“Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21).

People keep saying that the family as we have known it is doomed. That’s what the new morality cult has been saying in America for the last two or three decades, that the institution of marriage and the traditional pattern of family life are gone forever.

Of course, that’s what the Communists were believing and preaching for the past seventy or eighty years. They were confident that all the sentimental, American hogwash about Mother’s Day would fade into oblivion. For Marxist doctrine always held that with the destruction of the evil capitalistic system, some of the institutions that have been characteristic of capitalist, bourgeois culture would wither and die, and foremost among these, marked for inevitable destruction, was the family.

But now, on this Mother’s Day with communism and all Marxist theories and teachings being discredited and thrown on the junk heap of history, can we take hope for the family’s survival? Or would we be prematurely and naively optimistic, failing to discern all the glaring signs of the withering away of the American family’s strength, produced, not by the blight of Communist propaganda, but by a spiritual malignancy, entirely local and American, eating away at the American family’s soul from within?

One of the principal concerns of the Christian church through the centuries has been to strengthen the family. In Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth, the family is depicted in successive ages and civilizations as always under attack, and Mrs. Anthropos — the woman, the wife, the mother — pleads, “Save the Family. It’s held together for over five thousand years: Save it!” The Church, like Mrs. Anthropos, is driven by the same obsession.

But why is the Church so interested in keeping the family a healthy, going institution of society? Because the Church knows that strong, healthy, happy families furnish the best environment for growing souls. John Mackay, in Heritage and Destiny, puts it this way: “Life is a vale of soul-making, and souls are more important than civilizations. And souls are not made in solitude nor were they designed to live in solitariness.” The home, the family, is the factory for soul manufacture, and the pattern of production there is of utmost importance.

In fact, the Church has always held that the family is a divine institution and that God himself has a pattern for ordering Christian family life. If this pattern is followed, the family will be a strong, cohesive social unit, able to stand against the hostile forces that attack it from within or without and able to perform its immortal function of soul-making.

What is that pattern? Paul in Ephesians puts it quite simply in easy, straightforward terms: “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God.” Or, as the Revised Standard Version translates his words: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Wisely, Saint Paul does not go into minute or specific detail in outlining the pattern of Christian family life. Families vary from small units to large. Not all families have grandmothers. Some brothers don’t have sisters. In some families father or mother is not there — or can’t be counted on in the Christian pattern. Social conditions that impinge on family life change from generation to generation. Paul does not give detailed rules for ordering family life according to the Christian pattern. He just enunciates the great, overarching principle of mutual submission or subjection for all members of the family.

The term he uses is an old military expression pointing to the soldier’s subjecting himself to the rule of company and commander for the sake of a common cause. The commentary on this text in The Interpreter’s Bible states that “the spirit of mutual subjection is cardinal to the whole Christian conception of social relations. It is the antithesis of the spirit of self-assertion, of jealous insistence on one’s rights, which generally characterizes the men of the world. In substance it rests upon the example and precept of Christ, who `did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant”‘ This is, of course, the antithesis of the sentiment expressed in those words of the popular song, “I did it my way.”

The Christian pattern of family life, then, is one of mutual submission on the part of every member of the family to one another in accordance with the love and spirit of Christ. It is a way of life summed up by an inscription in a wedding ring I have seen: “Each for the other and both for God.”

But what does this principle of mutual submission involve in the varied family relationships of husband and wife, parents and children? Paul spells that out pretty plainly.

First, for the wife in relation to her husband, he says, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church” (Eph. 5:22-23). Sounds pretty patriarchal, doesn’t it? Undoubtedly Paul had in mind the patriarchal family unit. But even though we have come a long way from his day to women’s suffrage and feminine emancipation and the women’s rights movement, let it be definitely understood that the Christian pattern of family life still demands mutual subjection, and in the wife’s case this means, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.”

In Christian Behaviour, C.S. Lewis observes:

The relations of the family to the outer world-what might be called its foreign policy-must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world…. She is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers isn’t given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or, if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?

