Overview
Reformed Pendulum exists to help others craft the good life through the fulfillment of their created nature. We do this by showing men and women how to acquire the habits of mind and heart in order to think, desire and act in alignment with the created order.
Objective
Everything in the universe is created with an essence that has an intended design and order. Living according to how God designed us to function and seeking the kinds of things that are conducive to our proper functioning will make us happy in a deep and lasting way by attaining what is truly good for us. Goodness then is succeeding in being who we are according to our created nature. On the belief that all humans are to flourish and obtain “the good”, there is necessarily a set of behaviors we all must engage in. The “good life” then is understanding what is truly good for us (based on our created nature) and then aiming at the right ends and doing the right sorts of things to move towards our true good.
We have a proactive vocation of ordering ourselves and everything that we are involved with according to God’s original created design. We cannot order ourselves according to God’s created design or truly pursue human flourishing unless we have virtue. We must have the habits of mind and heart, a set of dispositions that incline us to act according to our created nature. To live the virtuous life, we must actively arrange our lives in such a way so that we can move towards our nature’s fulfillment. In order to do that we must have knowledge of the truth, which essentially is the conformity of the mind to the way things are. So, knowledge of our essence, our kind, our nature is the conformity of the mind to the nature of things.
At the very foundation of life is the community of family that is built by a male and female. Males and females are each designed with unique capacities, functions and purposes in order to accomplish their vocation based on the fulfillment of their nature. A husband and wife discover and enact their own good when they fulfill their vocations as husband & wife and father & mother. The diverse nature of the male and the female in their roles in their very diversity are participating and constituting one common good of the household. The parts are for the sake of the whole. The flourishing of the whole gives meaning and direction to the parts. The family household is the natural context that both masculinity and femininity were designed for. Sexual difference is at the heart of family life.
Co-parenting is a foundational component of the vocation of marriage. Successful co-parenting serves to connect and bond parents together. The complimentary parenting of father and mother, which successfully integrates and blends masculine and feminine, is itself an expression and function of the marital union of male and female.
Gender is inextricably tied to one’s biological sex and therefore is the social (relational in community) manifestation of one’s biological sex oriented towards, exemplified in and other times analogous to, the one form of marital good (husband or wife) and the one form of parenting (father or mother) by either action or symbol (signaling). The idea of gender is inextricably linked to reproduction and the creation of a new community, the family household.
These truths about one’s sex and the natural fulfillment and end that the sexual design necessitates must be communicated accurately (i.e. through gender) “precisely because of the massive significance of the good of marriage and family for personal and social well-being.” Indeed, all of civilization is built upon and dependent on the flourishing of the family unit.
Since we are born into families and communities no one can flourish on their own. On the belief that we are called to obtain the good, our good is necessarily communal. That means that humans cannot obtain their good without each other. One could accurately say, “My good is your good and your good is my good”. We are all called to desire and work towards arranging and ordering ourselves in such a way where we relate to each other to where we can all obtain our good. All our actions should be ordered to the common good.
Conclusion
God’s purpose for His people is to uplift, change, renew and enrich His creation through humans. God wants to work through intelligent and prudent human beings to bring about healing, restoration and flourishing that extends to all vocations, all institutions and all of creation. Human flourishing then is living in a way that is rightly ordered to fulfill our nature. Reformed Pendulum exists in order to help Christians be knowledgeable of what reflects God’s intent, design, purpose and function in any given situation so Christians can love and act according to that end.