Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 04:1 (Spring 2022)
Article: For The Family
Author: Colin J. Smothers

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 6

For The Family

Colin J. Smothers

Executive Editor

The theme for this issue of Eikon is human society’s bedrock institution, the family. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to notice that the family is in crisis in the modern West — in fact, statistics show that if you don’t have a Ph.D., you are more likely not only to feel the immediate effects of the family’s disintegration, but you are also more readily able to recognize the forces contributing to its breakdown.

A few years back, I wrote a review in these pages of Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck’s The Christian Family.1 Bavinck wrote at the turn of last century out of concern for the rapid decline of the family in his day, a trend that has only accelerated since. One can only wonder what he would say today.

Bavinck recognized an important truth that had once been nearly universally acknowledged: the family is the foundation of all of civilized society. Nevertheless, the family has been consistently and (one cannot help but suspect) intentionally undermined by forces of modernity which have wreaked havoc on the unmitigated goods of fatherhood, motherhood, and child-rearing. With the rise of expressive individualism, identity and authenticity have unseated older virtues like duty, loyalty, and self-sacrifice that once knit kin together and promoted the common good. Opponents of the family, however, have refused to recognize — or perhaps their nihilistic impulses predispose them not to care — that they are hacking away at a branch they themselves are sitting on. Once they cut all the way through, there is nothing left but collapse.

Eikon 4.1 (Spring 2022) p. 7

The Bible teaches us that the family is a pre-political institution designed and ordained by God on which both the church and the state are predicated. To wit, we relate to one another in the church as brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, and we relate to one another in the state, our motherland, through a web of analogous relationships: patricians and matrons and founding fathers and brotherhoods. This is particularly evident when a nation is described in domestic terms, such as America: the “land of the free and home of the brave.” Even aside from these analogues, a church is a community that joins natural sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, across bloodlines under a common purpose — so also the state. Most obviously, both depend on the fecundity of the family for generational perpetuity.

In other words, as goes the family, so goes human society. That fundamental reality is why we, the editors, have organized this issue of Eikon around the family. Christians should ca...