When the Church Was a
Family
Hellerman, Joseph H.
(2009) B&H Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Spiritual formation occurs primarily in the context of
community. People who remain connected with their brothers and sisters in the
local church almost invariably grow in self-understanding, and they mature in
their ability to relate in healthy ways to God and to their fellow human
beings. This is especially the case for those courageous Christians who stick
it out through the often messy process of interpersonal discord and conflict
resolution. Long-term interpersonal relationships are the crucible of genuine
progress in the Christian life.
(Kindle
Locations 43-47).
Social scientists have a label for the pervasive cultural
orientation of modern American society that makes it so difficult for us to
stay connected and grow together in community with one another. They call it
radical individualism. (Kindle Locations 109-110).
The New Testament picture of the church as a family flies in
the face of our individualistic cultural orientation. God’s intention is not to
become the feel-good Father of a myriad of isolated individuals who appropriate
the Christian faith as yet another avenue toward personal enlightenment. Nor is
the biblical Jesus to be conceived of as some sort of spiritual mentor whom we
can happily take from church to church, or from marriage to marriage, fully
assured that our personal Savior will somehow bless... (Kindle Locations 170-174).
The “let us meet your needs” approach to marketing the
church, which became so popular among baby boomers in the 1980s and 1990s, has
only served further to socialize our people to “prefer a variety of church
experiences, rather than getting the most out of all that a single church has
to offer.” (Kindle Locations 213-215).
We don’t desire growth for growth’s sake but rather a
community that grows slowly through natural introductions. We don’t measure our
success by numeric growth. We have decided to measure by other means, such as,
How long do relationships last? Are members of the community at peace with one
another? Are relationships reconciled? (Kindle
Locations 243-245).
Renewal movements have historically tended to emphasize
church practice and the various expressions of the Christian life, while giving
less attention to careful theological reflection and lessons learned from
church history. (Kindle Locations 260-261).
[In a strong-group society] the person perceives himself or
herself to be a member of a group and responsible to the group for his or her
actions, destiny, career, development, and life in general. Correspondingly
he/she perceives other persons primarily in terms of the groups to which they
belong. The individual person is embedded in the group and is free to do what
he or she feels right and necessary only if in accord with group norms and only
if the action is in the group’s best interest. The group has priority over the
individual member, and it may use objects in the environment, other groups of
people in the society, and the members of society... (Kindle
Locations 370-375).
The choices we possess in our radically individualistic
society have come at a tremendous emotional price. We pay dearly in the stress
department for our freedom to decide for ourselves, and as a result many of us
are now emotionally bankrupt. How much inner turmoil, how much soul searching
and self-evaluation, how much pressure do we experience in individualistic
America as we make—and take personal responsibility (Kindle Locations 584-586).
As Bellah and others have observed, the origin and
popularity of clinical psychology can be directly traced to the increasingly
individualistic slant of Western relational values. In other words, the great
majority of people on this planet never needed therapy until society began to
dump the responsibility for making life’s major decisions squarely upon the
lonely shoulders of the individual. Our freedoms, as intoxicating and
exhilarating as they often are, have pushed us over the edge emotionally. We
are reaping the consequences of decisions that were never meant to be made—and
lives that were never meant to be lived—in isolation. (Kindle Locations 671-675).
But in a number of instances, the people in our congregation
utilize psychotherapy as just another resource to enable them to continue along
their own selfish quest for personal autonomy, an autonomy that seeks to
escape—rather than courageously to engage—painful, real-life
relationships. (Kindle Locations 693-695).
As reasonable as all this sounds, for the Christian faith a
neutral approach to cultural differences proves highly problematic where the
distinction between strong-group and weak-group societies is concerned. The
reason for this is quite transparent. The collectivist social model is deeply
woven into the very fabric of the gospel itself. (Kindle Locations 714-716).
