Foster and Tennant continue with a chapter titled “No Father, No Manhood” and proceed to emphasize the importance of fatherhood for Christian men. I’m not sure we can point to any Christian that would say fatherhood somehow isn’t an essential part of what it means to be Christian. The differences occur where Foster/Tennant adopt a more domineering position about fatherhood and men more generally in line with a strong patriarchal focus.
Some of the language in this chapter is undoubtedly problematic. For example, Foster/Tennant claim that to image God, we must first fear him. Further, they claim that “without fathers, sons remain boys”. The authors also engage in profane speech by calling men without fathers “functional” and “clueless bastards”. What they mean is that men growing up with fathers are “clueless about how to harness and aim their masculine natures”. But, why not just say that and avoid the invocation of a word like bastard? Foster/Tennant use profanity for its jarring effect rather than adding anything new even to their own discussion right along with the postmodern design of the book more broadly. Speech for Foster/Tennant exhibits power, not meaning, otherwise normal words and actual arguments would suffice. The problem also remains that Ephesians 4:29 makes it very clear that our speech ought to be edifying and gracious. Shock jock language shouldn’t have a place in formative Christian writing.
The more troubling language, however, is the idea that we “image God” and failing to recognize that the imago Dei is something that isn’t lost in anyone even when they’re not yet Christian. All men and women have been created in God’s image and their very being reflects that whether their father was present in their life or not. A man may be dead in his trespasses and sin but he’s still a man made in the image of God (Eph. 2:1-10). Foster/Tennant switch to a verbal form to emphasize behavior that is learned rather than stick with the way the Bible speaks about what it means to be made in the image of God. This is a dangerous move that goes well beyond what the Scriptures actually teach.
Of course, we know that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10) but how do we know that the fear put forward by Foster/Tennant is actually the same thing we find in Proverbs since they don’t bother to define the term except as it’s related to bodily harm? In contrasting a mother’s nurture to that of a father, Foster/Tennant claim that a father is “a force who brings comfort not by folding us into his body but by subjecting us to his body. He has a fearful power to impose order upon us”. This reads like a passage straight out of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. All we need to know about our fathers is the extent to which they use their own body to discipline us with force? That’s the point of fatherhood in the main when it comes to “imaging God”? The Bible treats what it means to be a father in an entirely different way and it’s simply wrong to see a mother as nurturing and a father as forcefully punishing. In the Bible, God appears as an intimate Father who expresses steadfast love (chesed, covenant faithfulness, 1 Chron. 7:13) not in terms of punishment but rather in terms of blessing, reward, and inheritance (Matt. 6:6, 8; Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6; Ephesians 1:3-12). Part of a father’s love is discipline, but even discipline isn’t primarily a matter of bodily harm. The greater aspect of fatherhood is love, not wrath or fear, because fatherhood itself is based on who God is and what he has done in creating, redeeming, and sustaining us.
Not having an earthly father does not mean that men just remain boys as Foster/Tennant argue. Typically, not having a father means life is a lot harder and lessons take years to learn that would otherwise come more naturally. But, every boy grows up and becomes a man because that is who God providentially makes men to be. Treating grown men like boys is the very thing that handicaps many churches in the first place and introduces a reductive dynamic that makes men out to be something less than they are.
Other mistakes by Foster/Tennant demonstrate their problematic scholarship in this chapter and the rest of the book. Foster/Tennant would have their readers believe that a father’s overall fitness is the best indicator of a child’s future health on the sole basis of a very limited study of 47 prepubescent girls over a 2.7 year period. Body fat in these girls changed anywhere between 2-8 pounds based off the total body fat in a father. But, they neglect to mention that the study itself concludes that until further research is in play no one can know if these slight changes move on past puberty. Further, the claim here by Foster/Tennant is about children and fathers, something the study didn’t address as broadly in the first place.
