The next iteration of this continuing review is part two in evaluating Foster/Tennant’s chapter on fatherhood in It’s Good to Be a Man. Foster/Tennant seem to present fatherhood as a matter of imparting knowledge and wisdom but for whatever reason don’t consider that God providentially places other people into the lives of men beyond those Foster/Tennant have in mind. While the reader can certainly agree with Foster/Tennant that a teacher can’t replace a father, at the same time that doesn’t make teachers or other mentors that come along the way to help young men entirely useless or somehow inappropriate. Foster/Tennant want to talk about a void that men have in not having fathers that drives them to look elsewhere as if that’s a problem, but again these considerations are mere claims on their part offered without support. Maybe some men have a psychological need for someone to fill the void of fatherhood so-called, something probably considered a given by many in society. However, one wonders what kind of real evidence exists for this aside from the mere claim made by Foster/Tennant or how different this really is than similar Freudian claims rooted in psychoanalysis. Here Foster/Tennant are likely reflecting the zeitgeist of our times in considering psychological needs as a driver for behavior rather than a biblical worldview.
The need for teachers in the lives of men without fathers is more practical and useful than Foster/Tennant consider whether that comes from YouTube or through a professor at a university. The Bible speaks often in Proverbs and elsewhere that counselors and advisors are actually a good thing (1 Kings 12:1-15; Proverbs 11:14; 12:15; 13:10; 15:2; 15:22; 24:6; 27:17). In other words, there is room to consider that men are being wise in seeking help from other sources aside from missing fathers and not merely to fill some void. Foster/Tennant want to knock the influence of teachers so they can point men to pastors as fathers, something the Scriptures don’t advocate. In fact, Jesus himself said to call no man father in Matthew 23:9 and yet Foster/Tennant are leading the reader to the conclusion that the real resource for fatherless men is the pastor.
A pastor, however, is not in fact a replacement father to men but rather a shepherd and brother. In Reformed churches, the biblical requirement is for more than one elder in leading people and not the singular pastor as a father. One of the great weaknesses of the Presbyterian model versus the Dutch Reformed is the notion that an elder or pastor is somehow hierarchically over members and not shoulder to shoulder with them in the same church. In fact, in most Presbyterian environments, elders are not even seen as members of the church but instead function as members of the presbytery where the real decisions are made. This problem can become a further distortion of biblical ministry when Baptists used to the notion of a single pastor guiding a church become Presbyterians in a denomination like the CREC but continue the Baptist ethos as they go even though they technically work with a plurality of elders. Sometimes a plurality of elders is really just the main guy with a bunch of yes men as a result. Bavinck et al. make it clear that ministers in the church are responsible to and report to the collective membership of the church without the need for an additional hierarchy even when a plurality of elders is in play. The elders represent Christ to the church but the people also represent Christ back to the elders so that there is ministerial accountability.
Seeing pastors as fathers has too many parallels to Roman Catholic ministry to ignore and often creates a mediatorial relationship between priest and parishioner that can very quickly become unhealthy and unnecessarily domineering. This problem is compounded when husbands likewise consider themselves a mediator between God and their wives. The sexual abuse scandals of the Roman Catholic Church should be a stern warning for anyone wanting to go beyond what Scripture outlines here. While it’s certainly true that men are to imitate their spiritual leaders in obeying God’s commands more broadly speaking, care has to be taken to avoid simply doing what other men say as a matter of course especially when power is unduly exercised in a fallen world and the relationship is attempting to model fathers and sons. Further, the pastor’s role is not to dictate what men should do but rather to teach and equip them to practice ministry in their own lives (Eph 4:11-12).
Jesus instructed the people to do and observe whatever the Pharisees said as long as it was consistent with the Mosaic law and the commandments of God. But, Jesus also quite clearly told the people not to imitate the way the Pharisees completely disregarded the law (Matt. 23:1-4). Part of the express messianic mission of Jesus was freeing the people from the undue influence of exploitative, domineering, and abusive clergy (Ezekiel 34; Matthew 7:15-20; Luke 4:18-19). While someone like Timothy was viewed as a son by Paul or Paul spoke of himself as a father to the Corinthians, the normal relationship of pastors as fathers has far less biblical support than is typically considered especially when we remember that Foster/Tennant here are claiming that ministers ought to replace the missing fathers of men and not merely help lead them in discipleship to see God as their Father.
