The Fight by John White

Author:John White [White, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830877218
Published: 1976-06-30T23:00:00+00:00

The Family: A Script to Follow, a Score to Dance

The family, however much we may wish to change it, remains at its healthiest only when its members relate as God designed them to relate. It was designed to function neither as a democracy nor as a dictatorship nor yet as an economic unit in an agrarian society. Social change may modify its size or its links with the rest of the world, but nothing has and nothing ever will alter its essential nature.

Families exist because God designed humans to live in families. And whatever futurologists may say to the contrary, the moment man ceases to live en famille he will cease to be distinctly man, to become less human and more antlike. I make this statement on biblical rather than scientific grounds. All science can say (whether the sciences of anthropology, sociology or psychology) is what is happening to families and what might happen to them. Science can never say what ought to happen since science has no way of knowing what a normal family is. It can only know what a usual family seems to be like in a given cultural setting. Normality lies beyond the bailiwick of science. It implies purpose and design of which science knows nothing.

God is not a bachelor; he is a Trinity.

Whatever way we may conceive or fail to conceive in the nature of the Trinity, of one thing we may be sure. Human beings did not invent it out of their neurotic need for security. People who say that man created God as a father forget this. God, as he is revealed to us, comes not just as Father, but as a Three-in-One, an entity which we cannot understand let alone invent.

However, he is revealed to us as Father; and man, created in his image, is created also with an innate capacity for intimate personal relationships. The family unit may well meet basic biological needs. It may correlate with certain cultural and economic conditions, but these needs and conditions are less basic than we suppose. The family unit arises out of what God is in the very core of his being.

The God who created man made the basics of family relationships explicit. To be God’s servant in your family involves living out your special role (of child, wife, parent or whatever) as it is conceived in the inspired script. There is no more powerful way than this of bearing witness to your family or of being God’s agent of change and of healing there. And remember, your role, whatever it may be, does not include that of general judge and critic.

Long before I ever became a psychiatrist, I found myself involved in what is now known as family counseling. Because I was familiar with the biblical script for family role-playing, I would frequently point out to a father, a husband or a wife exactly what the script called for. Very soon I became accustomed to a stock reaction which in summary ran something

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