Family ties: how the early church became a community

Christian Century, August 28, 2002 by David L. Balch

Life Together: Family, Sexuality and Community in the New Testament and Today. By Stephen C. Barton. T & T Clark, 256 pp., $24.95

The Ancient Church as Family By Joseph H. Hellerman. Fortress, 295 pp., $23.00.

STEPHEN BARTON is more concerned with biblical interpretation than with detailing first-century family life or attitudes about sexuality. His goal is not to reconstruct the shape of the New Testament-era family but to provide "theological interpretation" that is "historically informed."

In debates over sexuality and sexual ethics, the right place to begin is not with texts of the Bible, as if a passage could settle a debate, but by asking: "What kind of people do we need to be to interpret the Bible wisely?" Such a question, Barton argues, avoids biblicism while still allowing us to read the Bible as life-giving and liberating. His position reminds me of a startling assertion by the most challenging of European feminist exegetes, Lydia Schottroff (author of Impatient Sisters: A Feminist Social History of Early Christianity): "For me, the most important school of justice I know is the biblical tradition." Barton wants to read the Bible with a hermeneutic of trust, not of suspicion.

He begins biblical interpretation with "the Christian vision of God as a Trinity of love, and argues that "the Trinitarian sociality of God is the basis for true creaturely sociality. The desire we have for union ...--whether the union of solidarity, or of friendship, or of intimacy, or of sexual intercourse--is a desire which expresses the divine nature within us." Suggesting how we may live today as families in light of the New Testament, Barton emphasizes the incarnation, the Word become flesh. The Incarnate Word begins his public ministry at a wedding and ends it by providing for his mother.

In the introduction to his chapter on the Gospel of John, Barton writes that the church is called to witness to the life together of people of every kind, doing so by being itself in unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity--four descriptors from the fourth-century Constantinopolitan Creed. A postmodern exegete, Barton advocates interpreting scripture, both Old and New Testaments, in light of the Christian confessions.

By itself, historical-critical interpretation not only avoids theology but serves the interests of liberal individualism. For example, social historians present the first-century family as a microcosm of the patriarchal city-state. They argue that its system of authority was hierarchical and nonegalitarian; slavery was taken for granted. Barton objects that this interpretation is minimalist, consisting of a few, mostly sociological commonplaces which allow contemporary readers to see their own family relationships by contrast as personalist and meaningful.

For his part, Barton insists that the New Testament witnesses to the corporate and institutional dimensions of Christian discipleship. He writes about the communal character of Christianity, about Christian community in John and in 1 Corinthians. In chapter 11, however, Barton abandons sociology and ecclesiology, attacks the Enlightenment practice of tolerance and argues that the New Testament promotes not evenhanded tolerance but zeal for God, not human reason but revelation. He ignores the fact that Luke-Acts does pick up the Greco-Roman emphasis on phil-anthropia (love of humanity), as opposed to antisocial mis-anthropia. But Barton is correct in pointing out that despite the warnings of several generations of New Testament scholars about "early Catholic" institutionalization, the earliest Pauline "house churches" were in fact quite concrete institutions.

Dealing with problem texts raises the key question of the relationship between church and culture, of how the already given structures of social existence are to be renewed in light of membership in the body of Christ. Barton cites the household codes in the New Testament that subordinate wives to husbands and slaves to masters as examples. Because Romans were obsessively concerned with rank within the household, the Roman houses in which early Christians typically worshiped opposed the egalitarian values that Christians proclaimed in their baptismal theology. And Christians often acted out these hierarchical Roman architectural and cultural norms. Since this is so, one must ask whether Barton's emphasis on the ecclesial dimension of faith is too optimistic.

Barton recommends Rudolf Bultmann's approach to outmoded cosmology and mythology: responsible interpretation involves ongoing engagement between the reader and the text in openness to God's justifying grace in Christ. The true meaning of a text is never static. The text does not have just one, literal meaning, but may have meanings beyond that intended by the original author.

Talk about the family must be eschatological. It should not hark back to antique family patterns but engage in creative, theological interpretation that speaks to family life today. In Matthew, "the kingdom of heaven is an eschatological reality," which means that "human relations of superordination and subordination (including relations between women and men) can ever only be provisional, open always to new revelations of divine wisdom." Reflection on the Gospel of John, too, must "have a strong eschatological dimension; ... it will demand of us readers and hearers an openness to ongoing judgment and transformation, both individually and in our life together." Paul situates the lives of the Corinthians in an eschatological perspective, between the cross at the letter's opening and the resurrection toward the letter's end. He wants to see the Corinthians' participation in the kingdom of God embodied in the life of the community, an alternative society.