My soul takes pleasure in three things and they are
beautiful in the sight of the Lord and of men: agreement between siblings,
friendship between neighbors, and a wife and husband who live in harmony.
(Sirach 25:1) (Kindle Locations 783-785).
There are striking differences between the way we do family
and the way that strong-group cultures conceive of family relationships. (Kindle Locations 805-806).
While marriage was important for those reasons, the closest
same-generation family relationship was not the one between husband and wife.
It was the bond between siblings. (Kindle
Locations 817-818).
It is imperative to recognize, however, that the way in
which Americans do family would have been quite foreign to first-century
sensibilities. The early church functioned like an ancient Mediterranean
family—not a modern American family. We need to resist the temptation to read
our idea of “brother” or “sister” into the biblical text. Instead, we must
learn to grasp the way in which “brother” would resonate with a strong-group
person, since the New Testament church family model reflects the relational
values and priorities of kinship systems in the first-century world. (Kindle Locations 823-827).
In Mediterranean antiquity, blood runs deeper than romantic
love. (Kindle Location 864).
[M]arriage in Mediterranean antiquity: Marriage, therefore,
is a legal and social contract between two families for (1) the promotion of
the status of each, (2) the production of legitimate offspring, and (3) the
appropriate preservation and transferal of property to the next
generation. (Kindle Locations 867-870).
The closest family bond in ancient Mediterranean society
was not the bond of marriage. It was the bond between siblings. Correspondingly, the most treacherous act of human disloyalty in an ancient
family was not disloyalty to one’s spouse. It was the betrayal of one’s
brother. (Kindle Locations 896-899).
Based on what we have learned we can expand our list of key
principles:
Principle #1: In the New Testament world the group took priority
over the individual.
Principle #2: In the New Testament world a person’s most
important group was his blood family.
Principle #3: In the New Testament world
the closest family bond was not the bond of marriage. It was the bond between
siblings.
Corollary 1 The central value that characterized ancient family
relations was the obligation to demonstrate undying loyalty toward one’s blood
brothers and sisters.
Corollary 2 The most treacherous act of human disloyalty
was not disloyalty to one’s spouse. It was the betrayal of one’s brother. (Kindle Locations 1129-1137).
So this is how a New Testament believer would have conceived
of his relationship to his church family: What this means is, first of all,
that the person perceives himself or herself to be a member of a church and
responsible to the church for his or her actions, destiny, career, development,
and life in general. . . . The individual person is embedded in the church and
is free to do what he or she feels right and necessary only if in accord with
church norms and only if the action is in the church’s best interest. The
church has priority over the individual member. (Kindle Locations 1151-1155).
He said, “Here are My mother and My brothers! Whoever does
the will of God is My brother and sister and mother.” (Mark 3:31–35) These
words, spoken in the hearing of a large crowd, were utterly scandalous in the
cultural context in which Jesus lived. In
the social world of Jewish Palestine, Jesus, as the oldest surviving
male in His family (we may presume that His father Joseph had died), was
responsible to defend the honor of, and provide leadership for, His patrilineal
kinship group. In a single stroke Jesus dishonored Himself and His family by
refusing to exercise that crucial family role. And He did so in a public
setting. (Kindle Locations 1252-1254).
The way we handle these disconcerting sayings is quite
revealing. In our efforts to understand what Jesus said about family, we
generally set aside these passages and begin to develop our theology of family
from the more positive teachings. We gravitate toward those portions of the
Gospels in which Jesus exhorts His followers to honor their parents or to
refrain from divorce. Only after we have persuaded ourselves that Jesus is
truly family-friendly do we return to the thorny passages cited above and
somehow try to fit them into a pro-family reading of the Gospels. (Kindle Locations 1259-1263).
It is simply to observe that the Jesus of the Gospels often
seems to be concerned with something quite different than the material
typically found in our creeds and statements of faith. (Kindle Locations 1315-1316).
