It isn’t hard to know why some want to idealize the family, while everywhere, there are others who want to undervalue and belittle it.

The church has been perhaps the most obvious warrior on behalf of the family in the past century. But there’s been an unfortunate side-effect to how church leaders and theologians have presented the church’s teachings about the family in recent decades: the tendency has been to stress the similarity between the family and the church, even to the point of blurring the boundary between them.

The costs of this have been to distort the church’s understanding of itself, by marginalizing its essentially political nature, and to create confusion by investing the family with a quasi-salvific quality. In other words, there are good reasons we should hesitate to refer to the family as a “domestic church” and to the church as a family.  

In the Catholic Church, to which I belong, this habit can be traced to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. One of the documents coming out of the Council, Lumen gentium, states that the “family is, so to speak, the domestic church” where “parents should, by their word and example, be the first preachers of the faith to their children.” According to Joseph Atkinson, in the Council’s documents the identification of “the family as an ecclesial reality is only haltingly made, and the family is called a domestic church only by way of analogy.” The mistake came later: “Within the magisterial teaching of Pope John Paul II, the relationship shifted and was described in ontological terms. The Christian family is a realization of ecclesial communion and, therefore, should be called a domestic church.” In Familiaris consortio, Pope John Paul II claims that the “Christian family constitutes a specific revelation and realization of ecclesial communion, and for this reason too it can and should be called ‘the domestic Church.’”

We must examine the many profound bonds linking the Church and the Christian family and establishing the family as a “Church in miniature,” in such a way that in its own way the family is a living image and historical representation of the mystery of the Church…. The Christian family is grafted into the mystery of the Church to such a degree as to become a sharer, in its own way, in the saving mission proper to the Church…. For this reason they not only receive the love of Christ and become a saved community, but they are also called upon to communicate Christ’s love to their brethren, thus becoming a saving community.

The love lived out in Christian families will, he writes, ensure that “the Church can and ought to take on a more homelike or family dimension, developing a more human and fraternal style of relationships.” For through their parents, each child “is introduced into the ‘human family’ and into the ‘family of God,’ which is the Church.” A later section concludes by stating: “Thus the little domestic Church, like the greater Church, needs to be constantly and intensely evangelized.”

When we treat the family and the church as though they could be seen interchangeably, the difference being only one of scale, we risk losing  the ability to see the relation between them, how one impacts the other, because that depends on keeping them distinct in our minds. 

Treating the family not only as a saved, but as a saving community grants a salvific significance to the begetting and raising of children that is hard to square with scripture. Childbearing cannot be considered a duty for all God’s people, nor is it the means by which God’s covenant with his people is maintained. Instead, childbearing can only reveal our need for grace and salvation in this world in which we are born to die. A crucial feature of Saint Augustine’s writings on marriage and celibacy is the claim that no regime can demand (as the Roman Empire did) that we bear children to maintain and strengthen its existence. A Christian’s body belongs first and foremost to God and is dedicated to his service (Rom. 12:1). We should always be reminded of this by the vocation of some to the single life, whether they be celibate or widows and virgins, as mentioned in the New Testament (1 Cor. 7:8). The radical witness of celibate Christians with same-sex attraction is also based on this fundamental truth: celibacy does not make them abnormal but makes them witnesses to the desire for God that all Christians are meant to place above everything else. Their witness is devalued by treating the family as a saving community, as a “domestic church.”

As for those who are married, we should admit that, while marital union points us, as Saint Paul says, to Christ’s union with his church (Eph. 5:32), the analogy can be pushed too far. The Fourth Lateran Council’s teaching that “between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them” must always be remembered. For example, in Amoris laetitia Pope Francis writes:

When a man and a woman celebrate the sacrament of marriage, God is, as it were, “mirrored” in them; he impresses in them his own features and the indelible character of his love. Marriage is the icon of God’s love for us…. The spouses … can make visible the love with which Christ loves his Church and continues to give his life for her.

But immediately afterward he adds: “We should not however confuse different levels: there is no need to lay upon two limited persons the tremendous burden of having to reproduce perfectly the union existing between Christ and his Church.” Yet in this document Pope Francis also speaks of the “domestic church” multiple times, writing:

The spouses are consecrated and by means of a special grace build up the Body of Christ and form a domestic church, so that the Church, in order fully to understand her mystery, looks to the Christian family, which manifests her in a real way.

Given that the church is meant to be a foretelling and foretaste of the new creation to come in the fullness of time, it would seem an impossible expectation to demand the same from families. It would certainly discourage, rather than offer hope to, those from broken homes and divorced parents, when instead their hopes ought to be lifted beyond the limitations and weaknesses of familial bonds to the greater fellowship of belonging to Christ. 

