| Marital and familial relationships in developed nations have deteriorated over the past several decades as a result of impacts from the late-modern technoculture and liberalism. To counter these impacts, a Christian moral vision that heeds the effects of contemporary culture is needed to inform today's marital and familial relationships. This dissertation formulates such a moral vision through dialogues with Christian ethicists including Margaret Farley, Adrian Thatcher, Don Browning and his colleagues of the Religion, Culture, and Family Project, and advocates of the complementarian gender theory in American Evangelism.;First, a framework for sexual and familial ethics is established by considering the four dualities of human existence---between body and mind, man and woman, individual and community, and present and future. This framework defines the boundaries within which moral discernment should be carried out concerning marriage and the family. Next, within this framework, Christ's love is proposed to be the Christian moral vision that informs marital and familial relationships. Using Oliver O'Donovan's notion of the moral order, three kinds of love are formulated: friendship, incarnational love, and unfolding love. They are different facets of the same love of Christ as revealed in his life, death, resurrection, and exaltation. While friendship emphasizes mutuality, communion, and covenant, incarnational love recognizes the material difference between persons and encourages solidarity and empowerment between them. Finally, unfolding love reifies the outflowing nature of God's love in the family and avoids family members from closing in upon themselves. Although all three kinds of love are relevant to all forms of familial relationships, each is especially pertinent to a certain form: friendship to the husband-wife relationship, incarnational love to the parent-child relationship, and unfolding love to the relationship between the family and its neighbors. The notion of Christ's love developed in this dissertation is then used to interpret the Ephesian household code (Eph 5:21-6:9) to enrich our understanding of the proposed moral vision and to suggest contemporary applications of the household code. |
