November 14, 2011
WHAT IS FAMILY? Defining family as restricted to a married man and woman and their children is far too narrow. There are all kinds of families. And that idea, I’m rather sure, is from a Christian perspective biblical. Psalm 68: 5-6 makes this clear. Jehovah (God) is “a father of the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. GOD SETS THE LONELY IN FAMILIES” The old King James version translated the Hebrew as: “God setteth the solitary in families.” Then too the whole work of redemption bought in Christ, in the Christian view, is to unite all humanity into one family. The basic unit of those brought together as family is, I think, the New Testament idea of what family is. The basic family of whatever setup is the fundamental place where vocation and mutual duty begins. Those closest to me as family is where my vocational love has its initial place and from there in ever widening circle embraced as family.
The Bartling Scholarship 