 FAMILIES AT THE CROSSROADS:Beyond Traditional & Modern Options by Rodney Clapp
InterVarsity
Press, 1993, 208 pp
Review by Barry Cramer
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Rodney Clapp's book provides much grist for the mill in the turmoil over the status and role of family in today's culture. Even though now a few years old, Clapp's book remains relevant as Society and Church continue to engage in debate over the future of the family. Clapp writes as an Evangelical Christian for an Evangelical audience, but his book should attract a broader audience given his reliance on the Social Sciences, his Christ-centered but critical approach to Scripture, and his use of non-Evangelical sources.
Clapp’s thesis is that the Church surpasses the 'traditional nuclear family,' as the most important human institution for Christians. The Church is our "first family." The church is God's most important institution on earth. The church is the social agent that most significantly shapes and forms the character of Christians. And the church is the primary vehicle of God's grace and salvation for a waiting, desperate world .With this, Clapp differs from those advocating for traditional family values. Hence, the first half of his subtitle. At the same time, as the second half of his subtitle suggests, Clapp does not endorse the values-free, overly individualistic approach to sexuality, marriage, and family that our larger, "postmodern," society might encourage.
Clapp is straightforward in stating that the "traditional family" in today's cultural debate is not a "Biblical" family; it is not to be found in either the Old or New Testaments. In the Hebrew culture of the Old Testament, nuclear families were not autonomous, but were "interwoven" into an intergenerational household ("house") of typically 50 to 100 persons. Marriages were arranged with reference to family status and economics, not to romance, and polygamy was permissible.
In the New Testament, Clapp maintains, Jesus was a notorious "family-breaker" in both practice and precept. Jesus was family-friendly in that he condemned divorce, welcomed children, and condemned the defrauding of parents through misuse of "corban," but he and most of his disciples remained single even though marriage was considered to be obligatory in Jewish tradition. He explicitly taught that the reign of God takes priority over family.
Clapp traces the development of today's "traditional family" from the small, autonomous, nuclear family that emerged from the Industrial Revolution of two centuries ago. This was the "bourgeois family" in which the husband/father became the public face of the family and its economic livelihood, while the wife/mother became manager of their private household and the source of the entire family's emotional and spiritual ("sentimental") satisfaction.
This family unit, maintains Clapp, is based upon an "economic exchange model" which has infiltrated our thinking about family. As one example, Clapp points out the substitution of marketplace notions of "contract" for the theological notion of "covenant" in our attitudes about marriage. Clapp further asserts that not recognizing this economic exchange model forms the core problem for today's families, even Christian ones. Only through understanding that the problem is within and not beyond us, will we find an answer to that which plagues our families, and one which is neither the "traditional" nor the "modern" answer:
Such resistance is the result of transformed lives springing from new birth into the body of Christ and active participation in that body.
Although Clapp was clear in his own discussion, this quotation from Paul Ramsey might better have been used in the body of the book, rather than tucked away in the appended notes:
Given the heavy reliance on the Creation accounts in discussions of sexuality and marriage, this thought should be more widely considered. As Clapp says, "our understanding of the family shifts if we read Scripture by beginning with Jesus." It is this Christ-centered focus, along with anthropological and sociological analysis, which sets Clapp’s book apart and is the reason I recommend it as having potential to move the Church forward in its dialogue over the status and future of the family.
Barry Cramer is the editor of Spirit Restoration Ministries. His degree in the Social and Behavioral Sciences is from The Ohio State University.
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