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The Church and The Family: An Ethical Task
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
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There has been a kind of “turn to the family” on the part of the Christian churches in the past decade, manifesting a concern for what is judged to be the western family in “crisis.” Unfortunately, the voices of religion have had little more effect than the voices of psychology or sociology in either healing or empowering the family, and they have had perhaps less success in interpreting the difficulties which beset the contemporary family as an institution. This failure may represent simply the intractability of the problems which individuals and families face. It may also, however, represent an almost tragic perception on the part of many persons that the Christian tradition regarding family life is today too oppressive to yield a prophetic, a healing or a freeing word.
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References
1 I am indebted-for much of the historical material here to the work of Greer, Rowan A., “The Family and the Early Church,” Unpublished manuscript, 1979.Google Scholar
2 See Nisbet, Robert A., The Social Philosophers: Community and Conflict in Western Thought (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 178.Google Scholar
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11 This way of understanding the relation between the love of God and the love of a human person is especially important for women's perception of the possibility of direct love of God which is not mediated through love of a husband. Its special importance for women comes not from the fact that women love differently from men, but from the historical situation in which women in particular were taught that marriage precluded for them a direct relationship with God comparable to that of the virgin. It is also interesting to note that this problem was not addressed by the Protestant reformers when they rejected celibacy in favor of marriage for the majority of Christians. The reason it was not addressed was that the Reformers generally did not talk about a direct love of God in the sense used here. Reformation spirituality tended to speak of faith in God and love for neighbor, implying on the one hand a reverential awe and even distance in relation to God, and on the other hand, a critique of the incorporation of eros into agape if the latter was directed toward God.
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19 Niebuhr, Reinhold, The Nature and Destiny of Man (New York: Scribner's, 1943) II, 313.Google Scholar Another aspect of this relativity is contemporary longevity. No one now can spend their whole life in the care of their children (with the exception, perhaps, of parents with differently-abled children).
20 See Gelles, Richard J., Family Violence (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1979), pp. 74–76, 126–30Google Scholar; Violence in the Family (Washington, DC: U. S. Catholic Conference, 1979), p. 7Google Scholar; Gelles, R., “A Profile of Violence toward Children in the United States” in Gerbner, G., et al., eds., Child Abuse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 85.Google Scholar
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26 Wallace, p. 158.
27 Ibid., p. 159.
28 Ibid. See also Lazareth, p. 165.
29 See Thomas, John L., “Socio-cultural Profile of American Catholic Families,” manuscript presented at the University of Notre Dame, June, 1980, p. 17.Google Scholar
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31 Aries, Phillippe, Centuries of Childhood (New York: Knopf, 1962).Google Scholar
32 Lasch, Christopher, Haven in a Heartless World (New York: Basic, 1975).Google Scholar
33 It cannot be irrelevant in this regard that, for example, fifteen percent of all American children under eighteen years of age live below the poverty level (or that forty-one percent of all black children live below the poverty level, and more than fifty percent of black and Spanish female-headed families live below the poverty level).
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