When Father Is a Bad Thing
Wednesday, October 3, 2012 at 9:16PM 
Quoting from Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith by Michael Reeves:
Not everyone instinctively warms to the idea that God is a Father. There are many for whom their own experiences of overbearing, indifferent or abusive fathers make their very guts squirm when they hear God spoken of as a Father. The twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault had very much that sort of issue. The bulk of his life’s work was about the evils of authority, and it seems to have all started with the first figure of authority in his life: his father. Fearful of having some namby-pamby for a son, Foucault Senior—who was a surgeon—did what he could to “toughen up” the little mite. That meant, for example, ghoulishly forcing him to witness an amputation. …
For Foucault, paternal power had not been used to care, to nuture and to bless, and so for him the word father came to be associated with a host of dark images.
One’s heart goes out to the children of such fathers, and those of us who are fathers ourselves know that we too are far from perfect. But God the Father is not called Father because he copies earthly fathers. He is not some pumped-up version of your dad. To transfer the failings of earthly fathers to him is, quite simply, a misstep. Instead, things are the other way around: it is that all human fathers are supposed to reflect him—only where some do that well, others do a better job of reflecting the devil.
This last paragraph is especially important for those who resist the idea of God as Father because of the hurt their own fathers caused, but it’s also a reminder to all of us, even those who have good fathers. God is not “some pumped-up version” of our own fathers. We don’t learn what God is like by looking at our own dads, rather, we learn what a father should be by looking at God.
Reader Comments (3)
Rebecca,
I just added this book to my reading list. How wonderful that you're going through it. I especially love the last line of your post. What a change in perspective one has when we remember this truth. Thank you.
"We don’t learn what God is like by looking at our own dads, rather, we learn what a father should be by looking at God."
Amen and amen!
I like to think that GOD (Good Old Dad) loves all of U>S (usual sinners) whether we were good father's or not and I also like to think that even so called bad dads are also loved in HIS EYES but asking HIM to love our sins is something that only a LOVING FATHER and LOVING MOTHER could ever dream to do.
Keep UP the good words and works Rebecca
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/10/04/identity-that-sends-us-toward-the-other-with-love/#disqus_thread
Peace