Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Family, Church, and State.

This post is going to stray from my Frisbee theme a little...  And go to the other theme of my Blog - Theology and Philosophy.  Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary states one of the definitions of 'Philosophy' as being - "an analysis of the grounds of and concepts expressing fundamental beliefs".  So I'm going to try and analyze for you guys the current state of the Family, Church, and State, and also what their Biblical roles should be.  So bear with me.  :)

The first thing to note is that the Bible clearly defines what the different roles of the different institutions are.  When it says that one realm is responsible for X, the other realms are not to assume that X is within their jurisdiction.  Although the way it is set up in the Bible - they all hold each other accountable.

~How it should be~

Family - Fundamental. (serving as an original or generating source.)  There's no doubt that the family is the fundamental institution behind all of the other realms - without family, there is no Church or State.

(Education)  Parents are responsible for teaching their children (Psalm 78:5).

(Inheritance)  The men of the family are supposed to provide for their family, even their widowed mothers/grandmothers (1 Tim. 5:3-8), but they're also supposed to lay up an inheritance to give to their children (Deut. 21:15-17 ).  The last sentence makes sense because - 1. The young cannot support themselves.  2. The working father is fully capable of supporting his living ancestors, descendants, and himself.  3. the aged and infirm cannot support themselves.  So, the man (if he wants his children to provide for him when he is old) must set aside an inheritance for his children.

Andrew Carnegie is an example of the opposite side - he made a lot of money in his time (He sold his steel company to J.P. Morgan in 1901 for $480,000,000!  During his retirement, he gave most of his money away to create libraries, help charities, support world peace, and the like.  At his death, his last $30M was given to foundations, charities, and to pensioners.).  But his philosophy was this - To get all the education you can get, then make all the money you can make, then give all your wealth away to worthwhile causes.  As far as I can research, he didn't leave an inheritance to his only daughter, or his grandchildren!  He left behind a legacy of squandering the money that God had given him through his hard work.

(tithing)  the family should tithe back to God by giving the Church at least 1/10 of what the Lord has blessed them with (Numbers 18:21, Hebrews 7:5).


Church - Spiritual.  (of or pertaining to the spirit as the seat of the moral or religious nature.)

(Spiritual responsibility)  The leaders of the Church are responsible for watching the souls of their flock (Hebrews 13:17).

(Receiving/distributing tithes)  I'll skip over going into detail on this point, since it was discussed somewhat on this Blog in an earlier discussion.  But the question is if the Church should be the ones funding places like hospitals, or should individuals/family make that their business?

State
- Physical.  (of or pertaining to that which is material)

(Punishment of evildoers) The government, made up of kings or governors, is supposed to punish evildoing (1 Peter 2:13-14).


~How it is~


Family -
(Education) The Family has left the education of their children to the State and Church.  Churches have age segregated youth groups and Sunday Schools, and the State has government-run public schools.

(Inheritance) Families have taken the inheritance out of the picture.  Children aren't looked at as responsible to care of their parents outside of putting them in nursing homes.  The fathers have put their money into IRAs and Social Security, because the State has taken over more of the Family's roles.

(Tithing) The Family is now tithing to the State because the State has made it mandatory to give it a portion of your income (part of the State taking over the Church's role).  There are surveys out there that state - "
Religious observers (those who attend weekly services) give 3.4 percent of income annually, while nonreligious people give only 1.1 percent to 1.4 percent. (The Gallup Organization)"  It goes on to say that - "If historically Christian church members had given 10 percent of their income to the Church in 2004, it would have added up to an additional $164 billion."

Church
-

(Receiving/distributing tithes)
The Church has been limited by the State taking the Church's tithe (by taxation).  Our government has started (it hasn't always been this way) taking our money and taxing everything, making it harder financially for families to tithe to the Church...  Messing up the whole system, and making our dependence on the State greater.  The Church then isn't able to do the things that they should be doing.

State
-
(Punishment of evildoers) The State seems to have kept this one pretty well...  Until you look at all the laws that we've passed in recent years.  The recent legalization of same-sex marriage in some states (a thing to be despised by Christians), for one, and then we have legal murder in the form of aborting unborn babies.  :(  It's sad.  Which brings me to my conclusion...