Foster/Tennant also fail to mention that the study included girls that were siblings (13 of the 47) and used multiple linear regression equations to come to their conclusions. For the non-statistically inclined that means that a lot of assumptions and other variables went into this predictive analysis that can only be described as subject to question without further confirmation and something that only makes a very minimal scholarly claim about a very small group of extremely young girls.
For Foster/Tennant, the actual analysis is really just an endnote in their chapter and is presented as evidence for their claim without discussion, an exceptionally weak way to substantiate their claim. We might see this on a student paper where the student is having a hard time coming up with enough viable sources that back his research or where really weak claims are being made. Instead of researching further or adjusting the paper’s claims, the kid just footnotes something he doesn’t expect his professor to check. True to form, if it was just one footnote among many others the reader might consider this a minor error not worth mentioning. But, the weakness presented in the notes provided by the authors is spread across the book. For example, instead of using well-established Reformed commentary, Foster/Tennant invoke the NET Bible several times as a place to find meaningful interpretations on particular passages in spite of the contradictory Wikipedia-like crowd-sourced problems the project presents in line with its general evangelical/dispensational focus. Strategies like this make the scholarship Foster/Tennant exhibit suspect especially when the reader can easily look up the citation provided and see how it’s not quite the evidence the authors need to establish a point.
One of the most startling things about this book is its lack of emphasis on Jesus Christ as the Second Adam and someone to emulate as a man. In fact, the authors are constantly referring to “natural” this and that in terms of relationships, sex, and many other things like fatherhood that they miss the forest for the trees. Is dominion really about natural fatherhood, sex, and having children alone? Or, is biblical dominion about more than that? Foster/Tennant claim that “the most important aspect of [Adam’s] sonship is becoming a father”. But, where does the Bible actually say this? Jesus Christ, the one who is perfect as Man and also fully God, didn’t become a father or even get married! Yet, we’re told that the most important quality of representing a father in terms of sonship is becoming one. In fact, Christ had no earthly biological father because of the incarnation. Christ learned from Joseph but very early on the Scriptures make it clear that he was about his Heavenly Father’s business (Luke 2:49). However, Christ didn’t become the Father or another father in any sense true to the claims of Foster/Tennant when it comes to him being fully man. There is a sense in which we can speak of Christ as ‘the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace’ and the ‘firstborn of all creation’ but these considerations are not what Foster/Tennant are pointing to in this chapter when talking about sons becoming fathers (Isaiah 9:6-7; Col. 1:15).
There seems to be some level of confusion between ontology and the performative life of a Christian found in obedience here in Foster/Tennant’s thinking. I would suggest that this may come from a more postmodern outlook influencing their consideration than the authors themselves have consciously recognized. Much of the way Foster/Tennant think about things is directly related to what we might call red-pill secular thinking about masculinity in our society as exhibited by figures like Rollo Tomassi and Jack Donovan. A trinitarian view of life is not in play here. A Christocentric perspective is not the focus of this book by Foster/Tennant. Yet, who is the King of Kings and the one that has taken dominion over all? Jesus said, ‘If you love Me, you will keep My commandments’ (John 14:15) not live and take dominion in the main by having children and becoming a father. What is important here as an adopted son of the Father is having faith in God and obeying the full counsel of his word. Christ himself said that his mother and his brothers were those that did his Father’s will (Matt. 12:46-50) and as a result denied the ordinary relevance of the natural family for kingdom obedience as far as his royal messianic calling was concerned.
There is too much in this chapter to analyze in one post, so tomorrow I will be addressing Foster/Tennant’s considerations that teachers are insufficient pseudo-fathers, that pastors ought to be, and also some notes on technology relevant to the chapter in question. Stay tuned!
Next Review:
The Anti-Technological Stance of It’s Good to Be a Man
No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 1
No Fatherhood, No Manhood – Part 2
No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 1
No Gravitas, No Manhood – Part 2
How Porn & Video Games Hijack Manhood
Two for One Day – How to Bear the Weight/Manhood Through Mission