It is not only families in crises that need to reflect on the biblical idea of family. Even those who are getting along crisis-free need to stop and take stock. That is because the biblical goal, or God's standard for us, is "fullness of life". Surely, this applies to family life as much as it does to every other aspect of human life. So mere crisis avoidance is not enough. We are obliged to keep 'fullness' as the yardstick for measuring the quality and health of our family life.

We need to turn to spirituality precisely for the reason that makes us want to flee from it. It does not help to complain that biblical spirituality confronts us with exalted and unrealistic standards. Instead, we could be grateful that this very thing saves us from the inertia of complacency, and urges us along the path to perfection (Mtt. 5: 47). The lowering of standards has done no one any good. It serves only to perpetuate mediocrity and un-fulfillment.

The biblical worldview is informed by a profound, even extravagant, optimism concerning the human situation. It accepts no easy limit to what human beings can do or attain. According to the Psalmist, we are "fearfully and wonderfully made" (Ps.139:14) and God has made us "a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned (us) with glory and honour" (Ps. 8: 5). There is something spiritual, therefore, about pushing the familiar limits of our attainment, especially if it is to reveal the glory latent in our creation.

As a rule, very few perform in any area to their full potential. Not even the best of athletes, for example, attain to even 90% of their muscle tonus, except perhaps in moments of rare inspiration. Many human potentials remain underutilized. Routine life is a wasteland of under-performance. The full utilization of human potential is a matter of rare inspiration. Inspiration points to the presence of something more than human. God is the context of our maximum actualization or empowerment. So there is a great deal of practical wisdom in the words of Jesus that we can be fruitful only if we abide in him. 'Faith' is the root that grounds us in Jesus. So if you have faith as large as a mustard seed, said Jesus, "you can say to this mountain, 'move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you." (Mtt. 17: 20).

The mark of a Christian family is not that it is free from conflicts and tragedies. Negative merits and virtues are not enough. What should distinguish Christian family life is that it embodies fullness of life. The biblical approach to family is based on this article of faith. Some of the distinctive prescriptions in this context may seem exaggerated or utopian if this goal, namely fullness of life, is deemed either optional or utopian. Husbands and wives need not, for example, "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ", if they do not wish to attain fullness of life. It is perfectly possible to co-exist even for a lifetime without such a discipline. This requirement does not exist in any jurisprudence or cultural tradition anywhere in the world. It is an out-and-out spiritual prescription.

It may be opportune to mention here that people's indifference, even allergy, to spiritual principles and demands is almost wholly on account of the mark they set, consciously or otherwise, for their lives. If it is to live like everybody else, according to the "patterns of the world", the need for spiritual discipline will not be obvious or desirable to us. Spiritual principles are an inconvenience to the pursuit of worldly norms and goals. "Abundant life" is a spiritual goal. Even when this goal is accepted in theory by the world, it tends to be misunderstood and pursued in materialistic terms. It was for this reason that Jesus emphasized, "a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions" (Lk. 12: 15). We need to receive and live by spiritual resources as well.

It is important to be clear as to the basic model, or paradigm, for our family life. Merely preserving the gloss of religiosity over a family modeled on the patterns of the world does not take us far. And it is an abuse of religion to see this only as an escape-route from the harmful consequences of a worldly life-style. A family becomes Christian because it is Christ-centred and, therefore, feels committed to producing the fruits of righteousness for God's sake in its total life and culture.

From the beginning of time, therefore, family has been seen a critically important sphere of witness and spirituality. The Genesis account of creation reveals that the idea of mission is basic to this God-founded institution of family. Predictably, family became the key theatre for the epic battle between good and evil. The infiltration and corruption of this institution was, and still is, the decisive satanic strategy to frustrate the loving purposes of God.

Consequent to the Fall, family relationships were recast on the pattern of 'desire' and 'domination' (Gen. 3: 16), which are the twin sides of the coin of power. The Fall degraded the culture of family as an institution. The regeneration of family is, therefore, an important thrust in the redemptive ministry of Christ. There are good indications that Jesus saw the transformation of the individual and the redemption of family as inter-linked. It was not enough, for example, for Jesus to call Zacchaeus down from the sycamore tree and have a good 'heart-to-heart' with him on the roadside. He deemed it imperative to go home with Zacchaeus. The result was, "Today salvation has come to this house" (Lk. 19: 9).

Since and on account of the Fall, the institution of family stands at the meeting-point between spirituality and culture, Church and the world. There arise two possibilities from such a situation. First, family could be a means for spiritually renewing culture. This makes parenting a prophylactic activity. Family culture is mandated to be redemptive. Special effort needs to be made to incorporate into the nurture of children those very values that the society compromises or rejects on account of its degeneration, as they are necessary for its regeneration. Especially when a whole society is fleeing from the demands of truth, as is the case today, truth-speaking needs to be emphasized as an important part of Christian family culture. When the prevailing culture becomes uncaring and indolent, the Christian family culture seeks to be sensitive, caring and compassionate. We work on the principle well put by Goethe, "If only every man would sweep his own doorstep, the whole city would be clean."

The second possibility is that family becomes a penetration-point for the prevailing culture into the life of the Church. Almost the whole of one's habits, tastes and strategies are learned at home. If family is shaped by the culture of the world, the same culture will necessarily reach and overwhelm the life of the Church through the individuals who are nurtured in the various homes that constitute the congregation. This danger is particularly acute today on account of the unprecedented invasiveness and pervasiveness of modern culture. Family that is envisaged to be the nursery of a healthy society today stands in danger of becoming a mirror that reflects the sickness of our society. The world around us is falling apart. So is the family. Relationships within the family seem not to be improvements on relationships outside of it. Life is lived superficially and functionally in both sectors. These patterns of the world prevail, often in acute forms, in the life of the Church, especially in matters relating to money, position and personal equation.

