I really think I need to read Doug Wilson’s Federal Husband and possibly Reforming Marriage. Not because I like Doug Wilson. To be fair, I don’t really know if I would like Wilson, as I’ve never read anything he’s written (beyond the occasional blog post). Most people say that he’s a very clever and clear writer, which is why I think he’d be the best person to read on the topic that I’m thinking of. And for those out of the loop (aka the Peninsula), I should say out of the gate that I am not currently thinking about getting married. Please do not check the registry at Target. Just buy me a gift card. Nothing says I love you like a gift card.
Anyway, I’m thinking about reading Wilson’s stuff on marriage, not so much for a view about marriage, but a view about the church. I recently found out that there is a VERY different view of the constitution of the church as a covenant community than the model that I’ve thought of in the past, and it distubs me. Greatly. How disturbed am I? I would describe it as the kind of mad that makes you want to puke in a stranger’s lap. How’s that for a fun little mental image at 11:30 at night?
What distrubs me most is how this sounds so reformed, yet so askew. It starts with the idea of families. God works through families. That’s very covenental. That’s why we presbyterians baptize babies, right? We believe that this model was begun in the Old Testament, and explicitly continues into the New Testament. The promise to Abraham was to him and to his children, and the message of the apostles went from household to household and into all the world. Right? Right?
Well, that’s where the difficulty comes. Notice how I said household up there. This idea that I’m talking about starts with this idea that God has a design for the family, and it is by the family that He shows His ordained order to the world and spreads the holistic message of the Gospel in Christ. And the order in the family begins with the idea of male headship, because the husband is called to love the wife as Christ loved the church, and Christ is the head of the church. So each man is the head (elder) of his respective community of faith.
The role of the local church, then, is to encourage the man as to how to lead his family to the glory of God for the expansion of His Kingdom. This is realized through regular times of family worship and devotions, with the husband and father providing a model of Godly sacrificial servant leadership to those that God has put in his familial charge. The Sunday service is a chance for fellowship, encouragement, and comeraderie as these various communities of faith join together and worship God as a model of the day when all families will be brought together into the perfect heavenly family.
And I think its bunk.
Let me back up again and see if I can show you what I think is my major difference with this model. I stand with the convenentalists in saying that Jesus didn’t just come to save you or to save me. There is no such thing as a lone Christian. God has always worked to redeem a people for Himself. This has always been through families and communities and systems. So the lowest common denominator in Christianity is not the individual believer. The difference between my understanding and the system that I’m trying to understand and describe above has to do with what is the lowest common denominator.
Their answer: the nuclear family. I think that’s a crock.
Why? I’m single.
So was Jesus, so was Paul. Yes, I know that’s a cheap shot and it gets used by singles all the time.
But I’m totally serious here. The reason why Paul appointed elders in each local church was not primarily so that they could instruct men on how to be better husbands and fathers by leading better nightlly Bible studies and encouraging the Children’s Catechism. It’s not. The reason why Paul and the rest of the Apostles instituted the office of elder as a necessary part of the local church WAS to make a statement about the importance of family in the new community of faith. But the new community of faith — the local church — was the new family, the new people of God. This new city was formed from the outcasts and the orphans, those who were not a people and have now become the family of God. Those who were without a father now call God their father.
The local church is not a weekly meeting of various little families of God that get together for some kind of town meeting of sovereign households. The church assembled is itself the family of God, one common household with Godly appointed elders, and we together are connected with the larger body of Christ thoughout the world by the common gift of the Holy Spirit.
And that’s why I want to read Doug Wilson. I want to see if this idea of father-elders that seems consistent with the little I know of Wilson-ites is what I think it is, or if I’m totally off-base. Let me be clear, I’m okay with being wrong on this and misinterpreting people. I’ll happily admit it if I am. Well, maybe not happily. No one is ever happy about being wrong. If you’re happy about being wrong, you’re weird.
Tim,
I’d like to see you read Reforming Marriage and flesh out this post a little more. I like where you’re going with it. I will say that I think the problem that you raise is more of a problem of singular emphasis on the father, rather than on God working through all of his people, birth to burial. I think family devotions are a great thing, as long as they’re at the altar of the Lord, not the altar of daddy. (I’m not accusing any one of this, just wanting to make a clarification.)
Eric, thanks for responding! You’re right. This really does need more fleshing out. I still have very little idea what I’m talking about, even though I wrote a decent amount. Yay for blogging!
The thing is, I do affirm that family devotions are a beautiful thing. I also think that there are Scriptural sex roles that are important, such as a father’s responsibility to be the servant, spiritual leader of his household. But I see a big problem when family devotions takes priority over the local assembly, when I think the opposite should be the case.
This really grows feet when I start thinking about what this means for the reformed marks of the church: preaching of the Word, adminstration of the sacraments, and exercise of church discipline. It seems like an over-emphasis on family devotions most immediately runs the risk of undermining church discipline, disregarding the sacrament, which would end in a distortion of the Word. It is NOT a necessary outcome, but it is a danger if the nuclear family has priority over the church.
Tim,
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I thought you are a Protestant. If so then what are you doing talking to a Priest?