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Confronting
the Household Gods:
The Church's Revision of the Family
as the
'Basic Political Unit'
by
Mary C. Moorman
[Ms. Moorman, an Episcopalian and native of San Antonio,
Texas, graduated from Hillsdale College, B.A., Boston University School
of Law, J.D., and Yale Divinity School, M.A.R. The essay was written in
May 2006 for a Seminar in Political Theology at YDS taught by Joe R. Jones,
then Visiting Professor of Theology. Ms. Moorman is currently enrolled
in the Ph.D. program in Theology at Southern Methodist University. Numbers
in brackets refer to notes found at the end of the essay. Used here by
permission. Copyright©Mary C. Moorman. Posted here 3/19/07.]
“Christians and the Church are the sort of folk who know themselves
as the beneficiaries of Christ’s living and dying and being raised,
and who therefore know themselves as in Christ… Because of Jesus
Christ, Christians construe the world differently from the many human
points of view that shape human identity and living.”[1]
… “every other theme is interpreted through this Gospel….”[2]
… “the Gospel is not altogether friendly to the family.”[3]
As Stanley Hauerwas’ deputized author on the Christian family,[4]
Rodney Clapp notes the obvious: evangelical Christians fiercely champion
“the traditional family.” After all, the traditional family
is linked with the free enterprise and the traditional values of the American
polity, and it is “threatened” in the modern era of moral
relativism and shaky sexual ethics.[5] Such a defensive posture reflects
modern evangelicals’ emphatic reliance on the biological family
as the very center of God’s purposes and work on behalf of the world.[6]
In the words of the traditionalist theologian R.J. Rushdoony, “God’s
dominion is extended in the world through the biological family, which
is essential to the life of the Church, state, (culture), and every phase
of life… but in its primary assignment and orientation, (God’s
dominion) is given to the family. The central area of dominion is…
the family under God.”[7]
In contrast, Rodney Clapp stands with Hauerwas in urging:
I have tried to remind Christians that for us the family is constituted
by a quite different politic from the world… in particular, I have
objected to the view of some Christians that the greatest virtue of Christianity
is the bulwark it supposedly provides for some form of defense of the
family. That seems to me to be nothing short of idolatrous. After all,
Christianity has been and will continue to be, if we are serious as Christians,
a challenge to familial loyalties.[8]
A similar assumption is evident in Joe Jones’ summons in a certain
ordination sermon, which he treats as “an earnest exercise in Church
politics.” In this sermon, Jones does not cling to the prerogative
of the home and family to claim the primary commitments of a Christian.
Rather, Jones instead suggests that the church must open its arms to supporting
the minister’s family, who will surely experience her absence more
than they would prefer (on account of her service).[9] Hauerwas has similarly
referred to the frustration of families and parents whose children dare
to consider a missionary or religious vocation against family wishes;
Hauerwas designates such events as clear evidence that the call of Gospel
can pose a serious challenge to family loyalties.[10]
Clapp considers evangelicalism’s “glorification” of
the family to be the last great stronghold of pagan family idolatry.[11]
Clapp thus contests that just as the Christian must submit that his first
social responsibility is owed to the Church rather than to the state,[12]
so must the Christian regard her family loyalties as relativized under
the over-riding loyalty demanded by Christ and His family, the Church.
In conversation with these aforementioned theologians, I will address
the modern evangelical culture’s political construal of the family
as “kingdom.” I suggest that such designation expresses itself
in the evangelical culture’s calling of the surrounding world, not
into the universal body and kingdom of Christ, but rather, into a sacralized
version of family life and political loyalties. I suggest that since the
Church’s politics are called by the Gospel to be distinctly different
from the world’s, the Christian family (as the Church’s basic
“political” entity) must construe itself anew to respond to
the summons of Christ within the Church, in full awareness of the tension
which its nuclear goals and interests may encounter against the Church’s
primary politics, and in full intention to submit family interests to
the interests of the Church.[13]
In short, the human household must be relativized under the reign of God’s
Household.[14] With Hauerwas, I will argue that apparent tensions between
Church and family may be resolved by a more robust ecclesiological construal
of the Christian family as the Church’s family and agent,
whose significance is derived from the Family of God,[15] and whose value
is understood relative to its contribution to the mission of that primary
Family.[16]
The Family’s Family: Secular Construals
Various para-Church initiatives identify themselves as practical expressions
of Rushdoony’s political thought; among these, The Vision Forum
(hereafter, Forum) describes its theology of the Christian family
in predictably Rushdoonian terms, beginnings with the Forum's response
to “the defining crisis of our age: the systematic annihilation
of the Biblical family."[17] Affiliated authors elaborate: the family
is God’s primary vehicle for communicating covenant promises to
the next generation; it is thus the basic agency of God’s dominion
on earth.[18] For purposes of this essay, I have chosen to treat the Vision
Forum as a primary reference to modern, Reformed Evangelical ideals of
Christian family life and social policies. This choice is consonant with
the Forum’s self-identification and public representations.
While lamenting the Church’s supposed neglect of the family, as
evidenced by “the diminishing of patriarchal structures”[19]
in modern culture, the Forum’s ecclesiology reflects their
construal of the relationship between the Church and the family. The Church
is viewed as being somehow derived from the family: “minimize the
father and the family will perish. Minimize the family and you have neutralized
the Church.”[20] Acordingly, Forum authors continue:
Rediscovering the biblical concept of “patriarchy” is
a first attempt in countering…dysfunctional cultural values. The
godly family IS the foundation of the social order; God created the family
FIRST, and then out of the family came the state AND the Church. Furthermore,
there can be no legitimate doubt that the father, in the home, has genuine
authority from God to govern the family; and both the wife and the children
are required to submit to his lawful governance. Not even the Church is
to take precedence over the father in lawfully governing his home.[21](emphasis
theirs)
In this construal, Church and state are viewed as parallel superstructures
which together exist to benefit and support the small “kingdom”
of the individual father’s domicile.[22] The family grips an exclusive
mandate in the formation and education of their children, though the family
may exploit the benefits of the Church to serve selective family purposes.[23]
Furthermore, the Church is thought to derive its structure, form, and
function from the family, since “male leadership in the home carries
over into the Church.”[24] The Forum thus places great emphasis
on reviving notions of “patriarchy,” whereby the family father
parodies the sacerdotal role of mediating God’s guidance to his
subordinate wife and offspring.[25] From the father’s “government”
within his home, his local political rule extends into the church and
the larger community. On the whole, this theology of the family revolves
around notions of Christian cultural dominance through the inculcation
of values within the home;[26] and always, the home is “central
to God’s kingdom work.”[27]
Though seemingly pious in orientation, such theologies of the family derive
precious little from the explicit witness of Christianity and the robust
ecclesiology of the Christian tradition. In many instances, it seems that
modern evangelical Christians prefer instead to baptize those universal
models of hierarchy, patriarchy, and modern market values which are equally
at home in both pagan and Christian cultures as their orienting paradigms.
For instance, Forum-endorsed publications lament receding birth rates,
which many secular governments are also desperate to halt; however, the
Forum authors do not recite traditional Christian motivations for an expansive
family life. Rather, these authors recite links between the expansion
of the family and the interests of the nation’s expansion,[28] and
reference the public pleas for larger families and reinforced patriarchal
structures in the military speeches of the ancient Roman Republic.[29]
Another sympathetic scholar elaborates on the family as the “basic
political unit” in pagan cultures, where the Roman domus,
as ruled by the absolutely powerful paterfamilias, constituted
“part of the natural order, the basic unit of society, upon which
the city, and ultimately the state, was built.”[30] Cicero had already
established that the family was “the seed bed of the state,”
an essential political institution that mediated between the individual
and the larger society in the Stoic worldview; Harrison summarizes Cicero’s
view that “in essence the household was a miniature ‘state’
over which the father ruled, its unity and harmony ensuring the well-being
of the state.”[31]
On these secular foundation shared with pagan politicians, Forum
authors rejoice at their population projections, because “liberal”
cultures have been producing too few children to avoid population decline,
whereas family-friendly “conservatives will inherit the earth.”[32]
These authors aim towards a national culture that will restore “patriarchy,”[33]
and a value system that requires men to marry women “of proper station…(in)
a regime that serves to keep birthrates high among the affluent.”[34]
This desirable “cultural evolution” promises to “maximize
(certain) populations, and therefore their power,” while those who
eschew such structures “will be either overrun or absorbed.”[35]
On the Forum authors’ analysis, the benefits of patriarchy
“collectively serve to maximize fertility and parental investment
in the next generation” through the “stigmatization of illegitimate
children”[36] and the enhancement of the father’s social status,
emotional power, and commitment to personal legacy. A key facet of this
arrangement is “the structural penalization of women who do not
marry and have children.”[37] According to their goals of cultural
dominance and national power, these authors conclude that in light of
brute numbers and potential for exclusion, “population is still
power,” and “the historical relation between patriarchy, population,
and power has deep implications for our own time.”[38]
In particular, the explicitly referenced connection between family life
and national interests has to do particularly with military strength (“it
is often the number of boots on the ground that changes history”);[39]
with economic stability (“…the falling ratio of workers to
retirees is overwhelmingly caused by workers who were never born”);
and with moral continuity. The authors rejoice that in light of such data,
trends will inevitably begin to reflect the hegemony of “traditional
families” who produce more children:
People adhering to more traditional, patriarchal values inherit society
by default: when the children of ‘secularists’ look around
for fellow secularists with whom to make common cause, they will find
that most of their would-be fellow travelers were quite literally never
born.[40]
However well intentioned, there is a glaring disjuncture between such
social goals, which implicate the family as existing for its own sake
and the sake of the coercive nation, and the mandates of the crucified
and risen Christ. The Christian confesses that it is Christ who is the
King of Kings, to whom ultimate political allegiance is owed. Furthermore,
the Christian confesses that this King entered His world to seek and to
serve by the outpouring of His own life, and promised His Kingdom not
to the mighty and many but to the meek, the poor, and the pure. If Christians
are resigned to the follow the state’s urging to build their families
as political units on the state-making principles of Cicero, while ignoring
their political identity under their heavenly King and His Church, a revised
vision for the Christian’s family re-construal under Christ must
be desperately needed.
