Is the “Traditional” Family Biblical?

The answer begins with a better understanding of the church and its role as First Family.

A few weeks after we learned that my wife, Sandy, was pregnant with our first child, we spent a summer weekend with a friend at his parents’ lakeside home. On Saturday night all of us, except Sandy, stayed up late. Tired by sailing and swimming, she retired early.

Around midnight I decided to join her, but when I opened the door into the bedroom, I saw Sandy sitting straight up in bed. She looked shocked, as if she were in extreme pain. I asked her what was wrong, and before she could answer I had crossed the room and was sitting next to her, pressing urgently on her abdomen. “It’s my allergies,” she said. “My throat is burning up.”

It was hard not to display my relief. Sandy was no less distressed, but the baby was in no danger, and that had been my immediate, visceral fear.

Looking back on the moment, I was intrigued by the intensity of my protective feelings. I had heard plenty of fathers talk about how much their children meant to them, but still I was surprised when the feelings overwhelmed me, unbidden, and certainly uncultivated during the four or five years I had debated whether or not I truly wanted children.

Of course, starting a family “changes your life”—if I ever had a question about that, it dissolved with Sandy’s pregnancy. But certain Scriptures made me wonder: Does it automatically change your life for the better in Christian terms? Does it make you more likely and better equipped to serve God and others?

These seemed to be important questions, considering the enormous emotional, spiritual, physical, and financial investment that children entail. So while Sandy’s waistline expanded, my library did as well. I was on a search: reading, praying, consulting those wiser than me to appreciate better two of the most important questions one could ever ask: Why do Christians have children? What is the purpose of family?

Are The Gospels Profamily?

There is good reason to doubt the Gospels are as profamily as we often pretend they are. After all, in their accounts Jesus is unmarried, and his 12 disciples are either single or leave families as decisively as they drop their fishing nets. Even as a boy, Jesus exhibits a startling detachment from his biological family. Luke records anxious parents returning to the Jerusalem temple, asking their son why he has been so inconsiderate of their feelings. His bemused reply signaled his own priority: “Did you not know I was bound to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49; all references, NEB).

Later in the Gospels, the adult Jesus forthrightly proclaims a kingdom that will—he makes no bones about it—divide and destroy families. Brother will betray brother to death; parents and children will turn on one another (Matt. 10:21). “I have come,” Jesus says, “to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a son’s wife against her mother-in-law …” (Matt. 10:35).

To one who wishes to bury his father before initiating his own discipleship, Jesus bluntly demands, “Leave the dead to bury their dead; you must go and announce the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:60). He suggests a recent marriage is an inadequate reason to delay answering the call of the kingdom (Luke 14:18–20). And, echoing his childhood words in the temple, he deems that his true mother, brothers, and sisters are not his biological kin, but those who do the will of God are (Mark 3:35). “No man is worthy of me who cares more for father or mother than for me; no man is worthy of me who cares more for son or daughter; no man is worthy of me who does not take up his cross and walk in my footsteps” (Matt. 10:37–38).

As hard as these words are to hear today, they must have been even more difficult to their original audience. In Jesus’ day the family was integrally linked to economic survival. More than that, the Hebrew tradition promised personal survival after death mainly through the memory of one’s children. (This fact largely accounts for the anguish of Old Testament men and women who were unable to produce heirs.)

In Jesus’ eyes, however good family may be, it is not sacred. Family—like possessions, reputation, and religion itself—is clearly subordinated to the mission of the kingdom of God.

In Need Of Redemption

The Gospels make me look harder at family, forcing me to stop merely applauding family as it is and to ask what it should be in the light of Christ. In subordinating the natural family to the kingdom, Jesus was apparently indicating that it, too, stands in need of redemption.

