What Is the Point of a Father?

Scripture, St. John Paul II instructed us, tells us two things about God: that God is Love (1 John 4:8) and that God is Father (Eph. 3:14-15).

These two definitions of God also point to the two ends (or meanings, or significances) of the sexual act: mutual support and procreation. But I want to focus a bit more on what these definitions from God mean for the rich vocation of fatherhood.

The secular world may reduce fatherhood to a function: insemination as prerequisite to parenthood. That view is impoverished because it is in some sense merely technical: what a man does to become a father, not what a man is as a father. It’s not just a question of viewpoint. It’s a whole vision of God and the human person.

God is Father. St. Paul tells us that “I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:14-15). In other words, whatever fatherhood exists derives from, is a reflection of, God’s fatherhood. God’s fatherhood is the measure of any other claim of fatherhood.

That’s a tall order to fill.

On top of that, as the introduction to the Pater Noster at Mass tells us, “Jesus taught us to call God ‘Our Father.’ When his apostles came to him asking for instruction in how to pray, Our Lord’s answer was clear: “When you pray, say, ‘Father’” (Luke 11:2).

Jesus’ teaching is revolutionary. No other world religions really present us a God who seeks a personal relationship with us. Israel begins approaching that threshold, and Hosea even speaks of God’s love for Israel as that of a husband seeking to woo an unfaithful wife. But progress all the way to God as Father, which is the consequence of adoptive filiation through Christ—being “sons in the Son” (see Eph. 1:5-6)—is a Christian advance. Indeed, St. Paul teaches that that adoptive filiation, giving us the Spirit of Jesus crying “Abba”—Daddy (Gal 4:4-7)—shows just how intimate that relationship is.

This is what comes to us from the order of redemption made possible in Jesus.

Preceding this is what comes from the order of creation. Genesis teaches us (1:26-28) that we are made in God’s image, “male and female.” Sexual differentiation is not a biological accident, even less a discriminatory “gender binary.” It is a normative aspect of creation.

The gift of parenthood—paternity and maternity—is part of God’s original blessing and command. “God blessed them,” saying, “Be fruitful and multiply.” It’s not just a sheer command, arbitrarily imposed. Their fertility is the first blessing God pronounces to the newly made man and woman. It is a blessing not because God said so, but because it reflects God. Human beings through procreation share in the fatherhood of God. They share in the life-giving role of the Holy Spirit. They share in God’s role as Creator, and they really and truly continue that work here and now, in twenty-first-century America, by continuing the work of creation God began eons ago.

One might say, “It’s really personal, dude.”

When it comes to what God the Father teaches us about being fathers, let’s not forget—as my wife reminds me—one final example.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son has also been called the Parable of the Prodigal Father. Like many other human fathers—and like God the Father at the hands of humanity—the father in the parable experiences the stupidity and ingratitude of his child. It’s not just that the boy wants to leave; that might even be a normal aspect of growing up. It’s that he went to his father to “ask his share of his inheritance” (Luke 15:12). What he’s really saying is, “Dad, I want the money and don’t even want to wait until you’re dead to get it.” Fr. Paul Scalia put it aptly: “He wants what is the father’s but without the father.”

We know the story. What’s important is the ending. The kid does dumb things his father probably warned him against. It didn’t stop him. He almost certainly “knows better.” He has to learn “in the school of hard knocks.”

When he does, he makes his way home motivated not by love of his father as much as healthy self-interest: “How many of my father’s servants have food to spare and I am starving to death!” (Luke 15:17).

But even if the prodigal son’s horizons are limited, the father’s aren’t . . . though he’s apparently been scanning the horizon for God knows (and only God knows) how long for the child to come back. He doesn’t berate the boy. He doesn’t “nag [his] children, lest they lose heart” (Col. 3:21).

He takes the initiative. Even before his son gets there (“while he was still a long way off”), even before he opens his mouth with his well-rehearsed lines, his father moves. He knows what the child needs and remembers he is still his child. He keeps things in paternal perspective, even if that proves annoying to the elder brother.

If the father of the parable is God the Father, from whom our paternity derives, then is the parable not also an instruction in our vocation toward children who fall and yet “come to their senses”?

We could also look at St. Joseph, a model father who doesn’t say much (Scripture doesn’t record a word of his) but who does a lot, especially the two most important things: protecting his wife and child in whatever home the moment afforded, and working for them. In a world where fathers abandon home and where men are increasingly alienated from work, those examples are strikingly relevant.

As we approach Father’s Day, people will undoubtedly talk about the essential role fathers play and the social studies proving the beneficial “outcomes” of intact families in which fathers are present. A year after Dobbs, some might even speak about fathers who lost children—by or against their wills—to abortion.

But first things first. To discuss fatherhood means to see it as a vocation—not just in the limited “seventy years, or eighty for those who are strong,” but how it fits within the whole fabric of God’s work of salvation and Providence. How it flows from “the Father, from whom all paternity in heaven and on earth is named.”

It also cuts both ways. Not only is our paternity measured by the fatherhood of God, but our fidelity in imaging that fatherhood, in turn, affects faith in our world. In her new book, Adam and Eve After the Pill, Revisited, Mary Eberstadt asks whether the rise in religious disaffiliation among the young has a correlation with their lack of, or antagonism toward, images of the father they have (not) known at home. That’s a heavy thing to consider for today’s fathers.