A lot of people are pointing out that Jesus did not exactly triumph the family first mindset that many preach today. Some are going so far as to say it is unbiblical to care for your family first. Jesus famously even called us in
Luke 14:26 to "hate their father and mother."
Below is my review of that book... and why I think both Ben Witherington and Joseph Hellerman are overstating their case about the family in ways that if fully taken to heart, will only perpetuate and hurt the family in ways that for the last several hundred years the church -and especially the evangelical pastorate- have been notorious for.
This is a long and theological blog post. Beyond what I normally do, as it is essentially a seminary paper on my blog. If it interests you and you want to wrestle with this, then I hope this helps. If your'e a student ministry pastor like I am, then I think it has profound impact on the gospel we preach and the role we call families to have. I'd encourage you to read it and the book it is interacting with.
Oh.. and for what it's worth. If google brought you here via a search for a book review, don't copy and paste my paper to plagiarize it for your own seminary class. #justsayin
_______________________________________________________________
DC 501: Discipleship in Community. Spring 2012. Bethel Seminary San Diego.
READING
REPORT:
Hellerman,
Joseph H. When the Church Was a Family:
Recapturing Jesus' Vision for Authentic Christian Community. Nashville, TN:
B&H Publishing Group, 2009. E-book
accessed on in April 2012, from Kindle Edition.
PURPOSE:
In this book, as the title
implies, Hellerman is declaring war on the individualism and CEO mentality of American
Christianity both in the congregation and at the pastoral helm of leadership, arguing
that it is neither helpful nor Biblical to live a Christian life apart from
community. In fact, Hellerman would
consider the phrase “personal Christian life” to be an oxymoron. He goes to
great length to build his case for a collective spiritual development,
examining everything from first century Mediterranean culture and literature to
modern psychology to the Biblical texts themselves. He leverages everything he can toward this premise;
even taking odds with the way the gospel has largely been presented in
evangelical circles to date. To this
end, Hellerman writes, “There is, in fact, no better way to come to grips with
the spiritual and relational poverty of American individualism than to compare
our way of doing things with the strong-group, surrogate family relations of
early Christianity. This is the central focus of this book. The New Testament
picture of the church as a family flies in the face of our individualistic
cultural orientation.” (pp. 6-7). Therein lies the purpose: to challenge the
modern day American Christian to return to a Biblical model of church as a
family, to which one is both redeemed for and sanctified through.
HIGHLIGHTS:
This book is primarily about the
following three propositions.
- In a healthy Christian
life, the body of believers to which one is a part are to be a surrogate
spiritual family.
The mindset of the first century
Mediterranean culture, not unlike the culture that is still there today, was one
of the “group comes first”. In this
context, it was and still largely is, the norm for decisions about life,
family, and faith to yield to the needs of the whole above the individual. In our ego driven and narcissistic culture we
live in today, it is critical that we understand that this is not God’s design
for social interactions. We are called
to be a part of a community. So much so, that when we are out of touch with a
community, we should recognize we are out of touch with God’s best.
- Jesus did not come to
be our “personal Lord and Savior.” He
came to be our collective Redeemer and Restorer. To this end, Hellerman argues that the way
we have presented and even crafted the gospel is unhealthy at best and
unbiblical at worst. He argues that one
cannot commit their soul to Jesus without committing their life to the
community of faith- the church. It is
absolutely necessary that when we call someone to give up their life for the
gospel, that we call them to take up the cross of the community. The call of
God on the life of sinner is not only to yield one’s life to Jesus for
redemption of sins, but to commit to a community in which God will use each of
us for the benefit of the whole in order that we all might be sanctified,
working out our salvation together until the day of Christ Jesus.
- People who fail to
honor the family of God will fail to become all that God has created them to
be.
To this end, it is impossible for a believer to move towards
sanctification outside of the church.
Just as in the New Testament we can scarcely find a new convert who is
not then almost immediately baptized, we also cannot find an example of a lone
Christian. Whether it is the community
responsibilities of the law within the nation of Israel or the collective
benefit of Spiritual gifts given by God for the benefit of the church, the
group has always been a necessary part of full faith development. While Hellerman doesn’t necessarily bring
focus to the “wisdom literature” of the scriptures, the truth remains that what
Hellerman has argued is also all over this genre of literature in the
Scriptures. “Do you see people who are
wise in their own eyes? There is more hope for fools than for them.” (Pro 26:12) Perhaps most famously, “Two are
better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If they fall
down, they can help each other up. But pity those who fall and have no one to
help them up! Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can
one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.”