King Jesus’ “Basic Political Unit”
“The Church, the harbinger of the Kingdom of God, is now the
source of our primary loyalty.”[41]
Though Christians readily accept the family’s legitimate sanctity
to the extent that the Church has so recognized, any attempt to establish
a Christian’s primary allegiance to the family as a central
locus of authority, or as a localized “kingdom” in the lives
of Christians, simply does not align with the historic confessions of
Christianity. As clearly defined in the Westminster Confession of Faith
XXV.II, it is the Church which is “the Kingdom of the Lord
Jesus Christ, the house and family of God.”[42]
A commitment to Scriptural integrity immediately posits a tension between
the family and the Church wherever the Scripture presents the Church itself
as family. New Testament images of the Church as “the household
and family of faith” abound. These allusions honor the Church’s
identification with the Old Testament’s descriptions of the “House”
of Israel, and “the community of the children of God,” where
believers live as mutual “siblings” under God’s “parentage.”[43]
The traditional familial images of the Church under God’s ruling
paternity and husbandry are particularly grounded in the New Testament
images of the Church as the bride of Christ.[44] Jesus extends the implications
of God’s primary and original fatherhood in the lives of His people
to the extent of urging the Pharisees “to call no one Father,”
so relativized was human fatherhood in light of God’s “fatherhood.”[45]
By extension of God’s fatherhood, the Epistle to the Hebrews depicts
Jesus as the builder and superintendent of God’s “household”
of believers,[46] a theme appropriated in I Peter to describe God’s
discipline of His household on the model of the parental discipline prescribed
in Proverbs.[47] Paul refers explicitly to the Christian’s mandate
to labor for the collective good of “the family of (the) faith.”[48]
I Peter also enjoins Christians to “love the family of believers,”[49]
which is constituted by co-suffering “siblings.”[50] Ephesians
refers clearly to the believer’s entrance into a new “family”
at conversion.[51] The Epistles to Timothy establish the explicit link
between Israel, “the household of God,” and the Church, the
new community of Christ’s family: “I write these instructions
to you so that you may know how to behave in the household of God, which
is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth.”[52]
Accordingly, St. Paul appropriates the radical Old Testament family language
of Hosea 1 in his own discourse on basic Christian dogma and praxis in
Romans 9: “where it was said to them ‘you are not my people,’
they shall be called children of the living God,”[53] a theme which
Paul emphasizes again in the purity codes of II Corinthians 6: “come
out from among them and be separate… and I will be your Father,
and you shall be my sons and daughters.”[54] As children in common
under the fatherhood of God, the author of John’s Gospel urges the
new-formed Christian siblings, who are born of baptism, to merge into
a unified community, welded together as distinct from the oppositional
forces of the hostile world that was evident in all that was outside of
the consecrated Christian community.[55]
In sum, Scripture offers a juxtaposition of two distinct families. First,
according to nature and the construal of human society, we find the given
reality of biological, patriarchially structed family life existing among
all nations and cultures. In contrast, we also find the family of God’s
consecrated people, assimilated by voluntary submission, anticipated in
Israel, and gathered in response to Christ’s gospel by the Holy
Spirit for service in the Church. In this way, Christians inhabit two
political/social spheres at once. As a human person, the Christian inhabits
the biological/covenantal family of his birth or marriage. As a baptized
Christian, he also inhabits the consecrated family of Christ’s Church,
the new Israel. The theological crux of the matter arises when each community
claims sovereign authority over its members. Such claims will inevitably
result in a competition of loyalties.
As Scripture clarifies, no man can serve two sovereign masters. Accordingly,
Scripture provides that at the establishment of a new primary family by
the covenant of marriage, former biological claims must in some sense
be abandoned; the spouses “leave” father and mother to “cleave”
to one another within their new, autonomous household.[56] In the same
way, Scripture indicates that at the entrance of Christ’s preeminent
family by the covenant of baptism, former biological claims must in some
sense be abandoned; having been espoused to Christ in baptism, the Christian
in a very real sense “leaves” father and mother in order to
“cleave” in their primary loyalties to Christ and to the members
of His household.
Of course, it could be argued that in the Biblical culture, the claims
of the biological family were merely relativized by the claims of the
newly formed marital household, and that extended family members retained
a measure of authority even over their married descendants, as a “grandfather”
community which indirectly superintended the newer household formed by
marriage.[57] Thus, by analogy, the “grandfather authority”
of the Church might be “mediated” into the life of the biological
family by the sovereign father/parent. But here one must remember that
the Christian rite of initiation into God’s new family is not essentially
a marriage rite in the Biblical sense; rather in the language of Jesus
and throughout the Epistles, the Christian’s rite of initiation
into God’s family the baptismal sacrament of new birth.
The Christian is “born again,” or “adopted,” into
the family of the Church, thus to submit to its sovereign claims upon
him.[58] Having been found in Christ, the Christian is a new creature,
with new primary identities, loyalties, and primary family members. As
Peter Selby puts it, “what happens, inevitably, is that the notion
of ‘family’ as the key to membership and esteem (now) has
to take second place to the new community of faith.”[59]
Thus we find necessary tensions between the bonds of the natural family,
as over and against Jesus’ calling to a “community of voluntary
commitment.” The Church is the sovereign community of those who
are sent into a dangerous and alien world to bear witness, and as such,
the Church invariably conflicts with the secular society characterized
by stable, religious family ties.[60] Hauerwas puts it bluntly: “the
first enemy of the family is Christ… (and although) the family in
the U.S. is in trouble, a true theological understanding of the Christian
family can only make things worse.”[61] Hauerwas continues that
Christians become disciples of Jesus by the way of renunciation, which
often involves the surrender of biological family life and affection.[62]
As Clapp puts it, Christianity simply does not permit us to put both Jesus
and family first. Attempted dual loyalties become impossible when Scripture
is read through the “lens” of Christ, such that we look back
even to creation and God’s establishing and blessing of the biological
family in light of Christ, and His example and commands.[63] Our understanding
of the family must shift if we read the creation narratives by beginning
with Jesus;[64] in Clapp’s words, “if Jesus comes before Genesis,
then we must read the family’s creation in light of such commands
as ‘whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother,
wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, even life itself, cannot
be my disciple.’[65] The most family-friendly Biblical commentators
are forced to agree that such passages relativize family loyalties in
light of the Christian’s primary allegiance to Christ, and in
light of the Christian’s his primary identification with those
who follow the Christ who said "who are my mother and my brothers?"…whoever
does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."[66]
In light of these Scriptural premises, positing the biological family
as the basic, central locus of the Christian’s allegiance becomes
highly problematic. The only suitable alternative is for Christians to
construe their family life in light of the Church’s primacy. The
Church is the only community that is uniquely called into being by Christ’s
Gospel, sustained by His Spirit for the glory of the Father. The Church
is the family which Christ forms uniquely for Himself, to be the community
of persons that uniquely conforms to the triune life of God in the world.[67]
As such, the Church constitutes an entirely new social reality in the
fallen world, and offers a more authentic human community than the merely
natural institutions of family and state; and only within this community
may human beings, as created spiritual beings, be uniquely summoned to
realize the full endowment of God’s grace.[68] Having been called
into being by the radical Gospel of Christ, the Church is a much profounder
witness to God’s grace than the naturally occurring human family;[69]
and as such, the Church is by its very nature an alternative politic that
re-defines and re-structures every order within it. The Church, as a community
revealed to be more determinative than the biological family in God’s
order, thus challenges family loyalties.”[70] As Jones puts it:
Hence, the Church is to be a community that has a different politics
and polity from the dominating social worlds in which it is to exist…
it is to be a community of freedom, living together in mutual love and
peace under the sovereignty of the triune God… it is in this sort
of community that creation itself is to be fulfilled.[71]
A Constructive Theology of the Church’s Family
"Though allegiance to God, His Christ, and His Kingdom precedes
and relativizes the family, it certainly does not destroy it."[72]
The issue that remains is then how Christians ought to order their Christian
families as basic political units in relation to the Church, which is
become the Christian’s primary political unit. Having given ultimate
allegiance to the Church, how should smaller communities of biological,
affective, and covenantal allegiance be structured?
In light of revelation, the Christian worldview does not begin with the
world in its givenness. Rather, the Christian worldview begins with the
sef-disclosure of the living God, who providentially shapes the world
for the glory of His Son. Christ is the one who rightly revises the world’s
fallen natural orders; and He is the one who will consummate the world
in its prepared destiny. Even the primordial paradise before the Fall,
in which the family was instituted, waited in incompletion for Christ’s
fulfilled glory. While pro-family theologians instinctively reach for
those creation narratives shared among the world’s cultures to bolster
their premise that family life is the ultimate destiny of humanity, an
authentically Christian theology of the family must appropriate the specific
revelation of the Triune God in Israel and in Jesus Christ for its construals.
In the light of Christ, we find that God forms His people into His own
family by calling them from among the families of the world,
into the ecclesial community that constitutes the beginning of God’s
new creation, and thus relativizes all former allegiances.
The first step in the Christian “revision” of the family is
the acknowledgement that the Biblical prohibitions on idolatry forbid
us to imagine God on our own terms. Christians cannot presume that our
conceptions of God might be adequately derived from our experiences. God
does not derive from us; rather, our very existence has its being as derived
from His being, such that His self-revelation grounds our world. The Incarnation,
the parenthood of God, and God’s founding of the Church as re-constituted
human family become the models by which we understand ourselves and our
families as merely analogous to His primary Being. Thus, given that the
Church is God’s household and sanctified family, human families
must be understood in relation to what God has renewed and re-formed from
the former creation; in Christ, all things are made new. Hence, the Christian
family must be understood as derived from the Church, the new family formed
by God at Pentecost; it cannot be the other way around.[73]
As Clapp notes, Christians may freely agree with Aristotle that, contrary
to the thinking of the fragmented world of postmodern hyper-individualism,
persons are social animals.[74] It is both naturally necessary, and commanded
by the God of Israel and the Church, that we should journey with our companions.[75]
Given such essentials in the human person, in light of Jesus Christ (the
Truth who revises all prior understanding), the Scriptures give us the
Church as the central society of Christian life, the solely Christian
polity in the fallen world.[76] Just as the Spirit hovered over the chaos
of the primordial universe to form creation and its natural structures,
the Spirit hovered over the small band at Pentecost to form the community
that would bear Christ’s life into the fallen, chaotic world for
its renewal. As such, the Church, in its Scriptures, community, and disciplines,
becomes the true basis of all that is involved in the Christian life-
including the Christian family.[77]
Obedience to God’s revelation- a disclosure so different from the
world’s claims of primacy in the natural structures of family and
state- demands practical revision. The Scriptures prescribe in particular
that Christ’s revision of the biological family is to break open
kinship boundaries according to the superceding, creative grace that invites
all persons into familial union with God;[78] the New Testament language
of the Church as family emphasizes the character of God’s transformation
of primary relationships according to His grace.[79] Thus, recovering
the “lost art” of the truly Christian family requires two
radical declarations: first, that the family is not God’s
most important institution on earth, nor the social agent that most significantly
shapes and forms Christians; nor is the family the primary vehicle of
God’s grace and salvation for the needy world.[80] Second, Christians
must affirm positively that it is the Church that is God’s most
important institution on earth, the social agent that produces and forms
Christians for Christ, and the primary vehicle for God’s grace and
salvation.[81] By extension, Christians must form their families as secondary
institutions that are oriented to the service of the Church- God’s
primary institution for the salvation of the world- in practice, and expendable
for the Church in theory.[82] As Hauerwas puts it, Christians are called
to be married and to form families for the upbuilding of the Church,[83]
and those so called are presumed to accept the call and responsibility
to have and care for their particular children in the name of the Church’s
community.[84]
In short, as Hauerwas puts it, when faced with the marginalization of
the family in secular society, Christians “cannot merely ‘do’
marriage and family; rather they must ‘do’ marriage and family
faithfully.”[85] Only by deliberately forming family life
in the service of Christ’s Church can Christians avoid the easy
mistake of adopting the secular, enculturated insistence that “the
family is central to what the Church means in this time between the times;”[86]
on the contrary, Christians must, as Hauerwas puts it, at all costs avoid
that temptation to forget their own best insights in justifying their
distinctive, radical, witnessing practices on grounds that may appear
more “natural” according to cultural contexts.[87] Such justification
that would be inappropriate for the Christian appear clearly in Forum
authors’ urging for increased birth rates among Christians in order
to enhance “political influence.” Christians must be careful
to recall that marriage and family life among Christians involves commitments
not readily recognized by the rest of the world,[88] in as much as Christians
are about the dangerous (and frequently socially unacceptable) business
of following and witnessing to Jesus Christ.[89] Christians cannot forget
that any other business can so easily become demonic and distorted.[90]
The first task of practically revising family theology is the renewal
of the bankrupt evangelical Protestant ecclesiologies that would view
“the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth”
(I Timothy 3:15) as little more than a glorified neighborhood community
center, to be used and exploited for its benefits to the nuclear family.
