Religious Education in the Family Part 3

The educational function suggests the features of family life which we do well to seek to preserve. Many incidental forms may pa.s.s, but the essential human relations and experiences that go to develop life and character must be maintained at any cost.

I. References for Study

C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_, chap. vii. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.

W.F. Lofthouse, _Ethics and the Family_, chaps. iv, v. Hodder & Stoughton, $2.50.

II. Further Reading

"The Improvement of Religious Education," _Proceedings of the Religious Education a.s.sociation_, I, 119-23. $0.50.

_Religious Education_, April, 1911, VI, 1-48.

S.P. Breckinridge and E. Abbott, _The Delinquent Child and the Home_. Russell Sage Foundation, $2.00.

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What is the chief end of all forms of social organization?

2. What is in the last a.n.a.lysis the aim of every parent?

3. What advantage has the family over the school and larger groups for educational purposes?

4. In what sense is the family an ideal democracy?

5. Show how the family sets spiritual values first.

6. What in your judgment are the first evidences of character development? In what way do these come to the surface in the family? What is the factor of love in the development of character?

7. Is that an ideal family in which none of the members bear pain or are called upon for self-denial? Can you see any especial advantage to character in the very difficulties and apparent disadvantages in the life of the family?

FOOTNOTES:

[5] See "Democracy in the Home," _American Journal of Sociology_, January, 1912.

[6] Francis G. Peabody, _The Approach to the Social Question_, p. 94.

CHAPTER IV

THE RELIGIOUS PLACE OF THE FAMILY

-- 1. DEVELOPMENT AS A RELIGIOUS INSt.i.tUTION

The family is the most important religious inst.i.tution in the life of today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain quant.i.ty, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize as to the practices of savage man in regard to family life, for those practices range from common promiscuous relations.h.i.+ps, without apparent care for offspring, to a family unity and purity approaching the best we know; but this much is certain, that there was a common sense of responsibility for the training of young children in moral and religious ideas and customs, and that, in the degree that the family approached to separateness and unity, it accepted the primary responsibility for this task. The higher the type of family life the more fully does it discharge its function in the education of the child.[7]

It might be safe to say that among primitive peoples there were three stages, or types, of relations.h.i.+p based on the breeding of children, or three stages of development toward family life. The first is a loose and indefinite relations.h.i.+p existing princ.i.p.ally between the adults, or the males and females, under which children born when not desired are neglected or strangled and, when acceptable, may be in the care of either parent, or of neither. Since the group, a.s.sociated through infancy with at least one parent, is as yet undeveloped, any instruction will be individual and usually incidental.

The second form is that of a kind of family unity, either about the mother or the father, or both, or about a group of parents, in which the children live together and are sheltered and nurtured for their earlier years. Here, however, the real relations.h.i.+p of the child is to the tribe, the family is but his temporary guardian, and, at least by the age of p.u.b.erty, he will be initiated into the tribal secrets. If he is a boy, he will cease to be a member of the family group and will go to live in the "men's house," becoming a part of the larger life of the tribe.[8] Such moral and religious instruction as he may acquire will come from the songs, traditions, and conversation which he hears as a child.

The third type approaches the modern ideal, with a greater or less degree of permanent unity between the two parents and with permanence in the group of the offspring. The parental responsibility continues for a greater length of time and, since the tribe makes smaller claims, and the parents live in the common domestic group, much more instruction is possible and is given. The tribal ideals, the traditions, observances, and religious rites are imparted to children gradually in their homes.

The last type brings us to the Hebrew conception of family life. It developed toward the Christian ideal. At first, polygamy was permitted; woman was the chattel of man and excluded from any part in the religious rites. But it included the ideal of monogamy in its tradition of the origin of the world, it denounced and punished adultery (Deut. 22: 22), and it gave especial attention to the training of the offspring. "And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart; and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up ... and thou shalt write them upon the door-posts of thy house and upon thy gates" (Deut.

6: 6, 7, 9).

Much later, the messianic hope, the belief that in some Jewish family there should be born one divinely commissioned and endowed to liberate Israel and to give the Jews world-sovereignty, operated to elevate the conception of motherhood and, through that, of the family. It made marriage desirable and children a blessing; it rendered motherhood sacred. It tended to center national hopes and religious ideals about the family.[9]

There are a few glimpses of ideal family life in the Old Testament. They are all summed up in the eloquent tribute to motherhood in the words of King Lemuel in the last chapter of the Book of Proverbs. It must be remembered, however, that such ideals did not belong to the Jews alone, that Plutarch shows many pictures of maternal fidelity and wifely devotion, that Greek and Roman history have their Cornelia, Iphigenia, and Mallonia.[10]

The Jews are an excellent example of the power of the family life to maintain distinct characteristics and to secure marked development.