The State has become centralized.  Meaning that it has taken the power of the other institutions...  Or they have given their power away!  The reason that the State has taken the place of our regular institutions is because every realm has turned from God and have set up their own system against God's standards.

Let's go back to the Bible and study and learn and reclaim the system!  It's time to look more in depth at the Biblical principles governing these realms.

This was a kinda long one.  :)  I had an off day from work at CFA!  ;D  I hope you enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to reading the discussions afterwords.

~Jay

5 comments:

  1. Awesome. Really, really awesome. That's a great synopsis there.

    I'll be weighing in real soon, but before I do, I have to ask a question: have you ever heard a speaker by the name of Mr. Eric Ludy?

    Buaidh no Bas,

    Andrew Romanowitz

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  2. Thank you!

    Nope, I can't say that I've heard that name before.

    ~Jay

    PS... I forgot to put what spiritual responsibility looks like in the Church now. But all you need to do is look around, churches seem more like they've given up that aspect and gone on to be a "social center" - if you know what I mean. The leaders in the Church are not about watching over doctrine as much as watching over attendance.

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  3. Okay. Please pardon my horrendous tardiness in responding, as I've been very busy over the past few days.


    If any of you reading this think that such discussions are silly, unnecessary or excessive, I would encourage you to consider that there is nothing Satan loves so much as to turn God's social order on its head. Why are parents murdering their own children before they leave the womb instead of nurturing them and protecting them? Why is everybody trying to redefine marriage? Why is the church so lethargic? Why is the state doing everybody's job but its own?

    Spiritual warfare, as far as we are concerned, isn't primarily about floating in midair and kickboxing with demons. Yes, we do engage against spiritual forces, but the battleground is this world, and it is thoughts, ideas, establishments and souls that are being fought over. Read 2. Corinthians 10. This is what our spiritual warfare is about. Bringing God's standards to bear in society has a lot to do with that. If you don't think so, then I might ask why God's law revealed in the books of the bible written in Old Covenant times deals so heavily with related issues.

    Our Lord did not redeem himself a Covenant people by bearing the full wrath of God and shedding his own blood that His people might be hopeless and defeated in their mission. We do not fight only to be defeated in the end. We fight for victory, and the Lord will have his victory on this earth. That's not some wacky eschatological oddity-that's just Biblical theology. God hasn't commanded us to be sanctimonious sky-watchers. He'll come back in his own time. We will watch for his coming, but until then, we fight the spiritual battle to which we are called. We're here to fight, not play prophetic games.

    That being said, I'll dive in.

    Authority is based on expressed grant. We know that parental authority extends to everything lawful, because children are told to obey their parents "in every thing" (Colossians 3:20). Authority is not some general thing; it is always specific.

    The family is the fundamental institution. Contrary to the position of some in the Christian Reconstruction movement, such as Mr. Gary North, who teach that the church is the fundamental institution. This is a, shall we say, rather exotic position, and totally indefensible.

    As I stated in a previous discussion, education is the duty of the parents. That's why I don't like to call home discipleship "home schooling." The school was a replacement institution invented by the Babylonians and Greeks, basically created for the purpose of trying to create a better society than the one God set up. My point is that it's not that Christians are trying to do the "school thing" at home; rather schools are trying to do the "family thing" away from home. And the fruit is always the same. Every single time a Christian society has tried to introduce the "school" model of education, the eventual result has always, always been a pagan society. If you educate your children like the Greeks, don't be surprised if, two or three generations down the road, your children are Greeks! It happened in Geneva, it happened in Scotland, it happened in France, it happened in Puritan New England, and it will continue to happen until Christian families subject the education of their children to the Sufficiency of Scripture.

    Let's face it folks: education is serious business. It can make or break a society. Let's not mess this thing up.

    (to be continued)

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  4. On Inheritance-

    I absolutely despise debt. I know it sounds strange to use terms that harsh. I know somebody's going to want to play the "don't judge" card. I know that I haven't tried starting a family yet. But I believe that if I really need something, the Lord will provide it for me without forcing me to break His own commands. Going into debt is taking money out of my children's inheritance. As Christians today we put way too little stock in the scripture and way too much stock in human experience.