While this could seem a gloomy scenario, the encouraging truth is that its underlying cause is essentially very simple. As a rule, big problems result, mostly, from the long-term neglect of simple principles, though it is a widely held myth that solutions are complicated and amenable only to the genius of specialists. But the fact that the cause is simple does not mean that it is visible or acceptable to all. This is where the Bible confronts us with the mercy of revelations. The pattern of the malady of family is revealed at the very outset of family life itself, like "the user's manual" that accompanies a product.

The Bible reveals that sin weakens the foundation for family. Sin penetrated this institution through the disobedience of Adam and Eve. The seminal impact of the Fall on family is in terms of the man-woman relationship. The Fall shifted its foundation from love to power. While love creates relationships of equality and companionship, power crates relationships or arrangements of "desire" and "domination" which are, significantly, the two words that God uses in describing the nature of man-woman relationship on account of the Fall (Gen. 3: 16). 'Desire' is the womb of power. It includes not only the desire to dominate, but also the desire to be dominated. From the desire to be dominated, to the desire to dominate is a small step. And that is so even if millions do not, or are unable to, take that 'small step'. A clown, for instance, is a failed hero. He is one who mimics the hero, without the hero's capacity to achieve. In a real sense, the desire to dominate stands on the desire to be dominated. It is the latter that makes the former possible. In a macro-sense, it is when a people prostitute their freedom that tyrants are born, though this awareness comes only too late and at a heavy price. Those who have any experience in marriage and family counseling would know that it takes a husband-wife collaboration to sustain a relationship of chronic conflict and misery. The pity of it is that often both parties remain unaware of the way they cooperate to perpetuate the misery of their family life.

It is instructive to unpack this "desire-domination" syndrome a little more to engage the dynamic of man-woman collaboration in a state of fallenness. Power is the shaping factor of this syndrome. Desire is the passive and domination the active element of power in the context of relationships. The meeting point between the two is 'ownership'. Men prefer to demonstrate the ownership of women; whereas it is enough for women to be inwardly assured of it. Proof is male and needs to be visible; assurance is female and is content to be inward. It is within this dynamic that the war of wills takes place between the male and the female. In practical terms, 'desire' seems to operate in terms of 'submission', which may seem to be the opposite of 'domination'; but that is so only outwardly. When this 'submission' is situated in a context of 'power' this too becomes a subset of power. Submission of this kind may well be motivated, consciously or otherwise, by the motive of power and domination. One may stoop to conquer and so resort to what might be described as manipulative subservience. Whether consciously so meant or not, such subservience could be aimed at, and often succeed in, making control-oriented husbands emotionally dependent.

But power is a sphere of impermanence. The parties that operate in it can, and do, switch roles. Hence hen-pecked husbands, husbands who are cast in the mould of 'desire' rather than 'domination,' are a logical necessity. Potentially and practically all husbands are 'henpecked' in patches. Ironically, these are also the moments of their maximum humanness within the paradigm of power.

Relationships governed by the "desire-domination syndrome" afflict men and women in different ways. It tortures the male with a sense of deep-seated insecurity which is the necessary accompaniment and self-punishment of power. Power breeds insecurity. A state of insecurity bristles with irrational fears and anxieties. Anxiety results from the frustration of the basic goal of power, which is total control over the partner. Therefore, the more insecure the man gets the more desperately, even irrationally, he begins to control his woman. Mistrust, violence of various kinds, cruelty, and so on are the means by which this is sought to be achieved.

As for the woman, the desire-domination syndrome holds out a different, but complementary, malady. The male penchant to dominate, and the need to demonstrate this in public, threatens to turn the woman into a commodity: an item of male ownership. This undermines the self-worth of the woman, which is already under siege through social and cultural conditioning. She fights back through strategies that are meant to assert and if possible demonstrate her worth.

From the above, it becomes clear that man-woman relationship has the potential to subvert the ideal of 'fullness of life' as long as it is established on the foundation of power. Theoretically, the best scenario that could be envisaged in such a situation is a 'balance of power'; similar to the 'balance of terror' that supposedly averts the outbreak of hostilities between nations. This is the goal that underlies the feminist discourse on empowering women in the relational context. Balance of power is a correlative of 'equality' within the paradigm of power. In practical terms, however, this makes deep and enduring human relationships virtually impossible. Power corrupts human intimacy and infuses all-round alienation into relationships. This embitters the partners who live aggrieved and burdened with a feeling of being given a 'raw deal' by each other.

The biblical approach to this situation is based on the fact that this is not the norm but a perversion of what God had meant for the human species. What was envisaged as a relationship of total commitment in love, has degenerated into a theatre of potential or actual warfare, simply because the foundation has shifted from love to power. The spiritual remedy for this universal malady is a return to the lost foundation of love. It is in this light that Paul's instructions to husbands, wives, parents and children are understood best.

Significantly, Paul prefaces his teachings in this respect with the instruction to husbands and wives "submit to one another" in the fear of the Lord (Eph. 5: 21). Mutual submission, in contrast either to the balance of power or to the subjugation of one by another, is nourished by a culture of love and can work or make sense only within it. Seen through the spectacles of power, it looks neither desirable nor possible. Mutual submission involves an authentic and constructive rejection of power as the shaping principle of the relationship involved. Balance of power gravitates towards a polarization of relationship, whereas mutual submission makes for dynamic and enabling integration.

Paul's teachings can be examined under two broad heads:
(1) instructions for wives and husbands and
(2) guidelines for children and parents. (Eph. 5:22-6:4).