A Family Faith: Domestic Discipling -- By: David F. Wright

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 160:639 (Jul 2003)
Article: A Family Faith: Domestic Discipling
Author: David F. Wright


A Family Faith: Domestic Disciplinga

David F. Wright

As is well known, the nuclear family in the traditional Western sense is in something of a crisis. If government policies still favor the family, at least as a context for raising children, they are increasingly reticent about the marriage of husband and wife as its core. Some of those within the churches who are sympathetic toward alternatives to the two-parent family rightly point out that the teaching of the New Testament, and particularly of Jesus Himself, is more equivocal about family bonds than the Old Testament might lead one to expect. The radical demands of serving the Lord may disrupt family relationships and certainly cannot be assumed always to cohere with a “happy-families” pattern of life. Jesus’ relations with His own family, not least His mother, displayed at times a discomfiting detachment.

The cost to family harmony of confessing Christ in the pre-Constantinian period is nowhere more sensitively and vividly illustrated than in the Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, the account of a group martyrdom at Carthage in A.D. 203. This persecution was directed against conversion to Christianity and those who promoted it—teachers and catechists. Perpetua was a young upper-class woman with a newborn baby, and Felicity, her slave, was heavily pregnant. Fortunately Felicity managed to give birth before the day of martyrdom dawned. Otherwise she would not have died with the others, “going from one blood bath to another, from the midwife to the gladiator, ready to wash after childbirth in a second baptism.”1 In this exquisitely feminine text Perpetua’s husband is

never glimpsed at all (later recensions supply the deficiency). She was estranged from her father, who “alone of all my kin would be unhappy to see me suffer” (from Perpetua’s prison diary),2 but she rebuffed his repeated pleas that she have pity on his gray hairs—and on her baby—by abandoning her stubborn stand. Felicity’s child was to be brought up by one of the Christian women, and Perpetua’s child presumably by her parents. The other familial dimension to the narrative follows Perpetua’s realization that as a martyr-designate she wielded special intercessory power. In a vision she saw her brother Dinocrates, who had died of a disfiguring facial cancer at the age of seven. At first she saw him suffering, but later, after she had prayed, he was healed.

A gamut of familial relations are at play in this story, informed by a delicate intimacy of personal feelings...

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