Theological Foundations of the Family: Carrier of the Covenant

Sometimes you learn the importance of something because you have it and can’t imagine life without it. Other times you learn its importance because you don’t have it and can’t imagine life with it.

When it comes to family, I was once the second sort of person.

My father abandoned my mother, my sister, and me on a cold January morning in an apartment with no heat. He said he’d be back, but he never returned. I was eleven years old.

My mother was not a well person, and she spent the rest of her life being cared for by the state. I was entirely unsupervised. I skipped so much school I had to repeat the 8th grade. I spent time in foster care after my mother heard voices telling her to kill me in my sleep.

I could say much more. But this is sufficient. I owe my mental toughness to those years. I also have a BS detector the size of Mount Everest. And one pile of BS that is currently stinking up the world is the lie that fathers are optional. If you are one of those people, you are not my friend.

I’m always on the look out for good resources that can help us see how the traditional family, and especially the work of the father, is not a matter of personal taste, or heaven forbid, the source of all that is wrong with the world. Joseph C. Atkinson’s Biblical and Theological Foundations of the Family is such a resource. It’s a great book. It is one of those books that needs to be talked up and read by everybody. I mean that: everybody.

Over the next few weeks I will be selecting seminal ideas from the book for brief consideration. These are teasers, I suppose. My intention is to get you to buy a copy for yourself–not for your bookshelf, but so that you will read it.

Today’s idea is this:

The Family is the Carrier of the Covenant

I’m not going to go into what a covenant is or why the Abrahamic covenant in particular was so important to Israelites. The key thing to know is this: covenants were heritable. And when it came to the covenant the Lord made with Abraham, the family life of an Israelite was designed to impress the importance of this covenant upon the members of the family.

In a chapter entitled: Family as Carrier of the Covenant Atkinson identifies how this was done. Some of it had to do more with how the Israelites looked at the world than it had to do with particular practices.

Atkinson begins the chapter with these words,

If the family was to carry out its function of transmitting unimpaired the covenant from generation to generation, it had to ensure that both the ethos of the covenant and all its specific details were faithfully “handed over” to the next generation. To do this, the family had to acquire a precise form and structure by which this task could be accomplished. Within the covenant, human sexuality and the family played a significant role which would ensure survival of the covenant. They were no longer instruments by which human life was physically continued. Rather, as well known Jewish philosopher Hirsch noted, the nascent human life born to the family had to be shaped and formed so that the person would be conformed to God.

Over the next few weeks, I will single out from the chapter for examination: 1.) Family as “Sanctuary”, 2.) Corporate Personality, and 3.) Family as Locus of the Cult and Priestly Fatherhood.

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