Lina Toth - Singleness and Marriage after Christendom: Being and Doing Family

Being and Doing Family

Lina Toth

SINGLENESS AND MARRIAGE AFTER CHRISTENDOM

Being and Doing Family

Copyright 2021 Lina Toth. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, W. th Ave., Suite , Eugene, OR 97401 .

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

W. th Ave., Suite

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-35 56-4

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3558 -8

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3557-1

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Toth, Lina, author.

Title: Singleness and marriage after christendom : being and doing family / Lina Toth.

Description: Eugene, OR : Cascade Books, 2021 | Series: After Christendom | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326- 3556-4 ( paperback ) | isbn 978-1-5326- 3558-8 ( hardcover ) | isbn 978-1-5326- 3557-1 ( ebook )

Subjects: LCSH: HomeReligious aspectsChristianity. | MarriageReligious aspectsChristianity. | SinglenessReligious aspectsChristianity. | FamiliesReligious aspectsChristianity. | SexReligious aspectsChristianity.

Classification: BT708 .T68 2021 ( print ) | BT708 .T68 ( ebook )

New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 , Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

After Christendom Series

C hristendom was a historical era, a geographical region, a political arrangement, a sacral culture and an ideology. For many centuries Europeans have lived in a society that was nominally Christian. Church and state have been the pillars of a remarkable civilisation that can be traced back to the decision of the emperor Constantine I early in the fourth century to replace paganism with Christianity as the imperial religion.

Christendom, a brilliant but brutal culture, flourished in the Middle Ages, fragmented in the reformation of the sixteenth century, but persisted despite the onslaught of modernity. While exporting its values and practices to other parts of the world, however, it has been slowly declining during the past three centuries. In the twenty-first century Christendom is unravelling.

What will emerge from the demise of Christendom is not yet clear, but we can now describe much of western culture as post-Christendom.

Post-Christendom is the culture that emerges as the Christian faith loses coherence within a society that has been definitively shaped by the Christian story and as the institutions that have been developed to express Christian convictions decline in influence.

This definition, proposed and unpacked in Post-Christendom , the first book in the After Christendom series, has gained widespread acceptance. Post-Christendom investigated the Christendom legacy and raised numerous issues that are explored in the rest of the series. The authors of this series, who write from within the Anabaptist tradition, see the current challenges facing the church not as the loss of a golden age but as opportunities to recover a more biblical and more Christian way of being Gods people in Gods world.

The series addresses a wide range of issues, including theology, social and political engagement, how we read Scripture, youth work, mission, worship, relationships, and the shape and ethos of the church after Christendom.

Thirteen books have previously been published:

Stuart Murray: Post-Christendom

Stuart Murray: Church after Christendom

Jonathan Bartley: Faith and Politics after Christendom

Jo & Nigel Pimlott: Youth Work after Christendom

Alan & Eleanor Kreider: Worship and Mission after Christendom

Lloyd Pietersen: Reading the Bible after Christendom

Andrew Francis: Hospitality and Community after Christendom

Fran Porter: Women and Men after Christendom

Simon Perry: Atheism after Christendom

Brian Haymes & Kyle Gingerich Hiebert: God after Christendom?

Jeremy Thomson: Relationships and Emotions after Christendom

Dan Yarnell & Andy Hardy: Missional Discipleship after Christendom

Joshua Searle: Theology after Christendom

Andrew Francis and Janet Sutton-Webb: Sacraments after Christendom

These books are not intended to be the last word on the subjects they address, but an invitation to discussion and further exploration. Additional material, including extracts from published books and information about future volumes, can be found at https://amnetwork.uk/resources/.

Stuart Murray

Stuart Murray, Post-Christendom: Church and Mission in a Strange New World (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004), 19.

Then his mother and his brothers came to him, but they could not reach him because of the crowd. And he was told, Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you. But he said to them, My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it. (Luke 8:2021 )

W hat comes to your mind when you hear such phrases as marriage and family or family values? Of course, your answer will depend on your background and experience. For people in the West, they are often associated with such words as Christianity or church, or perhaps traditional and conservative. The link between Christianity and family (understood to mean heterosexual marriage and children) has become a defining feature of the church of late Christendom.

The starting point of this book is the turbulent shifts taking place in Western societies and their structures: an exponential rise in single living and alternative family structures, the redefinition of marriage, and the ease and frequency of divorce. Going hand-in-hand with the loss of traditional family ways, some perceive these to be a direct threat to the future and the wellbeing of society as we know it. A considerable proportion of Christians also view them as a direct threat to the future and wellbeing of the church.

Yet back when Christianity was very young, its cultural homethe Roman worldwas also very concerned with the demise of the traditional family ways which, similarly, were seen as the very basis of the good society. The culprits accused of destroying family and Roman society were none other than the Christians. One of the defining features of their movement was its allegiance to a different kind of a family called the churchsomething that shocked Jews and gentiles alike. For these early followers of Jesus of Nazareth, such ordering of values was all part of their commitment to a new reality which they referred to as the kingdom of God. Moreover, the radical pronouncements of their leader had challenged the assumption of marriage as the norm and bearing children as an essential aspect of a life well lived. This was a profoundly different understanding of what counted as a good life, and one that clashed with the normative customs of the time.

How did it happen, then, that todays Christianity is so often associated with fixating on marriage and the nuclear family in a way that stands in contrast to the world portrayed in the New Testament? This book seeks to explore this question. I invite the readers to follow the changes in the practice of marriage and singleness, from those early days of the Christian movement to the current cultural climate which by and large still insists that a romantic partner and children are non-negotiable ingredients of a good lifeor, in todays parlance, happiness. I suggest that this vision of what counts as a happy life has been Christianized and developed into a very popular Christian happiness package. In fact, Christians seem to hold to it stronger than secular society does, pouring a lot of effort into defending and advocating for the centrality of marriage and the nuclear family to the life and future of the church, as well as that of society at large.