The Rushdoonian language of “the local Church,” expendable
for its constituency of local families, defies the essential Christian
confessions of the Church universal, separated ultimately only by place,
and mediating the power of God to command lives.[91] Modern evangelical
Protestants must gird themselves up to adopt Luther and Calvin’s
robust vision of Christ’s universal Church as the inauguration of
His Kingdom in the earth, in which the family, on the model of God’s
Kingdom in Israel, is regarded as expendable and enjoying merely relative
value. Clapp points out that just as the Israelite family possessed significance
because it represented the smallest unit of the holy nation of Israel,
so the Israelite family was also expendable for the holy nation, which
existed for God.[92] Rather than constituting various independent “sovereignties”
within the nation, the Israelite households merely constituted particular
instantiations of the larger community that witnessed to the sovereign
God, the only King of the universe. In this way, God’s chosen community
was determinative of the family (not the other way around!), and thus,
the chosen community appropriately dictated the lives of its families
for its own benefit. The family, as a political unit, was to be at the
service of God by contributing to His larger community. The same attitude
and behavior should characterize concepts of the Christian family as the
smallest unit of Christ’s “holy nation,” the Church.
In clear opposition to these Biblical tenets, Forum author Abshire
evidences a
bankrupt ecclesiology in stating:
Some may criticize the “patriarchs” for “idolatry”
in elevating the family as the “center of life.” However,
what IS the center of “life?” Granted, the sovereign Lord
has ultimate claim to all our love, worship and service, but this God
established the family as the basic element of community; it was not good
for the man to be alone, so God created the family…. (and so) not
even the Church is to take precedence over the father in lawfully governing
his home.[93]
On the contrary, as the new Israel and the household of God, the Church
is the Christian’s central social unit in the world; and as such,
the Church properly exercises an ultimate claim on her families. God’s
people will fail to respond in obedience to the reality of the Church’s
claim on them if, due to inadequate ecclesiologies, they are lead to construe
either the family or the nation as their determinative community. Both
alternatives deny the lordship of Christ as enacted in the Church at Pentecost,
and both alternatives will inevitably permit the nation to become the
determinative community for the Christian; but the state’s secular
stories and violent mission so readily usurps the life-shaping privilege
that belongs only to Christ through His deputized community, the Church.
The human imagination loathes a vacuum, and in the absence of the Church’s
Christ-centered polis under which to construe and structure the
foundational unit of the family, even Christians will turn to the only
alternative community available- the state. Historically, the state requires
Christians to reduce their Christian commitments to merely “personal
interests” or “private concerns” in the life of the
individual, safely tucked away for public application in his “private”
home life.[94] In the absence of corporate allegiance to the Church, modern
evangelicals succumb to this relegation and over-emphasize the family
as the only tolerable sphere of Christian life that they are “granted”
in a secular culture. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ was not meant for
such relegation. Rather, the Gospel is meant to be lived and enacted in
the public, communal, political sphere of the Church, which stands
for Christ among the nations, and defines what it means to be a family
within its politic. In affirming the robustly Biblical doctrine of the
Church as the all-encompassing Kingdom and family of God on earth, a universal
community dispersed in its various homes[95] (rather than being construed
as a mere “parallel” community outlet for the family), the
Christian family can position itself in service to God’s purposes
within their ultimate community;[96] the Christian family will become
the Church’s family.
In particular, construing a revised theology of the Christian family will
implicate the most critical points of tension between the Church and its
families, particularly regarding the issue of vocations and parental prerogatives.
The family’s construal of itself as the Church’s family
requires parental submission to the duty to make their home the stimulating,
nurturing environment for their children’s well-informed and broad
exploration of vocation among the Church’s people, and according
to the Church’s construal of the external world.[97] In as much
as the Church is called into being for the benefit of the world in God’s
saving plan, the Church’s family will raise its children to consider
carefully all prospective occupations, without imposing limits according
to secular expectation, or parental preference.[98] Parents will help
their children to view potential occupations and vocations not as mere
places that individual Christians happen to occupy, but as those places
where the Church exists in its members, as they exist in and for the world.[99]
Thus the Christian family that accepts the sublime vocation of living
as an extension of the Church’s mission will send their children
into the world for service, and will preemptively resign their children
to God’s personal calling to them as His own agents in the world.
Given that the Christian parent hopes in the Resurrection and thus does
not depend on his lineage to insure his after-life renown, and as he has
found his own ultimate meaning in Christ, he can afford to relinquish
any claim on the economic, emotional, or procreative resources of his
children; and given that the Christian parent’s own personal vision
and mission is conformed to the broader mission of the universal Church,
the Christian parent does not need to retain his children to serve his
own purposes.
Accordingly, all members of the Church’s family should be viewed
in relation to their primary loyalty to God, thereby avoiding both a false
anthropology and the idolatrous assumptions of radical patriarchy where
“father is king.” The Christian faith, as attested by its
martyrs and Scripture, proclaims that ultimately, only Christ is King.
With regard to patriarchy, the New Testament household codes must then
be read in light of the prior claim of Christ on the lives of wives and
children.[100] The significant benefits of benevolent patriarchal structures
cannot be embraced by modern evangelicalism without regard for family
structures’ purpose within the Church; modern evangelicalism commits
a grave error in the assumption that a father’s allegiance bends
first to a program of dogged maintenance of “natural law”
rather than to Jesus Christ.[101] Such allegiance is intolerable for the
Christian, given that the God of the Bible is neither a philosophical
construct nor an impersonal force to be cordoned off into our respective
loci of morality.[102] As Yoder explains, the Christian person, united
to God, is definitively liberated from every natural or ‘given’
form of subjection or alienation;[103] and this liberation from secular
categories may be lived with propriety and charity within the borders
of the Church.”[104]
It is only this light of Christian revision of the natural order that
notions of patriarchy, whatever their benefits, may be tolerated or embraced
by the Christian. Given that the new order of the Church is become the
Christian’s own renewed lifestyle of loving missionary impact and
creative transformation in the world, the Christian can freely embrace
the givenness of her role in society on the model of Jesus’ own
example of servanthood.[105] Knowing of a certainty that “in Christ
there is neither male nor female, slave nor free,”[106] family members
may persist in “voluntary subordination in the power of Christ,
instead of bowing to it either fatalistically or resentfully,” as
behooves the dignity of an agent of the servant Church within society.[107]
Though the arbitrary mandates of a natural law model oppress spouses and
children into “natural” roles (which can easily become predatory
means of accommodating purely biological structures), the authority of
Christ and the mission of the Church frees wives to obey and husbands
to serve, children to trust, and parents to nurture for the sake of Christ,
for the Church’s order, and for the benefit of the world.[108]
Furthermore, inasmuch as the Christian parent has renounced the pagan
drive to produce heirs and generations to bear his name in the world in
light of the Christian hope of the life in the world to come, the Christian
family will prepare itself to affirm warmly any potential inclination
to the traditionally prized vocation of celibacy as a great gift to the
Church’s life.[109] As Hauerwas points out, such freedom to endorse
the celibate state is due largely to the fact that Christians do not have
to have children to be Christians, because the Gospel can be received
by those who were not raised in it.[110] The Synoptics resound with the
same account of Jesus’ statements on the transience of the married
state relative to life in the heavenly Kingdom, as in Matthew 22:30, Mark
12:25, and Luke 20:35; furthermore, Jesus states that (resounding of Hauerwas’
derivation), though the Pharisees rejoice in their biological/ethnic inheritance,
God is able “to raise up children for Abraham from these stones.”
