Conclusion — Love and Unity in Christ

The Shared Ground

However a reader adopts and applies the faithful views, all Christian views on the parent-and-adult-child question presuppose a common ground. Naming it explicitly, before the final practical exhortations, is not a matter of picking a view. It is a matter of naming what every faithful reading of Scripture on this question presupposes.

• Christ is the treasure. “Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ” (Phil. 3:8). No view presented in §5.3 disagrees. The household arrangement, however ordered, is subordinate to the treasure.
• The Kingdom is the field of hidden treasure. “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” (Matt. 13:44). Every arrangement in §5.3 is legitimate only as it releases the household — parent, adult child, and the whole fabric of household life — for the kingdom’s sake.
• The believer’s life is hid with Christ in God. “If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory” (Col. 3:1-4). The parent-and-adult-child question is important and it is not ultimate. What is ultimate is Christ.

Every Christian view in §5.3 is a view of how to live these convictions in the household. No view in §5.3 is a substitute for them. Where a view begins to displace these convictions — where the household arrangement, of whatever style, becomes the treasure instead of the vessel of the treasure — it has ceased to be Christian, whatever its structural resemblance to a defensible view.

The convictions above are the shared ground. The views are different fields plowed on the same ground.

Love and Unity

The New Testament pattern is clear at its poles. Minor children under the parental roof obey and honor. Married adults form new households and cleave to their spouses. The middle case — the unmarried adult son or daughter — is left, deliberately, to be worked out by faithful households under the Lordship of Christ, in the community of the church, according to the honest reading of the texts we have.

The Bible does not give one household template. It gives:

• One command that never expires: honor thy father and thy mother.
• One paradigmatic transition: leaving unto cleaving in marriage.
• One first allegiance: Christ above every earthly bond.
• One inviolable boundary: no tradition may nullify honor.
• One direction of provision: parents for children, then children for parents as the years turn.

Within those, the Bible permits a range of faithful arrangements. It does not permit any arrangement that fails the love-and-unity test.

This study has surveyed the faithful views (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, and the orthogonal Arrangement Question). It ends not with a further survey but with a summons to four sets of readers — and to the church that shepherds them all.

To the unmarried daughter reading this. Your ultimate question is not which household template your family follows, and it is not whether you will marry. Your ultimate question is whether the God who calls Himself the husband of His people (Isa. 54:5; 2 Cor. 11:2; Rev. 19:7-9) is enough. He is. You are not incomplete for lack of a husband; you are already betrothed. Whether the LORD gives you an earthly marriage or not, you are the beloved of the Bridegroom now. Set your affections on Him first, and every other question — including whether to marry, whom to marry, and how to honor your parents through the process — falls into its place.

To the unmarried son reading this. Your task is not to wait for a wife; your task is to become the man Christ is calling you to be. Elisabeth Elliot’s counsel to her generation of daughters runs to sons with equal force. Manhood in Scripture is given under call — Elisha at the plow, Peter at the nets, Timothy from Lois and Eunice’s knee to Ephesus — and the call is Christ’s before it is your father’s, your mother’s, or your future wife’s. Honor your parents; take their counsel seriously; and where Christ is sending, go — do not let waiting itself become the calling. Do the next thing He has given you, today.

To the parent releasing an adult child. Your love outlasts your control. You have formed this child as well as you have been given grace to form. Now the task is not further formation by decree; it is intercession without restraint, and dedication to the LORD. Hannah lent Samuel to the LORD “as long as he liveth” — not for a season. Mary released her Son to a cross her release did not prevent. Neither woman controlled the outcome; both are honored. Your adult son or daughter belongs first to Christ. Release him there, and keep releasing him there, in prayer, for as long as you draw breath.

To the parent whose adult child has walked away. The father in Luke 15 does not run when the son turns around; he runs when the son is “yet a great way off.” He was watching the whole time. That watching — Monica’s seventeen years of tears for Augustine, Samuel’s mourning until the LORD said how long?, the widow of Nain’s silent grief that Christ met before she could ask — is not a lesser faithfulness. It is the parental posture of release joined to intercession-without-restraint (§5.0.1-§5.0.2). Keep praying. Keep the door open. Do not make honor conditional on your child’s return; do not chase; do not relent on your household’s confession. Do the next thing the LORD has given you today, and trust the ending to Him.

To the church that shepherds all of these: equip them. Do not require of any family a household template Scripture does not require; do not permit a template Scripture forbids (§1.8). Marry your young who are called to marriage. Care for and deploy your unmarried. Honor your elders. Bring the marriages of your young under pastoral counsel and blessing — the assumption Ignatius could take for granted (§3.4). And teach the reader to walk his own case through Scripture, Christocentrism, Antiquity, and Reality before the Lord (Chapter 6).

“And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.” — Malachi 4:6.

Soli Deo Gloria.

\newpage