There are not good stories among us on fatherhood. One effect of feminism (a good thing) and the normalization of divorce (not so much) is that we lack language with which to praise and guide fathers. Mine is the first generation in which it is normal to ask strangers when their parents divorced. Folks my age (nearing 40) and younger grew up in cobbled together families of half- and step-siblings and parents and surrogates and live-in significant others. It’s a wonder anyone takes on fatherhood at all, let alone talks about it.
I have been blessed with a good father, a good grandfather, three boys of my own, and more than my share of male mentors. But for all that, I still lack language with which to describe fatherhood, whether spiritual or biological. What are we doing when we throw a ball, have a prayer, lament or celebrate? Readers of this journal will agree with me that books are where we go to amend such lacks.
One tempting response to the undoing of fatherhood is to try to turn back the clock. Douglas Wilson’s Father Hunger is the culture warrior’s reveille: Christians know how to do this fatherhood thing right, so we should take back the institution, as well as the rest of the known universe. David Johnson’s Learning from My Father is Wilson’s nearly perfect opposite. It leaves us with a description of both fatherhood and faith so anemic it is hard to figure why we should bother. Jim Kelly’s The Playbook for Dads is not marketed for its depth. This is a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback rehashing war stories. Yet it is also a father mourning his lost son, Hunter, turning pain into grace through raising money to fight the obscure disease that killed him. That one has surprising depths.
If Wilson and Johnson careen to the right and left, Rick Lischer’s Stations of the Heart speaks sensibly, gracefully, truly. His book is about the death of his adult son, Adam. Stations doesn’t set out to be about anything other than Adam’s loss. But its wisdom about death suggests one touchstone for regaining a language we have misplaced. Fatherhood talk has to include loss. Just ask Jesus’ father.
I have been interested in Wilson’s work from afar. His church in northern Idaho and the blissfully odd little college with which he is associated, New Saint Andrews, seem to be recapturing the virtues of the Christian intellectual life. They do so in the shadow of the aggressively lefty University of Idaho in Moscow and with thinkers as gifted as theologian Peter Leithart. That the secular media has spleened over NSA enhances my sympathies. I wanted to like this book.
And Father Hunger is not without its graces. I especially appreciated Wilson’s attention to Malachi 4:6, picked up in Luke 1:17 about the ministry of John the Baptist: “He will go before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of fathers to their children.” (Promise Keepers and other men’s movements have championed these same verses.) These words seem central to John’s ministry, and so to Jesus’. What do they mean? Wilson is aware that calling God “Father” does not make God male. Only humans have genitals and hormones. But if God is not male, Wilson argues, God must still be masculine, else Scripture would not use male pronouns for God. I agree with Wilson that we must give some account of that. In Wilson’s unapologetically conservative universe, men must protect their families—especially, for him, from their own sins. He recommends that fathers read biographies of other fathers. And he helpfully points out that the charge to women to submit is about only their relationship to their own husbands, not to all men everywhere.
Wilson’s problems are primarily theological. He insists that gender follows God’s “creation design”—men lead, women follow, and any rejection of this must make for misery. So, his example, men do not carry things because we have broad shoulders. God gave us broad shoulders so we could follow his design and carry things (no account here of cultures in which women carry things on their heads, but never mind). God set boundaries at creation—our bodily gendered differences show this, and any questioning is simply rebellion. Women in the military come in for particular ire. Feminists receive Wilson’s deepest pity. Despite what they say, they really want men to lead. They may profess that gender differences are manufactured, but they know that men are hard and women soft for a reason: “Male authority is an erotic necessity … . Feminists, having demanded soft men, have discovered that it is beyond exasperating to be locked in a rape fantasy with some Caspar Milquetoast.” No opponent of Wilson’s needs to make any reductio ad absurdum argument against him. He has just made it for himself.
Wilson is more interesting, if no less provocative, when he turns to politics. Government’s role, he argues, is to get out of the way. As things stand, when a man marries and seeks to open a business, he is taxed and regulated and Big-Brothered to such a degree he cannot fulfill his creation mandate to procreate and homeschool and market freely. I love his insistence that the secular is a fable and his muscular place for Christian discourse in public. But is it even remotely the case that our culture is carrying on a “concerted, statist war” on fathers?
