Family: A Christian Social Perspective

Christian Century, Oct 10, 2001 by David Clairmont, Melanie O'Hara

Family: A Christian Social Perspective. By Lisa Sowle Cahill. Fortress, 170 pp., $17.00.

LISA SOWLE CAHILL has given a well-reasoned face to a position within the American family debate which has been difficult to describe and even more difficult to promote. The tug-of-war under way between rival claimants to the words "family" and "Christian" makes the voice of a thoughtful centrist difficult to notice. In her new book Cahill is once again at work with her sources--the Judeo-Christian scriptures; the Roman Catholic tradition of papal and episcopal writings on social justice; classic works in theological ethics by Protestant thinkers; the social sciences; and recent public-policy initiatives--to craft a corrective to the seemingly interminable drivel marketed under the words "Christian family."

This is not Cahill's first foray into family studies, nor is it her first attempt to balance multiple secular and theological sources in a sustained reflection on a timely practical issue. The list of topics to which she, a professor of ethics and theology at Boston College, has devoted her scholarly efforts puts her current volume into perspective: euthanasia, war, sex, aging, the rights of women and refugees, birth control and reproductive technologies, human cloning, economic justice--and the list goes on. Cahill's scope of scholarly interests is perhaps even broader than the entire Roman Catholic encyclical tradition from Leo XIII to John Paul II.

Her last book on concerns pertinent to the American family debate was Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1996), which, building on her earlier Between the Sexes: Foundations for a Christian Ethics of Sexuality (Fortress, 1985), charted a theology of embodiment and relationality based on a cross-culturally shared set of human goods, the preservation and cultivation of which forms the moral compass for individuals and communities. In each case, she has worked in an interdisciplinary fashion with the four classic sources for theological reflection: scripture, tradition, reason and experience.

Family: A Christian Social Perspective is both a summary of her previous thinking about the core principles of Christian social ethics and an important contribution to the ongoing debate about whether the form or function of family ought to direct the work of concerned citizens and policymakers. Her motivation for her latest research was, first, her concern to engage and think beyond her past collaborations with the Religion, Culture and Family Project, directed by Don Browning of the University of Chicago Divinity School. Second, she has been intrigued by the recent recovery by Roman Catholic bishops of the metaphor of the family as a "domestic church."

Cahill begins by discussing whether the overused rhetoric of "family values" would have made any sense at all to the earliest Christian communities. Her research into the structure and function of early Christian families reveals that the idea of the nuclear family headed by a beneficent male is an oversimplification, even in reference to Greek, Roman and Jewish patriarchal cultures. Cahill accounts for a range of scholarly investigations which have focused on the profound ambivalence of Jesus and his disciples about the ultimate worth of the structure and aims of human families.

When she moves to consider the trio of John Chrysostom, Martin Luther and John Calvin, she demonstrates that the idea of "family as church" is not foreign to Christian thinking, whether the family trains people for a life of charity, nurtures them to responsibly assume their duties in stations of life ordained by God, or provides a model for molding society in accordance with gospel values. As she reads the papal encyclical tradition, she notes its slow but steady shifts in emphasis from viewing the family exclusively as an institution for the propagation of children to viewing the family as a school for social justice and a model of equitable relations.

Cahill brings the theological discussion about the function of families into high relief with case studies of the recent political debate over welfare reform and of the centrality of churches for the family life of African-Americans. In each case, one of Cahill's sources--experience--becomes the test of the theological position she has formulated. In fact, she argues that the overwhelming power that unjust economic structures wield over poor families, particularly as those structures protect a family form most conducive to preserving the position of reigning social elites, makes the oft-heard claims that poor families have lost their moral resolve quietly fade away.

For moral theologians like Cahill, certain assumptions about what is most basic to the Christian message must guide the discussion of practical moral problems. She clarifies "the essence of Christian social ethics: to embody the reign of God in human society by including the neighbor, stranger and enemy in a new family of sisters and brothers in Christ." Though her suggestion that the family is best defined by its function in proclaiming and witnessing the Christian message rather than by its form--its resemblance to the traditional nuclear family--is right, her approach does not fully enunciate the relative merits and weaknesses of alternative forms in achieving that function.