Families at the Crossroads
By Rodney Clapp
The lost art of Christian family
Chapter 3 is entitled "The lost art of the Christian family" and the author begins by highlighting the transitory nature of much of our life, with high job mobility, and the constant search for new challenges or satisfactions. This lifestyle inevitably leads to a predominance of superficiality in our relationships. How can Christianity provide a model for fidelity and commitment in such an environment?
Moving on to look at what ails the family, he sets aside the influences of pornography, drugs, education systems and even humanism and focuses on capitalism itself which has invaded both family and church in the western world. He reminds the church that its role is not to promote one particular economic or political system over another, but to live according to God's kingdom. Over the last few centuries the family has moved from being an economically producing unit, through the industrial revolution to being a economically consuming unit. This has removed from the family many of it's responsibilities - much of the care of the elderly, support of the poor and education of the young has now been taken on by the state and the family struggles to find new meaning and purpose. For many family has simply become a haven from the tough world of work for the wage earner. In the nineteenth century, middle class women were called to stay at home and provide this haven for husband and children. In search of a purpose they were drawn into being the chief consumers in the changed society, their purpose to shop! Alongside these changes the public world of work became separated from the private world of the family and religion also became relegated to the home and God became little more than a household god to many rather than the Lord of the universe. Family and faith became gradually pushed to the fringes of the real world.
After World War II, consumption became a way of life, and economic growth the sign of "healthy" society. The terminology of the market has even crept into our conversations about friendship and relationships. We talk of time demands on our relationships, of agendas and accountability, of investing time in our relationships. So we have drifted closer to the view of marriage as a contract, where individuals commit to a relationship for as long as it satisfies their needs and wants, but feel at liberty to terminate it if they believe their personal development will be better served without it. The basis of "the bottom line" of economics has crept in and morality is tending to be seen in terms of the economic exchange model with value in terms not of some intrinsic system of good and evil, but more on whether its serves our own purpose. Thus we expect the freedom to choose, plenty of choice and almost the right to have whatever we choose.
Where the economic exchange model has invaded our thinking, marriage is entered into when it is seen to serve a couple's interests and when it cease to do so for the sake of self fulfillment, they move on. Immorality is seen as failing to become all one can be as a person. Even children bring challenges here, for they put demands on our time and resources and applying the economic exchange model one would wonder at the point of having them at all.
Thus family has lost its meaning and become separated from the social and political world and it's only use is seen as a haven to escape the pain of reality. But family needs a purpose beyond itself and its sentimentality in order to survive.
The invasion of the market has given us a new "religious" vision for life based on the belief that "if it feels right for both of us and doesn't in our view hurt anybody then let's do it". This gives a different spiritual and religious view of life which is in opposition to the true kingdom of God. There is a challenge to Christians to test how far they have taken this on board and then to return to the story of Israel and Jesus to understand what this story has to say about what marriage and family life are for and about.
In Chapter Four the author challenges the belief that family is God's most important institution or vehicle for God's grace and salvation for a waiting and desperate world. Instead he argues that the church is God's most important vehicle for salvation. He highlights the tension between putting family or church first, looking at the scriptures, the value placed on the family within the Jewish nation of the Old Testament and the challenges that the new community of believers brought to the culture of Jesus time. He sees Jesus calling us to a way of life not for isolated individuals, but for individuals in community, the family of God, living in unity and truth and worshipping the God of Israel. He proposes that our "first family" should be the church. This stems from the individual decision each of us must make to enter the kingdom and that in so doing we become part of the family of Jesus and the Father. These new commitments do not need to exclude blood ties, but allow us to enter into those relationships again freely and with renewed love and grace. Families gain a distinctive Christian identity through their involvement in the church. It gives them a place to stand, a story to be part of amongst the confusion and disintegration of the post modern society, where many reject the "big story" and have no real anchor or direction to guide them. In this way we can avoid the sentimentalisation of families and also challenge the rejection of family commitments. When the family is decentered and relativised, it's members are free to love each other, without holding each other bound in any way. People are freed to love unconditionally, but also to recognise and acknowledge the debt they owe each other, without feeling under obligation to repay it. The biological family is not discarded, but enriched.
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