Family, children and obligation

Program / Course 22: Christian Ethics / Lesson 3.4

What you will learn

• Describe the biblical teaching on honoring parents, raising children and caring for family members.
• Explain the traditions’ accounts of the family as a school of virtue and a domestic church.
• Identify debated questions about authority in the home, discipline and the claims of the family against the claims of the church.
• State how obligations to family relate to obligations to neighbors and to God.

The big idea

The Bible presents the family as the first place where people learn love, justice and obedience, and it lays duties on parents, children and spouses. Christian traditions have described the family as a small church, a school of virtue and a basic unit of society. The same Scripture also warns that Christ’s call can come before family ties (Luke 14:26), and has been read in different ways about roles in the home. The lesson sets out the main duties, the debated points and the limits of family claims.

Key terms

Honor

In the fifth (or fourth) commandment, the respect, gratitude and care that children owe to parents, which continues into adulthood.

Domestic church

A phrase used by Catholic teaching, going back to the Fathers, for the Christian household as a small church where faith is lived and taught.

Household code (Haustafel)

A New Testament passage setting out duties of wives, husbands, children, parents, slaves and masters (Ephesians 5:21 to 6:9; Colossians 3:18 to 4:1).

Headship

A term used for the husband’s role in Ephesians 5:23. Its meaning is debated among Christians as a matter of authority, responsibility or source.

Complementarian

A view that men and women have different but complementary roles in marriage and church, typically with male headship.

Egalitarian

A view that men and women are equal in roles as well as in worth, with mutual submission in marriage.

Subsidiarity

A principle of Catholic social teaching that matters should be handled by the smallest competent group, so that families have a protected role before the state.

Background

The Old Testament treats the household as the basic unit of Israel. The fifth commandment says, “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land” (Exodus 20:12). Proverbs urges parents to teach their children, and Deuteronomy 6:6-7 tells parents to speak of God’s words when they sit at home and walk by the way. The law also protects widows, orphans and the stranger, which shows that obligations did not stop at the family’s edge.

In the New Testament, Jesus welcomes children (Mark 10:13-16), condemns evasion of duty to parents (Mark 7:10-13) and also says that those who love father or mother more than him are not worthy of him (Matthew 10:37). Paul tells children to obey their parents and fathers not to provoke their children (Ephesians 6:1-4), and says that a person who does not provide for his own household has denied the faith (1 Timothy 5:8). The early church took on these themes, and the Fathers wrote on marriage, children and the education of the young. The lesson follows how the traditions have drawn out these duties.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Duties across generations

The fifth commandment is the only one that comes with a promise, as Paul says (Ephesians 6:2). Traditions read it as requiring respect, obedience while children are young, and care for aging parents. Luther’s catechism says that children should honor, serve, obey, love and esteem their parents. Calvin and the Catholic Catechism add that the duty extends to others in lawful authority, such as teachers and rulers, so long as their commands do not contradict God’s.

The duties of parents are equally stressed. Parents are to feed, protect and educate their children, and to teach them the faith. John Chrysostom wrote that parents who neglect their children’s moral formation will answer for it, and he urged fathers to treat their children as a sacred charge. Modern Christians debate how to apply these duties in cases of abusive or neglectful parents. Most traditions hold that honor does not require obeying a command to do evil or enduring abuse, while it can still require care and forgiveness where possible.

Step 2: The family as school of virtue

Catholic teaching calls the family the domestic church. Orthodox writers use a similar image, speaking of the home as a little church with an icon corner where the family prays. Many Protestants, including Puritans, called the family a little commonwealth or little church, with the father leading household prayer and teaching. In each case the idea is that faith, patience and self-giving are learned first at home.

Virtue ethics, studied earlier in this course, helps explain this. Habits of truth-telling, sharing, forgiveness and work are formed in childhood through ordinary practice. This also explains why the churches have been concerned about family breakdown and about forces that disrupt family life, such as poverty and long working hours.

Step 3: Authority and roles in the home

Christians disagree about the household codes. Complementarian readings, held by many Catholics (in a specific form), Orthodox, Southern Baptists and many Reformed and Lutheran Christians, take Ephesians 5:22-33 to teach male headship in marriage, with husbands called to sacrificial love and wives to submission. They stress that headship is modeled on Christ, who gave himself for the church, and exclude harshness and domination. Egalitarian readings, held by many mainline Protestants, some evangelicals and some Catholics and Orthodox, stress the opening verse, submit yourselves one to another (Ephesians 5:21), and argue that Paul was moderating the household practices of his day in a way that points toward equality.