(Matthew 3:9, Luke 3:8) Accordingly, the Church’s family will form
its children to regard the radical option of chaste celibacy as “the
first way of life for a Christian, the practice necessary for the Church
to participate in the hope secured through God’s cross, and in the
embodiment of the hope that God’s Kingdom is both real and expected.”[111]
Such familial affirmation of the celibate vocation accords with the apostles’
legitimation because of the Church’s recognized need to grow through
witness and conversions dispersed among the nations, often by unmarried
missionaries.[112]
In turn, it is only from this preferential affirmation of singleness as
the vocation tending most immediately to the Church’s mission in
the world should the Church’s parents form their children for vocations
to family life. Rather than vacuously proclaiming marriage to be the “norm”
on secular models of natural law’s deductions from biology, the
Church’s family proceeds from a prior commitment to the Church’s
mission in the world, which defines and warrants both married and single
life.[113] Given that the Church is a community of persons called to follow
Christ’s servant leadership at the expense of every “natural”
accommodation, and at the expense of life itself, “the intelligibility
of the Christian understanding of marriage makes sense only in relation
to the early Church’s legitimization of singles.”[114]
Hauerwas is urgent on this point: if Christians genuinely entertain the
joy and certainty of their faith and its promises of Heaven, pastors and
parents must avoid the tendency simply to underwrite the broad assumption
that marriage is (merely) a natural and primary context,[115] such that
most Christians assume that marriage is the first mode of sexual life,
whereas singleness remains to be justified.[116] Rather, Hauerwas urges
that in witness to the Christian’s present affirmation of the life
of the world to come, Christian marriage should be promoted not
as a merely “natural” institution, but rather as a highly
particularized vocation and sacrament, engaged by called persons, within
a community of people who marry for the purpose of serving the Church.[117]
The Church’s marriages should thus be construed as “heroic
institutions,” prized for their service to the polity which authorizes
and creates each marriage.[118]
Furthermore, the Church’s parents will prepare their children to
answer God’s call to the utmost by raising them in a home construed
not as “the father’s palace” nor as an intimate, private
“haven” where private devotion may be cordoned off from the
wily secular culture. Rather, the Church’s family operates its home
as the Church’s missions base, open and expendable for witness through
hospitality,[119] and, in its vigorous engagement with culture, as a vehicle
for the Church’s properly public role in society.[120]
Most importantly, the Church’s family must order its life as a center
for the Church’s catechesis of the Church’s children. Rather
than construing the family dinner table as the podium for parental opinions,
the Church’s parents will carefully defer to the Church’s
teachings in their conversation, and will faithfully transmit them to
their children out of regard for God’s (not the parents’)
ultimate claim on their children’s hearts and minds.[121] The Church’s
parents understand that their biological connection to their children
merely allows for the immediate extensions of the Church’s teaching
and nurturing ministry to their particular children.[122] This notion
will express itself further in parents’ honoring single and widowed
Christian adults as co-“parents” by employing their ministry
as co-educators and caretakers for the Church’s children, in light
of the single person’s shared parental office and responsibilities
within the Church.[123]
Such practices will invariably shape construal and language about the
Church, which is God’s primary social institution and the Christian’s
primary family. In pastoral proclamation, an adequate theology of the
family will require a revived and robust ecclesiology, grounded and explored
within the rich resources of the Church’s historic confessions.
The Church can shape its families self-construals particularly through
instruction on baptism as the definitive “re-birth” of the
convert into the new “family” and politic that uniquely embodies
the life of Christ in the world. In this way, the Church’s baptismal
vows are particularly critical to reclaiming a sense of the Church as
the determinative community that properly re-invents the family; and an
emphasis on baptism as the renunciation of all selfish claims that would
inhibit total surrender to Christ, and as the affirmation of others’
surrender to Christ, must be applied to familial claims. Such emphasis
will no doubt heighten awareness of the costliness of the Christian profession,
and will enhance the convert’s awareness of the Church’s value
and implications. If the demands of the Church are clearly explicated,
it will be difficult for the Christian to view the Church as a domesticated
“local community” existing at his personal disposal for personal
benefit; rather, the Church and its teaching will be better understood
as the requirement of the community, God’s institution
for the salvation of the world, standing over and against the world’s
“primary institutions” of coercive and sinful nations.
With this revised self-perception of its vocation in relation to families,
the Church will be able to better care for its families, not least by
requiring its members to renounce falsely sentimental illusions of family
life. The Church can instead return the Christian family to the family’s
traditional status of social, economic, and political function in support
of the Church; and in raising the family’s self-awareness as the
bearer of the Church’s traditions and practices, whose children
are raised to be worthy of carrying forward the work of their ancestors
in the faith.[124]
In sum, the Church’s deliberate revision of its sovereign vocation
as God’s Family strengthens the human family by conferring an adequately
Scriptural identity on its family units, by which those units may conform
themselves to a healthy “higher purpose.” As Clapp readily
acknowledge, “the family does need a purpose beyond itself to prosper,”[125]
and as Selby agrees:
A larger project is in hand than making our family ‘work’-
(though) that larger project turns out to contain resources for our life
in families too- (they are) participation in God’s hope and forgiveness
being enacted in the world… (and) those themes derive ultimately
from an invitation to us to become people who transcend our descent: we
are to become children of God.[126]
For Christ’s people, the higher purpose and organizing principle
of their families must be Christ’s Church rather than the goals
of violent nations, secular culture, or the self-interested family itself.
As John Paul II concluded in Centessimus Annus, “though
the totalitarian State tends to absorb the family within itself, the Church’s
defense of her own freedom and identity in a disparaging culture enables
the Church to defend the human person and families under her care in their
mandate “to obey God rather than men.”[127]
Conclusion: Christian Family for the Sake of the Church.
The Church is the particular people called to witness and live true
to the reality that Christ has come- that the Kingdom has come, that the
world really has been changed.”[128] And because Christ’s
advent changes and redscribes the entire world, the Kingdom’s coming
creates terrible conflicts of allegiance, particularly with the biological
family.[129] Scripture is clear that Christ has inaugurated a new family,
and as God’s family, it must be both “new” and “first,”
demanding primary allegiance that precedes and supercedes the family.[130]
This essay argues, in agreement with significant contemporary theologians
concerned with the state of modern Christianity, that the Christian family
is troubled not because of neglect from the Church, but because of an
over-emphasis on the family that sentimentally exaggerates the family
as an end in itself. Such construal thus posits a secular telos
for the human family which does not accord with the Gospel, and which
thus cannot survive the pressures of reality. To claim that the family
is the ultimate point of reference for the Christian is untruth, and hence,
tends to idolatry. Christ, the first and last Word of God, both precedes
and supercedes the Genesis narrative of the creation of the human family;
in as much as all things are to be conformed to His Gospel, the Christian
family is also subject to revision in order submit to the preeminent claims
of Christ.[131]
Christ in no way merely endorses the fallen, anguished world and its structures
as is, but calls the world and its natural structures to what they can
ultimately become in Him; and this calling of the world, from the present
to its destiny, as uttered by Christ’s people gathered on His behalf
in the Church, will involve a tension between natural structures and the
demands of the Christian’s particular commission. The Church is
radically different from the created world because the Church, in its
origin and consecration to holiness, uniquely belongs to God.
The unique sanctity of the Church, the family of God, relativizes the
biological family and calls the biological family to submit its own identity
and structures to those of God’s family, the superceding community
of the believers. There will no doubt be reluctance to do so. As Hauerwas
recounts, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments warns
that the existence of “a strong external community” weakens
family ties when sympathies and structures outside the family enable cooperation
for human flourishing beyond the bounds of biological kinship. It is in
this spirit that Jesus exhorts us that His primary family is not composed
by those who share His genetics, but by those who share in His obedience.
Thus there can be no doubt that Jesus in some way displaces the biological
family, such that family can no longer be the paramount loyalty for those
who follow Him.[132]
For modern American evangelicals, schooled carefully to read theological
meaning into our nation’s imitation of the Roman Republic’s
political structures, the proposal of the Church as primary community
may seem dangerously communitarian, or worse yet, “socialist.”
Indeed, as Hauerwas admits, for the Church to enact the social ethic of
Christ in the world, Christians must re-capture the social significance
of common behavior and dependencies. Communal identity becomes especially
significant regarding the formation of families, since communal trust
becomes impossible when separate kinship communities regard other kinship
groups as a challenge and threat to their existence; one of the most profound
commitments of a community, therefore, is providing a context that encourages
us to trust and depend on one another.[133]
For the Christian, it is Christ and His mission, not personal property,
nor personal freedoms, nor individual autonomy, nor familial rights that
are the center of Christian life, and the bond with Christ takes precedence
over all other bonds, whether familial or social.[134] Given such all-encompassing,
real demands, the Christian is called to relinquish all facets of his
life and identity for the all-encompassing claims of the community that
Christ inaugurated and authorized to carry His presence into the world
by word and sacrament. As Rushdoony acknowledges, it is the sign of that
which opposes God to diminish the Church and to cause it to disappear
through a “dismantling” of its structures and community: “the
purpose of the synagogue of Satan is thus to make the Church invisible
in the sense of being non-existent as a Church, and the state visible
as the true order of man.”[135] Furthermore, as Jones so clearly
states:
Our steadfast refusal to put any common and shared conceptual “meat”
on the mantra of ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’ is at the heart of
the widespread disarray and even discouragement in our tradition today.
Our discourses and therefore also our practices in regard to Jesus are
in chaotic discord. This leaves us vulnerable to having the center of
our faith occupied by idols of the moment… When the discourses and
practices of the Church are in disarray, then we can also conclude that
the way its members construe themselves, construe Jesus, and construe
the world, may be in stark contrast to how the NT and the early Church
traditions have construed Jesus and the reality of God and the destiny
of the world.”[136]
In conclusion, I suggest that the dangers that threaten the modern family,
as so acutely perceived by modern evangelicals, are not primarily
the dangers presented by the culture without. Rather, the Christian family
is threatened by bankrupt ecclesiologies that would replace empty household
gods for the will of the living God in the historical, Scriptural establishment
of His Church as the primary community of the believer, “the pillar
and ground of His truth.” An over-emphasis of the family results
in an inflated, hollow, household idol which neither leads the person
into his destiny in Christ nor effectively enacts Christ’s radical,
transforming mission of conversion in the world; and this over-emphasis
is the result of denying rightful allegiance to the Church as that Kingdom
wherein Christ is Lord, while instead turning anxious eyes to the nation
for ultimate, saving meaning for ourselves and our families. The family
itself can lend no intrinsic meaning for the Christian; for all its worth,
dignity, and sanctity, the Christian family is nonetheless a universal
institution, at home as the basic unit of any given human society, however
appropriated and theologized according to Christian presuppositions.[137]
In that very action of appropriation and definition of the family according
to Christian theology, the family becomes the Church’s family;
one has only to consider conservative evangelical striving to maintain
heterosexual, monogamous, chaste marriages as the national cultural “norm”
for evidences that the Christian community has claimed the family
for its own, and presented it to the world as the model on which all other
human families were meant to be formed. Christians believe that this is
as it should be. How then, given that evangelicals have tacitly accepted
that the family is to be lived according to the Church’s understanding,
thereby granting that the family is created and governed by the Church
to some extent, then retreat back to the family as “fundamental
political unit,” possessed of an independent “sovereignty”
that flies in the face of the Church’s sovereign authority?[138]
Unqualified patriarchy, given its assumption of the father’s autonomous
and ultimate authority, inevitably conflicts with the Church’s claims
of ultimate authority over its people. I argue that potential reconciliation
between the claims of the family and the Church requires a renewed self-identification
of the Christian family as the foundational unit of the Church, existing
by and for the Church, and expendable for the Church. This identity and
practice are comprised in the notion of the “Church’s family.”
