Protestant Ethics Today: The Fifth Commandment
Be sure to check out part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 of this series on Protestant Ethics Today.
Greenville Seminary, where I teach, recently posted to social media the following quote from Samuel Davies, one of the forefathers of American Presbyterianism:
It is, therefore, of the greatest importance to religion and civil society that families be under proper regulations that they may produce proper plants for church and state and, especially, for the eternal world in which all the temporary associations of mortals in this world finally terminate, and to which they ultimately refer.
It reminded me of another quote by the Italian Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli about individual, family, and national ethics:
Among these moral subjects, the first place is surely held by ethics, then economics, and finally politics. I see this order as circular. Through ethics, those who are its students will, one by one, become good men. If they prove upright, they will raise good families; if the families are properly established, they will in turn create good republics. And in good republics, both law and administration will aim at nothing less than each man becoming a good citizen, for they have eyes not only for the body but also for the spirit, and they will take care that citizens live according to virtue.
These older Protestant figures grasped the heart of what is expressed in the Westminster Larger Catechism’s Question 124 on the fifth commandment when it states that “by father and mother, in the fifth commandment, are meant, not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts; and especially such as, by God’s ordinance, are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth.”
The fifth commandment, in other words, is about far more than simply how children honor their parents. It is certainly not less than that, but it encompasses all of the relationships of authority that exist in the world. The Bible supports this broadening of the fifth commandment in a variety of ways, for example when it applies the title “father” to a whole host of authority figures: elders in the church (1 Tim 5:1–2), men who were the progenitors of various trades (Gen 4:20–22), Joseph in his capacity as second-in-command in Egypt (Gen 45:8), the Syrian army commander Naaman (2 Kings 5:13), and the prophet Elijah (2 Kings 2:12). Isaiah 49:23, which is a key prooftext in Protestant political thought, applies the title “father” to all civil magistrates: “Kings shall be your foster fathers, and their queens your nursing mothers. With their faces to the ground they shall bow down to you, and lick the dust of your feet. Then you will know that I am the Lord; those who wait for me shall not be put to shame.”
In a world where all distinctions of rank have nearly been abolished, the language of superiors and inferiors in the Westminster Larger Catechism is jarring. By this is not meant any sort of ontological or moral superiority, but rather superiority in terms of authority relations. Some are in charge of others in families, businesses, and political units, and civil society cannot function without these relational structures. This is a basic fact of the natural law. In societies in which there has been a subversion of authority relations, such as the Russian revolutions of 1917, existing authority structures were toppled, but new, even more authoritarian ones quickly filled the void. Men cannot live without authority.
The proper exercise of authority, however, must begin in the home. Parents are not to be obeyed only outwardly, but from the heart. Children are to obey their parents “in the Lord” (i.e., from a genuinely transformed heart) and are promised great blessing if they do so (Eph 6:1–3). Parents, especially fathers, have their own responsibilities toward their children: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Eph 6:4). The Old Testament, recognizing how foundational is the structure of parental authority stipulated the death penalty for children who rose up in aggressive rebellion against their parents, as stated in Exodus 21:15: “Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death.”
The Westminster Larger Catechism devotes more space to the fifth commandment than to any other, precisely because it recognized how important it is to understand and live in light of the different authority relations that exist in life. Some of the things that the catechism emphasizes are ensuring that we obey properly constituted authorities with “all due reverence in heart, word, and behavior” (WLC Q/A 127), that we pray for them, imitate their virtues, and be willing to tolerate their foibles.
Families in which the proper functioning of authority is absent will lead to radically disordered societies. It is an iron law of social relations. The irony is that in these societies, the rallying cry will be “Freedom!” But it is the Enlightenment notion of freedom, as expressed (for example) by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan: “A FREE-MAN, is ‘he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindred to doe what he has a will to.’” Freedom, in this way of thinking (which dominates our world today), means a freedom from restraint. The fifth commandment, on the other hand, teaches us that true freedom is the result of obedience to God-ordained authority: first to God, then to parents, then to the civil magistrate. Roger Scruton captures this notion of freedom well when he writes that “liberty is not the foundation of social order, but one of its by-products.”
This is the seeming paradox of all social relations: authority, not the absence of control, is the indispensable presupposition for true freedom. Or as Russell Kirk puts it: “The good society is marked by a high degree of order, justice, and freedom. Among these, order has primacy: for justice cannot be enforced until a tolerable civil social order is attained, nor can freedom be anything better than violence until order gives us laws.” The fifth commandment reveals this very thing: We must honor our fathers and mothers if we expect to have our days “be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Exod 20:12).
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