Families at the Crossroads: Beyond Traditional & Modern Options

by Clapp, Rodney

• ISBN13: 9780830816552
• ISBN10: 0830816550
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1993-10-01
• Publisher: Intervarsity Pr

Summary

"Scant decades ago most Westerners agreed that . . . Lifelong monogamy was ideal . . . Mothers should stay home with children . . . premarital sex was to be discouraged . . . Heterosexuality was the unquestioned norm . . . popular culture should not corrupt children. Today not a single one of these expectations is uncontroversial." So writes Rodney Clapp in assessing the status of the family in postmodern Western society.In response many evangelicals have been quick to defend the so-called traditional family, assuming that it exemplifies the biblical model. Clapp challenges that assumption, arguing that the "traditional" family is a reflection more of the nineteenth-century middle-class family than of any family one can find in Scripture. At the same time, he recognizes that many modern and postmodern options are not acceptable to Christians. Returning to the biblical story afresh to see what it might say to us in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Clapp articulates a challenge to both sides of a critical debate.A book to help us rethink the significance of the family for the next century.

Table of Contents

Postmodernity: A New Battlefield for the War over the Family

The Unnaturalness of Family

Advanced Capitalism & the Lost Art of Christian Family

Church as First Family

The Superiority of Singleness

Whose Fidelity? Which Intimacy?

Welcoming Children & Other Strangers

No Christian Home Is a Haven

Acknowledgments

Notes

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.