CHRISTIAN HOME AND THE SOCIETY
CHAPTER ONE
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.1 Introduction
The role of the Christian home in our society is to be a model of life. Not only are man and woman created in the image of God, they are also called to unite with each other in order to fulfil the maximum of human nature and human existence. Their union within marriage is founded upon love that stems from God and goes beyond nature. At the same time, it gives nature quite a different dimension—the call for sanctification.
We talk so much about love in our religion. We make it theonly and total principle of life. We define God as being LOVE. What does this mean to us in our daily life, our family life? Love, from our Christian viewpoint, implies some-thing that goes beyond the individual. Each spouse loves the other for his or herself, and, beyond all this, they love each other in God.
We define genuine love in psychology as the capacity to sacrifice one’s own interests and pleasures for another, to love the other before one’s self, to seek his or her interest.Astonishingly, two thousand years before modern psychology, the main ideas of modern clinical psychology were found in the gospel and in the first epistle of John—a magnificent contribution to the philosophy of love.
After Jesus and John, love become a principle of knowledge alongside that of reason. It is one of the basic contributions of Christianity to the history of civilization and ideas.When a marriage is based upon genuine love, it becomes a way of a new knowledge for the human being, something that opens the family to society, and makes out of it an active element that serves as a model of change and evolution.
Plato denied the reality of the world of senses. He considered only ideas as “real.” The genuine Christian, however, conceives of the flesh as being completely worthy, completely ontological, rooted in being—it has to be transformed through the effect of love, rooted in God Himself.Any marriage cannot be conceived of as “real” if it is not founded on love. Between spouses, there is a vocation of unity in the spirit and in the flesh, a vocation of mutualunderstanding, and the vocation of begetting children and bringing them up worthily.
The second basic model that must be implemented by the Christian family is to be an adequate setting for bringing up children, in order to prepare them for life and service in their immediate society. The upbringing of children in a Christian family is a tremendous task. Now, because of scientific knowledge we have very efficient tools for implementing Christian ethics and social values through practical education and psychology.