My own family life has been decidedly positive, but the experience of some friends has taught me how destructive it can be. Some tell of huddling in childhood bedrooms, listening to their parents fight and damn one another. Others remember extramarital affairs, dictatorial stepfathers, and weakened mothers who expected their children to stabilize a capsizing world. Today these friends struggle with their own relationships, with an inability to trust, with a lurking suspicion of the universe in general and God in particular. Apparently there are few wounds that sear deeper, or last longer, than those inflicted by family.

But the message of the gospel is that family needs to be, and can be, redeemed. In their own way, the ancient Hebrews looked ahead to this hope in God. They were sometimes caught up in the fatalism of believing they could never escape the repetition and effects of the sins of their fathers. This fatalism is reflected in a proverb repeated twice in the Old Testament: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

But the proverb is refuted in both of the instances it is cited (Jer. 31:29–30 and Ezek. 18:2–3). God offers a new beginning, and will consequently call each to account only for his or her own sins.

Hope for a new beginning, for a breaking of the cycle of pain, is exactly what my friends from unfortunate families need. If they had nothing to look to beyond family, if that was the only place they could go for love and meaning, they would be locked in despair. But since family is not sacred, since there is a gracious God above and beyond it, they can transcend the ugly limitations put on them by their natural families. In fact, so may we all, since—no matter how idyllic our families—we are all wounded to some degree.

Bourgeois Or Biblical?

Any current search for the purpose of family encounters the many Christian appeals made today on behalf of the “traditional family.” Is this family according to God’s purposes?

In Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation, sociologist James Davison Hunter and coauthor Helen V. L. Stehlin draw from the avalanche of evangelical literature on the family and conclude that evangelicals have adopted a nineteenth-century bourgeois (that is, a middle-class) understanding of family. This view concentrates on family as a place of peace and familiarity, a refuge from the hard world of commerce and politics. For evangelicals, Hunter and Stehlin believe, “The utopian qualities of the notion of family and home as Edenic retreat cannot be overemphasized.”

They cite several evangelical family books:

• “In such times as these … the Christian home should be a holy refuge. A place of peace. An enclave of loving authority and Godly grievances and truth.”

• “Our earthly family should be the ones to whom we want to run, cry, telephone, telegraph—when we feel overwhelmed by failure! An earthly family is meant to be a shelter, a solid, dependable ‘ear’ that will hear and understand, as well as a place to run.”

• “[The home is] an island of serenity and support and in a hectic, plastic, often avaricious world. A Christian oasis far from the maddening throng and godless currents and pressures.”

Surely there are valuable and biblically valid features inherent in the bourgeois family. But just as clearly, there are problems with adopting this as the traditional family, the model for families today.

The meaning and purposes of the family have, in fact, changed through the ages. From the late Middle Ages into the eighteenth century, the family served as an economic unit (with the entire household, including children, working to fill the family table) and a vehicle for the transmission of property from generation to generation. Medieval family life, unlike today’s evangelical ideal, was hardly a private refuge or shelter.

With the Industrial Revolution, work was separated from home, and urbanization developed, dividing nuclear families from a hamlet hub of relatives and placing them in cities with thousands of strangers. Eventually, the middle classes no longer needed to concentrate on mere economic survival. And only then, within the past two centuries, was the stage set for a family whose raison d’être was the cultivation of intimacy. On a simple historical basis, then, we cannot identify this “traditional” family with biblical family.

Other aspects of the bourgeois family clash with family submitted to the redemptive and transforming gospel. Bourgeois family is exclusivistic, emphasizing its privacy over the good of others. It leaves the public life of commerce and industry untouched by the ideals of the kingdom, while maintaining its private comfort and order. Bourgeois family is flawed to the degree that it helped us so long neglect the social implications of the kingdom. It is flawed to the degree that it encourages blithe individualism and erodes a sense of the common good.

