Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:1 (Spring 2020)
Article: Recovering Bavinck’s "The Christian Family"
Author: Colin J. Smothers

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 8

Recovering Bavinck’s
The Christian Family

Colin J. Smothers

Colin Smothers serves as Executive Director of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Associate Pastor at Kenwood Baptist Church in Louisville, KY.

Imagine, if you will, a divinely-designed institution perfectly tuned toward maximal human flourishing — dynamic, responsive, devoted, fecund, nurturing. Now consider any concerted opposition to such an institution. Would it be motivated by hatred toward God? Or man?

At the turn of the twentieth century, Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck (1854–1921) found himself confronted by a society increasingly hostile to human flourishing according to divine design. Sufficiently alarmed, he busied himself with a counteroffensive, which has been passed down to the anglophone world under the title, The Christian Family. The family was in trouble, and one of the most influential theologians of the Christian era unsheathed his pen in defense — he knew it was a matter of civilizational life or death.

Bavinck wrote The Christian Family in a day animated with revolutionary spirits. Socialism, Marxism, and the collectivists were threatening to upset the political order from one end of the spectrum, and aftershocks from the French Revolution were galvanizing hyper-individualists from the other.

More fundamentally, what Bavinck termed “the women’s issue” was threatening the natural order, mobilizing various nascent feminist groups and their strange — but not altogether unsurprising — bed-fellows: proponents of legalized prostitution, supporters of communal-living, and advocates for universal, state-run childcare from birth. These and other destabilizing factors made the situation so dire in Bavinck’s estimation that he could write, “There has never been a time when the family faced so severe a crisis as the time in which we are now living” (61).

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 9

But that Bavinck was alive to see the state of the family today! Those of us used to tracing the familial ills of twenty-first century America back to the sexual revolution may be surprised by Bavinck’s assessment from the first decade of the twentieth century — a full half-century and an ocean away from the American ‘60s.

Bavinck’s The Christian Family is one of the best — it could be argued the best — book-length apologies for the family in print today. It is not my intention here to summarize or even extensively review the careful and convincing argument Bavinck makes in The Christian Family. The book is short enough that you would be much better served to get a copy for yourself and read it in a sitting or two...