What Foster/Tennant are really doing here is over-extending the analogy of fatherhood employed by Paul to speak of Christian discipleship. Christian ministry isn’t a stopgap to missing fathers because discipleship happens in the church whether one has a father or not. Pastors don’t replace fathers for Christians that already have them and asserting that they ought to for those that don’t is saying more than Scripture outlines. Christian discipleship is a matter of bringing men to their Heavenly Father and not taking the place of earthly ones. Additionally, to avoid treating passages like Matthew 23:9 and their implications in Foster/Tennant’s discussion on these points is a huge oversight and shows how prejudicial their case is.
Paul, for example, was not saying he replaced a natural father so men could be men but rather that he was foundational in bringing folks to Christ and modeling what it meant to be Christian. The ‘mature man’ of Ephesian 4:13 is figurative here, speaking of the body of Christ where all members grow into maturity rather than the notion that Paul was ever making men out of fatherless boys. Paul was also speaking covenantally in addressing Christian brothers so his statement expressing himself as a father in places like 1 Corinthians 4 isn’t about men being men but rather discipling the whole church to be mature in the faith. That’s why we see Paul addressing wives, children, slaves, and even apostates in his letters to the churches as part of the body of Christ. Overall, Foster/Tennant miss the mark here in terms of the role of pastors leading a church when they make these passages about fatherhood rather than what Paul was actually saying about ministry and discipleship.
One other thing I’d like to consider in this chapter is some of the commentary on technology because Foster and Tennant talk about participation and the physical presence of a father as it pertains to being a son. For the authors, “sonship is imitative…not something learned from afar, but something learned by participating in another man’s life…sonship involves real life discipling”. Further, the authors claim that sons without fathers “long for [them]..why they idolize…they do it from a distance–disembodied”. Foster and Tennant then say that “God created us as embodied creatures, where the physical and the spiritual are intertwined…we are not living in the Matrix. Embodied existence is the only way for human males to truly participate in the experience of other men”. Last, the authors claim that “love requires a physical connection”. All of this is leading up to their recommendation that men get into a church and follow a pastor as their father.
However, the distinctions Foster/Tennant make here are typical ways Christians often talk about technology as disembodied, lacking a physical connection, and pretending there is a difference between “real life” and the virtual. But, the problem with this from a technological and ontological perspective is that what they say just isn’t relevant or true. There is only one reality and it is the reality we all live in thanks to God. There is also never a time when we are disembodied short of death itself (2 Cor. 5:8). So, a son lacking a father is never really about being disembodied or some kind of alternate reality because experience is always embodied and reality is always one and the same. Furthermore, love in fact does not always require a physical connection and no doubt Foster/Tennant handle this from the standpoint of looking at sex or its outgrowth as the engine of dominion. Foster/Tennant help maintain a materialist worldview in describing sex and its social effects as the primary driver of dominion and in doing so echo the secular masculinity arguments of men like Rollo Tomassi.
The misconstruals Foster/Tennant offer here are not just a lack of precision in saying what they want to say. If all they really meant was the notion that being a father with a son requires face-to-face proximity and presence, I’d have little issue with the claims they make. Furthermore, they confusingly defend a claim about physical connection by referencing trinitarian oneness, something that isn’t physical in the first place and yet contains love. Too bad love for them doesn’t require logic because statements like the ones they make in this section betray the fact that the authors haven’t considered this topic in any depth or provided anything here other than a reflection of common Luddite concerns about technology and its use many Christians regularly express.
Foster/Tennant are just wrong to say that you can’t have “digital onetogetherness” in speaking about being online. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, most churches met via Zoom or Webex every Sunday when they couldn’t meet in person. Are Foster/Tennant really going to argue that such connections online weren’t really worship on a Sunday because folks weren’t in the same room? We can certainly say churches weren’t worshiping the way they might normally and should if a global pandemic weren’t in play, but that fact is not material to the claim here. Furthermore, worship via Zoom is not in fact a disembodied experience. People are not even physically separate in Zoom, they merely exist with less proximity in play if for the moment we agree for the sake of argument that proximity means nearness. In reality, proximity could also refer to the ability of the church to be one together anywhere by virtue of the Holy Spirit. Foster/Tennant here represents spiritual as non-material but in fact spiritual for a Christian is about the presence and work of the Holy Spirit so the Gnostic dialectic they wind up engaging is a misconstrual of what we really mean by using the term spiritual.
