Family: kinship that matters

• Conference of Protestant Theological Faculties from Central and Eastern Europe and The Netherlands
• Konferenz der Mittelsüdosteuropäischen und Niederländischen Theologischen Fakultäten (MNTF)

Apeldoorn / Netherlands, 21-25 April 2010

 
Is the extended family a kinship that matters? If so, for whom? For every individual person, or in respect to society? What theological significance has kinship, if any?

In 2008 four christian ethicians from a variety of confessional backgrounds, G. Höver, G.G. de Kruijf, O. O’Donovan and B. Wannenwetsch, together published a statement about ‘the freedom of the family’.1 They observed that during the centuries that lay behind us life within the nuclear family was highly influenced not only by the church and the neighbourhood, but also and even more and deeper by the extended family. All human beings are born within this wider family and influenced by its relationships; even people who lost almost their whole family in a war, always remain tied to relatives they never got to know. Before we shape our lives we ourselves are to a high extent shaped and formed by parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, in short: by all the people who belong to our wider family. No need to say this influence also had its shadow sides: kinship is for better and for worse...

In the course of the twentieth century the family grew apart from the social institutions it was embedded in, as church and neighbourhood, and even from kinship, the special network that is given rather than chosen. The nuclear family became isolated and had to fulfill a whole range of functions by itself, like education, exchange of wisdom, shaping of opinion, assistance in problems of different kinds, in which it hardly succeeded.

The extended family never explicitly became a theological theme. Unlike marriage, and the bringing up of children, the ‘womb’ of kinship in which a person grows and becomes a unique human being, was hardly dealt with theologically.

In this conference we want to deal with the extended family as the kinship we belong to. The four ethicians call it in its rich diversity a ‘school of humanity’.2 The question is: what is theologically at stake, when we want to do justice to this reality and try to explore what it could mean in twenty-first century Europe?

In this conference we want to discuss the theme of the family in all theological subdisciplines. The following list is a hint for what the subthemes could be:

• As far as the Bible is concerned: how does the extended family appear in the Bible? Does it have a theological significance? What to say about the legal side of the family? What does the family mean economically?
• Regarding church history: are there traditions, countercultures, initiatives for renewal which could help us today? Can we learn from what went wrong in history?
• Systematic theology is challenged: if the family can’t be restricted to and even at first hand approached from the viewpoint of the familia Dei, but is a phenomenon which is a reality for all people, what does that mean for e.g. ecclesiology? And how shall ethics deal with the family as a kind of ‘creation-order’? How is the ‘un-voluntariness’ of kinship related to human autonomy?
• Practical theology recently discovered the family in the so called ‘contextual therapy’ (Ivan Böszörményi-Nagy), which stresses the importance of an open relationship to the extended family for the well-being of the individual. Family is an ambivalent reality. How about the other side of the family: the pain and suffering people can undergo?
   

More information and applications:

Prof.Dr. G.C. den Hertog >>  (new window)