I didn't give this a star rating because I have some questions and concerns about some of it, and because I listened to the audio book in a single day and have no hard copy to refer back to or check against my memory. So here's my grain of salt. Please take it.
First, the comparison between Abraham and Aeneas was fresh and compelling, and Wiley makes a number of sharp-witted and spot-on critiques of the failings of contemporary secular society and its distortions of what family and the home ought to be. Second, his explanation of what the first-century Christians would have understood as a household was also helpful and sheds light on how to understand the Bible's regular use of the family/household as a metaphor for the church (the household of faith, the family of God, etc.). A right understanding of the household has big implications for society, the church, and, yes, the cosmos. And a right understanding of the church and the cosmos has big implications for the household as well.
But one thing that raised, if not a red flag, then at least a yellow one for me was simply positioning the household as the central institution rather than the church. I'd like to know what he thinks about the roles of those two institutions, since Jesus' call to be willing to leave father and mother, children and lands for His sake seems to indicate that belonging to the church takes precedence over the family. His mother and His brothers, He says, are those who do the will of His Father. And God can raise up children of Abraham from the very stones. The blood of Christ, not the blood of family, is the primary thing that unites us. I'm sure Wiley doesn't disagree, but it doesn't come through very clearly with the centrality he places on the household.
The second concern is the almost nostalgic descriptions of the way family life used to be in a pre-industrial world where the economy was driven by husband, wife, and children working harmoniously from home-centered businesses, and so on. His portrayal of the good old days struck me as a bit simplistic and romanticized. No doubt home-based proprietorship was more common in centuries past (this seems beyond dispute), but that this was the norm everywhere and that it therefore ought to be our ideal for 21st-century Christians seems problematic.
I say problematic, in part, because my husband recently had a conversation with a young husband and father who had just read this book and was on the brink of quitting his steady job in order to start some kind of unspecified home business. What kind of business he didn't know, but he was feeling burdened with guilt for being "just a wage earner" outside the home. I don't know if Wiley intended this to be the response, but it's not hard to see why it was. And something may be wrong if men come away from this book feeling like they aren't measuring up as Christians unless they're the self-employed owners of their own home-based businesses.
Don't get me wrong. Self employment can be great for some. But it can also (as I've repeatedly seen with my own eyes) be financially less secure or even ruinous, not to mention a less efficient use of the talents and human resources that may already be in short supply within a community.
The other reason this call to business ownership raises a yellow flag is that we already live in one of the most individualistic cultures in history, and I'd argue that there's actually something spiritually beneficial—for young men in particular—to have to answer to somebody other than themselves as they earn their paycheck. My husband will tell you that getting chewed out by his boss as a young man was one of the best experiences he ever had for shaping the trajectory of his life and work ethic from that point forward. It was the centurion, remember, whose faith grew from his military employment as a man under authority. It taught him something true and commendable about what Christ’s authority was like.
There's no question that we've lost something valuable by turning our homes into little more than places of weekend recreation, nor that this loss can distort our understanding of both the church and the world. But at the same time, living in a culture that exalts individual autonomy, and in a sector of Christendom that tends to reject the established authorities and lean heavily libertarian has pitfalls of its own—namely the potential to produce men who have no concept of what it means to live under legitimate authority.
My concern here (particularly as the mom of five boys who are just months away from beginning to launch out into the world themselves) is that in rejecting one set of errors, this book could, perhaps, drive some Christians toward a different set of errors as they establish their own households.
We have a certain Christian subculture with an already-strong impulse to drive all of our dealings back into the home—to school the children at home, treat medical conditions at home, have babies at home, keep the government out of the home, spend leisure time at home, to work from home and so on. The result is that we have no teachers, no doctors, no governors, and now no bosses to submit ourselves to. None of these things is bad in itself, and I understand the reasons behind choosing to do all of the above. But if no one except God Himself stands as a legitimate authority over a single facet of a man's life, it can—and sometimes does—produce the kind of men who become a law unto themselves and who split churches, ruin marriages, and alienate children.
And because church is the one place where authority over these men may still exist, and because they have little practice submitting to legitimate authority or accepting rebuke and criticism from anyone above them, the minute the leaders of that church makes a ruling they don't like, they cast it off and do one (or all) of three things: gather a little clique of fellow dissenters around themselves to complain about and to the authorities, go start their own separate sect where they themselves call the shots (home church, anyone?), or march off to some church down the road that won't tell them what to do. (I am not making this up. I'd go so far as to call it a predictable pattern.) In other words, for some men, working outside of the home for a boss could be the crucial part of character formation that teaches them what it actually means to have a master in heaven and to live accordingly.
Lastly, I'm no historian, but I am quite sure there were plenty of men, even in the early church, who were employed by others and were doing God-honoring work out in the world, without wife and children alongside them throughout the day. There were teachers and tent makers, jesters and judges. Take the fishermen Jesus called to follow him. They were engaged in work that necessitated leaving home, and it wasn't exactly family-friendly work either, but Jesus uses fishing as a metaphor for reaching lost souls, and the disciples clearly continued in their work even after the resurrection without being rebuked for falling short of the ideal.
Then, as now, there were many ways to make a living, and then, as now, each kind of living must have come with its own set of practical, financial, and spiritual benefits and drawbacks. I wish the book had presented more of a call to faithfulness suited to the post-industrial century into which we were born rather than calling us to the faithfulness that requires the pre-technological underpinninings of a society that has largely passed away.
To be fair, I have not yet read Man of the House, so Wiley may very well have made the careful qualifications and caveats that seem to be missing from what he says here. But without them, this book, though valuable in many respects, concerns me in how it may work itself out in the lives of those who read it.