Where does the State end and the Family begin?

What a peculiar title, I think to myself – surely it should be reversed? Yet undoubtedly we live in an era defined by the totality of the State. In most Western nations, it is generally accepted that the State has a monopoly not just on violence, but a moral primacy in education, in social relations, in economic activity, and so forth. We may reflect upon why – certainly the scale of modern nations, combined with the interconnectedness made possible by first the railway and now the Internet, explains a lot.
 
But for those of us who see our families as of first importance, mere explanation of the State’s expanding control is not enough. There is an obvious rivalry between these two locations of loyalty, social activity, and moral education. The pandemic has brought that home in a brutal fashion: the ordinary life of nearly every extended family in the West has ceased. There is no parallel to this in our history. That we have largely accepted this state of affairs indefinitely is tribute to the sheer emotional power of the state, much more than its bare legal authority.
 
The secular members of our society can perhaps accept this as the natural endpoint of materialist religion, but the Christian must take pause. Isn’t the family really important to God? I’m going to try to outline what Kuyper would call the “sphere” of the family in Biblical terms, but first I’m going to outline a parallel situation.
 
I have said the State enjoys a monopoly of violence. The State secures our social relations by removing the private rights of expansion by violence and of revenge. Yet most of us would think there is a natural right to self-defence – and indeed the Bible says this is so. In the Jewish Law – which is repeatedly affirmed as a revelation of good morality in the New Testament – killing a thief who breaks in to your house by night incurs no bloodguilt (Exodus 22.2-3). Jesus Himself affirms the need to procure the means of self-defence in some circumstances (Luke 22.36-38) – despite many creative attempts to empty this passage of any force, it still involves the dominical command to buy weapons. Of course, Jesus also spoke against his disciples living violent lives (Matthew 26.52). Nonetheless, it is notable that the way God providentially arranges the salvation of the Jews in the Book of Esther is via the Persian King granting them a right to arm themselves in self-defence.
 
Self-defence is granted as a right in God’s Law; it is how God saves the Jews via a pagan King in Esther; and it is implied to be appropriate by Jesus Himself. The state has no overmastering right to hurt you, and so its monopoly on violence ceases at the point your right to self-defence is invoked.
 
Something similar is clearly true for the family. One of the Ten Commandments – the Fifth – tells the Jews to “Honour your mother and father, so that it might go well with you and that you might live long in the land.” The Ten Commandments are still binding today on believers and, in one, sense all mankind, as affirmed repeatedly in the New Testament (Matthew 22.37-40; Matthew 5.8; Romans 1.18-32). This specifically includes the reaffirmation of the Fifth Commandment, and the attendant promise (Ephesians 6.1-3). Christians – whether Jew or Gentile – are blessed in a special way by God if they honour their parents.
 
Do we believe for one moment that the State can simply supervene the Ten Commandments? That the State can order us to murder or commit adultery or worship other Gods? Suffice to say, none of us do so believe. We know the story of Daniel and his friends refusing to worship false gods on repeated occasions; we know the catalogue of faith in Hebrews 11, in many ways a record of the suffering of believers. The State cannot give you a dispensation for honouring your mother and father, and it cannot define the terms of that honour. God does.
 
This is one clear example of where the State ends and the Family begins, but the Scripture furnishes at least a few more. Immediately after Paul reaffirms the Fifth Commandment in Ephesians 6, he lays a duty upon Christian fathers: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” Fathers are to raise their children to honour God; the education of the child is to be directed towards God (which, incidentally, is surely rational at a basic level for the Christian – if reality is defined by God, true knowledge is, too). A father might make one decision or another about the exact provision of education for their child, but the State cannot remove that right in any general sense, except perhaps where the father or parents has heinously broken the moral law of God.
 
The state cannot determine the general relations of parents and children, then, even where the children are out of the home (the Fifth Commandment applies to all children in relation to their parents, not just juveniles). Given the responsibility parents bear for their children – and vice versa – it is logical to say that this parent-child sphere includes, for instance, the provision of food and of physical protection as well as of education or general “honour”. Anything reasonably required to provide these for such family members, then, is beyond the state’s competence to determine.
 
One difference between our society and that of the ancient world is that our extended families are very much more dispersed, and very much less well recognized in civil law. In ancient Israel, elders and “the heads of fathers’ houses” managed and bore responsibility for matters well beyond their own immediate family unit. In the Greek and Roman systems, often ethnic groups in a city would have a number of leaders appointed to represent them, essentially as the leader of an extended family. All such legally binding relations for us are formally organised by the state – local government is not self-germinating or ordered, but defined by Westminster statute, for instance.
 
This might make it seem like the only place the Christian can define his or her family sphere is in respect of parents and children, but this is to forget that Christians are told they have a new extended family – the church. Pointing to His disciples, Jesus said “Here are my mother and my brothers” (Matthew 12.49). In Galatians 6.10, Paul tells us to do good to everybody, “especially unto the household of faith”. This is not a mere one-time metaphor; regularly in the New Testament the Church is envisioned as a new form of Israel, including a vision of extended family relations.
 
Two examples of the sort of behaviour this requires will suffice for now. Widows were to be provided for by the church in many cases (Acts 6.1-7; 1 Corinthians 7.8-24; 1 Timothy 5.1-16). This was a duty usually associated with biological family, which actually extends the sphere of the biological family discussed already. But the church should do so when the biological family cannot or will not, and where remarriage is not the right option.
 
Secondly, Jesus’ brother James says that when church members are ill they ought to call the elders of the church for prayer (James 5.14-18). This is not intended as a replacement for any medical care, necessarily, but as a duty proper to elders. Why? Because elders ought to be faithful men – and have a particular responsibility for church members. This is because they are repeatedly envisioned as fathers of the church – hence the paternal qualifications required for overseers and elders in 1 Timothy and Titus, and the idea of church leaders having to give an account to God for their flock in Hebrews 13. Church leaders are understood paternally. James understood plagues existed – he still commended prayer by the elders for sickness. The State has no right to interfere with that sacred familial duty.
 
Examples can be multiplied. But just as I have previously argued in these pages that the spheres of the State and the Church are distinct, so too are the spheres of the State and the Family – and these spheres connect, because the Christian gains an extended family in the Church, to whom they owe irreducible duties and can ask unlockdownable aid from. The State has an ordering duty for all of its subjects, but if it overreaches, its commands have no force in such matters.