In less overheated moments, Wilson admits that no one planned the loss of fatherhood. Until Christ’s return, the world will always be out of sorts with God’s intention. Moreover, the Bible itself tells of God’s redemption plan more than it laments the loss of his “creation plan.” Jesus’ own family thought he was crazy, as Mark’s Gospel makes clear (3:21-22, 31-35). Jesus presents the church as a rival to the family, as Christians today in places more statist than Idaho know all too well (Mt. 10:37; Luke 14:26). Galatians 3:28‘s pronouncement that baptism undoes division between male and female and Jesus’ and Paul’s self-references in feminine terms suggest the New Testament is less absolutist in its gender divisions (Luke 13:34; Gal. 4:19). Great Christian thinkers from Origen to Gregory of Nyssa to Bernard of Clairvaux have noticed the way the Bible switches male and female genders for both God and the one praying in places like Isaiah and the Song of Songs. Men in Christ have to see themselves as a “bride.” Women in Christ have to become part of a male body. In Christ, men pant in labor pains. In Christ, women proclaim the gospel, as with Mary Magdalene at the tomb and Priscilla and Lydia in their house churches.
We should, like Wilson, present a strong enough view of the world to offer a container for our children to have cohesive selves (I take the description “container” from Richard Rohr). But “strong” and “inflexible” are not the same thing. We should aggressively point out where we Christians differ from the world around us. But if “difference” becomes breezy superiority, something is wrong. Whatever fatherhood means, it cannot mean that.
David Johnson’s book is built around a collection of letters from Johnson’s father, a Presbyterian minister trained at Princeton Seminary, written when Johnson was a college student. The portrait of his minister father is lovely, full of longing and admiration. His dad met all his ambitions simply by leaving home and becoming educated—so the rest of his life was filled with gratitude. His father’s love for his mother is clear in such small things as notes left where she will find them (one in her shoe: “I love you from head to foot”). His father loved study but warned, with Milton, against the reader who is “deeply vers’d in books, and shallow in himself.”
Johnson found that as a preacher’s kid he had more in common with politician’s kids than anyone else. It is not surprising he tried that way, getting drubbed badly in an election for the U.S. Senate from Indiana. But he’s still in public service, seeking to lure tech companies to the Hoosier state. Like many of the children of liberal Protestant pastors, he has a strong commitment to the common good. But he’s a little stuck on whether to offer faith to other people. He breezily dismisses Christian mission. Far better to live a good life, he thinks, wait for someone to ask why you do, and then maybe at the end of a long conversation you might eventually, at some point, broach your faith (though Johnson admits that in his case this never actually happens). This is the logical end of Protestant liberalism—dismiss an ancient teaching you never really understood and refuse to tell a neighbor about Jesus even when asked. If Wilson suggests that the gift of fatherhood is to offer a strong container in which a child can put her- or himself, Johnson’s has so many cracks as to be crumbling.
Jim Kelly’s Playbook for Dads, as its title suggests, is from another bookshelf altogether, yet it offers some resources for thinking Christianly about fatherhood. Kelly details what it felt like to avoid a pass rush and fire a strike downfield on a big play. He describes the way he struggled to learn the offense in college at the University of Miami. (He was too slow, he says, to hit the corner just right on the option.) And he describes the little things he’ll always miss now that he doesn’t play football—the locker rooms and uniforms and intensity. Sports fans delight in this sort of treasure—and we fathers often do love throwing balls with our kids. We’re together, enjoying something bigger than ourselves that neighbors near and far also love. Wanna have a catch?
Kelly’s book is as full of clichés as one would expect from a sports star. Groan with me now: athletes work hard and play hard. Kelly kept a picture of his hard-working parents in his locker. Behind every great man there is a great woman, for him his devoted wife Jill. There is a picture of a tough friend by the word “tough” in the dictionary. Kids should learn to say please and thank you, show up on time, and look someone in the eye when they shake their hand. And kids should know not to hang out with the wrong sort of crowd. The worst clichés are the Protestant anti-Catholic sort: the Catholics the Kellys grew up with trusted ritual to save them, and the Kellys only “became Christians” when they accepted Christ later. Ok, groaning over. Kelly is a quarterback first and a source for his co-writer later.
But Kelly’s forthright depiction of failure rings true. Not only the Buffalo Bills’ four Superbowl losses, but also—and more deeply—his loss of a great athlete’s physical prime. Now, Kelly’s life is pretty much just showing up and being Jim Kelly. There is real self-awareness and pathos in that rueful assessment. Far more important is the loss of his son Hunter, who was born with Krabbe’s disease and died very young. The book is almost a letter of longing for his lost boy. The Kellys’ fears, their frantic hopes, and their eventual loss are familiar to anyone who has loved someone who has gone through such suffering. Jim’s own feelings of failure when he couldn’t hold his son right, couldn’t parent well under his own roof, when his marriage drifted, all suggest more depth than the typical sports memoir.
