Fatherly Love

 

When Christ taught us how to pray in Matthew 6, he started, the now titled: Lord’s Prayer with the words: “Our Father.” These opening words have become somewhat of a rallying cry for a juvenilized generation of Christians. This generation has promulgated and perfected the personalization of a deeply communal religion: Christianity.

            The first Person of the Trinity, the author, and upholder of the universe, the Lord who the Jews so revered that they dared not even write his name (electing rather to call him Yahweh), is now called “Dad” or “Daddy.” This generation of Christians loves their “Daddy” and their “Daddy” loves them back. This soft and cuddly love affair between the Creator and his creatures is great for selling books and mass marketing a religion, but this misguided and childish theology can leave its adherents in the muck of a real existential crisis when pain and suffering crash their love- fest.

            A theology rooted in the belief that God is our buddy, our Daddy who loves us, can not withstand the deep philosophical issue of the problem of pain, hurt, and suffering.

            Part of the problem lies in our current conception of Fatherhood. In today’s culture it is all too common to hear a father say, “I love my son. I do not care about the morality he chooses, as long as it makes him happy.” This is certainly not the type of father Christ was talking about when he taught us to pray.

            The ancient conception of father was far different from the one most of us hold today. C.S. Lewis wrote, “Love between father and son, in this symbol (Father to Christ), means essentially authoritative love on the one side, and obedient love on the other. The father uses his authority to make the son into the sort of human being he, rightly, and in his superior wisdom, wants him to be.”

            Love is not utilitarian in nature. Love does not intrinsically and primarily care about your comfort or misguided conception of happiness. True love, the love that God has for his creatures is a demanding love. It demands the perfecting of the beloved. The “kindness” of a Daddy which tolerates anything except suffering in its child is the furthest thing from the biblical conception of love.

            God is love. All Christians believe it. All Christians have said it. It makes a nice bumper sticker and cute picture to hang above your toilet, but what does it mean? Plato rightly taught us that virtue is one. Someone can not be truly kind or loving unless they are courageous, temperate and just. “Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty.” God is love. God is also justice and goodness. Love therefore must conform to the justice and goodness that is God.

            True love, the love of God, may forgive all infirmities and wrongdoings and love in spite of them: but he can never cease to will their removal. The love of a father must grind on the son to change him, not into the person the son wants to be, but into the person that the father knows that the son should be. This grinding, this true, deep, all encompassing love can bring about great suffering and pain. The Bible reminds us that we must die unto Christ. He loves us so much that he can not accept us as we are. He is not Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin. He is not a senile benevolence that kicks back in the clouds and wishes for you to choose your own path, find your own happiness, or just be yourself. “His is not the love of a host who feels responsible for his guests, but the consuming fire himself the love that made the worlds.”

            Much of the suffering and pain we experience here on earth is the sanctificatory process leading to true happiness. ‘What we would hear and now call our happiness is not the end God chiefly has in view: but when we are such as he can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy.”

            God is Goodness. He wills the goodness of his creatures, and our goodness is to fully love him. To experience the true and eternal love of God is to surrender to his commands. We are commanded to become Christ-like, to put on Christ. That is to say we are to become like God. Whether we like it or not we are to become goodness. For God so loved the world that he wants to make us into himself, to make us love.

            With that being said we should do what we like. We should do what makes us happy. Kant gave us the misguided notion that we should not admire a man for doing a good act if he enjoyed it. The very saying, “but he likes it”, implies that the action has no worth or merit. This modern notion, ushered in largely by Kant, has gained credence due to the rejection of the truth of Aristotelianism. Aristotle taught that a virtuous man will delight in virtue. The more virtuous we are the more we will revel in goodness, justice and truth.

            The love of God and the love of a good earthly father may hurt at first. It may hurt way more for some than other. Why? Read the book of Job. The answer being—We don’t know. But true love can not accept evil. It must demand change. It demands change so that we can be happy--truly happy—happy because we are fulfilling our telos. God is love.

The 300 Year Old Man

      George Bernard Shaw once wrote, “The world will never progress until everyman lives 300 years.” In response G.K. Chesterton quipped that, “If George Bernard Shaw lived 300 years he would undoubtedly be a Catholic.” Part of Chesterton’s genius is his poetic nature; that is his ability to touch on a deep truth in a small economy of space.

            Part of the curse, a side effect of the fall of man, is his now myopic vision. Adam, in wanting equality with God, in wanting God-like knowledge, by being self interested, set the course of mankind on an endless cycle of self-centeredness. It is difficult to avoid the trap of believing that right now is the most important moment; this election is the most important election, if only we could fix this or that problem than everything would change. Shaw may have been right. If everyman could live 300 years, we would see progress. If everyone lived 300 years, everyone might be backed into the truth of the gospel.

            Imagine the now 300 year old man. He would have seen endless revolutions that promised hope but delivered death. He would have seen moments that promised to be climatic that came and went with nothing but a dud. He would have been built up on the back of hope only to be gunned down to the ditches of human depravity.

            Some forty years ago he would have been witness to the promise of hope in the form of the “crowning achievement” of gender equality. He would then proceed to have his body drug through 50 million aborted fetuses. He would have seen capitalism defeat communism, only to result in the greed of the Wall Street hedge funds. He would have seen the achievement of science, of Einstein and Planck, and then 160,000 incinerated Japanese in the streets on Hiroshima. He would have seen the War To End All Wars give birth to the WWII. He would have seen Aristocracies replace monarchies, aristocracies overthrown by dictators, dictators replaced by democracies and bloodshed, greed, and unthinkable feats of human cruelty achieved by each.

            As each well-spring of hope dried up, hopeless, the man, given enough time, might stumble upon an ancient truth—a truth that gave the proper apportionment of power to princes and principalities. He might find a truth that defined the true meaning and application of freedom, of equality, of justice, and of wisdom. He might be taught the only true way to love, to have community, to unite with one voice, to join a unified chorus. Given 300 years, a man would be hard-pressed to deny and suppress the complete catholicity of the covenantal love found in the community that is the Triune God. He would see that there is no solution without ultimate teleology. If there is no design, there is no proper way to fix the individual parts. The man would be forced to humble himself before the cross of grace. He would know, with first hand experience, that there is no solution, and no hope without Christ.