One other shortcoming of the bourgeois family needs mentioning. In its aim to be a private haven, this version of family often displaces the church. For years it has been popular among evangelicals to list three lifetime priorities, in this order: God, family, and church. More blatantly, one evangelical family expert has written that “family—next to God—is the most important and influential agent on earth.” In these popular rankings, family usurps the place the New Testament assigns to the church. It is “through the church,” according to Ephesians 3:10, that “the wisdom of God in all its varied forms” is made known to the powers and principalities. It is the church, according to 1 Peter 2:9, that is called to “proclaim the triumphs of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.” And we are, above all—according to 1 Corinthians 14—to seek and cultivate gifts that “build up the church.”

First Family, Second Family

I found myself led to reconsider, then, the family’s relation to the church. And in the strange seventh chapter of 1 Corinthians, I found a handle on the matter. I say “strange” because here Paul’s statements run hard against our modern grain.

Biblical scholars tell us we can shed some light on this enigmatic chapter only if we realize that here Paul is presenting the kingdom’s most radical implications for family life. He is telling the Corinthians how to understand and live their intimate lives in light of the fact that the Messiah has come and, with him, the beginning of the world’s end (v. 29). As New Testament scholar Gordon Fee comments, this means “that the future, which was set in motion by the event of Christ and the Spirit, has been ‘shortened’ so that it is now in plain view.”

Seeing how the story will come out shapes how we live in the present. And in Christ, Paul reminds the Corinthians, we know the end of the world’s story. Christ will vanquish sin and death. “Paul’s concern, therefore, is not with the amount of time [the Corinthians] have left, but with the radical new perspective the ‘foreshortened future’ gives one with regard to the present age,” Fee writes. “Those who have a definite future and see it with clarity live in the present with radically altered values as to what counts and what does not. In that sense it calls for those who want to get married to rethink what that may mean.…”

Here, then, is Paul’s clear call to reenvision family and singleness as they encounter the kingdom come. They are transcended and limited by the “shortening” of the present age. Family (and celibacy, too) belong to the frame of things passing away (v. 31). Accordingly, in Fee’s words, we are beckoned to live “totally free from its control,” no longer determined or entrapped by it.

Paul is not at all condemning marriage or family. (As do neither Jesus nor Scripture in general: Consider Gen. 2–3, the Decalogue, Song of Solomon, Prov. 30:10–31; Mark 10:6–9; John 2:1–11; Eph. 5:21–33; 1 Tim. 5:14; Heb. 13:4, and 1 Peter 3:1–7.) He is careful only to instruct the Corinthians that they are now free to live in the world without living by its values.

In the words of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, no longer was one’s future “guaranteed by the family, but by the church. The church, that harbinger of the kingdom of God, is now the source of our primary loyalty.” And the church is itself a family. Jesus tells his disciples they may lose families, but will receive new ones a hundredfold (Mark 10:29–30). He invites them to recognize and pray to a new Father, “who art in heaven” (Matt. 6:9). Christians are adopted, out of slavery, into God’s family (Rom. 8:14–16; Gal. 4:5–7). The church is a “household of faith” (Gal. 6:10).

For the Christian, church is First Family. The biological family, though still valuable and esteemed, is Second Family. Husbands, wives, sons, and daughters are brothers and sisters in the church first and most importantly—secondly they are spouses, parents, or siblings to one another.

And exactly as family is how the New Testament church behaves: opening homes to the Christian community (Acts 2:46; 1 Cor. 16:15), extending hospitality to a wide network of Christians, including missionaries and even those on business trips (2 Cor. 8:23). It is no accident that the church’s central sacrament, the Lord’s Supper, symbolizes a basic domestic activity.

Tamed For The Kingdom

If, then, family is itself in need of reformation, what might that reformed family look like? What alterations in our vision of family do Jesus and Paul introduce in fidelity to the kingdom?

