians have the same challenges in their families as nonbelievers. They even have additional challenges that nonbelievers do not have, such as the biblical mandate for the wife to submit to the husband, which, as it plays out in ordinary life, can drive some husbands to tyranny and some women to rebellion or despair. Christian marriages often come apart and end in divorce.

To be sure, many Christians do have strong and loving families, despite their occasional problems. What is their secret? Even those who have a good family life may not be able to explain the inner workings of a family functioning according to God’s design. They may not realize that God not only established the institution of the family in general but that he also established their actual, personal family. Christian husbands and wives may assume that to say “Christ is in marriage” is a figure of speech or a pious aspiration rather than an actual presence in their relationship. Christian parents will acknowledge God as “father,” but they may not recognize how God exerts his fatherhood through their own relationships with their children. Christian children, whether young or all grown up, may not see the connection between their relationship with their parents, however old they might become, and being a child of God.

God is present and active in families, bringing his gifts and working his purposes. He and his works may be hidden in the mundane-seeming details of ordinary life, but it is useful—both in times of family difficulties and when everything is going right—to catch a glimpse of him.

The Family and Contemporary Culture

Our culture, to put it mildly, is confused about the institution of the family. This cultural confusion throws off Christians as well as non-Christians. As a result, we have no consensus about how husbands and wives should treat each other or how to raise children. We are very confused about sex. We desperately want to have a strong family, and yet too often our families are falling apart, with husbands and wives, parents and children, at each other’s throats.

So far we Americans still value marriage surprisingly highly, with four out of five adults getting married eventually.1 But we have stripped away its moral significance. Marriage is no longer seen as a prerequisite for sex (61 percent of Americans believe it is morally acceptable to have sex outside of marriage2); or for living together (51 percent of married couples 18–49 lived together first3); or for having a baby (55 percent of Americans believe that having a child out of wedlock is morally acceptable4). There is no longer a cultural consensus that marriage should be permanent (70 percent of American adults believe that it is morally acceptable to get a divorce5).

If marriage is no longer necessary for sex, cohabitation, or parenting, and if it is no longer a permanent relationship, what is left? There is romance. Companionship. But romance and companionship can come in many different forms.

Thus, we have problems even knowing what marriage is. If marriage is just a matter of romantic attachment, why shouldn’t same-sex couples who are romantically attached to each other be able to get married? Following this reasoning, some states and nations have changed their laws to allow men to marry men and women to marry women. Ironically, as same-sex couples clamor for marriage, an increasing number of opposite-sex couples have found that they can do without marriage altogether. In Scandinavia, which has had gay marriage for over a decade, cohabitation—“just living together”—has virtually replaced marriage as the norm.6

What about parenting? In one sense our culture loves children, and we value having children. Many couples go to extraordinary lengths to have a child, and reproductive technology—both in traditional medicine and nontraditional experimentation (sperm banks, egg donors, surrogate mothers, genetic engineering)—has become a big business. But so has the technology of not having children.

Contraceptives have become more than a tool for spacing children; they have had the effect of largely separating sex from procreation. If sex is just a physical pleasure, with no essential connection to having babies, why not enjoy that pleasure any way you like? Sex no longer needs to be with someone you are married to since the prospect of parenthood is no longer an issue. Sex can just as well be with someone of your own gender, or in the virtual fantasies of pornography, just with yourself. Should sex sometimes result in pregnancy—which seems strangely surprising to some people when it happens—there is always a medical procedure to take care of the problem: abortion.

Parenting too has been separated from the family. Women who do want children are increasingly raising them by themselves, without the father in the picture at all. As many as 40 percent of the children born in 2007 were to unmarried women. In 2008, one-third of America’s children, 33 percent, lived without married parents.7

The family is the basic unit of the culture. So the instability of the family brings with it all kinds of cultural instability, from the hypersexualization of our entertainment to the alienation and misery of those who grew up feeling abandoned. This cultural dysfunction, in turn, pulls families further apart by creating unrealistic expectations that no one can live up to and by distracting people from addressing their problems.

Christians, in particular, have been concerned with the state of the family, both their own and those in the broader culture. Christians have a basis for marriage and child raising that secularists do not have. Some are saying that, given the cultural forces that are undermining the family, Christians should just pursue their own family values. Why should the state have laws regulating families at all? If the culture wants to encourage serial polygamy or same-sex marriage or out-of-wedlock births, let it. In the meantime, the church will bless lifelong marriages in which two parents will raise healthy, well-adjusted children. The church will be the place of strong families. Individuals who yearn for a rich family life will come to the church, which will thrive as an attractive counterculture in the midst of the larger cultural collapse.

But there is a rather large problem with this scenario. Christian families are often as dysfunctional and unstable and confused as the families of secularists. According to George Barna’s 2008 study, 33 percent of American adults who have married have been divorced. Among “born-again Christians,” the divorce rate is 32 percent. Barna has another category of “evangelicals,” who not only say they have been born again but who also have a high view of the Bible and who hold to traditional Christian doctrines. These “evangelicals” do have a lower divorce rate, in fact, among the lowest of all of Barna’s categories. But that rate is 26 percent. So one-third of America’s Christians have been divorced. One-fourth of America’s conservative Christians have been divorced. Breaking down the religion factor in more detail, 33 percent of “non-born-again Christians” had been divorced, the same as for the converted. Roman Catholics, whose church does not permit divorce at all, had a somewhat lower rate of 28 percent. Ironically, atheists and agnostics had fewer divorces than most believers, with a still substantial rate of 30 percent.8 Sociologist Bradley Wright has taken issue with Barna’s research, finding that the more seriously Christians take their faith, the stronger their marriages and the fewer divorces they have.9

Still, we Christians must confess that we too have problems with marriage, parenthood, singleness, and sex. What plagues and confuses the culture often plagues and confuses us, also. We need to recover, both in theory and in practice, the Biblical estate of...