The God Image As "Daddy"
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It's a lovely picture, isn't it: the innocent vulnerable child being lovingly protected and guided by the wise and kindly father. I can think of few images that could bring to mind more of a sense of comfort than to be safely held in a father's loving arms. It was a wonderful thing to be a child, and I have wonderful memories of that time. But then it was time for me to grow up. It became my turn to be the giver, the "father", the lover and nurturer.

It's a seductive idea that religious Christianity promotes when it teaches us to relate to God as if God were our father. Even those of us who may not have had a father figure in our childhood, or perhaps had a father that did not live up to those responsibilities as he should have, can still imagine the father that we longed for, and then imagine God as that being. The human imagination is a very powerful force in our lives and can easily overcome the evidence of any uncomfortable actualities. Many of us do accept this fantasy father figure as our image of God: the fantasy of a father we never had, or the father we wish we'd had instead of our own, or if we are really fortunate, the father we do have but on an even greater scale.

But is it healthy for grown adults to be inventing omnipotent father figures who, though invisible, are at their sides every moment to help them deal with their lives? When children invent imaginary playmates we tend to get a little concerned for their mental and emotional state, and should they not soon outgrow the habit we would consider it an illness. Wouldn't it be that much more of a concern to see a grown man or woman doing the same thing? My guess is that it would be, and is, and this is why we don't see adults interacting with these imaginary "fathers" in public, except in churches and with others who have chosen a similar habit. Though the fantasies are very comforting, somewhere inside us we know they are not really the way healthy adults ought to think and behave.

Few people realize that all that father/child imagery used in the bible represented a relationship between parent and child that was very different than the relationships that most parents have with their children today. When we read about Jesus calling God ''Daddy'', the image that comes into our minds is very different than those that would have come into the minds of the people who lived in Jesus' time. Their image would not have been that of an innocent and naive child being lovingly protected and guided by a wise and kindly father. Their image would have been more that of the head of a large household, the family patriarch of whom the rest of the world would consider the children appendages. And the child image would not have been so much of the vulnerable innocent and naive protectorates that we imagine today, but rather more like the natural property of, and extensions of, the patriarch that gave seed to them. And this patriarch would not have been seen so much in terms of protection, as much as sort of a 'blood boss'. A household in Jesus' time was not a small dwelling with a small nuclear family as we think of a household today. It was more often a large compound with an extended family run by the men according to a strict set of cultural rules.

A family in Jesus' time was more what we would call a clan. And to deal with any one member of that clan was by extension to deal with the others. They were all representatives of the patriarch and any business conducted with the sons of the patriarch was considered to be approved of and backed up by the patriarch himself. And any responsibilities to other families or the community of the patriarch was expected to be fulfilled by the sons should he pass on. In Jesus' culture, the force that bonded a family together was not so much love and intimacy as it was the lineage and responsibilities of it's covenants with other families and it's community. A family was a collective and the patriarch was it's head. And that power was passed down through the families through it's male heirs. The patriarch's ideas about how the clan should conduct itself were then the clan's ideas by default.

The original choice of using this family imagery to help illuminate our relationship with God did not paint the soft and romantic picture of this relationship in Jesus' time that it does for us today. It does, though, give a sense of reality and responsibility that the soft and over-dependant "Daddy-God / vulnerable child" image does not give us nowadays. When Jesus used those familiar images, he did not mean to convey the dangerous dependence on self induced sentimentality and superstition that they have come to represent to us today. Instead, Jesus was conveying a "father"/God that gave us our spiritual seed, as an earthly father gave us our biological seed. And that we as the inheritors of that seed are then to consider ourselves extensions of the essence that this seed carries. We are spiritual extensions of God, as we are biological extensions of our earthly fathers. Being children of God doesn't mean being pampered and protected so much as it means being God's extensions into this plane of existence.

In Jesus' day, the son of a family patriarch was expected to continue the family business, and honor all contracts that business made when his father was running it. He was expected to treat people as though he was an extension of his father, and was treated this way in turn, as would be his son. He even often signed his father's name to business he conducted in his father's stead. And he could be held accountable for decisions that his father had made before him. So if we are to see ourselves as children of God, as children were seen in Jesus' day, we will see ourselves as spiritual extension of our father God. And we will be expected to act as God's 'appendages' here on earth.

What I am trying to share, here, is that the image Jesus was giving us about how we should relate to God was not the image of a big strong all-knowing deity pampering and protecting a weak, vulnerable, lost child. The image Jesus was conveying was that of a partnership by extension, from God as progenitor, to us as progeny, and on to our children as well. And the nature of that relationship was not one of emotional dependence, but one of shared responsibility.

It's not healthy for we as adults to be fantasizing about being perpetually dependent children, and Jesus was not conveying this image to the people he preached to in his time. Unfortunately though, over the years the imagery Jesus used has become somewhat misleading because the nature of our earthly parent/child relationships has changed. And so nowadays it is actually preached that we should imagine ourselves as perpetually dependent children upon God, and this idea is preached as though it were Jesus' message, when it was not.

And if we still aren't convinced, or still don't wish to let go of our childish fantasies, then we can ask ourselves if true love really wishes to perpetuate dependence? Does any healthy parent who truly loves their child honestly wish that child to remain forever dependent upon them? Of course not. To love someone means that we care about their well being as much or more than our own. And so ultimately we wish to see them become free and self sustaining adults. We want them to become more fully themselves because we love who they are. We even wish to see them surpass us.

There is also the issue of why organized religion wishes to keep it's participants seeing themselves as dependent children, while the organization's elite act as stand ins for this "Daddy"/God, but I'm sure you all can see the dysfunction in this already, so I'll leave that question be.

Peace,
Dave