We cannot ignore the fact that they assert the value of singleness. To be single is not to be a second-class member of the church, nor simply to be in a holding pattern until one can land in the higher state of marriage. The single man or woman, far from being spiritually crippled, is especially free and unencumbered for mission (1 Cor. 7:32–34). The faithful single, moreover, is a living sign that all Christians’ ultimate trust and approval comes from God, not posterity. Singles and marrieds share the First Family of the church, and should complement one another in that family, each bringing special gifts and resources to the service of the kingdom.

Marriage, in light of the biblical vision, channels sexuality to the service of the kingdom. Sexuality can be shaped and used for different ends. For instance, as C. S. Lewis observed, “There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.” This is sexuality in service of Mammon, sexuality trivialized and rendered manipulative.

Sexuality in service of the kingdom, on the other hand, is substantially free of its destructive possibilities. It is freed from service to compulsive promiscuity, dissolution, or trivial hedonism, and instead binds one person to another in love and continuing commitment. On one level, married sexuality is simply an enjoyment of God’s gracious creation, male and female. But on another level, it is the base for a stable home from which to minister to the wider Christian community.

If Paul in 1 Corinthians 7 almost seems to present singleness as a higher station in the kingdom, we do well to remember that in other contexts he is effusive in his praise for married couples whose homes are apparently the hub of the church in several cities (Rom. 16:5, 23; 1 Cor. 16:15, 19; Col. 4:15; Philemon 2). Singles have the missionary advantage of mobility, but marrieds have the missionary advantage of hospitality.

It is impossible to read Scripture and not notice that hospitality is a crucial Christian virtue. Unlike the bourgeois family, Christian family is haven not only for the members of the nuclear family. Christians are called to open their homes to others, and particularly other Christians: “Never cease to love your fellow-Christians. Remember to show hospitality. There are some who, by so doing, have entertained angels without knowing it” (Heb. 13:1–2).

Hospitality, I discovered, may be the key to answering the difficult question, Why do Christians have children? The kingdom beckons us to the arduous task of loving other people, with all their concrete faults.

Children, seen in this light, are precious gifts given to us so that—among other things—we might learn how to love others. Parents cannot deny that their children are different persons from themselves. Yet to see through their eyes is to see the world afresh.

As Jesus suggested in his embrace of children, their free dependency and openness ushers them into the kingdom of God (Mark 10:13–16). Thus, children teach that others bring newness and change that is sometimes unimaginably better than what we had formerly accepted as unalterable. When we learn how to love a child, we are acquiring a transferrable skill—the skill of loving others.

It is children and others who kindle our imaginations in new and unexpected ways, enabling us to become the sort of people we could never have been without them. So openness to children also signifies openness to the future, to the belief that there is a future. What, after all, could be a more profound signal of one’s despair for the future than the refusal to have children?

The Christian family, then, bears children to bear witness. It bears witness to the Christian trust that there is more to this world than sorrowfully meets the eye. It signifies that everything is not up to us bedraggled men and women who live in the present; that we need no longer be slaves to the tyrannical illusion of self-sufficiency. Children are sign gifts of the love of a God of gracious surprises, to whom we dare entrust not only our own future, but also that of our children.

In Everyday Terms

In general, then, family tamed for the kingdom is both a base of hospitality within the church and a training ground for learning how to live hospitably. But can this make any practical difference? The kingdom-centered family can indeed affect several pressing contemporary issues:

• Making divorces fewer. Historian Edward Shorter has observed that marriages were once held together by the indispensable purpose of economic production. Today, sexual intimacy is practically the only thing cementing the marriage relationship. And sexual attachment, while it is a gracious gift of God, is notoriously explosive and unstable. Marriages based on it too easily come apart.

Marriage for the kingdom is different. While rejoicing in sexuality, it tames and harnesses sexuality to serve the needs of mission. Those couples who see their marriage as a station for evangelism and hospitality will not find it as easily shaken by the tremors of an over-eroticized society.