    If the children have an inheritance, they too can start debt-free. There's a reason why the third plank of the Communist Manifesto is the abolition of inheritance. Marx was evil, but he was not stupid at all. Inheritance wars against statism, because inheritance is independence from welfare and debt to the government. If you want to create a statist society, you have to break up the multi-generational passing on of capital. You must. There is no other way about it. The two ways to do this, if you are a statist, are 1. engineer a debt-based society or 2. abolish inheritance laws. Rather than totally abolishing all inheritance laws, most modern socialist states have instead aided a college system which charges ridiculously high fees for education, trying to get young people deep in debt as early as possible, which leads to the prevention of a multi-generational inheritance. Don't be fooled; modern society has been engineered by marxists to think that very expensive college education is necessary to have a chance at good employment.

    In regards to Carnegie, I'd have to say that he forget the Biblical principle that "to obey is better than sacrifice" (1 Samuel 15:22)

    The Church/Family hospital question would be fun to get into again...

    On How it Is:

    Family
    Education: yep. A comprehensive mess. Thank God the home education movement is restoring some sanity to this.

    Inheritance: If all of the money poured into Social Security, IRA's, and various insurance policies were put into an inheritance instead, think how much capital could be built up for future generations to employ to God's glory. (Somebody out there might get really mad at me for saying this, but sometimes I wonder if insurance is a big rip-off. God hasn't commanded or even advised me in the scripture to use insurance; I know he will provide as much as I need when I need it. Doubtless some will venture, that he might use the insurance companies? I would counter, that the "insurance company" is a business. The point of having an insurance company is (for those involved) to make money. Excepting the few whom God in his providence brings to times of crisis, most people will never need to use the money provided by the insurance company. Flatly stated, insurance companies take your money and you usually don't give it back to you. In my mind, it's usually false security and wasted money. It's also an instution for which we find no support in the scripture; and from a basic economic standpoint it doesn't make a lot of sense. In my mind, insurance is what happens when Christian charity dies. In the future I will be using something a little more self-consciously Biblical, such as Samaritan Ministries, based on Christians giving to each other to support each other in times of financial crisis. If there is a need in the church, the question should not be, where is the insurance company, but where is the church? I might add that the Scripture has some pretty harsh imprecations for he who doesn't give to his brother in his time of need.)

    (to be continued)

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  5. Tithing: Yes. Income tax. I'm not against taxation, but I don't believe in taxation on incomes. I believe in a flat amount of money charged on heads of households. I think that's a much better, and a much more biblical method. If we must charge percentages of incomes, then it needs to be flat rate at least. (Interestingly enough, another of the "planks" of the Communist Manifesto was the instatement of a heavy, graduated income tax.)

    Church: Today, the Church is a basically a social organization. Churches are starved for the capital they need to do their job, and what capital they do have they often waste on frivolous buildings and expensive entertainment-based programs. A lot more could be said, but it's mostly on this note.

    State:

    Yeah...when you can't even define what an evildoer is because the very term evildoer is at war with your postmodern worldview...it's kind of hard to have a meaningful government, one that upholds a righteous law standard. That's why you hear fuzzy terms like "anti-social" being thrown around in Europe. What evil is punished is not punished because it is evil, but because it is not good for Socialistic society.

    Let's face it. When somebody claims authority over something they don't have, it's absurd and wrong. If I'm married and have children someday, and some other man is visiting our house, and all of a sudden he starts telling my children how to do their chores in my house, I would expect my children not to obey that man. Why? It's not his jurisdiction, and to acknowledge a person as having jurisdiction over something they don't is wrong.

    All authority is given by God. We obey authority because God put it in place. We have no right to obey any authority but God and that which he has put in place. When a person claims authority over something that they have not been given by God, and we obey them, it is idolatry, because we are giving subservience to authority that is not from God, and serving anything other than God is idolatry.

    I reckon that's about all I have to say for now. Very nice post, Justus, and hopefully we can bring some more people into this discussion!

    Buaidh no Bas,

    Andrew R

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