The Family and the Nation -Natural Affections
While reading the latest issue of Chalcedon Report, which celebrates the 500th anniversary of forgotten Reformer Pierre Viret, I was struck by a quote of Viret’s taken by the author of the essay from a work of church historian J.H. Merle D’Aubigne. Being unhealthily drawn to academic minutia, and one of the 100 or so individuals in the the Americas who possesses the entire tome of A History of the Reformation in the Time of Calvin, I determined to check the quote, and to my satisfaction, article author R.A. Sheats quotes D’Aubigne (quoting Viret) with precision. But what particularly arrested me for a moment was Sheat’s description of the fervor with which Viret undertook the gentle conversion of his Roman Catholic parents to the reformed faith. Sheats describes it in this way, “Many souls were converted under Viret’s preaching, but of greatest importance to the young pastor was the conversion of his two Roman Catholic parents.”
Greatest importance? Surely this is an exaggeration. Are Christians not to regard the conversion of all men, irrespective of familial or filial attachment, equally important? Did Christ not say “who is my mother?” Are Christians not to adopt a disinterested, a “holy” impartiality toward all men? Was Viret’s urgent and tender activity to be looked at as sin, or at best human weakness? I opened D’Aubigne again and noted, then, Viret’s actual words:
“I have much occasion to give thanks to God in that it hath pleased him to make use of me to bring my father and mother to the knowledge of the Son of God… Ah! If He had made my ministry of no other use, I should have had good cause to bless him.”
Such filial piety and loyalty thrills those who see the family in natural terms -that is, terms that comprehend the nature of the familial bond which God has written on the hearts of men. I am reminded that modern Christianity has traveled so far from that decreed nature that it has in great measure come to view the family not with the generosity and regard intended by God, but with suspicion and malice. While mouthing comforting (if not actually disingenuous) and conventional platitudes regarding the importance and centrality of the family, Christian leaders and intellectuals write subtle polemics against the very thing that they praise.
All very well and good for the family, they say, but let’s not take things too far. When one points out that, historically, the basis of the nation, and its ancient precursors, the nature of corporate existence itself, was rooted in the family, there is a murmur. The natural connection between the nation and the family has not merely been severed academically, the very notion of nations deriving from the family has been anathematized. But what of the familial piety and “bigotry” of the great reformer Viret? Alas, he was victim, it seems, of an partial revelation, as the full character of the family and the nation as unrelated has only recently become known. Of course, the father of the conservative renaissance in Presbyterianism spent the better part of his classic Christianity and Liberalism refuting just such notions, which, he alleged, partook more of secular liberalism than of scripture. But, it is all too clear that the Presbyterian Church no longer has any regard for its fathers. It has become a church of the moment, a cult of pure immanence.
Returning then to the family as God-decreed nature, its destruction or demotion in relation to national life (being as it were the fountain of life of the nation), one searches for a biblical framework in which to roundly condemn this liberal abandonment of the family. Romans 1:26-27 provides such a framework. Here Paul describes to the church at Rome the exchange of natural “affections” (“relations” in some renderings) for those which are unnatural. Those which have been decreed by God in nature, and those which have been decreed by Divine Man, which is invariably an escape from the natural order of things: in matters sexual, familial, and national. Our views of the nation reflect, then, our views of the role of sexual relations, or pure Will.The two cannot be arbitrarily disconnected.
The context of the passage is the sexual sin that derived from the unnatural cultural mores of the culture in which the church was situated, but the framework of the exchange of the natural function for the unnatural is fitting to describe the manner in which both the unity and importance of the family are attacked, not as a matter of Gospel, but as a matter of left-liberal social presuppositions which have crept into theology at the seminary level, and have spread through churches via the inherited social thinking of members. And the form of divine recompense is the same in each case: God gave them over to their sinful conceptions of the New Family and the New Nation, and they were afforded the very sort of nation (and government) they desired, whose litany of woes is too long to mention.
In examining these novel errors, of particular interest are various theories of corporate existence which seek to diminish the centrality of the of the family in determining the extent and constitution of national (birth-based) social-political existence: insistence that national sovereignty is an “outmoded” and pre-Christian attenuation of governance, insistence that the greater family of the nation (the founding people) can have no voice the biological consitution of the country, and further, that any opposition to biological extinction or disenfranchisement as a people is heterodox, and that cultural or economic considerations must never factor into an evaluation of the suitability of candidates for immigration, or insistence that missions be directed predominately or exclusively to foreign peoples, among other, related notions. We have forgotten the meanings of words (where they have not been systematically altered): it is not happenstance that the words “nature” and “nation” share the same root: that of birth. The rise of the police state is testament enough that what is held together by force is not, by definition, a natural construction. We are no longer a nation by consent of the governed. That is, we no longer have national existence, but merely notional. And the guns are there to ensure that we have the correct notions.
The healthy church will see these ideas for what they are: simply the expressions of the modern secular spirit, supported by an apologetic that is grounded in liberal constructions of scripture, crypto-dispensationalism, and outright social Marxism disguised as libertarianism, and all are to be rejected prejudicially, as being at variance with the God-decreed nature of family and nation.