(Ecc 4:8–12) It is both a Biblical
reality and social truth that people do not, and cannot, become all that God
has created them to be in this broken world apart from the collective soul
shaping of the body of Christ.
CRITICAL COMMENTARY
I
found this book to be a pleasure to read and resonated with a lot of what I’ve
been thinking and feeling as a pastor and follower of Jesus in the last decade
or so. I found the balance of historical
data, theological musing, and personal stories to be a great mix that moved me
along as a reader and invited me to seriously consider the weight of
Hellerman’s argument. I thought his premise was well thought out and his
argument solid on two levels.
First, I thought his
proposal that the gospel is about the body more than it is about the individual
to be profound and timely. I think that
the idea that someone can make a “personal commitment” to Jesus on a whim and
end up in eternity because of a prayer is a whole lot of theology based upon a
couple of verses and a story of a thief on a cross. The vast majority of the material in the
Scriptures is not about God saving an individual, but rather calling a
people. While I agree that a group is
made of individuals, I think it is critical that we also understand that if an
individual does not connect with a group, they are missing a massive piece of
what it is Christ came to redeem and begin again. Not a religion, but a community of believers
who would love God and love one another in ways that would transform them and
the world around them into the imago dei.
Secondly, I thought
his argument that the priority of the individual over the group has left us
with few disciples and a church that is moving towards irrelevance is spot
on. I found the history, biblical texts,
and personal stories about how a congregation can transform individuals in ways
that an individual alone never could were very well written and supported. It made me want to recommend the book and
highlight huge sections of it as prophetic for the church and discipleship at
large. I already did so for my own
leadership team at our church.
By way of a critique,
I do think Hellerman goes too far in his observation about first century group
culture. He goes to great lengths to
recognize the cultural norm of the day is a “group first” mindset. He explains how
that influenced both Paul and Jesus’ teaching.
However, he then concludes that the church today desperately needs to
understand that it is not one’s own blood family that Jesus most cares about,
but it is one’s church family. This may
have been well and true in a collectivist society where Jesus was being countercultural
in his message. But today, I wonder if
Jesus’ message to the church would not have been something like, “Don’t call
your spiritual disciple your son or your fellow Christian your brother if you
won’t disciple or care about the ones in your own home.” I’m not arguing against the message that we
are called to care for and shepherd more than just the immediate blood family
that God has given us. But I do think
it’s overstating the case and missing the need in our current American culture
when one says, “Care about your surrogate church family” more than you do the
one in your own home. I’ve seen far too
many homes destroyed by parents who cared about work or school or even leading
in the church at the expense of their own marriage and parenting. The consequence is not one where I now think
we should challenge people to do a better job at taking care of the church, so
you can do a better job at home. The
cart is not before the horse. The
reality is, that in America today, telling the average believer to take care of
their brother in Christ before their own brother is equally unbiblical when we
understand that the first century Mediterranean culture was doing this by
default and our culture rarely does this at all. If you take the cultural desire to do this
away, then what you end up with is only half the story.
It is true that
Christians need to understand the value of church as a faith forming community. It is true that the modern day believer needs
a solid reminder that “personal Lord and savior” is not a phrase pulled from
the pages of the Scriptures. It is true that the evangelical world today needs
to redeem the idea of community and value the call to be brother and sister
with those in the family of God. It is
also true however that we need to remind and re-teach a generation what it
means to be the family. The idea that we
can pull from Luke 14:26 that Jesus cared little about the family is just selective
hermeneutics. The family of God is only
as valid a metaphor as the family is healthy.
Even passages like Hebrew 12 have difficulty being understood today when
the discipline of an earthly father is often (a) not present and (b) punishment
rooted instead of healthy and corrective.
