The Family

Just finished "The Family in Its Civil and Churchly Aspects," by Rev. B.M.Palmer of First Presbyterian Church in New Orleans, LA, in 1876. This was an outstanding exposition of the various elements of the family and how they relate to one another. With chapter titles like "Supremacy of the Husband," and "Authority of the Parent," it isn't likely to make Amazon's top 20, or the similar top list at the Christian Bookseller's Association.

The strength is its focus on God's design, and how He tempers a strong and influential parental authority with familial affection. God does this so that safeguards against abusive tyrrany on one hand, and against overindulgence on the other. Another strength revealed in the subtitle, is the relation between family, and church and state. We get our idea of the church's identity from the family relations we experience. The state relies wholly on the health of families for its well-being. His chapter on the symbolic mystery of marriage is an excellent expansion on Paul's analogy in Ephesians 5:22-33: as Christ loves the Church as His Bride, so the husband is to love his wife.

A minor weakness is a possible or potential over emphasis on the family, to the diminishment of respecting civil or churchly authority. At one point he implies that the church is a collection of churches (families). But we must say the church is a new family born of God, not just a collection of natural, biological families. Switching to the state, while the state tends to encroach upon the family too much these days, it isn't helpful to swing too far the other way. There is little to no mention of the family's true obligations to the state or church; only the ways in which the state and church derive secondarily from the family. While this latter aspect is true, the former ought not be overlooked in order to reclaim and honor the family. An illustration: the wife was created secondarily from the man. But the man serves her and meets her needs. The relationship is reciprocal. Similarly, the church and state don't exist solely to serve the family. Family also serves state and church in certain ways.

But this is a minor, and in many ways only potential, weakness. Overall this is a very healthy Biblical-guided corrective for modern distortions of gender roles.