If the man is the spiritual authority in his home and is a Baptist and his wife converts to Catholicism does that constitute a failure of his "headship"? Somewhere some very serious Christians must be blogging about this issue and I would rather make an entry that is not very serious becasue any time I attempt to seriously consider it ... I find it perplexing.
I know about the "you and your household" verses. I know about all that covenant stuff. Thing is it's easy to take that stuff too far and it is easy to misread covenantal theology into texts because, hey, you feel like it. I've met guys who seriously argued Adam and God had a covenant. God has to have a covenant with everything. Now covenants are important ... but there has been in some places a fad about covenants that in practice is just another variation of Western contract negotiation. The "covenant" aspect comes along simply because some pastors want to make sure that if they break the rules you still have to keep them. If you break the rules that they may change when they see fit then they can discipline you. There's something somewhere in there about servant leadership but I will leave that alone for now.
Christians I have interacted with over the last eight years might give an emphatic "yes" to that initial question. I'm parsing the potential significance of this because depending on how you slice the apple headship may mean that if your wife or kids leave your denominational affiliation it means you're a failure as "head" or it may mean the definition of "headship" holds you responsible for things that autonomous moral agents also known as sinners have already made decisions about. I'm not considering the whole scenario from the standpoint of "is so and so fit to be a pastor anymore" but "what is the practical outworking of this kind of view?" and "What does 'headship' actually mean if it is applied in a setting to say that a husband is responsible for his household?"
The way I have heard it described is that Eve sinned first but God came looking for Adam. Fair enough, I get that. But I have also seen people declare, almost without batting an eyelash, that if Samson turned out as badly as he did it is because his parents dropped the ball, no ifs ands or buts. Child of the covenant stuff and all that, I guess. Thing is, if you are a Protestant and you raise your kids up to be Protestants and then they jump ship and become Orthodox or Catholic does that mean you failed as a parent? Really? Doctrinal litmus tests become the measure of your parenting skills? If my parents raising me in a Pentecostal background about half the days of my youth was supposed to have gotten me to be a Pentecostal Republican then, sure, I'd have to say they "failed" because I have become a Calvinist with Anglican and Lutheran sympathies while retaining aspects of charismatic/pentecostal thought and some sympathies to Presbyterianism. And I happen to be an often politically apathetic moderate real conservative as opposed to a neo-conservative and I am deeply skeptical about Christian attempts to sanctify the public sphere for their own benefit while professing a love of country and God.
But the thing is my parents didn't raise me to be a particular KIND of Christian. They raised me to be a Christian. My differing with them on any number of doctrinal or political issues is not and should not be taken as a sign that they failed. If my family who are Orthodox one day discover that one of their kids becomes a Methodist that won't mean they will have failed as parents.
Would such a change indicate that perhaps a pastor had not, so far as outsiders observed, done a good job of keeping his house in order for the sake of satisfying a Baptist or Catholic or Presbyterian hiearchy? Well, sure, I get that. But what I am contemplating here is the nature of the parent-child relationship. At the risk of pointing out the obvious the conundrum of training your kid to think for himself is that he will and then he's likely to think you have some bad ideas. I have personally been skeptical of parents who want to raise kids to think for themselves from the earliest age. Kids aren't that smart by nature, they aren't that autonomous,and it's foolhardy to impose on them a level of emotional, intellectual, and cultural responsibility they are developmentally incapable of.
So, no, were I to be a parent Iwould not be that kind of "enlightened" parent. I would insist on raising my kids to be Christians who learn about Christ, the Father, and Spirit and learn the Bible. What I'm not sure I would do is raise them to think that other confessional tradtiions within Christendom are a priori wrong. That doesn't mean I'd be so ecumenical as to let everything go by the board a la Unitarianism, it means that I take seriously the proverb that says that if you train up a child in the way that he should go then when he is old he won't depart from it.
But I know from my own life and what I learned of the life of my parents is that this is no insurance clause that the kid won't veer wildly from the path when young. As Michael Spenser once put it, the proverb says that when he is OLD he won't depart from it. He might for a while in his hot-blooded youth. I know a few people whose rebellious years were full of hedonism and turning away from the faith and they stayed away for good. Others came back to the faith. My rebellion and asserting my own identity in my late teens and early twenties was to become a Calvinist and to become more moderate in my politics. It didn't make things easy for my parents, I guess I'll just leave it at that. Anyone can imagine how that might have looked.
I'm certainly not married but what struck me about Spenser sharing his frustration about his wife's conversion to Catholcicism is the gnawing sense that came from in his writings that maybe it was his fault. Married people must have some aspect of themselves so inextricably tied to the other person that it would look, frankly, like a really co-dependent identity. Like you're not really you unless the other person is there. I have no real comprehension of that and I admit it. What things I can infer from what Spenser has shared in different settings is that no matter how one flesh you may be when it comes to Christ the two of you are NOT one and that in the age to come you won't be married. Who knkows whether the breath of man rises to God or the breath of the animal descends to the earth. Koholeth asks the question as if he didn't know. Do we have immortal souls? Not likely since only God is eternal, but more pertinent is the observation that we cannot be so certain of what we ourselves are.
I have heard that one of the beauties and trials of marriage is that you can wake up every morning and ask yourself, "Who is this person beside me?" Marriage is the trial or joy or whatever it is of waking up each morning with a quest, if I am observing things with any accuracy (and I'm probably not) and that quest is to know Christ but also to know and be known by this other person. I have heard it said that a husband or wife is the one who will sin against you and be sinned against by you more than anyone on earth. If that's true then parents can rest easy because it means there's finally someone else their kid can be upset with and blame for ruining their lives. ;)
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