Family Idolatry: A New Heresy for the 90s?

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I do not want to write this article. It will be controversial, and the last thing I want is to be divisive. It will make people angry - it has made me angry. I would like to hide behind Berridge's advice to 'avoid all controversy in preaching, talking or writing; preach nothing down but the devil, and nothing up but Jesus Christ.' Yet Paul 'preached down' error that was harming the people of the churches that he loved, and so, I feel, must I.

We have a very subtle enemy. One of his favourite devices when someone rediscovers biblical truth is to find someone who has zeal without knowledge to push it to an unbiblical extreme. (He usually doesn't have far to look.)

Justification by faith alone fell a victim to this; so did predestination, and in our own time, the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement.

Now, here we go again. A good, biblical, vitally necessary emphasis is being distorted towards idolatry, heresy and blasphemy. It's the family.

There is a vast proliferation of books, seminars, tapes, sermons, even ministries, dealing with marriage and the family these days. This in itself is fine. Many of them are useful, even essential.

Marriage and the family are in major trouble in modern Western society, and not just among non-Christians either. Many, many problems, from the rise in violent crime to the horror stories of youth ministry, are closely linked to this breakdown. We need to be giving biblical answers, and what is more, applying biblical solutions on a wide scale.

Yet I am concerned when I pick up at random a list of the month's best-sellers at an American Christian bookstore and find that half the hardback titles and about a third of the paperbacks deal with marriage and the family.

I am concerned when I see single people becoming defensive and frustrated towards the church, and the widowed and separated feeling alienated and condemned.

And when I see the centre of anything - anything at all - drifting in any direction away from Jesus Christ, I am deeply, deeply concerned.

'Women and Children First'

The first heresy I have detected creeping into material on marriage and the family is in direct opposition to Jesus' repeated teaching.

'"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters - yes, even his own life- he cannot be my disciple."' (Luke 14:26.)

'Still another said, "I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family."

'Jesus replied, "No one that puts his hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God."' (Luke 9:61-62).

'"I tell you the truth," Jesus said to them, "no-one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God will fail to receive many times as much in this age and, in the age to come, eternal life."' (Luke 18:29-30.)

And yet some teach that our family is our first responsibility - of course, next to our personal relationship with Christ.

The problem with this view is that Jesus said, "Whoever has my commands and obeys them, that is the one who loves me." (John 14:21.) We cannot biblically separate our relationship with Jesus and our service to him and place one above and the other below the family in our scale of priorities. The above quotations from Luke don't talk about relationship with Jesus, but about service in the kingdom of God.

(The two are clearly inseparable, as the parallels show. Matthew's version of the third text, in 19:29, has 'for my sake', and Mark's in 10:29 'for me and the gospel', where Luke has 'for the sake of the kingdom of God'.)

Are we then to neglect our families, let them fall apart, so that we can minister 'more'?

No! 'If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.' (1 Tim 5:8.) And provision for one's family includes the investment of time and love as well as money.

Some have neglected their families in the name of 'ministry' and others have had to spend valuable ministry time picking up the pieces - which, as anyone who has ever broken anything knows, is the part that takes the longest.

We can, however, go to the opposite extreme, making the family an idol and so spiritualising our relationship with Christ that we can justify serving it instead of him. The balance is found when Christians with families see them as part of their ministry, with their own place in the totality of God's call on their lives.

A Matter of Degree

But it is not only the individual family that becomes an idol. The family (and indeed marriage) as a whole can. 'Let marriage be honoured by all', said the apostle (Heb.13:4); but I wonder which he would have preferred: 'For God, for family, for country' (motto of the conservative Coalition of Concerned Christians, active in the late 1980s), or Steve Green's 'For God and God alone'?

As the title to this section says, it is a matter of degree. The Bible recognises the single/married distinction, for instance, but it shows little sign of the rigidity given to this distinction by the modern church, almost parallel to the male/female, Jew/Greek, slave/free distinction which were such stumbling blocks back then. It certainly does not make the value judgements on these two states that are present in today's church.

I wonder, too, if we are producing too much comment on marriage and the family, in over-reaction to the crisis they face - some of it unbiblical, some of it irrelevant, some of it culturally bound; some of it trite, some of it badly written, little of it Christ-centred and much of it impractical and poorly thought through.

Are these two topics really so broad, and really so central to the Christian life, that they equal the combined importance of: the nature and character of God, the Bible, holy living, prayer, evangelism, discipleship, God's workings in the lives of his people, and all other topics? American hardback buyers seem to incline towards that idea, and it seems we may be following them.

The Completion Heresy

Perhaps all this may be in part to blame for something I see and hear increasingly often in many Christian contexts - many of them otherwise of the greatest doctrinal soundness. I call it 'the Completion Heresy'.

A classic statement of this taken from an article (and a good article, too, in many ways), runs: 'Adam, in a perfect environment and in a perfect relationship with God, was still incomplete'. In other words, singleness is a temporary, non-ideal state preparatory to marriage.

