Family Identity and Christian Tradition

The Holy Family, a Paradigm of the Truly Christian Family Unit

By Bishop Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

While Christianity can be a beautiful expression of the highest values of humanity, “religion" must also be recognized as a force of discontinuity and destruction, and this is why it is so essential that the family moderates and allows for human flourishing, wearing off the "edges" of dogma, making idealists more realistic, and forcing realists to become more idealistic - why? Because family, the engine of human biological and cultural existence, can't survive without a justifying ideology, one provided by a social and relational reading of Christianity, the great equalizer, reformer, and enlightener of Man’s heart. The family also can't survive when the ideology takes precedence over it (such as we see in times of obsessive Monasticism, as in the final days of the Byzantine Empire). While most "ideological" converts tend to react to the predominance of family culture in the more ancient forms of Christianity, seeing the radical difference between what is essentially a family cult and a personal and empirical claim to ultimate truth, most from within the system see all the blustery claims to being the "one and only" a necessary rhetorical part of protecting the family, and this is why they all, aside from their political hierarchy - The Greeks, the Italians, the Irish, the Armenians, the Assyrians - respect each other and "agree to disagree”.  That’s because the use of religion as an internal regulator within family dynamics has been kept and is still functioning to create a positive family dynamic. (One of the only cultural exceptions in history have been the Germans, whose absolutist and individualist culture has fueled four philosophical revolutions and two world wars - Papalism, Protestantism, Romanticism, German Higher Criticism, all come from the radical exultation of individuals above the family, resulting in cultural tragedies and self-extinction.) 

The problem, the faithful of Ancient Christian communities would argue, is when people become ideological and "believe everything too much". They know what their political wing says, but they aren’t fooled, because the whole point, they know, is to be a good person - something that most of the heirarchs throughout history have failed to accomplish. Being a truly loving, good, contributing member of a community is the hardest thing in the world to accomplish, and it is achieved through selfless love in the context of the family much easier than through a selfish or isolated asceticism (and not that all monasticism is selfish or isolated, but that it CAN become the opposite of Christian life very easily, filling monasteries with self-confident, proud, self-serving, intellectuals who think that they are spiritual by virtue of being a monk)! When Faith becomes about belief, rather than about supporting, explaining, protecting and moralizing human life in the context of living, loving, thriving nuclear families and their local church communities, then the belief itself becomes toxic, de-habilitating and cause for concern! It is mainly a reaction against this ideological bias that manifests when Catholics or Orthodox vent their dislike for Protestants, because Protestantism boils Christianity down to a few simple, personal, Truth claims as its belief component. It does this without compensating for family or culture, effectively destroying and invalidating the Christian cultures of older communities and calling into question the very validity of the process of formation of Sacred Texts, which historically occurred as they were filtered through generations of listeners, understood as a record of God’s work within the Covenant Community to call humanity and the individual to repentance, not as individual, infallible, scientific documents primarily aimed at convincing the individual. 

Conversely, this is also why conversion away from Protestantism to Catholicism or Orthodoxy is dangerous for the fledgling Protestant Community attempting to “grow up” and deal honestly with history, because the redemptive and protective family culture that has been built up and justifies itself quite well within the American cultural context (regardless of whether or not some would see being American or Western as innately a problem) is torn down again by another Protestant mistake, an adherence to a personal philosophy that separates one from the life-giving and blessed precincts of the consecrated family. Thus, while claiming to "Rediscover an Ancient Faith", Converts are really just repeating the Reformation, rejecting the family, and attempting to individually "correct error" and live more ideologically-centered lives, rather than working to preserve, protect and build their families and communities, and foster understanding and doctrinal dialogue from within their community with older, culturally different Christian communities. Once we understand this, the family problem with "convertism", both as a missionary ideology that Protestants have used to damage and even destroy other Christian communities, we can also see why it has resulted in the unhappy and unsuccessful conversion of Protestant individuals to older Traditions, which has resulted in the breaking up of happy Protestant families and creating unnecessary division through individual realizations of cultural problems, philosophical narrowness or an ahistorical founder's narrative. 

One can hope that the "Becoming Orthodox" movement in Protestant Churches will merely be a “normalization” and “peace-making” process, not a “another reformation”. Hopefully, this process can maintain and develop a new sensibility within an American Community, already rooted and growing within its own historical, linguistic and political context, creating a synthesis of what is good in both traditions, rather than creating a reactionary antithesis to Western Culture. We already see this coming about in Thomas Oden’s “Paleo-Orthodoxy”, John Milbank’s “Radical Orthodoxy”, NT Wright’s “New Perspective on Paul”, and Michael J. Svigel’s “Retro-Christianity”, which are attempts led by Protestant pastors who are knowledgable of the basic problems of culture, category, and communication, and who desire to preserve the family and negotiate a positive Christian culture, rather than deal in absolute truth claims or canonical norms that can never be resolved and cannot be historically proven as universal. To do such would require a change in the Protestant mentality, flushing out the iconoclasm, anti-liturgicalism, and the error of seeing a faith based in language, which is cultural in its definition, as a personal decision. But it should refuse to change as a rejection, but instead, embrace its families with a kind of gusto and love that we see today within Conservative Evangelical ranks! It will also require a painful release of ecclesiastical power on the part of hierarchs, the politicians of more ancient cultural powers and the tellers of their own cultural narratives, requiring them to recognize what is not only foreign, but also “ugly” in comparison to their idyllic systems. This is the only way that the Gospel will be sincerely acculturated in a Postmodern world in the same way that it encountered the Pagan Societies of Greece, Rome and Persia, transforming culture by the Presence of Christ through the Work of the Holy Spirit in the midst of the baptized people, the Covenant Congregation, who strive to be one with one another and reflect both Apostolic continuity and truly biblical doctrine. 

Ultimately, both "Ancient Christian" and "Contemporary Christian", Middle-Eastern/European Christian and American Christian, our view of Christianity must be Biblical in that we realize that only through the Holy Spirit can a community confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, and that, in reality, all Christians whose faith conforms to the Nicene Creed and who invoke the Holy Spirit through the Name of the Holy Trinity for the mysteries of Baptism, Confession, Eucharist, Marriage, Ordination and Burial are practicing a simple “Apostolic Faith"; and just as St. Peter discovered, when he found to his surprise that the Holy Spirit was already at work amongst the Gentiles, and that "God is no respecter of persons" (Acts 10:34), it is our duty to submit to what God has revealed, rather than impose what we think is best. Those that the Orthodox already recognize through chrismation in “economia” need to have the validity of their ordinations recognized as well, for the Holy Spirit was also invoked over them for the purpose of the ministry of the Word and the Eucharist in the Congregation, the SAME Holy Spirit that is invoked over the Apostolic Ordinands. In this the origin of the blessing and the power of humble and orthodox-conscious Protestants is one with the Orthodox Churches. And those Protestant Communities that seek love and mutual submission with Ancient Christian communities need to be brought in, not as vassals of a conquered kingdom, forced into taxation and subjugation to financially support Churches from poor or persecuted “Motherlands”, never to be released to her own bishops (which they already have) and a form of spiritual colonialism, but the Protestant Church who normalize their relationship with the Ancient Churches need to be recognized as the Churches of the places where they are - indigenous Churches, with sound faith, but with a different practice and aesthetic. We will all have to realize that it is this uncontrollable Holy Spirit, this “Wind blowing where it wills”, who cannot be maximized or filtered by any one political structure or cultural group, is the one who is building up the Church, of Jews and Gentile, Slave and Free, into the Body of Christ, the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and that it is this Church that will be revealed in its glory as the Bride of Christ at the Last Day!