But what of the husband’s relationship to his wife in the Christian pattern for family life? Again, the principle of mutual submission is invoked. Paul spells it out clearly: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Eph. 5:25). The heavier obligation of submission is laid on the husband. The one explicit command to complete sacrifice of self in all the precepts for Christian family relationships is directed to the husband or father in the family. He must love and give himself for it.

One of the most ancient symbols of Christ in his Atonement is that of the pelican in her piety. According to the legend, the pelican in time of famine would open with her own beak the great artery in her breast and pour out her life’s blood for her young that through her death they might drink and live. This is a symbol of what Christ did for his Church, which in turn is the model of the supreme submission of the husband’s love and self-giving for his wife. As the captain cannot leave his sinking ship, so, in the pattern of Christian family life, the husband must in love give himself for his wife.

Last, there is a third area of relationships in the pattern of Christian family life: parents and children. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right” (Eph. 6:1). See, this business of mutual submission still runs all through the Christian family, and here the form the submission takes is that of a child’s obedience to his parents, or literally his hearkening unto them in the Lord.

Parents are not just bosses to tyrannize over their children. Children are not born into a straitjacket pattern of family life and owe obedience to their elders just because parents are older and bigger, but in order “that it may be well with thee and thou mayest live long on the earth.”

Rufus Jones, the Quaker philosopher, as a very young child was aware he had come into a world “where love was waiting for me, and into a family in which religion was as important an element for life as was the air we breathed or the bread we ate.” In later boyhood and early manhood, Jones says, he encountered “every kind of temptation except bank-robbery,” but he was kept safe and pure from participation in vulgarity by “that culture of the spirit in the family center.” He submitted himself to the religious regimen of his family — obeying his parents in the Lord — and in later years he saw that this pattern of Christian life was exactly what had saved him and gave joy, beauty, and stability to his whole life. This submission and obedience to his father and mother in the things of the Lord did not destroy his affection for them but enhanced it. As Jones’s biographer, David Hinshaw, writes in Rufus Jones, Master Quaker, his mother was so important to him that in the last years of her life, as her health failed, “when friends would ask him how she was, he would be unable to say a word.”

If children living in a pattern of Christian family life find that submission to parents galls at times, let them remember that the submission is mutual. Parents in the pattern of a Christian home must submit themselves unto their children in the Lord. A man and his wife were showing me through their new, half-completed house. It was a magnificent structure. But what they seemed to be most enthusiastic about was the family room. “This is what we are most proud of,” they said. “When our children get to their teens, we want them and their friends with us here rather than out on the town.”

A grandfather was talking to me about his son and grandsons. The grandfather was concerned about his son, a mature man who had not been well, and he said, “My son has a big job cut out for him, educating those three boys.” The father’s health must be taken care of, his strength conserved, that he may submit himself to the divine commission to launch those three young lives.

The pattern of Christian family life is amazingly simple — all based on the principle of mutual subjection. “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” And the family that unanimously adopts that pattern finds their home becoming a heaven.

The poet Carl Sandburg in Always the Young Strangers wrote of the beautiful bond of mutual subjection that was willingly taken in his family:

Mama’s wedding ring was never lost-it was always on that finger as placed there with pledges years ago. It was a sign and seal of something that ran deep and held fast between the two of them. They had chosen each other as partners. How they happened to meet I heard only from my mother…. A smile spread over her face half-bashful and a bright light came to her blue eyes as she said, “I saw it was my chance.” She was saying this at least twenty years after the wedding and there had been hard work always, tough luck at times, seven children of whom two had died on the same day — and she had not one regret that she had jumped at her “chance” when she saw it.

Here is our chance at life’s most satisfying arrangement of these dearest relationships in family and home: “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Will we jump at our chance?

• Scripture Reference: Ephesians 5:21-0 • Secondary Scripture References: n/a • Subject : Family; Mutual subjection; 697 • Special Topic: n/a • Series: n/a • Occasion: n/a • First Preached: 5/9/1954 • Last Preached: 5/13/1990 • Rating: 2 • Book/Author References: n/a