Abstract
This timely work is the forty-first volume in the Cambridge Studies in Christian Ethics series. It does not disappoint. The author is determined to foreground ‘the lived reality of family’ above the more usual ‘metalevel of scholarly reflection’ (p. 11). The first chapter is a sweeping survey and evaluation of family ethics, of historical, philosophical, sociological, anthropological, theoretical and (eventually) theological approaches. Schaafsma explains that she does not want to defend the institution of family from academic criticism nor to add her weight to reinstating conventional family forms theologically, as Don Browning and others have tried to do. Her preliminary analysis skilfully creates a space for situating her own ‘lived reality’ approach to families, and for introducing as the core concepts of her work mystery (the point at which analyses of family give out or become opaque), dependence and gift.
The family tie, never uniform but always a component of mystery, has an ‘unreflective, immediate and everyday character’, and is ‘something to which members hold one another answerable’ (p. 153). However, families are not without conflict. Drawing inspiration from Rembrandt’s paintings of the Holy Family, she finds ‘the common life receives unexpected attention. It is worthy of being contemplated as representing the holy’ (p. 220). Beyond arguments about changing family forms there is a prior givenness to being part of a family and so a prior dependence on its members. But the experience of dependence is generally unacknowledged because independence is valued more in contemporary Western societies. Yes, living dependently in a family ‘easily leads to asymmetry, power abuse and exploitation’; yet, even so, ‘family is a pre-eminent context in which people are confronted with the dependent nature of their being’ (p. 279). In families, people learn ‘to be open to the other, which presupposes a fundamental trust’ (p. 286). This trust, however, is never guaranteed. Close attention to the image of the adulterous family of Hosea in the Hebrew Bible shows that even a broken family can be restored. How? ‘Because of the larger framework of dependence in which family is embedded, the failure or brokenness of the family itself is not final’ (p. 286). Intuited theologically, ‘[t]he family image thus reveals a more encompassing interdependence of all life and its basis in God’ (p. 286).
The author has immersed herself in her topic (probably over several years). She makes family ‘ontological’, an entry into the entwinedness of personal being with all its ambiguities and prospects. Ethics, she says, ‘contributes to becoming aware of the mystery in everyday life in a way that does not aim to control it’ (p. 304). The book is hard going on first reading, but that is not because it is difficult to read or splattered with technical vocabulary or overlong sentences. Being about mystery, it hovers over the unsayable. What it says it says very clearly. It is the unexpectedness of many of the sources used (art, literature, philosophy) and the sheer depth of its engagement with the topic that makes a close reading of the book, if initially difficult, an enriching experience.