The Pressure of Modernity on the Christian Family – Moral Christian Values Versus (I) Moral Modernity Values

Abstract

ABSTRACT: As any other Christian institution, the family is also subject to the dissolving influences of the values promoted by modernity, being part in the accelerated process of secularisation specific to the contemporary society. In contact with the modernity, its values and its custom of political correctness, the Christian family – the small Church, as called by Saint John the Chrysostom – tends to lose the fundamental theological valences and meanings of the communion and of the community, by the ghettoization of its capacity to respond to some general human aspirations with pregnant ontological and soteriological connotations, becoming more and more a simple social form among other forms of two partners living together, too little preoccupied by the fact that "unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labour in vain" (Ps. 127:1). KEYWORDS: traditional family, modernity, single-parent family, ghettoised community, soteriology, eschatology