A Theology of Family Love

    I am summarizing some ideas about the Latter-day Saint theology of family love.  Our human and more especially our family connections encompass a significant part of the eternal products of our mortal experience.
    “What we are most certain of, is that “Our natural affections... are the cement of all virtuous and heavenly society”[from Orson Pratt].  Ultimately we understand God’s nature, and human salvation, to be the simple amplification of that which is most elemental, and most worthwhile, about our life here on earth.  The divine nature of man, and the divine nature of God, are shown to be the same– they are rooted in the will to love, at the price of pain, but in the certainty of joy.  Heaven holds out the promise of a belonging that is destined to extend and surpass any that we have ever known in this wounded world.
    “So we learn, and we love.  What we have learned, and how we have loved, endure.  These are the two constants in our continuing existence.” (Terryl and Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps: How Mormonism Makes Sense of Life, Salt Lake City: Ensign Peak, 2012, 105-106)
    The family is the critical laboratory for learning and establishing loving interpersonal  relationships.  The Givens suggest how Restoration scriptures document this concept in a way that resonates deeply in my soul, especially as I contemplate my own family and its individual members:
    “Jesus named love of God first in the hierarchy of heavenly commands, with love of others second (Matt 22:38-39).  Yet, when Enoch [in Moses 7] asks a weeping God the Father... the cause of His tears, His answer has three astonishing dimensions.  The first appears when God prefaces His response by reciting the two great commandments in reverse order.  “Unto thy brethren have I said, and also given commandments, that they should love one another, and that they should choose me, their Father.”  The second [dimension] is that though God’s children have clearly broken both commands, God’s grief is over their violation of the second.  He is not weeping because they have failed to worship, honor or obey Him: “Behold, they are without affection, and hate their own blood.”  Third, His tears flow, indeed , “the whole heavens shall weep over them... seeing these shall suffer.”  Three times the account affirms, and Enoch marvels, that God’s weeping is over human “misery.”
    “These verses are the clearest prism through which to see our Divine Parents’ true nature  and greatest concern.  It is not for themselves, for Their glory, or for Their priority in our hearts that they labor.  Their greatest longing made manifest in those verses accords with the deepest desire we know as parents... that our children live in love and harmony with one another.  That we would be jealous of our children’s love for each other is simply perverse.  Love in a community of perfect sociability is not competitive– it is mutually reinforcing.  How could we have missed this lesson?  To serve each other is to serve [God]...  To succor the thirsty or feed the hungry is to succor Christ, to feed Christ.  We may make distinctions, but God does not.  We cannot contribute to the heavenly community, the Zion of perfect sociability, if our relationships with each other are fractured...” (Fiona and Terryl Givens, All Things New, Rethinking Sin, Salvation, and Everything in Between, Faith Matters Publishing, 2020, 143-144)
    “In Enoch’s vision, heaven shocks by its familiarity.  God it would appear, is first and foremost a relational Being, and the heaven toward which we aspire consists of loving relationships that are eternal... When God created man and women, he brought them together.  That a man should cling to his wife and she to him, on the way to becoming “one flesh,” was a pattern and order He established...  It was... a sacramental union established in paradise, and anticipated no end.  Marriage is a heavenly order, modeled on a divine template– a relationship that may be sealed on earth, in order to be “bound in heaven.”  “Divine families encircled by the fire and light are the very essence of life and eternal life; without them this earth– indeed this cosmos– will have missed the measure of its creation.” [Truman Madsen quote]
    “We pass through birth and death as individuals.  But the years in between are filled with the unceasing search for community, for companionship, for intimacy...  Affection, friendship, romance, and charity [storge, philia, eros, and agape, Greek words encompassing our English word love]... dominate our social existence, revealing our lives to be an ongoing, comprehensive effort to find and secure relationships and connections on every conceivable level.
    “Relationships are the core of our existence because they are the core of God’s, and we are in His image.  God’s nature and life are the simple extension of that which is most elemental, and more worthwhile, about our life here on earth...”  (Terryl Givens, The God Who Weeps, 106-109)
    And the highest, most significant ordinances of the restored Church, temple sealings,  bind together loving families, husbands and wives, parents and children, across the generations, for the eternities.
    Speaking more broadly, elements of family connection help define our entire religious commitment.  In our church, why do we call each other Brother or Sister?  Because we by baptism have each become new creatures or Covenant Children of Jesus Christ.  As King Benjamin states,
    “And now, because of the covenant which ye have made ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters; for behold, this day he hath spiritually begotten you; for ye say that your hearts are changed through faith on his name; therefore, ye are born of him and have become his sons and his daughters.” (Mosiah 5:7)
    Therefore, we have entered by adoption into the family of Christ.  He is our covenant or spiritual father, and we have acquired a multitude of spiritual brothers and sisters.  Our relationships with these covenantal siblings should model and follow after the best of our nuclear or biological family connections.
    Our scriptures also suggest an even broader church, and, by implication, family connection.  Beyond our institutional church, there may exist a larger holy invisible church of God, in the wilderness.   “Holy men [and women] that ye know not of"(D&C 49:8), persons that might fit under a broadly defined “Church of the Lamb of God” (1 Nephi 14:10), who are kept from the fulness of God’s truth, only because “they know not where to find it”  (D&C 123:12).
    President Dallin Oaks has suggested that this broader church encompasses those who believe in God and seek to serve Him according to their best understanding. (“Witnesses of God”, devotional address, Brigham Young University–Idaho on February 25, 2014.)  And President Russell M. Nelson has urged us to “expand our circle of love to embrace the whole human family.” (Russell M. Nelson, “Blessed Are the Peacemakers,” Ensign or Liahona, Nov. 2002)