As Clapp urges, the Christian family exists at the pleasure of the Church;
it is for her own sake as Christ’s witnessing Body that the Church
solemnizes Christian marriages and accepts both offspring and converts
to her ritual of re-birth into Christ. Christian families should behave
accordingly, even though revised behavior in light of the Church’s
ultimate prerogatives may mean toppling the housed gods that formerly
promised social power and political identity. Revised behavior in the
Church’s family requires the replacing of that which is “natural”
with that which is “right,” as Christ has revealed it. I conclude
with Rodney Clapp’s summary:
…For Christians this is no surprise. We in fact expect that
families and states will not even know what is ultimately good or natural
for them unless, in the life of the Church, they hear and see the story
of the Kingdom come. Our confession is that the good and the true are
revealed through the particular story of Israel and Jesus Christ. So we
cannot understand family apart from our confession, which is our story.
We must resort explicitly to that story to “explain” family
and our hopes for family…as Christians we affirm that all that is
true and real about family is finally revealed in Jesus Christ and the
Kingdom He inaugurated. …(because of the Fall) we often fail to
see what is best for ourselves and for the world. But we do see Jesus.
Only be seeing Jesus and all that He means can we begin to build “natural”
families, families that serve the one and final reality, which we call
the Kingdom of God. With this understanding, this vision of what is real
and true, we cannot affirm that the hope of the world rests in the bosom
of the biological or nuclear family… the hope of the world is Jesus
Christ, and the people called to bear witness to that hope is a people
drawn from all families and nations. It is the Church.[139]
Endnotes
[1] Joe R. Jones, On Being the Church of Jesus Christ in Tumultuous
Times (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2005), p. 172.
[2] Joe R. Jones, Grammer of Christian Faith II (New York: Rowman
&Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2002), p. 657.
[3] Stanley Hauerwas, “The Radical Hope of the Annunciation: Why
Both Single and Married Christians Welcome Children,” The Hauerwas
Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001): 511.
[4] “Rodney Clapp has quite simply written the best book we have
on the family by a Christian theologian. Challenging both mainstream and
Protestant liberal accounts of the family, Clapp shows how the family
has to be reconfigured in terms of the basic theological convictions of
the Christian Church.” Stanley Hauerwas, Review of Families
at the Crossroads. Rodney Clapp, Families at the Crossroads:
Beyond Traditional and Modern Options (Downers Grove: InterVarsity
Press, 1993).
[5] Clapp, Families 10, 11.
[6] Clapp, Families 68.
[7] John Rousas Rushdoony, The Foundations of Social Order: Studies
in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church (Prebyterian and Reformed
Publishing Company, 1968), qtd. Clapp, Families 68.
[8] Hauerwas, Radical Hope 511.
[9] Jones, Church 176.
[10] Clapp, Families 224.
[11] Clapp, Families 12.
[12] Clapp, Families 12.
[13] Joe Jones also cites Matthew 10:6, Luke 1:33, 69; Acts 2:36 and 7:42;
Hebrews 3:2-6; I Peter 4:17; Galatians 6:10; Ephesians 2:19; I Timothy
3:15; I Peter 4:17; Romans 9:26; II Corinthians 6:16-18; Hebrews 2:10;
I Peter 2:17 and 5:9; I Corinthians 6:5; I John 3:10-17; Matthew 23:8;
John 3:29; Revelation 19:7-9; II Corinthians 11:2-4; Ephesians 5:21-32.
Jones posits this tension in terms of the “dialectic” between
the Church and the world in these words: “if we accept that the
“the Church essentially exists in the mission of witness to the
reality of the triune God for the benefit of the world,” such that
the Church is in the world though not of it, we anticipate a dynamic tension
and irreducible tension between the Church and the world, because the
Church is an empirical group of persons gathered in community comprised
of distinct discourses and practices and construal of the world in terms
of itself; the Church is always a comprehensive and particular culture
and society (a subculture) within and different from the larger culture,
society, and world. The Church is a visible social group with its own
distinct structure of relationships, and thus lives through its own distinctive
discourses and practices, thereby maintaining a distinct identity in differentiation
from other prevalent groups and identities in the world of the Church’s
various social locations. The Christian within the Church has a distinctive
moral and spiritual life in differentiation from the surrounding social
worlds, and thereby inquires as to what is truly Christian in practices.”
Jones, Grammar 600.
[14] Jones, Grammar 600. See also Col 4:15, Philemon 2.
[15] Theologian Peter Selby emphasizes that it has always been the missionary
purpose of the Church that have grounded and determined the basis for
“fellowship” within the Church. James D.G. Dunn, “The
Household Rules in the New Testament”; Peter Selby, “Is the
Church a Family?”; Carol Harrison, “The Silent Majority: the
Family in Patristic Thought,” The Family in Theological Perspective,
ed. Stephen C. Barton. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996): 87- 169.
[16] Hauerwas urges for such a perspective of Christian family life as
“derived” from the primary community of the Church in terms
of marriage, the bedrock of the family: “Accordingly, the love required
of Christians even in marriage imitates that love discovered (first) through
our brothers and sisters in Christ. Therefore, marriage is not for Christians
where we learn what love is about; rather marriage is made possible for
Christians because we have been loved by God. Hauerwas, “Sex
in Public,” Reader 225.
[17] Mr. Doug Phillips, The Vision Forum. My acquaintance with
this and other affiliated and sympathetic institutes and schools of thought
is indebted in large part to the work of Mrs. Jesse Paine and her online
publication “Biblical Womanhood.” Crystal Paine, Biblical
Womanhood Blog, http://www.biblicalwomanhoodonline.com/blog.htm (November
2005-May 2006).
[18] Doug Philips, Forum, Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy
2, http://www.visionforumministries.org/home/about/biblical_patriarchy.aspx
(March 2007).
[19] “While one cannot really yet call it a “movement”,
the term “patriarchy” has made a return describing an attempt
to develop a counter-cultural model of the Christian family and by extension,
a just Christian social order.” The link between an idealized patriarchal
family structure and a desirable social order is further explained as
follows: “Now what has all this to do with reforming the Christian
family and evaluating ‘Patriarchy?’ In effect, Western civilization
was a ‘patriarchy’ up until recent times and assumed as the
normal means of governing not only households, but also entire nations.
The English proverb ‘every man’s home is his castle’
represents the cultural assumption, handed down from antiquity, that the
father, as head of his household, WAS the federal representative of his
own family to the broader community.” Brian M. Abshire, Forum,
Biblical Patriarchy and the Doctrine of Federal Representation,
http://www.visionforumministries.org/sections/hotcon/ht/family/patriarchyfederal.asp
(May 2006): 1-10.
[20] Abshire, Patriarchy 5.
[21] Abshire, Patriarchy 3.
[22] “Christian fathers cannot escape the jurisdiction of Church
and state and must be subject to both.” (Cited also Rom. 13:1ff.;
Eph. 5:21; 6:4; Heb. 13:17; 1 Pet. 2:13ff.) See also Matt. 16:19; 18:18;
Acts 4:19; 5:29; 25:11; Heb. 13:17; 1 Pet. 2:13ff.; Eph. 1:22-23; 1 Tim.
3:15. Philips, Patriarchy 7.
[23] “Since the educational mandate belongs to parents and they
are commanded personally to walk beside and train their children, they
ought not to transfer responsibility for the educational process to others.
However, they have the liberty to delegate components of that process.
While they should exercise great caution and reserve in doing this, and
the more so the less mature the child, it is prudent to take advantage
of the diversity of gifts within the body of Christ and enjoy the help
and support that comes with being part of a larger community with a common
purpose. (1 Cor. 12:14ff.; Gal. 4:1,2; 6:2; Eph. 4:16). The age-integrated
communities of family and Church are the God-ordained institutions for
training and socialization and as such provide the preferred pattern for
social life and educational endeavors. Philips, Tenets, 19-20.
[24] “Only as a man demonstrates “domestic competence”
in his own home is he then authorized by God to minister to the broader
community (I Tim 3:1ff, Titus 3:5ff).” Abshire, Patriarchy
8.
[25] “Few Christian fathers even know how to begin the process of
shepherding their children and leading their families in the ways of God…A
husband and father is the head of his household, a family leader, provider,
and protector, with the authority and mandate to direct his household
in paths of obedience to God. (Gen. 18:19; Eph. 6:4). The biblical patriarch
thus assumes personal responsibility for teaching his wife and children;
out of his secret worship, meditating on the Divine Word, (Josh 1:8) God
equips him to minister to his entire household through family worship
(Deut 6:4ff). Furthermore, as the federal “head” of his family,
he adjudicates disputes, resolves problems and maintains justice in the
home.” Abshire, Patriarchy 5. In this way, Forum authors represent
an evangelical appropriation of ecclesial roles and functions clearly
designated as the prerogative of the Church in Scripture, to the household
father. Cf Matthew 18.
[26] Additional practices incumbent on the Christian home and directed
by the father include home education- because, “as R.J. Rushdoony
has pointed out, “education is inescapably a religious discipline.”
Thus Vision Forum proposes that “any approach to Christian
education ought to recognize and facilitate the role of fathers and mothers
as the primary teachers of their children. (Deut. 4:9; 6:6ff.; Ps. 78:3-8;
Prov. 1:8; Eph. 6:4) Philips, Tenets 6.
[27] Contemporary Roman Catholic statements also affirm the family as
“the basic political unit” in dialectic with the Church. John
Paul II states that the family and political community serve related purposes
in accommodating the “innermost nature” of the human social
creature: “human being’s social nature makes it evident that
the progress of the human person and the advance of society hinge on one
another…. The social life is not (merely) something added on to
the human being.” Pope Paul VI, Pastoral Constitution on the
Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes (The Vatican: December
7, 1965.) n. 25, p.180. John Paul II notes further that the Christian
view of society recognizes that “the social nature of man is not
completely fulfilled in the State, but is realized in various intermediary
groups, beginning with the family…the first and fundamental structure
for "human ecology" is the family, in which man receives his
first formative ideas about truth and goodness, and learns what it means
to love and to be loved, and thus what it actually means to be a person.”
Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus 39 (The Vatican:
May 1, 1991). In this way, John Paul calls the Church to view the family
“as the sanctuary of life… the family is indeed sacred: it
is the place in which life, the gift of God, can be properly welcomed
and protected.” Ibid 39.
[28] “The nature of the family derives from the most part from social
necessity… we form families because our parents, Church, and nation
tell us to… and they tell us to form (families) because they serve
the family line, the mission of the Kingdom, or the survival of the state.”
Clapp, Families 44.
[29] In particular, Forum authors cite the following: the speeches of
Quintus Macedonicus (131 B.C.), who called for stronger family life as
“a plan for Rome’s lasting preservation;” the fact of
the historical changes changes resulting from the agricultural revolution’s
transformation of population into power in rural tribal cultures; the
orations of the Greek King Pyrrhusin (3rd century BC), who called for
larger families when his Greek armies were defeated by the Romans, “who
by then were procreating far more rapidly than were the Greeks, (and)
kept pouring in reinforcements;” and the admission of Polybius (140
B.C) that “in our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children
and a general decay of population,” as linked to consequent Roman
domination. Philip Longman, “The Return of Patriarchy,” The
New American Foundation, Spring 2006. http://www.foreignpolicy.com
(March/April 2006): 8.
