Family

In the Western world family is a term applied to any group of people that claim to belong together, including same-sex couples. It is a freely contracted relationship between individual consenting adults. Traditional families (father, mother and children) are under attack not only from the option of many alternatives but also from an erosion of confidence within those families. Some argue that the nuclear family (mother, father, children) is dead except for the first two or three years of child rearing. In the light of this many Christians are appealing for a return to “family values” and family goals without realizing that family has no common, shared meaning.

Does Scripture point to a common core meaning of this basic and first human community? As we shall see, the “biblical family” looks much more like an African extended family than the stripped-down Western nuclear family. We will also consider why family life, even given its imperfections, is a location for faith formation and by its very nature a spiritual discipline. A companion article explores the idea that for Christians the church is their forever family (see Church-Family).

The Fragmented Family

Tremendous forces have conspired to reshape the family in the Western world. The rise of wage labor and industrialization took work out of the household into the factory and office. The family changed from a unit of production to a unit of consumption. With the so-called invention of children, by which children came to be treated with new tenderness and removed from the family for education, family roles were reduced once again. Political changes have had their effect as well. The feudal system dealt with households, but later political forces tended to abstract the individual as a political unit. Indeed, the basic unit of society in the Western world has become the individual—a truly revolutionary change. Not surprisingly, family is understood in this cultural context as an arrangement between individuals rather than the way people experience a corporate identity.

Whereas the bourgeois family (composed of a master of a craft, his wife, children, other blood relatives, a fluctuating number of tradesmen, and apprentices all living together) functioned as a shared economic enterprise (Berger and Berger, pp. 87-104), the modern family is a stripped-down version with mother, father and children, moving from place to place, having few vocational roles other than the mutual meeting of emotional needs. Many modern families are single-parent families. Blended families with children from various previous marriages have convoluted and interlocking circles of belonging. Taking this trend to the logical extreme, the postmodern West, having shorn its roots with the Judeo-Christian faith, now wants to have family without risk. So what has emerged is no-fault divorce, cohabiting couples, both parents working outside the home, the demise of vocational homemaking, and the professionalization of parenting in care centers and schools. All this is aided and abetted by the church, which has successfully moved Christian education from the home to the church. What Marx attempted by social revolution (the replacement of home education by state, and of families by collectives) the church has assisted by neglect.

The Changing Family

In spite of the popular misconception, the “nuclear family” (a household consisting only of a married couple and their children) has a long history. Research has shown that in North America and Western Europe the nuclear family is not a modern invention arising from industrialization and urbanization but predates these trends by centuries, at least as far back as the High Middle Ages, though in Eastern Europe something closer to the extended family was more common (Berger and Berger, p. 87). Nuclear families in previous generations, however, did contain servants (now replaced by machines). Brigitte and Peter Berger argue that modernity did not produce the nuclear family; the nuclear family produced modernity through a closer relation between parents and children, greater parental influence and greater individuation (p. 91). All of this, however, is under serious attack and subject to bewildering forces of change.

People in other cultures are wrestling with their own changing family forms. The African family, once experienced as concentric circles of family, clan, tribe, often with polygamy at the center, experienced the disintegration of its nuclear core through colonization and urbanization (separating father and mother to gain remunerated employment) and a changed value of children (once a sign of wealth, now a major cause of poverty). In spite of all this, even first-generation city dwellers retain profound ties to the family land. Asian families, characterized by hierarchy and power structures, now face their own pressures of modernity and postmodernity.

In all cultures most of us belong to multiple families: our family of origin, the family created through marriage, the spouse’s family we joined through marriage, and, in the case of multiple marriages, overlapping relationships with children and former spouses (because we cannot divorce family members). Add to this the Christian’s experience of entering the family of God through faith in Jesus (see Church-Family), and we have one more family experience—this one less provisional, as it lasts forever! Notable in the Gospels is the record that Jesus lived with the complexity of competing loyalties to his “birth family” (Mary, Joseph and his siblings) and the family of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as evidenced in the sensitive way he fulfilled his mother’s request to work a miracle without betraying the Father’s timing (John 2:1-11). At the cross he provided for his mother as a good son would (John 19:25-27). Apparently Jesus regarded family as an appropriate context in which to practice discipleship (Mark 5:1-20) and even called siblings into his disciple community (Matthew 10:2-4).

All of this raises an important question. Is there a continuous core meaning to our nonchurch family that is not culturally crafted but divinely ordained?

Defining the Family Biblically

Family is a permanent human community that one enters by birth, covenant (marriage) or adoption. The simplest and smallest family unit was the Adam and Eve covenant (dyad), through which persons not actually “next of kin” became closest relatives. This is the meaning of Adam’s poetic and praise-full outburst “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:24). While Adam and Eve were commanded to “be fruitful and increase in number” (Genesis 1:28), they were a God-imaging community even before Eve brought forth a man “with the help of the Lord” (Genesis 4:1). Even a childless couple is a core family, though they will continue to experience other levels of family life with their birth families, thus extending the family experience to other generations. So at the heart of the family experience are a man, a woman and child; this calls into serious question whether same-sex couples can ever be truly “family” in a divinely approved way (see Homosexuality). Cohumanity is central to the family experience.

Family is marked by covenant, that binding personal agreement by which a man and woman belong to each other “for better, for worse” (see Marriage). Covenant communicates the relational genius of family: each lives for the other and all live for the one. There is something like an unlimited liability toward one another in a family. This unconditional belonging extends to our parents even when we “leave” them to “cleave” to our spouse (Genesis 2:24); the new core family is thus prioritized over the extended family. Even though we have left father and mother, however, we do not divorce our siblings and parents. We cannot! When we have children, we extend covenant belonging to them unilaterally, even before they can respond. But that covenant becomes bilateral when children are able to reciprocate. The covenant may, much later, become unilateral again as we become dependent parents needing care from our children (Balswick and Balswick, p. 21).