Practically throughout all the Christian era they have been a people without a land, a const.i.tution, or a government, and yet never without race consciousness, national unity, and separateness. Their unity has continued in spite of dispersion, persecution, and losses; they have remained a race in the face of political storms that have swept other peoples away. Their unity has continued about two great centers, the customs of religion and the life of the family.

The results of Jewish respect for family life can also be seen in the health of their own children. In 1910, for instance, among poor Jews in Manchester the mortality of infants under one year of age was found to be 118 per thousand; among poor Gentiles, 300 per thousand; and comparisons made some six years ago between Jewish and Gentile children in schools in the poorer parts of Manchester and Leeds (England) have shown that the Jewish children are uniformly taller, they weigh more, and their bones and teeth are superior.[11]

-- 2. THE CHRISTIAN FAMILY

The Christian family is a type peculiar to itself, not as a new inst.i.tution, for it has developed out of earlier race experience, but as controlled by a new interpretation, the spirit and conception of the home and family given in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. He did not give formal rules for the regulation of homes; rather he made a spiritual ideal of family life the basic thought of all his teaching. He said more about the family than concerning any other human inst.i.tution, yet he established no family life of his own. He is called the founder of the church, yet he scarcely mentions that inst.i.tution, while he frequently teaches concerning home duties and family relations. He glorifies the relations of the family by making them the figure by which men may understand the highest relations of life. He speaks more of fatherhood and sons.h.i.+p than of any other relations. He gives direction for living, using the family terms of brotherhood. He points forward to ideal living in a home beyond this life. He teaches men when they think of G.o.d and when they address him to take the family att.i.tude and call him Father.

If we sum up all the teachings of Jesus and separate them from our preconceptions of their theological content, we cannot but be impressed with the facts that he seized upon the family life as the best expression of the highest relations.h.i.+ps; that he pointed to a purified family life, in which spiritual aims would dominate, as the best expression of ideal relations.h.i.+ps among his followers; and that he glorified marriage and really made the family the great, divine, sacramental inst.i.tution of human society.

We can hardly overestimate the importance of such teaching to the character of the family. The early Christians not only accepted Jesus as their teacher and savior; they took their family life as the opportunity to show what the Kingdom of G.o.d, the ideal society, was like. Family life was consecrated. Men and women belonged to the new order with their whole households. Religion became largely a family matter. The wors.h.i.+p that had been confined to the temple now made an altar in every home and a holy of holies in the midst of every family. The scriptures that belonged to the synagogue now belonged in the home. Above all, this family existed for the purposes taught by Jesus, that men might grow in brotherhood toward the likeness of the divine Fatherhood. It was an inst.i.tution, not for economic purpose of food and shelter, not for personal ends of pa.s.sion or pride, but for spiritual purpose, for the growth of persons, especially the young in the home, in character, into "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ."

Christianity is essentially a religion of ideal family life. It conceives of human society, not in terms of a monarchy with a king and subjects, but in terms of a family with a great all-Father and his children, who live in brotherhood, who take life as their opportunity for those family joys of service and sacrifice. It hopes to solve the world's ills, not by external regulations, but by bringing all men into a new family life, a birth into this new family life with G.o.d, so securing a new personal environment, a new personality as the center and root of all social betterment. He who would come into this new social order must come into the divine family, must humble himself and become as a little child, must know his Father and love his brothers.

Christianity, then, not only seeks an ideal family; it makes the family the ideal social inst.i.tution and order. It makes family life holy, sacramental, religious in its very nature. This fact gives added importance to the preservation and development of the ideals of family life for the sake of their religious significance and influence. It not only makes religion a part of the life of the home but makes a religious purpose the very reason for the existence of the Christian type of home.

It makes our homes essentially religious inst.i.tutions, to be judged by religious products.

I. References for Study

G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, chap. xvi. Revell, $1.35.

Article on "The Family," in Hastings, _Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics_.

II. Further Reading

On the educational function of the family: A.J. Todd, _The Primitive Family as an Educational Agency_. Putnam, $2.00.

On the religious place of the family: C.F. and C.B. Thwing, _The Family_. Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, $1.60.

I.J. Peritz, "Biblical Ideal of the Home," _Religious Education_, VI, 322.