The operative question for the first-century Palestinians
who were confronted with the miracles and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth was
not What is Jesus like? The operative question was What is God like? (Kindle Locations 1319-1321).
The right-hand side of the chart approaches the Jesus
question from an entirely different angle. Here we are not asking, What is
Jesus like? We are asking, What is God like? Since Jesus claimed to be speaking
and acting on God’s behalf, we ought to be able to answer this question by
observing Jesus in action. If we want to find out what God is like, we simply
observe what Jesus said and did. Pretty straightforward. Yet this is precisely
where Jesus’ contemporaries in first-century Palestine had a serious problem
with Him. (Kindle Locations 1341-1345).
By behaving in a totally counter-cultural way and by
demonstrating His right to do so with stupendous signs and wonders, Jesus was
asserting to His contemporaries, “God is not like you think He is—God is like
me!” (Kindle Locations 1357-1359).
The loyalty conflict is not about making a choice between
God and people. Rather, it is about choosing between one group of people and
another—between our natural family and our eternal family. Recall from the
previous chapter the three central social values of the ancient Mediterranean world:
1. In the New Testament world the group took priority over the individual. 2.
In the New Testament world a person’s most important group was his family. 3.
In the New Testament world the closest family bond was the bond between
siblings. (Kindle Locations 1427-1434).
[W]e see that Jesus’ concept of the family of God was
tangibly realized through the sharing of material resources, as Jesus and
certain of His followers traveled together. Here is a group of people,
unrelated by blood, who nevertheless spent a significant period of their lives
together and who related to each other according to the standards of ancient
kinship solidarity. They understood themselves to be a surrogate family. (Kindle Locations 1489-1492).
Apparently, leaving one’s father and following Jesus
constitutes for Mark a paradigmatic example of what it means to “Repent and
believe in the good news!” Again, exchanging one family for another is at the
very heart of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. Luke 14:26 (Kindle Locations 1539-1541).
N. T. Wright, in a ground-breaking study of the life of
Jesus, asserted that “the only explanation for Jesus’ astonishing command is
that he envisaged loyalty to himself and his kingdom-movement as creating an
alternative family.” (Kindle Locations 1583-1585).
This is a key point. In the markedly collectivist social
setting of rural Galilee, people would not simply have related to a
prophet-teacher like Jesus as isolated individuals. Jesus would have been much
more than their “personal Savior.” They would have joined His group. (Kindle Locations 1589-1591).
An ideal and not uncommon situation, we might surmise, would
see the conversion of a whole household, with the disciple’s natural family
embedded in, and serving the mission of, the dominant surrogate family of
faith. In this case there would be no conflict of loyalties. But even here the
natural family existed to serve the designs of the family of God, and not
vice-versa. The focus was on the church—not on the family. And where conflict
between the natural family and God’s family did arise, the faith family was to
become the primary locus of relational solidarity. (Kindle Locations 1619-1623).
[As American Christians, we prioritize our relationships as:] (1st) God — (2nd) Family — (3rd) Church — (4th) Others This
list of priorities misses the whole point of the above discussion. The
strong-group outlook of the New Testament church meant that the early
Christians did not sharply distinguish between commitment to God and commitment
to God’s family. (Kindle Locations 1628-1631).
Jesus and His followers did not define loyalty to God solely
in terms of a low-group, individualistic “personal relationship” with Jesus.
Nor, by the way, did they define it as loyalty to the church as an
institutional organization (more on this later). For the early Christians,
loyalty to God found its tangible daily expression in unswerving loyalty to
God’s group, the family of surrogate siblings who called Him “Father.” This is
the lens through which we need to read Jesus’ variegated teachings about family
in the Gospels. People in Mediterranean antiquity had to leave one family in
order to join another. If we are truly serious about returning to our biblical
roots, where our relationships with our fellow human beings are concerned, our
priority list should probably look something like this: (1st) God’s Family —
(2nd) My Family — (3rd) Others (Kindle
Locations 1638-1645).