Kelly muses that he never asked “why me?” when his life was turning up aces. His newfound evangelical faith has given him resources with which to face loss that his experience of Catholicism failed to. Manners are important, my complaint about the cliché above notwithstanding. (Flannery O’Conner would have agreed with Kelly, Thomas Aquinas too.) So is game-playing. It suggests life is more than what we produce or achieve. And fatherhood does assume the loss of one another and eventual reunion in God’s time, whether we far outlive our fathers or not.
These lessons are hinted at in Playbook for Dads. They are sounded in their depths in Richard Lischer’s Stations of the Heart. Attentive readers know Lischer’s previous book, Open Secrets, about his first parish in rural Illinois. Adam Lischer is a child in that book, newly baptized, delighted in, waking up on its last page on the drive east from the prairie to ask his parents, “Are we there yet?”
As Stations opens, young Adam Lischer’s life is already over. He grew to be a man, became an accomplished young district attorney, and was two weeks from meeting his first-born child when cancer took him. This is the book of a good man grieving hard. Reading it feels like hiking at high altitudes. One has to stop and rest. But the book gives us resources for grief, for facing loss, and so for life and facing God. Our clichéd language lacks words for treasures this beautiful. This book is the best on fatherhood I know.
Stations is bookended by baptism, the “dramatic funeral” in which a pastor marks a sign of death—a cross—right on the newborn’s forehead. Adam’s is remembered decades earlier. The book closes with his daughter’s baptism. Lischer’s book is sacramental in this way. It shows rather than tells its best stuff. In baptism, our death has already happened. Christ’s death can contain all our uncontainable sorrows. The stations of the book’s title suggest that pain can be incremental. Chaotic and world-ending as pain seems, it is neither. Death is self-defeating. It only makes way for resurrection.
Lischer overhears a former courtroom colleague of Adam’s say that his “daddy” was looking for where Adam used to work—”That is the way southerners talk about unhappy fathers and their lost boys.” The actual death of his son itself is less devastating. By then, readers are ready. But the description of the nine-month pregnant new widow, “alone in a way she had never been before,” hits home like a hammer-blow. If “souls need opponents worthy of them” (a quote from Merton), death has a worthy adversary in these achingly gorgeous lines.
The deepest point of learning for me came in Lischer’s account of the maturing friendship between him and his dying adult boy. They play video games together, sometimes with joy, sometimes in misery. They experience what G. K. Chesterton called “the slow maturing of old jokes.” Adam loads up on painkillers to go to a final baseball game with his dad on Father’s Day. Lischer marvels at a father’s love that has to be “mediated” by such things as sports, whereas a mother’s can be more direct, unapologetic. This is no bad thing in a faith as mediated as Jesus’. Mediated by death, the father and the son’s love for each other is not gone. It is lamented. And it will rise. That sentence is more triumphant than anything in Lischer’s own book. Its glory is partly in its understated hope. Christ is risen. But Adam is not yet.
This is a hodge-podge of books on a remarkably complex and fraught subject. But there are common threads. We learn what fatherhood is first by looking at God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. And yet we cannot and should not try to imitate God’s Fatherhood of Jesus. We are creatures, not God. Our being is not determined by our child’s the way God is. If the Son could ever go away, the Father would too. It is not so with humans (hence tragedies like Hunter Kelly’s and Adam Lischer’s). Mere humans cannot be each other’s everything, the way the divine persons can. Further, we human fathers are sinners, as are our children. In this relationship we have to learn forgiveness in a way that divine persons never do.
As Karl Barth put it, the child on whom the hope hangs has already been born. Those called to have a child bring into the world another who will also die. Baptism announces early on the way of all flesh. Christian fatherhood is no different from other kinds this way. But the Christian knows that this relationship, like all others, must serve the other’s discipleship. Its end is not itself but the other’s glory. So should all our lives be as disciples. Jesus says we have to become small children. Those of us who do this fatherhood thing right will become smaller, childlike, transparent, holy.
Jason Byassee is a fellow in theology and leadership at Leadership Education at Duke Divinity and senior pastor of Boone United Methodist Church in the Western North Carolina Conference. He is the author most recently of Discerning the Body: Searching for Jesus in the World (Cascade).
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