More women are abandoning their children (and
their families generally) than ever before. CNN reports it. The Huffington Post, in a piece too
appalling to link to, actually defends it. Indiana has decided to enable it, becoming the first state to install “baby boxes” at hospitals, police stations
and fire stations as an easy and anonymous way for parents to give up their infants.
Some would say men have always been quick
to stampede for the exits when things get tough, but an epidemic of wives and
mothers doing likewise is a comparatively new phenomenon. It may be the straw
that breaks Western society’s back.
What we might call natural affection is rapidly
becoming a thing of the past. The world around us is increasingly
heartless.
Where English gives us a single word, “love”,
which we use to describe a variety of emotions, dispositions and their consequent
actions, common or koiné Greek has
four different words that cover the same semantic range.
One of these four (storgē) is almost exclusively used to describe love within a family, particularly the love of parents for children
and children for their parents. It also describes the love between husband and wife in a long term, committed relationship; specifically, the aspect of such love that is not merely romantic or sexual in nature.
Conceptually, I suppose, that made the
Greeks better equipped than we are to discuss the subject.
Nothing New Under the Sun
Perhaps they had good reason to do so, because the failure of love within the family is nothing new. It is in the nature of mankind wherever and whenever we reject
the knowledge of God.
The word storgē is not used in the New Testament. Its negative, however, is
used twice. Paul says that people who suppress the truth revealed to them by God through nature become, among other bad things, “heartless” or “unloving”. The Greek word he uses here is astorgos,
meaning lacking family affection (or “natural affection”, as the KJV has it).
So in one sense this is how things have
always been. The testimony God has left to his existence in the natural world
is evident. Rejection of that testimony and suppression of our natural
knowledge is the source of much degradation in family relationships.
Still, for millennia there have been forces
in place that have — however temporarily and imperfectly — worked to counter the
human tendency toward heartlessness. At various times (and often in some combination or other), romantic or erotic love, affection, societal pressure, hard times,
religious affiliation, the negative financial consequences of parting, guilt,
duty, shame, fear, lethargy and even lack of opportunity have kept men and women from
acting on whatever decreasing enthusiasm they may have felt for their family responsibilities.
None of these external or internal
pressures has been completely successful. Feminists rightly point out that
there have been many, many unhappy marriages over the centuries. Still, the
inevitable heartlessness produced by rejection of God has been restrained to a degree
throughout history despite frequent and consequential reminders of its
presence: polygamy, abuse, divorce, cheating, abortion, abandonment and even
child sacrifice have had their place in human society for thousands of years.
And It’s Getting Worse
But the traditional restraints on heartlessness
in our society are all coming loose simultaneously.
Do I need to prove it? Divorce is
skyrocketing. Abortion has devastated our Western culture in ways most do not
yet understand. The forces that historically served to keep the lid on the simmering
cauldron of disaffection for family life have disappeared one after another.
With abandonment of exposure to religious teaching, away went duty, guilt, and
the commitment (at least in theory) to monogamy. With the advent of no-fault
divorce, near-automatic child support, the ever-expanding social safety net and
generalized affluence throughout the West, away went fear and much of the
financial pressure associated with divorce. Not only are women no longer
dissuaded from seeing if the grass might be greener on the other side of the marital
fence, they are actively encouraged to do so. Shame and social pressure
are directed against stay-at-home moms and homeschooling families, not against
those who pursue “happiness” or personal development at the expense of their families.
Again, this was not unexpected. Paul says
that especially “in the last days” people will be “heartless”.
Paul was right. Things are definitely
getting worse. Heartlessness is actually trendy.
Natural Affection and Jesus Christ
We often talk about the love of Jesus
Christ without necessarily associating that love with our own very human
emotions related to family. And indeed, his life was exceptional in that his natural
affections extended far beyond the limits of his own biological family. “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” he asked rhetorically. “Whoever does
the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother”.
There is no suggestion here, by the way,
that the Lord was prepared to neglect his responsibilities toward his own biological
family. Even in extremity on the cross, he displayed his concern for the
spiritual and material welfare of his mother in saying to John, “Behold, your mother” and to Mary, “Behold, your son”. Those of us who might take our spiritual responsibilities so seriously that we are
tempted to overlook our family duties are wise to notice these words in the
gospel of John. But there is a lovely balance here as well: his statement in
Matthew reminds us that the family ties of the kingdom of heaven eclipse those
which are merely earthly and biological.
Those who seek to follow Christ in truth
have an obligation to model his heart for those of his extended family, not just his very natural and recognizable affection for his mother. This means that the church should
be characterized not only by a complete reversal of all that we see happening
in the world around us, but a redoubled effort to display natural affection to
one another just as the Lord Jesus loves those who do the will of his Father.
Loving the Truth
What is the remedy for heartlessness? I’d
suggest it’s a renewed love of the truth.
Makes sense, doesn’t it? If natural
affection is stymied and stultified in a human heart that rejects the truth of
God, surely it overflows where truth is heard, accepted, practiced and prized. The end of
those described as “heartless” in Romans 1 and 2 Timothy 3 is
set out for us in 2 Thessalonians, where Paul says they perish “because they refused to love the truth and so be saved”.
Rejection of truth is not simply a problem
for the unsaved. Increasingly, Paul tells us, we are to expect to find the
suppression of truth a feature of the church.
Now in the church, we generally try to
avoid suppressing the truth of God’s existence (though there is a little bit of that too), but there is a lot of truth suppression of a less obvious kind occurring within
Christendom these days. Most of the movements within the modern church claiming
to have “discovered” interpretations of scripture that neatly dovetail with the
trends of modern culture are of this nature. They suppress the truth in
unrighteousness. It would be a huge surprise if the affection-killing cancer of truth suppression afflicting our broader Western culture fails to produce equally catastrophic
heartlessness if allowed to spread unchecked among the people of God.
That means not just loving the truth when it’s
inconvenient but when it hurts. It is not enough to appear to be loving: we
need to speak the truth in love.
Or else we risk not really being loving at all.
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