There is a myth of functionality in regard to the nuclear family in the pietist evangelical context. This myth has been fostered and cultivated by people like James Dobson and his ‘ministry’ Focus on the Family. Surely, aiming at perfection or completion as the Apostle Paul admonishes in the Corinthian correspondence is always the aim; but to elevate that aim to some mythological status as if some have arrived while others haven’t is a fallacious reality. And yet in evangelical contexts, particularly ecclesial contexts that are shaped by the experiential such as we find in Pentecostalism/Charismatic, this sort of ‘perfectionist’ framework has taken root among many. There seems to be a psychology present, among such adherents, that those with “more faith” can have greater and more direct access to God than others can in the body of Christ. As such, when such proponents (of this way of thinking) meet ad hoc external criteria—i.e. in regard to what counts as ‘functional’ family, or maybe a better word would be ‘stable’—these people believe they have arrived at a first class level of Christianity and spirituality while those who don’t apparently meet such standards, these are relegated to second class level Christians (maybe best suited for the steerage sections of the Church).

If you think this sort of thinking is artificial among Pentecostal/Charismatic Christians, in particular, think again. I attended Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa (and their Bible College) for many years. There is the belief among such Christians that if someone hasn’t been ‘baptized in the Holy Spirit’ (or more crudely iterated: ‘received the second blessing’) that these ‘Christians’ are not able to function in the power of the Holy Spirit; thus they can, at best, only live a dysfunctional and unstable Christian life. It is not a stretch to extrapolate out from this theology of the Holy Spirit (and the attendant theological anthropology), and apply it in a variety of ways. In this post we are applying this sort of theology to a ‘perfectionistic’ understanding of the Christian family.

Further, and you may have noticed, at a soteriological level, what this sort of “functional” understanding of the Christian family works from in these contexts is a works-based or performance-based understanding of the Christian life. Again, coupling together the concept of first class level over against second class level Christians with the idea of a stable and functioning Christian family, there is an ad hoc or overly radicalized external standard that is elevated up as the marker by which someone can determine whether or not they have achieved a Spirit-powered functional family that makes such families greater than other Christian families who have apparently failed to meet said standard. But the point of this is that in order to achieve this sort of ‘functional/stable’ Christian family status, said family must appear a certain way; it must meet certain standards of ‘perfection’ that have been asserted as the standard that any healthy family must attain if said family can be said to be a functional and stable Christian family. If we reduced this way of thinking to purely soteriological terms we would identify this as a works-righteousness conception of salvation.

If we were to reduce this discussion down to its bare theological-bones something I wrote previously with reference to Barth’s critique of the Liberal Christian in his German context could perfectly apply here. I once wrote: “For Barth, for the Liberal Protestant, because of the collapse of the Christian self into the self as the moral self there no longer remained space for Christ to break in and speak a fresh word of holiness over and against the established norms of what the Liberal Protestant had come to already think of what counted as such. In other words, Barth was against a What Would Jesus Do? society.” This really captures perfectly what I am getting at in regard to the elevation of the ‘functional’ Christian family as a ‘given’ standard for what counts as achieving a level of righteousness before God that is simply a given fact among those who adhere to such simplistic thinking. When Christians presume that their particular practice of Christianity has achieved a standard of holiness that others have not, and out of that such Christians build a praxis that elevates themselves over against others, these Christians are no longer practicing a Christianity that can hear the voice of the living Lord, Jesus Christ. They have substituted their standards, their works, their particular church-enculturated givens as one in the same with the Word of the Lord; and anyone who does not rise to these artificial standards, again, are considered suspect, dysfunctional, and unstable—possibly not even ‘saved.’

I am not saying that genuine abuse cannot and does not happen in many Christian families. But I am saying: that in general most Christians, genuine Christians, are struggling through various life circumstances that are hard and unstable. The ground of a healthy Christian family is not what we can achieve, or how ‘stable’ we might appear by meeting ad hoc external standards (i.e. standards that God in Christ never prescribed, per se). The ground of a healthy, functional, stable Christian family is the grace of God in Jesus Christ. If this is the basis for all of reality, then it is the basis, or the standard of how a Christian family will operate. God’s grace is not something that ‘perfects nature,’ but instead is a reality that breaks in moment by moment into the lives of God’s people and reorients whatever the harsh circumstances of life brings, and turns them towards God. In other words, God’s grace breaks in and elevates, and reverses circumstances, that might appear to break us, and produce broken people, and allows for continued fellowship with God to be present even in the broken and dysfunctional circumstances. As such, ‘functional’ or ‘stable’ Christian families that come to think of themselves this way are often, and typically based upon a conception of God’s grace that is not grace at all, but works. If works and self-performance become the standard of salvation, and as a subsequent, Christian families, there will always be an attitude of superiority of such proponents over against those who are simply attempting to slog through this life as based upon the grace of God in Christ alone.