Catholic teaching under Pope John Paul II described marriage as mutual self-gift and the submission of Ephesians as mutual. The Southern Baptist Convention’s 1998 amendment and statements by Reformed bodies state the complementarian view. Both sides condemn domestic violence and abuse of authority. The disagreement is real, and it is not usually a disagreement about whether husbands and wives owe each other love.

Step 4: The limits of family claims

Jesus’ words about hating father and mother (Luke 14:26) are generally read as a statement that no human tie may rival loyalty to him, not a command to neglect family. The traditions have discussed the case of those who leave family for a religious vocation, as monks and nuns do, and of converts whose families object. They also discuss the duty to the poor and to society beyond the household. Catholic teaching on subsidiarity holds that the state should support the family, not replace it, and that parents have the first right to educate their children.

Questions of public policy touch the family: schooling, childcare, work hours, welfare and the care of elders. Christians disagree about these, even where they agree about the family’s worth. Some stress family autonomy, others social support for families. The traditions agree that obligations extend outward, to the neighbor and the stranger, so that a family may not close in on itself.

1. What does the tradition say a child owes to a parent, and what does a parent owe to a child?
2. Does the view treat the family mainly as a school of virtue, a unit of authority or a network of care?
3. How does it read the household codes of the New Testament?
4. When may a person put another claim before the family, and what are the limits?
5. How does it deal with abusive or neglectful families?
6. What does it ask of those who are single, childless or estranged from family?

Examples

Different perspectives

Catholic

The Catechism teaches that the family is the original cell of social life and a domestic church. Parents are the first educators of their children, and the state must help and not replace them. Husband and wife are equal in dignity and called to mutual self-giving, and the church teaches that children are a gift of marriage. The church also teaches that vocations to celibacy and religious life are an honorable way of serving.

Orthodox

Orthodox teaching regards the family as a little church in which the parents lead their children in prayer and the life of the church. The marriage service emphasizes mutual love and common life. Orthodox writers stress the role of the mother and father in forming children, the importance of the saints’ examples and the place of godparents in a child’s spiritual formation.

Protestant

Protestants, from Luther’s praise of marriage and family life to the Puritans’ household religion, give the family a large place. Reformed and Lutheran confessions treat the family as one of the orders God has established. Evangelical and mainline Protestants differ on gender roles, with complementarian and egalitarian views each widely held, and both claiming Scripture.

Secular and scholarly

Sociologists and historians study how families have changed, with attention to the effects of family structure, poverty and work on children. Findings are debated. Secular ethicists discuss the duties of parents and the rights of children, and some argue for a stronger role for the state in protecting children, while others defend parental autonomy. These debates give Christians common material to work with.

Why it matters

Family life is where most people meet moral demands most closely and most often. A lesson on obligation shows that Christian ethics is not only about public controversies but also about ordinary duties: feeding children, caring for the old, forgiving parents, keeping promises at home. It also shows that Christians who agree on the importance of the family can still differ on its internal order, and that those differences deserve patient study.

Common misunderstandings

Knowledge check

Think it through

1. What did you learn at home about forgiveness, truth or work, and how did you learn it?
2. How should a person weigh duty to aging parents against duty to a spouse and children?
3. Which reading of Ephesians 5 do you find more faithful to the text, and what is the best objection to it?
4. What would it mean for a church to support families without making family an idol?

Independent assignment

A map of obligations

In your notebook, write 400 to 600 words. List the main obligations a person has to family, neighbors, church and God, using at least four Scripture passages. Describe one case in which two obligations conflict, state how a Catholic, an Orthodox or a Protestant source might decide it, and say what you think the best resolution is and why. Do not send this to anyone or post it anywhere.

Further study

• Martin Luther, The Small Catechism Read the household table of duties at the end.
• John Chrysostom, On the Priesthood Read selectively on pastoral care and moral formation.
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church Read the section on the fourth commandment and the family in society.
• Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, The Orthodox Church Read selectively on family life in the Orthodox church.
• Deuteronomy 6:7 Teach the words diligently to your children.
• Ephesians 6:4 Fathers, provoke not your children.
• 1 Timothy 5:8 Providing for one’s own household.
• Mark 3:35 Whosoever shall do the will of God is my brother.