Family
A family is the bond by which persons receive one another as kin, through birth, marriage, or adoption, and by which a household is joined to the generations before and after it. The Hebrew mishpachah names a clan, a circle of kin between household and tribe, while the Latin familia first denoted everyone under one head of house, servants included. Both senses suggest a mortal arrangement that ends at the grave, and a saying of the Savior appears to loosen even the household. Told that His mother and brethren waited outside, He pointed to His disciples: “whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Matthew 12:50). Restoration teaching hears in the saying an enlargement of the family to all who keep the covenant, whose relationships can continue beyond death.
All Families of the Earth
The covenant with Abraham began with a summons away from kin. “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house,” the Lord commanded, and He closed the call with a promise: “in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:1, 3). The word for families in the promise is again mishpachah, so that the blessing given to a single clan extends to every clan upon the earth. The patriarch must leave one household to become the blessing of all households. When the Apostle Peter repeated the promise at Solomon’s porch in Jerusalem, he rendered the families of Genesis with the Greek patria, a lineage reckoned through its fathers, which the King James translators gave as kindreds.
Paul draws upon the same term when he bows his knees “unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Ephesians 3:14-15). Commentators have long observed the wordplay in the Greek, every patria taking its name from the Pater. In Latter-day Saint teaching the verse acquires a literal force, for God is the Father of the spirits of all humankind, and the 1995 proclamation on the family describes each person as “a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents,” possessing “a divine nature and destiny.” Abraham’s promise and Paul’s prayer thus describe a single household that expands until it embraces every kindred. The terms on which new members enter that household have now become, in part, a technological question.
Children of Heavenly Parents
At least twelve million children have been born through in vitro fertilization since the first such birth in England in 1978, by the estimate of the international committee that monitors assisted reproduction. The Church’s General Handbook affirms that “when needed, reproductive technology can assist a married woman and man in their righteous desire to have children.” It discourages the use of sperm or eggs from anyone other than the husband and wife, and it otherwise leaves such treatment to the judgment and prayerful consideration of the couple. Children so conceived and born to sealed parents are counted as born in the covenant, so that the technique of conception alters nothing in the child’s standing within the eternal family.
Since 2019 some fertility clinics have offered to rank embryos by polygenic risk scores, statistical estimates of a future adult’s susceptibility to heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions. The scores predict modestly, they were derived largely from populations of European descent, and in 2021 the European Society of Human Genetics judged their use in embryo selection unproven and unethical. Beyond the statistical weakness lies a quieter danger, the habit of regarding a child as a product to be optimized before birth. The proclamation’s teaching that each person is a spirit child of heavenly parents, with a divine nature and destiny, sets the worth of each child before conception, and it places that worth beyond the reach of any score a laboratory can compute.
The far end of the family’s life is changing as well. Family sociologists describe an emerging “beanpole” family, tall and thin, with fewer children in each generation and more generations alive at the same time, as declining fertility coincides with lengthening lives. Radical life extension, among the central aspirations of transhumanism, would render the coexistence of four or five generations ordinary. It would also raise hard questions of inheritance, of care for the very old, and of the place of elders whose working years ended decades earlier. A society that prolonged life while neglecting these obligations would multiply the generations of a family without strengthening the bonds between them. Restoration doctrine holds that the time the generations share need not end with death at all.
Sealing Across the Generations
The Savior gave Peter keys by which “whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven” (Matthew 16:19), keys which Latter-day Saints understand to include the authority to seal spouses to one another and children to their parents. In 1823 the angel Moroni quoted Malachi to Joseph Smith in altered form: Elijah “shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers” (D&C 2:2). Those promises are the ones given to Abraham, and President Joseph F. Smith’s vision of 1918 names their fulfillment as “the sealing of the children to their parents,” performed in temples for the dead as well as the living (D&C 138:48).
Lincoln Cannon describes sealing as “the process by which relationships are affirmed, sanctified, and ordained to endure throughout eternity,” and he insists that it rests upon the consent of those it binds, since “sealing cannot be imposed, even by God.” Priesthood authority, proxy work, eternal marriage, and even resurrection, in his reading, all “converge on sealing the family of God.” The emphasis on consent carries a practical caution for reproductive and genetic technology. Embryos ranked by a score, elders sustained by new therapies, and ancestors recovered from archives and databases all enter the family on terms set by others. The sealing ordinances supply the standard for those terms, receiving each person as kin by covenant and offering every binding to the free acceptance of the one who is bound.
Abraham’s story begins with a departure from a father’s house and closes, in the revelations of the Restoration, with the hearts of children turned back to their fathers. Between the departure and the return lies the whole history of the family as scripture tells it, a single household enlarged until it takes in every kindred in heaven and on earth. The technologies now altering how children are conceived and how long the generations endure fall within that history, and Mormon transhumanists may welcome them as means of fulfilling the promise made to Abraham. The doctrine of the family asks that the household remain one in which each member, whether embryo, elder, or ancestor, is received by kinship and covenant, without regard to health, usefulness, or any measure a laboratory can supply.