Conversely, describing the church using familial language has its own problems. The danger of relying exclusively or excessively on this kind of familial imagery is to forget the primarily political language used to refer to the church in the New Testament. The habit of thinking of the church as a “religion” belonging to the private sphere, rather than to the public sphere, is so pervasive in the West that it is hard not to succumb to its influence. We forget that we follow King Jesus. And yet, by calling us to belong even now to the heavenly Jerusalem, the church breaks open the secular political order, which would otherwise present itself as deserving the supreme loyalty of its citizens and as the giver of their most important identity. The political implications of the gospel, in other words, are blunted when the church conceives of itself in cozy, homey, familial imagery.

A comparison of the Eucharist with the family dinner table may help to bring the distinction between the church and family into focus. It was certainly good that, after Vatican II, Catholics came to see how the Eucharist is also a banquet, the supper of the Lamb, at the table of the Lord. But, according to an article by John Cavadini, Mary Healy, and Thomas Weinandy, “its character as a banquet should be balanced by language that emphasizes its character as a sacrifice, and that the table of the Lord is also, and predominantly, an altar.” The table is predominantly an altar because the Mass is believed to make present in sign and sacrament Christ’s one sacrifice on the cross, and the eschatological wedding feast of “the Lamb slain in sacrifice ever since the world was made” (Rev. 13:8).

The Eucharist is exclusively for the baptized, united by their faith and way of life, while the family table can be open in hospitality to guests and strangers. Those who gather to receive the body and blood of Christ are prefiguring the fullness of time when all who belong to Christ are united in perfect fellowship with Christ and with each other in him. It is not meant to create a sense of community in the present among strangers, nor is it an act of hospitality. It is meant to enact the mystery of the kingdom where hospitality will no longer be necessary, where all alienation and estrangement will be consumed in perfect love. None of this eschatology can be conveyed if we think the Eucharist is simply a family meal on a different scale. As Brent Waters writes, “Blurring the distinctiveness of the two tables is symptomatic of a more ambitious attempt to ease the continuity between the providential unfolding of creation’s history and its eschatological destiny.”

The political implications of the gospel are blunted when the church conceives of itself in cozy, homey, familial imagery.

So what should be done? First, there needs to be a clearer distinction between the two before we can conceptualize the tension. What is marriage? Rooted in our created nature “from the beginning” (Matt. 10:8), the exchange of vows that binds together a marriage is meant to ensure that the friendship and complete union of two lives can provide a home in which children may be received and raised. That Christ has also blessed and restored marriage can be seen in his teaching about what was intended at creation for those whom God has joined together (Mark 10:6–9) and in Christ’s choice to perform the first miracle revealing his glory at the marriage at Cana (John 2:1–11).

Yet the kingdom that Christ will establish on his return will no longer require marriage: “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven” (Matt. 22:30).  And obeying him is to take priority over any and all family ties: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matt. 10:37). The division and opposition he creates will cause families to be corrupted into allies and agents of persecution: “Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death” (Matt. 10:21). There is therefore a tension between the family and the church.

Christians can certainly marry and undertake the task of welcoming new life into the world. They can be strengthened in the knowledge that their labor – the daily round of feeding, changing, and bathing their brood – is not work wasted, but guided by God, who will bring it to completion in Christ. The covenant Christ made with his church at the Last Supper and sealed by his crucifixion assures those who receive the sacrament of marriage that the Spirit will help them to make and keep their vows. But whereas the marriage vow is “till death do us part,” the baptismal vow to Christ survives death and points to a more perfect union in God’s kingdom.

Rather than becoming self-absorbed, the family is meant to be open to serving others, whether by taking care of elderly relatives, by extending hospitality to others around a common table, or by helping the less fortunate. But while families can be restored and reoriented by the gospel, the tension between the church and the family can never be eliminated; for instance, obligations to children and one’s spouse will limit how much time can be spent helping at a homeless shelter. Or there may be conflict between the vocation one receives in the church and the expectations of family members. The family naturally lives through time: children are brought up as they pass through the different stages of life, spouses learn to love by the experience of forgiveness given and received, by periods of suffering borne and shared. Yet time also brings into relief the frailty of our bodies as they continue to suffer the consequences of the Fall: the pain we feel in sickness, in grief, in death.

In this way, the messy and difficult work of building a family can point beyond itself to the greater things to come. The church’s faith, therefore, lets us see the limitations of the family as the shadows that throw into relief our need to remember that we belong to a greater community, and are subjects of another kingdom (Phil. 3:20), where delivered from this passing age in the fullness of time, we shall share in his reign for eternity.