[30] Selby, Family in Theological Perspective 151-169.
[31] Carol Harrison here cites Cicero, On Duties I, 17, 54. Harrison
notes that Augustine stressed a similar theme in the City of God XIX,
where he emphasizes the role of the paterfamilias in “securing peace
in the state by maintaining peace by just government of his household
according to the rules of the state.” Harrison, Family in Theological
Perspective 89.
[32] Longman, Return of Patriarchy 1.
[33] “Patriarchy, for as long as it (can) be sustained, (is) the
key to maintaining population and, therefore, power.” Longman, Return
of Patriarchy 1.
[34] Longman, Return of Patriarchy 2.
[35] Longman, Return of Patriarchy 5.
[36] “Under patriarchy, “bastards” and single mothers
cannot be tolerated because they undermine male investment in the next
generation. Illegitimate children do not take their fathers’ name,
and so their fathers, even if known, tend not to take any responsibility
for them. By contrast, “legitimate” children become a source
of either honor or shame to their fathers and the family line.”
Longman, Return of Patriarchy 9.
[37] Longman, Return of Patriarchy 9.
[38] Longman, Return of Patriarchy 7.
[39] Longman here laments that “even with a fertility rate near
replacement level, the United States lacks the amount of people necessary
to sustain an imperial role in the world, just as Britain lost its ability
to do so after its birthrates collapsed in the early 20th century.”
Longman, Return of Patriarchy 6. There could be no clearer disjuncture
between the Christian view of the family as the servant of Christ and
the demonic abuse of the family as a means to domination; though the world
might hold that one’s interests in one’s family might seem
to justify hostility towards the enemy as being lives forfeitable and
expendable for the sake of other lives nearer to our own, people rooted
in Christ are commanded to construe the apparent enemies “as those
for whom Christ lived and died and for whom He was raised.” Jones,
Grammar 173-174.
[40] Longman, Return of Patriarchy 10.
[41] Hauerwas, “Sex in Public” Reader 498.
[42] Westminster Confession XXV.II, qtd. Rushdoony, Foundations
179. The Vision Forum interprets this statement as allowing that
“family, Church, and state are parallel institutions, each with
real but limited authority in its ordained sphere;” and, “as
the keeper of the keys of Christ’s kingdom, the Church is the central
and defining institution of history…every Christian father and family
ought to be a submitted and committed part of a local Church, subject
to the authority and discipline of the Church through its elders.”
(Heb. 10:24-25; 13:17) Philips, Forum, Tenets 7-9.
[43] There are over one hundred forty- six descriptions of Israel as “the
house of God” in the Old Testament, located in the books of Exodus,
Leviticus, Numbers, Joshua, Ruth, I and II Samuel, I Kings, Psalms, Isaiah,
Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Amos, Micah, and Zechariah. These references
are affirmed in the New Testament’s mention of “the House
of Israel” in Matthew 10 and 15, Acts 7, and Hebrews 8. Such notions
are inextricably linked to notions of a familial relationship between
Israel, the consecrated nation, and God particularly in Hosea, where God’s
persistence on behalf of His unfaithful people is “justified”
on account of His kinship/spousal/parental relationship to them; in Amos
3, God describes Israel as His own particular family, selected from among
the “families” of the earth; and in Isaiah 63, God is invoked
as the “father” of His collective people. Furthermore, Abraham
is described as the collective father from whom all the Israelites derive
their genealogy/ethnic/religious identity under the Father God (Malachi
2; Genesis 17, 32, 48; Exodus 3 and 4; Deuteronomy 1, 6, 9, 29; Joshua
24; and I Chronicles). These references to Israel as a collective “family”
under the father Abraham are affirmed in the NT references of Matthew
3, Luke 1 and 16, John 8, Acts 3 and 7, James 2, and are powerfully cited
by Paul when referring to the Christian’s new, primary spiritual
family in Christ in Romans 4).
[44] The nuptial imagery for the Church, and by extension as applying
to the individual believers within the Church exploits every relational
image of patriarchal structures incumbent on the believer, and thus undermines
those structures as they exist in secular forms; not only does the Church
and her members have a new “Father” by their conversion but
also a new betrothed “husband”- in this way, all claims to
familial authority are taken up by Christ. CF also, John 3:29, Revelation
19:710; II Corinthians 11:2-4; Ephesians 5:21-32.
[45] Matthew 23:8.
[46] Hebrews 3:1-6
[47] I Peter 4:17.
[48] Galatians 6:10
[49] I Peter 2:17.
[50] I Peter 5:9. The sense of sibling relationship among believers in
the Church is appropriated again by the interchangeability of the terms
for “believer” and “brother” in the I Corinthians
6 injunction against lawsuits between Church members.
[51] Ephesians 2:19-22: “So then you are no longer strangers and
sojourners, but you are citizens with the saints and members of the household
of God… in (Christ) the whole structure is joined together and grows
into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you are also built together spiritually
into a dwelling place for God.”
[52] I Timothy 3:14-15.
[53] Romans 9:26.
[54] II Corinthians 6:18. Hebrews 2:10 corroborates that God will bring
many “children” to glory through Christ.
[55] I John 3:10-17
[56] Genesis 3 and Ephesians 5.
[57] As Forum authors elaborate: “furthermore, biblical
patriarchy understands that as sons and daughters mature and get married,
they form NEW covenant relationships that supersede their previous households
(Gen 2:24). Godly marriage requires a transition of authority from the
father, to the son. There is still a family relationship; albeit a transformed
one. In pre-industrial cultures wherein most economic activity was family
based, the setting up of these new households did not negate the broader
family relationships; often sons continued working with and for their
fathers. This meant that the “grandfather” retained SOME authority
(as the head of the family business) while recognizing the legitimate
family authority of his sons over their own households.” Abshire,
Patriarchy 7.
[58] Selby notes that the “rebirth” which Jesus requires of
Nicodemus would have been thought to have literally changed his line of
descent; “so the source of his membership in the community of God’s
people is changed from human descent to spiritual descent. This is also
the effect enacted for all believers when they are baptized into the family
of faith, which is God’s “house,’ that is, God’s
lineage.” Selby, Family in Theological Perspective 165.
In Selby’s thought, this rebirth is no mere analogy, but would have
been understood as the total transformation of natural loyalties and intimacies
in God’s new “clan.” Selby, Family in Theological
Perspective 165: “this very quickly goes beyond a mere method
of explanation, an analogy to help people understand. Were it just that,
it might simply be replaced by other analogies in other cultures….
But it (emerges not to commend present loyalties) but to offer a transformation
of those loyalties that people naturally have. Natural loyalties may be
determined by the boundaries of kinship, but not so with the new clan
God is creating: Whoever does the will of God is my (parent and sibling.)”
Ibid.
[59] Selby, Family in Theological Perspective 166.
[60] New Testament scholar James G. Dunn lists the Scriptures which indicate
Jesus’ “disparaging” of family ties in Mark 3, Matthew
8 and 10, and Luke 9 and 14. Family in Theological Perspective,
55. See also John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 68.
[61] Stanley Hauerwas, “Family Grace: The Christian Family and the
Difference it Can Make for the American Family,” Grace Upon
Grace: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Langford (Nashville: Abingdon,
1999): 65.
217. Hauerwas goes on to explain that the American family is in so much
“trouble” precisely because it is so celebrated, qua American’s
“clinging to it desperately;” Hauerwas attributes such devotion
to an overly idealized account of the family as the place where persons
“receive and learn affection”; given the diminution of reliance
on kinship and strengthening of sympathy between strangers in an organized,
capitalist society, the family is “reduced” to the interpersonal
and psychological role of a sentimental, romanticized haven for affective
development, an expectation which the family is not able to meet. Hauerwas,
Family Grace 223. Hauerwas continues in another essay: … “the
very celebration of the family- the fact that Americans so desperately
cling to the family as our anchor in the storms of life- is but an indication
of the trouble in which the American family finds itself. The more we
are forced to make the family the end-all and be-all of our existence,
the more the family becomes a problem not only for American society generally,
but more particularly for Christians. Hauerwas, “Radical Hope”
Reader 507. Clapp follows suit: “Stripped of economical
and political functions, the bourgeois family concentrates on the only
thing left to it: affection. (But) our expectations of family warmth are
often stretched to the point of being utopian. We can rather easily sentimentalize
family and imagine it to be something far rosier than anything we actually
experience.” Clapp, Families 36.
[62] Hauerwas, “The Peaceable Kingdom,” Reader 125.
Cf Matthew 10:37.
[63] "One of the marks of the Church's heritage is that it sees movements
within the canonical story, and therefore a difference between the Testaments.
Instead of a timeless collection of parabolic anecdotes for allegorical
application, or of propositional communications ready for deductive exposition,
the Bible is a story of promise and fulfillment that must be read directionally.
The New Testament, by affirming the Hebrew Scriptures that the Christians
have come to call the Old Testament, also interprets them. ...Abraham
and Moses are to be read through Jesus and Paul." John Howard Yoder,
The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel (South Bend: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1985), p. 59.
[64] “For Christians, the primary creation account is not Genesis,
but the first chapter of the Gospel of John. There Genesis’s opening
words are directly quoted, only to be modified in light of Christ: In
the beginning… was the Word. (John 1:1) There we learn that “all
things came into being” through the Word and that the Word became
flesh and lived among us,” bearing the name of Jesus.” Clapp,
Families 68.
[65] Clapp, Families 69.
[66] Mark 3: 33- 35.
[67] Jones, Grammar 609. Jones adds that “the grammar of
the Church as a called community contains some important denials: (a)
the Church does not call itself into existence—it is has a Lord
and Savior; (b) the Church is not a self-constituting democratic reality
which gives itself its own marching orders and direction; and (c) the
Church is not called by the world. Whenever these denials are forgotten
or overlooked, the Church in its concrete life mutes the power of its
distinct calling in Jesus Christ.” See also Joe R. Jones, “A
Grammar of Christian Faith Bearing on The Church and Political Theology,”
(Unpublished Course Document, Yale Divinity School, 2006), p. 5.
[68] Jones, Grammar 609.
[69] Hauerwas, “Family Grace” Reader 218.
[70] Hauerwas, “Family Grace” Reader 224.
[71] Jones, Grammar 609.
[72] Clapp, Families 77.