Excuse me, but I am a complete human being. Colossians 2:10 tells me- and I believe it - that I have been given fulness (fulfillment or completion) in Christ - not in marriage. It was not good for man to be alone- that is, without relationship with others of his own kind (and recent US studies have shown that people who do not have close social relationships have a death rate as much as two and a half times of those who do) but there is nothing in my Bible that says he was incomplete, or needed a specifically sexual relationship.

This is more than an abstract theological point. Do marrieds know the insult a single person with a full life and a significant ministry can feel when told that he or she is 'incomplete'?

And it need not be that direct. The assumption that everyone is eventually destined to marry exists, largely unchallenged, in many books, articles, sermons and speeches produced by Christian married people (and even parroted by some Christian singles), though Scripture and experience deny it.

I was at a student conference recently where one of the main speakers mentioned three important choices we should have to make during our university years: who our master would be, who our mate would be, and what our mission was. There was not a murmur of dissent from the large, mainly single audience.

Nor is it only the never-married (so insidious is the assumption that I nearly wrote 'not-yet-married') who are affected. Those who are widowed feel the loneliness and exclusion; those who are divorced feel the condemnation of the completion heresy. Those who come from non-Western cultures, where the extended family rather than the nuclear family is the norm, simply do not understand it.

I am afraid, though, that it is worse than this. I wish I could stop at calling this popular view heretical, but I must in all conscience state that I consider it blasphemous. Blasphemy is a serious charge to place against the mostly genuine and otherwise orthodox exponents of the completion heresy, and I must hasten to justify it.

If rigidly applied, this doctrine teaches that Jesus, in his life on earth, was not a complete human being. While not as bad as the Moonies' teaching that Jesus failed in his mission because he was crucified before he could marry, this still carries serious implications for the Atonement. If the 'Son of Man' - the representative human being - was not a complete person when he died on the cross, his representative work was flawed likewise incomplete.

Now I don't believe that - I've read Hebrews. The innocent proponents of the Completion Heresy, who have simply drawn a false assumption out of Genesis 2 and not thought it through in the light of other texts, would be quick to deny that they believe it either, and horrified at the implication. But there it is.

It is my hope - not, I pray, a fond one - that a few of my more open-minded readers will be asking at this point, as the Jews did at Pentecost, "What shall we do?"

There are a few things, mostly small. First, be aware of singles - not only of their special struggles, but of their special strengths. Don't imply that everyone gets married sooner or later - and tossing off one concessive sentence in a half-hour talk or a 200-page book will not go far towards cancelling this implication.

And then, perhaps, we could substitute a few of the 'How to get married' books for some on 'How to be content to be unmarried'.

Not only for the sake of those who are going to remain single, either. If people are not content as singles, there is the danger that they may equate their discontent with their singlesness and marry in order to 'cure' it.

But marriage doesn't cure our problems, it only spreads them. We need to point people to Christ, because it is in him that they will find contentment, fulfillment and completeness. As one of those many books on getting married refreshingly puts it, 'There is never a place in the Bible where it says that marriage makes you happy. It says over and over again that God makes you happy.' (Dick Purnell, Becoming a Friend and Lover, Here's Life Publications, p 114.)

So let's get biblical! Don't just parrot off the platitudes of marriage and family; search the Scriptures and check out your assumptions.

And in saying, "Get biblical", I am inevitably implying, "Get Christ-centred". He has the words of eternal life (John 6:68). There is no other Rock - I know not one (Isaiah 44:8).

Afterword, nine years later

Looking back near the close of the 1990s, I am pleased to see that my worst fears in 1989 were unjustified. The Completion Heresy hasn't got any worse; we don't see full-blown cults of the family comparable to the cults of prosperity, health and success which do such violence to Scripture in the service of cultural standards.

On the other hand, I am distressed to see that things haven't got any better either. This is nothing new. I found several books about singleness in a second-hand bookshop a while ago. One, in the blurb, spoke about the issues facing single Christians "today" in the "modern era", and appeared to address a lot of contemporary issues. It looked a little battered, so I checked the publication date. It was published the year I was born.

In other words, there appears to have been no progress on this issue in the church through my whole lifetime - just over thirty years, as I write.

More and more people are remaining single later and later - though many of them are living together, or at least sleeping together, before marriage. Large parts of the population of most western countries are single in some sense - never married, divorced, separated or widowed. I have seen figures of 25% and upwards. And large parts of the church in most western countries have nothing useful to say to them.

There are hundreds of singles groups on the Internet and in "real life". With no exceptions that I know of, their focus is on pairing up. The only thing many of the people have in common is loneliness and desperation. And - wake up, people, and smell the garbage - loneliness and desperation is not a problem to which the fundamental solution is pairing up. In many cases (I would not be so arrogant as to say all, or even most), the solution is growing up. Wising up. Getting over it and getting on with having a life, for God's sake.

But there is very little support for such a solution. I received an email in July 1997 from a single woman in her thirties who had been looking for Christian singleness sites which offered support for singles to be single and contented, rather than opportunities for them to meet and mate. This article was the only one she had found.

We've since become good friends, and out of our email conversations we have put together an article on singleness, shortly to be published in Reality magazine (and shortly thereafter to go up on our joint Purposeful Singleness website).