Sons of the Promise
The Rich Legacy of My Christian Father’s Jewish Wisdom
For readers familiar with the history of Christian art, the term “family altar” likely conjures up the special niche spaces in medieval Italian homes—or the more elaborate chapels in the homes of noble families—in which small paintings, such as La Madonna del Libro (Madonna of the Book) by Sandro Botticelli, would be placed over a domestic altar. Such works recall a time when family prayers and Scripture readings were, for some at least, a daily devotional practice.
In the simple rural home of my childhood the term referred to something much less elegant, yet similar in intent. After dinner two or three times a week, my father would reach over to the windowsill, take up his Bible, and, praying aloud, ask the Lord by his Holy Spirit to bring true understanding to our hearts. He would then read a passage, after which we could ask questions. There would follow prayer, sometimes led by our mother. Like the family depicted in Robert Burns’s poem, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” gathered around “the big ha’bible,” we too, without knowing the slightest thing about medieval Christian family devotions, much less about paintings like Botticelli’s, were enacting our small part in what Pope John Paul II was to call the perennial “domestic church.”
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David Lyle Jeffrey is Distinguished Professor of Literature and the Humanities at Baylor University and Guest Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Peking University. Among his recent books are Luke: A Theological Commentary (Brazos 2012) and In the Beauty of Holiness: Art & the Bible in Western Culture (Eerdmans, 2018). He is the grateful father of five children. This essay is extracted and modified from his forthcoming book with Baker Academic (2019), Scripture and the Poetic Imagination.
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