[73] “(From God’s revelation) emerges not an image by which
to convey the truth, but a truth that radically changes the image: for
the message of Ephesians 3:15, (for instance, “… the God and
Father of all, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives
its name,”) is not that by reference to our experience of life in
families we are able to understand our relationship with God. It is (rather)
that our membership of family has to take its meaning and shape from what
has emerged about our relationship with God, “from whom all fatherhood
derives its name. In the light of God’s ‘fatherhood,’
and the fraternity and sorority that turned out to be God’s human
project, family patterns have to be re-examined. Selby, Family in
Theological Perspective 166. Although such notions as those of the
“domestic Church” are based on thought as ancient as that
of John Chrysostum- who emphasized the well-run Christian family as a
“little Church” making up the wider Church- the sense of the
family’s existence as called into being by the Church, and oriented
towards the Church’s service can still remain unhindered. Chrysostum,
Homily on Ephesians 5, qtd, Harrison, Family in Theological
Perspective 89.
[74] Clapp, Families 24.
[75] Clapp, Families 25.
[76] Clapp, Families 25.
[77] Clapp, Families 25.
[78] “Those who have to be addressed as two separate groups in Paul’s
addressing Antioch (‘my brothers who are of Abraham’s family,
and you others who fear God,’ Acts 13) are able to become newly
related as “brothers and sisters” under the God who breaks
down every wall.” (Ephesians 3), qtd. Selby, Family in Theological
Perspective 164.
[79] Selby, Family in Theological Perspective 165.
[80] For corroboration in a separate tradition, we note that the Roman
Catholic Catechism points out that “from the beginning of Christian
history, the assertion of Christ’s lordship over the world and over
history has implicitly recognized that man should not submit his personal
freedom in an absolute manner to any earthly power, but only to God the
Father and the Lord Jesus Christ; Caesar is not “Lord.” The
Church believes instead that the keys and center and purpose of humanity’s
history is to be found (only) in its Lord and Master.” Catechism
of the Catholic Church. 450 (New York: Image Publishing, 1995).
[81] Clapp, Families 68.
[82] The notion of the “expendability” and relativization
of the family for the sake of God’s Kingdom finds its grounding
not only in the calling of Jesus Christ on point (Matthew 10:35-37, Matthew
12:46-50, Matthew 19:29, Matthew 3:31-35, Matthew 22:30, Mark 10:29-30,
Mark 12:25, Luke 2:48-52, Luke 8:19-21, Luke 12:51-53, Luke 20:35, John
19:27), but also in the obedience of ancient Israel as the over-arching
family for whose sake individual families were formed. As we find in the
expulsion of foreign wives in Ezra 10, the death of progeny according
to God’s wager in Job, and the Levitical commands to put insubordinate
children to death for violation of the national religious law, the natural
family exists at the pleasure of God’s consecrated community, and
is maintained only according to the mission of that community. It is in
that spirit that we find the apostles responding to questions about family
life and granting their permissions, prohibitions, and qualifications
as the leaders of the Church. It is also in this spirit that we find the
implicit question about the propriety of marriage for Christians posed
to Paul in I Corinthians 7, to which Paul responds with a highly qualified
evaluation of the merits and disadvantages of family life; as the German
historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler noted on trends in family life,
“when the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins
to regard ‘having children’ as a question of pro’s and
con’s, the great turning point (in views of the family) has come.
Paul’s evaluation of the family life, not in terms of divine mandatum,
but in terms of “pro’s and con’s” in light of
the needs of the Church could be no clearer: the testimony of Jesus Christ
had undone the prior data of family life and had radically relativized
its commitments relative to commitments to Himself.
[83] Hauerwas, “Family Grace” Reader 224.
[84] Hauerwas, “Family Grace” Reader 227.
[85] Hauerwas, “Radical Hope” Reader 506.
[86] Hauerwas, “Sex in Public” Reader 502.
[87] Hauerwas, “Sex in Public” Reader 502.
[88] Hauerwas, “Sex in Public” Reader 502.
[89] “It is the practices of witnessing to the reality of God that
can be characterized as the being- in acts of the Church’s actuality.”
Jones, Grammar 619.
[90] Jones summarizes thus: “(Christians) must take seriously these
questions or we will be forever a Church dominated by its surrounding
culture in ways similar to the way the Church has allowed itself to be
dominated by other national cultures…. But we do think that we are
a people created by Jesus Christ, and that very self-designated fact about
our language and Scriptures is an awesome challenge to our inclinations
to adopt and hold other human points of views.” Jones, Grammar
620. See also Hauerwas, “Family Grace” Reader 218.
[91] References to the “catholic,” universal, and authoritative
Church which made its way into the first creeds can be found in their
earliest form in the writings of Ignatius of Antioch, AD 105-115. Furthermore,
we find the following language in the Westminster Confession XXV.I-III-
I: “…the catholic or universal Church, which is invisible,
consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall
be gathered into one, under Christ the head thereof; and is the spouse,
the body, and the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.” Ibid.
II. The visible Church, which is also catholic or universal under the
gospel (not confined to one nation as before under the law), consists
of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion, together
with their children; and is the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ; the
house and family of God, through which men are ordinarily saved and union
with which is essential to their best growth and service. Ibid.
III. Unto this catholic and visible Church, Christ hath given the ministry,
oracles, and ordinances of God, for the gathering and perfecting of the
saints, in this life, to the end of the world; and doth by his own presence
and Spirit, according to his promise, make them effectual thereunto. Ibid.
[92] Clapp refers in particular to the nation’s complete control
over the disposal of a father’s children in light of national obligations,
and also to the laws that required the death of children for abrogation
of religious laws. (Ibid) CF Genesis 22, Judges 11:34-40, Deuteronomy
13:6-9, Exodus 21:7-11, Leviticus 19:29. Clapp, Families 37.
[93] Abshire, Patriarchy 3.
[94] Clapp, Families 50.
[95] Dunn points out the significance of the home to the Church as the
situation of most early Church gatherings within wealthy urban households:
“”the earliest Churches were all house Churches and the model
of a well ordered household could also serve as a model of a well ordered
congregation.” Dunn, Family in Theological Perspective
56. Furthermore, Dunn continues, the Household Codes should be read in
context as serving as means of witness to the wider society: “the
household codes were attempts to codify the rules which had been found
most effective in promoting social welfare and stability… to indicate
that Christian discipleship could be supportive of society’s ‘basic
structures…. (for) witness bearing, both facilitating communication
with the rest of the society, and making possible an evangelistic impact.”
Dunn, Family in Theological Perspective 57. Here we see the New
Testament writers construing basic household structures of convenience
for the service of the Church’s mission, “concern for the
well ordered household as an integral part of being the Church and of
effective witness to the wider community.” Ibid.
[96] Here I refer to the principle that Abshire sets forth: that fathers
are uniquely situated to determine the best calling for their sons, and
may indeed rightly do so, and that his daughters ought to be dissuaded
from “expensive higher education,” since “a simple examination
of the birth rates for professional women shows that the more highly educated
a women becomes, the LESS likely she is to get married and the LESS likely
to have children. Thus, this writer is actually encouraging brilliant
Christian women to take a course of action that will mean cutting off
their genetic inheritance for future generations! We do not need MORE
female Christian lawyers, doctors or artists, but MORE godly women raising
MORE godly children who will fill the earth and subdue it to the glory
of God. And does it really make economic sense to invest tens of thousands
of dollars for a woman to get an advanced education (often having to go
into debt to finance that education) that she will NOT use if she accepts
that her highest calling is to be a wife and mother? Abshire, Patriarchy
4. For a Christian perspective on vocational considerations, and parental
influence over the young person’s personal responsibility before
God, I offer Selby’s statement: “The Church claims to set
before its families an even larger project. Having born children, families
are invited to present them for baptism; having fed them, to teach their
children to pray; having given them the best upbringing they know how,
at the same time to place themselves alongside their children in the community
that is subject to God’s word and exists by God’s nourishment.”
Selby, Family in Theological Perspective 167.
[97] Here I adopt Jones’ designation of “vocation” as
“those imperatives of living which the individual, as a member of
the body of Christ, carries with her into the (world)…. the Christian
is called to these places by the Gospel and must find ways in these places
for witness to the reality of God. The particularities and eventualities
of these places need not be accepted as the status quo beyond change or
challenge. Rather it means that these places must be seen as being under
God’s sovereign rule and intention to redeem…. The Church
is the place where these other places are reconceived and construed as
the places where the Spirit of God can be at work". Jones, Grammar
633. The importance of vocation as a topic treated in the home at the
service of the Church is expressed by Dunn, who notes that the New Testament
household codes indicate that “the relationships with the family
and household were themselves part of Christian vocation and were the
first place where responsibility to the Lord should come to expression
and be put to the test. Discipleship begins in the home.” Dunn,
Family in Theological Perspective 56.
[98] “Whatever may be the power and responsibility accorded to parents
by their strength, their money, or their rights, their relationship is
actually, and ultimately more crucially, defined in light of Christ as
an equality. That equality derives not from our politics or our culture,
but from the reality of our being recipient alike of that adoption that
God offers to humanity… the real issue for us is the hope that God
has in store for us and them alike in His divine family, from which ours
“takes its name,” and within which our families, like all
other loyalties, has to take their proper place.” Selby, Family
in Theological Perspective 167.
[99] Jones, Grammar 633.
[100] Dunn notes that these codes in their milieu would have been taken
for a certain “settling for life within the status quo,” in
a transition away from the earliest phase of the Christian mission, “more
marked by breaches within families” in light of “the degree
of disparagement of traditional family ties” implicit in Jesus’
call to discipleship. Dunn, Family in Theological Perspective
55.
[101] “Because of the Fall, the early chapters of Genesis do not
tell us all we need to know, or even what is most crucial for us to know
for the formation of the good and natural family. Our object is not merely
to restore family as it was in Eden, before the Fall. The Fall means that
family life was interrupted before it matured or ripened to its full potential,
before it fulfilled its destiny… yet the pivotal point in history
has already occurred, with the coming of Jesus and His initiation of the
Kingdom.” Clapp, Families 46.
[102] “Christians affirm that only through God’s revelation-
through the particular culture of Israel, in the particular person of
Jesus- can we see the natural order as it really is and ought to be. This
is the crux of Paul’s argument in Romans 1 and 2. In our fallenness
we are given up to a corrupted imagination, to a senseless, debased mind.
Clapp, Families 15, 45.
[103] “The liberation of the Christian from “the way things
are,” which has been brought about by the Gospel of Christ…
makes evident to the believer that the givenness of our subjection to
the enslaving or alienating powers of this world is broken. It is natural
to feel Christ’s liberation reaching into every kind of bondage,
and to want to act in accordance with that radical shift.” Yoder,
Politics 45.
