Norwegian theologian Halvor Moxnes argues that “household and families are not objective facts, they are social systems that are human constructions. As cultural constructs they are given ‘meanings’” (Constructing Early Christian Families, 2002, 18). In this view, the household is a historically contingent reality, a human institution that is always embedded within, informed by and reciprocally formative of the broader social and cultural context in which it is located.
This stands in contrast to the contemporary evangelical discourse in which “the Christian household” (or “the biblical/traditional family”) is often depicted to be an ahistorical and culturally independent construct. Indeed, increasingly amongst some, its reinstitution is considered to be the most necessary evangelical enterprise today. And yet, key matters are often left unexplored in this evangelical agenda. These include inquiry into what makes a household genuinely Christian, how far back the “traditional household” actually goes, to what degree the contemporary “nuclear family” overlaps with biblical conceptions of family and household, what parts of Scripture actively define the “biblical household”, and how we are to undertake responsible hermeneutical translation of those biblical insights made within an ancient Mediterranean context for the sake of a western, post-Christian society.
In this paper, I explore the presumption that “the Christian household” exists as a timeless and socially-independent construct of meaning. In dialogue with scholars past and present, sociological and theological, I argue that, far from being an ageless and abiding theoretical reality, the contemporary imagining of “the Christian household” is not only deeply historically, but very recently historically at that. In surveying the complexity of Christian household formation, character, experience and significance across the sweep of Church history, I demonstrate that what evangelicalism most urgently needs to reinstitute is not so much “the Christian household” but a Christian theology of the household.