Saturday, June 25, 2005
(2:25 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Redefining Family: A Conjecture
I think there's a significant chunk of the New Testament devoted to redefining the family. In fact, except for some of the later pseudo-Pauline works, I think that the dominant way of talking about family in the New Testament is a highly metaphorical one that ends up undermining the importance of one's biological family.One could say that all of those references take for granted the importance of family duty and that the higher duty to the kingdom of God or the gospel should put family duties into proper perspective, effectively making one a better parent/child/whatever -- and indeed, the Pastoral letters and Colossians and Ephesians seem to be moving in that direction. The important thing is to keep an appropriate balance, because our duties to family are simultaneously duties to God.
It would be natural to lean toward this late pseudo-Pauline view if one shared with those letters the idea that the apocalypse is not coming any time soon, and indeed, even with the (largely understandable) fascination the book of Revelation exerts on some people, our contemporary religious culture is not one that consciously expects the apocalypse to come any time soon. One could go a step further: emphasis on familial duty is a good indicator that apocalypticism is dying out, something like the frogs who start to die off as a prelimary sign that an ecosystem is collapsing.
Interestingly, the ideology of family arose in the Roman context just at the point where it seemed like this cannot go on. Family values were aggressively portrayed in imperial iconography even while the emperors themselves were terrorist thugs whose legitimate children either never materialized or were murdered immediately upon being born. The imperial system of government was not stable in its early years. Every regime change was a military coup, with the people clamoring for a new leader to remove the old one, until the new leader turned out to be even worse. And the institution of marriage was deteriorating as well -- you couldn't pay young men to get married. But again, family values was the official party line. Even if the emperor was in fact a serial rapist and murderer who had neither wife nor children, the imagery of the emperor cult was at great pains to show the subjects that they were being ruled not just by a man, but by a family.
Partly, this was just a matter of keeping warm bodies pumping out. As Peter Brown remarks near the beginning of Body and Society, we can't imagine today the horrible immediacy of death in the ancient world, the absolute necessity of reproducing merely to keep the thing running. But as the world was united in the peace provided by a brutal warlord who, in the early years at least, paid the army out of his own pocket -- just as the wonderful opportunities for travel, trade, mutual understanding were being opened up in the civilized world, people could not be convinced to invest in it any longer. People could not be convinced to invest their bodies, to invest their lives in the raising of children, because the whole thing was coming down and everyone knew it. When Paul declared in his letter to the Romans that the wrath of God is revealed against the injustice of Rome, it was old news, likely eliciting the same hopeless shrugs that a Chomsky tirade evokes among us today.
Paul, and the Jesus of the written gospels after him, says -- let the whole thing burn, and we'll be ready when it does. "Everything is permissible," every aspect of this world -- which is not merely wicked or evil in some abstract way, but that is objectively doomed, radically devoid of future -- can be used on an ad hoc basis, including even marriage or food sacrificed to idols. It's just a matter of keeping these little families -- real families, the kind made up of a worker's commune in Thessalonica who share everything, the kind made up of a bunch of ignorant Galatian hicks who somehow became convinced that some Jewish guy from across the world was raised from the dead, or the kind made up of a bunch of vagrants travelling two-by-two relying on the kindness of strangers -- together to greet the one who will redeem the world when it comes tumbling down under the force of its own inertia.
The irony of Christianity comes in here. We've got to keep these groups together, perhaps even growing. That means that we have to keep people from getting killed, or at least from being so mistreated that they give up an plug back into the mainstream culture. And so how do we do that? One really obvious way is to take the official imperial values and actually do that stuff better than the people who really profess them. So that's what a lot of Christians start to do -- raise solid families, create loving stable marriages, become obedient slaves and kind masters. After all, everything is permissible, even marriage, even family! And in this way, the Christians spread like wildfire, saving the empire in the process, creating a Romanism with a human face -- the greatest, perhaps the sole, achievement of Christianity. Retrospectively, we can see it as a powerful symbol when Jesus, dying on the cross as the corrupt Roman leadership tries to placate the crowd, prays for those who are murdering him -- objectively, historically, it is precisely Rome that he died to save.
That, in any case, is one conjecture among the many that are possible.