[104] Yoder, Politics 185.
[105] “The wife or child or slave who can accept subordination “because
it is fitting in the Lord” has not forsaken the radicality of the
call of Jesus; it is precisely that attitude toward the structures of
this world, this freedom from needing to smash them since they are about
to crumble anyway, which Jesus had been first to teach and in His suffering
to concretize.” Yoder, Yoder, Politics 186-187.
[106] Galatians 3.
[107] “…the example and teaching of Jesus himself… enables
the person in a subordinate position in society to accept and live within
that status without resentment, at the same time that it calls upon in
the superordinate position to forsake or renounce all domineering use
of that status. The call then is not precisely a simple ratification of
the stratified society into which the Gospel has come. The subordinate
person becomes a free ethical agent in the act of voluntarily acceding
to subordination in the power of Christ instead of bowing to it either
fatalistically or resentfully. The claim is not that there is immediately
a new world regime that violently replaces the old; rather, the old and
new order exists concurrently on different levels…the apostles transformed
the concept of living within a role by finding out how in each role the
servanthood of Christ, the voluntary subordination of one who knows that
another regime is normative, could be made concrete. Yoder, Politics
186-187.
[108] I would suggest at this point that Yoder’s scheme of the concurrent
existence of the old and new order co-existing in the world would rebuke
Christian interest groups that thrust patriarchal structures on the Church
in a more liberal age. The “New Testament ethic for living with
the structures of society” could easily be read as a mandate for
the Church’s authorization of feminist ideals in modern times; but
at least recognizing that the New Testament household codes accommodate
their culture should give pause to those Christians who insist on resisting
their culture to the extent of opposing women’s higher education,
political franchise, etc. Such positions reek of self-righteous self-aggrandizement
rather than expressing the tone of a servant community. As Clapp suggests,
we must read the biblical story with special relevance to modern families;
“the Church must respond to the story of Israel and Jesus in light
of the particular challenges and privileges of its culture.” Clapp,
Families 17.
[109] Patristics scholar Carol Harrison notes the early Church’s
resounding, passionate preference for ascetic and authoritative “holy
virginity,” and the severe relative dearth of reference to the positive
aspects of family life in the early Fathers. Harrison notes that the single
state was preferred as tending more towards unity and solidarity within
the Church than did the fracturing influence of marriage and reproduction.
Harrison, Family in Theological Perspective 80-97.
[110] Hauerwas, “Radical Hope” Reader 512.
[111] “When the Church loses the significance of singleness, I suspect
it does so because Christians no longer have any confidence that the Gospel
can be received by those who were not “raised” in it. Put
differently, Christian justifications of the family may often be the result
of Christians no longer believing that the Gospel is true or joyful.”
Hauerwas, “Family Grace” Reader 224.
[112] “Singleness was legitimate….because the mission of the
Church was such that ‘between the times’ the Church required
those who were capable of complete service to the Kingdom… through
the (most) significant sacrifice of giving up heirs. There can be no more
radical claim than this, as it is the clearest institutional expression
that one’s future is not guaranteed by the family, but by the (Gospel
preserved in the) Church. Hauerwas continues elsewhere, “singleness
is as valid a way of life as marriage because it poignantly embodies the
hope of the Kingdom of God and because children are not necessary for
the growth of that Kingdom, because the Church is that family that can
call the stranger into her midst and recognizes the parental role of those
who do not marry.” Hauerwas, “Abortion Theologically Understood”;
“Sex in Public” Reader 499, 613.
[113] “The political nature of the Church’s (ethic) is perhaps
most clearly illuminated by calling attention to the alternative of singleness
as a legitimate form of life among Christians.” Hauerwas, “Sex
in Public” Reader 499.
[114] Hauerwas, “Sex in Public” Reader 497.
[115] Hauerwas, “Sex in Public” Reader 497.
[116] Hauerwas, “Sex in Public” Reader 497.
[117] Hauerwas qualifies that “singleness is the first way of life
for Christians does not imply that marriage and the having of children
is in any way a less worthy way to be Christian. Rather, that Christians
do not have to marry means that for Christians marriage is given new dignity.
We are called to be married for the upbuilding of that community called
Church.” Hauerwas, “Sex in Public” Reader 227,
447. Notice the comparatively secular worldview expressed by Forum authors
who propose expectations of the Christian family than sound household
management, propagation, and exclusion of those who are of a different
mind; gone are the Christian themes of renunciation for the Kingdom and
evangelization of the world: “Therefore, let those who earnestly
seek a return to the biblical family carefully search the Scriptures to
develop a consistent and comprehensive Christian view of the “patriarch’s”
role. Let them meditate on the doctrine of “representation”
and understand both the legitimate authority of the father, as well as
the limitations of his role. Let fathers govern their homes wisely and
justly for the benefit of the entire family not giving in to pride or
arrogance. Let the “patriarchs” raise strong, self-governed
sons who have discovered their calling and who will work diligently at
fulfilling it. Let the “patriarchs” raise godly, modest and
temperate daughters who rejoice in their duties as wives and mothers,
teaching their children and managing the households. And as for the critics;
let us not worry about them-they and the children they never bore, raised
nor discipled, will soon be a thing of the past.” Abshire, Patriarchy
10. I propose that such sentiments, bereft of any explicitly Christian
mission and orientation, would be entirely at home in the worldview of
a fundamentalist Muslim, Hindu, or ancient Roman pagan; Selby proposes
on point that “against the dire effects of the loss of (traditional
family life) we have to weigh the even more dire effects of the refusal
of human clans everywhere to honor their membership of the boundless family
that God in His divine grace seeks to bring into being.” Selby,
Family in Theological Perspective 166. See also the contrast
in between Hauerwas’ and Selby’s perspectives at Selby n.103.
[118] “Marriage and the constitution of family life is the Church’s
act, celebrated in its public liturgy, initiates the parties into an ecclesial
order and creates rights and duties in the Church between the spouses
and their children.” Catechism of the Catholic Church 1631.
1069, 1537. Hauerwas adds that “the vision of marriage for Christians
requires and calls forth an extraordinary polity for the very reason that
Christian marriage is such an extraordinary thing.” Hauerwas, “Sex
in Public” Reader 494.
[119] In construing the Church as “family” relevant to its
mission and the mission of believers within the Church, the author of
John asks explicitly, “how does God’s love abide in anyone
who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and
yet refuses to help?” (I John 3:17)
[120] Opening the home as the servant of the Church avoids secularization’s
false dichotomy between the “public realm” and the “private,”
as though the Church and her people were not called into the world for
its benefit. In this regard, Clapp traces a serious threat to interests
of God’s Kingdom to an enemy that modern American Evangelicalism
has embraced in its patriarchal preferences, namely, the relegation of
the spiritual to the private sphere through the serialization of the home:
“with the rise of the industrialization came the separation of life
into compartments pf public and private…. Today we are prone to
think and imagine according to these divisions: the public world is male,
productive, and areligious. The private world is female, consumption-oriented,
and religious. … Christians have (thus) been oddly complicit in
relegating God to the domestic… religion has become synonymous with
family life and only with family life, till it becomes “hard to
see how one could safely leave home at all, while the household removed
from the public world becomes trivial and thin.” Clapp, Families
57, 65. Such unfortunate “relegation” and division of temporal
from spiritual is evident in this Forum author’s designation of
distinct political “realms:” “the task of any person
in authority is to APPLY that law wisely and justly; i.e., the king to
the political realm, the elders to the ecclesiastical realm and fathers
to the family realm.” Abshire, Patriarchy 6.
[121] In this regard, Hauerwas emphasizes the Christian’s responsibility
to have (or adopt) children in the first place, qua “the refusal
to separate marriage and the having of children…What we are about
as Christians is the having of children… the having of children
is not a matter of our being able to make sure the world into which children
are born will be safe… children are the way we remember that it
is God that matters, not making the world safe or rich.” Hauerwas,
“Radical Hope” Reader 227, 517. On the other hand,
Hauerwas sternly avoids the pagan assumption that merely biology makes
children ours.” Hauerwas, “Radical Hope” Reader
227. Even Forum authors cede on this point: “We must also
understand and accept that with authority comes responsibility; the family
belongs to God, not the father. The father cannot govern any way he pleases
but only as a wise steward of God’s people; and like unjust, tyrannical
kings, God CAN and WILL depose us if we do not fulfill our responsibilities
according to His law.” Abshire, Patriarchy 4.
[122] I propose this model in direct contravention of Abshire’s
proposal that the Church exists to serve the family and the father’s
prerogative to form his family on whatever model he pleases:; Abshire
suggests that “teachers in the Church are supposed to assist godly
fathers in their dominion duties, not berate them because sometimes not
every father gets it completely right.” Abshire, Patriarchy
9.
[123] “In the Church, every adult, whether single or married, is
called to be a parent. All Christian adults have a parental responsibility
because of baptism. Biology does not make parents in the Church. Baptism
does.” Hauerwas, “Abortion Theologically Understood”
Reader 612. Hauerwas elaborates further, “from a Christian
perspective (that children are born of our bodies) is not a necessary
condition for our responsibility for children.” Hauerwas, “Radical
Hope” Reader 227. On this understanding, “Christians,
single and married, are parents,” since “parent names an office
of the Christian community that everyone in the community is expected
to fulfill faithfully. Those called to marriage are presumed to accept
the call and responsibility to have and care for particular children in
the name of the community… that is why the Church rightly expects
parents to bring up children in the faith.” Hauerwas, “Radical
Hope” Reader 227.
[124] Hauerwas, “Radical Hope” Reader 511.
[125] Clapp, Families 65.
[126] Selby, Family in Theological Perspective 168.
[127] John Paul II, Centessimus Annus 45. See also Acts 5:29,
qtd, Ibid.
[128] Clapp, Families 46.
[129] Clapp, Families 76.
[130] Clapp offers the following corroborating Scriptures: Jesus names
His followers as His true “brothers and sisters,” superceding
His biological relationships; Jesus declares that the advent of Kingdom
will mean brother turning against brother, children against parents, and
parents against children (Matthew 10:21-22); Jesus warns that He has not
come to bring peace but a sword (Matthew 10:34) and that those who would
love father or mother more than Jesus are not worthy of Him (Matthew 10:37).
Furthermore, Jesus’ admonition to “let the dead bury their
own dead” of Luke 9:57-60 would have been culturally understood
as a harsh and demeaning abrogation of the fourth commandment. Clapp,
Families 77.
[131] “The Church renders its service to human society by preaching
the truth about the creation of the world, which God has placed in human
hands so that people may make it fruitful and more perfect through their
work; and by preaching the truth about the Redemption, whereby the Son
of God has saved mankind.” John Paul II, Centessimus Annus< |