There are theological reasons for restricting the idea of family to the covenant community. First, in the Bible the first community on earth was the family, predating the church or the nation. Family is not a human invention but a divine creation, a matter of vocation or calling rather than convenience and human choice.

Second, God is family. God exists communally as a triune God marked by covenant love (John 17:1) in which each person is for the other and all for the One. God is a family God. Thus every family in heaven and on earth derives its nature and dignity from God as family (Ephes. 3:14-15). A family God crafts family creatures. So the human family is a commentary on God, expounding something about the God whose image we reflect (Genesis 1:26).

Third, Old Testament legislation dealt with family-plus-land units, as is graphically illustrated by the story of Ruth. These families were more like what we would call clans or extended families and constituted the basic social, kinship, legal and religious structures of the people of God. God ultimately owned the land but entrusted it to families, to whom it would be returned in the Jubilee (Leviticus 25:4-18). God deals with families under the Old Covenant.

Fourth, even under the New Covenant, where the people of God are not called to construct a holy nation, God continues to work through families. God’s kingdom works through families as whole households (including servants and resident aliens) become Christians (Acts 16:32-33). Spouses are sanctified by their believing partner (1 Cor. 7:14), and children grow up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord (Ephes. 6:1-4). Church leaders are expected to prove their ministry first at home (1 Tim. 3:4-5). So we may speak of the family as a domestic church, the basic ecclesial unit.

Family as Spiritual Discipline

The Second Vatican Council used the phrase “domestic church” to recapture the ancient idea that the family is a form of church and a place for evoking and applying faith. Families are the smallest possible units of congregational life and often the core of a local church. So we do not need to “bring the Lord into our homes” by a program of Christian education for the family, or even by family devotions, good as these are. God is already there, even if our family has problems. These reasons are important.

Issues that arise in family life set us up to find God freshly and to grow in discipleship. As already mentioned, family has covenant at its core. Covenant is a two-way lens that allows us to see something of the covenant love-life of God; at the same time, God’s covenant with Israel and the church inspires our covenant life in marriage and family.

The warp and woof of family relational life both suggest godlikeness and invite us to seek God’s help in living with relational integrity: forgiving one another, welcoming one another, offering hospitality. Parenting involves sustaining, guiding and relinquishing—all dimensions in which we learn from God as our ultimate parent. Childhood involves trusting, acknowledging and honoring—all fundamental to faith formation. Brothers and sisters learn to play together and cooperate—both fundamental for living by grace through faith rather than by the performance of works. Grandparenting involves enjoying (rather than using) and comforting; being grandchildren involves appreciating and, usually, mourning—again, all dimensions of the life of faith (Henley, pp. 33-105). What better school for Christian living could be contrived? What better laboratory for experimenting with faith?

Take the question of unconditional acceptance. As the older brother in the parable of the two prodigals discovered, one cannot experience the welcome of God while rejecting one’s brother (Luke 15:11-32). Family life sets us up to experience the gospel—unconditional acceptance on the basis of relationship rather than performance. The elder brother in the parable prides himself on his impeccable behavior and hard work (Luke 15:29-30) but is really damned because grace and gratitude have not broken his hard heart. It is family life that invites him to live by faith and grace.

It is widely recognized that the family is the first environment in which we gain images of God as Father and the human paradigm for the feminine references to God in the Bible. Sometimes these images must be unlearned. Even in the best family we do not learn the fatherhood of God from our own parents; rather, we learn our fatherhood and motherhood from God. Nonetheless, our experience of parenting and being parented is evocative—a call to be converted to the fatherhood of God rather than to be convinced from our human parents. Child rearing turns out to be a moral and spiritual education for the parents. Children help parents grow up. We cannot give children affection, correction and a future with promise if we have not received these from God ourselves (see Blessing, Family). In the end, we need to ask not just how a family’s children turned out but how the parents turned out!

The Jacob story in Genesis 25-35 demonstrates that God was determined to bless Jacob in the context of his actual family life, through his relations with parents, brother, wives and father-in-law, even though that family was riddled with favoritism, deceit, family secrets and multigenerational sin (see Family Problems). In the end, when Jacob was reconciled to his brother Esau, Jacob confessed that seeing his brother’s face was “like seeing the face of God” (Genesis 33:10). A perfect “Christian” family is not required for faith development; the best place to meet God is right where we are. Even seriously troubled families can become arenas of spiritual formation if the liabilities and difficulties are processed (sometimes the help of someone outside is needed for this).

To run away from our families is to run away from one place God wants to meet us. So we are invited to find God at the center of family life, in all of its relational dynamics and covenantal structure, rather than at the periphery through religious exercises.

» See also: Church-Family

» See also: Family Communication

» See also: Family Goals

» See also: Family Problems

» See also: Family Values

References and Resources

R. S. Anderson and D. B. Guernsey, On Being Family: A Social Theology of the Family (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985); J. O. Balswick and J. K. Balswick, The Family: A Christian Perspective on the Contemporary Home (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989); B. Berger and P. L. Berger, The War over the Family (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983); R. Clapp, Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional and Modern Options (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1993); M. Eastman, Family, the Vital Factor: The Key to Society’s Survival (Melbourne: Collins Dove, 1989); J. A. Henley, Accepting Life: The Ethics of Living in Families (Melbourne: Joint Board of Christian Education, 1994); C. J. H. Wright, God’s People in God’s Land: Family, Land and Property in the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990).

—R. Paul Stevens