“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

This, the opening line to Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, is packed full of meaning, and the rest of the book expounds in story form what he means.   We read of one miserable family owing its pain to the self-absorption of the husband.  In another, it’s because of the internal angst of a middle-aged wife that drives her into the arms of a young man.  In another, it’s the insatiable desire for success of the politician husband.  Each family is truly uniquely miserable in its own way.

But is it true that all happy families are alike?  Is it true that there is a model for how to be a family, and the degree to which a family resembles that model dictates the level of happiness the family will experience?

My hunch is that Tolstoy is correct.  I believe that God has created families to relate in a certain way.  Happy families relate to one another the way the Godhead relates to itself.  Happy families love one another the way God loves others.  They are full of sacrificial love and concern for the well being of the each other.  Their relationships are rooted in commitment, and the culture is one of honesty and grace.  In these systems, health, not perfection, is possible, and happiness can emerge.

The problem that Tolstoy so eloquently highlights through his story-telling is that the “happy-family” model is unnatural for us.  We don’t just fall into it.  We have to work at it.  Monogamy is a commitment we have to stick to, and it requires the disciplining of our passions.  Sacrificial service towards our spouses and our children is inconvenient and at times demands the delaying of our dreams.  Love often times looks more like death than it does like lust.  Following the “happy-family” model is hard work and it takes discipline.

But as I read through Anna Karenina and see the truth about families in its pages, it’s obvious that this hard work is well worth it.  Whenever we veer from God’s path of familial happiness, the pain is inevitable, if sometimes delayed.

“So some have doubted.  But then in turn there were some who sought to refute doubt with reasons.  As a matter of fact, the connection was actually this: first of all they tried to demonstrate the truth of Christianity with reasons or by advancing reasons in relations to Christianity.  And the reasons fostered doubt and doubt became the stronger.  The demonstration of Christianity really lies in imitation.  This was taken away.  Then the need for “reasons” was felt, but these reasons, or that there are reasons, are already a kind of doubt — and thus doubt arose and lived on reasons.  It was not observed that the more reasons one advances, the more one nourishes doubt and the stronger it becomes, that offering doubt reasons in order to kill it is just like offering the tasty food it likes best of all to a hungry monster one wishes to eliminate.  No, one must not offer reasons to doubt — at least not if one’s intention is to kill it — but one must do as Luther did, order it to shut its mouth, and to that end keep quiet and offer no reasons….those whose lives are marked by imitation have not doubted….because their lives were too strenuous, too much expended in daily sufferings to be able to sit in idleness keeping company with reasons and doubt, playing evens or odds.”

Soren Kierkegaard, For Self-Examination, translated Hong and Hong, pg. 68

if one is on top, well fixed, secure, then one can afford to be sanguine about sin.  We people in power always think of ourselves as basically good people living in a well-ordered world.  Why not? It is our world.  To such folk, “prophetic ministry” means mostly minor tinkering with the present political structures, the passage of new legislation, helpful advice to Congress.  Our world, while needing certain modifications, is basically good because it is our world.

Willimon, Will. Pastor, pg. 266

An excellent assessment by John Stackhouse of the cultural response to Collins’ appointment to NIH.  Money quote:

Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, has been named by President Obama to head the National Institutes of Health. What makes this news is the breathtaking idea that someone could be both a scientist and a believer in God.

Like Isaac Newton. Or Johannes Kepler. Or Galileo Galilei. Or most of the other leaders of the Scientific Revolution. And a large number of scientists today.

This isn’t news. What is news instead is the continuing ignorance of people who think that science and belief in God are incompatible. They are not.

Money qoute:

Postmodernity is about announcing the doctrine of the fall to arrogant modernity. That was necessary, but the doctrine of the fall is never the last word. And, the task of the church today could be summed up as: how…do we now announce appropriately the doctrine of redemption, which is not a return to a chastened modernity but a going through and out into somewhere else that we ain’t got to yet.

Here is a link to a video that is very, very helpful in providing a number of different perspectives on what the emerging church is.  It’s long (90 min), but worth the watch.

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/ctliveblog/archives/2009/04/the_emerging_ch.html

The panel members include: Scott McKnight, Tony Jones, Kevin DeYoung, and Alex & Brett Harris

It was in a moment of tension between me and a more grounded co-worker, that he said to me, “you know we aren’t dealing with platonic ideals here…”  He was saying, “John, here in the real world, things have to work.  Real, physical, life and blood people are going to use this program and it has to work.” 

My co-worker was referencing a Platonic worldview.  He was jokingly calling my attention to the day-to-day nitty-gritty details and challenging me to come off of my idealistic high horse.  At the center of Platonism is this sort of ideal vs. real dualism.  A Platonic worldview believes this world is a shadowy reflection of the true world.  This physical material universe is a copy or distorted mirror-image of the non-physical immaterial true world.  The true world is the world of forms and types, perfect and unchageable.  Our world is the world of copies and material objects.  Within this worldview, death means being set free from the physical to go and be alive in the non-physical ideal.  To me this sounds an awful lot like the popular Christian idea of heaven.  Earth is the imperfect material copy of the perfect immaterial heaven.

For evangelical Christians, heaven is the place you go after you die.  You escape earth; you leave your body; you go to heaven.  In heaven we get new bodies for sure, but we think of them as bodies like angels floating around on the clouds.  Heaven is a spiritual place; earth is a physical place.  These are the ideas that I find I’ve inherited from my evangelical tradition, and I don’t think they are biblically accurate or very inspiring.

If I believe that I’m going to leave this world and go to another place after I die, it’s hard for me to become inspired and hopeful about my actual life here on earth.  For me it produces two responses.  The first response can be called escapism, which causes me to take on a sort of headonistic attitude, ‘eat drink and be merry’.  Who cares about the state of the world?  Who cares about the state of the climate?  Who cares about my own personal growth?  The second is a form of hard asceticism.  If heaven is a spiritual place, then everything physical is evil.  If God is spirit and spiritual, then I want to mortify everything physical in my life and only nurture the spiritual.  This is the sort of thing that cause evangelicals to disdain wine and fear enjoying sex too much.

In the following posts, I’d like to present a different view.  One that I think is more consistent with the biblical narrative, and one that I’ve found to be very inspiring and hope-filling.