In Zoom, church members are still face-to-face and physical togetherness only represents the Spirit-filled nature of believers together that allows them to transcend time and space. But, even here, the physical nature of a Zoom call is still physical. Monitors streaming atoms of light into eyes to see everyone’s faces retain physicality via electrical signals through computers out to the Internet across and into everyone else’s homes. At no point is the physical nature of worship compromised because a different technology is in play to make it happen. After all, the physical medium of technology isn’t witchcraft. Someone isn’t in a different reality or world because they’re using Zoom instead of sitting next to others in worship. But, forget Zoom for a moment. Is the worship of the universal church on any given Sunday compromised as a whole because local congregations aren’t all in the same room? Such a claim would be absolutely absurd. The work of the Holy Spirit and the technological innovation we have in something like Zoom actually can foster oneness in Christ and has for churches worldwide. After all, technology itself is a gift of the Holy Spirit (Exodus 31:1-11).
Besides, we forget that the common instruments of worship, even the sacraments themselves, are technological. Are we worshiping less if we’re not in a building? Or, is less worship in play if no pews are present and we all stand? Further, if we don’t commune via the Lord’s Supper is Christ not present in his flesh with us or is Colossians 1:27 entirely irrelevant unless and until one is consuming the Body and Blood of our Lord in the Eucharist? That last question would answer yes if one is a Lutheran or Roman Catholic, but the Reformed understanding of Christ’s presence is manifestly spiritual and not directly tied to the physical elements of the Supper themselves or even its use on occasion. Further, are we or are we not seated in the heavenlies with Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:6)? Are Christ’s two natures divisible such that we only experience his presence and love if he is with us physically the way Foster/Tennant talk about physical connections and how they’re required for human love? To say so means going wide of the Definition of Chalcedon and Christian orthodoxy. Last, God is not a man and he is the absolute definition of love. Yet, for us, somehow Foster/Tennant argue that love must be physical.
At best, Foster/Tennant carve out an undue separation between the physical and spiritual that is manifestly a reflection of the false dichotomies of a Gnostic dualism and at worst mere materialism when they claim that love must have a physical connection. All of this serves to allow Foster/Tennant to claim that men without fathers need to find a pastor they can trust and get in a church where they can be physically present and learn from the man God gives them as a sort of pseudo-father.
Of course, men should be in church and churches should be faithful to the gospel. Foster/Tennant know that the world doesn’t always work this way and considers that the “majority of pastors are themselves clueless bastards, weak in constitution and effeminate in conduct”. The dilemma their advice faces is that clueless men are likely going to be clueless about picking the right men to follow and so ultimately they offer advice that can’t be taken seriously or implemented as offered with any level of discernment by already clueless men. After all, fatherhood isn’t something sons choose. So, the whole model they’ve been working up to here falls apart if what they say is true. How is that solved? Foster and Tennant reply that a man should uproot and move to a region in the country where there is a good church or join a church plant where they live.
But, indiscriminately applied this also remains bad advice. Church plants are notoriously unstable. They fold very quickly and often fail. Most folks put church plant fails at or near 80%. Most all of them are gone in ten years or less. Further, church plants today are typically not composed of a normal membership of folks that represent the sort of generational diversity needed to model and exhibit Christian living with wisdom. Most church plants are pastored by very young men but following a young pastor with kids barely out of diapers is likely not going to give one the insight needed that real seasoned men in the faith might provide. But again, how does someone who is clueless clue themselves in about what a good church looks like?
The real solution is doing what we’re called to do as Christians. Trust and obey. Search the Scriptures and learn how to rightly divide the word of truth. Being busy with these things is more than enough to keep one on the straight and narrow even if a man isn’t in a good church. God will providentially move you elsewhere if that’s required, but for most folks standing firm where you are and being obedient to God is the order of the day. Developing a specialized understanding of ministry as a matter of patriarchy is a distraction from our calling to live for God’s glory. Foster/Tennant are just on the wrong track.
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