• Making us free to love kin. Psychologists tell us that those seeking counsel often are so enmeshed in familial relationships that they can gain no perspective on them. They often feel suffocated, at the mercy of forces beyond their control. For such persons, seeing biological family as Second Family and the church as First Family is potentially freeing and therapeutic.

Adopted into God’s family, our identity is no longer utterly dependent on parental approval. And family idolatry, which fosters a destructive and constricting counterfeit of love, is revealed for what it is. We can begin to build a relationship that is holier and healthier.

• Making hope for infertile couples. For a variety of factors, more and more couples find themselves physiologically unable to bear children. This will, understandably, remain a source of tremendous pain to couples so afflicted. Yet the family tamed for the kingdom can alleviate some of this grief.

When family’s purposes include hospitality and mission, the couple faced with childlessness is not at a dead end. They have other opportunities for fulfilling service to God, whether those be adopting needy children or intensively devoting themselves to a mobile or dangerous ministry few families with children could undertake. Infertility remains a grievous tragedy, but not an unmitigated one.

• Making celibacy a credible option for homosexuals. Evangelicals strenuously assert that we do not condemn homosexual orientation, but only homosexual practice. Logically enough, we then counsel homosexuals to embark on lives of sexual abstinence.

But in the context of our unqualified glorification of marriage (and married sexuality), this counsel strikes many homosexuals as glib and inconsiderate. The picture might change if we honored those in our midst (whatever their sexual orientation) who live singly with integrity. What is needed to make our counsel credible is our affirmation, in word and deed, that singles can lead fulfilling and challenging lives—in no sense second best.

• Making chastity plausible for teenagers. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre writes, “Any conception of chastity as a virtue … in a world unformed by either Aristotelian or biblical values will make very little sense to adherents of the dominant culture.” Conservative Christians simply have to face the fact that chastity no longer makes sense to the dominant culture. But it does make sense within a community still shaped by biblical values, namely the church. Nuclear families tightly knitted within the fabric of their First Family will, when facing the stormy adolescent years, find support for both parents and teenagers.

• Making parenthood manageable again. Parents in days gone by could look to members of the extended family for counsel and encouragement in child rearing. Today new parents, such as Sandy and I, find themselves separated from their parents by hundreds of miles. Parenting manuals are a poor substitute for the embodied presence and wisdom of one’s own parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles.

It would take massive social and economic changes to restore the extended family to its bygone vitality. But once again, if the church is seen as the central community in the Christian’s life, there is hope. Novice parents can turn to fellow believers for unintimidating, personal counsel and readily available support.

Here I might also mention the plight of the single parent (usually the mother), who faces an overwhelming burden in our individualistic society, juggling work and the nurture of children, usually forced to abandon her own, legitimate needs in the process. If the church were understood as First Family, the single parent would more easily find assistance with child-care, household chores, and meal preparation. And the children of single parents would be provided, at least to a degree, with needed role models of both sexes.

The Family Tree

Recently I was jogging with a friend, Jeff, who is a high school teacher. As we trotted along a wooded path, we reviewed the week. It had been a difficult one for him. Parent-teacher conferences had left him more aware than ever of the distance between contemporary children and their parents.

Almost daily, it seemed, Jeff counseled students whose grades were falling, who were in the middle of a family breakup, who were experimenting with drugs, or pregnant, or even considering suicide.

We slowed to a walk. It was all so oppressing, Jeff admitted, that he wondered how he would ever summon the courage to father children. As we talked further, the stillness of the evening was broken by a loud crack, and a tree limb dropped to the ground in a flurry of twigs and branches.

I assume the limb fell of its own accord. And looking back, its demise seems symbolic. We speak of family trees; and like the hardwood in the park that evening, the family, facing the strains of our changing world, can crack and give way.

More than ever, the family tree needs rich, fresh soil to grow stronger and deeper roots. As new parents, Sandy and I need a courage and a sustenance grounded in something greater than ourselves and our meager personal resources. And if the parents and potential parents we know are not atypical, so do we all.

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