When the metaphors that illustrations are built upon break down, the
message changes with it, and often the metaphor and the message must be
adjusted to compensate for the new cultural reality if the same message is still
to be rightly communicated. In the world
of absentee Dad, single parenting, rampant divorce, abuse and infidelity, and a
multitude of sins that destroy and divide homes, I’m not at all convinced that
the message from Jesus today would be, “leave your kids and follow me.” Just as Paul advises those in slavery to
honor God within that system, so I think Jesus, if he was giving a word to the
American family today, would not call us to care less about our marriages and
kids and care more about him. Instead he
might retrain and remind an entire generation that parenting matters and flows
from the Holy Spirit’s leading. He would
take us all the way back to Deuteronomy 6 and remind us of the way the Shema
was to be lived out among a family, and then as a people. In this, Hellerman overstates his point to
correct a misreading of the “brother” concept in the Scriptures and to
counteract the “personal Lord and Savior” imagery. I’m not convinced however, that he shared the
other side of the coin. In many cases, I
more felt like he simply flipped the coin over.
Instead of a expanding the picture of family to include the church, I
felt like he tried to undo the family in favor of the church.
NOTABLE QUOTATIONS:
“Radical individualism. What this amounts to is
simple enough. We in America have been socialized to believe that our own
dreams, goals, and personal fulfillment ought to take precedence over the
well-being of any group—our church or our family, for example—to which we
belong. The immediate needs of the individual are more important than the
long-term health of the group. So we leave and withdraw, rather than stay and
grow up, when the going gets rough in the church or in the home.”
(p. 4). Kindle
Edition.
“As
church-going Americans, we have been socialized to believe that our individual
fulfillment and our personal relationship with God are more important than any
connection we might have with our fellow human beings, whether in the home or
in the church. We have, in a most subtle and insidious way, been conformed to
this world. “
(p. 7). Kindle
Edition.
“Note
this well. In Mediterranean antiquity, blood runs deeper than romantic love. “
(p. 38). Kindle
Edition.
“If
we are truly serious about returning to our biblical roots, where our
relationships with our fellow human beings are concerned, our priority list
should probably look something like this: (1st) God’s Family — (2nd) My Family
— (3rd) Others This represents a radical reinterpretation of what it means to
follow Jesus.”
(p. 74). Kindle
Edition.
“People
did not convert to Christianity solely because of what the early Christians
believed. They converted because of the way in which the early Christians
behaved.”
(p. 105). Kindle
Edition.
“We
need to reconsider our approach to evangelism and to rethink the very content
of the gospel we proclaim. The biblical model of the Christian church as a
strong-group family offers a great tool to help us refine the doctrine of
salvation to better accord with the beliefs and practices of the New Testament
church.”, Joseph H.
(p. 122). Kindle
Edition.
Due to the individualistic tendencies of our culture,
and the correspondingly loose connection in our thinking between soteriology
and ecclesiology, it is not uncommon to encounter persons who claim to be
followers of Jesus but who remain unconnected to a local faith community. In
contrast, we do not find an unchurched Christian in the New Testament.
(p. 123). Kindle
Edition.
“This
strong-group perspective runs throughout both the Old and New Testaments. It
has been God’s design from the beginning. The one-sided emphasis in our
churches on Jesus as “personal Savior” is a regrettable example of Western
individualism importing its own socially constructed perspective on reality
into the biblical text. Our individualistic culture encourages us to assume
that God’s main goal in the history of humanity consists of getting individual
people saved. Salvation is all about what God has done for me as an individual.
I suggest instead that we view God’s work in human history as primarily
group-oriented.”
(p. 125). Kindle
Edition.
“But
something else happens when we are saved, which is just as real in God’s eyes,
on God’s positional ledger sheet, so to speak, as our justification, something
I like to call our “familification.” Just as we are justified with respect to
God the Father upon salvation, so also we are familified with respect to our
brothers and sisters in Christ. And this familification is no less a positional
reality than our justification. “
(p. 132). Kindle
Edition.
“We
set ourselves up for great disappointment if we overidealize the concept of the
church as a surrogate family. Even the warmest blessings of living out the
church family model do not come without their own challenges.”
(p. 155). Kindle
Edition.
“The
American evangelical model of the CEO pastor who functions as a spiritual
father to his congregation and as a business executive with his staff—but who
relates to no one in the church as a peer brother in Christ—directly betrays
the New Testament metaphor of the church as a family. “
(p. 181). Kindle
Edition.
“Christians
in America do not need pastors who are celebrities. They need pastors who are
mature brothers—pastors who walk alongside them hand-in-hand, overcoming the
same spiritual obstacles that their sheep face, in the context of the
interpersonal accountability and relational integrity that God has provided in
His church family. “
(p. 194). Kindle
Edition.
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