Church and Family 1: Church and Family in the Scriptures and Early Christianity

Extract

We hear much today, particularly from conservative American Christians, about the need to restore the Biblical view of the family. It is assumed by these spokespersons that the “Biblical family” is a male-dominated nuclear family consisting of a working husband, a non-working wife, who is full-time “mother”, and several dependent children. What is really being assumed here is that the Bible endorses a conservative version of the late Victorian, Anglo-Saxon patriarchal family. Such rhetoric about the “Biblical view of the family” lacks a sense of the socio-economic history of the family over the last three to four thousand years. It is taken for granted that this Victorian ideal of the patriarchal nuclear family was created in the Garden of Eden and has remained static ever since, until a recent period in the twentieth century when, for some inexplicable reason, it began to be “undermined” by feminism, gay rights and delinquent children. It is not necessary, then, to reflect upon the norm itself the forces that are challenging it, but simply to restore what is presumed to have always been, as the expression of God’s will.